keegan_leech's reviews
51 reviews

(Alright, it's been long enough that I feel okay trashing this. I've seen it come and go from shelves and I just wanna get out the frustrations that have stuck with me long after reading this.)

I really really wanted to like Womb City, but it's just not good. I finished it mostly out of stubbornness, but the process was like trying to wade through concrete. I still think that there are a lot of good ideas in this book. It's set in a dystopian future where consciousness is transferable but expensive, and so the rich are able to escape death while the poor and the marginalized are coerced into surrendering their bodies to others. Women and those considered criminal have not just their actions but their emotions strictly monitored every minute of the day. All that's just the tip of the iceberg. Tsamaase stacks new concepts and details on this foundation in what should be a complex exploration of some very interesting themes. But  the novel's best ideas have been done a terrible disservice by the actual writing (and editing) with which they're expressed.

For starters, Womb City feels like an unedited draft. I was concerned that I might have bought an uncorrected proof or something, but that doesn't seem to be the case. It's just that the novel is riddled with errors that any decent editor should have caught on a first pass. Not just typos and grammatical mistakes (which are somewhat inevitable in early printings of a book and might eventually be weeded out in future print runs) but glaring continuity errors. I'm aware that parts of the novel were originally published as standalone short stories, and it feels as though these were stitched together without much regard for consistency. One of the examples that stood out to me as particularly egregious is also a good example of how easy these issues would be to correct. (I'll avoid plot details but still spoiler tag this lengthy discussion of it just in case).

The novel is meticulous about keeping track of time. A full page section break indicates the beginning of each new day, recording the date and day of the week. Every chapter title also includes a time down to the minute. So, about halfway through the novel, it is made very clear to the reader that the main character, Nelah, is not just waking up on a Saturday morning, but at exactly 10:44. In a chapter beginning two hours later (at 12:44) her husband tells her that he will "get breakfast ready" while Nelah washes and dresses. She enters the kitchen to find her husband and niece at the breakfast table. Nelah says good morning to her niece, and the TV is playing the morning news. Characters repeatedly refer to the "morning" or similar, and Nelah's husband promises to take their niece to school... at what is now after 13:00 on a Saturday.

To me, that seems like a telltale sign that this chapter was written as a short story or first draft which initially be set much earlier on a weekday morning. It doesn't match any of the published short stories which were apparently adapted into Womb City but there are other details in this chapter which don't crop up elsewhere in the novel. So I think it's likely that this was (at least initially) intended to be a separate piece. It was clearly not integrated very well into the rest of the novel, and the result is distracting and frustrating to read. The chapter would otherwise be tense and dramatic, as well as a perfect example of the novel's explorations of bodily autonomy and patriarchal violence but the only thing that stands out is the absurdity of characters saying good morning to one another, eating breakfast, and starting the schoolday at one PM on a Saturday.

As I've alluded to, one of the most frustrating things about these inconsistencies is how trivial they would be to correct. There are several ways the example above could be fixed without impacting the rest of the plot at all. (Spoiler tag again mostly because that makes it easier to skip my lengthy examples).

Here are three simple ways that this particular inconsistency could be fixed, in order of laziness:

Fix 1: Just have it happen earlier. By changing the chapter titles so that the events take place a little earlier, the characters could go through this morning routine in the morning. It would still be odd for a child to be going to school on a Saturday, but that could be hand-waved away as a quirk of Womb City's dystopian future Botswana. This might lead to some  slightly awkward timing elsewhere, but nothing that would be so obvious, especially since there is already some buffer time between this and other chapters that is not covered moment-by-moment.

Fix 2: Also have it happen on a different day. The events of the plot are not so tied to the calendar that this scene had to take place on a Saturday. Some events take place on particular days, but only because the fictional world has been constructed that way. A few tweaks to the dates would leave the plot unchanged but allow this to take place on a weekday morning. Slightly more effort, because it would mean changing dates throughout the text, but that's why a book (usually) goes through multiple drafts.

