I’d resolved to give this a solid 4 until the final chapter, which managed to tie together a lot of stuff in a way I didn’t really see coming.

Ella, a PhD candidate, presumably, since she’s going to be a doctor if she ever completes her thesis (but I don’t think is ever described that way?) is our primary narrator. Through her we see a veritable constellation of memories concerning her hyper anxieties, all of which associate with one kind of sickness or another. There are chapters that solidify different characters, and they do characterize the primary components of the narrative, but they are very much only coloured by Ella’s memory of these events. And synapses, as we learn, are tricky things.

This—it must be said—is a heavy book. Deceptively so. Because the prose are absolutely electric and incredible in flow, specificity, construction, verbiage. Basically perfect. And this is a translated work. A friend reminded me of this as I was reading and it flabbergasted me. It’s incredible just that this reads the way it does in a completely different language. It’s a divergent story to tell, told in a divergent prose style. Ella constantly makes associations with words; sometimes etymologically, other times lyrically. It may be the only rr so barometer we have for her stating her feelings outright.

Which is odd, because boy is this packed with feeling. Mostly anxiety and shame and guilt. Negative feelings one almost always had around family. Which is why, strangely, in a juxtaposition of nearly everything conveyed in the text, my take away is: It is okay to fail. Even when pain is the only relationship to a task or person or event. And it may be inherently negative in connotation. It ultimately is the only sensory organ you have to understand it and process it. People error all the time, in a multitude of ways.

Somehow the knot that this book provokes under your skin in often uncomfortable ways, is exercised somewhat in its completion. Another hat trick to go along with the prose. Astrophysics wise, I’m not sure I got the metaphor or analogy in this. Are we all the same stuff out there that is colliding, bringing about changes and new forms? It makes sense in a literal way perhaps… but it’s also lifeless bodies that come together there. But why then is everything Ella relates to seems to be, more-or-less, from her father’s (a doctor) perspective? Pain, medication; the dance of disease and recovery. Or is the question the point?