A review by emilyinparis
Fresh Complaint by Jeffrey Eugenides

challenging funny reflective tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

‘Tomasina loved me, though. She was crazy about me for a while. Some dark hook in our brains, which no one could see, linked us up’

‘Sometimes you thought you heard the music, especially when you were young, and then you spent the rest of your life trying to reproduce the sound’

‘She looks at me, into my eyes. While she does this, she’s not so much my mother as just a fellow human being, with troubles and a sense of humour’

‘Skulls make better pillows than you’d think. Dr Peter Luce (the famous sexologist) rests his cheek on the varnished parietal of a Dawat ancestor, he’s not sure whose. The skull tips back and forth, jawbone to chin, as Alice himself is gently rocked by the boy on the next skull over’

‘All around the village, from the swampy ground up to the tops of the trees, animals are eating each other and digesting with open, burpy mouths’ 

‘the Dawat word for “vagina” translates literally as “that thing which is truly no good”.’ 

‘For sixteen years now, Chicago had given Kendall the benefit of the doubt’ 

‘But Kendall had his doubts as to whether their home achieved an authentic state of interiority. For instance, the outside was always breaking in. Rain leaked through the master bedroom ceiling’

‘With the twisted sheets and blankets on the bed, the pillows either mashed or denuded of their pillowcases to show saliva stains or spew feathers, and the socks and underpants littered like animal skins across the floor, the bedroom was like a den where two bears had recently hibernated’

‘One’s country was like one’s self. The more you learned about it, the more there was to be ashamed of’

‘The clouds, as they always do here, hang low in the sky. It’s as if, having travelled across the ocean, they’re surprised to find land beneath them, and haven’t withdrawn to a respectable distance’ 

‘The glittering nonsense surrounding the holiday all came down to this, to light and its brevity. You lived, you burned, you spread your little light—then poof’ 

‘He’d reached the stage of the evening—of evenings like this on the road—when a rosiness came over things, a slow, flavourful, oozing light invading the restaurant almost like liquid’

‘Matthew has the feeling that he is fingering a wound. Not compulsively, as he used to do, risking reopening or reinfection, but just to check if it’s healing’