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A review by attytheresa
The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty by Vendela Vida
2.0
I should have liked this book. But I didn't. I didn't hate it either. At its core, it is about a woman running away from her life, which from the beginning we sense has gone seriously off the rails, looking at first for anything that makes the pain of the recent past less, then ultimately to reinvent herself. And where does she run away to? Morocco of course. Doesn't everyone?! Personally, I'd head to Paris. Morocco feels like somewhere you went to find yourself in the 1970s not in 2015 when this book was published.
My problem with this book is I think that the entire short novel (only 136 pages) is written with the narrator speaking of herself as 'you' - always in the second person. There is something judgmental and harsh about how that reads here. It also made me feel like I was rushing headlong without direction - which of course I realized at the end was deliberate because that is what our narrator is experiencing -but at a remove. Obviously, this author is gifted as she succeeded in pulling me into the character's heedless flight away, that sense of no real control. But I did not like it and it contributed to my negative feelings about this woman.
Our narrator, whose real name we never learn although we learn much about her life, is also an unreliable narrator, but not because of drugs or alcohol or mental illness. Her reasons, when they are revealed, are heart-breaking, and should have made me find her far more sympathetic than I did. By the end, I was a bit impatient with her, although I grudgingly admired how she was so easily overcoming all the hurdles and problems raining on her in Morocco. And boy are there hurdles!
Most of the action is set in Casablanca -- and nothing described makes me want to ever visit there! Well maybe just to visit the Rick's Cafe built for the tourist trade that loves the movie. As is oft repeated, "When you get to Casablanca, the first thing you do is get out of Casablanca."
Couple of notes: The epigraph at the beginning, a quote from Clarice Lispector, is absolutely the perfect preface. The apt title is from Rumi's eponymous poem which is presented in the text about half-way through, read by the narrator.
My problem with this book is I think that the entire short novel (only 136 pages) is written with the narrator speaking of herself as 'you' - always in the second person. There is something judgmental and harsh about how that reads here. It also made me feel like I was rushing headlong without direction - which of course I realized at the end was deliberate because that is what our narrator is experiencing -but at a remove. Obviously, this author is gifted as she succeeded in pulling me into the character's heedless flight away, that sense of no real control. But I did not like it and it contributed to my negative feelings about this woman.
Our narrator, whose real name we never learn although we learn much about her life, is also an unreliable narrator, but not because of drugs or alcohol or mental illness. Her reasons, when they are revealed, are heart-breaking, and should have made me find her far more sympathetic than I did. By the end, I was a bit impatient with her, although I grudgingly admired how she was so easily overcoming all the hurdles and problems raining on her in Morocco. And boy are there hurdles!
Most of the action is set in Casablanca -- and nothing described makes me want to ever visit there! Well maybe just to visit the Rick's Cafe built for the tourist trade that loves the movie. As is oft repeated, "When you get to Casablanca, the first thing you do is get out of Casablanca."
Couple of notes: The epigraph at the beginning, a quote from Clarice Lispector, is absolutely the perfect preface. The apt title is from Rumi's eponymous poem which is presented in the text about half-way through, read by the narrator.