Fix 3: Rewrite the scene just a tiny bit. It's not at all important that Nelah's niece is specifically going to school, and while a family sitting around the breakfast table is a domestic cliché that fits the scene, the chapter would have lost nothing if Nelah's husband and niece had been eating lunch and going on some other outing (for the sake of the plot it really does not matter where). This would actually involve rewriting the chapter instead of just changing the chapter headings, but would have the very distinct advantage of making the chapter fit into the rest of the novel.

Tah dah. Easy. None of those solutions would require much effort, and some of them would considerably improve the experience of reading the novel. Not only are they undemanding corrections, they're practically a standard step in the editing process.

I couldn't guess why this book went to print with such easily-corrected issues. Did it just not get a second draft? Why would any editor or publisher sabotage an author like that? For that matter, why didn't Tsamaase spot such a glaring issue? The whole thing just feels careless. And the issues in that example are just minor continuity issues, not details that are integral to the plot. You heard that right; major setting and world-building details are just as garbled!

It doesn't help that Womb City is bloated with far too many different plots, sub-plots, side-plots, revelations, twists, and conspiracies. New exposition is being delivered right until the novel's final chapters, and for the most part it just weighs the plot down. The same thematic concepts are reintroduced in slightly different metaphorical guises over and over again rather than being developed or explored. Neither characters nor readers have time to make sense of one uncovered conspiracy or revelation about the world before another supersedes it. Earlier details of the plot or world-building are seemingly forgotten as later details contradict or simply fail to cohere with them.

While the minor issues were distracting and frustrating, these larger issues actively hamstring whatever good work Tsamaase is doing. I'll allow myself one more example, this time an actual major plot spoiler.

Literally from the outset of the novel, we are made aware of two things. First, a microchip has been implanted in Nelah's body which records all of her actions and experiences so that her husband can monitor her behaviour. He does this via a daily review of her memories, aided by a computer programme which monitors Nelah's "bio signals" for unusual emotional responses. Second, we learn that Nelah has been having an affair with another man, which she must keep hidden during these daily interrogations. That's a very interesting tension! So how does Nelah manage this?

We get some details later in the novel. At a hotel with her lover, Jan, he asks whether her microchip is recording them. (Why ask? We've been told it records everything, and this doesn't seem like an exception.) Nelah doesn't answer the question, but Jan produces a small remote and presses a button on it. He tells Nelah that this remote is a device that interferes with her microchip's recording abilities, overwriting some memories with invented scenarios. Via narration, Nelah informs the reader that she and Jan have been conducting their affair at a "gentlemen's club" which has similar technology built into its walls, but still  questions Jan about what technology is and what it can do as though she's unfamiliar with it. Moments later, when they are about to take drugs and have sex, Nelah is again concerned about the microchip recording them. Apparently, despite the magical little remote, her microchip has a "backup recorder" (not mentioned until this point) which her husband doesn't have access to, but which is accessed during a second kind of memory evaluation. And so the problem is kicked down the road. For now, Jan simply promises that he will use his wealth and influence to make the problem go away, and we are left with more questions than answers.

The biggest question of all: why are Jan and Nelah only discussing this now? This is an ongoing affair, so has the remote only just become available to them? The way Jan talks about it, that doesn't seem to be the case. If they've been using similar technology before now, why doesn't Nelah know how it works? The one thing she does seem to already know is that this remote won't affect her "backup recorder" so why is that not a problem that she and Jan have discusses in the past? Surely they would have needed to explain (at some point) why the backup and the default recording are different? Why is Jan asking whether her microchip is recording, when he (of all people) should know that it is always making two recordings, one of which can't be affected by the tampering technology that he hasn't turned on yet?

Reading scenes like this made my head spin trying to keep track of the many bizarre, contradictory elements of the setting. Elements which might end up being crucial to the plot, but were just as likely to be never relevant again. Even the most important allegorical or plot-relevant details were often never explored or expanded on and simply popped up again chapters later to accompany some new plot twist. If the moment-to-moment writing were better the book might be more enjoyable, but it isn't. The prose is boring at best. Every page is a slog.

I have spent a lot of the last year wondering how Womb City ended up as bad as it did. From my (admittedly limited) experience, Tsamaase's other work seems to be of a much higher standard.

It doesn't matter. I have exorcised my frustrations and I am putting the novel out of my mind. I wouldn't recommend reading it.

