I gave it 1 star on Goodreads because the plot is promising (a young woman moves back to her rural hometown to become her divorced brother’s housekeeper. After she arrives, strange things start happening—bovine hysteria, death of farm animals, a dog’s phantom pregnancy), but the writing was so not what I was expecting. Many chapters seem to be one long paragraph with so many asides for each sentence that it drove me crazy & so I just did not enjoy it.
Did I overlook something? What did you think of this novel?
by OjoDeOro
1 Comment
I have it four stars. Normally I don’t like books that are too lost in their own interiority, but I found this one an exception. I really liked the ambiguity of the events and a submissive character who may secretly be controlling and manipulative. Plus it’s rich with different themes. This is my goodreads thoughts:
This stream-of-conscious novel features an unreliable unnamed protagonist. The novel has a strong sense of interiority with long stretches of the main character walking through the woods lost in her own reflections. The protagonist claims she wants to suppress her own will, ambitions, and desires to serve others, while her brother represents the dominating personality, the will to power, the successful businessman. Any good novel contains paradoxes: in a sense, the attempt to suppress her desires and personality is her personality and desire. Even the protagonist’s lack of a name is symbolic for her desire to subvert her will and self to others.
Various sections hint the character is Jewish. Although she expresses ambivalence about her connection to her ancestral traditions. It is tempting to read this work as an allegory of the Jewish experience, the way the protagonist feels like a perpetual exile and outsider, hoping by being submissive to others desires that she can disarm their suspicions and the way that the townsfolk regard her with suspicion and blame her for the strange occurrences and village misfortune that imitate patterns of rural antisemitism in Europe. However, seeing it only as an allegory for Jewish experience is reductive. Another dimension is the character’s gender in which the reader might be tempted to read the protagonists insistence of suppressing her own will, especially to men and her brother, as symbolizing traditional gender roles. There is also themes between submissive personality versus dominant personalities, resentment versus self-pity, understanding versus misunderstanding, the individual versus the community.
Despite her declaration of wanting to submit to others’ wills, sometimes the protagonist finds herself accidentally expressing her own will or not being obedient, which makes her feel guilty and reinforces her negative thoughts about herself and the world. As the brother’s health deteriorates the novel leaves open the question of who controls who. How accurate is the protagonist’s perspective? She claims to want to submit to the will of others, but the ending with her brother’s health deteriorating and him slipping further under her control to maintain his health contradicts this perspective and represents a subversion. We are told that she perceives the villagers resenting and blaming her, but there is a language barrier. The book leaves ambiguous through the language barrier whether they really feel this way or if it is a false perception on her part. Do we often assume things about other’s intentions or what they think about us? The same could be said about the brother and what he thinks of his sister. As his health deteriorates and he makes feeble attempts to contact the outside world, the ending hints that he might be scared of his sister who is supposedly trying to help him. The greatest strength of the book is the voice of the protagonist that leaves everything in a miasma of ambiguity, leaving the reader guessing how we should understand the events unfolding. It leaves the works with a disconcerting atmosphere.