super readable, but as a story this felt incomplete. i didnt really buy the slowburn romance--partly because i found Grimm to be a very inscrutable chsuper readable, but as a story this felt incomplete. i didnt really buy the slowburn romance--partly because i found Grimm to be a very inscrutable character, and partly because i wasnt feeling any tension whatsoever between these characters (slowburn only works if there is, in fact, a "burn")--and i didnt like how this ended so abruptly. it felt like a one-book story that was split into two books just for the sake of it. but the writing really is great. a lot of the debuts i read feel like theyre trying too hard, but the writing in this one strikes the perfect balance between earnest and funny. too bad the story and the character work didnt follow suit......more
"Isla had picked at the cuticle of her thumb with her ring finger and nodded dumbly along with this, tried to remember the sequence of a poem she’d wa
"Isla had picked at the cuticle of her thumb with her ring finger and nodded dumbly along with this, tried to remember the sequence of a poem she’d wanted to quote to a patient earlier in the week, about Old Masters and suffering: how it takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. The point, of course, being the whole bright dailiness of agony, the way Icarus in the Bruegel painting could crash to earth as little but a background detail while the bland spool of life went on in the foreground; the ploughman at his plough and the fabric of the day untouched, uninterrupted."
Private Rites is, to me, a novel about the question of the everyday within the disastrous. That is, how do we continue to live our everyday lives while in the midst of an ongoing disaster? How can something that is catastrophic, life-altering on a global scale, become subsumed into, or sit alongside, everyday life?
Wherever you are in Private Rites, you are, just like the characters, forced to reckon with the inexorable, immovable, undeniable reality of its central disaster: it will not stop raining. There is rain everywhere, water everywhere, whole cities flooded, their infrastructure long gone. This is the world the characters of the novel must live in, and what makes the novel so compelling, I think, is that simple fact: that they need to continue to live in it, despite the fact that it is slowly becoming uninhabitable. I think sometimes the tendency with these dystopian settings is to Provide Commentary on a disaster, to explain it by pointing to any number of factors (Capitalism, Technology, Oligarchy, etc.), but it can be so much harder to just have your characters live in it, to suffer its daily degradations and deprivations--to experience, day by day, the gradual worsening of an already bad situation, and to have to live through it anyway, because what other choice is there? Despite everything, there is still an everyday to be gotten through: groceries, jobs, commutes, meals, family. (Though--and the novel is very aware of this--the characters are very privileged to even have this semblance of an everyday life.)
But as much as Private Rites is a climate disaster novel, it's also very much a family drama novel. We have three sisters--Isla, Irene, and Agnes--and an abusive father who, we find out on page one, has just died. From there, the sisters are forced to come together and reckon with how their father's abuse has affected--and continues to affect--not just their own selves, but also their fraught relationships with each other. There are, of course, the material realities of the novel's climate disaster, but I think water is, in a way, also an apt motif for a book whose characters have absorbed these ways of being from their childhoods--been steeped in that abuse such that now, as adults, its traumatic aftereffects seep into their adult lives and relationships. And seep they do: Armfield doesn't give us any big flashbacks to illuminate this past, but rather flashes of memory that constantly intrude on the sisters when they're alone and together. We don't get the full picture, but we get bits and pieces of it, and the effect is all the more powerful for this restraint.
Climate disaster + childhood trauma--Private Rites seems maybe like an unrelentingly bleak novel, but it's really not. It's not an upbeat novel by any means, but despite the bleak circumstances, it never feels one-note. The characters are fleshed out, shown to us in both their worst and most vulnerable moments; and even as the novel's climate disaster rages on, its characters still manage to have faith, even if just a little, in something--be it a person, a relationship, an act, a belief.
Private Rites is definitely (and unexpectedly) one of my favourite reads of the year, and such a different novel from Armfield's debut: longer, more ambitious, and, I think, ultimately more satisfying.
did i like this? sure, but idk it felt kind of...cobbled together. the plot is mostly just whatever--its not a super complex plot and yet it somehow cdid i like this? sure, but idk it felt kind of...cobbled together. the plot is mostly just whatever--its not a super complex plot and yet it somehow came across as convoluted--and the romance itself was enjoyable but forgettable. altogether this was a bit bland, a bit flimsy, nice in the moment but a story where ultimately nothing much stood out to me. (tbh the cover has more intrigue and tension than the actual book...)
generally liked this but i felt like the character arcs were underdeveloped (especially considering how long this book is) and ultimately unsatisfyinggenerally liked this but i felt like the character arcs were underdeveloped (especially considering how long this book is) and ultimately unsatisfying
The Safekeep is, to me, a novel set apart by its sensuality in both senses of the word. It's a sensual novel in the way that it's especially 3.5 stars
The Safekeep is, to me, a novel set apart by its sensuality in both senses of the word. It's a sensual novel in the way that it's especially attuned to the senses, to its narrator, Isabel's, sensory experience. Isabel is a lonely character. She lives by herself in a country house in a rural part of the Netherlands, her mother dead, her brothers elsewhere. In a way, she lives for that house, to maintain its rooms, to tend to its garden, to keep careful track of its state. The house is an extension of her, and as such her sensory awareness of it is careful and specific. Isabel is attuned to the house, and so we, too, are attuned to her acute sensory experience of it: its spaces, its sounds, its atmosphere, its furniture, its crockery.
All of this changes when Isabel's brother brings his girlfriend, Eva, to stay at the country house while he's away. With Eva's arrival, the story tilts. Isabel's keen sensory awareness shifts from an awareness of the house to an awareness of Eva. And it is here that the novel becomes sensual in that second sense of the word: still attuned to sensorial experience, but now in a way that's coloured by attraction, desire--by Isabel's attraction to Eva, her desire for Eva. There is a charge between these two characters, and it is evidenced in the writing, in its careful sensory accounting of Isabel's perceptions. She is so keenly aware of Eva, of her presence, of her gaze, of her looks, of her words. I love books where interactions matter, and this is absolutely one of them. Isabel and Eva's interactions matter because they resonate with the tension that exists between them, a tension that by turns pushes them apart and brings them together. Isabel resists Eva and yet is inexorably drawn to her; she is hostile to Eva and yet is utterly taken in by her presence.
Solitary but also closed off and set in her ways, Isabel is then forced to contend with this tension, with the way Eva not only unsettles her routines, but unsettles her. She is attuned to the house, to Eva, to Eva in the house, and those things all blend together in a way that Isabel cannot ignore. At once compounding and competing with each other, these awarenesses make Isabel both more and less aware of the house: Eva's novel presence bringing the house and its routines into sharp relief, and yet also eclipsing it and its previous comfortable familiarity. It's a delicious dynamic, and I loved watching Isabel grapple with and grow into these feelings: repressing them, denying them, acknowledging them, articulating them, acting on them. It's not an easy or comfortable process for her, but this only makes it all the more meaningful when she is finally able to come out of her shell and articulate to herself what (or who) she wants.
All of this is to say, there is a tension between these characters, and the novel is not afraid to unravel it, to dwell on it, and to follow it to its end. And I thought it was very much well done: sexy and intimate and authentic to who the characters are and who they become with each other. But more than just sexual tension, there is also another kind of tension in this story, one that is sensed if not entirely understood. This, too, the novel follows to its end. You get answers, and the novel delivers them with real impact and emotion.
I honestly really liked this one. It's an efficient novel, the plot pared down to its most essential--and thus effective--elements: a house, two women, and a question mark underlying it all.
(thank you to Avid Reader Press for the eARC!)...more