A very interesting premise, at times very enjoyable and even engrossing, but just not executed well enough.

My biggest issue was Self's misogyny. Dave, voice of much of The Book of Dave, is a misogynist. He is a racist, a xenophobe, and a general bigot to boot. It is a cartoonish, all-encompassing bigotry and Will Self recognises that Dave's bigotry makes him a worse person. However, Self is unable to recognise his own misogyny seemingly because it is not so cartoonishly obvious. It comes across is the women in the novel, all of whom are two-dimensional and written to type. They are poorly motivated (where they are motivated at all) and in contrast to the much more complex male characters, easily reduced to simple tropes. Not that the novel focuses much on any women.

It's very much about men, about what it means to be a father or a son, and what is (or should be) expected of a man in society. That is an interesting concern, and the book does explore some very interesting material. For example, Self's depiction of the ways in which far right wing grifters leverage men's failures under patriarchy to manipulate and radicalise them; the ways in which patriarchy is not merely a tool for controlling women. However, most of the novel is simply not that interesting. Its exploration of religion is shallower and less engaging than the premise of the book would suggest, and despite some very interesting and enjoyable world-building its post-apocalyptic society often feels artificial and brittle. So often, it felt as though Self was writing what he a book like Book of Dave should be, and not something with a life of its own. Spoilers for the arcs of the book:

In modern (well, early 2000s) England, Dave Rudman is a miserable, hateful man. A bad husband and father, a bigot, slowly being consumed by his own worst impulses. Despite some unconventional writing, his arc is a very staid three act structure which has him end the novel happier, more self-aware, and trying to make up for the consequences of his consumptive hatred. The scenery is different, but the path is very well-trod. Meanwhile, in post-apocalyptic "Ing", Carl Devush goes on an equally conventional hero's journey. The setting is strange, and the writing is sometimes very compelling weird fantasy, but once again the story is cookie-cutter. If slightly jumbled, Carl gets all the features of the hero's journey: he has his own wise older mentor,  crossing of the various thresholds, atonement with the father, and return home changed by his journey.

Add to this that the book drags a little too much in both of its stories, and the clever premise or occasionally engrossing writing just isn't enough to keep it all together. If you aren't so put off by a very conventional narrative, then you might quite enjoy this book. But I found it mostly just "alright". A somewhat laclustre execution on a clever idea.

Easily one of if not the most playful books I've ever read. Absolutely charming and delightful the whole way through. The novel feels like a great literary game which Calvino is inviting you to play with him. A game of cat and mouse, of adventure, of puzzles and hidden meanings, the rules and the objectives themselves shifting as you read (a game of "Calvinoball" if you will). Yet, at least for me, it was never tiring.

The simple plot becomes somewhat chaotic and untethered some way through the novel, and threatens to go off the rails. I could see some people finding it too outlandish, or being frustrated by the constant denial of gratification built into the structure of the novel. I was satisfied to treat it as an extension of the game, and pleased with the (somewhat tongue in cheek) way that Calvino closed the loop in the end.

Thematically, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, is more focused. It covers a lot, but Calvino returns to and toys with all of his themes with a kind of dogged persistence. It also helps that the themes each contain one another, like a set of matryoshka dolls. The novel is about reading, and by extension stories, storytelling, and communication. By extension, it is about translations and mistranslations, confusion and deliberate obfuscation, hidden meanings and apophenia. The plot is full of fakes, forgeries, miscommunications, doubles, mirrors, and opposites. Each story-within-the-story returns to these through different lenses with the result that the novel is a thematic kaleidoscope.

An absolute highlight of my year, and a book I'll definitely return to.

Tough to talk about this one without really digging into the ending so spoiler tags ahead. Generally though, an excellent exploration of how societal systems can alienate and dehumanise not just the most obvious victims of those systems, but all who participate in them. A moral erosion that undermines all it touches and which feels (and partially because of this, becomes) inescapable to those within trapped within it. Often a difficult read, and I was glad that Bazterrica avoided didacticism in favour of treating her themes with complexity and nuance.

