The Invoice by Jonas Karlsson: Review

The Invoice by Jonas Karlsson
Publisher: Hogarth. July 12, 2016.
Pages: 208
Genre: Literary
Source: Publisher



ADD TO GOODREADS

BUY FROM INDIEBOUND

BUY FROM BOOK DEPOSITORY

A passionate film buff, our hero’s life revolves around his part-time job at a video store, the company of a few precious friends, and a daily routine that more often than not concludes with pizza and movie in his treasured small space in Stockholm. When he receives an astronomical invoice from a random national bureaucratic agency, everything will tumble into madness as he calls the hotline night and day to find out why he is the recipient of the largest bill in the entire country.-Goodreads

This tiny book is so sweet and charming, and that's coming from somebody who thinks horror movies pussyfoot around opportunities to kill off child characters. So it's not cheesy, dopey, or annoying in any way. It was just a very nice time to read. Jonas Karlsson wrote one of my favorite funny books, The Room, and while The Invoice isn't hilarious, it is equally quirky. And equally focused on the ridiculousness of bureaucracy. Karlsson knows what he likes. Or, I guess, hates in this case.

Our unnamed protagonist is confronted with a 5,700,000 Swedish kronor (~658,000 USD) invoice, which he soon learns is the cost of all the happiness he's experienced in his life. Despite being a guy with very little going on in his life -- a part time video store job, no financial responsibilities, little family, one friend -- he has one of the largest bills in the country. We follow him as he tries to find out why his invoice is so enormous. He calls up the agency and speaks with a representative on the phone to try to figure out what happened, and he finds himself getting closer and closer to the woman on the other end.

With some reluctance, I had to admit that I was pretty happy with my life.

This book was a very quick, fun read. At first, our hero seems like a pretty miserable, lazy nobody, but he has a spectacular ability to appreciate the little things in life. As we learn more about the events that have taken place in his life, both the main character and the reader learn a lot about perspective. His capacity for contentment is both admirable and inspiring, at least to somebody like me who is all sorts of restless.

There are some really excellent moments in this book. A couple of them near the end gave me shivers. Some of it felt repetitive, however, and I feel like The Invoice could have stood to be shorter than it was. All in all, though, I had fun reading it.

3 Books About People Who Aren't What They Seem

I'm going to be real, I was beyond delighted to notice the common theme between my last three reads. A nonfiction book about undercover women. A novel exploring the roles of women and a woman who rejects them (in a more strange, allegorical way) in South Korea. And a novel where EVERYBODY has identity issues. The first one may not necessarily count for #weirdathon, but the other two SO DO.

Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy by Karen Abbott
Publisher: Harper. July 2014.
Genre: Nonfiction
Source: Library Audiobook
Pages: 513


ADD TO GOODREADS

BUY FROM INDIEBOUND

BUY FROM BOOK DEPOSITORY

War, like politics, was men’s work, and women were supposed to be among its victims, not its perpetrators. Women’s loyalty was assumed, regarded as a prime attribute of femininity itself.

As someone who's super scared of nonfiction and who hates reading about wars, I was nervous about this book. But when I heard that Karen Abbott was coming to town, I decided it was time to give this book a chance. Everybody who has read it loved it and the subject matter certainly sounded interesting. Badass women undercover?? Sign me up. I've just always had trouble with history, for whatever reason. Abbott makes Civil War history so interesting and accessible, without dumbing it down. All of the women included were incredible in what they were willing to do either for their sides of the war.

Something I really liked was how Abbott doesn't present those who fought on the Confederate side of things like villains. She just presented the facts and the personalities; what the women did without judgement. No side was glorified, every woman flawed and incredible in their own way. Also, when I saw Abbott speak she described one of the women, Belle Boyd, as a mixture of Sarah Palin and Miley Cyrus, which is SO ACCURATE. If that doesn't make you want to know more about these women, I don't know what will.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang
Publisher: Hogarth. February 2016.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Source: Bought new
Pages: 192



ADD TO GOODREADS

BUY FROM INDIEBOUND

BUY FROM BOOK DEPOSITORY

Everything starts to feel unfamiliar. As if I've come up to the back of something. Shut up behind a door without a handle. Perhaps I'm only now coming face-to-face with the thing that has always been here. It's dark. Everything is being snuffed out in the pitch-black darkness.

It's so hard for me not to give this four stars, because eeeeeverybody else loved it. But I don't at all feel comfortable giving it a solid four. I think I got caught in a hype trap a little bit. Everybody who read this heralded it as super disturbing and weird. So I was expecting the most disturbing book ever. Much to my dismay, it was only sort of disturbing. This story about a South Korean woman who gives up eating meat due to a violent dream she had is definitely interesting.

