abbie_'s Reviews (1.79k)

I read Songs on Endless Repeat in January and was enamoured with So’s unfinished novel, so I was so excited to finally read Afterparties to get more of his prose. But I think my expectations were set too high - I was expecting every one of these stories to be a gem, no notes, but a few of them I did have to slog through. 

Some of them, like The Badminton King and Maly Maly Maly, I finished and was just like, okay? That was fine. BUT, others were genius. The first story for example, featuring a mother and her two daughters working alone in their 24-hour doughnut shop was such a perfect portrayal of the way we project our inner thoughts onto absolute strangers, only to feel betrayed when they don’t live up to these impossible, imaginary expectations. It was a perfect short story. 

I also loved The Shop, which features a young queer man who moves back to his hometown after college to work at his father’s struggling garage. The ennui captured here, the stifling feeling of a hometown where nothing ever changes, except perhaps to get worse, is so good.

Of course a common theme in all the stories is that of the Cambodian genocide. So explores how such a tragedy imprints itself indelibly on the psyches of its survivors, which can then also be passed down to their descendants. There’s a lot of themes of immigration, the American dream, parental expectations, and of course queerness.

Now I’ll just go back to mourning the fact we’ll never get a finished version of Straight Through Cambotown - the author left us too soon. 

I’ve been wanting to try Brontez Purnell’s later book 100 Boyfriends for a while, so when I spotted Since I Laid My Burden down on Everand, I jumped at it. It was exactly what I needed last week - short and gritty, fast paced and laced with humour, though veering into murkier territory than I perhaps expected.

It’s unflinchingly honest about growing up Black and queer and punk in the American south - religion and traditional values do not make this an easy life. The main character DeShawn recounts the various relationships he’s had with damaged men over his life, both familial and sexual, most of whom are now dead. The style is rough, raw and choppy - no frills and it suits the content perfectly. 

Quick, brutal and desperately sad. 

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for my free digital ARC of A Small Apocalypse! Laura Chow Reeve is an author to watch if you like your fiction heavy on the queer with a tinge of surreal, and brimming with found family and unease. It’s a lovely mishmash of unnerving and heartwarming, melancholic and hopeful. Honestly probably more melancholic and dark, but those moments of togetherness with the queers just hit you right in the chest!

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A lot of the stories are interlinked, so characters weave in and out of them. That was where my main caveat came in - for some reason I had trouble keeping all of the names straight. Though no doubt the glorious messiness of queer love lives in a tight knit group didn’t help, with relationships forming and changing with every story 👀 I just need to reiterate how amazingly Reeve depicts queer community, like the dynamics and heartbreak and togetherness is wonderful!

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Beyond the interlinked stories, which is more rooted in reality and following the ups and downs of our lovely big group of queers, we delve into sci-fi, dystopian, horror - a little bit of everything, but all of it feeling very much in the realm of possibility! I loved Real Bodies, where dating is now under the government’s control and mandated for everyone; Three Card Spread, where a man is haunted by a twin who died in the womb; and Happiest, where a family’s idyllic trip to Disneyland is shattered by a tragic accident.

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Reeve leans heavily into themes of identity and belonging. Of power imbalances in interracial relationships. Of transformation and transition. Of prejudice and the way those prejudices get projected onto marginalised bodies. Of erasing parts of yourself to fit in, but standing out regardless, feeling less than whole with those missing parts. Loved it and can’t wait to see what she comes out with next!

I was excited for this one, thinking it would be a biting, queer exploration of sexual dynamics and power imbalances… instead I got ? Some rich white people having mediocre sex with a mediocre white man who thinks himself a sex god. Eve was insufferable, the way she treated her girlfriend was just awful like… if you want an open relationship literally just find someone who wants the same thing. Romy deserves better. It felt like it was trying to say a lot but said not very much at all. Probably would have DNFd if it wasn’t so short and listening on 1.5x speed. 

My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for my digital ARC of The Fetishist! I don’t believe I’ve read many posthumously published works but I’ve read three so far in 2024. The Fetishist does what it says on the tin - explores one white man’s fetishisation of Asian women - but it does so with impeccable wit and warmth. I loved spending time with these characters (okay, not Daniel), especially Kyoko and Kornell.