There are a couple of weaker spots. It is always difficult to judge this kind of thing in translation, but the prose often felt awkward, and occasional elements of the plot just felt out of place. I don't want to judge them harshly, it's certainly possible that through a different lens I would've liked them better, but I am uncertain about elements like the

creepy twin children with a shared secret language

or the

wealthy and ageless Romanian human-hunter who drinks from a red goblet and whose ornate study is conspicuously without sunlight

. They just stuck out as much more camp than the rest of the otherwise very sombre and straight-faced writing. Sure, maybe they shouldn't feel out-of-place in a novel about systematised cannibalism, and I don't necessarily think they're thematically inappropriate, but defter writing might have made them feel more natural. Also, the implication that "the government and media" have secretly manufactured a global health emergency as a cover for some authoritarian conspiracy well... after the covid pandemic it just seems kind of stupid. The book was written in 2017, so I don't think Bazterrica is some kind of "plandemic" conspiracy theorist. But an actual pandemic showed the powerful and privileged to be far more incompetent and self-interested than ruthlessly conspiratorial. Absurd theories that the covid pandemic was manufactured, rather than being some kind of dangerous truth suppressed by authoritarian overlords, only granted more leeway to a disinterested system that failed to protect the most vulnerable in society. By comparison, Bazterrica's manufactured health panic seems like shallow cartoon villainy.

Then there's the ending. Whatever the novel's flaws, I think the ending tied an absolutely perfect bow on the whole thing. An effective twist ending reframes all that came before it, and to do so well is an impressive achievement. In this case,

killing Jasmine—the woman he's seemingly been treating with greater and greater  humanity until this point—reframes Marcos' motivations  in a way that only strengthens the themes of the novel. After all this, he still sees her as inhuman and disposable? Well of course! For months he has raped her and treated her as a human pet, unconsenting surrogate, and replacement wife. Even if he treats her better than many others would, he has not been treating her as a person. No matter his reservations about it, Marcos is still a willful participant in a system which treats humans as livestock, and he has come to see this system as the norm.

In the penultimate chapter Marcos suggests a plan to poison the scavengers who take discarded corpses from the processing plant, and I found myself thinking with some fascination: "However his behaviour might have changed, he's still calculating and capable of incredible callousness." With hindsight, it's obvious that this isn't a defensive tactic or an example of some moral blind spot. This is who Marcos has always been. The people who make the system run smoothly (people like Marcos and Sergio the stunner) are not psychopaths or villains. They're practical ordinary people who don't relish their work, but do it anyway. So what is the value of the revulsion that Marcos does feel, or the small ways in which he does refuse to participate in this system? It is surely not meaningless that he is kind to puppies and avoids eating meat. To what extent is that undone by his continued treatment of other people as disposable property?

I like that Bazterrica doesn't offer an answer to these questions. These conflicts are presented and explored in great depth and with a real clarity of purpose. But the reader isn't lead to any obvious answers. I'm certainly going to be mulling over the implications of the novel for a long time.

Sally Rooney   seems to have this ability to entangle and blend together emotions like no one else. It's as though she writes "run-on feelings" which flow into one another and can't be picked apart afterwards. Individual emotional phrases might be simple, in some cases almost cliché, but in a torrent of other emotions, the overall sense is of something more complex and true-to-life.

Haven't we all at some point felt that our emotional turmoil is entirely unique to ourselves, and also that Joni Mitchell has conveniently written it down in words and turned it into a massive international hit? Rooney's writing, in my experience, evokes that same sense of experiencing something simultaneously deeply personal and infinitely relatable. I constantly vacillate when reading her work between "These feelings must be universal, surely everyone has felt this way," and "I never knew this feeling could be described, I never thought anyone else felt like this". Really, it isn't even what her characters feel that makes Rooney's writing so familiar, but the way they feel. They're bundles of a million incompatible impulses and desires, mundane and pretentious and self-destructive and transcendent all at once. (Just like me and you!)

This kind of emotional emulsification of confusing and contradictory feelings is in a broader sense how Rooney treats all human relationships.  Intermezzo captures this particularly well; one passage, which might as well be the novel's thesis statement, reads:

I find that a moving sentiment, and Intermezzo expresses it far better than I ever could. So go read the book! Entangle yourself in the emotions of others, in life itself.

