Reviews

My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki

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marcusrei's review

dark funny inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

This book made me incredibly queasy. Ozeki seamlessly juxtaposes house wives and the slabs of meat that they prepare for the in-novel show "My American Wife!", and much less subtly, the horrors of abusive marriages, infertility, cattle farms, and slaughterhouses. I was often unable to sleep after reading this before bed, even after chapters that were not graphic. While sometimes the book felt preachy, or perhaps bordering on anti-meat industry propaganda, I appreciated Ozeki's defense in her interview: "Does fiction have to exist in some suspended, apolitical landscape in order to be literary? ... I see our lives as being part of an enormous web of interconnected spheres, where the workings of the larger social, political, and corporate machinery impact something as private and intimate as the descent of an egg through a woman's fallopian tube."

My favorite thing about Ruth Ozeki's novels is that she is extremely good at mixing nonfiction and fiction, autobiography and novel, past and present. This shows in both books I've read of hers, Tale for the Time Being and My Year of Meats. In the interview with the author at the end of the book, Ozeki attributes this to her being mixed race, saying that this means that she has "always been suspicious of binary oppositions." While her books have not been my favorite, I think she is an incredibly interesting author and highly recommend her work to people who are looking for something different.