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A review by nclcaitlin
Private Rites by Julia Armfield
2.5
A King Lear retelling with three sisters, the end of the world, and a watery dystopia.
Isla, Irene, and Agnes are three sisters who are estranged, brought together where their father dies, famous for being an architect for making the new world navigable.
A world being submerged by water as it never stops raining.
The environment and the end of the world isn’t the focus (which seems crazy with such a cool premise), rather the relationships between the three queer, volatile sisters. They find themselves uncertain of how to grieve their father when everything around them seems to be ending anyway.
Not to mention, they all seem to have either mummy or daddy issues and an undercurrent of competitiveness, miscommunication, and pettiness brought forward from childhood.
Isla…. 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."
I am an older sister with two younger brothers and the snapping and automatic japes had me examining my own relationship with my brothers, seeing my own interactions in the siblings.
The two oldest, Isla and Irene, try to come together, only to slip into habitual competitiveness. On the other hand, Agnes is the youngest by eleven years and this age gap is keenly felt and hard to breach.
”It is,” Isla finds, “just so easy to allow herself the fun of resenting Agnes, as easy as it was when they were kids.”
I would have loved more on the rainy city, where people live makeshift lives on the top floors of flooded tower blocks, travelling by ferry. Yet, I know this isn’t Armfield’s purpose.
Just like Our Wives under the Sea, this is a slow moving, intimate look at our connections with those closest to us. The push and pull.
The first half was definitely better than the second half. Then it just felt repetitive and self-indulgent in pity, shame, revulsion, and frustration.
Maybe if you like books like My Year of Rest and Relaxation, you might enjoy it more.
And the ending was just such a let down. I think I kind of expected it, but it felt like a cheat, a cop out.
Again, this is written for certain people and I kind of guessed before even picking it up it wouldn’t be me.
Isla, Irene, and Agnes are three sisters who are estranged, brought together where their father dies, famous for being an architect for making the new world navigable.
A world being submerged by water as it never stops raining.
The environment and the end of the world isn’t the focus (which seems crazy with such a cool premise), rather the relationships between the three queer, volatile sisters. They find themselves uncertain of how to grieve their father when everything around them seems to be ending anyway.
Not to mention, they all seem to have either mummy or daddy issues and an undercurrent of competitiveness, miscommunication, and pettiness brought forward from childhood.
Isla…. 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."
I am an older sister with two younger brothers and the snapping and automatic japes had me examining my own relationship with my brothers, seeing my own interactions in the siblings.
The two oldest, Isla and Irene, try to come together, only to slip into habitual competitiveness. On the other hand, Agnes is the youngest by eleven years and this age gap is keenly felt and hard to breach.
”It is,” Isla finds, “just so easy to allow herself the fun of resenting Agnes, as easy as it was when they were kids.”
I would have loved more on the rainy city, where people live makeshift lives on the top floors of flooded tower blocks, travelling by ferry. Yet, I know this isn’t Armfield’s purpose.
Just like Our Wives under the Sea, this is a slow moving, intimate look at our connections with those closest to us. The push and pull.
The first half was definitely better than the second half. Then it just felt repetitive and self-indulgent in pity, shame, revulsion, and frustration.
Maybe if you like books like My Year of Rest and Relaxation, you might enjoy it more.
And the ending was just such a let down. I think I kind of expected it, but it felt like a cheat, a cop out.
Again, this is written for certain people and I kind of guessed before even picking it up it wouldn’t be me.