Imagine Me Gone
Ratings18
Average rating3.7
Michael is John and Margaret's eldest son. He's a precocious kid, smart and funny, obsessed with books and music. His sister Celia is the sensible one in the family: tougher than the boys, unshakeably certain about how the world works. And then there's Alec, the youngest, the most ambitious and also the most sensitive. He grows up in the shadow of Michael's distant coolness and Celia's pragmatic confidence, never quite keeping up with the others. The children are still living at home when their brilliant, beloved father walks into the woods by their house and take his own life. Years later, one of them will follow him. How are we damaged by what we inherit? How much can any family give to save one of its own? And how can you tell the difference between what is passed on and what is picked up between the truly inherited flaw and the self-fulfilling prophecy?
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I found it thematically very similar to Miriam Toews' All My Puny Sorrows: the ethics of suicide, genetic burden, transgenerational trauma are major themes in both. Imagine might lack the eloquence of Sorrows but I found it structurally more elegant. The fact that both books feature chronically depressed characters who are obsessed with music is interesting considering Michael's (the protagonist of Imagine) driving theory.
*EDIT
Changed to 5 stars because I still regularly think about it 10 months (& multiple novels) later.
Beautiful prose in this novel, told from multiple points of view of the 5 members of one family. It's a bit depressing, and the outcome is mostly known from the broad hints in the prologue, but it's a great ride getting there. Writers can learn a great deal about characterization from the wonderful details of how these family members interact with each other.
