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vexyspice's review against another edition
3.0
Being generous and rounding up to 3 stars. Jones writes in such a way you have to pay attention otherwise you might get lost in the story. Each character presented is interesting, to say the least.
Being that this is not the first book of Jones that I’ve read, i am used to her female characters having engaging personalities. This novel doesn’t disappoint in that regard.
Despite that being the case and the plot sounding really amazing, it’s not. I kinda finished it for sake of finishing it.
Being that this is not the first book of Jones that I’ve read, i am used to her female characters having engaging personalities. This novel doesn’t disappoint in that regard.
Despite that being the case and the plot sounding really amazing, it’s not. I kinda finished it for sake of finishing it.
seeceeread's review
I have the back of a crocodile. If I don't put oil on it every morning, it flakes. In some countries and times, I would have been sacred. They would have called me Crocodile Woman.
In the introduction to SULA, Morrison describes her small writing community:
Cut adrift, so to speak, we found it possible to think up things, try things, explore…. Write a play, form a theater company, design clothes, write fiction unencumbered by other people’s expectations. Nobody was minding us, so we minded ourselves.
Jones' novel is a study of women who are interested in – and want to be interesting to – themselves. Other people's desires, needs, even lives, are subordinate to the three central women, who begrudgingly co-construct each other as (and yet beyond) artists.
Catherine, a sculptor, is intent on killing her husband, Ernest Shuger – and finishing her signatue piece, the titular BIRDCATCHER. Amanda is an erstwhile romance writer who lives with the Shugers, sometimes, as she tries her hand at travel writing. She flits around to a variety of cosmopolitan centers, avoiding the husband who disliked her last manuscript, and the daughter she left in his care. Gillette is a painter who studiously calls her daughter a "hog" at every opportunity, then accidentally (?!) kills the young girl with poisonous shrooms (which she uses in place of brushes). Each woman is deliberately adrift, desperately seeking a life of her own, to remix Woolf – and hoping her art will be the better for the cleavages.
The Egyptian plover is said to symbiotically partner with crocodiles, cleaning their teeth of rotting meat and thereby rounding out their own diet. Jones seems to be asking us whose mouths we've crawled into ... and whether carrion is all we prefer, these days. She invests thoroughly in Amanda as an edgy narrator, inviting readers to identify with her depiction of Catherine's certain madness towards Ernest. Then flips the cart, revealing Amanda to be at best unreliable, a snapping dinosaur eager to gobble anything that moves her, until she's stunned by stagnancy and lumbers into her next intrigue.
This strikes me as the fifth in an accidental (to me) series of Black Art novels. There was Leilani's LUSTER in 2021. Then I read Newman's FRANCISCO in January of last year. And Everett's SO MUCH BLUE in October. Nelson's OPEN WATER sang to me in March. There's a throughline of fugitivity, a kinship in revolt, especially via form.
PS: Truly fascinating that this was first translated into German ... and released for the first time in English 36 years later, in 2022, when it immediately received literary acclaim
carly23r's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
fast-paced
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
3.5
Didn’t exactly “get” it but it was an enjoyable read.
bike_mike's review
challenging
dark
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
While there were flashes of brilliance, I found nothing to make wading through this book worthwhile. It could be that the audiobook version obscures the different voices, would they be more obvious with a physical book? There were few if any cues to help stitch together what plot there was from the non-linear storytelling. Could it be that the characters in this novel are too culturally distant from me that I don’t have any touch point to engage with compassion, or are these characters intended to be unrelatable and unlikable.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Toxic relationship, Self harm, Infidelity, Domestic abuse, Sexual content, Cursing, Mental illness, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , and Injury/Injury detail
hannahventer2802's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
leeroff's review against another edition
challenging
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
leah_alexandra's review against another edition
challenging
reflective
fast-paced
3.5
An interesting and well-written bit of fiction about multiple complicated relationships. There’s a lot going on, but ultimately not much happens.
thart3's review against another edition
1.0
Not a good read. Very confusing, no real meaning or message gained.
sam_bizar_wilcox's review against another edition
4.0
Gayl Jones' novel about black artist expats is a vision. Her book is at once a meditation on ambition and jealousy, as the novel spirals around the strange relationships of three artistic women: Amanda Wordlaw--writer, and one-time romance novelist; Catherine Shuger--sculptor, so in love and revolted by her husband that she frequently attempts to murder him; and Gilette--a white painter as dangerous as her razor-ous name suggests (or, is she?). The way these women talk to each other, and the men and children in their lives, uncover a restlessness with the status of the black woman artist. The Birdcatcher is Catherine's sculpture, something that she futilely works on as her husband encourages her to move on. Catherine becomes caught in a prison of her own making, both in her artistic pursuits and in a marriage she is unable to leave (despite numerous attempts to free herself from her husband...by murdering him). Amanda, on the other hand, is in constant flight; she's become a travel writer after ditching her husband, Lantis, and she no longer writes period romance novels but researched non-fiction that jets her off to Brazil, Ibiza, and Paris (or Cleveland?). She is free to narrate the relationship between Catherine and Ernest, and Catherine and herself, but what becomes clear quickly is how her voice becomes an imposition. She is not an objective narrator in her (so-called?) friend's life, but a woman with her own blindspots and obfuscating prose.
This is a dazzling book, written with insidious cruelty that (perhaps) hides a more sympathetic core.
This is a dazzling book, written with insidious cruelty that (perhaps) hides a more sympathetic core.
amrituu's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.75