enne📚 reviewed Gliff: A Novel by Ali Smith
Gliff
5 stars
I quite enjoyed this book.
Was a horse more lost to the world, because of no words, or was the horse more found – or even founded – in the world because of no words?
Were we in our worded world the ones who were truly deluded about where and what we believed about all the things we had words for?
Gliff is a surveillance dystopia novel—thematically about words, borders, and questions about authentic reality.
The point of view in this book is a child being raised on the margins of a system; they're an unreliable narrator who doesn't quite understand everything enough about the world to lay it out explicitly for the reader.
Stylistically, the writing is a stream of consciousness in the narrator's head, relating the past. Sometimes not having quotation marks for speech can feel jarring for me as a …
I quite enjoyed this book.
Was a horse more lost to the world, because of no words, or was the horse more found – or even founded – in the world because of no words?
Were we in our worded world the ones who were truly deluded about where and what we believed about all the things we had words for?
Gliff is a surveillance dystopia novel—thematically about words, borders, and questions about authentic reality.
The point of view in this book is a child being raised on the margins of a system; they're an unreliable narrator who doesn't quite understand everything enough about the world to lay it out explicitly for the reader.
Stylistically, the writing is a stream of consciousness in the narrator's head, relating the past. Sometimes not having quotation marks for speech can feel jarring for me as a reader, but somehow here it lent itself to a feeling in the narrator's head, of a story being told stream of consciousness style. Because this book focuses on words, there's also some fun wordplay.
Despite being a dystopian story, all of this gives it a dreamy quality that I quite enjoyed.