"You Will Never Be Forgotten" by Mary South (2021)

 

A collection of sci-fi-peppered short stories about the bond between two persons joined by their shared context [a caregiver and a patient/ an interviewer and an interviewee/ a mother and a daughter/ etc] and 

the effects of this relationship on both of them. The focus of these stories revolves around themes of grief and coping, individualism, disappointment, motherhood, and love.

There's a pronounced structure to South's style where she dunks the reader right into the world of the story before she slowly and methodically unveils the mystery. This unique approach 'contrigued' me; it sort of confused me as well as intrigued me. 

One of the issues I've had was the diction used. I thought it was a bit... ornate –not purple– just a bit stylistic. 

Mary South is a truly capable writer. She's got the diction, the style, the imagination, the guts to experiment. Yet, something is missing. This book felt unreachable. I couldn't relate to the characters or the stories on a deeper level. It wasn't a matter of soullessness. The stories have a heart, but the beating is so low, it's barely perceptible. What led me to this feeling was the gamble of the skeleton of the story. The structure and mood of the stories promised shock, plot twists, something, anything, but all I got were flat denouements leading the characters into realization-recognition-acknowledgment-acceptance of their situations. I'm not saying this is bad. Realism is necessary when talking about human relationships, but promising something and not keeping it. That is bad. It's like watching a movie trailer and getting hyped over the action scenes, but when the movie comes out, it turns out we were tricked by false advertising.

_____________________________

My impressions of each one of the stories:

Keith Prime: (2.5)

In a world in the future where human bodies are harvested from donors of benighted clones called Keiths, a nurse gets attached to a particular Keith with a mole. 

Nothing fancy happens here. The light humor is sweet.

The Age of Love: (3.5)

A male nurse works at a home to care for convalescents when his coworker tells him about the sex calls the old people make.

It's got the whole package of a good story. It's funny and dirty and warm and sad.

Frequently Asked Questions About Craniotomy: (1.5)

A pamphlet, a brochure, an interview (?) of FAQ about brain surgery subjectively answered by a surgeon dealing with grief and disappointment.

Darkly humorous. Painfully sad. Infinitely boring.

Architecture For Monsters: (1)

A former master's degree student's article about a leading female figure in the field of architecture who used to be his teacher.

The prose was so purple, it bullied my intellect.

The Promised Hostel: (2)

A bunch of backpackers breastfeed from a woman called Madeline. 

This is weird and perverse!

You Will Never Be Forgotten: (3.5)

A female content moderator develops an obsession with her rapist who works for a prestigious seed fund in Silicon Valley.

Humorous. Satirical. Realistic. So Black Mirror. So Murakamian. Loved it!

Camp Jabberwocky For Recovering Internet Trolls: (2.5)

A rehab camp for online trollers where one of the teens decides to run away and his friends go into a wild goose chase trying to find him.

Light-hearted. Funny. Insightful. 

To Save The Universe, We Also Must Save Our Selves: (1.5)

Fans are obsessed with a show called Starship Uprising and its leading actress.

Didn't click.

Realtor to the Damned: (1)

A realtor selling houses of the elderly inventing stories for self amusement.

A story about grief. 

Not Setsuko: (4)

A couple loses their daughter and decides to make a clone out of her, but the reconstruction of the daughter's memories has produced a different copy.

My best! The composition is perfection. The main theme echoes throughout the story. And the ending was exactly what I needed.

________________________________

Summary:

The stories are a hit-or-miss due to their structure and the presentation of the climax. Some will resonate with readers. Most will not. If you decide to read the book, go for Not Sesuko/ You Will Never Be Missed.

CW: animal abuse/ child abuse/ incest/ graphic content and language

"The Silence" by DeLillo (2020)

 

The master of 'show but not not' did it again... or didn't. Anyway, in this novel, DeLillo is concerned about one question: "What happens when people live inside their phones?"

