book read standing up
May. 2nd, 2008 10:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacThis is a category of books that I happen to pick up in bookstores to browse through, and the next thing I know it's a couple hours later and I've read the whole thing. In this case it's a literary novel. I rarely find SF novels these days that are even remotely compelling.
I picked up The Rain Before It Falls by Jonathan Coe because I'd liked his The Rotters Club, though nothing else I'd seen by him caught my interest. The Rotters Club had been very funny as well as tragic. This one is purely dark, one of the most somber novels I've read, like a symphony of adagios.
The bulk of it is a first-person narrative by a woman in her 70s, reviewing her life largely in her capacity as the (mostly) frustrated and ineffectual observer to three successive generations of girls being abused and neglected by their mothers, the same dismal pattern repeating over and over again. Coe unfolds the history like an emerging puzzle, to the horrified fascination of the other women listening to the tale, a tape recording made by the now-deceased narrator.
Unlike most of Coe's work it's not at all political in the narrow sense; it does address a number of social issues in women's lives besides the abuse theme; but like The Rotters Club the story pivots on distant connections suddenly brought forward, and on some uncanny coincidences.
But at the end I'd felt I'd read not a depressing book but a powerful one.
I picked up The Rain Before It Falls by Jonathan Coe because I'd liked his The Rotters Club, though nothing else I'd seen by him caught my interest. The Rotters Club had been very funny as well as tragic. This one is purely dark, one of the most somber novels I've read, like a symphony of adagios.
The bulk of it is a first-person narrative by a woman in her 70s, reviewing her life largely in her capacity as the (mostly) frustrated and ineffectual observer to three successive generations of girls being abused and neglected by their mothers, the same dismal pattern repeating over and over again. Coe unfolds the history like an emerging puzzle, to the horrified fascination of the other women listening to the tale, a tape recording made by the now-deceased narrator.
Unlike most of Coe's work it's not at all political in the narrow sense; it does address a number of social issues in women's lives besides the abuse theme; but like The Rotters Club the story pivots on distant connections suddenly brought forward, and on some uncanny coincidences.
But at the end I'd felt I'd read not a depressing book but a powerful one.
