maketeaa's reviews
226 reviews

an incredibly holistic look at the tragic murder of kitty genovese, stripping back the mainstream glamours pasted over the crime and giving an analytical, x-rayed depiction of the horrific details from the entire timeline of the case. pelonero begins by describing the murder as a shocking summation of details, the way in which we can imagine everyone glancing at a newspaper new of the crime. but then she takes us deeper, allows us to meet kitty genovese as everyone in her life did, see the smile she was well known for, feel the warmth of her kindness. subsequently, we learn of winston moseley and his upbringing, and, in particular, his unexpectedly reserved, quiet demeanour for someone capable of his crimes. we return to the crime, and, most importantly, the fallout of it -- how can 38 witnesses have heard what happened and not called the police? this question ties together the theme of the whole case account. explanations ranged from 'i thought they were teenagers messing around outside' to 'i didn't want to get involved' to, most concerningly and prevalently, 'i thought it was a lovers' quarrel.' important points are made about sexism and how underlying misogynistic sentiments hindered actual help being called for kitty genovese. what i found most poignant was that, while the author could have easily stopped here, given what the genovese case is most well known for, she also gives an incredibly moving and human voice to genovese's loved ones -- what struck me the most was her partner mary ann zielonko, who, in her police interview, was unnecessarily made to discuss her sex life with genovese.

this book was ALMOST five stars. but i really didn't like the last few pages which explored the recently risen statements that denounced the fact that 38 witnesses had ignored the murder. while i think there is some value in the way pelonero considers the believability of these statements, i feel like her argument of their falseness is diminished by the fact that her main point for not believing them is that it's based simply on people saying it 'wasn't possible' -- but is there any stronger evidence from the police reports that calls *did* come through? did the police themselves not literally just say 'there's no way calls could have come in early on and we wouldn't have heard it'? more should've been done to look at the efficacy of the police in new york at the time and comparisons with other cases where police officers may (or may not) have arrived at the scene any faster than they should have.

this was more literary than horror, imo, and definitely the kind of read where you need to go through your annotations again afterwards before you can totally figure it out. a mysterious figure at new seoul park hands out free samples of pink jelly, claiming that whoever shares it will stay together forever, only for the entire theme park devolving into a grotesque jellied massacre of pairs of loved-ones once the sun had set. we're taken through the events before and after the massacre through varying point of views, learn of the gritty lives under the cheery theme park mascots, one man's obsession with money, and the murderous conflict between two users of a devil-worshipping forum who insist that they are the one that has been entrusted with the real words of their deity. albeit in a disjointed, and sometimes incohesive manner, we explore the consuming nature of love, and, most of all, the inherent horror of allowing oneself to be blended and mixed with another person, along with its inevitably when you wish to belong to something -- whether that be a parent to a child, or a girlfriend to a boyfriend, or a follower to their deity. however, the last few chapters makes us question whether it is better to be totally separate from the ones we love in order to avoid such a blending, and whether life is worth living without it. i think the overall theme of this work was very interesting, especially with the aspect of horror added to the bonds of love between people, but honestly it felt like so much was going on that i didnt really know what to focus on all the time

will come back to this later in the month 

genuinely one of the freakiest books ive ever read, the kind that's short and easily formatted enough to keep you rooted through one sitting but in that singular sitting makes your very essence feel scrambled. like gerald's own consciousness, this work feels like the literary equivalent of the sunset.gif, of the disintegration of form and sense and meaning to be left with the nonsensical code of existence. this book is like a study of why things have given forms and questions what we are left with when the shape of our self is lost. 

in other words: the definition of a biblically accurate novel.

somewhere in this novel, the narrator mentions how it felt to have a fever as a child, the feeling of walls coming up between the real world and her consciousness, a forced introspection from the incapacitation. that is the overarching theme of this book -- reflecting on the details floating inside of oneself so intricately form parts of your being that it can only be seen when you can't see anything else. we first learn of the narrator's ex-girlfriend, johanna, who left her kisses on her lips but also everywhere else, on her writing and book inscriptions and who shocked her in her ability to switch herself, to change her temperature, to be warm one moment and cold the next. we then learn about her friend/roommate niki, with a fascination for the gross, the maggots on the dead rat, with her black and white view of the world and her catastrophic fear of abandonment. and, what to me was a turning point in the reflections of the narrator, we have alejandro, with whom the narrator shared a visceral, passionate affair, where the idea of getting lost in the details and not caring about the what and the how but the who first comes to light. it is interesting how the cast of characters all occupy transitory positions in the narrator's life, and, notably, the narrator's repeated observation that, had their times together been in the present, they would have had some diagnosis of mental illness that had gone uncategorised when she knew them -- as she says, there is no inherent rationality to our actions but is only superimposed onto our memories retrospectively. with the theme of undiagnosed mental health, with people in her life that leave a mark on her but ultimately fade away, only to be recalled in the cloud of fever, this is the sentiment genberg highlights to us: these transitory moments, these memories floating in us, may make no sense when we take them in their raw form, but begin to illustrate something when reflected on, when you consider the who instead of the what and the how. what struck me the most, i think, was the realisation that the last chapter was about the narrator's own mother, an anxious woman who the narrator viewed as a fish among a group of fish, chameleoning herself ad a defense mechanism while losing her own character on the way. birgitte herself feels like another five chapters of transitory characters with the number of phases she goes through, and perhaps there is a metaphor to be found in that the person who birthed the narrator was herself a slideshow of different whos, as if collecting these different whos is simply something in her dna. but the book finishes with the narrator and her longtime friend, sally (which was also a striking detail to me -- sally, who cut the umbilical cord of her first child, a constant in all the chapters but yet without a chapter of her own) walk through the cemetery, and the quote at the top of this review was stated. because while johanna and niki and alejandro and birgitte all, to some extent or the other, focused on the externals, the narrator realises that everything is internal, everything is already inside of us, and that all we wish to be and do exists in the network of people we brush up against in our lives, no matter how briefly.

