Two more from the Man Booker shortlist

Wow, for all that I loved this year's Man Booker longlist, I'm really not liking the shortlist. Well, I did love Exit West, but Autumn wasn't for me, and these two fell in the same category.

TITLE: Lincoln in the Bardo
AUTHOR: George Saunders

I'm not even going to try to explain what Lincoln in the Bardo is about. Mainly, that's because I'm not sure. It's a novel made up from fragments and lots of different voices. It's set in a crypt, where Lincoln's young son Willie lies dead. But it's also set in a realm inspired in the Tibetan tradition of the 'bardo', a place where spirits linger in between life and death, not quite ready to take the next step.

It's an intriguing concept, but I found this quite unreadable. My brain was trying to turn the different voices and fragment into a single whole, but it could never quite do it. I tried to listen to the audiobook first, but the constant reading of the citations (after every little fragment, we get a citation explaining where it's from... what book, what letter, etc) kept breaking my concentration. I really should have listed to Sunita, who had a similar problem. So I returned the audiobook and bought the ebook. It solved the problem of the citations, but it still didn't bring this any nearer to working for me.

I persisted for much longer than I should have, but after several days of forcing myself to keep turning pages, I accepted this wasn't for me and gave up. In addition to the difficulties with the way the book was written, I wasn't getting anything from it. I didn't feel it was saying anything insightful or new about... well, anything, really.

MY GRADE: A DNF.

TITLE: History of Wolves
AUTHOR: Emily Fridlund

Fourteen-year-old Madeline and her parents are the last remnants of a commune in the woods of Minnesota. With almost no supervision in her life, Madeline spends her days roaming in the forest. When a family with a young child move into the nearest house, Madeline (calling herself Linda) befriends them, and ends up spending a lot of time with the little kid. And we know as we read that it all ended in some sort of tragedy: death, a trial, trauma.

History of Wolves strongly reminded me of a book in last year's shortlist, Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen. Fortunately, the obsession with ugliness and bodily fluids wasn't there, but there was something about Madeline that felt very much like Eileen, at least in the sections I read: the unfeelingness, the lack of involvement with what's around her. She walks around observing and barely reacting. She doesn't seem to care, so why should I?

And that was my main problem and the reason why I found reading this a struggle. I found it really hard to care at all, particularly because I didn't quite buy the characters (both Linda and the mother in the family she befriends). The characterisation felt inconsistent and a bit shallow. Not one for me.

MY GRADE: And another DNF.