As she herself becomes more and more like a plant, and the book jumps to new narrators across relatively big spans of time separating the book into three parts, it definitely gets progressively stranger. I really appreciate what Kang has to say about conformity, women, and mental illness in South Korea. At the same time, though, I wasn't blown away by how the story was told. It felt like it lost steam a little bit when it had some excellent opportunities to get really unsettling and pack a punch. That being said, I did like a quieter ending -- but the second part of the novel was slow and the weird sex stuff was not nearly weird enough. That might be a personal problem, though.

Mislaid by Nell Zink
Publisher: Ecco. May 2015.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Source: Library Audiobook
Pages: 242



ADD TO GOODREADS

BUY FROM INDIEBOUND

BUY FROM BOOK DEPOSITORY

Besides, adulthood is never something girls grow into. It is something they have thrust upon them, menstruation being only the first of many two-edged swords subsumed under the rubric “becoming a woman,” all of them occasions to stay home from school and weep.

Mislaid is a complicated novel, but I was so delighted to see that it had more of a structured narrative than The Wallcreeper did. I don't even know how to describe it. A gay professor and a lesbian student bone a lot, get married, have two kids, then the wife runs away, taking her little girl with her. To hide from her husband, Peggy/Meg and her daughter take up the identities of two deceased African Americans and live in poverty passing as black despite being very white. Shenanigans ensue, but like in the most intellectual sense.

The characters are all ridiculous, the plot is ridiculous, but it is soooo smart and funny. Zink does not hold back in her social commentary, and I'm glad she goes so boldly into the absurd while looking at identity. Having read The Wallcreeper, which was a bit of a narrative clusterfuck, I was pretty satisfied with the ending of her second novel. Granted, when you look back at it once you're done, you'll wonder why certain events and characters were included at all. Overall, though, it was pretty entertaining and it definitely makes you think.

Review: The Shore by Sara Taylor

The Shore by Sara Taylor
Publisher: Hogarth. May 26, 2015
Pages: 320
Genre: Literary fiction
Source: Publisher
First Line: When news of the murder breaks I'm in Matthew's buying chicken necks so my little sister Renee and I can go crabbing.


ADD TO GOODREADS

BUY FROM INDIEBOUND

BUY FROM BOOK DEPOSITORY

We are one of three islands, off the coast of Virginia and just south of Maryland, trailing out into the Atlantic Ocean like someone's dripped paint.

The first chapter of this book absolutely blew me away and the rest of the book did not disappoint. If you're at all interested in dark, gritty Southern Gothic literature, or perhaps think you could be but have been put off by how male-dominated those stories tend to be, grab this immediately. And if you want a little dose of magical realism, too, you're in the right place. I waited a couple weeks to read this after acquiring it, and I regret it.

The Shore is an interesting book, in that each chapter focuses on a different character (though sometimes narrators recur) and each chapter jumps to a different year, sometimes up to 100 years in difference. But the common thread is that they all focus on families, and particularly the tough and fascinating women, who inhabit a group of islands off the shore of Virginia. And boy does Sara Taylor know how to evoke a sense of place. The marshland these families have populated for years is both desolate and enchanting. Taylor's writing is absolutely stunning and I loved just soaking in how real and rich her descriptions were.

Behind her, the marsh stretches silver and gray and bright lime green, veined with creeks the reflect the blue of the sky, out to the gold smudge of barrier islands and white smudge of breakers at the horizon.

Taylor is also extraordinary at writing characters. Each one was intriguing and different. Sometimes at the beginning of a story, you had no idea who you were watching, but you could begin to recognize people from earlier just based on how they felt. One character that was vaguely mentioned in one story could be the main character of the next one. It was a lot of fun taking notes and trying to keep track of how all these people were related, because they all were in some way, and it added a layer of depth and interaction that many books don't achieve.

It's worth noting that this book is really intense. Beautiful, but intense, and it goes to very dark places. Anything that you imagine might happen in a rural, isolated, run-down set of island towns does. There's violence, crime, drugs, domestic abuse, child abuse, sexual abuse, and rape. I think all of it was important to read and it doesn't feel gratuitous, but it is worth mentioning.

I loved this book. Well, I loved all but the last chapter of this book, which felt unnecessary. But I'm fully behind every other chapter. Even if you think you don't need to read this book, you do. I'm beyond excited to see what Sara Taylor does in the future.

She'd reached out her hands, like he'd shown her, and felt the breeze between her fingers like long strands of dried grass, only this time she felt it in her mind, too, as if her head was an empty room with all the windows open and the breeze was wandering through it. She'd grabbed hold and twisted, and the breeze twirled in on itself, picking up the cut grass on the road, spinning a confused chicken around a few times, then straightening back out.

Outlandishness Rating: 8/10

Ok, I didn't really touch on much of the magical realism, but it is there and it is SO magical. I love how it's just kind of integrated without trying to explain it too much. Also, when I said there can be differences of 100 years between chapters? It definitely goes into the future a couple times. Those stories show a grimmer future. A little bit literary apocalyptic, akin to Station Eleven or Cloud Atlas. It's so good. Except for the last chapter, but we really don't have to talk about that.