peripetia's reviews
535 reviews

I can't get into this. I'm sure it's great and masterfully crafted and all of that, but I'm just not in the mood for incomprehensible prose and I'm not going to read hundreds of pages of what feels like nonsense. The problem is probably in my own brain. I couldn't bring myself to focus on the story and I kept avoidin picking it up. I can read challenging books but I just don't want to read this one, end of story.

This book started very promisingly. The prose was beautiful and the setting was interesting. Unfortunately, it didn't go anywhere from there. The beautiful and imaginative prose continued and one magical realism element follow the next. The focus was so much on the writing that it feels like the story was forgotten.

I loved Shuggie Bain and I was expecting to be destroyed in a similar way with this one. My expectations were correct - maybe too correct.

This novel feels very much like Shuggie Bain repeated. In both books, we have a young boy, youngest of three children, his siblings being a boy and a girl, with an alcoholic mother and an absent father, trying to come to terms with his sexuality. The plot was very similar even if the details had been changed. Like Shuggie Bain, this book was slow and heavy and in the end the plot got solved (in a way) very fast.

Still, Stuart writes beautifully. What I love the most about his books is the depiction of working class life, which is usually completely ignored or forgotten. For me this book was more about class and poverty than anything else. I wish there were more books like this. I will definitely read whatever he writes next. 

This was a fast read for me - first of all it's short, and second, it just pulled me into it. The book even has this hurried quality, as if the author just had to get these words out, like he sat down one night and couldn't stop writing until the book was done.

It seems that for many people this is a story about growing up gay in a small town. For sure that is what it's about, but for me it was more about poverty. While books about poverty are often about surviving it, Louis' novel is about the mental load it creates and how people in fact do not triumph over adversity. Life in poverty is full of contradictions, rigid life paths to inevitable ends, finding someone to blame, not being able to see where the blame should lie, and, what was most important and impactful for me, the heavy shame that it dumps on people.

Sure, people make bad life choices, but those in poverty have much less space to make choices, and the if the choices they make are wrong, they can't be rectified. People from more prosperous backgrounds get to experiment, wander aimlessly, and make mistakes, while still insisting that their wealth and status are due to their own "hard work", as if the 20-year-olds with their wrists destroyed from working as a cashier are just lazy. The book forces you to look at these uncomfortable truths up close.

Class is one of my favorite topics, in literature and otherwise. This book gave me exactly what I wanted. I do think it ends abruptly, like the author ran out of steam, and it would have been interesting in a different way to see the main character trying to find his way in a strange environment amid the middle class. These class clashes are like culture shocks, just worse. Maybe he's written about this in another book, and I do intend to continue reading from him. 

(Arvostelu suomeksi alempana)

The short version: I disliked this book more than I liked it, but the ending redeemed it a bit.

The long version, starting with the things I disliked:

The LANGUAGE. I read this book in Finnish, but I felt like I was reading a poorly translated book from English to Finnish. This book was written to be read in English. It includes so many poorly written lines and phrases that made perfect sense when I translated them into English in my head, and those translated phrases were the exact same that you find in every single fantasy and scifi book. The writing in general seemed to leaned into the Finnish setting more in the latter half of the book. 

The lyricism has gained praise, but it was way over the top, to the point that it didn't make sense sometimes. In these parts the author took the opportunity to use Finnish to its full potential, which was great, but the descriptions were just... I don't know. Childish somehow. Like a teenager thinking that stuffing as many metaphors and innovative descriptions into their text makes it good writing. (I just recently read some of my own old writings and this is a sin I am guilty of as well)

The pacing was poor. The first and second halves of the book felt almost like different stories. Very little happens in the first part, and the plot begins in the second half. Even then it drags on. The plot happens during the last 20 pages or so.

What I liked:

I don't really like to read novels about the ecological destruction of the planet because it seems too realistic. This was cool, though. I liked the mix of cultures that had become the norm as time passed. The setting in Lapland was also cool when it was discussed in any way.

Overall I just didn't like reading this. It made me frustrated and bored. Still, I would recommend this with the caveat that you should read it in English.

Suomeksi:

En suoraan sanottuna tykännyt tästä kirjasta. Suurin ongelmani oli, että kieli oli anglismia anglismin perään. Käänsin kummallisen kuuloisia kohtia englanniksi päässäni ja katsos vaan, kuulostaa ihan siltä samalta shaibalta kuin mitä jokaisessa tusinafantasiakirjassa on.

Näistä voi olla eri mieltä, mutta pari kohtaa missä minun mielestäni oli huonoa kieltä:

"Meillä on määräyksemme", sanoo sotilas. En koskaan ole kuullut tuota suomeksi; "We have our orders" on liiankin tuttu. Tässä suomeksi sanottaisiin (minun mielestäni) jotain muuta, vaikka että "teemme vain työtämme" tai jotain mitä voisi kuulla paikallisen baarin portsarilta.

"Huvitatte minua, neiti Kaitio". Taas minusta outo, englanniksi olisi "You amuse me". Tämäkin on joka ikisessä fantasia- ja scifikirjassa. Suomeksi sanoisin itse esim. "Olette huvittava" tai jotain ihan muuta.

