jayeless's reviews
337 reviews

I'm not sure what to say about this book, really! I dashed through it in the time it took to listen to 2.5 albums. The writing is tense – short sentences, all action, no detail. The central message of the book is, or seemed to me to be, that working life sucks and life is pointless.

It's the protagonist's hatred for his life that spawns his alter ego Tyler, and thus instigates all the events of the book.

The thrill of violence, of cruelty, appeals to the men who fight because it's the only escape their have from their monotonous and deeply pointless existence. Of course, the reality is that most working class people's lives are monotonous and miserable, and the book is reasonably class conscious, with for instance this amazing paragraph:

The people you're trying to step on, we're everyone you depend on. We're the people who do your laundry and cook your food and serve your dinner. We make your bed. We guard you while you're asleep. We drive the ambulances. We direct your call. We are the cooks and the taxi drivers and we know everything about you. We process your insurance claims and credit card charges. We control every part of your life.

The book is really depressing. Marla's philosophy is that no one should get old, and Tyler clearly has no objection to thrill-seeking in violence and cruelty.

The protagonist actually does react against this to a certain extent and claims that Tyler's gone too far, but this is purely out of self-interest - he doesn't want to lose his body to his alter ego Tyler, he doesn't want to be castrated, and he doesn't want Marla (who he's developed some affection for) to die.

I guess there's a reason why this book gets called nihilist.

The other complaint I could make is that it's a book all about machismo, with only one female character, but it didn't really bother me that much; machismo is just the topic of the book. Books can't just explore everything ever - that's why we read a range of books - and this one was self-consciously about machismo and the masculine, so it didn't bother me the way it would have in a book that wasn't about that. And having said that, I'm unsure why I bothered writing this entire paragraph. Because it's something that crossed my mind while reading, I guess.

Overall, it was quite the page-turner and I enjoyed it, with its appropriately climactic ending and all. I recommend it, especially since it's short!

Where do I even begin?

This book reads like a first draft. What's more, it reads like a NaNoWriMo first draft, with oodles and oodles of pointless description that seem to serve no purpose but to pad the page count. But unlike the NaNoWriMo requirement, this book is really long. According to my phone's Kindle app, it is 580 pages long. There might be 300 pages' worth of content in there. Look, there's nothing wrong with your first draft being overlong and unwieldy with lots of pointless stuff that needs to be cut out, but if the finished product is like this, it's a big problem. Most of my antipathy for this book is probably due to this.

Considering the 580 page length, it feels like not a lot really happens, either. Looking back on it, I guess stuff happened, but the way I remember it is: something happened at 10% in, another thing happened at 42% in... and although reviews on Goodreads had suggested that the book would get better in the second half, it really didn't. It continued to be a slow and plodding story in which I was desperate for something, anything interesting to happen.

At 54% into the book she did seem to die, which fit my criteria quite admirably, but unfortunately she didn't actually die and kept on narrating from the spirit realm. And then returned back into the "real" realm, where she discovered that she had a brother who was a giant cat. Mmhmm.

What did happen in the second half was narrator Cat randomly crushing on her would-be murderer and general vain and conceited twerp, Andevai. As well, in the last 20% of the book, we suddenly found ourselves in the midst of a vast, popular uprising, but not to worry, as if this novel would spend much time contemplating that! Instead, we hear all about Cat's aforementioned sudden inexplicable love for Andevai. I'm assuming that this is what the next two books in the trilogy are going to be about (the sudden inexplicable love that is, I wouldn't hold out any hope it'll be about the uprising) but I don't really intend to find out.

My review might seem unrelentingly negative, but honestly I'm just frustrated that I spent so long reading this book, which was set in the lead-up to a mass uprising with a woman of colour for a protagonist, and it was so boring. How do you even have a beginning like this and make it so boring? How is this even possible?? Like, there's potential here, and it's completely squandered and buried under hundreds of pages of hardly anything ever happening. Ugh. If you'd like me to begrudgingly admit some things that I liked:

1. the demonisation of Camjiata over the whole book - I don't recall any huge block of exposition at once, but he's gradually depicted as some incredibly evil, dangerous guy, who challenged the political order (even though we can see this order is really bad) - before it's revealed that he's a radical who isn't too bad.

