An electrifying novel of blood ties, online identities, and our tormented efforts to connect in the digital age. At twenty-three, Alice Hare leaves England for New York. She falls in love with Manhattan, and becomes fixated on Mizuko Himura, an intriguing Japanese writer whose life has strange parallels to her own. As Alice closes in on Mizuko, her 'internet twin', realities multiply and fact and fiction begin to blur. The relationship between the two women exposes a tangle of lies and sexual encounters. Three families collide as Alice learns that the swiftest answer to an ancient question - where do we come from? - can now be found online. (amazon)

between 2.5 and 3. this is really well written but a bit overlong and dense. (i'm not sure what i'd take out, though.) it's not hard to read, but there are a lot of details that pop back up later, and if you don't remember exactly what she was talking about, you miss a connection or a point the author is making. there's a lot in this book, and it's interesting both from a story perspective and a social commentary perspective, but i'm not sure i enjoyed it for the first half or so. it got intense and fast then, and lots from the first half became more clear, but i think readers would be better served with a more chronological account. or at least not jumping back and forth, a week here or there, again and again. i'm not sure what purpose that served. maybe just to disorient us, like alice was feeling. (the time jumps aren't typical, and certain periods of time are repeated a few times, so it's not just back and forth between two periods of time; it's kind of all over the place.) her statements about how social media is in our life, and how it jumbles what should be shown outwardly versus inwardly (and how people handle that messiness) were the most interesting part of the book for me. ("Man had such impenetrable means to stop the outside world from coming in, and so little to stop our inside world from surging out...") the way that writing something down (in a letter, sure, but specifically on social media) makes it real, and erasing it therefore makes it go away, or erases that part of someone's life and identity. there was lots more - on identity in particular, on adoption, on stalking/obsession, on relationship, on responsibility, on genetics, on sex, on physics, on events happening in early/mid 2016. i feel like i'd like this book more if i read it again, but i don't know that i want to. and i wouldn't say that i enjoyed the read, but it was interesting and lends to good discussion. ( )

I read it for the Lesbian Book group. We all agreed, that it was NOT a lesbian book. Most people did not like it, and disliked all the characters. I wasn't sure, going into the group, how I felt about it. I knew that I didn't exactly like it, the characters were not very likeable, and the book somewhat creeped me out and interfered with my sleep Monday night (when I finished it, late at night, because I wanted it read for the book group.)

The book centers around a young woman, Alice Hare, who is dealing with a lot of complicated identity issues and who is very unconnected to other people. Through the internet, she develops a stalker-ish relationship with a Japanese woman writer, Mizuko. Alice does some really not-good things in pursuit of this relationship.

In the end, I decided that it was a good book. Lots of room for thought, and I figured anything that made me feel that uncomfortable, must have had some depth. The book does have a non-linear and sometimes repetitive format. That bothered some people, I thought it was a reflection of how Alice moved through the world, and so I was OK with it. ( )

Sympathy is virtually impossible to describe, I'm struggling to do so even to myself and it was a struggle I grappled with all the way through. In the end Sudjic's own narrator says it best when she characterises her tale as a “love story that is mostly made up, from memories that are mostly false, between people who were mainly not there.”

Alice Hare has never really known herself. Adopted as a baby she knows little of her birth parents except that her mother is dead and her father in prison. Her adoptive family also offers little stability, her mother telling and retelling, embellishing and rewriting the story of their history so often after her husband disappears that neither mother nor daughter have any real sense what is true. In an attempt to escape what feels like a vortex of uncertainty and parental neediness Alice relocates to New York and the home of her cancer-stricken grandmother Silvia.

As Alice attempts to find her way and herself in a new city and a new life, her perceptions and expectations constantly shaped by the "lives" she observes online she stumbles across Mizuko Himura, a Japanese heiress, freelance writer and constant user of social media. Alice becomes obsessed with the connections and parallels she comes to see between her history and Mizuko's. Parallels that take on increasingly irrational significance until she manages to engineer an entry into Mizuko's real life. This is stalking in the internet age and it is not pretty as Alice becomes increasingly obsessed, harnessing all the knowledge she has amassed online into manipulating Mizuko into friendship by aping her like, her opinions and playing to her character. Alice in an extremely complex and unsettling character, incredibly self-involved and yet almost entirely lacking in self-awareness and despite her disturbing penchant for manipulation she is almost endearingly naive to the fact that Mizuko's consciously-curated online identity is no more genuine than her own.

Despite Alice's flaws, her obsessive and possessive tendencies, her selfishness, her guile it is testament to Sudjic's talent that she somehow forces a little sympathy, unpicking these unpleasant characteristics in a way that reveals the sad fragility and vulnerability that underpin her neuroses.

The narrative structure is really quite mind-bogglingly clever. Alice's fragmentary, disjointed and unreliable reminiscences deliberately invoking those long, convoluted "rabbit-holes" (her name is no accident) with which anyone who has ever accidentally lost hours of their life to the internet will be disturbingly familiar. We follow Alice through many, often fascinating, digressions, from particle physics to the 2011 Japanese tsunami to the disappearance of flight MH370. These labyrinthine tangents draw us in an out of the main narrative forging unexpected connections and consequences that make Alice's bizarre focus on coincidences seem less and less absurd. Because Sympathy is all about our lives online and how the constant presence of undiluted, unsubstantiated data can potentially affect and warp our opinions, our thinking and our identities, you find yourself becoming just a little Alice.

Sympathy is an impressive, immersive and ultimately addictive experience, disorientating and irresistible and Olivia Sudjic is, without a doubt, a young author to watch. ( )

As an experiment, I'm going to share my thoughts on this book (as of page 80 in my reading progress) in lieu of a formal review:

So far in this book, I’m not sure what’s happening when. I’m about 80 pages in and I can tell it is quite the deep dive. Sudjic is dealing unabashedly with whatever subject comes across her psyche in the course of this story that feels as surreal as it does painfully biographical. But it is fiction, treading on undergirding themes of obsession and our modern-day digital lives. It’s making me question other new writing I’ve read. Why do other books so nonchalantly gloss over the backlit details of our increasingly virtual world? Why don’t other authors even seem to sense the impending tsunami of virtual reality as it sends tremors shivering up to our coastline?

For what it’s worth, the unflinching and deft metaphor that Sudjic is weaving throughout this story is giving me pause. Swiping and tapping and pressing into squares of reality. It’s more than pause that it’s giving me, it’s shivers, and a sneaking, lurking fear is being shaped into existence. I think if I don’t make at least some effort to separate myself from the online world, I’m doomed to succumb to it, to fall into the pit that is filled with the failures of my generation. I want to be separate from the ubiquity of the Internet somehow. I want to exist as a self, an identity apart from that which is created and molded and crafted with pixellated detail online. I want to live in touching, tasting, breathing reality, not under the light of an artificial apple, glowing to the rhythm of false life.

Right, so maybe I’m not thinking about the book. But the book is making me think about life. I hesitate to keep reading, because I know it will stretch me in a way that is painfully uncomfortable. But then, I know she wrote it on purpose this way. I want that. I want to feel the crushing weight of Sudjic’s world through the eyes of her broken, unreliable narrator. I want to delve into her world because the truth is, it’s my world, too. ( )