We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler

I hurried up about reading We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves because my aunt talked about reading it, and since she doesn’t seem to be a big reader, I thought it’d be interesting (and maybe add to dinner table conversation the next time she visits). She told me about the twist in a somewhat oblique way that had me wondering how the facts fit together. When I hit the apparently infamous page 77, though, it does all make sense; if I hadn’t needed to return this to the library for the next patron who reserved it, I’d have reread the first 77 pages and figured out where there’s subtler foreshadowing and so on. I wasn’t looking for it in the right places, so if it was there, it passed me by.

All in all, it’s an interesting story, based on the idea of raising a chimp among humans and seeing how much we can humanise them, which has been done in various experiments. It’s hard to say more about the themes of the book without spoilering people for page 77, because the whole way the plot comes together relies on that reveal, and whether it works for you. For me, it did. I got the book out of the library at 5.30pm and finished it by 11pm; I feel that the voice is engaging, the unchronological way of telling the story works well, and the mystery/twist combined with that narrative voice worked for me, because Rosemary (the narrator) speaks to the reader. It’s like an oral story in some ways — you’re being told a story by someone who finds it difficult, who is feeling their way into telling it.

There are things I didn’t like very much about this book, even so; some of the plotlines/characters didn’t seem to add much. Some of it was all part of the red herrings, of course, to lead the reader astray. But I was unsure about the whole character of Harlow — her later appearances seemed unnecessary, and that first performative scene with her the best and most revealing thing about her character (revealing both herself and Rosemary, I mean). The lost suitcase plot… shrug? The puppet… what?

So needless to say, given how fast I devoured it, I did quite enjoy it. I haven’t a clue what I’ll have to say about it when my aunt visits again, though; I’m still thinking about it all.

(Mum, this book is very anti-animal experimentation, it’d drive you nuts. Squirt, don’t read it, it’ll upset you.)

Rating: 4/5

If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, Italo Calvino

I can appreciate Calvino’s prose (albeit veiled through translation), but I can’t seem to get on with his work as a whole. If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller is just really frustrating to me, no matter how good he is at conjuring up a scene, an atmosphere, an intriguing idea. I’ve never been much for experimental novels and the like, so it was probably inevitable I wouldn’t like this, but I had hoped I’d like it more than I did — it’s all about books, after all! But it annoyed me from the start, first because it’s not written for me at all. I don’t think Calvino thought for a moment about a female reader really picking up the book, because it’s all addressed to a male reader who you can supposedly, as a reader, relate to. So he wasn’t talking to me, but to some man: isn’t there enough literature that does that?

Secondly, the whole construction of the thing is just infuriating. It’s not what I look for in a novel at all, because the entire point is that disconnectedness and incompleteness, the constantly broken thread of story.

Besides, this might sound weird, but the way he writes, he seems untrustworthy. I can get behind a good unreliable narrator, but I don’t like it when I feel as if the writer himself is deceiving me, sneering at me.

Rating: 2/5