I thought my first Cormac McCarthy book would probably be The Road, considering the length of time it's been hanging out on my "to be read" list and its shorter length. But No Country for Old Men has come first, and I sense I now have a pretty good taste and feel for the rest of McCarthy's uniquely told narratives. My short review for this book is as follows: "this book was like a puzzle with all the pieces scattered and labeled in plain sight. but i still wrote 'what?' 'who?' and 'wow.' all over every page." I'm really rocking with this idea of a puzzle because McCarthy's writing style requires readers to do some moderately heavy lifting to keep track of everything that's going on. From a flippant use of pronouns, to sections within chapters acting as if they're completely separate from other sections in content and focus, to time jumps that imply things that happened in between without them ever being explicitly stated, it's, in one word, thrilling. Another word could be "frustrating," which I'd be lying if I said I didn't resonate with more than once. But I have to admire McCarthy's ability to create and sustain a story that stays manages to stay afloat without explaining everything to the reader. I had plenty of moments where I felt the satisfaction of being a "smart reader" for putting a few of the puzzle pieces together. And, in terms of the plot itself, I feel like I became the most invested in the overlapping storylines that focused on Chigurh chasing Moss and Bell chasing them both. Bell strikes me as the most fascinating character. He's aware that he's getting old and past his prime in the police force (hint hint, title significance!), but still invested enough in his perception of what it means to fight against evil to try to find and get Chigurh back in handcuffs. Precisely because he fails, with Chigurh roaming free and Moss dead (which was a major turning event that happened earlier in the story than I expected it to, wow), is where true emotion lies: the state of America is plummeting toward an evil that past generations can't "defeat" and future generations must learn to live with. The book's female characters make me equal parts fascinated and uncomfortable with McCarthy after the recent publishing of the very timely Vanity Fair article about his long-time, underage lover. That's a wild sentence. But yeah---Moss' wife and the hitchhiker Moss picks up on the road and ends up getting killed are the only two female characters of note. And guess what---they both end up dead. Larger commentary on how they relate to the women (or more like "woman") in McCarthy's own life has to be acknowledged here, that no one is safe from the evil Chigurh embodies, save for those he doesn't see as being a threat, like Bell. People like Bell would be dead if they and their power in law enforcement were actually a threat to someone like Chigurh and his connections. There's a lot more I could say, but I'm still processing most of it and feel like the Vanity Fair article is clouding most of my opinion of this novel's author right now.



Some of my favorite quotes from No Country for Old Men:

"How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?"

"It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it."

"If there's one thing on this planet you don't look like it's a bunch of good luck walkin around."

The amount of content and craft moves pushed into each and every one of the essays in this collection makes approaching a book review feel nearly impossible, if I'm being honest. I want to feel like I'm covering all the bases of my thoughts, but my thoughts feel jumbled because each piece left me with a different impression of either awe or confusion. Over the entire collection, I was able to make clear connections back to the title and felt like I was therefore able to grasp themes of cultural identity, violence in Colombia, violence in America, and the author's multilayered relationships with multiple family members and their family history. I think my main point of contention is every essay's plethora of names. There's too many to keep track of, to be frank, which made the skim reading I was already doing even more difficult. But, to be fair, I understand how the author had to hold all of the names of these people and places to be able to write about her family and some of the more researched elements that intersect with her family history and history in Bogota, Colombia. I'm also aware I could've been a better reader and sat with each piece for longer, but I just didn't have the time. In connection to that, I think there's just one too many things going on in each essay. After learning that Cabeza-Vanegas' style of essay-writing is heavily inspired by Montaigne's rambling, digressing influence, I feel a lot more accepting of her maximalist style. Because that's clearly what's going on here: an attempt at approaching a variety of ideas, impressions, and images with a lot of language and repetition. Each essay is filled to the brim with similes and metaphors (my nonfiction class made jokes about counting how many we could find across the book, but that we didn't have that kind of time). Truthfully, this sense of maximized figurative language really only demonstrated to me that she's a talented, eloquent author. At times, I started to get annoyed at what seemed like a stretch of word choice or a rambling metaphor spanning across two or three sentences. There's a lot of digression going on on the sentence-level as well as the macro paragraph-level, which makes it really hard to focus on one thing at a time and reach the end of each essay with a sense of what its aboutness was. A few essays stand out to me particularly for very specific images and physical sensations, but aboutness-wise? They're mostly shaky. I know I'm the type of reader who appreciates a good flow of figurative language, but also the writer's ability to get me to the conclusion with a vague idea of what I should be feeling or taking away from the content. So, to wrap things up, this book and its emphasis on lofty prose and maximalism isn't ultimately for me, though I really appreciated the element of translation that can be found at the beginning of each essay. None of the translated idioms seemed to really connect to the content of the essay it was affiliated with, but I was kind of okay with that. Each part of the collection begins with a retold Colombian creation story as well, and these didn't clearly connect to other parts of the essays in a way I was also okay with. But I'm here for anything mythology related. :)



