Emily Robbins
Auteur van A Word for Love: A Novel
Werken van Emily Robbins
Tagged
Algemene kennis
- Geslacht
- female
- Woonplaatsen
- Chicago, Illinois, USA
Brownsville, Texas, USA - Opleiding
- Swarthmore College (BA)
Washington University in St. Louis (MA) - Prijzen en onderscheidingen
- Fulbright Fellowship
- Korte biografie
- [from Penguin Random House website]
Emily Robbins is the author of the extraordinary novel A Word for Love, and she has lived and worked across the Middle East and North Africa. From 2007 to 2008, she was a Fulbright Fellow in Syria, where she studied religion and language with a women's mosque movement and lived with the family of a leading intellectual. Robbins holds a BA from Swarthmore College and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, and and in 2016 she received a second Fulbright, to study in Jordan. She lives in Chicago and Brownsville, Texas.
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This was disappointing, for a few reasons but mainly because I see such potential in this book. Syria is not exactly a place that a lot of novels are set in, or TV show or movies dare to explore. So this interested me because of how rare it is. I was expecting to get a glimpse of Syrian culture in the midst of a romantic tale. There was some of that, but the story itself in my opinion wasn't executed well.
While reading the story felt disorganized, all over the place. It was like reading someone's jumbled thoughts and life experiences, which to be fair this sort of is, but I couldn't get attached to anything, every time I started to get into the story I was ripped away from it to observe something else. Which lead to me getting bored, which in turn made reading each page more difficult.
Another oddity I noticed was that the dialogue at times seemed awkward and unnatural. It reminded me of playing a Japanese video game from the 90's that was loosely translated into English, it just felt off, like if it was said in its original language it would make sense but in English it doesn't. This often pops up when Adel is talking to his parents, but also when we are meant to feel his pain for not being able to be with the woman he loves, the awkward dialogue destroys these moments.
For the most part I didn't really get to know the characters enough to say it I liked them or not, that could be the disorganization's effect. Everybody seemed okay, but the person who I couldn't stand was Adel, a character who was apart of one of the love stories in this novel. Throughout the novel his love was compared to ancient love story about a man you couldn't have the woman he loved, he was a character you should feel bad for, but in Adel's case that fell flat. Adel came off as obsessive and pathetic, the begging and pleading made me hate him. His behavior alone was huge reason I couldn't really get into the story.
Overall I can't say I recommend this book, I do feel like I bashed this book into the ground and I hate that. I don't like saying so many bad things about a book I know takes a very long time to write, but I have to be honest. Though there are a lot of things I don't like, there are beautiful sentiments of love, family, and culture (which I love) scattered throughout this book, I just wish they were enough to outweigh the bad.… (meer)
While reading the story felt disorganized, all over the place. It was like reading someone's jumbled thoughts and life experiences, which to be fair this sort of is, but I couldn't get attached to anything, every time I started to get into the story I was ripped away from it to observe something else. Which lead to me getting bored, which in turn made reading each page more difficult.
Another oddity I noticed was that the dialogue at times seemed awkward and unnatural. It reminded me of playing a Japanese video game from the 90's that was loosely translated into English, it just felt off, like if it was said in its original language it would make sense but in English it doesn't. This often pops up when Adel is talking to his parents, but also when we are meant to feel his pain for not being able to be with the woman he loves, the awkward dialogue destroys these moments.
For the most part I didn't really get to know the characters enough to say it I liked them or not, that could be the disorganization's effect. Everybody seemed okay, but the person who I couldn't stand was Adel, a character who was apart of one of the love stories in this novel. Throughout the novel his love was compared to ancient love story about a man you couldn't have the woman he loved, he was a character you should feel bad for, but in Adel's case that fell flat. Adel came off as obsessive and pathetic, the begging and pleading made me hate him. His behavior alone was huge reason I couldn't really get into the story.
Overall I can't say I recommend this book, I do feel like I bashed this book into the ground and I hate that. I don't like saying so many bad things about a book I know takes a very long time to write, but I have to be honest. Though there are a lot of things I don't like, there are beautiful sentiments of love, family, and culture (which I love) scattered throughout this book, I just wish they were enough to outweigh the bad.… (meer)
Prijzen
Statistieken
- Werken
- 2
- Leden
- 52
- Populariteit
- #307,430
- Waardering
- 3.6
- Besprekingen
- 3
- ISBNs
- 7
I have such mixed feelings about this one. It's got a lot going for it. The setting is interesting, and there's a fair amount of thematic stuff about language, which always appeals to me. And the writing is nice. Not flowery, and not full of vivid metaphor or imagery, really, but with a flow and a rhythm that's just really pretty. The thing is, though, that for much of the novel the very prettiness of the writing was oddly alienating to me, like a constant barrier of artificiality between me and the characters that kept me from being able to think of them as real people talking about real things, rather than as constructs being used by the author purely to say the right things at the right time to give the prose that nice flow.
The novel is also basically an extended meditation on the subject of love, and I must confess, I do not have nearly enough romance in my soul for that to move me the way the author clearly intends. Indeed, my reaction to the lovers here, at least for quite a while, was what it often is with love stories of this kind: a desire to roll my eyes at them and tell them, "You're not in love. You barely know each other."
So for quite a while, my main thought about the book was that while I appreciated some of what it was doing, and while I was certain it would be the perfect read for someone, someone more on the author's wavelength, it was just kind of leaving me cold.
But then I realized, as I read on, that it was starting to work for me more and more. The characters were starting to feel more like real people, and I started to care about them. The romance began to seem interestingly nuanced and to feel less idealized and more human. It still wasn't exactly gripping me, but it was doing a lot more for me, and I started revising my opinion of it steadily upwards.
...and then it culminated in an event so contrived, so cliche, and so casually tossed-off that it all kind of fell apart for me in the last few pages. Sigh.… (meer)