About the book

There’s no book. Woman Last Seen in Her Thirties is a sort of container which keeps Maggie in. She’s like a jinn in an oil lamp. You touch the container, you let Maggie out, and she starts complaining about her life.

I’ve never felt like a therapist to a fictional character before, but Maggie made this experience possible. She entered my reading life, made herself comfortable and for the next several hours relayed each and every thought and trouble of her first year as a divorcee.

About Maggie

Her husband is divorcing her. She’s devastated. For years her life orbited around her family only, but now her husband is swooshed away by a midlife crisis, and her adult kids have their own lives. She’s lost, confused and grieving. She doesn’t feel noticed or needed. The last time she did feel noticed was when she was thirty (hence the title).

Maggie is mainly fixating on

• why her husband left her. Was it her body? Was it his work? Was it the way she kissed? Was it the was she didn’t kiss?
• what others think about her. Do they notice her? Who noticed her? Why did they notice her?
• what she did to others. How could she? Could she? Was it ok then? Is it ok now?

Maggie is full of doubts, whether she’s in Rome, or in a new house, or at work. Her mind is full of “maybes”. Here’s what it looks like:

…maybe he, like I, was bereft over our children leaving home.

Maybe he really had changed… Maybe we both had.

Maybe it was not the autumn of my romantic life. Maybe there was some spring left in me after all.

But maybe, I thought – just maybe – …

So you did, Maggie. There are 112 “maybes” (on 254 pages).  And I haven’t even calculated all instances of “probably” and “perhaps”. Maggie is full of uncertainties and she knows it.

I know I’m overanalyzing it, but that’s kind of what I do.

The only breathers happen when Maggie is having conversations with somebody other than herself. But even then, for god knows what reason, Maggie interrupts the dialogues in order to inform us what a cup looks like, or how many dandelions she has picked already.

Anything about the book?

No, there’s NO book! There’s no plot! It’s a year in a woman’s life during which she takes a trip, talks to her kids, meets friends, makes some changes. Sometimes she goes shopping, sometimes she tries new make-up. She changes her hair colour (oh no, is this a spoiler?  ) She cuts tomatoes. In fact, when I was 94 percent into the book and Maggie was still just cutting tomatoes, I braced myself for the book to end on her picking up a cucumber to cut next. Thankfully, it ended on a nice closure of one major question. I’m glad that was the moment I last saw Maggie, and that I didn’t have to say goodbye to her when she was just making a salad.

Final thoughts about Maggie

Maggie is the only reason I’m giving this text two stars. I like her, even though she often sounds like a friend who gets drunk and then goes on and on about her ex. Maggie is still fun. She can joke. She would make a good book reviewer!

Jean [Maggie’s friend] has shelves full of apocalyptic-type novels. Some of them are strangely good, though the main takeaway is that if you manage to survive the beginning of the end of time, your reward is prolonged misery, and maybe the occasional roll in the hay with some survivor who’s even more screwed up than you are.

Would I recommend meeting Maggie?

If you are looking for an imaginary friend, but the one who wouldn’t really be there for you and instead would need you to be there for her, then you will love meeting Maggie.

Reading mediocre books is like being around toxic people. They are never too bad to be dropped straight away. By the time you realise they will never change, you already have lost too much time and energy.

That’s what happened when I was reading A River or Stars by Vanessa Hua. The book is not that bad. It actually introduced me to more aspects of a culture than it probably intended to. I don’t mean straightforward information like the facts about the life of Chinese people in rural areas, or the fact that Chinese people born in rural areas are not allowed to work or study in the cities (is it really so?!) There are other, more subtle cultural aspects noticeable in the book. For example, a man is still considered a good father figure even though he calls his previous children by ordinal numbers. He doesn’t care enough to refer to them by names because they are female.

A River of Stars promised to be way more dynamic than it actually was. Pregnant women on a run in a foreign country sounded like a story with possible adventures. The adventures never happened. The book does start with several fast-paced events but it soon falls apart into many irrelevant flashbacks from different characters which, while exposing the characters, still leave them looking flat and underdeveloped, probably because the characters themselves rarely do anything. They float around the book like oil stains on water, flashing their memories and tweaking their existence until everything arrives to a culmination that would have happened anyway even if they had remained absolutely still. One character’s life is parallel to the plot. The character is not really knitted into the plot but not dropped from it either. Another character’s behavior puzzles both readers and characters but is never explained.

