Saturday, January 14, 2006

Marine Life by Linda Svendsen

It's odd, I can't quite make up my mind what I thought of this book. The characters are dysfunctional and not terribly sympathetic. The book can't seem to decide whether it's a novel, or a series of short stories about the same characters, or maybe something else entirely - at any rate, the narrative is oddly disjointed, with events related in a detached way and out of chronological order. Adele, the narrator, reminisces about her childhood, growing up the youngest of four children in a working-class Vancouver family. A picture slowly emerges of the relationships she has with her siblings, her mother, her stepfather, her husband and her children. Nothing really seems to happen and even when it looks like something it about to, the story abruptly switches to something else, and the moment is lost. Even the last part of the book, which has hints about the darkness of Adele's sister Irene's seemingly happy family life, doesn't really go anywhere with the hints. I find books like this rather irritating - all these little ideas thrown together in a way that is obviously supposed to make you think and try to work out for yourself what you believe happened to the characters. The trouble is that I'm not sure I really care, but that I had to read this book in order to write an essay for an English class - it was either this or D. H. Lawrence, which I'm putting off as long as possible. :-P

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hilarious... I just had to read this AND DH Lawrence (sons and Lovers) for an english class (and compare the two...)

Anonymous said...

Me too, I think it is safe to say we were in the same class...

Anonymous said...

Holy, was it Eng101 at SFU?
Me too!

Anonymous said...

Wow, here I am three years later googling Linda Svendsen for an essay comparing her to Lawrence in ENGL 101 at SFU :P bizarre. I agree with your review btw. Very difficult to sympathize when the novel stumbles all over the place and the protagonist seems to make all the wrong choices.

Anonymous said...

Ha, this is kind of funny because I am also writing the same paper for engl 101 at sfu and i googled marine life to see what would come up for some help.

Anonymous said...

haha i am doing the exact same thing! i read marine life and if i was asked to summarize what it was about i can't even put a sentence together. the plot was everywhere and was just to mumble jumble.

Anonymous said...

i also have eng 101 at sfu.. and have to write about it.. i think these two horrid books are on the curriculum... that's why we all have to google it!

Vicki said...

I keep almost cracking up over all these comments about my humble blog post, years after reading this book; but then I suddenly get depressed when I realize how very long this exact same curriculum has been taught to so many poor unsuspecting SFU students. You guys have my sympathy when it comes to the book selection in this course (except for "Regeneration", which I thought was extremely good).

Anonymous said...

Yes, Regeneration was definitely one of the better ones. Alice Munro, however, was NOT...

Anonymous said...

Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!

Anonymous said...

it isn't a novel. it's a short story cycle / composite. this is directed at some of the comments.