whoischels's reviews
104 reviews

Eugenides writes beautiful prose. His sentence and paragraph structures are incredible. I was initially surprised he hadn't been recommended to me by college professors. The immigrant experience portion of this story is very unique and well-written. You empathize with the characters in totally unexpected ways, and find yourself hungering to know more about what's going on inside of them, which Eugenides delivers on. 

I wasn't entirely happy with how character development was balanced on the whole though. The portions of this book that cover the immigrant experience of the narrator's grandparents, and the 1940s teen courtship experience of the narrator's parents are detailed and imbued with a sort of a welling mythic feeling that I've also enjoyed in Chabon books and in Roth books. I really, really like that quality in a book, and this is why I like reading multi-generational stories (I don't necessarily like them in movies because the mythmaking feeling doesn't carry over well). 

This mythmaking undercurrent sort of falls off when we get to the 3rd act of this book and learn about the narrator's life. Things become more concrete and less meaning-laden when we learn about how Cal comes to know about and think of his being an intersex person. My chief disappointment here is that the quality and care that went into the first portion of the book isn't really paid to the main character in the final 3rd of it. You could argue that the final generation of one of these stories necessarily can't have that mythmaking aesthetic in it, but specifically in this book, where the narrator lives early life as a girl and then remakes himself, it's a bit odd the aesthetic goes missing. I think this aesthetic literary quality could quite easily be applied to talking about gender dysphoria, but there isn't actually a lot of talk about gender dysphoria.

From what little research I did, I guess intersex people don't really like this book, and I get where they're coming from: Cal's decision to run away and live as a man is a bit hamfisted given there's not much indication that he's been experiencing gender dysphoria apart from being attracted to women, which is not the same thing. Cal's descriptions of his own genitalia are like, kind of literarily fetishy, which I personally (not being intersex) excuse on the grounds of the author being artful. It is, though, very unintentionally funny that Cal has described his own genitalia like this and then we are meant to view the descriptions written by the peep show runner at the end as bad and fetishistic, when they don't actually differ that much from what we've been reading already. I think Eugenides did a great job creating an intersex narrator that feels present and real. At the same time, he didn't seem to do the empathic work of writing at the level he did for the other generations whose story the book tells, and this shows.

Reread this for a book club. I had forgotten what it was about. I recently read Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a surreal and fun fantasy, and expected something similar. Wrong. I had an overwhelming sense of foreboding while reading Norwegian Wood and couldn't quite figure out why until I got to the Reiko part.
 
Good bits: This book is beautifully written. I always hear people complaining that Murakami writes women terribly and I actually disagree with that in this case. The women in this book feel like people, and are like-able people, even filtered through the eyes of the narrator Watanabe and through the romanticized distance of the memories he is recounting. The story really beautifully demonstrates how a young person can focus on fixing the suffering of others in order to avoid thinking about their own grief. It shows how a typically male-leaning stoic handling emotions can fail. It has incredibly vivid imagery and the aesthetic of Murakami's stories is always really engrossing.

Bad bits: Unfortunately, all of this is overshadowed by the

child rape committed by Reiko.

Rereading this now as an adult with an english degree and I think a generally good understanding of how to read fiction that has traumatic themes...Murakami does not handle the

child rape

well. Like Lolita handles this well and very firmly establishes the unreliability of its narrator. Norwegian Wood does not. Reiko's story is presented with her as the 31-year-old victim

of a 13 year old girl who is somehow a sex predator

. Her story is told sympathetically, and one could argue this is because of either a) Watanabe being 20 years old and naive or b) Watanabe viewing things through the rosy and kind lens of nostalgia. I genuinely don't believe there is enough textual evidence to argue for either of these explanations though. We're left with this random recounting from a

sexual predator about how it wasn't her fault

.

Watanabe then goes on to sleep with Reiko, who is twice his age, which one must imagine can't do his mental health any good, and yet the narrative presents their sexual experience together as freeing and fun.

Is the takeaway here that Watanabe, even 20 years on from these events, is still unwell and just sort of stuck as a damaged person because he never really came to terms with any of the shit that happened to him? I guess it is, which really bums me out. The handling of all this is very vibesy and jumbled for something attempting to tackle this subject matter. I would be okay with a story this viscerally upsetting if the plot weren't so clumsy and directionless.

Looking back on this a month or so after reading it, there isn't a lot that sticks out, but among the things that do:
- A widow from the dominican republic erupts into birds when her fiancé betrays her
- Ghosts of birds in an apocalyptic pacific northwest
- A guy going through a quarter life crisis / grappling with fully being an adult by developing an odd obsession with a weird dude he knew from college
Overall, not a lot that really hit me in the feelings bone. A few interesting ideas within those stories that included magical realism. Most of the grounded stories did not quite manage to feel fleshed out.

I reread this after watching Poor Things, wanted a bit more context for what Poor Things was trying to do. Things that stuck out:
- I forgot that this story is framed as a story within a story within a story, e.g. an adventurer on a boat in the far north is hearing from Frankenstein about his creation of the monster, and then hearing about the monster's experience.
- Poor Things largely seems to be an exercise in asking "what would happen if the monster were treated kindly by most people it encountered?"

I'm a ride or die for the Witcher. Fantastical enough that it's a relaxing and fun read before bed. Philosophical and meaty interpersonal themes that make you really care about the characters. Mass-market fantasy done extremely well.

Quite disappointed by this in all honesty. This was really talked up on various corners of the internet, and I went in blind expecting a modern literary science fiction book that would knock my socks off. It leans more literary than science fiction and suffers from a lack of concrete world building. The romantic writing is genuinely beautiful and often moving, yet the world it takes place in feels vague and unbuilt. I understand that the authors are attempting to dilate a romance story in on two characters, but the hints of a broader sci-fi world felt tantalizing rather than functioning as a backdrop for the romance. I also take issue, more generally, with time travel stories and the sort of recursive undoing that has to occur for any sort of resolution to happen. At this point, this one-trick-time-travelers-don't-tell you has been done so many times before that one always sees the twist coming.

A horror fairytale. Explores questions like: Can you love someone despite them being a monster? Can you love someone despite being a monster? Is embracing the monster within yourselves the source of real love? 

Khaw writes gore and body horror in a tenderly visceral way. Beautiful prose containing several levels of fantasy allegories about queerness.

This is the first Stephen King book I've read. Thematically, it tries to do a lot and doesn't quite pull it all off. Themes of alcoholism, how children deal with trauma, race, hints of dealing with gay feelings (these last two are where it really lacks cohesion). The way I see it, if you're going to write with the general bluntness that King uses, you don't really have the leeway to hint at so many disparate themes. On the one hand, I understand the desire to introduce a lot of heavy ideas into your work even when you are writing for as wide of an audience as possible, but on the other, I prefer to rate books on how well they pull off whatever it is they're trying to do. The mix of heady psychosexual themes and pulpy blunt writing sort of turns me off. 

I read this because I really like this guy's productivity app. Good book full of short ideas for hacking your tendency to procrastinate. Quite useful.