aiona's reviews
120 reviews

A beautiful spilling out of grief. 

I had to look up a lot of words in this book and at times that could feel a little pretentious. 

This book starts off beautifully, loses track a little until you’re about halfway through and then it’s stunning through to the end. 

Very highlightable, lots of little nuggets of wisdom. Some things I disagreed with but overall a good read. 

There were things I loved about this book, and things I hated. It felt a lot like a Netflix sitcom or something, and a lot of the characters felt really tropey. A gay man who loves princess Diana, super pretentious arty New Yorkers. I didn’t find them relatable at all. But there were some parts, and some characters that I did find relatable. I think Eleanor was probably the best character in this regard. She seemed much less one-dimensional than the others. 

And although to begin with, the overdone, witty quips from Frank and Cleo felt fake and tiring, their doomed relationship developed to the point that I felt quite emotional reading about how fiercely they loved each other, yet could not connect. Seeing them come to that realisation was moving, despite how pretentious their lives seemed in other ways. 

I suppose I wish the author had written about characters that didn’t feel the need to name-drop and live high-flying lives. Why couldn’t Cleo have been working in a cafe or something rather than be an unemployed artist wife to a guy who built up his own ad agency? People this broken do not have such glitzy lives. And this book would have really been incredible if the characters had seemed more real. The author has a real talent with words. But she chose to write about such unrelatable, movie-like characters. I wonder why she made that decision. 

I have a lot of thoughts. 

It was really hard to imagine characters that are like…. Mole rats and trains. So this book takes a lot of suspending your disbelief. 

I liked the first part and found it jarring that in part 2, we follow a different group of characters, and never follow the ones who were most developed in the first part again. 

I almost DNFed this book at that point. But I was reading it for a book club so I kept going. I started to enjoy the characters a bit more, and I really liked the animal liberation vibes. I liked reading about a vegan friendly world. 

I liked the question of what makes a person. And that everyone introduces their pronouns. It was kind of cosy queer in that way. 

I really hated that there was a city called Kokowadoko- Japanese for ‘where is this?’ Because it pulled me right out of the story. 

Somehow I found part three compelling despite a train having a sexual relationship. I’ve never read a book like that before….

And of course the gentrification and public ownership stuff was really cool. 

I kinda wish the author had split this into volumes. And had more time to dedicate to character development and backstory. 

I listened to the audio version, which could sound a little disjointed at times because there wasn’t very much separating each poem from the next. A little more breathing space between chapters would be good. Some lovely commentary on beautiful poems, though I have to say, the podcast is better. 

Typical Murakami, replete with strange depictions of women. Some really good stories in here, others that miss the mark. 

A very difficult to love main character, but full of interesting ideas. 

Quite exciting story but I found it hard to understand the details of what was happening.