Klik på en miniature for at gå til Google Books
Indlæser... Dept. of Speculation (original 2014; udgave 2014)af Jenny Offill
Work InformationDept. of Speculation af Jenny Offill (2014)
Books Read in 2015 (11) » 23 mere Top Five Books of 2016 (143) Top Five Books of 2014 (914) Top Five Books of 2018 (411) Books Read in 2020 (1,868) Books Read in 2021 (2,325) Contemporary Fiction (63) Female Protagonist (727) Overdue Podcast (512) BBC Radio 4 Bookclub (276) Indlæser...
Bliv medlem af LibraryThing for at finde ud af, om du vil kunne lide denne bog. Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog. The first few chapters wowed me. Offill's writing was crisp and she had a talent for observing and writing about people. For example, who could forget the wife's experience of hiding something she dislikes at a restaurant and then find out that the restaurant's staff didn't care? However, I feel that the tone of the book somehow changed after the first few chapters, which affected my enjoyment of the book. An amusing book about adultery; educational too! I never knew that research shows men tend to have affairs after their oldest child turns six, our evolutionarily reptilian brains thinking that genetic investment is able to carry on without us now, so time to go create a different one. Or that Buddhists believe there are 121 states of consciousness, only 3 of which involve misery or suffering, though naturally we spend most of our time just in those three. I have no confirmation that these are true, mind, but they sound legit. The book's heroine never intended to get married, and the book never intends to give the reader much of any idea about the husband. He exists, he is outlined, and then he cheats, and we're given the wife's reaction along with a steady stream of amusing factoids. Interestingly, the perspective shifts from first to third person once this trouble occurs, as if the character steps back from this clichéd situation to wryly observe the difficulty she's gotten herself into. "If only you'd stuck to your plan to be an Art Monster," her third person omniscient voice might say to her first person character, "this totally could have been avoided." Happily, however, the first person wrenches back control of the narrative at the last. It's always better to have loved. There is a comparison in the style of this book to Renata Adler's Speedboat in that it is told in little episodic chunks. But Offill is funny; Adler is arch. Offill has a plot; Adler does not. Between the two I'll definitely take Offill.
Offill’s brief book eschews obvious grandeur. It does not broadcast its accomplishments for the cosmos but tracks the personal and domestic and local, a harrowed inner space. It concentrates its mass acutely, pressing down with exquisite and painful precision, like a pencil tip on the white of the nail. Dept. of Speculation is a riposte to the notion that domestic fiction is humdrum and unambitious. From the point of view of an unnamed American woman, it gives us the hurrahs and boos of daily life, of marriage and of parenthood, with exceptional originality, intensity and sweetness. [...] Dept. of Speculation is a shattered novel that stabs and sparkles at the same time. It is the kind of book that you will be quoting over and over to friends who don't quite understand, until they give in and read it too. Offill is a smart writer with a canny sense of pacing; just when you want to abandon the fragmented puzzle pieces of the novel, she reveals a moment of breathtaking tenderness ... especially engaging when it describes new motherhood ... For better or worse, this is not so much a book about their marriage; it is a book about the wife’s marriage. It would be interesting to read the other story to this marriage, to know more of the husband, the father — but Offill still makes it seem as if the wife’s version of the marriage is story enough and, perhaps, the only story that matters. From deep within the interiors of a fictional marriage, Offill has crafted an account of matrimony and motherhood that breaks free of the all-too-limiting traditional stories of wives and mothers. There is complexity to the central partnership; Offill folds cynicism into genuine moments of love. It may be difficult to truly know what happens between two people, but Offill gets alarmingly close. Jenny Offill's novel Dept. of Speculation, which weighs in at 192 pages soaking wet and includes a fair amount of white space, is extremely short for a novel. It's an unusual book not only in terms of its size, but also its form. Make no mistake, this is an experimental novel. By which I mean that the narrative isn't a series of flowing scenes that keep you reassuringly grounded in plot, but a collection of vignettes, observations and quirky details that are sometimes pulled from real life.... Offill has successfully met the challenge she seems to have given herself: write only what needs to be written, and nothing more. No excess, no flab. And do it in a series of bulletins, fortune-cookie commentary, mordant observations, lyrical phrasing. And through these often disparate and disconnected means, tell the story of the fragile nature of anyone's domestic life. Tilhører ForlagsserienHæderspriserDistinctionsNotable Lists
Kort roman om en kvinde med kunstneriske ambitioner, der ædes op af moder-, ægte- og utroskab. Et eksistentielt drama med en særlig fragmenteret skrivestil. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsIngenPopulære omslag
Google Books — Indlæser... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC-klassificeringVurderingGennemsnit:
Er det dig?Bliv LibraryThing-forfatter. |
Each sentence is beautifully written, but disjointed from the others. It’s almost stream-of-consciousness, but then there is a plot twisted into it. It rambles, yet somehow no words are wasted.
The storytelling is not my style, I’ve concluded, but I can’t discredit the author’s way with words. Give it a shot. It’s so short that if you don’t like it, it’s still a book read and didn’t eat up too much of your time. ( )