Reviews

The Pisces by Melissa Broder

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melissaguido's review

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dark sad 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

3.0

tdem122's review against another edition

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3.0

[1st read on 30/12/2023] — 3⭐️

salisbury_hare's review

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2.0

Lost me somewhere between the narrator drugging the dog in favour of giving herself enemas so she could have anal and her abandoning her suicidal friend to go on a date with a sexy merman

lugojayce's review

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challenging dark emotional funny reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Self inflicted misery that is just a little too drawn out for me. Maybe I missed a lot of the point but there wasnt much beyond “oh I must be broken”

DNF @ 52%

I love Melissa Broder and will continue to read/buy anything she puts out. However, I am extremely hit or miss when it comes to smut in books and unfortunately this one is just not working for me.

Content Warnings

mtomchek's review

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4.0

"I was no longer lonely but I was."

"I, myself, had a very complicated relationship with emptiness, blankness, nothingness. Sometimes I wanted only to fill it, frightened that if I didn't it would eat me alive or kill me. But sometimes I longed for total annihilation in it - a beautiful, silent erasure. A desire to be vanished."

"I don't know that we are ever really okay in life, but there are times when we feel closer to it - when we don't remember what it feels like to suffer. During these times we are moving forward in the void, forgetting we are going nowhere, so the void feels less daunting. We feel like we are handling shit. We are handling shit and doing work on ourselves. And then another person comes in, and meets us there, and we think we can handle it. We think we can handle it, because in that moment we feel that we can handle anything."

"You simply had to expect nothing from it. That's what the Stoics believed."

"The trick, I now agreed, was you had to remain unattached to any future wishes or vision. You had to never get attached to any other person or expect anything good to come to you, and that was how you fell in love with life and how maybe certain fun and good things could happen to you. They only happened as long as you didn't need anything from anyone. As long as you didn't take anything from anyone or give any part of yourself away to another person, but you just sort of met the other person in space, good things could happen. You had to fall in love with quiet first."

"Yes, it certainly seemed like the human instinct, to get high on someone else, an external entity who could make life more exciting and relieve you of your own self, your own life, even for just a moment."

"Was it ever real: the way we felt about another person? Or was it always a projection of something we needed or wanted regardless of them?"

"What if everything was natural? What if there was no wrong or right action in terms of who you loved, who you wanted, or who you were drawn to? If the will of the universe was the will of the universe, and if everything was happening as it was, then wasn't everything you could possibly do all right?"

Phew...what an intensely strange and erotic book...but weirdly found it impactful and deep. Melissa Broder, wow, she wrote this novel focusing on Lucy, researcher of the ancient poet Sappho, and her chaotic struggle to learn about her life, love, and what is it we are really looking for. A seriously strange twist, but it was beautifully symbolic, weird, but touching, and relatable. I have so much to say, but overall, ended the book with a weird but enlightened feeling...if that makes sense. We attached ourselves to people, to ideas, to dreams, and we lose ourselves...