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Obviously the whole novel is a pushback against the stereotypical views of Asian and Asian-American women, but Kyoko was just the embodiment of this pushback. She’s infused with so much love and depth, the author and her intent are clear as day - but not in a ‘beat you over the head with a stick’ kind of way. I’m explaining this badly, but basically we love Kyoko and fuck the stereotype of the meek, pliable Asian/Asian-American woman.

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I won’t give too much away of the plot, but the cover is SO good. The sections we spend in Daniel’s head are tough to read but so important. It’s like I said before, Daniel’s fetishisation is clear as day but also subtle. His ‘preferences’ are all the more harmful because he genuinely doesn’t see himself as one of those guys blatantly chasing after Asian women. He *does* love Alma (another great character I haven’t even mentioned yet!) but Min doesn’t shy away from plumbing the seedier depths of his desires, prejudices and the power dynamics of such a relationship.

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And Alma! Her sections was amazing and heartbreaking. She’s a classical musician with MS, dealing with the subsequent loss of a huge part of her life. I loved her relationship with her neighbour (although I forget his name, oops), and her strength.

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I did find the timelines a little bit confusing. Usually I don’t have trouble jumping back and forth in time in books, but for some reason it took me a while to get acclimated to each new section.

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A taut, dark, funny read which makes me so sad that Katherine Min passed away before we could see more of her talent. She does have another book from 2006 though!

I really liked the twist but other than that not much has stuck with me three weeks after finishing this book. It’s a bleak dystopian where essentially illness has been eradicated from society and people are put together with optimal genes for reproducing. Brave New World-esque, with a bit of 1984 since if you deviate from ‘The Method’ you’re seen as a heretic. It’s a bit dull, the language (or translation?) quite dry and uninspired. It seems this is a book studied at school for lots of Germans, and I can see the merit in discussing it with a group! Overall, didn’t make me particularly excited to pick up more of Zeh’s work. 

I read my first Nunez a few months ago (The Vulnerables) and really enjoyed her style, and I’m trying harder to pick up more books by the same authors. I tend to bounce around authors quite a lot and it’s likely making me miss out on some new favourites!

The Friend is just as engaging as The Vulnerables, and I like all of the literary references Nunez weaves into her work. The Friend is a meandering novel about grief and the bond between humans and dogs - and ironic if you’ve read it, but nothing bad happens to the dog! The narrator is mourning the loss of a friend, an altogether not-great person, which makes the grieving process more complex, and takes on his great dane who nobody else wants. The dog is reticent and unaffectionate, grieving for his master, and so the bond that slowly grows between them is all the more affecting.

I thought it started to lose its way a bit towards the end. The sections with ‘the friend’ lost me a bit, as he really is an unappealing guy. His rants about creative writing students and authors were eye-roll-worthy. But I enjoyed the little meta twist towards the end.

Even when I’m not loving the plot though (and I use that term loosely, Nunez’s works are more vibe-heavy), her prose keeps me engaged. It’s effortless, makes you feel things without straining itself.

I liked the Vulnerables more, but will certainly continue making my way through the rest of her books!

Another audiobook roulette pick, Ghost Music is an odd, melancholic, beautifully written little book. I haven’t read Braised Pork yet, An Yu’s first book, but I certainly will try to soon, though I think I’ll try to find a print copy as I think Ghost Music would have been further elevated if I’d been able to linger over some of the lovelier sentences.

It gets off to an intriguing start, Song Yan wakes up in a room with no doors to find a glowing orange mushroom talking to her. Once she manages to wake up, she’s back confronted with the mundanity of her everyday life. Her mother-in-law has just moved in with Song Yan and her husband, which obviously requires some adjustment, Song Yan is increasingly bored with her job as a piano teacher, and her husband is steadfastly ignoring her desires for a child. But the routine cycle is broken when boxes of mushrooms not addressed to them keep showing up at the apartment. 

I think I wanted the book to lean more heavily into the weirdness of the talking mushrooms and possibly ghostly dead pianist. We get flashes of the surreal, the otherworldly, and then they’re taken away and we’re abruptly forced back into the quotidian. Which is probably the point. Song Yan is unable to escape the trials of her regular life, despite feeling big feelings like loss of direction in her career and a yearning for a child that her husband doesn’t want.

One to mull over, and one I’d possibly recommend in print over audio. 