All the usual impact of Rooney's writing aside, this novel affected me very deeply. I don't know if it was something about myself or my life, if I was just especially receptive to it at the time I picked it up, or if this is just Rooney's best work yet and this is what everyone else must feel too. Whatever the case, it did something to me and I find it impossible to say exactly what. It seems as though the novel has burrowed into me and is rearranging some part of myself that I can't reach. It's going to stay with me a long time, I can tell.

After all my effusive praise for the novel and my own attempts to pick it apart in my head, I find it hard to say why it's felt so personally impactful. Which is not a bad experience, I think.

This was great! An interconnected collection of short stories is a difficult thing to write, and it's rare to read even a collection of standalone stories that is consistently this good. Jollof Rice has been one of my favourite reads of the year so far. The characters are well-rounded, the writing is interesting, and the stories are fun. (That's not to say they're entirely lighthearted. The collection covers sombre themes including police brutality and religious intolerance with appropriate gravitas. Though there's a kind of infectious joy that drives the collection as a whole and makes for great reading.)

Not every story is perfect. There's a couple of lackluster ones, but no outright duds. If I had one complaint it would be that the whole thing wasn't long enough. The final story in the collection takes place after a jump in time and suffered from having to cram in a lot of exposition. A few extra stories to fill the intervening time would have given that final one some needed room to breathe. But even where there are rare lulls in the writing, the momentum of the whole collection makes them plenty interesting and worthwhile.

I'll be on the lookout for more of Ogunyemi's work, and I only hope it's as good as this collection. If this is all I get though, I'm grateful for it.

I keep going back to what an impressive feat it is to pull off a collection like this. Connected short stories come with the pressure to include work that is crucial to the narrative but not an author's best writing. And a thematic connection can quickly become boring when repeated across a dozen stories. (On the other hand, trying to broaden the focus too much can make everything less cohesive.) Ogunyemi makes the whole thing seem effortless. The stories cover so many characters, perspectives, arguably even genres that each one is something fresh and new. Characters get a lot more development than an individual story could give them; they have space to be interesting but flawed, compelling and really human. The connections between each story make the whole collection more engrossing and exciting to read. And despite the variation, the standard of quality throughout is exceptionally high. Everything feels like part of a greater whole, and yet stands up well on its own. A really remarkable book.

If you like stories like Taiye Selasi's Ghana Must Go or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus then this is right up your alley, but I'd recommend it to anyone really. It is an absolute blast to read, and goes quickly.

Overall, a flawed by surprisingly worthwhile novel that seems more relevant than ever. There's a lot to like about it, but a lot of it is also just bad. All of it is very typically Stephen King.

Let's start with what's worst about the book. Top of the list: a pervasive misogyny which is unfortunately a hallmark of  King's. In the first few pages there is a very direct rape metaphor which sets a lot of the tone for the book. Annie Wilkes' attempts to revive Paul Sheldon by CPR are presented as a kind of metaphysical sexual assault (with some heavily gendered  undertones about the implications of a woman raping a man). It is poorly-thought out, clunky in its execution, clearly intended to shock readers and provoke disgust towards Annie, and comes across as generally rife with misogyny. Not necessarily a deliberate misogyny; it seems instead to be a kind of obliviousness on King's part that might have been avoided by a better writer or a more careful second draft. (Annie, as one of essentially only two characters in the novel, often becomes a stand-in for women in general, but especially for a perception of women who fail to properly perform femininity by being unattractive, controlling, unstable, and insufficiently motherly or nurturing. Whether King was aware of any of this is hard to judge.)

Some of this can be waved away as the preconceptions and prejudices of point-of-view character Paul—a half-decent author who is, of course, a Stephen King-type. Except there is so much about the poor execution of the gendered dynamic between he and Annie that can be laid only at the feet of Stephen King himself. It's the glaring flaw at the heart of the book which undercuts its most interesting themes. Annie Wilkes is a less effective commentary on the nature of controlling fans and toxic parasocial relationships when she is being portrayed as something closer to a cartoon sketch labelled "women sure be crazy!" This isn't the only flaw, but it is the hardest to ignore as being a fault of Paul's. (The sections where "Africa" and mental illness are mentioned in any detail are also tactless, but more easily read as deliberate attempts to portray an author who is somewhat of a hack at the best of times.) It's also hardly the only Stephen King book with this particular flaw.

