(by Solvej Balle, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell)<\/p>\n
I’m still really liking this series, though as more and more characters are introduced it feels harder to get a sense of the personalities\/particularities of any of them—though I guess maybe this is partly because there isn’t an omniscient narrator, just Tara Selter narrating her days. So we see each new arrival at the house in Bremen (which Tara and three others moved into in the previous book) as she sees that person. So of course there’s a bit of a remove: people come and go, and it takes time to get to know people. (Though in an apparently endlessly-repeating 18th of November, there is a lot of time, with room for a lot of conversations: this book starts on day 1892 and finishes on day 3637). <\/p>\n
I like the way this series keeps building on its themes, playing with variations. Separateness and togetherness were a theme in the first book, when Tara was spending days with her husband that he wouldn’t remember when morning came; in this book there is a whole community of people who are all going through the same thing and Tara ponders how “enmeshed” they are, those of them who live in the house in Bremen, how they are “entangled in each other or grown together, too close to tell where one thing ends and another begins.” But the various people stuck together in the 18th of November are still individuals with different beliefs and leanings and priorities: to take just one example, Ralf wants to focus on the project he’s been working on to track\/prevent incidents and accidents and is keen on systems and “frameworks”; Tara talks about how she’s “more inclined to believe in random chance and a simmering enthusiasm.” <\/p>\n
There are lots of meetings and debates and discussions in this book: there are questions of vocabulary\/terminology and theories about what is happening exactly and speculations about what is possible in the 18th of November and what is not, and yeah, minor quibbles aside I’m definitely still here for it. And like the other volumes, this one ends in a twist\/revelation, which means I’m now eagerly awaiting the publication of the English translation of the next one!<\/p>\n
Favorite passage in this one: “My own excitement, I said, had always been more of a gentle simmer, and my momentum like the sound of pebbles on the shore shifting with the waves on a calm day. The sound of pages turning. Quiet weather systems. A crackle in the fireplace.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(by Solvej Balle, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell) I’m still really liking this series, though as more and more characters are introduced it feels harder to get a sense of the personalities\/particularities of any of them—though I guess maybe this is partly because there isn’t an omniscient narrator, just Tara Selter narrating […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14424"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14433,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14424\/revisions\/14433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}