Nico Babico

I don't know why, but I just wasn't a fan of this book at all. I might have just had high expectations because I recently read Voyage in the Dark and loved it. I found the narrative in this book to be a bit hard for me to follow, and I often got characters confused with each other. I also found a lot of the descriptions confusing, as in I had trouble tracking what was happening, to who, and where we were. It's by no means a terrible book, I just don't think it's for me.

I fully understand that Virginia Woolf is an icon of modernist writing, but I cannot read her writing. Despite only having a reading length of about 5 hours, it felt like six months. Her style of writing is so rambly, and while I understand that being rambly is a part of the stream of consciousness model, it's done in a way where it feels unauthentic and without purpose. Jean Rhys also used stream of consciousness in Voyage in the Dark, and it worked very well, it's one of my favorite books. I can only assume that Virginia Woolf's writing just isn't for me. That being said, one of my biggest pet peeves in writing is definitely meandering around points rather than using smaller points to reach the main point, and Woolf's writing resides in the former category (from my point of view). There were bits and pieces I really enjoyed, but they were so far apart between the pages and pages I skimmed as I got bored that I can't give this book more than one star. I was initially going to give this book two stars because I thought Septimus' story was interesting, but his conclusion was so incoherent that it made me laugh.

This review does not contain direct spoilers, but I do discuss the novel in depth!

☄️ At a glance:

This book is terrifying, multilayered, complex, and lingering. It is marred by sections of meandering text and a character who inserts himself into interesting sections, breaking the pacing with his rants.

🟢 What I thought was done well:

I found a lot of Zampanó's parts were intriguing and often horrifying in the way that makes events linger in your mind. The idea of writing something with the intent of making it feel like an academic study, especially of a visual medium transcribed into text, was very well done and a unique take to follow.

The actual horror elements were also done with so much thoughtfulness and intent that, as mentioned before, scenes often linger with me. I loved Zampanó's writing style and his way of describing things. The story itself is very interesting as well and it's also explained in a way that captivated me throughout the text during his section.

I thought the characters were also very complex and well described. I love how the author doesn't just present us with characters, but also has other in-universe characters discuss their intentions and complexities like a real media analysis.

I loved the ending. It concludes things nicely while cementing that feeling of lingering dread the novel had built up until that point.

♦️ What I didn't enjoy:

Truant's sections usually drove me nuts, especially when he interrupts something interesting happening to describe something completely unrelated and often uninteresting. He goes on long rants stemming off of a vaguely related word or sentence written by Zampanó and it can go on and on for

pages. Every female character Truant meets is A) ogled by him for being super hot, B) often super intelligent to, of course, complement their super hotness, and C) immediately an object of sexual desire and he has sex on paper with, I swear, 9 out of the 10 women he meets. I was genuinely hoping that by the end of the book we would find out that all of the women he apparently had sex with didn't exist and it was all a mind trick.

90% of the horror of this book originates from Zampanó while Truant mumbles in the background trying to add effects. There were a few interesting parts from his perspective but I wasn't a fan in general. I understand why Truant needs to exist for the story's sake, but I feel like if the unrelated shit he talked about was trimmed, the book would be at least 1/3 shorter. Every time he would start talking, I often had to resist the urge to skip to the next Zampanó bit.

🏠 The takeaway:

The horror of the domicile is strong here, and I enjoyed the idea of taking a place (a home) often considered to be a safe space and turning it into something terrifying, existential, and cold. But if I'm being frank, giving this book 3.5 stars is generous considering how often Truant's sections made me want to put the book down. It felt like trying to read a book while an annoying sibling is whispering varied words relating to genitalia in your ear. I hated the treatment of women in this book. While Zampanó never discusses women in an objectified way (the way Truant does), other male characters not associated with Truant often treat Karen as an object of stimulation (Holloway, Wax, several of the men she interviews about The Navidson Record are some examples that come to mind). The book didn't need any of it. The horror here is not even about misogyny, though I think that could have been an interesting lens to explore. The horror here is ████. I want more ████. I want less Truant talking about how hot woman #7 is and how despite all of these women having different names and looking different, they all melt together in my head as "woman Truant had sex with while interrupting Zampanó for the 20th time." In fact, writing this review made me realize I think this book deserves 3 starts instead of 3.5.

I wasn't particularly a fan of this book. There's some real dissonance here (not in a good way), most section that take place in Vietnam draw me in and I get so intrigued by the story at hand. But every time we return to the present, and anything “GertrudeStein” related, I immediately lose interest and I start speed reading until my eyes were just skimming the page, jumping across whole paragraphs if nothing catches my eye or it gets repetitive, which is often, especially the last few chapters. There's also something strange about reading a novel that employs the likenesses of real people that kind of rubs me the wrong way. It feels almost fanfiction-y, if that makes sense.

There were also several sections of the book where I was confused by the narrative hopping. We go from being deep in the main character's head, stream of consciousness style, into whole chapters where we no longer feel like we're in the main character's perspective, and instead we're following the story in retrospective from a seemingly omniscient narrator that knows things Bình shouldn't know. I really love stream of conscious-styled writing, hell Voyage in the Dark was my favourite book last year, and yet this book doesn't feel like it does it justice. It feels too scattered and unnatural. One idea is started very very briefly at the beginning of a chapter, only for the main character to drift into barely related ideas that last pages and pages, possibly even chapters, and when we finally return to the original thought, I feel so disconnected from where we started that I'm lost. And yet, at the same time, things are repeated chapters and chapters apart, making me feel like I'm going crazy because I can't remember if it sounds familiar because I really did read it before or if it's just a deja vu thing. But I went back flipping through the pages, and surely enough, things WERE repeated.

Finally, the dialogue. There isn't much dialogue–and I count that as a blessing because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to finish this book. The author's favourite dialogue inserts are definitely “What?” and “Oh.” They are scattered across nearly all dialogue, sometimes almost back to back, and the worst part is that in all cases, these could have been removed and you wouldn't have ever notice. They do not need to exist so repetitively in this book. Especially because BOTH of these can easily be varied: “Oh...” “Oh!” “Oh?”

There's also no progression. Bình does not change, he begins this book as a victim, and he ends this book as a victim. There's no growing, there's no revelation, there's no considering what to change. It's just a circle. We spin back and forth between Bình thinking back about his life in Vietnam, and then his current life in France with “GertrudeStein.” This book begins with GertrudeStein and ends with GertrudeStein. An ouroboros of a book if I'd ever seen one.

Finally, and this was the last straw. There are many instances of strange, and kind of gross, sentences across this book. The one I remember most vividly (probably because it was within the last few chapters of the book), were the main character reminiscing about his mother's “salty nipples” that he used to suck on when he was a baby. Yes, her salty nipples. I think that sounds like about the right place to end this review.

This book was such a let down for me. I loved the televised version that used this story as one of the source materials, and I NEVER say this, but the t.v show is leagues better than the original horror classic.

Eleanore, Theodora, and Luke all speak the same for the first 70% of the book. It's this weird whimsical speech that reminds me of Alice in Wonderland except the way Alice spoke made sense because she was 10-12, and in a nonsensical land. This whimsical nature of the dialogue is so so annoying because it clashes so severely with the setting of Hill House. This was magnified when I realized that the main character (and I'm assuming the other two as well) are not 20-ish like I first thought. No, Eleanore is THIRTY TWO???????????

Further, the horror was just not as horrific as I expected. I've read good horror, I've read things that keep me up at night. This is no where near one of them. Also, the ending was just....it cemented the idea that this story was just so lack luster. The more I read classics, the more I hate them.