"Pystyin näkemään kuinka henkilölle X tehtiin näin" eli "I could see what/how". Mielestäni jälleen esim. "Näin mielessäni" olisi luonnollisempi.

Mutta nämä on tällaisia minun vinkumisiani.

"Lyyrisyys" oli itselleni aivan hirveää luettavaa. Tässä käyttäisin sanaa <i>cringe</i> – eli anglismia, tekopyhä kun olen :). 

Juoni on hyvin hukassa ensimmäisen puoliskon verran, sitten alkaa tapahtua edes jotain, mutta itse juoni tapahtuu n. 20 viimeisen sivun aikana, vaikka toisaalta juonenpätkä jää auki. Loppu pelasti silti jonkun verran.

Olen yrittänyt lukea enemmän suomeksi, mutta tämä oli suoraan sanottuna ihan perseestä siltä kantilta. Jos haluan lukea englanniksi niin sitten luen englanniksi. Suomenkielistä kirjallisuutta olisi kiva lukea niin, että siinä käytettäisiin luonnollista ja kunnollista suomea.

I didn't get much out of this book. I felt that it was uneven and inconsistent in both the prose, the plot, and the theme of violence against women. This wasn't bad but it wasn't good either. I wasn't in love with the audiobook narrator either.

I don't really have anything to say about the book which, for me, is reason enough for 3 stars. Interesting concept, meh execution. 

This was a confusing and challenging book to read. It took my full attention to even keep up with what was going on, and even then I often failed.

The story is highly allegorical with references that I for sure missed. Every line could have been analyzed for hours. 

This novel for me was more about the themes than the plot, a story that keeps repeating throughout the book in different forms from different perspectives. I'm sure there are multiple theses out there written about this book from a more literary perspective, but I am woefully uneducated when it comes to literary analysis.

My understanding of this book is probably lacking, but I expect that people in general will draw different things from it. Personally, I haven't stopped thinking about it since I finished it four days ago, and I doubt I ever will.

This book was an interesting look into the mind of a person you - or at least I - couldn't understand and whose life is at a different point from mine. 

The protagonist and narrator is struggling with getting old and accepting her daughter being a lesbian. She works at a care facility for old people and projects her own anxieties onto a woman she is taking care of. She feels like she's the only person who acknowledges that we will all grow old and face the same horrible treatment the old people they're caring for face now. This I was fully on board with - old people should be cared for and treated with respect simply because they should and it is right, but I also cannot understand politicians also in my own country constantly cutting from the care of old people, as if it won't concern them too some day.

It was interesting to follow her thoughts regarding her daughter and motherhood in general. She is conflicted about her feelings. On one hand, she feels like she somehow owns her daughter and she owes her mother a life that she accepts. On the other hand, she cares about her daughter and is worried about her, even when her worry feels misguided to the reader.

I liked the difficult exploration of a person many readers cannot agree with. I loved reading about an older person finding herself and her place in a world that has changed faster than she has. There are not enough books with old main characters.

In the end, however, I didn't quite connect with the character. I think it might have been the audiobook narrator. For me, the reading didn't feel like I personally thought it should be read. So, to sum it up, this was a good book but unfortunately fell a bit flat for me.

I'm dnf'ing this around 50-55%. I rarely dnf this late in the book but it's just not going well and based on the reviews, it won't get better.

I wanted to read this because I read No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us by the same author. That book was great and I read it at the right moment. Based on the title of this book, I was expecting something about, you know, women we buried and women we burned, but so far this theme is nowhere in sight. 

The book is marketed misleadingly. This is not about VAW, nor is the religious community she's in a cult. At this point in the book, we're still going through her childhood, and as tragic as that was, I was expecting the story to get somewhere.

The way that the book started and based on the reviews, I expect much of the book to be about her backpacking around and that's just not interesting to me.

It always feels wrong to call a memoir bad, and maybe this wasn't, I was just expecting something else. Huge disappointment.

I started this book as an audiobook but kept losing the thread of the story, but - more importantly - I was immediately <i>obsessed</i> with this book. So I switched to the written word and started the book from the beginning (skimming the parts that I remembered and understood).

This book is so confusing, so enlightening. There are layers in this book that I know I haven't reached. I should have stopped to analyze, especially those parts that I didn't understand, but I was fully immersed in the story and I had to know what was going to happen. In other words, I would love to read this again.

The story alone is good, but the context in which it was written and the topics that it critiques, even before they became reality, are fascinating. I was sold when I read that this was the first book banned in the Soviet Union - and now I can see why.

As every other review mentions, 1984 is basically a rip-off of this book. It's been a long time since I read 1984, but We to me was deeper and less clear-cut. There's much more ambiguity and confusion in Zamyatin's novel. 

The confusion and fracturing of the main character gave the story a nightmarish and feverish feeling. That also meant that it was sometimes hard to follow. It felt like one of those dreams that almost make sense but not quite, the kind that you try to understand after you wake up but it slips away.