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Loading... Dept. of Speculation (2014)by Jenny Offill
  
Books Read in 2015 (11) Top Five Books of 2016 (142) » 21 more Top Five Books of 2014 (918) Top Five Books of 2018 (413) Books Read in 2020 (1,677) BBC Radio 4 Bookclub (268) Books Read in 2021 (2,093) Contemporary Fiction (60) 250 Page Project (14) No current Talk conversations about this book. Full of beautiful aphorisms, and I could empathize with the narrator’s dilemma of having a happy nuclear family vs. being an “art monster,” but the story of a marriage ultimately left me cold. (  ) Charon07 | Jun 18, 2022 |  A beautifully written account of a mother and wife, who didn't necessarily want to be a mother and wife but fell into and accepted it.  ) Elna_McIntosh | Sep 29, 2021 | Aphoristic style, micro observations about marriage and parenting (  ) wordloversf | Aug 14, 2021 | This is a remarkably short book that is a very quick read. I basically read it in a day. More and more I'm finding that brevity is a virtue that by limiting their length authors are forced to really stay focused and nail their material. That is the case here. I lack the intelligence or vocabulary to really describe why, but this book fits in my mind between the books by Rachel Cusk and Sally Rooney. Like those fantastic novels, this feels very real and close to the bone. There is no artifice or cover here, our narrator is right there for us to read. And possibly judge. Every time I read these types of books I realize how little I actually want to judge, the honesty is so refreshing I let go of that often negative part of my personality. And I found myself finding so much common ground with her. This could have been written by me, "She thinks before she acts. Or more properly, she thinks instead of acts. A character flaw, not a virtue." Changing the pronouns of course. ( ) MarkMad | Jul 14, 2021 | Dept. of Speculation is an impressionistic meditation on marriage that hooked me from its first few sentences. I'm not sure whether it's fiction, poetry, or thinly-disguised memoir, but I am sure that it's very, very good. ( ) CaitlinMcC | Jul 11, 2021 |
Offill’s brief book eschews obvious grandeur. It does not broadcast its accomplishments for the cosmos but tracks the personal and domestic and local, a harrowed inner space. It concentrates its mass acutely, pressing down with exquisite and painful precision, like a pencil tip on the white of the nail.  Dept. of Speculation is a riposte to the notion that domestic fiction is humdrum and unambitious. From the point of view of an unnamed American woman, it gives us the hurrahs and boos of daily life, of marriage and of parenthood, with exceptional originality, intensity and sweetness. [...] Dept. of Speculation is a shattered novel that stabs and sparkles at the same time. It is the kind of book that you will be quoting over and over to friends who don't quite understand, until they give in and read it too. Offill is a smart writer with a canny sense of pacing; just when you want to abandon the fragmented puzzle pieces of the novel, she reveals a moment of breathtaking tenderness ... especially engaging when it describes new motherhood ... For better or worse, this is not so much a book about their marriage; it is a book about the wife’s marriage. It would be interesting to read the other story to this marriage, to know more of the husband, the father — but Offill still makes it seem as if the wife’s version of the marriage is story enough and, perhaps, the only story that matters. From deep within the interiors of a fictional marriage, Offill has crafted an account of matrimony and motherhood that breaks free of the all-too-limiting traditional stories of wives and mothers. There is complexity to the central partnership; Offill folds cynicism into genuine moments of love. It may be difficult to truly know what happens between two people, but Offill gets alarmingly close. Jenny Offill's novel Dept. of Speculation, which weighs in at 192 pages soaking wet and includes a fair amount of white space, is extremely short for a novel. It's an unusual book not only in terms of its size, but also its form. Make no mistake, this is an experimental novel. By which I mean that the narrative isn't a series of flowing scenes that keep you reassuringly grounded in plot, but a collection of vignettes, observations and quirky details that are sometimes pulled from real life.... Offill has successfully met the challenge she seems to have given herself: write only what needs to be written, and nothing more. No excess, no flab. And do it in a series of bulletins, fortune-cookie commentary, mordant observations, lyrical phrasing. And through these often disparate and disconnected means, tell the story of the fragile nature of anyone's domestic life. Belongs to Publisher Series
"Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all. Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband, postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes--a colicky baby, bedbugs, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions--the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it, as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art. With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation can be read in a single sitting, but there are enough bracing emotional insights in these pages to fill a much longer novel. "-- No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54 — Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.72)
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