“Baby, why you all wet?

This story is almost tailored to me as a tabletop role-play game designer. If you’ve read it, you’ll know why. In the indie scene there has been many articles written about players (unintentionally) using role-play as a sort of therapy. It’s a safe space with psychic distance, and some games intentionally create a lot of player bleed, where people pour a themselves into their characters. But that’s not what role-play is equipped for. Not in the least.

This makes this particular story even more fascinating to me. I’ve seen what role-play can do, as well as it’s limits. So the desperate bid to bring Andrew to himself by playing out his fantasy is very compelling to me. Perhaps making it even easier for me to suspend my disbelief. The ending especially made sense to me. It’s funny, because I think the story otherwise would have felt pretty contrived.

What helps, of course, is getting along very well with the prose. The voice here is gripping, interesting, and insistent. And it’s far better than the movie at inserting plausible deniability. I first saw the movie and my date was particularly annoyed when I guessed what was happening in the first five minutes. But that’s because he literally spells it out for you right away. It was still a fun movie to watch, but I would have preferred by far some more deftness with the foreshadowing. The book is that. Before it tips the hat there is a bit of background on the character and some additional context. It’s still there, but it’s far better. What’s more, foreshadowing like that makes sense and is far more satisfying in a book rather than in a movie, in my opinion.

“Teddy gave him nothing.”

On a journey across the sea, numerous passengers petition a champion chess player for a game. But from the initial competition comes a surprise contender who has not played chess for decades, yet is seemingly an equal partner in play.

While the premise is simple, the execution is absolutely masterful and riveting. Both players are given context in the form of pivotal life events which inform their play so much so that when they play, the reader sees the communication taking place so much so that the game becomes a medium for every fundamental component of the players to clash.

Perhaps it’s the most character driven story I’ve read, with a simple plot. Yet in another way, when you consider how integral the story of each character makes, and how much that aspect of the plotting shapes the outcomes, it seems more like a perfectly balanced equation.

If I were to nitpick, I could say that stylistically it does have very weird paragraph structuring that took me a bit to get into. There are walls of text, though mind you, this is a small digest size novella, that reoccur throughout. And I can’t really figure out how they’re formulated. Lots of times it’s a specific thought or interaction or scene. But even the dialogue will go on like that, and it’s formulated such that there’s no interruption to the flow. It’s a monologue is what it is. But when where natural pauses and break points aren’t represented in paragraph formatting. Very strange.

Everything else though, and especially the specificity and diction during the monologue, are all so rich you just sink right into it. Fantastic voice once it all clicks.

It made me think a lot about the nature of lived experience and role-play, trauma, how each persons’ mind is truly unique and beautiful in its own way, and our relationship to the media and stories and books we consume.

A man chronicles his strange journey while marooned on an island with strange machinery in his diary. As he obsessively dissects the island with his considerable perception to understanding what is happening, he, in turn, ends up disassembling and learning more about himself.

This book is masterful in its thematic throughline. I have always been fascinated with perspective and perception. Without feedback from other people, we become disturbingly reliant on motivated thinking. It is so crucial to a persons' identity that we interact with other people; without it we never really know ourselves at all. How much of what we see is actually just a projection of ourselves? Without any means of distinction, reality takes on an unknowable Otherness.

With the stream of consciousness that fits very well with a diary written in blissful, straightforward prose, the mind of the man cultivates almost uncanny anticipation of the readers’ thoughts. Even as he does something absurd, or has not taken something crucial into account, or is overly cruel in his observations—you have only to turn the page and discover he himself knows this and wrestles with the same problem.

It’s also more frenetic than a modern thriller, almost genre-bending as our man desperately tries to make sense of the goings-on. And as such, the reader establishes synchronicity with the story as it unfolds. Something of a feat given how old the text is. It still feels fresh and original and regards a human experience that will forever be, (ironically, if you’ve read it), timeless.

It made me think about more than that. But any more would be considerable spoilers and this is a book with a reading experience where the less you know, the better, in my opinion.

This is wildly amazing and also taxing and draining to read at times. What presents as a whodunit crime becomes an exploration of the socioeconomic conditions that would instigate the brutal crime.