2. that Cat is a member of a minority group... this got annoying when it was 755867968 characters commenting on her shiny black hair, but it was good when it involved her explaining how the Romans had demonised her people, for instance. It wasn't a whitewashed vision of alternate-universe nineteenth-century Europe, which I appreciated.

3. the basic story around Cat's parentage, I guess... except IF IT COULD HAVE BEEN GOT THROUGH A BIT FASTER, THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN GREAT.

Yeah.

I can't fairly rate this, so I won't try. I'm not going to try reviewing it in Spanish either, even though I read it in that language. Or, you know, tried to. This novel is written in very idiosyncratic language, full of archaisms and (I assume) indigenous words. At the back of my Kindle edition was a glossary taking up 6% of the book (i.e. 26 pages), which gives me the impression that the language isn't easy for the majority of native Spanish speakers, either. Unfortunately, there are no actual links to the glossary from where these words appear in the text, making it a massive ordeal to check them – and if I had, it'd have taken me way longer to read this than two months, I can tell you. It seems that Amazon's pulled the book from sale since I bought it two years ago (although not from my library, evidently). I really hope they pulled it to fix this.

I am really not sure how this vibrantly non-standard Spanish was translated into English, but I guess I'd like to see. My university library theoretically has an English translation of this, and I went looking for it when I was about one-tenth of the way through this and realising I just could not understand it. Evidently the uni lost it because it wasn't on the shelf. So, I struggled through… and while I guess my Spanish got some good practice, I can barely tell you anything about this book that isn't in the Wikipedia summary of it. I can tell you about some of the language use, I guess…? Like once it used the verb "parlar" and I went on a great bout of research to discover what this word was doing in Castilian (the answer: it's a borrowing from Occitan, but in Castilian refers specifically to speaking indiscreetly, or in an otherwise mischievous manner. but it's very uncommon). I don't really remember quién parlaba o porqué, though. You see? I didn't absorb much of anything.

So… while this seems like a very interesting book to me… I did not gain anything by actually reading it and I really wish the English edition hadn't been out of print for decades. If I ever get my hands on one…

This book was very readable, I got through it quickly enough, but I wasn't a huge fan. Basically, I think the best part of the book is the banter between the protagonist and his friends, and some of the quotes about paper towns (I can type up what I marked in my Kindle once I have a more reliable Internet connection!). The weaknesses include ~Margo Roth Spiegelman~, the unrealistic paragon of all that is exciting in the world, and the fact that most of the entire book revolves around a quest for her after she takes off. The book is narrated by the protagonist, so her perfection can be passed off as reflecting the way HE idealises her, but for me it got boring.

Also, I think this is the first time I've partaken in high school-set fiction that's made me think I'm maybe getting a bit too old for high school-set fiction. So, there's that.

When a work is beautiful even in translation, it can do nothing but inspire awe... and so with this. At only 200 pages, it's a briskly-paced outline of the Chile of Isabel Allende's imagination, full of exaggeration and lyricism, and deeply absorbing. There's reminiscing about eccentric relatives, the excitement of the short-lived Unidad Popular government, the regime of fear that was Pinochet's... another element that I found interesting was the reflections on the patriarchal nature of Chilean society. In some ways it reminded me of Simone de Beauvoir, as these reflections too were coming from the perspective of a relatively upper-class woman, except that this book is better written! Ha ha.

No seriously though, there's a lot interesting in this book, and I found it so engrossing due to the way it's written. Also, it makes me really want to travel to Chile...

I know I cheated with this one; I read it in English, when I really should have tried it in Spanish. It's just I usually read on the train and it's really frustrating to only get through 10 pages per journey. Plus, Maya's Notebook, written from the perspective of a nineteen-year-old American girl, is the kind of thing that would "really" be written in English anyway, at least if it were real and not a novel by Isabel Allende. Which it obviously isn't, with a tone less lyrical but otherwise similar to Allende's other novels; not really the style an American teenager would go for in their personal journal. So, I don't know which language would have been better, but I did read it in English, so there we are.

Overall I liked this novel, but I agree with some of the criticisms others gave made of it — the plot is chaotic, unbelievable. The novel begins when Maya has to flee powerful enemies in the United States and ends up hiding out on an isolated island of Chiloé with an old friend of her grandma's. From that point on, there are two timelines — Maya writes about her experiences in Chiloé, and intersperses them with sections on her life in the US, all the events that culminated in her fleeing.

