imogenrose97's reviews
492 reviews

I've challenged myself to read a book of poetry a month and it has so far been so fullfilling. It's so interesting to explore poetry in different styles and actually try to find pieces I enjoy. Mary Oliver has stolen my whole heart, as I'm sure she has many others. I had to start reading a second book so that I would slow down and get to savour each poem as they deserved. 
I'm struck by how gleefully Oliver writes the world around her, I've never felt so much joy come through nature writing as so often it's tied to climate change, which whole pressing is not always hopeful. I've already bought myself another collection of hers to read this year and I'm so excited to delve in.

Gripped from the beginning I deeply enjoyed the first half of this book. The writing is bold and introspective, and the characters are vivid and visceral. Our main character Joana is rough and independent, not understanding her place in the world as a young woman who follows her whims without a care for those around her. I found the first half to be much stronger writing than the second, the first half was clear and the stream of conscious style worked in conjunction with a child narrator. By the second half, the writing became muddy and convoluted. Strings of words that felt too heavy to bear, I ended up skimming the pages to find my way to the end. I lost the sense of clarity the beginning had held and that unfortunately made the second half of the book a bit of a drag. I'm interested to read some of her other work as she has a clear talent.

 Both hilarious and gut twistingly tense, Big Swiss holds you over the precipice of a catastrophe coming from too many sides to count. Everyone is either lying, stalking or hiding something from someone else and I couldn't tell which fallout would be the worst.
At face value, Big Swiss is a story of an ill advised affair, though aren't they all, this one to be fair is ill advised on more than one front. I don't think I expected to be so confronted by mistakes I have made myself, mistakes that you aren't told are mistakes until you are too deep to turn back, mistakes I think society should take more responsibility for righting.  I wont go into these mistakes as I think that they'll be too much of a spoiler for the true narrative of the book. The unexplained heart.


I found the discussions around trauma so interesting, "victims say all trauma is equal and I hate that" was a particularly difficult to navigate quote, the space that those who have experienced trauma try to make for those around them to me is deeply beautiful, there is no way for trauma to be measured and something happening to one person could be completely, and validly, interpreted so differently than someone else. I think that Big Swiss was so caught in not letting her experience shape her that she let it become so much larger of an issue. Greta however embodies the victim, she has not processed the trauma that shaped her, she allows it to inform all her decisions. Both responses make perfect sense under the lens of trauma, its what they do with it now that is important. 
 

 You spend so much of this book unaware of what CM and X's relationship is like, glimpsing parts of X, and witnessing CM amid her grief. It's hard to get a glimpse of who either are inside of the relationship. I think that this hooked me, I couldn't understand CM's attraction outside of the natural urge to touch a flame burning bright. Which to be fair, is an extraordinarily hard urge to quell. X seemed to be running purely on her feelings in each moment rather than accepting that each action had consequences that would drip long into her future. She made choices that severely impacted her growth, reputation and access not only as an artist and creative but as a friend and partner. It was hard to tell whether she knew that these things would happen or if she blindly walked in the world. What was shown of X was so hard to decipher, we know so much about her actions but due to not ever being inside her head, not ever being able to hear her true thoughts and definitely not being able to trust her actions, words or even her diary entries, we're left with a splintered half person who is reckless and cruel and treats people like they are a cast of pawns to use at her artistic whim.
CM was a whole other kettle of fish, she is fearful, jealous and wary of people who knew X before she did, somehow equating a mysterious past with betrayal of her known relationship and love (though X proves that even a relationship already well established does nothing to quell her thirstless want for more). 
Beyond their relationship the book focused on a fictionalised history of America that intrigued me so much. I thought it provided the perfect backdrop for a messy love and the deeply complexly flawed person shaped by her past. 
 

It got too slow. I wasn't interested in the writing style. I couldn't get into the depictions of nature even though that's very much up my alley. It just wasn't the book for me

 At first reading was difficult and cringey but I don't read a lot of YA so that makes sense. As I grew more comfortable with the writing style it became just so gorgeous and sweet and toe curlingly gay. By the end I was drawing so many comparisons between Isabel and I and Eloise and my partner Emma. The author wrote everything so incredibly, with flaws and all. I just can't get over how incredibly kindly she wrote the reactions and where I might have used black and white thinking to absolutely fuck one of their rude friends right off out of my life, they were different and it was beautiful 

Natalia Ginzburg has an incredible power to write basic situations beautifully, with elegance and humility. People who you might have thought might otherwise be intolerable are written with an unexpected kindness. Ginzburg puts people on display and does not judge them for who they are. I think that's what is most striking in her works—the ability to let people be without writing judgment into the story. You are made to decide who they are yourself, you are made to admonish their behaviours yourself without the help of Ginzburg's own opinion. Though the characters themselves judge the others it does not feel as though Ginzburg always agrees.

I wish I could capslock the YES that the flaws of the characters were a main focus of this book because this book was messy and long and took place over I want to say 5-10 years. My copy had a foreword about learning to write after quitting being a lawyer. What followed was effectively a masterful collection of human thought, how someone is thinking about a situation, how many different thoughts we all have all happening at the same time in the same room, ricocheting from the things we take in. How separate from those thoughts the other people experiencing that same moment are and how incorrectly we judge what the other might be thinking. 

I took a little to get into this book, the pages felt gluey, and the writing so different to the book I had just finished, I felt disjointed. Our narrator hides so much from us, her mind a mess of moments and lists that make so little sense, until all at once they make all the sense until all at once it's too late and you realise the space she inhabits is so different to what we expected. The confusion falls away after that. Suddenly you are tightly wound and holding your breath. Suddenly you can't uncurl your fingers for the fear of it. Suddenly it's over. Suddenly I breathed again.

I've set myself a goal to read a book of Poetry a month because incidentally, I had already started too. This was a beautiful collection though I did find myself a little lost as we flipped between personal collections and fictional poetry. Both had stunning prose but my head felt lost in interpreting.