The writing is decent. The sentences don’t look like written by a graduate from ‘How to be a popular writer’ course. The style is genuine and flowing. The phrases are nicely built. They just don’t have a structure to convey. There are tons of details and descriptions scattered across the book but they never play any role. They are sort of Chekhov’s guns gone wrong. The events with a potential to some salience are described distantly and monotonously as if the author herself is bored with telling them. The backward, flashback-based storytelling makes the book sound like those long detailed monologues of people who you can’t escape from because of some social situation. As soon as you allow yourself to skip a paragraph, it turns out you missed some important information, so you have to return and go through the boring part again.

I wouldn’t suggest A River of Stars to anybody. Even though it’s not a bad book, it still takes time that could be spent on a really good one.

You always know when you are reading a good book. It doesn’t feel like a book. You see no traces of backstage manipulations, no tricks, no author. The story is alive on its own.

The Air You Breathe by Frances de Pontes Peebles feels so real I had to double-check it’s not a memoir. Even when I already knew the characters were fictional (although they were partially based on real people) I was still googling for them. I wanted to see what they looked like even though I knew they never existed. That’s the closest I could find.

According to the interview with the author, these two singers, Carmen Miranda and Chavela Vargas, were the inspiration for some of the characters’ traits and stories.

In some sources The Air You Breathe is called a saga. It does indeed cover a lifelong story but it doesn’t feel unbearably huge. Reading it is like listening to a person who is speaking about her love for a person and for music.

The music is so palpable it gives the book a new dimension. I now know samba without having ever listened to it before.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76R6O1va9iM?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

At first, I was thinking the book would make a great movie. There are so many amazing visuals, really good songs. But the more the story developed the more I understood a movie might turn this story into another postproduction amputee. There are too many depths and precious moments for a movie to handle. I just hope that if the story is ever picked up for an adaptation it will be preserved as it is.

Such books are not born overnight. I don’t even mean all the research that went into The Air Your Breathe to show the readers Brazil in the 30s and Hollywood in the 40s. I mean the maturity of the book. It feels like classic even though it was published just three days ago. Such quality requires not only skill and talent but time to brew. I contacted Frances de Pontes Peebles, the author, for more information and found out that my perception was right. Frances said it took her 9 years to write the book.

I feel lucky to have found this book and to be living at times when I could get it with one click. I also feel a bit envious of those who haven’t read it yet. They have yet to meet the characters, whom I already miss, and to enjoy a really good book.

When I was a kid a special type of books was very popular. The genre could be called romance with erotical scenes as the main reason for the books to be written. Housewives frantically exchanged those cheap paperbacks hiding them from kids and reading them by packs. The books contained no plot, no decent dialogues, no character development apart from characters being beautiful and having sex whenever the plot allowed.

Have modern thrillers taken the place of those books? Is there a target audience for whom certain types of books are produced? These audience oriented books contain a number of obligatory elements that are to be squeezed in regardless of the plot.

The Girl Before is a classic example of such a product. The story is so dumb its mere existence is possible only due to the real estate market being bad. The characters agree to follow the rules of a bizarre landlord because they can’t find anywhere else to live. Is the market in London really so bad or it’s just an invented factor?

Looks like the target audience of the book is supposed to be interested in:

• What the characters are wearing. All of them, always, everywhere, in details; color, material, shape, size, texture. Nothing of it is related to the plot.
• Men who serve as furniture for the book; “slick body under the shower water”.
• detailed sex scenes.
• OB visits, pregnancy tests, pregnancy symptoms discussed at length with no purpose for the plot.
• Parenting problems not related to the plot.

While many books are infected with a certain set of words that authors think make the dialogues sound more natural, in case of The Girl Before the infestation is severe. At one point the word “somehow”, the most popular parasite, is used 4 times by different characters within one scene. The same happens with “that’s all” which is plopped at the end of a phrase regardless of the situation. Somehow it’s just another bad book that’s all. By the end of the book there’s a risk of developing a strong allergic reaction to the words due to overexposure.