Dividing the book into quarters, they all have different vibes, and there are different things to say about them. The first quarter, like those of a lot of Allende books, is pretty slow. In the second, things get pretty intense and exciting, aside from the Chiloé parts which continue not to be. In the third quarter, the US timeline gets seriously depressing, which Allende counterbalances (or tries to) by introducing a romance subplot in Chiloé, but this doesn't work that well. Then in the last quarter, everything is chaotic and so many different scattered subplots get resolved and then there are some random tangents that don't seem to advance any subplots and it's all a mess. I suppose it did resolve anything (I can't think of any open ends, although I'm not really the best at that anyway)… but it was just very messy.

Suddenly revealing that Manuel Arias was Maya's real grandfather, not Felipe Vidal, was completely out of the blue – I don't believe this had been hinted at, or set up in any real way. The extended flashback to Maya's aborted stay in Denmark with her mother also seemed out-of-place, considering this mother barely figured into the story at all. Things like that gave it its chaotic feel.

In some ways I feel like this novel tried to cover too much. Or maybe not so much that, but it didn't blend everything it was trying to discuss very well. Primarily, it's about an American teenager who felt lost after her (step-)grandfather's death, got mixed up in drugs and eventually organised crime, and has to go into hiding and recover. The subplot about Manuel being persecuted by the Pinochet regime felt tacked on. Mostly because that entire subplot, minus Manuel having some nightmares that I didn't necessarily expect to be explained – thinking "trauma from the dictatorship" explained it enough – happened in the last quarter of the book. It just didn't feel that well incorporated.

The other thing about this novel is that parts of it are very brutal. It's graphic in its depictions of drug-related violence and addiction, and the way Pinochet's regime tortured people, but there's also a very brutal rape scene at one point (although on that note, kudos to Allende for depicting it purely as violence without trying to make it "sexy" or "scintillating" at all). So if you have a low tolerance for these kinds of scenes or topics, this is not a great book for you.

In retrospect, another thing this book did well was describing some of the social problems of small-town southern Chile – the legacy of the dictatorship, lack of employment, domestic violence, molestation even. But it did this while retaining a real affection for the society and people it talked about. (Well I mean, most of the people…) It was sort of hard to notice this while I was reading because the parts of the book set in the US were always more action-packed than the parts set in Chile, so they captured more of my attention, but that element is there.

Overall I liked it, and it's getting three stars, but man it was chaotic.

This book should really be divided into two parts, as the blurb suggests – the first two chapters provide a concise history of various workers' struggles (and revolutions) and their relationships to women's movements; the latter two (which are much shorter) provide an equally concise overview of various schools of feminist theory and Arruzza's opinions on the merits of each. I was mostly in agreement with those opinions – I found her takedown of Luce bloody Irigaray's "difference theory" particularly satisfying – and so I would certainly recommend this.

I did have a couple of points of scepticism, mostly in that Arruzza seems to feel that "patriarchal structures" or "male structures" have a more solid existence than I would argue. It's hard to say this for sure because given the nature of the book, she tended to describe trains of thought that weren't her own and wasn't always that hard on them, so perhaps this exaggerated the impression I got. Nonetheless… I felt she gave too much credence to the idea that there are these parallel structures of capitalism and patriarchy, when "patriarchy" is really more of an ideology that justifies the oppression of women that's been going on since the rise of class society. "Patriarchy" in that sense is not a structure in and of itself, but an ideology borne of structures that is used to reinforce those (and other) structures. They're not "dual systems" but different things – different types of thing – that interact with one another.

One thing that Arruzza said again and again was that she didn't feel it was "useful" to argue for a hierarchy of oppressions, although class is not an oppression. I still agree that trying to subsume class into gender or gender into class is undesirable and unhelpful, but there were these kinds of theoretical statements I disagreed with, I guess.

Even so… this was an excellent overview of history and theory surrounding the question of how these two movements intersect, regardless of how Arruzza's theory ever so subtly differed from my own. It's very readable, concise and well-structured too, so no impenetrable academic language to struggle through and give you a headache. I knocked it off in an afternoon! Good stuff.