A review by sharkybookshelf
all this here, now by Anna Stern

2.0

The premature death of Ananke rips a hole in the lives of their friends, one of whom reflects on their shared lives…

I love a grief book, but this was far too much hard work. I think it might have been too avant-garde for me…or trying too hard to be so, I can’t decide. I kind of appreciate what the author was trying to do, but the writing and stylistic choices started to feel laboured and got in the way of the story itself.

The entire thing is written in lowercase, which I suspect is more of a statement in the original German - in English, it’s mostly a mild inconvenience. Crucially though, there are no gender pronouns. Which I initially didn’t notice (in a good way - it shows the sentences flowed naturally). But it started to feel contrived when every character was solely referred to by name - it took me quite some time to realise that some of the characters were in fact parents and not part of the friend group, and I’m not sure what this lack of clarity really achieved. Nouns are gendered in German, so I’m terribly curious about how Serre approached that - by using only neuter nouns?

The story bounces between the past and the present, and the formatting was very clever - the vignettes from the present are printed in black on even pages and, facing them on the odd pages, the memory vignettes are in a dark grey. It’s subtle, but I loved the idea of a visible contrast between a clear present and fading memories.

A demanding story of overwhelming grief, friendship and different forms of love, but the author’s stylistic choices ended up feeling contrived, somewhat obscuring the point.