One of my favorite quotes from Don't Come Back:

"This is what we do, impose narratives on the unfurled darkness, try to steer heavens and countries for the greater good and the greater truth."

I'm so impressed with all the moving parts of this novel. The influence of several Greek myths, mainly the legend of Demeter and Persephone, combined with the poignant and literary setting of Cambridge, really gave this book a distinct atmospheric feel. Listening to it as an audiobook only helped add to this sense of atmosphere, of a campus riddled with death, potential suspects, and reminders of a past the main character, Marianna, won't ever be able to get back. Having read Michaelides' The Silent Patient only recently, I picked up on his preference for melding new storylines with the patterns of classic Greek narrative and the intrigue of a good old fashioned murder mystery. The crossovers to The Silent Patient, which in this literary universe occurs after the events of this book, were so so cool for a knowing reader to pick up on (aka, I thought it was really cool and gasped out loud when I realized Theo Faber was entering onto this book's scene). Like The Silent Patient, this novel's narrator is also a psychotherapist, spurred to pursue the particular profession from her own set of intense daddy issues, among other childhood abuses. I think from what I've seen of this author so far, they're clearly capable of crafting unique and believable characters in settings that enhance their characteristics rather than turn them cliche. So much of what we learn about Marianna becomes so important for the delayed reveals in the story later. The comparison of Tennyson and Marianna's own experience of looking just past the veil to the people they've loved and lost really resonated with me. I didn't think to question Marianna's opinion of her late husband, Sebastian, who tragically drowned in the ocean on a trip Marianna urged them to take for the sake of their marriage, until I realized that we only had her opinion of him to go off of. Since she's clearly biased, how farfetched is it to discover that he was a murderous, disturbed man who manipulated a naive young woman, Zoe, into committing horrendous acts of murder that would not only wreak havoc but ultimately cause a brutal betrayal for Marianna, a wife he clearly didn't truly love? I was truly shocked when this plot twist unfolded, not only because I never suspected Zoe, but because I was very nearly convinced that Edward Fosca, Marianna's prime suspect upon starting her unofficial investigation, was guilty of killing his own students---particularly a set group of young women self-titled The Maidens. Fosca is such an interesting character in his own right, since we find out he was sleeping with these female students of his, but not actively killing them. He really comes off incredibly guilty at times, but perhaps that's just Marianna's clear lack of complete mental stability and desperation for a way to explain the horrific stabbings and have a sense of closure for the loss she's suffering in her own life. I also must sing Fred's praises for a moment---he is just the sweetest, most romantic, clumsiest thing. The way he pursues and cares about Marianna, and actually helps her productively move forward with her investigation, is precious. His belief in premonitions added to the element of the book's atmosphere that felt supernatural, too, what with Marianna's hunch that her prayer to Demeter and Persephone on the island of Naxos may have started all of her misfortune and followed her to Cambridge. I definitely had some points of confusion upon finishing the book, though. I can tell the ending was supposed to be ambiguous for the sake of what I assume will be another book. That's cool, but caused me to say, "What? No, c'mon! There's gotta be another book out already." to myself in the car as the audiobook wrapped up. I think the logistics of how Zoe pulled off the murders are a little cloudy to me, as well as why Sebastian was so motivated to have these murders be orchestrated in the first place. Could it be that Marianna was really too jaded to see any red flags, and we, therefore, as readers don't get to see them either? I'm not sure. The beginning section of each new part was clearly meant to imply we were reading from Fosca's perspetive, but I think it's actually supposed to be interpreted as Sebastian's perspective once we know his true intentions. I also wanted to see Marianna speak to Fosca at least one more time, since I ended up convinced pretty early on of Marianna's theory that Fosca was guilty. I'm very glad there was a plot twist in this regard, though. This is definitely a book I'd reread a year or a few years down the line with the intent of closely reading for details I wouldn't have thought to focus on for a first read. I also need to keep tabs on Michaelides to make sure I'm aware of when his next book comes out.



