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booksinblossom's reviews
472 reviews
We hebben altijd in het kasteel gewoond by Shirley Jackson
4.25
"My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise, I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cap mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead..."
The first page of We Have Always Lived in the Castle immediately draws you into this strange and claustrophobic book.
The story is told by Merricat. Her voice is childish for an eighteen-year-old, which makes sense since she's been cut off from the rest of the village/world since the majority of her family died when she was 12. She invents magical safekeepers to ensure that everything remains as it is, including magic words that should not be mentioned, burying things in the garden as offerings. Above all, Merricat is an unreliable narrator, which makes her very intriguing.
Shirley Jackson creates a universe where time seems to stand still forever: a fixed routine for every day of the week, the same walking route to the library and the grocery store, her sister Constance who obsessively cooks the vegetables from the garden to store in jars (like all the other Blackwood women before her). This family is completely cut off from the outside world until unexpected visit threatens the fragile stability of the family and of Merricat's mind.
This book is mysterious, bizarre, sinister, haunting, and leaves the reader with an ever-growing sense of unease. Love it!
The first page of We Have Always Lived in the Castle immediately draws you into this strange and claustrophobic book.
The story is told by Merricat. Her voice is childish for an eighteen-year-old, which makes sense since she's been cut off from the rest of the village/world since the majority of her family died when she was 12. She invents magical safekeepers to ensure that everything remains as it is, including magic words that should not be mentioned, burying things in the garden as offerings. Above all, Merricat is an unreliable narrator, which makes her very intriguing.
Shirley Jackson creates a universe where time seems to stand still forever: a fixed routine for every day of the week, the same walking route to the library and the grocery store, her sister Constance who obsessively cooks the vegetables from the garden to store in jars (like all the other Blackwood women before her). This family is completely cut off from the outside world until unexpected visit threatens the fragile stability of the family and of Merricat's mind.
This book is mysterious, bizarre, sinister, haunting, and leaves the reader with an ever-growing sense of unease. Love it!
Manifesto: On Never Giving Up by Bernardine Evaristo
3.0
"Schrijven werd een kamer voor mezelf; schrijven werd mijn permanente thuis."
Girl Woman Other is één van mijn favoriete boeken, waardoor de schrijfster me natuurlijk ook erg genegen is. (Ook al herlees ik steeds dat ene boek en moet ik dringend de rest van Evaristo's oeuvre ontdekken.)
Ik had dus best hoge verwachtingen van haar manifest. Helaas voelt dit boek als een allegaartje dat snel bij elkaar is neergepend. De stukken variëren qua kwaliteit, scherpte en mate van gewichtigheid.
En toch ben ik blij dat ik het gelezen heb. Ik werd aangenaam verrast door haar manier van kijken en haar moed om haar leven in functie van het schrijverschap te vorm te geven. Bovenal vond ik het fijn om via haar levensverhalen te (proberen) ontfutselen wat ze van zichzelf in haar personages legt.
Girl Woman Other is één van mijn favoriete boeken, waardoor de schrijfster me natuurlijk ook erg genegen is. (Ook al herlees ik steeds dat ene boek en moet ik dringend de rest van Evaristo's oeuvre ontdekken.)
Ik had dus best hoge verwachtingen van haar manifest. Helaas voelt dit boek als een allegaartje dat snel bij elkaar is neergepend. De stukken variëren qua kwaliteit, scherpte en mate van gewichtigheid.
En toch ben ik blij dat ik het gelezen heb. Ik werd aangenaam verrast door haar manier van kijken en haar moed om haar leven in functie van het schrijverschap te vorm te geven. Bovenal vond ik het fijn om via haar levensverhalen te (proberen) ontfutselen wat ze van zichzelf in haar personages legt.
Água Viva by Clarice Lispector
4.0
"I write to you because I don't understand myself."
Clarice Lispector dazzles me. The beauty of her writing is overwhelming. In the introduction Benjamin Moser is fangirling over Lispector and he made me realize why i like her books and stories so much: "Clarice Lispector's weird word choices, strange syntax, and lack of interest in conventional grammar produces sentences - often fragments of sentences - that veer towards abstration without ever quite reaching it. Her goal, mystical as well as artistic, was to rearrange conventional language to find meaning - never to discard it completly."
