girlpdf's reviews
91 reviews

pacy and cohesive. i like the clean sparseness of the prose and the two very different voices. the simple division into two parts works for this novel, complementing the straightforward and detail-oriented style. it puts the reader in an interesting position to understand the intimate mechanics of what the protagonist is researching, moreso than the protagonist herself... a bit uncomfortable, maybe even accusatory, in a very effective way. it kind of speaks for itself, in such a way that i'm not totally sure what a review should mention... very quick read that pulls you all the way in and puts your heart in your throat at times - a standout, passive detail in the penultimate moments of the novel really encapsulates the powerful economy of shibli's work. it is dropped in masterfully! 

i absolutely went into this re-read thinking that the gloss would have faded - i read this book when i was 16 and loved it, but have had people who read it since then give it middling reviews. and in year 10 almost everyone hated it.

WELL! it has not faded. it's not the best novel ondaatje has written, but i still find it strange and beautiful. the images interlock delicately and meaningfully, skulls and buddha heads and miners, the act of chiselling and the erosion of water and the interruption of rain, women disappearing through crime or by choice, the homogenising force of violence and death and religion. some images are contrived and melodramatic — ananda's hand on anil's face, her strange dancing — but that's not the worst crime a writer can commit, especially one whose man disease i have excused and will continue to excuse into the forseeable future…

the gamini window towards the end takes the wind out of the novel's sails a bit, but i do enjoy hearing about his work — i love the focus on work, the detailing of tasks, the physcality of labour! — perhaps a more integrated structure would have allowed for the same content without the loss of momentum. and of course, that unsatisfying ending to the ordeal with sailor. it makes the story real but doesn't necessarily make it great. anil becoming once more a frustrated outsider treated cruelly and kept in the dark, while men manage things around her, isn't a super fulfilling turn of narrative either. a meatier climax would have served — there was melodrama before, so why none where it mattered?

still enjoyable, still very rich, still a lot going on! i stand by 16yo laura and her fierce defence of this book…. you were right girl….. 

"Football is born in the brain, not in the body. Michelangelo said he painted with his mind, not with his hands… That was our philosophy… I didn't want solo artists; I wanted an orchestra. The greatest compliment I received was when people said my football was like music."

so my desperate, and some may say futile, mission to understand football, not just to love it, continues. i think i have some kind of idiot disease which makes formations and diagrams and positions about as sensible to me as alien glyphs, but i can say that wilson's no-nonsense charting of the development of footballing tactics DID make me feel like i was at least beginning to understand what the hell is going on in this strange and beautiful game.

he doesn't dive too deeply into politics but i wish he would! the brief gestures towards fascism and invasion shaping and reshaping paranoid, cynical italian football; the allusions to england's imperial decline-and-denial preventing proper tactical development; the explanation of south america's narrow streets and working-class communities developing a game focused on trickery and holding the ball close… all of this was very very fascinating and i did feel the dip of disappointment whenever this finished in an 'ANYWAY! enough about that.' but i suppose that's just another book. this book does boil down to what it says on the front: how the pyramid got inverted.

very glad i read this but it is heavy on the minutiae - football fanatics only, i'd say. if you're more interested in the social / political side of things, you get tantalising glimpses, but the focus stays with the actual mechanics of the game. which i did like! because i love the mechanics of the game. and wilson's prose isn't half-bad, either, though it is helped by heavy quotation from some of the more lyrical managers of the game. (e.g. that quote from above is sacchi….. definitely not wilson)

the slightly melodramatic lament re: the decline of the tradiitonal playmaker towards the end was actually AWESOME though, i love when they get serious and OTT with it in sports writing, like this bit about riquelme: "Perhaps his melancholic demeanour reflects his knowledge that he was born out of time… Our man is a romantic hero, a poet, a misunderstood genius with the destiny of a myth… Riquelme, the last specimen of the breed, shares with Bochini the melancholy and the certainty that he only works under shelter, with a court in his thrall and an environment that protects him from the evils of this world". absolutely hilarious, weirdly moving. it's true that this kind of football is over, but poetry within a system is still poetry. and anyway, messi became such a phenomenon, especially after the publication of this book, that perhaps the loss of riquelme isn't that devastating? or do we just cop the L. i guess we have to wait for the sequel to find out what wilson thinks! get writing jonathan

