Really didn’t like the writing style of this one, and it took waaaaay too long to get going. Dialogue lowkey impossible to follow, and even some sentences didn’t parse. Kept waiting for things to pick up cuz I was bored and un-compelled and saw that I was already at 44% and had to call it on principle. 

Wow, this was bizarre. I never would have guessed from the cover/title/reviews/summary that this was so irreverent, mostly incomprehensible, and truly outlandish. I struggled to even follow the content of the dialogue. But I was glued, and I blew through this just to figure out more (and succeed even less in understanding) what was actually happening. Surprisingly tender at the end toward an ailing mother who fluctuates between delusion and reality (partly as a result of her old age but also partly from just being generally loony). I wanted more from the narrator though — either decide to let your narrator be a blank canvas in the present or give me some back story, but definitely don’t give me

two whole mentions of a wife and child and also possible queer backstory and also a career as a novelist

in the in-between. This book is very German/Swiss-German core  (extremely preoccupied with family histories of Nazism, etc) and also extremely bourgeois (I had to look up a lot of name-drops and locations) (also ironic (but I think self-consciously so) given the sort of bourgeois satire it’s attempting). Confusing to try to formulate an opinion on this. Hrumph. 

Oh my goodness how delicious is this. So heartbreaking but tender. Stuart’s portrayal of the characters and events goes beyond just what IS and looks at it with such love and empathy. You can tell you’re seeing the world through Shuggie’s eyes who just loves his mother so much, yet you feel for and understand Agnes’s pain and self-destructive impulse and Leek’s fed-up-ness, and everyone’s perspective is fair and valid and so empathetic. So tragic but not trauma porn — instead just looking at how boringly painful life can be, but also how beautiful and the tender nuggets of goodness. I devoured the end of this book especially. Makes me want to jump straight into Young Mungo again now!

This was good! And better than I had expected considering I’d never heard of this or the publisher. Could potentially be a little shocking to some (but that comes with the territory of writing about queer sex work) so this isn’t a recommend-to-everyone kind of book for sure. I found this compelling! But sometimes a little too contrived or intentionally over-profound at odd moments. Sometimes the tone would slip weirdly to waxing poetic (and a little cliche) then jump back into dialogue or just recounting events. Either way, I enjoyed the three characters and wanted to know more! Would be interesting in seeing what else Kemp has written since 2010

Lots of discourse online about how this is hard to get into, which I don’t think I agree with — I was sucked in at the beginning, and things plodded a bit in the middle, then ramped back up at the end. I never quite know what ppl mean when they says a book is meditative, but I do now: this book soothes you into a lull so that you feel like you’re living the repetition with Tara. Also fundamentally relatable because I too hide in my room for hundreds of days rather than explaining myself to my housemates. My biggest complaint is that we don’t know anything about the characters — we barely even know how the main character feels, just a catalog of actions and repetitions. Which I suppose could be the point. But I was reallyyy missing some character work here 

I just kept waiting for this to catch me and it just didn’t I fear! Should’ve been up my alley but just felt.. boring? Lots of Lacanian business that was sort of over my head so maybe u need to rly be about that life

I had moments of really loving this book and really being turned off by overly-poetic (read: nonsensical) prose, changes between first-person/third-person, and the sort of dream-realm (

which I was reallyyyy unhappy to end the book in

). I liked all the reflections on art and writing and making sense of a senseless world amid feeling generally suicidal but wary of that death making not a difference, but this just didn’t land for me. 

Here are some favorable quotes/sentiments, nonetheless: 
“Maybe it’s because we could pass along science. You wrote a fact in a book and there it say until someone born five hundred years later improved it. Refined it, implemented it more usefully. Easy. You couldn’t do that with soul-learning. We all started from zero” 
“But can’t you feel this mattering? Right now?”
“His whole life was a conspiracy of other people helping him, other people teaching him this or that. He felt like Hamlet, just moping around waiting for the world to assuage his grief, petulantly soliloquizing and fainting while everyone else fed him bananas and candy bars”
“‘Humans are just a long emptiness waiting to be filled […] Never love? That seems like the big one” 

This was perhaps a little too sickly-sweet for me. Very White Teeth vibes in that it follows siblings, partners, their coworkers, parents, random side characters, all taking place around one modern event that keeps cropping up in the background. This ended up being rather sweet and happy-ending-ish, but it just felt a little too contrived?? Almost read like a rom com, which I don’t tend to love in a book. Cute summer vibes though 

Wow, I enjoyed this so much more than Permafrost. This cuts like a KNIFE. So heart-wrenching on motherhood and anti-motherhood, queer love and family, depression/disconnection/general ennui dogging it all. This was so delicious that I immediately want to re-start it and go through with a pen. Seeing lots of ppl complain about how much they hated the narrator and to that I say: god forbid a woman be a bad person and also, I kinda really resonated with her at times so. Do with that what you will. But! I think it’s valuable to have seen that on the page at all. 

Although I will add that at times the turns of phrase literally don’t make sense. Idk if this is a translation thing or part of the fact that Baltasar is a poet and so is perhaps (overly) heavy handed with the metaphors

Samantha Shannon just does not miss with this fantasy series. A delicious true stand-alone (I couldn’t remember a lot of what happened in Priory, and that was no biggie). The pacing was perfect, which was a remarkable feat in an 850-page fantasy epic. I loved the characters (shoutout to Wulf especially), and the twists were TWISTING! A perfect giant book companion while slogging through my thesis this month