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frasersimons 's review for:
Our Wives Under The Sea
by Julia Armfield
Edit: I grabbed the audiobook from Netgalley and the two narrators are absolutely fantastic. Highly enjoyable way to consume this story.
Two wives retell a story where one goes on a deep-sea dive gone wrong, finally returning much changed, while the other, left in the dark for months, begins to mourn her. In alternating chapters, the dive itself is retold, as well as her partner reckoning with, and caring for her wife.
The prose do an amazing job making the reader sink into the story of the couple while fostering the quiet mystery and blossoming melancholy of a life and love changed. What’s brilliant about this is how subjective the experience is. I think you could come up with a bunch of reading of this, taking the events as surreal aspects to the story, or else fantastical; certainly metaphorical. Given the themes of liminal space and sea lungs, and transitions—perhaps a more fitting label is a combination of them.
It is, I think, from my own reading, a story about mourning the change of a relationship, mourning that loss. I’m not sure I subscribe to the more unbelievable aspects as literal, but more of abstract motifs to further drive home the feelings of both women. How loving multiple things at once, especially when they are a fundamental conflict, cause a schism. How creating a story about loss can aid in processing complex feelings around loss. And perhaps in the doing, the literal action, of letting go, in whatever form it takes, can be the thing that makes it real.
In its own way it makes plenty of sense. But to allow for that to happen, the reader will have to do exactly what the story does: Turn inward in search of answers that are important to look for, but entirely of your own making. Some people will love it and some people will hate it. This is a predominantly interior novel. The ecosystem of the words is so incredibly chosen that the propulsion is the beautiful prose and the dread of both wanting and not wanting to know what will happen next. This makes it quiet. Understated. Wildly vivid and unconcerned with the expectations of the reader. It almost eschews them entirely.
Two wives retell a story where one goes on a deep-sea dive gone wrong, finally returning much changed, while the other, left in the dark for months, begins to mourn her. In alternating chapters, the dive itself is retold, as well as her partner reckoning with, and caring for her wife.
The prose do an amazing job making the reader sink into the story of the couple while fostering the quiet mystery and blossoming melancholy of a life and love changed. What’s brilliant about this is how subjective the experience is. I think you could come up with a bunch of reading of this, taking the events as surreal aspects to the story, or else fantastical; certainly metaphorical. Given the themes of liminal space and sea lungs, and transitions—perhaps a more fitting label is a combination of them.
It is, I think, from my own reading, a story about mourning the change of a relationship, mourning that loss. I’m not sure I subscribe to the more unbelievable aspects as literal, but more of abstract motifs to further drive home the feelings of both women. How loving multiple things at once, especially when they are a fundamental conflict, cause a schism. How creating a story about loss can aid in processing complex feelings around loss. And perhaps in the doing, the literal action, of letting go, in whatever form it takes, can be the thing that makes it real.
In its own way it makes plenty of sense. But to allow for that to happen, the reader will have to do exactly what the story does: Turn inward in search of answers that are important to look for, but entirely of your own making. Some people will love it and some people will hate it. This is a predominantly interior novel. The ecosystem of the words is so incredibly chosen that the propulsion is the beautiful prose and the dread of both wanting and not wanting to know what will happen next. This makes it quiet. Understated. Wildly vivid and unconcerned with the expectations of the reader. It almost eschews them entirely.