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A review by thebobsphere
Brickmakers by Selva Almada
3.0
Having adored Selva Almada’s The Wind that Lays Waste and enjoyed Dead Girls , I was looking forward to her second novel. I’ll get into my feelings later on in the review.
The novel opens with two men lying on the ground at a funfair, they are on the ground dying. As they are taking their last breaths their memories are coming back to them, in other words we readers are seeing, in a non chronological way, how these two ended up in this situation.
What we get is a tale about abuse, family traditions, same sex relations and a couple of supernatural elements. Brickmakers is a snapshot of how a typical toxic male environment can create a lot of damage. There are many powerful scenes of machismo here counterbalanced by a certain sensitivity.
Unfortunately where Wind was a sparse novel, Brickmakers felt too choppy, even unnecessarily maximalist at times. I was tired of the messed up timeline and I was exhausted by the end of these brief 200 pages. I’m not saying that the book is bad but I just felt more of an emotional resonance with the previous books.
Her new one, It’s not a River, will be published in 2024 and I am well excited for that. I have definitely not giving up on this author as her works are genuinely exciting.
The novel opens with two men lying on the ground at a funfair, they are on the ground dying. As they are taking their last breaths their memories are coming back to them, in other words we readers are seeing, in a non chronological way, how these two ended up in this situation.
What we get is a tale about abuse, family traditions, same sex relations and a couple of supernatural elements. Brickmakers is a snapshot of how a typical toxic male environment can create a lot of damage. There are many powerful scenes of machismo here counterbalanced by a certain sensitivity.
Unfortunately where Wind was a sparse novel, Brickmakers felt too choppy, even unnecessarily maximalist at times. I was tired of the messed up timeline and I was exhausted by the end of these brief 200 pages. I’m not saying that the book is bad but I just felt more of an emotional resonance with the previous books.
Her new one, It’s not a River, will be published in 2024 and I am well excited for that. I have definitely not giving up on this author as her works are genuinely exciting.