(villa mentioned twice, second time as an afterthought and first time via a direct insult to our old chairman, doug ellis. so awesome. the socceroos were literally mentioned in a more complimentary fashion than villa…. and THAT is truly embarrassing. AVFC the depression #forever #UTV)

narcisistically obsessed with its own incomprehensible, paradoxical images, brutes amounts to a series of shallow aesthetic choices. the novel is exemplified by its snatches of conversation where every piece of dialogue, if it is not a mere four words long, is cut off preemptively before it can get to its subject. packed with clumsy sentences, naked statements of character intent — "we felt X", "we thought Y" — and inexplicable interactions that were empty of whatever weight they allegedly should have held (when leila kissed mia i let out a huff of unconvinced laughter; when gum exchanged mouths for the twelfth time i felt something akin to agony), brutes is an exercise in utter pretension. LOL!

the experience of reading this novel (which i did in one sitting) amounted to a disorienting show of nothingness. alone, this statement is not condemnatory; it is possible to write beautifully about listlessness, ennui, hollowness, the desperation to leave the emptiness of your life behind. on top of that, truly good writing often disorients its reader. but i cannot orient myself in brutes not because of an influx of information which requires my attention, but because reading it feels like a viewmaster clicking, clicking, clicking at such a speed that i grow apathetic. it is a disorientation that comes not from failing to understand, but from not being asked to understand a damn thing in the first place! it is an emptiness that is not about emptiness — it is just itself. reading brutes i felt as if my head was swaddled in gauze, as if there was a thin film over my eyes preventing me from seeing, from feeling.

the idea of emptiness, the image of emptiness — even these feel like generous descriptions of this book. there is no heart. the girls tell you the emotions they feel — anger, shame, jealousy — and these emotions are flavourless, invisible, inconsequential, floating about without impact, only labels. that they tell us they feel these emotions is the only evidence we have of them in the text. the novel fluctuates between reality and fantasy artlessly, its allegories and metaphors weak, uninspired. 

i'm astounded at the comparisons this novel has drawn. the florida project, with its detailed, saturated exploration of the humanity of those living in poverty — their meanness, their generosity, their wicked humour, their deep love, their irresponsibility and their dignity. the virgin suicides, an ambitious and powerfully reflexive consideration of what it means to look and to write and to exhibit, of what it is to steal girls and turn them into fantasies, of the marks those girls in turn leave on their viewers — of how looking transforms you. brutes' exploration of poverty’s citizens consists of a hollow stencil-girl, replicated over and over again without variation. i am being completely honest when i say i struggle to differentiate any of the characters, any of them, in a meaningful way (beyond age or gender). worse, its consideration of voyeurism ends in a shrug and a convoluted, graceless attempt to confront sexual violence.

 

(major aside BUT david lynch died the day i read this… i'll never forget the living, horrific, fleshy reality with which he told a story about sexual violence, about being closely watched and therefore unprotected, about the girlish war between the grotesque and the pretty and the desperation of a child who wants only to be in control of her own life. to read this book on the day he died really brought into stunning clarity tate's total failure. LOL 2! miss you forever mr lynch.)

another thought: the virgin suicides worked because it was about the lisbon sisters, who were the subject of the collective narration’s gaze. of course, through their obsessive watch of the sisters alongside the odd act of reflection, the gang of boys revealed themselves, their wants, their failures. brutes is about the watching brutes, with cursory glances outwards but none of that sharp clarity of the virgin suicides. it tries to do too much; it stuffs itself with narrative and allegory and a gaze that oscillates wildly both broadly outward and shallowly inward. this is its biggest failure, and the source of that disorienting emptiness.

combine all of this with some of the clumsiest, ugliest prose i've encountered recently — i mean, "the mall parking lot looks spectacular, vast and white-tipped, like an ocean that we are not afraid of because we know exactly what it is" — and this book brought me despair. pretentious in the truest, truest sense of the word. what dismay i feel at this shallow image of girlhood — the only feeling this clumsy, irritating, vacuous novel managed to wrestle out of me.

