anneklein's reviews
605 reviews

I think this book was less for me than I initially thought it would be. I was excited by the idea of a thriller set at a k-pop survival show, but the actual plot was more like a bootcamp, not televised, and the structure of the training program quickly got sidelined by the supernatural events and the horror elements. 

That whole plotline made sense to me, especially the sapphic final girl vibe we get from the halfway point onwards. It just wasn't the element of the book that actually interested me, so as these elements took more and more prominence I was less and less engaged. Actually, it's not that the book wasn't engaging, because it was really gripping and fast-paced from start to finish; it's more that I didn't feel emotionally invested, because I am way more interested in the realistic fucked-up problems with kpop survival shows (cameras, fan voting, etc) than in the supernatural elements the book added. But I can see this working well for someone who is into commentary on beauty culture using body horror elements. 

I also enjoyed the rivalry and tension between the two main characters (the narrator and Candie), it felt very true to how fraught teen friendships between women can be. And the influence of The Craft on the book was very clear and fun as well!

Man, am I disappointed. I read the first part of this book a few years ago, dropped it because of life getting in the way of my concentration right before Patricia's story, and picked it back up this year hoping it would be as good as the first few stories.

But the more I think about it the less I think I enjoyed it. There are several reasons for that:
a) The characters are so superficially constructed. They feel very tokenistic: the gifted tech prodigy with Indian heritage, the Chinese daughter of migrants who for some reason becomes a practitioner of alternative therapies (Orientalist, hello), the manic pixie dream girl who hears voices and draws everybody to her (and her "tits glow like pearls" at one point), the crazy veteran who isn't that crazy... it's just not interesting, especially coming from a white cis man.
b) The fact that Indigenous people are only mentioned to make the white researcher come across as authoritative. A couple of Brazilian Indigenous people also appear, again to facilitate the journey of the white lady who is trying to extract seeds from their territory.
c) The lack of intention behind the way the plot unfolded. After the Mimas debacle comes to its resolution, we follow the characters for another couple hundred pages in an aimless way that somehow still tries to pretend it's saying something important. I'm not saying all books should make their messaging clear, I'm saying this was not an ambiguous ending done right.
d) Relatedly: why do we need to go on for so long about every single thing the characters will do? This reeks of "established author lacks a firm enough editor". Like other reviewers have said, it's incredibly bloated and a lot of the pontificating comes across as pretentious, if not directly patronising. The author is so unconvinced that he can change the reader's mind with a few words, he spends hundreds more rehashing the same messages just in case.
e) This one might simply be pointing out that the book did not age well, but still. Why is the solution to the destruction of ecosystems... some sort of AI? It sounds so  to me that in 2018, enough people were credulous enough about the detriment that AI represents to the planet that this whole plotline was written, greenlit AND critically acclaimed. I am not convinced whatsoever by the parallels Powers tries to draw between Neelay's "learners" and the processes we find in nature.

All in all, I think I had hyped this book in my mind purely because I do think the short stories in the first part are good, and because I liked the way Powers referenced Walt Whitman, who I do have a soft spot for. But I guess in the end both of them are white men (if you catch my drift), and it shows.

This was so good. Both parts were enraging, in a good way, but the first one in particular made me feel a disdain that contained so many facets. There's the way the commander refuses to admit he has been bitten by the animal (possibly a snake?), which portrays so well the toxic masculinity of military environments. Then the politics of hygiene, with his efforts to keep himself clean even as he refuses to see his rotten insides; the book emphasises this imagery by repeating the scenes of routine washing and shaving. Later on, he even insists in his head that there is no way that the putrid smell coming from his hut is caused by his own wound. Another facet was obviously the imperialist discourse of the soldiers, the way they speak of their settling. The sterilisation using petrol, the cutting of hair, the humiliation with the water hose...

