3.5 stars
Elsewhere was everywhere for quite a while recently, and so I allowed its presence to worm its way into the queue when I saw that the audiobook was available on Scribd.
From the very first words, Elsewhere contains layer upon layer of atmosphere. The comparisons made in the book's summary are apt, and it takes very little time to be drawn into its story. What Schaitkin gets right from the beginning is this incredible otherworldly and slightly off-kilter feeling of everything normal that's happening in the story.
Vera has grown up in the small town where everyone is aware of this single thing that makes them very different from everywhere else. That lauded awareness though isn't ever directly addressed, but alluded to and approached by coming at it sideways. The town tends to lose some of its mothers. They disappear, and presumably the fear of it happening to the other mothers, to someone's wife, and the very fact that this is real within their community keeps them from ever really exploring it.
I enjoyed Vera as a main character. She had a depth of understanding, a willingness to speak to the reader, and an incredible amount of self reflection that seemed at odds with the rest of her community. There was also a cloud of melancholy that kept Vera in a self-regulated place clearly brought on by the way she was raised and the place in which she is raised. Vera has lost her mother, and she grows up containing, but purposely avoiding, that deep fear that she too will disappear.
The disappearance of the mothers, and the acceptance of this phenomenon, provided a wonderful exploration into the way women tend to disappear into their wide variety of roles assigned to them by society and by themselves. While this definitely had the feeling of a Shirley Jackson story, it also gave off hints of Lois Lowry's The Giver quartet. And with that, in addition to the introduction of a more solid plot line as the book progressed, especially accompanied by such a strange and deeply atmospheric quality to the beginning, made me wish for a more concise and plot-focused resolution. Or, actually, for many of the plot elements that take place in the latter half of the book to never have been introduced at all. The attempt at keeping the meandering plotless storyline gets a little murky once more plot-focused elements are introduced, and I think the fogginess that Schaitkin tries to maintain gets a little away from itself by the end. A quality I missed as the story progressed.
Elsewhere was everywhere for quite a while recently, and so I allowed its presence to worm its way into the queue when I saw that the audiobook was available on Scribd.
From the very first words, Elsewhere contains layer upon layer of atmosphere. The comparisons made in the book's summary are apt, and it takes very little time to be drawn into its story. What Schaitkin gets right from the beginning is this incredible otherworldly and slightly off-kilter feeling of everything normal that's happening in the story.
Vera has grown up in the small town where everyone is aware of this single thing that makes them very different from everywhere else. That lauded awareness though isn't ever directly addressed, but alluded to and approached by coming at it sideways. The town tends to lose some of its mothers. They disappear, and presumably the fear of it happening to the other mothers, to someone's wife, and the very fact that this is real within their community keeps them from ever really exploring it.
I enjoyed Vera as a main character. She had a depth of understanding, a willingness to speak to the reader, and an incredible amount of self reflection that seemed at odds with the rest of her community. There was also a cloud of melancholy that kept Vera in a self-regulated place clearly brought on by the way she was raised and the place in which she is raised. Vera has lost her mother, and she grows up containing, but purposely avoiding, that deep fear that she too will disappear.
The disappearance of the mothers, and the acceptance of this phenomenon, provided a wonderful exploration into the way women tend to disappear into their wide variety of roles assigned to them by society and by themselves. While this definitely had the feeling of a Shirley Jackson story, it also gave off hints of Lois Lowry's The Giver quartet. And with that, in addition to the introduction of a more solid plot line as the book progressed, especially accompanied by such a strange and deeply atmospheric quality to the beginning, made me wish for a more concise and plot-focused resolution. Or, actually, for many of the plot elements that take place in the latter half of the book to never have been introduced at all. The attempt at keeping the meandering plotless storyline gets a little murky once more plot-focused elements are introduced, and I think the fogginess that Schaitkin tries to maintain gets a little away from itself by the end. A quality I missed as the story progressed.