My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for my free digital ARC of The Extinction of Irena Rey! After publishing Homesickness last year, which I loved, renowned Polish & Spanish translator Jennifer Croft has ventured once again into the realm of original fiction, though this one ties closely to her translation work. It features a group of translators from Polish who gather at the home of their ‘Author’ to translate her latest novel. Except when they arrive at their usual summit, the Author is behaving erratically, and eventually goes missing.

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I got strong Olga Tokarczuk vibes from this one, but whether that’s just through my own biases since I’ve read Croft’s English translations of Tokarczuk, I couldn’t say. This feeling is closely linked to the themes of this novel - the relationship between writer and translator, this strange key to wider audiences, both one-sided and not, as translators are trusted to bring the author’s words to languages they cannot comprehend. As a former student of translation, this relationship never fails to fascinate.

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The structure of the book is also fun, as it’s ostensibly a fictional book written by one of the translators about their situation with the author, translated (and edited?) with footnotes by another of the translators. I really enjoyed the tension that’s visible between the author of the novel (the Spanish translator), and the English translator translating it - all played out via the footnotes. Their rivalry isn’t the only lightness to a novel that’s a literary mystery. I thought the whole thing had a sort of frivolity to it.

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Despite my interest in translation, what should have been an engaging mystery, and plenty of humour though, I often found myself disengaged from it. It’s not a long book but it felt sluggish. It took me a full week to read 288 pages, the pacing was just off. The translators who didn’t have a major role to play were also somewhat two-dimensional - though this could have been intentional as Emi (the author of this novel, the Spanish translator - confused yet?) might not have viewed them as tantamount to the story.

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If you’re a fan of meta vibes in your fiction, I’d definitely recommend this odd little novel filled with fungi and forests, musings on translations, and authors behaving badly. It slightly missed the mark for me, but still I enjoyed lots of aspects!

Reached for this one as part of Queer Your Year 2024, a book translated from a language that doesn’t use the Latin alphabet, and it’s a fascinating piece of work. It was originally published on a queer Chinese website, and the author is still anonymous. No one knows if they’re a man, woman, nonbinary, queer or straight, but Beijing Comrades has become a cult novel depicting the underground queer scene of mainland China in the 80s/90s.

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Be warned, it’s absolutely not a romance novel - not least because when the two main characters meet one of them is only 16 years old. Lan Yu and Handong embark on a tumultuous 7-year relationship, on and off again, filled with toxic behaviour, internalised homophobia, infidelity, mistrust, the works. A relationship that starts with one side so young and an exchange of money is not exactly written in the stars. Handong, the older man, is also insufferable - intentionally so. He struggles hugely with internalised homophobia, often returning to sleeping with woman and even seeing a psychiatrist to find out if he’s ‘actually gay’. His attitude towards women is awful as well, just all round not a good human being.

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Scott E. Myers, the translator, wrote a super helpful introduction to this Feminist Press edition. This English translation is not actually a translation of the original Chinese e-novel, or of the later version, or of an even later version - it’s a translation of a mishmash of all these texts. I think is both amazing viewing the novel as a living, breathing text, but has also led to a few inconsistencies. Characters seemingly forget things they knew a few chapters ago, and Handong’s decisions/opinions chop and change - though this could be down to his grappling with accepting his sexuality.

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Beyond queerness, the novel also attempts to tackle capitalism in the wake of China’s cultural revolution. However, that part felt a bit lacklustre. Handong is a ‘businessman’. I genuinely couldn’t tell you more than that, and I don’t think the author could either. It felt almost childish, ‘I’m a businessman, doing business, with my business associates and my businessman suit. Business’. 😂

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Criticisms aside, I do think it’s a valuable piece of queer fiction looking at homosexuality in a closed-off society. I love that the author didn’t hold back with the sex scenes - I can only imagine the stir those would have caused being published even online in the 90s!

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I feel like this quote sums up the book perfectly:

‘China was much more closed off in those days, and its people were much less aware than they are today. On the one hand, we lacked the knowledge and information we needed to understand what we were feeling. And at the same time each of us was unconsciously doing his best not to understand.’

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An agonising back and forth, played out internally and externally, about accepting (or ultimately not) your sexuality when anything other than cishet was considered taboo. Sad, frustrating, fascinating in both content and production.