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Loading... Dept. of Speculation (2014)by Jenny Offill
  
Books Read in 2015 (11) » 21 more Top Five Books of 2016 (143) Top Five Books of 2014 (915) Top Five Books of 2018 (411) Books Read in 2020 (1,840) Books Read in 2021 (2,298) Contemporary Fiction (63) Female Protagonist (727) Overdue Podcast (484) BBC Radio 4 Bookclub (276) No current Talk conversations about this book. Perfect. (  ) cbwalsh | Sep 13, 2023 |  This is a terrific, small novel about humans - getting along & not - with numerous insights and delightful writing. (  ) RickGeissal | Aug 16, 2023 | Surprising structure and simple yet stunning insight into the workings of marriage and parenthood. A quick read full of unexpected turns of phrase and twists of feeling. One woman's story of straddling the dream of living as an "Art Monster" and life as a partner and parent. Bristling with ache, whimsy, and wounding. ( ) rebwaring | Aug 14, 2023 | Series Info/Source: This is first book in The House Witch series. I borrowed this ebook through Kindle Unlimited. Thoughts: This was a poetic and intriguing. It's basically a stream of conscious thoughts from a woman as she deals with falling in love, marrying, a miscarriage, another pregnancy, raising a child, dealing with a cheating husband, and trying to mend everything back together. It was very well done and a cynical and somewhat depressing look into American society. It does a good job of giving you an American slice of life...but does so from a somewhat depressing perspective. I did really enjoy some of the obscure quotes and random bits of information that were included throughout. I also enjoyed a lot of the questions that the wife's daughter asked. This brief but dense novella echoes a lot of the struggles people deal with as they age. For example, looking back at who you were and your dreams and trying to reconcile that with who you are 20 years later. The whole thing is written in third person and the woman is known as "wife" and her husband is "husband". This is an interesting way to do things because it holds that characters at a bit of a distance that seems to mimic the distance the wife feels from a lot of the world around her. I listened to this on audiobook and the audiobook was very well done. The author narrates it herself. My Summary (4/5): Overall this was a brief and intense look at a woman's journey from lover to mother in modern American society. It is a fairly bleak story but has glimmers of light. I enjoyed a lot of the random facts in here and seeing American society from this unnamed woman's perspective. I would definitely consider picking up more books by Offill in the future. ( ) krau0098 | Jul 13, 2023 | 3? 4? I enjoyed this lens for a fairly common story, it allowed for different insights. Of course I also don't enjoy Ferrante, if we're making these the only choices. (They are not the only choices.) (  ) Kiramke | Jun 27, 2023 |
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 SeriesAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
"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)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.72)
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