This was a book I recently read on a plane ride home. It has strong themes of existentialism, and what individualism and position in society can mean for a person. It focuses on the state of our climate through the main character, a dutch climatologist, and left me with a yearning to improve ours, and everyone's, home. It's a super raw and confronting but the authors style of narrative and poetry made it a beautiful journey. I found myself taking pictures of pages and copying quotes into my journal so I would always be able to easily come back to pieces of this book. HIGHLY recommend this book and I hope you seriously consider checking it out!! :)
Dec 30, 2024
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A widowed mother in her forties goes on a trip to a cabin in the Austrian mountains and wakes up one morning to find that she is trapped there by an invisible dome. She is alone, save for a few animals who are the other characters in the story. Everything outside of the dome is dead, their corpses frozen in the positions in which they suddenly passed. A coffee cup halfway to their lips, dogs curled at their feet. The book is written as a log of her years in the dome, on the final pieces of paper she can find in her cabin. The result is an extended soliloquy that jumps between the past and present to account a life shed of time and societal expectation and instead ruled by the rhythms of nature and the necessity to care for herself and her animal companions.ย
I read it this year, have already done a reread, and I still want to read it again after typing this out! Itโs surrealism lite and an ecofeminist meditation on death, isolation, memory, and the nature of reality. Canโt recommend it enough!
โBut if time exists only in my head, and I'm the last human being, it will end with my death. The thought cheers me. I may be in a position to murder time. The big net will tear and fall, with its sad contents, into oblivion. I'm owed some gratitude, but no one after my death will know I murdered time. Really these thoughts are quite meaningless. Things happen, and, like millions of people before me, I look for meaning in them, because my vanity will not allow me to admit that the whole meaning of an event lies in the event itself.โย
Dec 21, 2024
A tense, slow burning, gripping read.
โIt's been raining for a long time now, for so long that the lands have reshaped themselves and the cities have retreated to higher storeys. Old places have been lost. Arcane rituals and religions have crept back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their estranged father dies. A famous architect revered for making the new world navigable, he had long cut himself off from public life. They find themselves uncertain of how to grieve his passing when everything around them seems to be ending anyway.โ
King Lear meets the climate crisis. Just as stunningly written as Our Wives Under the Sea. I cried when I finished it this morning, mostly at it being over.
Aug 13, 2024
Thoroughly entertaining collection of poems. You can fly by this entire book with a lot to think about afterwards.
Dec 3, 2024
