Reviews

I think I loved this? The magical realism and surrealistic writing style created such a dreamlike world and ambience that I really enjoyed. I don't know enough about the history of the region to really understand if/how the alternate history aspects altered the story more than the dystopian aspects already did, so it kinda just added to the otherworldly quality of the writing. There's very little plot and it's focused more on atmosphere and characters and ideas/feelings more than a solid/hard science approach to the future.

I think this would make a fantastic movie, especially with the imagery of the final scene. The vividness of the writing was definitely the best part of this book. There's also one scene towards the end where music is important and I felt like I could hear it in a movie!! This could adapt so well into an art house film and I would eat it up.

I listened to the audiobook and it was pretty good. It's always nice to hear how words in different languages are pronounced but there wasn't so much French in the translation that I felt that the audiobook was necessary. I would like to return to this story as a physical book to take my time with the language and all of the different characters. Because there's so much going on in those regards, I wouldn't really recommend this as an audiobook if you have the choice between audio and physical, but the narration was pretty well done and I don't think I missed too much listening to it.

A weird one but worth giving a go if you like surrealism, no-plot-just-vibes, interesting writing, and ambiguous dystopias.

heartfruit's review against another edition

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Just too depressing to continue.

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