The story is straightforward, no side-tracks, no leeways. Jim and Tessa are on a flight from Paris en route to NY to meet their friends and become stranded in their apartment when an event of an apocalyptic scale disables anything electronic and digitized and submerges the globe in total silence. 

Not making it to the headlines, the catastrophe remains nameless and open to speculation: selective internet apocalypse/ communication screwup/ a mass power station failure/ cyberattack/ digital intrusion/ deviation in nature/ etc. The event is more like an undertow to the story, white noise in the background. 

It's not important. 

What matters here are the interactions of the characters themselves and how they first absorb the shock and adjust to the new reality as they fill in the silence by either 'talking talking talking' for the sake of talking or staring at the blank, black surfaces of their mobile phones and tablets and TVs, or engaging in awkward conversations, realizing that 'each has become a mystery to the others', strangers in a strange world. And, paradoxically enough, some others are rejoicing as they 'accepted the shutdown' when Max says 'All my life I've been waiting for this without knowing' which instantly reminded me of Haruki Murakami's 'Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to happen'.

The first third of the book was rough and bumpy. The exposition and dialogues were extremely and painfully jarring as the narrative 'skipped and skidded for a while' just like the plane crash landing. The reading experience felt like a bunch of AIs making snippets of exchanges. I admit, DeLillo is brilliant at the sentence level, but so terrible at the conversation level. Eighty+ years and he doesn't know how normal chit-chat works. I'm not making that up, and he sort of admits it, "much of what the couple said to each other seemed to be a function of some automated process". Luckily, when I got over the state of 'totally impaired orientation' and got a sense of the context, I felt that dread before the disaster, that restless calm before the calamity, that thrill of mixed curiosity and anticipation and elation when something truly bad somewhere is happening and we're at its fringes, safe and not safe.

If DeLillo was aiming for the readers to feel these two distinct feelings on purpose—growing distant from the characters' dysfunctional interactions at the beginning and vicariously relating to their experiences later—then, I believe, the master of 'show but not tell' did it again. The two different impressions mimic the shock and the aftershock: first, you're feeling confused and don't know what's happening, but after the event is over, you begin to rationalize what has just happened.

Brilliant!

__________________________________

Summary:

Don DeLillo's The Silence is 90% similar to Ruman Alam's Leave the World Behind, or is it the other way around? That's weird since both of these books were published in the same year, 2020. Or perhaps the collective panicking caused by the COVID-19 outbreak in 2019 was to blame. Regardless, The Silence concerns itself more with the prevalent, chronic dependency on technology rather than the event that caused its shutdown.

Forget the low reviews, go for it blindly, and make up your own impression of it. Personally, I found it subtle and smart. DeLillo is treating prose as an impressionist, sprinkling ideas here and there, and it's up to the readers to make a picture that makes sense to them.

"Piercing" by Ryu Murakami (2008)

 

A psychological thriller of protagonists with flawed logic about channeling traumatic experiences. It's dark definately and not everyone might stomach the themes discussed here and the graphic descriptions.

I wouldn't say this was Ryu Murakami's best, but what made a positive impression on me was the structure where the narrative hops between the two protagonists and lets us see the world through their eyes.

"Earthlings" by Sayaka Murata (2020)

 

"Earthlings. This is a funny word I haven't heard of in ages," I thought to myself. "Kinda reminding me of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I'm so digging it." 

So, I started reading it right away, and my thoughts of it were like: 

Ohh, a nice family reunion. Japanese mountains. Festivals. Lanterns. Ancestors. Oh, a boy meets a girl. How cute! How adorable! Huh! We're back to cram school. It's okay. We still got our friend. We'll see fireworks and dress in yugata kimonos. Plus. The teacher is nice and handsome like those boy bands and... wait just sec. What's that h— OH MY GOD! This isn't happening! What the flying fuck is happening?! I didn't see that coming. Nope! That escalated waaaay too fast, I donno what to feel!!!