Aqua Viva is unique: enigmatic, formally innovative, and philosophically profound. This short book is a long letter from a painter and is composed in fragments. The artist seeks to create a language to capture the instances that comprise a lived life.
"The secret harmony of disharmony: I don't want something already made but something still being tortuously made. My unbalanced words are the wealth of my silence. I write in acrobatics and pirouettes in the air - I write because I so deeply want to speak. Though writing only give me the full measure of silence."
I'm so pleased that I saved this book for my vacation so that I could read it greedily, put it down to think and then grab it again.
Clarice Lispector dazzles me. The beauty of her writing is overwhelming. In the introduction Benjamin Moser is fangirling over Lispector and he made me realize why i like her books and stories so much: "Clarice Lispector's weird word choices, strange syntax, and lack of interest in conventional grammar produces sentences - often fragments of sentences - that veer towards abstration without ever quite reaching it. Her goal, mystical as well as artistic, was to rearrange conventional language to find meaning - never to discard it completly."
Aqua Viva is unique: enigmatic, formally innovative, and philosophically profound. This short book is a long letter from a painter and is composed in fragments. The artist seeks to create a language to capture the instances that comprise a lived life.
"The secret harmony of disharmony: I don't want something already made but something still being tortuously made. My unbalanced words are the wealth of my silence. I write in acrobatics and pirouettes in the air - I write because I so deeply want to speak. Though writing only give me the full measure of silence."
I'm so pleased that I saved this book for my vacation so that I could read it greedily, put it down to think and then grab it again.
Berlin by Bea Setton
4.0
4,5* zelden zo vaak luidop moeten lachen met een boek
Daphne, a disaffected woman in her mid-twenties trying to make sense of her crumbling life, arrives in Berlin for a fresh start in a thrilling new city. She knows she needs to do the usual: learn German, find an apartment, make new friends, acquire some lovers and invent a whole new way of life.
But instead she freezes and second-guesses her choices, obsesses about being skinny, spends long nights gorging alone on family-sized jars of Nutella, Facebook-stalks friends and ex-lovers she left behind in London without saying goodbye. And one night, something strange, dangerous and entirely unexpected intervenes, pushing her in front of the abyss.
Berlin is a fresh, wry, piercingly contemporary debut about a young woman who moves to Berlin to escape her demons - only to find more. This book is surprisingly funny, and made me laugh out loud a lot. Bea Setton has a witty flair, biting humour and combines this with razor-sharp observations about contemporary life.
I read this while exploring Berlin for the first time, and I must admit that this book didn't feel extra 'Berlin-y' for me. In my opinion, this story could've happened anywhere in a major city and that feels like a missed opportunity - especially since the main characters moves to different apartments which seems like a great chance to grasp the atmosphere of a few neighborhoods. But other than that i really enjoyed reading this while traveling on the U-Bahn and I'm super grateful i discovered this beauty in a lovely small bookshop.
"After months of gasping the befouled breath of my solipsistic bubble, I remembered that there are some great lofty things in this world: decorum, pathos, fate, honour, love. Somewhere along the way, I'd lost sight of this fact. I'd fallen into worrying whether the supermarket stocked my favourite sweetener, if Rewe or Aldi was cheaper, if it was important to buy organic, whether or not identity politics is actually a good thing or if I just feel compelled to think it is because I want to be considered good personen, whether all my personal failures can legitimately be blamed on parenting and patriarchy or if this is just the coward's way out."
Daphne, a disaffected woman in her mid-twenties trying to make sense of her crumbling life, arrives in Berlin for a fresh start in a thrilling new city. She knows she needs to do the usual: learn German, find an apartment, make new friends, acquire some lovers and invent a whole new way of life.
