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gxuosi's Reviews (390)
fuck yeah that was fun as hell bro. it got a little predictable and repetitive around the 70-85% mark but that was also the point, people doing the same shit over and over expecting different results.
to be born from the anguish of your fathers and to be the omen of wrath against their oppressors. a power unmatched found in the unseen identity of girlhood.
this has to be one of the most unique short stories i’ve ever read man. so fucking cool. really impactful takes on otherism and interplanetary racism with realistic depictions of the violence between different peoples and the subsequent blood feuds. *review originally for binti book one, imported incorrectly.
dnf at 9%. it took me 6 days to read 29 pages. this just wasn't working for me from the first line and nothing following it gave me any hope of me locking in with this book. no rating cause i bailed way too early to judge it.
dnf at 38%. i just don’t wanna read. i haven’t touched this in days and i cannot make myself pick it back up. it’s not what i wanted based off how it was described and it’s not enticing me into finishing it.
“… the West is stuck in a loop, always looking at the past (displaced into language), instead of at the present (communicated in images), from which they want to look away.” incredible lecture by hammad that amongst other things, ties together the narratives of the moments of recognition in fiction which the public sees as entertainment versus the lived moments of recognition in which we are unnerved, existentially discomforted, and do not enjoy. language, art, and fashion are all whistles warning us for the coming political climate, and in particular war. to concisely bridge the gap between literature and the palestinian resistance against the genocide and occupation was a literary feat in itself.
living with the war and the generational trauma it carries is a sisyphean task and yewon isn't pushing the boulder up the mountain—she is using all her strength to stop it from rolling down and flattening her. every waking moment she is suffocating in the sweltering, claustrophobic agony of the price of war; the dead, the dying, the missing, the mourning, the surviving. she shifts helplessly, without agency, between waking dissociative moments and the dreadful nightmarish landscape of the hotel. each symbolic piece of the story directly constructing the inescapability of the war as a whole and the personal war each person is carrying within them; the bones of her family, the doors to escape the trauma, the windows of hope. this book is an agonizing slog through a waist-high mud pit that the reader feels viscerally. the walls closing in around yewon are palpable. it's deeply terrorizing in a surrealist way, consistently reinforcing the cyclic nature of generational trauma and its manifestations in the families it affects.
if you aren't connecting with the meaning of the invisible hotel, i highly recommend around 20% of the way into the book, reading both olivia ho's review published on "the straits times" and gianni washington's review on the "chicago review of books" to better sort through the symbolism and cultural context you may be missing.
if you aren't connecting with the meaning of the invisible hotel, i highly recommend around 20% of the way into the book, reading both olivia ho's review published on "the straits times" and gianni washington's review on the "chicago review of books" to better sort through the symbolism and cultural context you may be missing.
layla martínez you INVENTED atmospheric writing. NO ONE can weave a web like youuuu