To my surprise, King seems to have put more of an effort into the ending than is usual for him. The book was perfectly poised to end with the "And then the author got bored and wrapped up this book to start another one" that I've come to expect from his books. Instead it got a tidier ending that did a little more to put a satisfying coda on its themes. That level of effort didn't seem to persist long enough for him to do any very thorough revisions, but I'll take what I can get.

That makes quite a poor basis on which to then recommend a book, and I wouldn't blame anyone for deciding that the complaints above were enough to make up their mind and skip the thing. Despite all that, I think Misery is well worth reading.

The best aspects of the novel are, like its worst aspects, very typically Stephen King. His writing about writing is absorbing. (I think it's no surprise that On Writing is so popular and so widely-quoted.) There's an understanding—expressed through Paul—that King isn't a genius or some kind of once-in a generation talent, but that beyond a certain point his skill matters less than the actual process of storytelling. More than anything else, the heart of the novel is a feeling that stories have a kind of inexplicable force to them that can animate and compel people beyond what reason would suggest. Paul is, even at his lowest and most pitiful, animated by the process of writing; Annie is equally compelled by stories despite (or to the point of) completely disregarding the humanity of the person telling them. This isn't because the stories are especially good, but because the process of storytelling itself is compelling. Like surfing a wave, there is a kind of precarious equilibrium which makes the whole activity thrilling, which drives the surfer forward with an energy which seems external and almost uncontrollable. In Misery, Stephen King conjures that feeling, both in his writing about writing, and in the experience of reading the novel. It is so easy despite all it's flaws to pick up Misery and just read. The novel moves quickly and sustains itself with a tension and intensity that is surprising considering how simple the premise is.

Finally, there are the other thematic elements. As I'm writing this , Chappell Roan has become just the latest face of a discussion about toxic fandom, entitlement, and celebrity culture. For all its failings, Misery as an exploration of toxic parasocial relationships and obsessive fandom is startlingly relevant. It's a shame that Annie Wilkes is so often depicted as a "crazy woman" in a way that undermines the gendered dynamics that drive so much real world harassment of public figures. It's not a perfect book, and I don't want to heap undeserved praise on King here, but it is insightful and interesting beyond anything he seems to have envisioned for it. There's even elements of the novel that could be read in the context of online "media literacy discourse" (for want of a better phrase).

There's a sense that, despite Misery being so quintessentially A Stephen King Book, King himself was never in control or even really aware of where the novel went as he wrote it. He's too shortsighted to stop his prejudices from creeping in, and couldn't have predicted how its thematic relevance would only deepen with time. It is as if (to paraphrase Misery's own description of the writing process) King simply fell into the paper in front of him and emerged to find a completed novel in its place. In the best of circumstances, reading Misery is like falling into that page yourself. I recommend the experience.

Unfortunately, this is that most irritating of pop science books. It is vapid and thin on content.

Going into Planta Sapiens, Paco Calvo encourages readers to set aside their doubts. "What you read here will be a challenge to anyone's preconceptions. So try to let them go, begin with an open mind and follow the path the evidence is building for us", he says. I thought to myself that this would be no problem. I am not a skeptic or resistant to the ideas the book promises to present. I sought it out, and I know little about them going in. My mind is open, bring on that evidence baby!

How disappointed I was by the absolutely meagre "evidence" presented. By page count, the greatest volume Planta Sapiens is anecdotes and asides that in a better book would used occasionally to illustrate or explain some point, but there is so little to explain. It's all filler.

Ironically, I came away from the book feeling that Calvo had done a better job explaining the positions of his critics, because they are laid out briefly and straightforwardly. As for Calvo's own arguments, the material in Planta Sapiens could essentially be condensed down into an (admittedly lengthy) introduction to a better book. He is not particularly interested in describing in detail how plants grow, respond to stimuli, and interact with their environment. The book gives many examples of these, but then simply moves on. It always felt as though there were something missing. Early on, I just thought that more complex, detailed information would be presented in later chapters, that Calvo was easing the skeptics in gently, but at some point it became clear that this was the entire book.