But instead she freezes and second-guesses her choices, obsesses about being skinny, spends long nights gorging alone on family-sized jars of Nutella, Facebook-stalks friends and ex-lovers she left behind in London without saying goodbye. And one night, something strange, dangerous and entirely unexpected intervenes, pushing her in front of the abyss.
Berlin is a fresh, wry, piercingly contemporary debut about a young woman who moves to Berlin to escape her demons - only to find more. This book is surprisingly funny, and made me laugh out loud a lot. Bea Setton has a witty flair, biting humour and combines this with razor-sharp observations about contemporary life.
I read this while exploring Berlin for the first time, and I must admit that this book didn't feel extra 'Berlin-y' for me. In my opinion, this story could've happened anywhere in a major city and that feels like a missed opportunity - especially since the main characters moves to different apartments which seems like a great chance to grasp the atmosphere of a few neighborhoods. But other than that i really enjoyed reading this while traveling on the U-Bahn and I'm super grateful i discovered this beauty in a lovely small bookshop.
"After months of gasping the befouled breath of my solipsistic bubble, I remembered that there are some great lofty things in this world: decorum, pathos, fate, honour, love. Somewhere along the way, I'd lost sight of this fact. I'd fallen into worrying whether the supermarket stocked my favourite sweetener, if Rewe or Aldi was cheaper, if it was important to buy organic, whether or not identity politics is actually a good thing or if I just feel compelled to think it is because I want to be considered good personen, whether all my personal failures can legitimately be blamed on parenting and patriarchy or if this is just the coward's way out."
Dogs of Summer by Andrea Abreu
3.0
2,5*
Dogs of Summer is a tale about two inseparable friends which paints a real and awkward picture of girlhood, sexuality and friendships. The nine-year-old narrator is known to us only as Shit - a pet name given to her by her best friend Isora, a fearless young girl who tries to explore all kinds of boundaries. Together, Shit and Isora wander the streets, shooing away the neighborhood's many pitiful dogs, dreaming of being skinny and to go to the beach, passing the time doing nothing. Over the course of the summer vacation the narrator's simmering love for her friend erupts into a painful sexual awakening, just as Isora begins to heed the first calls of womanhood. Shit tries to keep up with her, but learns that growing up is a path one must walk alone.
I really wanted to like this book: a queer story about friendship and desire, translated by Julia Sanches and (as the cover promised) sentences like Marieke Lucas Rijnevelds 'The Discomfort of Evening'. Although not badly written, it didn't surprise me. The overall plot barely had much going on (which wouldn't be a problem if the atmosphere and language in the book would've grasped me), until the final act. This book is trying hard to be edgy and experimental, and although it is well tried and conceived, the story ends up being a bit boring. This was a good 'in-between-book', which i read while train traveling the whole day.
"We'd be grinding on things ever since we were small. In the summer, when there wasn't much to do, we grinded more and more often. We used clothes, pegs to touch ourselves over the cut-off sweatshorts we wore in the summer. When we drew, we slipped crayons under out panties and when we played with Babybjörns we slipped to dolls under too. We touched ourselves with Barbie heads and with Barbie hair and then everything smelled of minky, of those itsy crabs that skitter across the rocks, of salt water that dries in puddles and forms a gross crust that's hard like a slab of concrete. Sometimes we got merker stains all over our clothes and our pens would explode, but we carried on grinding and grinding until we'd finished, we always held out until we finished. Then we'd have to come up with an excuse to give our mothers (...) Isora always made me pray when we finished grinding and I went psspsspsspss with my sweatshorts streaked in colours, like a rainbow between my thighs, like a rainbow that rose up above the ocean, all the way down there, where the clouds mixed with the sea and everything was grey, and then it was just our minkies left, throbbing like a pair of blackbird hearts buried in the earth, like a forest about to burst into flower n the center of the Earth."
Dogs of Summer is a tale about two inseparable friends which paints a real and awkward picture of girlhood, sexuality and friendships. The nine-year-old narrator is known to us only as Shit - a pet name given to her by her best friend Isora, a fearless young girl who tries to explore all kinds of boundaries. Together, Shit and Isora wander the streets, shooing away the neighborhood's many pitiful dogs, dreaming of being skinny and to go to the beach, passing the time doing nothing. Over the course of the summer vacation the narrator's simmering love for her friend erupts into a painful sexual awakening, just as Isora begins to heed the first calls of womanhood. Shit tries to keep up with her, but learns that growing up is a path one must walk alone.
