subtextual
what i have to say about this book is that i read it in a single day and it killed me a thousand times. and then the next day i read it front to back again and was killed another thousand times. i went into it blind and went very quickly from this pacing is pretty slow but i like the prose —> ratatouille chef eyes bugging out dot gif —> WHAT THE FUARKKKKKKKKKK FINGERSMITH SPIRITUAL SUCCESSOR OF ALL TIME????!!!!!
the long and short of it is that this is about two women who spend a summer reluctantly cohabitating together in a big house, set in the post-ww2 dutch countryside. firstly, i love stories where characters live in a big house and do nothing but perceive each other, react to each other, be disturbed by each other’s presence, etc. as someone living with roommates, i am familiar with the psychological crimes one could easily and silently commit against someone they're living with, even if unintentionally. second, everything that made isabel an ostensibly unlikeable character was a bullseye for my top traits in women: acerbic, obstinate, repressed, lonely, resentful, paranoid, neurotic, and oblique to her own desires until they consume her entirely. so i was having an extremely fun time reading her terrorize everyone and especially eva with her off putting personality. i was also diagnosing her with autism in my head which is kind of a cheat code for reading characters as more endearing than they are textually.
naturally i was very engrossed by the gay sex parts but what i really found the most intoxicating was the build up of isabel’s erotic desire barreling from fraught repression to obsession, and how it pierces through eva’s tortured ambivalence. i love women who are freaks about other women! op knows how to write tension. i was ripping through pages impatient for the rubber band to snap and eatingggggggg up the payoff so bad.
the mystery of eva’s character and the twist caught me off guard because i didn’t connect the dots that she was jewish until it was revealed explicitly. looking back the clues were so obvious and would’ve been obvious to anyone reading this as a post-holocaust story, but i was reading it as just vaguely set in post-ww2 the first time around, because present day isabel and her siblings seemed somewhat unaffected by the war. which i did find odd at first. so like the flashbacks to the woman knocking and banging on the door of their family home registered with me as potentially noteworthy, but not, this is the family whom the house belonged to before they were forced to flee into hiding. and then other stuff like eva being vague about her family, her racial otherness that isabel couldn’t put her finger on, her overt curiosity regarding the house, etc. the banality of these observations from isabel’s pov was of course intentional, but i still facepalmed myself for missing the straight up text. like i felt soooo stupid but at the same time it preserved the mystery for me so the reveal landed like a sucker punch.
eva’s diary excerpts, while narratively heavy handed (i mean....how convenient that isabel was able to get the full story from it), really moved me, and the grief of seeing another family eat off your family’s plates and sleep in your family’s beds really struck me as singularly devastating. but i felt like it did TOO good of a job flipping the script bc it left me grimacing at the next part wondering how isabel was ever going to recover from THAT. in general i felt like the first half was really precious and delightful to read, the epistolary intermission a shocking recontextualization, and the final part not that satisfying of a denouement....like ur telling me after all that isabel was STILL not going to give the house up to eva?! and what was with the awkward relationship stipulation. i felt like it happily ever after’d too quickly and so the resolution fell flat....i wanted more!
despite my gripes, overall: read of the year i think. the scene where isa goes to amsterdam to find eva desperately hoping not to be sent away only for that to happen....i am not immune to this classic trope :’)
It was a water-heavy fruit, full-ripe. The first bite spilled on Isabel’s skirt. It wouldn’t show: the fabric was brown, checkered. There was no way of eating it in silence—the sounds it made, the wet. Isabel ate through the whole thing: the flesh and stick and pits and core and all. She made sure nothing was left of it, as though it had never been given in the first place.