this novel felt a little unbalanced; i think the first act took up a little more breathing space than warranted. i wonder if i would have preferred a more non-linear approach? that being said, perhaps that would have obscured the action of the book too much. there's plenty to keep track of already, even in its (relatively) linear state.

this is a dense and really fulfilling read. wright's voice, so strong and rich and immediately identifiable— thinking of those 'Well!'s and her prominent use of words like 'stuff' and 'things' — twists masterfully between conversational and elevated. the characters are sharply drawn and unique and she does names just so fantastically! the third act of this book was where i really, really started enjoying myself. i loved the shift into a sprawling landscape and the way wright really expertly renders different ideas of 'ceremony' and how these play into narratives of dominance.

insert here all the stuff everyone says about wright too: incisive and witty and surprising etc. it's true! nuanced and damning and such an interesting choice of focal point, the observant and distant oblivia. and can't review this book without mentioning that killer first line. truly an all-timer.

now THIS is one i've been meaning to get around to for an age…… read and loved middlesex when i was 17 and then promptly forgot to read anything else by him. devoured this one intwo days because if it is anything, it is readable! the neat and efficient mechanics of his prose make it difficult to stop once you've started; he has an undeniable mastery of pacing from what i've seen of his work.

the attempts to separate the lisbon girls from the fantasies of the narrators fall a little short, but they're certainly there and certainly prevent a lazy romance from permeating the narrative. abjection comes close on the heels of every daydream; the girls' ordinariness makes valiant appearances from time to time. i think the book did all it could considering who was telling the story. what i remember most are scents, which were so important to this novel. he's got a grasp of scents! they were visceral and ranged from pleasant to totally revolting….. i think this was one of the key tools to dismantling the fantasy and i think he used it well! 

michael ondaatje you have to stop. YOU HAVE TO STOP!!!!!!!! you have to stop. it's getting to be too much now. you can't keep writing the most beautiful sentence in the world over and over again for upwards of a hundred pages. it's getting too crazy. i'm getting too crazy. 

yet another book with the feverish clarity of caravaggio (the painter, not the character ondaatje named after him, although isn't that indicative…) what i mean is he writes in the language of chiaroscuro. the light is so clarifying it almost blinds you; the dark so deep it takes on colour. ondaatje was made to write about jazz. i'm kind of cut that he hasn't written about it since. 

without the sprawling narratives of his other work, i couldn't quite tip it up to five. but it's focused and intense and empathetic to all the real subjects of his narrative, a fine illustration of the truth of fiction. i love this freaking author so much i can hardly stand him!!!!!!

never in my life have i wanted to kill kill kill maim destroy a narrator more than this annoying ass kinbote motherfucker. anyway what a book! a rich blend of literary fiction and fantasy. a strange and wonderful new shape for a story. sometimes a person looks into literature seeking a crystal mirror or a still lake or the facetune app… many such cases, all of them bad. 

nabokov is a titan of delusional narration within a prose sometimes so pretty it makes your teeth hurt. and to compliment that the plot is pacy even as the dread creeps slowly along. the parallel of gradus' approach and the poem's growth is so neat and ominous! i am maybe a bit stupid and did not clock the Botkin thing until reading about the book later, but very awesome… 

in my last review of drive your plow i mentioned how izma said mysteries often have great premises and then anticlimactic conclusions. total opposite here. very neatly laid cards that still surprise you.

slow and beautiful. saramago's sprawling dialogues are so rich - they make up some of my favourite moments in literature. sometimes the voice of his work feels like it's not my kind of thing — too obvious, too authoritative — but then you get lost in these meandering paragraphs that inevitably draw you back in.

i struggle sometimes with his intense focus on details and mundanity, but the commitment always pays off.  the last few chapters of this book really moved me, particularly the appearance of the shepherd and the afternoon in the apartment. the conversations with the ceiling were also great! 

the simplicity of the narrative — the war between fear and desire, the need to rescue an ordinary stranger from oblivion, the strange love which motivates that need — was deceptive, like senhor jose's timidity. and of course the book does fun things with God, it wouldn't be a saramago novel without it. nothing hits like cain, but for every book of his i've opened, i've found myself a little nervous that i won't enjoy it. luckily i've always been proven wrong!