I really wanted to like this book: a queer story about friendship and desire, translated by Julia Sanches and (as the cover promised) sentences like Marieke Lucas Rijnevelds 'The Discomfort of Evening'. Although not badly written, it didn't surprise me. The overall plot barely had much going on (which wouldn't be a problem if the atmosphere and language in the book would've grasped me), until the final act. This book is trying hard to be edgy and experimental, and although it is well tried and conceived, the story ends up being a bit boring. This was a good 'in-between-book', which i read while train traveling the whole day.
"We'd be grinding on things ever since we were small. In the summer, when there wasn't much to do, we grinded more and more often. We used clothes, pegs to touch ourselves over the cut-off sweatshorts we wore in the summer. When we drew, we slipped crayons under out panties and when we played with Babybjörns we slipped to dolls under too. We touched ourselves with Barbie heads and with Barbie hair and then everything smelled of minky, of those itsy crabs that skitter across the rocks, of salt water that dries in puddles and forms a gross crust that's hard like a slab of concrete. Sometimes we got merker stains all over our clothes and our pens would explode, but we carried on grinding and grinding until we'd finished, we always held out until we finished. Then we'd have to come up with an excuse to give our mothers (...) Isora always made me pray when we finished grinding and I went psspsspsspss with my sweatshorts streaked in colours, like a rainbow between my thighs, like a rainbow that rose up above the ocean, all the way down there, where the clouds mixed with the sea and everything was grey, and then it was just our minkies left, throbbing like a pair of blackbird hearts buried in the earth, like a forest about to burst into flower n the center of the Earth."
Happy Stories, Mostly by Norman Erikson Pasaribu
4.0
Happy Stories, Mostly is a wonderful short story collection by Norman Erikson Pasaribu. The book's title is - of course - misleading, as the stories are not cheerful tales. In the words of the translator Tiffany Tsao: "So many of the stories are about the heartbreak of 'almost' - either deep longings denied, or hopes crushed, or false notions shattered, or coming so close to happiness or actually experiencing it, only to have it ripped away."
Normally, I have mixed feelings about a short story collection, but i read this one cover to cover. The stories queer the norm and are inventive, layered and emotionally charged. Most of all, i found this book refreshing and memorable.
*
"(...) I felt that such a story would prove useful someday - a bottomless pit ow sorrow-bricks for me to mine, to build my Babel Tower of misery. Maybe one day I could tell the story to someone who could fall asleep only if they heard a sad tale. With my story's help, they'd be able to slumber in peace for a very long time. Forever perhaps. And so, from that point on, in order to make the story even sadder, I decided to start taking writing classes - where questions like "What is the worst thing you ever experienced?" and "What is your darkest secret" are routinely trotted out to be answered by people, a portion of whom are sure from the start that it is they who have the most miserable experience, that strangest secret, the wildes imagination, to the point that, from the start, they won't take much interest in the story I'll tell them, much less in me."
Normally, I have mixed feelings about a short story collection, but i read this one cover to cover. The stories queer the norm and are inventive, layered and emotionally charged. Most of all, i found this book refreshing and memorable.
*
"(...) I felt that such a story would prove useful someday - a bottomless pit ow sorrow-bricks for me to mine, to build my Babel Tower of misery. Maybe one day I could tell the story to someone who could fall asleep only if they heard a sad tale. With my story's help, they'd be able to slumber in peace for a very long time. Forever perhaps. And so, from that point on, in order to make the story even sadder, I decided to start taking writing classes - where questions like "What is the worst thing you ever experienced?" and "What is your darkest secret" are routinely trotted out to be answered by people, a portion of whom are sure from the start that it is they who have the most miserable experience, that strangest secret, the wildes imagination, to the point that, from the start, they won't take much interest in the story I'll tell them, much less in me."