She’s taken care of Mum’s garden. It looks nice. I saw her harvesting the rhubarb today. She did it the same way I remembered, with the basket and the scissors. I stood there and tried to think, You thief, you’re a thief. It’s hard to think that at someone cutting rhubarb in the hot sun. Then she told me to roll up my trousers before I got on the bike and I did. I mailed the spoon to Malcha.
what i have to say about this book is that i read it in a single day and it killed me a thousand times. and then the next day i read it front to back again and was killed another thousand times. i went into it blind and went very quickly from this pacing is pretty slow but i like the prose —> ratatouille chef eyes bugging out dot gif —> WHAT THE FUARKKKKKKKKKK FINGERSMITH SPIRITUAL SUCCESSOR OF ALL TIME????!!!!!
the long and short of it is that this is about two women who spend a summer reluctantly cohabitating together in a big house, set in the post-ww2 dutch countryside. firstly, i love stories where characters live in a big house and do nothing but perceive each other, react to each other, be disturbed by each other’s presence, etc. as someone living with roommates, i am familiar with the psychological crimes one could easily and silently commit against someone they're living with, even if unintentionally. second, everything that made isabel an ostensibly unlikeable character was a bullseye for my top traits in women: acerbic, obstinate, repressed, lonely, resentful, paranoid, neurotic, and oblique to her own desires until they consume her entirely. so i was having an extremely fun time reading her terrorize everyone and especially eva with her off putting personality. i was also diagnosing her with autism in my head which is kind of a cheat code for reading characters as more endearing than they are textually.
naturally i was very engrossed by the gay sex parts but what i really found the most intoxicating was the build up of isabel’s erotic desire barreling from fraught repression to obsession, and how it pierces through eva’s tortured ambivalence. i love women who are freaks about other women! op knows how to write tension. i was ripping through pages impatient for the rubber band to snap and eatingggggggg up the payoff so bad.
the mystery of eva’s character and the twist caught me off guard because i didn’t connect the dots that she was jewish until it was revealed explicitly. looking back the clues were so obvious and would’ve been obvious to anyone reading this as a post-holocaust story, but i was reading it as just vaguely set in post-ww2 the first time around, because present day isabel and her siblings seemed somewhat unaffected by the war. which i did find odd at first. so like the flashbacks to the woman knocking and banging on the door of their family home registered with me as potentially noteworthy, but not, this is the family whom the house belonged to before they were forced to flee into hiding. and then other stuff like eva being vague about her family, her racial otherness that isabel couldn’t put her finger on, her overt curiosity regarding the house, etc. the banality of these observations from isabel’s pov was of course intentional, but i still facepalmed myself for missing the straight up text. like i felt soooo stupid but at the same time it preserved the mystery for me so the reveal landed like a sucker punch.
eva’s diary excerpts, while narratively heavy handed (i mean....how convenient that isabel was able to get the full story from it), really moved me, and the grief of seeing another family eat off your family’s plates and sleep in your family’s beds really struck me as singularly devastating. but i felt like it did TOO good of a job flipping the script bc it left me grimacing at the next part wondering how isabel was ever going to recover from THAT. in general i felt like the first half was really precious and delightful to read, the epistolary intermission a shocking recontextualization, and the final part not that satisfying of a denouement....like ur telling me after all that isabel was STILL not going to give the house up to eva?! and what was with the awkward relationship stipulation. i felt like it happily ever after’d too quickly and so the resolution fell flat....i wanted more!
despite my gripes, overall: read of the year i think. the scene where isa goes to amsterdam to find eva desperately hoping not to be sent away only for that to happen....i am not immune to this classic trope :’)
It was a water-heavy fruit, full-ripe. The first bite spilled on Isabel’s skirt. It wouldn’t show: the fabric was brown, checkered. There was no way of eating it in silence—the sounds it made, the wet. Isabel ate through the whole thing: the flesh and stick and pits and core and all. She made sure nothing was left of it, as though it had never been given in the first place.
She’s taken care of Mum’s garden. It looks nice. I saw her harvesting the rhubarb today. She did it the same way I remembered, with the basket and the scissors. I stood there and tried to think, You thief, you’re a thief. It’s hard to think that at someone cutting rhubarb in the hot sun. Then she told me to roll up my trousers before I got on the bike and I did. I mailed the spoon to Malcha.