Holger Seelefand reviewed The End We Start From by Megan Hunter
Too much detachment be it for creation or apocalypse
2 stars
Books like these, which are not driven by plot but by language and style are always a bit tougher to discuss.
I loved reading the first couple of pages, the first person narrator's description of giving birth in this witty and detached style, somewhere between prose and poetry.
There are two plots from then on, the narrator's son's first year from baby to toddler and a journey through a country thrown into violent turmoil but a flood catastrophe. The country is actually the UK, but that matters none, because all particularities are abstracted away, along with all the names of novel characters. There is an echo here of Saramago's "Blidness", which took a similar approach.
The issue is that this style-based approach gets somewhat strained even in a short novel like this. To phrase the problem differently: A first person narrator who can keep that level of poetic detachment no …
Books like these, which are not driven by plot but by language and style are always a bit tougher to discuss.
I loved reading the first couple of pages, the first person narrator's description of giving birth in this witty and detached style, somewhere between prose and poetry.
There are two plots from then on, the narrator's son's first year from baby to toddler and a journey through a country thrown into violent turmoil but a flood catastrophe. The country is actually the UK, but that matters none, because all particularities are abstracted away, along with all the names of novel characters. There is an echo here of Saramago's "Blidness", which took a similar approach.
The issue is that this style-based approach gets somewhat strained even in a short novel like this. To phrase the problem differently: A first person narrator who can keep that level of poetic detachment no matter what is actually going on the the material world outside seems an implausible invention.
Plot wise, the "quest" is how she and her son get reunited with "R" the boys farther, but that is also something which just "happens". I do like the carefulness and the indirect approach to emotion, but the author takes that so far, that I cannot help just letting the narration float by, stanza after stanza.
The antipode of this novel has to be "The Road" by Cormac Mc Carthy: Where the reader has to live through the post apocalyptic world's gritty material reality and any form of detachment from it is hard-won both by the reader and the novel's characters.