not a river feels like the literary equivalent of a painting in a gallery - the vivid descriptions, the thematic sequences: in less than a hundred pages she knits the reader into her text, like by reading we, too, have become part of the tiny island the book takes place in, that we are another character in the close cobweb of interactions that define this tiny surface area of a town. above all, this is an exploration of masculinity -- the book opens on a fishing trip with three men, and their very typically masculine hunting of a stingray. it follows with their encounter with two young girls, an invitation to a dance, and the revenge that is seeked on them for having thrown the sting ray back into the river. but what struck me the most was the magnifying glass that almada held up to the relationships in the book, so we could see the very fibres of the bonds between the men, could look at the crass jokes, the insistence of bonds like 'cobwebs', the other things we may view as 'traditionally masculine' through a new lens. because zoomed in, what is clear is the tenderness all the men feel for each other, the bond between them to maintain the routine of going fishing together in the still and quiet river. the final scene demonstrates this especially well, with the older men's immediate concern over tilo ("where's the kid?!") and the note of care that their last scene finishes on. the events occuring on their small island, where all the characters seemed linked to each other in one way or another, makes it feel as though the entire region can be summed up by the relationships we see between the cast, that the complicated feelings of home but not home, of wanting to stay but not to stay, of accepting loss but not quite understanding it, is the entire defining factor of this small area of argentina.

closing this book and seeing the title again feels like completing a puzzle. because the whole book reads exactly like that -- a short collection of things the narrator does not want to think about. the story opens with the unnamed narrator and her twin brother as children, and takes us through the entirety of their complicated relationship through adulthood, the narrator's desire to keep her brother close, to not drift away, and her brother not feeling the same way. the overall story reminded me a lot of a little life, particularly the sentiment of loving someone who are fighting their own battles with mental health, and i guess because of that it did sometimes feel like there was nothing that really hit me that hard. but i can appreciate from a literary standpoint the ideas that arise from their relationship as twins, of one being 'smaller' than the other, the older one needing to be 'destroyed' first. i wish the themes in this were explored a little deeper, especially the recurring idea of taking up space in a person's life. but i did enjoy the overarching exploration of disappearance, of the right to erasure, of what it is like to want to disappear when another person so strongly wants you to stay. to truly disappear means being unable to come back -- so can the narrator's brother disappear leaving her behind?

this installment was a little bit... eh, which is kind of disappointing. i think after three books the repeated paragraphs and sentences becomes less of an effective way of sharing the theme of the café and rather becomes a bit exhausting to read. while i still loved the general premise the series is based on, the collection of stories in this one felt rather confusing and unclear, and while it explored the idea that there are probably things we don't know about our pasts, it didn't have the same feeling of epiphany as the first two books.

third installment of a series which, as it goes along, becomes clearer and clearer that reflecting on the past is good as long as it helps us move forward in the future. through the stories of a young woman who feels abandoned and wishes to meet her dead parents when she was a baby, a comedian who wishes to show his dead wife that he won a comedy contest before he takes his own life, an older sister suffering from severe anxiety after her younger's sister's death going to see her one last time, and a young employee at the café returning to visit 'the one that got away' before she leaves for america, the resounding message is that we don't know what the future holds for us, but, just like yayoi's mother wanted to see the future she desired, we, too, can create our own future. however, with the theme of death still running through the book, it's evident that the future itself may not be what we desired either way.

nanako, despite reiji's hope to marry her in the future, still passes away

. but what is important is to have hope, hope to fuel yourself to keep going, to see whether that next day will come, to fight for the feeling that a promise of better days gives you.

i liked the overall message of this one but the change of location and new characters felt a little confusing. found it hard to feel as invested as the last installment!! but still very sweet and enjoyable

i thought, at first, that maybe the rest of this series would just be a repetition of the original book, that it would just be a reiteration of the lesson that the past is something to make peace with rather than change, and while this story was an extension of that, it certainly wasn't a redunant collection of stories. in 'tales from the café', kawaguchi takes a closer look at death and bereavement, expanding on the final story from the café between kei and miki and the message of wishing happiness for miki beyond the grave. we meet a man wishing to meet his dead best friend, whose young daughter he adopted after his death, a son wishing to meet his dead mother while he himself considered suicide, a lover wishing to meet his old girlfriend after he passed away from cancer, and an old detective wishing to pass on a birthday present to his wife after she was murdered twenty-two years ago. throughout, we see miki, the widowed nagare's young daughter, bringing light and life into the café, symbolising new beginnings and rebirths through the excitement of a seven-year-old, in her songs about spring and her ever-changing phases, and kazu, who we learn is the daughter of the ghost in the chair. all the former characters share one thing in common -- a desire to hold onto the past, to punish oneself for their loved one's death, and an inability to dig themselves out of their bereavement. going back to the past, for them, means going back to make amends, to do what they believe will absolve them of their guilt -- for the man and his best friend, it is to take a video revealing to his daughter that he is not her real father,  for the son, it is to turn himself into a ghost after the death of his mother, for the lover, to make sure she is happy in the future, and for the husband, to pass on the present. but what each character learns that it is not necessary to make amends, to 'fix' anything to absolve them from their guilt -- the best way to give meaning to each death is to continue life in a way to make themselves happy. the time that the person they have lost spent in their lives is time that was spent with love, and thus, instead of using their legacy to live in sorrow, they should live with the memory of the joy they felt to experience being alive at the same time as them. a truly touching second installment to a very sweet series❤️