"As I write these words, my tale is over."
I was warned in the beginning I wouldn't get any answers but still, ending a book with just a pile of questions? Never read anything like this.
Following their journey was a whole ride. You try to be hopeful for them but then the same old grief and the same old sadness and the same old lonliness, over and over and over again. And since it was written in the past tense, you know it's going to be the same but still you can't stop reading, and you can't stop hoping.
I couldn't ignore the underlying patriarchy and deep rooted beliefs in the women that was present throughout the book, but that's a whole different discussion.
Why was everything the way it was? I got goosebumps when they came across the bunker holding men! So it wasn't just the women. By the end of the book, I thought that the planet they were on was not Earth at all? Because there were no seasons, the weird ground structure, the sparsly found trees and flowers and even insects. Or did Earth get struck by some sort of calamity or virus that they had to take extreme measures to ensure the survival of humanity? But even that seems unlikely. Because why be so cruel? What was the purpose of locking them up? What a tragic story.
"One after the other, they were buried under that sky and neither they nor I knew if it was the one under which we’d been born."
What are your thoughts on this book?
by yuukkii0
4 Comments
I thought it was sort of… fine? It was certainly very well written, but I felt like I didn’t get the point of it at all.
I loved it. It left me wanting to know more and read more, but just like the characters sometimes you just don’t get that.
I read this for the first time earlier this year and it really stayed with me in a way not a lot of books do. I think the point is to not know, and the inherent cruelty and despair at living in a world where we don’t get a “why” when awful things happen is the point. The author was a Jewish woman whose family fled the Nazis in WWII, so to me, any explanation would have cheapened the book and lessened the impact. There is no answer we could get (in the book or in real life tragedies) that would make the horrible things that happened “make sense” or be okay, and I feel like it was a really brave and bold choice to make readers grapple with that.
The underground scenes and walking around the surface painted quite a vivid picture of loneliness and desperation in my head that I won’t soon forget. The narrator never knowing hope or deep connection with others with a landscape that never changes is quite an accurate depiction of depression; it put me as a reader wanting something for her over each hill but I never got it.