Some of my favorite quotes from The Maidens:

"That was the horror of it. We all secretly hope that tragedy will only ever happen to other people... sooner or later, it happens to you."

"She sometimes felt she had been cursed, as if by some malevolent goddess in a Greek myth, to lose everyone she ever loved."

I've never read a short story collection quite like this one, or a collection I liked as much as this one from start to finish. I made jokes to my peers who read this book with me, as well as in my Goodreads review, that I'd like to have whatever Saunders was having when he wrote these stories. But in all seriousness, he as a writer has the kind of tone that makes readers even remotely familiar with his work go, "Oh, that's Saunders for sure." He has such control over each of the narratives, even when things seem completely wacky or abstract. I've since learned that a lot of post-postmodernism elements are at work in these stories. Postmodernism can be understood as traditionally cynical and focused on the idea that nothing really matters. Post-postmodernism, then, decides to go beyond this irony to find some hope. I really see this happening in the first and last stories in this collection (which happen to be my two favorites): "Victory Lap" and "Tenth of December." Just when all seems truly lost, that some one or other is gonna die and the ending might leave you in tears, something turns around and bam---there's just a little bit of hope or redemption in the midst of the sadness and postmodern foundation. All of these stories take place in pretty average places, at a first glance. I was fascinated by how Saunders tells readers what they need to know about the setting and society of a story without directly telling them at all. I mainly saw this happening in "The Semplica Girl Diaries" and "My Chivalric Fiasco." Like, c'mon, the language is hilarious in "My Chivalric Fiasco" and does the necessary work to orient readers in the setting. This is one of several stories that also hints at there being technological advancements and miracles of medicine that we haven't quite reached yet in our own society. From "My Chivalric Fiasco's" KnightLyfe drug to the morbid reality of what's happening to the Semplica Girls, to nearly all of "Escape from Spiderhead," we're thrown into the deep end of stories that Saunders makes believable enough to track with in the midst of things that make it very clear we're not quite situated in a society where everything's normal. If I ever happen to master post-postmodernism, I hope I'm able to at least mimic Saunders' mastery of delayed reveals sorta well. I'll be thinking about these stories for a good long while and definitely want to check out more of his work soon.



Some of my favorite quotes from Tenth of December:

"Why was she dancing? No reason. Just alive, I guess."

"Which maybe that’s what love was: liking someone how he was and doing things to help him get even better."