The behaviour of the characters often doesn’t match the situation. “I can never say if you are joking” says a character to the one who never jokes. Another character keeps gulping down tons of sadistically cooked food. It can serve as a demonstration of personal traits when done for the first time but it keeps being repeated along the whole book, probably to make the book more salient; hey, the plot was dumb as were the characters, but they had sex and ate live fish so now the book is stuck in my memory.

Surprising as it may sound, there are still two good things to be thankful for. The first one is that narcissistic people and sociopaths are described quite well. I believe many people can benefit from learning what those disorders are and how they manifest themselves.

The second nice thing happens in the audiobook. A complete silence is used to illustrate a situation. The silence creates such a powerful effect that I listened to it several times. I’ve never rewound any record before to listen to its silence. That silence is a brilliant idea. I hope more audiobooks will pick up this tool.

With this book I’m putting on hold my reviews of thrillers. I need some literary detox. There will be one more thriller-related rant but otherwise better books will be discussed. Stay tuned!

You know how sometimes you go to a shop with very poor choice or quality of products and after some time of browsing through mediocre options you start liking things you wouldn’t like if there originally was a better choice?

That’s what’s happening with my judgement of thrillers. This month has been filled with such bad thrillers that my perception has adjusted. I no longer expect clever characters. Maybe a thriller’s plot cannot happen without their stupidity? I no longer expect to be surprised about who the villain is. I’m thankful to be just slightly entertained. I’m thankful if the word “somehow” does not pop up in each line of internal monologues.

With all that new judgement adjustment I was intending to give Behind her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough four stars. Only some of the characters are idiots. The villain becomes obvious twenty percent into the book but you still can’t guess what’s going on so you have a reason to go on with the book. You watch females in love, a blond guy, and psychological abnormalities entangled together and heading somewhere unpredictable as the end gets nearer. After all the predictable thrillers that unpredictability alone deserves four stars.

Suddenly, eighty percent into the book it becomes clear why you can’t guess what’s going on. Apparently, the book is of a different genre altogether!

Imagine a Sherlock Holmes story where a mystery is explained by a green gnome living under a kitchen sink. You thought you were reading a gnome-free story but a gnome becomes the main tool of the plot. Eighty percent into the story! It’s literature, so everything can happen. At least that seems to be the author’s opinion.

The four stars quickly lost two of their mates after that. The remaining two stars are still a product of a perspective adjustment. Had it been another genre I would not have forgiven the language, the stupidity of characters, the “green gnome” plot twist. But I have learned not to expect much from a thriller, so Behind her Eyes does receive two stars from me, although it is a generous rating.

Laura and Emma became my punishment for opting to read a bad book till the end. Truth be told, I wasn’t sure the book was bad and I’m still not. Maybe I am just witnessing the beginning of a new era in book writing, the era of books with no plots.

After all, several years ago an idea of broadcasting mundanities of ordinary lives would sound obscene, and yet there’s Big Brother now.

Thus, maybe Laura and Emma is not a bad book, but a pioneer, the first book of plotless genre. Maybe the book is a reality show for readers. The characters go to work, run errands, do their shopping, argue, have dinners. They even go to the sea, twice, but no plot happens there either.

The characters themselves are realistic, although they do change their personalities quite abruptly while nothing in the plot prompts them to. Because there’s no plot. Duh! The language is good; easy, but not primitive. It doesn’t reveal any disappointments lying ahead. It tricks you into following this spineless creature, curious of what would become of it. At some point it feels like Emma would pick up the role of the main character, but she is born too late, and by the time she reaches the age where she can lead the book to its plot, the book is already over.

It was the first time I went against my principles and didn’t drop the book when it should have been dropped. I naively thought nothing worse could happen if I read till the end. I would at least get a sense of completion, right? But how can you get a sense of completion from something that has never started?! You are left with a string on which beads were being put on. You followed the string wishing to see what it would become in the end, but it just tears abruptly midway.

The book is a set of nice details that could theoretically be assembled into a fine construction, but the main piece went missing, and now it just cannot function.