The final chapter does offer slightly more interesting fodder. It stood out to me for presenting more challenging thoughts about what plant consciousness implies for humans. Why it is important to consider and explore the idea of plant consciousness at all, and how we should let these ideas change our actions and our outlook. Unfortunately, it was too little and came too late. That's even when we set aside that, having given so unconvincing an argument for plant consciousness over the preceding pages, Calvo is begging the question by now telling us how it should change our outlook.

If this book were condensed to the length of a magazine article, it would be a worthwhile read. A glimpse into a subject and topic that is both fascinating and likely novel to most readers. But that's all this is, a glimpse. It isn't worth 200 pages just for that.

What a fascinating book. A quote from the afterword:

"Genre, in the end is just a game of possibilities and clues; it takes only a little misstep to slip out of a novel, to fall into an autobiography and resurface again in an essay, all in the short span of a sentence."

The whole book feels like exactly that. I didn't realise going in just how much of this "novel" was actually memoir, though I suspected that much of it was drawn from life. And so much of it is drawn from elsewhere. At times I felt like I was reading an academic essay on literature or philosophy, before the book slipped into what felt like fable, memoir, or idle train-of-thought. Even the references felt anarchic and eclectic. Durastanti makes reference to everything from Nautilus magazine to Beverly Hills, 90210. Bob Dylan is mentioned, and so is the controversy over his 2016 Nobel prize win.

The closest comparison I could make (very favourably) was to the writing of Patti Smith. Especially her memoirs, which can also seem at once like impossibly normal banal diary entries,  bizarre modern fables, and literary musings. It's fitting that Smith too is mentioned in the book.

It's such a strange, wonderful experiment that I can't help but love it (how could I dislike any book that includes a list of influences strange enough to encompass Ursula Le Guin, Leonard Cohen, Luc Besson's Léon, and Remedy Entertainment's Max Payne). I'm sure the oddness of the novel will put some off, but if you too love experimental writing, you couldn't hope for anything better.

Oh and thematically it is an absolute tour de force. I gather Durastanti was very disappointed at the novel's (necessary) change in title in translation, but Strangers I Know is a wonderful promise of exactly what's to come in the book. Love, language, communication and community, the bizarre and horrible and wonderful experience of trying to understand another.

I'll definitely be rereading this in future, and maybe next time I will follow the original plan for the novel, and read it out of order, picking sections as I'm drawn to them.

Not quite what it promises on the tin, but very interesting nonetheless. A more accurate title might be Four Case Studies in Digital Media Activism. Surveillance and state repression certainly feature (the latter more prominently than the former) but it is the differences of context and approach in the various examples of digital activism that are the real focus of the book.

Robé takes almost a film critic's approach to his subject. He often approaches activist video with an eye towards its cinematic technique, and explicitly draws on Third Cinema to comment on, for example, copwatching videos filmed on the streets by activists with smartphones. It's a fascinating approach that prioritises the practicalities of digital media activism. Which messages does a particular framing amplify, which does it undercut, when are activists forced to use particular methods, when can they alter their approach, and how does digital media activism complicate interactions between activists and the state? These are the kinds of questions at the centre of the book. They make for an especially unique perspective on activism in the modern day.

Despite the broad range of activist causes and approaches that Robé discusses in his case studies, his tight focus on video in particular and the further tightening in on the cinematic techniques of activist video make for a very close look at the book's chosen topics. I would have appreciated a broader view (or perhaps, as I suggested earlier, my expectations would simply have been more appropriate with a change as simple as a different title).

The book was well-written though, barring a few moments where I felt like Robé was re-treading ground that had already been covered. A great deal of research has gone into the four case studies covered, and Robé's subjects are always treated with an intimacy and depth that must have taken many hours of exaustive interviews and context-building research. For this quality of the writing alone, I feel the book will have a broader appeal than it's focus on activist video might otherwise give it. But for those involved in modern activism (and particularly digital activism), it will be an invaluable read.