Ratings7
Average rating3.9
Reviews with the most likes.
Siento que'l conceptu tenía munchu potencial, que o l'autor nun supo aprovechar o que yo nun supi ver.
What a great way to round out a year of reading. Displacement and alienation, loneliness, trauma, love and war, absurdity and allegory, ritual and tradition, faith. It's terrifying, moving, and enlightening. Statovci repeatedly knocked the air out of my lungs. The translation is excellent—the language cohesive and economical. The more surreal moments reminded me of Bulgakov's [b:The Master and Margarita 117833 The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327867963l/117833.SY75.jpg 876183], grounded in a more sinewy, visceral narrative.The cat wanted a story whose protagonist's life began from a set of impossible circumstances, a story that would be so heart-wrenching that it might make him shake his head at the state of the world. But he wanted the story to end in such a way that he was able to applaud the protagonist's ability to take matters into his own hands—despite the fact that the protagonist had learned that skill specifically so that he could shake off the burden of other people's pity—and in order to reaffirm his own beliefs. Anyone can change the direction of his life, any time at all, if only he has enough motivation: that was the moral of the story. The cat found it easier to believe this than to think about what it actually meant: that the word anyone actually referred to a very small group of people, that time has no direction, and that motivation is rarely the salient difference between people.
4.5 this book is a story full of rich emotions. It is heartbreaking and beautiful.
CW: sexual assault; violence against an animal
It took me a while to get into this, despite it jumping out at me from the indie bookstore “In Translation” shelf. While it tells the story of a mother and her son in parallel, the stories - their content and tone, and even the lyricism of the writing - are so drastically different from each other that it was jarring at the start, but as the book continues, the storylines seem to veer closer to each other, and you start to understand the layers that make up a family and a life, and all the secrets and hurts and shames and fears within. This is a refugee story, and a story of a spiraling young man whose actions often seem like a cry for help, and a story of war, and patriarchy, and how fast cultural changes and expectations can occur. There is a lot here, and I don't feel like the blurb does it justice.
This is not a book where I felt for the characters; I was a bystander watching this story unfold, and that's okay - I never felt like I needed to be closer. Even though I didn't love it, I'm glad I read it.