Did I skip all the other Bridgerton books in favor of reading this one to be ready for Season 4 of Bridgerton coming out soonish? Yes. Do I think I'll go back and read all the other ones to catch up? No. Do I particularly care? No! I have this thing where I only reread books I really really love and don't read books I've already seen the TV show or movie for but never originally read. I don't quite know why, but it's just what I do. I know that Benedict Bridgerton is my favorite character in the show and that I had plenty of time to start reading his book before the season aired if I started now. So I did! And I listened to it as an audiobook, which I highly recommend, seeing as the narrator has a fantastic accent and did a really good job of jumping back and forth between character voices and genders. All in all, I think the Cinderella storyline this book follows fits really well into the original fairytale as well as a Regency-era setting. I loved how Sophie's lineage and birth out of wedlock is explained at the very beginning, since the rest of the story really hinges on how she and Benedict cannot be socially accepted together because of it. I really liked how they have a "love at first sight" moment, but what I liked even more was how messy their relationship becomes. If you read or watch Bridgerton-adjacent content, you've got to except spice, and there was plenty of it here. I didn't expect Sophie to end up working in the Bridgerton household and be painfully close and far from Benedict at the same time, but I liked how it allowed the two of them to really fall in love without Benedict knowing that she's not the servant she seems. A lot of the characters (especially Violet Bridgerton) end up being onto her, what with her refined education, accent, and social skills, but the charade of her identity is kept up for long enough to be believed. I also really really liked that Benedict is able to realize Sophie is his mystery woman only once she has a blindfold on, covering half of her face. That's such a great way to resolve that conflict! But the conflict of him continually asking her to be his mistress was sooooo good, too. Sophie's wicked stepmother ended up being a more hateable villain than I imagined, especially when she has Sophie thrown into jail. Oh, my! My audiobook version also included a bonus epilogue that detailed the short but cute romance of Sophie's stepsister, Posey, which I thought was super cute and gave more of a glimpse into Benedict and Sophie's happily ever after. Overall, I was thoroughly entertained and can't wait to see how this particular story is adapted to the screen, seeing as they went out of order and gave Colin a season before Benedict. How Benedict's past relationships with men and women in the show's canon will affect his own personal season and relationship with Sophie is yet to be seen!



Some of my favorite quotes from An Offer from a Gentleman:

"I'm leaving!" she said, with, in her opinion, great drama and resolve.
But he just answered her with a sly half smile, and said, 'I'm following.'
And the bloody man remained two strides behind her the entire way home."

"I can live with you hating me," he said to the closed door.
"I just can't live without you."

"It was strange, to find a woman who could make him happy just with her mere presence. He didn’t even have to see her, or hear her voice, or even smell her scent. He just had to know that she was there."

"A man only got one shot at declaring himself to his true love; he didn't want to muck it up completely." 

*MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD*
Wow, this book is masterfully crafted. Which makes a review both difficult and exciting. I've fixated the most on the running motif of fuku as well as the novel's interesting narrator, Yunior, and the few chapters where we see other first person narrators and why. The book begins with what I guess could be called a prologue that educates readers on the idea of fuku, which can be interpreted as a generational kind of curse of the Dominican people directly related to the suffering and terror their people endured under the dictatorship of Trujillo. This figure and his dominance is incredibly important for every character in the novel, and the history associated with him illustrated so well (and humorously at times) in multiple footnotes that really go off. This idea of bad luck following an entire family plays out in the novel in such interesting ways, since the element of magic realism is sustained enough to make it feel like the presence of magic or spirits in the story could be possible, but also might just be superstition or cynicism on the narrator's part. Either way, the history of the Dominican people being one of oppression and rich folklore is taken into consideration. I also admire on the craft level how the stories of each family member were told in the order they were told. It all builds upon itself to execute an emotional impact that I really appreciated. We have to start with an introduction to Oscar Wao, our dorky, girl-crazy, good-hearted protagonist, in order to see how his actions make the ending so impactful. And the second chapter has to get into the head of his sister Lola who shows readers more sides of Oscar as well as a glimpse into the toxic relationship she has with her mother, Beli, who struggles with reemerging cancer for most of the book. We have to transition to an amazingly in-depth chapter about Beli and her childhood growing up in the DR, coming into a woman's body, falling in love, and falling into major trouble related to the powerful connections of her "Gangster." We have to then return to our original narrator, who we learn is named Yunior and knows the family intimately from dating Lola and living with Oscar in college. This narrator is the one we hear from the very beginning, and the final voice that wraps up the events of  Oscar's brief and wondrous life. And even though he's a misogynistic, sleazy guy nearly as geeky as Oscar for all the pop culture and Lord of the Rings references he uses, wanting to know who he was kept me engaged, considering the novel is set up for readers to realize that Yunior's writing an account of Oscar and his family's life for the sake of legacy and processing the possible fuku-related tragedies their family experienced. Which brings me to my next point---we then have to transition to learn about Oscar and Lola's grandfather and his daughters in the DR, about how he wasn't able to protect himself and these daughters from the lust and power of Trujillo as he would've liked. Understanding how Beli is born right after the possible fuku of her family takes hold makes the background we already have about her as a young woman and a mother to Oscar and Lola all the more valuable. It helps me now come to terms with the fact that this book seems to, at its heart, want to be about the complexity of familial relationships, specifically in a Dominican sphere and culture. It can also arguably be about the multiple infatuations that Oscar experiences, lovesick as he constantly is, and chiefly how he ends up dying for what he calls love but could very well just be unreciprocated obsession. It really is the kind of ending that leaves readers with enough to interpret on their own and feel satisfaction. I was a little let down at how quickly it all just ends, but also incredibly impressed by the attention to storytelling detail and intentional work on the narrator's part to flesh out parts of Oscar and his family's story that do them justice.