I wish it stopped at that, but no, it was just getting started.

Earthlings is seriously not for the faint-hearted. What makes it so is how easy-going and straightforward the prose and narrative style are, so straightforward to the point that the book splashes the reader's face with things unimaginable matter-of-factly, and then says, 'Deal with it.'

There were a few instances when I literally dreaded reading forward because the story was too much for me. Earthlings tops this list without dispute. It has this inviting atmosphere that makes you feel relaxed and cozy, and actually want to be living in that world, but then, without a hint, it catches you off guard and twists your psyche in horrible ways. But that is the point, the trap, the lure, isn't it? How else the shock value would be quadrupled in effect? 

Anyway, satire works best if writers blow the characters and their actions out of proportion so they can highlight the themes discussed. Clearly, Murata is just so fed up with society's values, and its assessment of one's worth: how should they dress, eat, talk, act, sleep with another, etc. It's predeterminism vs free will. Are we truly free to do whatever we want, and to what extent, or are we slaves not just to our genes but to society's rules, to what she refers to as 'the Factory' whose sole purpose is to produce babies who will grow up to produce more babies, sort of like living life just for the sake of living life?

In this sense, the book can be looked upon as an example of escapism. Think of it as Into the Wild minus all the disturbing stuff, where the protagonist feels alienated and longs for a basic, two-dimensional understanding of the universe, where s/he yearns to return to the roots of nature, and shed all of humanity behind and all its confusing rules and constrictions by committing the unthinkable.

________________________________

Summary:

Why do you have to be so weird, Japan?!

"Bunny" by Mona Awad (2019)

 

Surreal, absurd, satirical, and not in the least entertaining. It's a trap book that everyone cheered for and appraised which prompted me to give it a try and see what's what. 

I wish I hadn't.

On second thought...

I'm glad I had.

But then again...

It's not even worth considering.

All I can say is it was a love-hate relationship, or perhaps, a mildly tolerant-hate relationship. Sometimes I wanted to gut the book and set it on fire. Sometimes I thought it was onto something of some worth. But mostly, I wanted to just use it as toilet paper. 

There are two layers to the story: the literal and the metaphorical. Literally, it's about self-conscious, passive-aggressive, deeply troubled Samantha who is a grad student in an avante-garde school called Warren for creative writing. She's the black duck of her girl cohort in an MFT program as she tries so hard—but doesn't admit it—to fit in with a bunch of 'mean girls' who are in some sort of a cult, who are waaaay over the top with their girly attachment to each other, cooing and hugging and eating everything tiny and cute. The cult is sort of like A-ha's take on me as the girls turn bunnies into human boys which symbolizes writing drafts.

Metaphorically, however, Bunny is about the process of creative writing while being self-aware and self-critical of one's work. In essence, Bunny is about a real-life writer writing about writing whereas a grad student writer is having a block and writing about writing.

The premise sounds promising but the execution didn't catch up to it. Many things stood in the way. Throughout the book, Awad was trying—let me add—too hard to slough off the vernacular of nowadays prose, the overused cliches, the exhausted molds of dialogue dynamics, of plot progression, and came up with expressions that were unique and creative, but, sadly, they came out weird, awkward, and ill-fitting. I know. I know. This might be an exaggeration on my part... not as exaggerated as Awad's attempt at the avant-garde and completely going off the rails. For example, "She is cherry blossoms falling. She is serious moonlight. She is shivering green leaves." Seriously! Who writes like that?! The reading experience wasn't fun; it felt like reading the scribbles of a toddler. My cringe spectrum was maxed out in this book, it made me feel like a spider curling up. And the abusive use of similes was just on another level.

__________________________________

Summary:

Apparently, this isn't my cuppa tea, but it might be for others. I realized I was not the target audience. That's why it didn't click on me. If you're up for a millennial, washed-down version of Chuck Palahniuk's style on drugs, then, sure, go for it.