I love the strangeness of Téa Obreht’s work; her play with genre; the way she surprises you at every turn. Right when you think you have a sense of what the novel is doing, it wriggles away into some totally unexpected direction.
The Morningside might be the strangest of her books, and maybe the least successful? but it is strangely gripping nonetheless. Where Inland dabbles with Westerns, The Morningside plays with sci-fi, imagining a semi-apocalyptic future of war and climate crisis that, terrifyingly, is more and more reminiscent of the present as the book goes on.
What is the book about? That’s harder to explain. As with her other novels, the world is sort of the point. The girl who lives in this world, and the things that happened to her. There is no one story, but I also wouldn’t call it a Bildungsroman. It’s more like Obreht is setting these characters loose to explore the contours of their given world. The result is less like a socio-political novel than a folktale that gradually illuminates the laws of reality. It’s maddeningly difficult to describe, and often feels sort of meandering or muddled as you read — but I liked it anyway.
Kasia Reads 