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sonyareadsstuff 's review for:
Leave the World Behind
by Rumaan Alam
I’m very into this book, for all the ways it frustrated me but was ultimately rewarding in an unexpected way: by setting us up to project certain expectations of what a novel should do and then turning it completely upside down. Leave the World Behind is at its best when you let go of these expectations, or when you at least allow the book to challenge your expectations as you read.
A white family rents a holiday home in the middle of nowhere, ready for their long-awaited vacation from the city. In the middle of the night, a Black couple who claim they are the homeowners shows up at the door, saying there’s been a blackout in the city and that they need to stay in the house too. The internet and TV are down, and no one knows anything more.
I loved how this book so precisely examined the interiority of individuals during crisis. It may make the book feel overwritten at times, but reveals how much there is to glean just from how these individuals interact with each other. It fascinatingly and eerily illuminates how we cling to the mundane rituals and material objects during crisis, the way crisis underscores and exacerbates racial and class dynamic at the interpersonal level, the tension between paralysis and doing everything you can, and whether you can really trust anyone… or if trusting each other is the only thing you have.
Smattered throughout the book is also the presence of an omnipresent voice, which is totally creepy but brilliant – revealing just enough to keep the suspense on high at all times, but still taunting us with the limitations of what we can know. I could not resist the temptation to grasp for a coherent logic to the crisis and lol, I was certainly put in my place by this book, which resolutely rejects our desire to make sense of things. The unfolding of the crisis feels absurd at moments, too close and familiar for comfort at others, and all the while drumming up a slow panic that made sure I could not move on with my life until I finished the book.
A white family rents a holiday home in the middle of nowhere, ready for their long-awaited vacation from the city. In the middle of the night, a Black couple who claim they are the homeowners shows up at the door, saying there’s been a blackout in the city and that they need to stay in the house too. The internet and TV are down, and no one knows anything more.
I loved how this book so precisely examined the interiority of individuals during crisis. It may make the book feel overwritten at times, but reveals how much there is to glean just from how these individuals interact with each other. It fascinatingly and eerily illuminates how we cling to the mundane rituals and material objects during crisis, the way crisis underscores and exacerbates racial and class dynamic at the interpersonal level, the tension between paralysis and doing everything you can, and whether you can really trust anyone… or if trusting each other is the only thing you have.
Smattered throughout the book is also the presence of an omnipresent voice, which is totally creepy but brilliant – revealing just enough to keep the suspense on high at all times, but still taunting us with the limitations of what we can know. I could not resist the temptation to grasp for a coherent logic to the crisis and lol, I was certainly put in my place by this book, which resolutely rejects our desire to make sense of things. The unfolding of the crisis feels absurd at moments, too close and familiar for comfort at others, and all the while drumming up a slow panic that made sure I could not move on with my life until I finished the book.