“There was something planted deep within me that made it impossible for me to abandon something that had been entrusted to me.”
How would you or I go o“There was something planted deep within me that made it impossible for me to abandon something that had been entrusted to me.”
How would you or I go on with this life if we were to wake up one morning to find there was no human left on earth but oneself? That’s exactly what our unnamed narrator grapples with in this beautifully written, reflective novel. She finds that she has been divided from the rest of the world by a wall, beyond which no human or animal seems to have survived. She’s left alone at a hunting lodge in a little section of the Austrian Alps with only a dog, a cat and a cow for companionship. On the surface, it’s a post-apocalyptic story, but really, it’s a journey of survival. I found a great dose of existentialism woven throughout. A lot of the reader’s time is spent in the mind of the narrator as she contemplates both her former and her current existence.
“On the long walk back I thought about my former life and found it unsatisfactory in all respects. I had achieved little that I had wanted, and everything I had achieved I had ceased to want.”
She had grown children, which both the narrator and the reader must assume are no longer part of this world. I found it very moving when I read these sections. This one struck a chord with me as I too have adult children:
“If I think about my children today, I always see them as five-year-olds, and it strikes me that they’d left my life even then. That’s probably the age at which all children begin to leave their parents’ lives; quite slowly they turn into strangers. But that all happens so imperceptibly that you barely notice it. There were moments when that terrible possibility dawned on me, but like any other mother I very quickly suppressed the thought. I had to live, and what mother could live if she recognized this process?”
Like any of us would certainly do in a situation like this, the narrator sometimes falls into the feeling of hopelessness. But always she finds some reason or something new to help her carry on. It made me think about how I felt during the times of the pandemic, when our freedoms were so limited. Even now, while I am in a life transition, where some days it’s difficult to find that ray of light, I still get up and carry on each day with the knowledge that life always does and will get better.
“I was practically clinging to the meagre remnants of human routine left to me. Incidentally, I’ve never abandoned certain habits. I wash myself daily, brush my teeth, do my laundry and keep the house clean. I don’t know why I do that, it’s as if I’m driven by an inner compulsion. Maybe I’m afraid that if I could do otherwise I would gradually cease to be a human being, and would soon be creeping about, dirty and stinking, emitting incomprehensible noises. Not that I’m afraid of becoming an animal. That wouldn’t be too bad, but a human being can never become just an animal; he plunges beyond, into the abyss. I don’t want this to happen to me.”
Routines are what get me through some of my days as well. And if I’m lucky, that day turns out to be more than just a routine. And if it doesn’t, there’s always the next day. And so it goes. I might not be out milking the cow or growing potatoes for sustenance. I’m not alone - I do in fact have people to talk to. And yet, I felt that I could understand this woman so completely. The time I spent in her company was valuable to me. At times I felt filled with sadness and other times I felt renewed with possibility.
“… I’m only a simple person who has lost her world and is on the way to finding a new one. That way is a painful one, and still far from over.”
As an aside, this novel has apparently been adapted into a film. I think it’s one that would be well worth watching if I can find it. And the film director, Julian Roman Polsler, leaves the reader with this comforting message in the Afterword:
“I hope that this novel allows you to find the strength and courage to go beyond your own wall and discover your own version of inner freedom, whatever that might be…” ...more
“Life, she understands, is a collapsing down, a succession of memories held not in sequence but together, occurring and recurring all at once.”
After f“Life, she understands, is a collapsing down, a succession of memories held not in sequence but together, occurring and recurring all at once.”
After falling head over heels for Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea a little while back, I was totally stoked for the release of this novel. I’m sorry to say, I feel a bit disappointed this time around. Maybe my expectations were too high, but I couldn’t quite muster up the same level of enthusiasm for it! As far as the prose, on a sentence level this was equally masterful. The story itself is what left me feeling kind of enervated. A bit limp. Maybe it was all that rain and dreariness that did it. After all, the book is set during a dystopian world where rain dominates everything.
“It rains constantly and the fact of the rain, of the rain’s whole great impending somethingness, runs parallel to the day-to-day of work and sleep and lottery tickets, of yoga challenges, of buying fruit and paying taxes, of mopping floors and taking drugs on weekends and reading books and wondering what to do on dates. It’s exhausting, as it always was, to live with such a breadth of things to take up one’s attention – exhausting, the way there can be too much world, even in its final stages. Exhausting, to be so busy and so bored with no time left for either.”
See what I mean about the writing – yes! It's the stuff about memory (like that first quote above) and family and sisterhood that jazzed me up the most. The gist of this story is that three sisters are left to deal with the death of their father. And the three sisters aren’t all too warm and fuzzy – with one another or with the reader. And good ole pop wasn’t exactly the poster boy for fatherhood either. That’s okay though. I didn’t mind that part. Family dynamics always intrigue me. Armfield alternates points of view between Irene, Isla and Agnes. Oh, even the City has a little voice interspersed here and there. I liked that quite a lot. There’s an underlying current of something eerie, and the rain adds to that feeling. I did like the interplay between distorted memory and distorted view due to that excess of water. Even the people seem to have transformed due to the constant deluge.
“Irene often feels she can detect a certain amphibious quality in the people with whom she shares transportation, shares offices, shares the ingrown cramp of city space.”
Throughout the entirety of the novel, I was expecting this to go somewhere and knock me for a loop. Instead, my kneejerk reaction at the end was “Oh, come on. Really?!” Well, I can’t tell you why. It might be just your thing, but it wasn’t mine. I was a bit relieved when it was all over. Enough of that rain! I happily basked in a small patch of sunlight that managed to creep through the picture window in the living room. It’s warming my back on this frigid, snowy day as I type this review, too. Read Our Wives Under the Sea if you want the perfect introduction to Julia Armfield!
Here are a few of my favorite quotes, because like I said, many of her sentences captivated me!
“How, she wondered, was one supposed to grieve an absence when that absence was familiar? What, she wondered, was grief without a clear departure to regret?”
“The first time you lose a parent, a part of you gets trapped there, trapped less in the moment of grief than in the knowledge of the end of childhood, the inevitable dwindling of the days.”
“Sisterhood, she thinks, is a trap. You all get stuck in certain roles forever.”
“The problem with love, of course, is that it frequently asks too much of unlovable people. It can be hard,on even the best of days, to compel oneself to be selfless and patient and undemanding or even halfway reasonable when one is not given to any of those behaviors. But these are nonetheless the qualities that love demands.”
“Love, it seems, is bizarre in its moment of realization, too blatant to speak aloud.”
“At what point, she wanted to say, do we stop being the direct product of our parents? At what point does it start being our fault?” ...more
Nope. As much as I adored Oryx and Crake, I can't get into this one at all right now. Maybe I'll revisit this in the future. Or maybe not!Nope. As much as I adored Oryx and Crake, I can't get into this one at all right now. Maybe I'll revisit this in the future. Or maybe not!...more
Sorry, that person's shelf is private.
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