This novel puzzled me in tantalizing ways — it did all kinds of things that I didn’t expect, and that didn’t quite make sense; which I was tempted to say were flaws, but that came to seem essential. The novel has an irregular structure: four parts, the first with two chapters, the next two with five, the final with three, and it jumps, unexpectedly, from one character to another, and compresses and accelerates time willy nilly. When you get to the end, you return to the beginning and think, ‘but what is all this? why did we spend so much time on this part?’
I’m extremely resistant to the notion that certain kinds of lives cannot be accommodated by certain kinds of forms, but there was a moment in this book when a character said, “You want me to tell you about myself as if I have a complete story but all I have are fragments which are snagged by troubling gaps, things I would have asked about if I could, moments that ended too soon or were inconclusive” (193), and I found the statement both true, and deeply moving, in a way that surprised me. And it’s hard not to link that to the particular socio-historical circumstances the story considers; the layering of historical narratives and forces. The unruliness of the novel seemed exactly right
Kasia Reads 