Author: elizavictoria

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is a nominee for both the Nebula Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. I can’t remember now where I read it, but this is the first time the same novel has been nominated for both prestigious awards. I got curious (the Nebula Awards focuses on science fiction and fantasy, while I have always assumed the PEN/Faulkner focuses on realist literary work, though I can see that I am mistaken) and immediately went on Amazon to read the sample. You should go ahead and do that. The writing is extraordinary. Two pages in and I was hooked. Chapter 1 shows a couple breaking up and the girl going berserk in a cafeteria. What’s not to like?

The novel is narrated by Rosemary Cooke, and she starts her story, as she is wont to do, in the middle. It is 1996, she is 22 years old, and she has not seen her brother Lowell in a decade. Her sister Fern has been missing for seventeen years.

I am going to stop here just to say that this is an incredible book, very well-written, heartbreaking, with an important message to tell, and that you should stop reading this post (and the book’s reviews, and the summaries) and read the book instead.

However, if you have read it, or if you don’t mind spoilers, I’ll see you after the cut.

Continue reading we are all completely beside ourselves by karen joy fowler

Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 by Anna Reid

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

For nearly 900 days, from 1941 to 1944, Hitler’s troops encircled Leningrad, the former capital of Russia and the symbolic capital of the Russian Revolution, in an effort to starve out its inhabitants. The siege, known as the Leningrad Blockade, forced inhabitants to turn to murder and cannibalism, and starved to death around 750,000 people, or “between one in three and one in four of Leningrad’s immediate pre-siege population.”

It took me a long time to finish this book – not because it was written in a way that discouraged continuous reading, but because the despair and horror depicted in its pages were so difficult to absorb. I feel there is nothing I can say that can be considered an adequate response. I can focus on the language, the craft of it. I can say Anna Reid writes so vividly that the book has the feel and sound of poetry. I can say everyone should read this important historical account. But regarding the stories and diary entries she quotes, to say the siege was “horrible” is a horrible understatement.

I can only share the passages from the final few chapters that struck me:

Statues, landscaping, poetry – nothing can say all that should be said and felt about a tragedy on the scale of Leningrad.

…

For them the siege is not history but acute, lived experience, and their memories of it, as Olga Grechina puts it, ‘a minefield of the mind. You only have to step on them, and you explode. Everything flies to hell – quiet, comfort, present-day happiness.’

…

‘All those stories’, [historian Anzhelina Kupaigorodskaya] said, ‘of girls too weak to stand roped to lathes, clutching their dolls – they’re just post-war sentimentality.’ In reality the siege was drab, hard, and horrible. No human being should have to live through such a time…Now that my questions were over this was the important thing, the point she was determined to get across.

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