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Some of my favorite quotes from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: 

"But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in."

"It's exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, that prayer has dominion."

"As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiation, loved atomically."

*MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD*
Any book that receives a massive amount of hype threatens to let readers down when the climax or twist ending doesn't deliver quite the way it's expected to. That's what happened here for me, but on a degree that didn't make my overall reading experience a flop. I have some gripes about how the female characters are portrayed in general that also contribute to some of my more negative comments about this book, but there are plenty of good things to talk about first! The integration of Alicia's journal entries, for example -- chef's kiss and one of my favorite parts of the entire story as well as the novel's form. Beginning with her voice juxtaposes so well the irony that she remains silent for nearly the entire book. It's just so good. And each part beginning with her expanding on this story that she's being watched and no one's listening to her works to make the reader wonder if they can trust Alicia or not. She is, after all, in a psych ward for killing her husband. Getting the main narrator, Theo's, perspective for the majority of the book serves the twist ending I think the author's able to pull off well. A combination of maintaining the illusion that Theo cares about Alicia for pure reasons (related to his humanity and devotion to his career of psychotherapy) and seeing Alicia act out in occasionally violent fits sustains the notion that Alicia is not mentally well and needs the interference of someone who thinks they can help in her journey of healing and eventual return to speaking. While it becomes clear this isn't entirely the case, I was still entertained long enough to get to the first false victory: Theo getting Alicia to speak. Precisely because we see Theo dealing with the realization his wife is cheating on him with some unknown man, the possibility he's mentally unstable is believable later and, more than anything, satisfying. When he starts to unravel and fantasize about what he'll do when he gets his hands on his wife's lover, he's already showing signs that he's capable of the violence and crazy he displays with Alicia -- it's just not until the end that we realize how unreliable of a narrator Theo is, that he's been telling us a story that operates on two separate timelines for the sake of revealing all the stuff he did to Alicia after the fact that she killed her husband -- something he didn't think she'd actually go through with doing. Now, I was really worried that Theo was going to get away with all of it, that the way he'd been viewing and talking about and treating the female characters in this book the whole time was going to go unaccounted for. But Alicia being sneaky with the placement of her journal to end up getting Theo incriminated was even more satisfying a twist for me then realizing Theo had been Alicia's stalker all along. Even with the obvious attraction he was feeling toward Alicia in their sessions, I was still shocked enough to gasp out loud and start piecing together all the parts of the narrative's puzzle in my head with delight. There's a lot more I could talk about regarding the side characters, but I'll mainly just comment that I think they're really well written to serve smaller order purposes in the narrative. Like Christian being a perfect suspicious therapist with motives regarding Alicia that can't be anything but good. And the head of a psych ward having extensive knowledge on a Greek myth directly tied to Alicia's circumstances and personal affiliations (later revealed in her journal). This mythological tie in was one of my favorite parts. But are we surprised? I get the sense the male author of this book wanted the clearly unreliable, egotistical narrator of his book to not treat or view women in the healthiest of manners, but at times I had to remind myself that just because the novel was written by a man doesn't mean he was ignorant to the portrayal of his female characters throughout. Whether or not this was the best execution of a purposefully problematic character, I'm a sucker for a solid unreliable narrator to analyze and maybe even despise, so I was on board with Theo, at least from an analytical perspective, from the start. The character I was the most intrigued by from start to finish was Alicia, though. Star of the show for real. Was I entirely convinced by all the stuff about how it was actually Gabriel who killed Alicia and not she who killed Gabriel? No, but I still appreciated the drama of the big moment and how it connected to other psychology tidbits sprinkled throughout. I wished I could've been able to see depictions of her art that are described so beautifully throughout. I also had fun listening to the audiobook version of this novel. The voice actors were very talented, and it felt like the kind of thriller made to fit the theatrical elements of an audiobook. I give it a solid four and a half stars.