Yet throughout the violence, a few images appear of life pushing forward regardless. At one point, the commander finds a spider in his hut and spends the next hours looking for insects and crushing them under his feet. The metaphor here is so clear, even more so when considering the military boot as the specific foot that tramples them. And "meanwhile, a little insect advanced towards the edge of the room and slipped through a crack between the floor and the wall, escaping into the gap" (p. 23). After cutting the girl's hair and burning it in a pile alongside her clothes: "Far from the flames that consumed her clothes, a few tiny black ringlets of hair remained scattered across the sand" (34). Finally, on one of the commander's escapades into the hills, "a small black bird charted a line through the sky, which turned a deeper shade of blue [...]" (48). 

Each of these minor details, woven so subtly they pass as atmosphere, insist that life prevails, no matter how intense the violence or how unmatched an oppressor may seem. The bird imagery also comes to mind during the second part of the book, as a point of comparison with our narrator's life experience which is in its essence defined by borders (so much so that they are in her head, too).

The second part of the book is so cleverly interwoven with the first, in catastrophic ways that are only apparent once it is too late to turn back. From the beginning we have a parallel in the image of the dog howling, but little by little, as our narrator gets closer to the origin of the story she investigates, details resurface from the first part of the book. Often, these minor details even appear with their wording nearly unchanged from the way they initially appeared. Compare, for example, "carrying a hose wrapped around his arm in equal-sized rings" (30) and "on the sand lies a hose, neatly running from one tree to the next and coiled in equal-sized rings around each trunk" (96). Or "thick clouds of sand sprung from underneath the vehicle's tyres, rose up and followed after them, completely obscuring the view behind" (10), compared to this passage from part 2: "Despite how cautiously I'm driving, thick clouds of dust rise up and swiftly form a halo that obscures the scene behind me" (105).

Through the minor details of our narrator's journey, we realise, in a moment of dramatic irony, that the story she is chasing is one she is already recreating. Her search turns her into a living participant of the story, includes her in ways that go beyond mere research. The truth lies not necessarily in the specific answers of what had happened, but in the shared lived experience between her and the girl from part 1. By the time we follow this logic to its inevitable conclusion, it is much too late.

I have never read writing like this. It was long-winded but not quite prosaic or purple; it rather felt like a frantic stream of consciousness, which worked so well to immerse the reader in the life of Erika Kohut, our main character. I also really liked the third person present tense, it's so effective when it comes to communicating immediacy even when it's omniscient. The way I interpreted it, we had a degree of omniscience most of the time, but every so often we'd go into Erika's head and experience her memories and feelings, the specific moments a present thing would remind her of, and it was so vertiginous that it left me reeling and needing a deep breath. Truly a very experiential (and experimental) style of writing.

The degree of fucked-up-ness was not as high as I was expecting, probably because the blurbs and reviews had warned me to it already and I had gotten myself ready for something even heavier. Still, it was ugly, all right. And in terms of rawness, definitely one of the crudest books I've ever read. It's so complicated in that there is no black-and-white morality, everybody is susceptible to both causing and receiving harm from everybody else. 

Some moments that stood out to me were the public transport scene (writing, characterisation, sheer surrealism of it all, insane comedy), the flashbacks to Erika's childhood (and her fraught relationship with her mother!), and the music rehearsal in the gym. Up until then I'd been more or less ok with what was going on, but that whole scene was so wild that it made me go "damn, we're really in it now, huh?".

The ending is so sad, and I think perfect for what the story was trying to say. A big part of Erika's character is that she is stuck between becoming the best she can be, and becoming the worst she can be. And not being able to do either is what makes her such a pitiable character. I also appreciated that Jelinek does not push any particular interpretation of the topics she brings up through her characters: Erika has her own flawed opinions, Klemmer has his own flawed opinions, Mother has her own flawed opinions, and through the use of the third person we realise they often say really apt things, and yet their actions rarely match what they preach, or they have other perspectives that seem to us insanely wrong. Topics such as women's autonomy, capitalism and property, one's artistic purpose and career, and relationships as a whole are discussed by the characters, and they are no more likely to offer an insightful perspective as they are to completely misread a situation.

Overall this was such an incredible reading experience on many levels, and I'm grateful that pieces of literature such as this one exist, for all the ways they make us confront the darkness of humanity.