There are a lot of content warnings for this, but most predominantly is sexual assault and harm to a 13 year old girl. So, you best be in the mind set for that. While the actual crime is not depicted in extreme detail, it’s centering is reframed from a lot of different perspectives, from privileged racist cop guy to a mother who reports the assault and has to comfort her children shortly after.

It is probably the smartest use of a whodunit, as it directly connects the reader to problems in Canada, such as racism and musing indigenous women. And it does so in such a way that it points to nearly every factor why this could happen. People often weaponize racism as a form of dehumanizing indigenous people, especially on reserves, and cite events like this (as if things like this didn’t happen more often in urban areas regardless, but I digress) as “reasons” and the “problems” on reservations. This completely exposes the generalization and then educates the reader.

It’s really just absolutely stunning, if you’ve got the stomach for it. I will say, I think the narrator does a good job but the themes and characterizations would come together a lot sooner for me had I been reading it, I think.

I don’t think I’ve ever read such a compelling point-of-view and voice when a narrative centres trauma and mental health. There is a horror that comes with the psychic distance, as the narrator is, ostensibly, a god who has entered a young girl when she experiences trauma and compartmentalizes.

We see her story from this perspective most of the time, but there is a dialogue between the girl and our narrator occurring from time to time. They have different needs and different responses to the moments chronicled here, a-temporally.

It’s very compelling because it allows the narrative to have really vivid interiority but also feel distanced when terrible things are both happening to the girl and by the girl.

The narrator is spectacular as well, I highly recommend the audiobook. I could not stop listening. Absolutely riveting. The pacing is on point, the prose vivid; everything about this worked for me. I had just bailed on Bear Town, trying to tackle similar forms of trauma, and felt it performative and vacuous, and here comes along Freshwater absolutely solidifying that for me.

Sarah is a professor enduring an abusive workplace manipulated by a small man who has apparently done similar to all the women he’s encountered and desired. When she is refused a promotion and competency is continually undermined, her husband also chooses to take off and cheat on her.

She also intervenes when she noticed what looks like an attempted kidnapping. As a result, a thankful father, who moves in “a different world” than her, allows her to select any person he will have “disappeared”.

This felt really contrived, even for a commercial fiction thriller. Most of the narrative works toward undermining the competency of every character. The dialogue sometimes doesn’t fit what is established for the person or is just straight up bad. The hitman, syndicate person isn’t even competent. Sarah, a mother, only passingly thinks of her children being affected by situations. It’s really odd.

While I liked that all the men were pretty useless, it makes some of the connections to characters really contrived and the ending more like a Deus ex machina, rather than something earned. The pacing is also pretty off for such a straight forward story. Feels like a short story padded up.

A singular experience. Prose, art, poetry come together in a way that is elusive until it becomes a self fulfilling prophesy surrounding the heart of grief. I took quite a few pictures of some of the most beautiful prose I’ve read followed by opaque art; something I’ve always found hard to intercept. And even as I got to the ending, and I wondered what ending could be appropriate, it offers not even a subjective conclusion. Also thematically appropriate, I thought.

Exceptional, if a bit odd voice. I can see why this puts some people off. However, on audio, this really shines. The narrator is exceptional and just gets the cadence created here. It’s natural and fluid. I struggle to suggest another book with this kind of anchoring in time and place; certainly not with this kind of voice. It’s not as though Whitehead struggled with voice previously either, and this feels revelatory. My favourite part of it by far and away.

It’s also true, I think, that people who criticize the plot have some standing here. In a book with a blurb and cover that sort of looks like genre fiction, the plot is a fairly fluid thing. It feels like a pretence for some of the most loved and spotlighted characters to be studied, and by proxy, make the areas they frequent, characters themselves. And so it’s hard for me to penalize it much as I genuinely was in awe in some of the descriptions and playfulness of the voice. You really do feel like you’re learning about the area.

There are slight intrusions that other voices could never pull off. For instance, a character feels eyes on his back and turns around, encounters a woman reacting to him with suspicious disdain, and the voice says, quickly, “That why you don’t turn around.” It’s weird sometimes to examine who this story is for, kind of? But then the next interaction or description of nothing becomes an absolute gem your mind sinks it’s meat into and who cares?

This feels like a reread to me. There’s a quality here that may not translate to the page for me, but then again, perhaps it will. Maybe there’s even more to chew on, especially now that I’ve got that voice in my head already.