Some of my favorite quotes from The Silent Patient:

"...we often mistake love for fireworks - for drama and dysfunction. But real love is very quiet, very still. It's boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm - and constant."

"We are drawn to this profession because we are damaged - we study psychology to heal ourselves. Whether we are prepared to admit this or not is another question.” (can you say 'foreshadowing'?)

"Trust, once lost, is hard to recover."

"Well, I’d rather be lonely than be with the wrong person." (BARS)

"Perhaps some of us are simply born evil, and despite our best efforts we remain that way."

Nonfiction essay collections on music always pique my interest. This vast, sweeping collection is about more than just music, though -- it's about lifting up marginalized Black voices and the impact of profound music for the sake of recognizing facets of the American experience as a person of color. I really appreciated how this book was structured with music and culture constantly at the forefront. From each of the five essay sections being "Movements," to every essay having some sort of reference to music, popular culture, historical performers and musicians, and specific songs (the Whitney Houston and Aretha Franklin content were my faves), there's just so much here. I also loved the author's stylistic choice to use ampersands in every "On Times..." essay that begin each Movement. The two essays where we see the expected rule broken, where other prepositions and punctuation are used, really draws attention to the content. In general, I felt like I wanted to underline every other line in this book because Abdurraqib makes writing extremely profound sentiments in simple, heartwrenching prose look like a piece of cake. I can only imagine the amount of revision it took to get to these polished final versions, how sprawling the sentences may have started out just for the sake of getting a complete thought down on the page, but wow, I was continuously blown away. I also just adore how much I learned from every essay on topics I didn't even realize I was interested in. Like marathon dancing and dance competitions, for example. What a niche, random concept, with a rich, multilayered history. Abdurraqib always finds a way to connect every topic back to ideas of humanity, community, and the struggle of marginalized people groups, specifically African Americans. The personal connections he makes to his family and friends also shine in their vulnerability and dedication to detail. Once again, I was grateful and interested to learn as much as I did from the well-integrated research that each of these essays frames within a narrative that often feels like fiction, like the author just did some cool Googling and wants to share what they found with you in a way that's so far from condescending. My two favorite essays were "On Marathons and Tunnels" and "The Josephine Baker Monument Can Never Be Large Enough." I definitely recommend this book to any readers trying to read more nonfiction or break into the nonfiction genre. 



Some of my favorite quotes from Notes in Praise of Black Performance: A Little Devil in America:

"I’ve run out of language to explain the avalanche of anguish I feel when faced with this world, and so if I can’t make sense of this planet, I’m better off imagining another."

"And I realized then that this was yet another funeral. I was reminded, once again, that our grief decides when it is done with us."

"I am in love with the idea of partnering as a means of survival, or a brief thrill, or a chance to conquer a moment. Even if you and the person you are partnered with part ways walking into the sunlight after exiting a sweaty dance hall, or spinning off-camera after dancing your way down a line of your clapping peers."

"There is not enough distance between tragedies for my sadness to mature into anything else but another new monument obscuring the last new monument."

