Assembly
2021 • 112 pages
Ratings29
Average rating4.1
15
Ratings29
Average rating4.1
I don't want to be a part of it. I want to grab it, grab its face and pull open its mouth, prize its jaws apart and reach down, in, deeper. Touch what's inside. Set over the course of 48 hours, Natasha Brown's staggering debut follows an unnamed narrator as she prepares to attend a garden party at the posh estate of her boyfriend's parents. She is aware that she is heading into a space where she will be appraised and tokenized, but she is used to that. After all, she spends most of her time accommodating the needs, projections, and prejudices of others -- at the investment bank where she works, in her relationship with a man who has political aspirations, in a country where she is treated as an exploitable resource. All her life, she has worked twice as hard, mastered the art of "assimilation," and swallowed microaggressions with a smile. Now she's got it all: the glistening City career, a glamorous Lean In feminist for a best friend, and her wealthy boyfriend is about to propose. She's a success story. So why is she suddenly thinking about ending it all? While dismantling the narratives she's been fed (and made complicit in), she transports the reader across centuries, memories, and snatches of conversation, and begins to look hard at those who have spent their lives watching her. Blisteringly intelligent and utterly fearless, Assembly is about one woman daring to take control of her own story, even at the cost of her life.
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Hace mucho no leía algo tan corto y a la vez tan pero tan bueno. Assembly es un slap in the face. Es también un retrato de época, que no se agota -ni por asomo- en la cuestión racial.
Desde su lugar de mujer inglesa afrodescendiente, la protagonista (cualquier similitud con Brown ¿es pura coincidencia?) cuestiona el lugar que le toca ocupar en la sociedad británica. Al hacerlo, acaba por controvertir buena parte de los principios de la sociedad moderna contemporánea y sus vicios: el éxito como un fin en sí mismo; la misoginia; el racismo; la desigualdad de oportunidades. Con muchos guiños de época y con un estilo de envidiable síntesis, es inevitable que los planteos de la protagonista no le hablen -en mayor o menor medida- al lector.
Miren sino:
Dread. Every day is an opportunity to fuck up. Every decision, every meeting, every report. There's no success, only the temporary aversion of failure. Dread. From the buzz and jingle of my alarm until I finally get back to sleep. Dread.
I'm not a huge fan of stories told in vignettes, where you have to weave the threads of plot yourself but this is a novella so it didn't last long. The first half was very good, then it stumbled around in a series of thoughts about multiple things before resuming with the plot, which was left unresolved. I think, with the right editing, this would have made an extraordinary short story but instead it is an inconsistent and unsatisfying novella.
I was sent a free copy of this book for review so thank you to Hachette Press.
Assembly cuts like a knife: sharp, deep, painful. It reads more like a manifesto than a novel, anticlimactic, and anti colonial, upping the ante of its meaning at every turn. Very remarkable.