Learning as much as I did about aspects of the Vietnam War I wasn't aware of or hadn't thought to examine before was one of the most valuable parts of this reading experience. Reading it with the support of a classroom environment to talk through some of the viscerally violent scenes and more political context of the text was also extremely helpful, as I think I would've felt lost in all of the historical and cultural impacts otherwise. Generally, the intrigue of our unnamed narrator, a man who's able to empathize on a level that makes his profession as a double agent more complex, kept my interest the entire way through. This was mainly due to the fact that I couldn't always tell if I sympathized with the sympathizer, if I felt pity for the series of events he lives through or general disgust for the way he views and interacts with women (this quality in the narrator is still an uncomfortable one for me). On the other hand, the narrator's relationship with his childhood friends Bon and Man ends up being significant in the narrator's ability to understand how, despite all three of them believing in different political ideologies, America's influence on the war in Vietnam has caused all of them terrible suffering. I was also really interested in this narrator's consistent guilt over the various things he's done as a part of his spy work. We get the occasional glimpse into white interrogation rooms before an extremely violent scene involving a female communist agent at the end reveals just how much trauma this man is holding inside of himself. Witnessing the narrator kill two people and then be essentially haunted by these two people is also a curious craft move to show inner turmoil and guilt. I ended up diving into a conversation with a classmate for the sake of research on the concept of names and namelessness. She framed it like this: "Who's doing the naming and what are their names?" A fascinating question to ask of a book where most of the men are only given names that signify their careers or rank in the military (Commandant, Captain, "crapulent major," etc.), and the two prominent women are given actual names and referenced as such (Ms. Mori/Sophia and Lana). What this is meant to either say or not say about how the narrator views other characters in light of their national identity as Vietnamese-Americans is only complicated by our narrator who never receives a name, but by the end of the book has begun to see himself dually as "a man with two faces." I haven't even mentioned the movie the narrator ends up taking a part in, chiefly in working with and advocating for the Vietnamese refugees acting as extras on the set, tasked with representing their entire people group on the silver screen dictated by an American director. But I could go on and on, and won't for the sake of my own time and sanity. Be wary of the aforementioned violent scenes in multiple parts of this book, but step into it as a whole with an open mind and willingness to engage with a narrator that feels hard to fully grasp in the best possible way.


One of my favorite quotes from The Sympathizer:

"What was it like to live in a time when one's fate was not war, when one was not led by the craven and the corrupt, when one's country was not a basket case kept alive only through the intravenous drip of American aid?"

I'll be pretty frank in saying that I didn't really enjoy this essay collection as a whole, though I can most definitely recognize how big of a deal its publication and positive reception were for the world of nonfiction writing. Jamison's intersection of impressive research, self-reflection, and meaningful questions related to the illusive concept of empathy and how we can understand and act it out is interesting as a premise. In execution, though, I got lost along the way. I can't overgeneralize the whole collection with comments about specific essays, but enough of the pieces felt like they were trying to do too many things at once for me to latch onto one solid idea of aboutness and run with that. It really is impressive to see all the different moving parts at work here, within each essay as its own little city as well as the collection as a whole, but it's just a lot. And sometimes I wanted the point Jamison was trying to make concerning empathy to be a bit clearer. This is just my personal preference when I read creative nonfiction essays, and I'm very aware of that. But some of the essay's tones felt overinflated and rose on hot air to the rafters until the general vibe turned pompous and overly academic. I started to get annoyed with how many times I had to reread sentences... But her willingness to experiment with form throughout the entire collection is admirable. The first essay, also titled "The Empathy Exams," is by far my favorite and, seeing as it was the first one I read, I expected the rest of the collection to wow me in equal measure. I can't blame the text for not meeting expectations I set and upheld, but it just continued to sour my overall reading experience. I think I might need to return to the collection for a second read and read everything slower, to give it another chance and digest all of the content crammed into its pages. But for now I'm content to end my review here.


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Some of my favorite quotes from The Empathy Exams:

"Empathy isn't just remembering to say that must be really hard---it's figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all."

"At what volume does feeling become sentimental? How obliquely does feeling need to be rendered so it can be saved from itself?"

"We're disgusted when anything comes too easily. But also greedy."

"This is how writers fall in love: they feel complicated together and then they talk about it."

"Empathy is contagion."

"How do we represent female pain without producing a culture in which this pain has been fetishized to the point of fantasy or imperative? Fetishize: to be excessively or irrationally devoted to."

"The wounded woman gets called a stereotype and sometimes she is. But sometimes she's just true. I think the possibility of fetishizing pain is no reason to stop representing it."