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Our Wives Under The Sea: 'A gothic…
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Our Wives Under The Sea: 'A gothic fairy tale, sublime' – Florence Welch (urspr publ 2022; utgåvan 2022)

av Julia Armfield (Författare)

MedlemmarRecensionerPopularitetGenomsnittligt betygOmnämnanden
7924527,727 (3.8)40
"Leah is changed. Months earlier, she left for a routine expedition, only this time her submarine sank to the sea floor. When she finally surfaces and returns home, her wife Miri knows that something is wrong. Barely eating and lost in her thoughts, Leah rotates between rooms in their apartment, running the taps morning and night. As Miri searches for answers, desperate to understand what happened below the water, she must face the possibility that the woman she loves is slipping from her grasp. By turns elegiac and furious, wry and heartbreaking, Our Wives Under the Sea is a genre-bending exploration of the depths of love and grief at the heart of a marriage"--… (mer)
Medlem:Larou
Titel:Our Wives Under The Sea: 'A gothic fairy tale, sublime' – Florence Welch
Författare:Julia Armfield (Författare)
Info:Picador (2022), 241 pages
Samlingar:Ditt bibliotek, Ska läsas, E-books
Betyg:
Taggar:Horror Fiction

Verksinformation

Our Wives Under The Sea av Julia Armfield (2022)

  1. 00
    I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself av Marisa Crane (Aquila)
  2. 00
    The Book of M av Peng Shepherd (Charon07)
    Charon07: Both are at heart love stories and, while they contain fantastical elements, might be disappointing to those who are expecting science fiction or horror. But if you want sad, strange, and beautiful stories that explore what it is we love when we love someone, these are both good choices.… (mer)
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» Se även 40 omnämnanden

Visa 1-5 av 42 (nästa | visa alla)
3.5 stars actually. the ocean is scary! and 'when the grief is inevitable' is also scary!! ( )
  griller02 | Mar 18, 2024 |
this was such a stunning exploration of love and loss and grief and mourning someone who is right in front of you with a bit of (lovecraft, annihilation, the shape of water- i've seen all these associations and agree) horror. julia's writing is gorgeous, she gives you the kind of sentences you just have to sit with, read over and over and appreciate. the story is a slow wade, and once you start receiving answers it's going to be just enough to infer and imagine but that's all you're going to get. AND I LOVE THAT SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! this is for the ambiguous plot lovers, hill house enjoyers, and horror fans that love to leave feeling completely emotionally wrung out rather than with a racing heart. ( )
  bisexuality | Mar 3, 2024 |
Very slow paced and very strange…like I can’t think of a single other book like this one. People keep comparing it to “Annihilation” and while I understand the comparison I disagree; “Our Wives Under the Sea” is much more introspective and tender, and overall I think the characters are much more likable. Those prose here is really lovely and evocative, and it fits the story wonderfully. Although I’m not sure who exactly I’d recommend this to, I’m so glad I read it!! A definite standout, if only for how unique it is. ( )
1 rösta deborahee | Feb 23, 2024 |
A strange, unsettling, weird, sad love story about the things we’ll do and the things we’ll sacrifice for the one we love. The fantastical/science fictional elements are surreal, dreamlike. I was reminded of those nightmares where something awful is happening and there’s nothing you can do about it—you can’t find your house, you can’t remember something essential, your teeth are falling out—when in real life you’d just ask for directions or see a dentist. So the actual plot is nightmarishly nonsensical. The real strength of this book is the myriad tiny everyday details that make up a loving relationship, that make up our concept of the one we love: the small gestures cherished, fragments of conversations remembered, even the fights and annoyances. It’s a love story, above all. ( )
2 rösta Charon07 | Feb 3, 2024 |
I really, truly wanted to like this book, because the premise sounded so unique, but it fell so flat in so many ways that I ended up skimming the last 40%. For all the good things I've heard about this novel so far, I never expected to be so disappointed. (Spoilers to follow, along with 4 exclusive excerpts of stoopid, free of charge!)

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1 - Characterization.

Miri is a whiny, self-pitying imbecile whose tendency toward neglect qualifies as abuse, and Leah is a marine biology Wikipedia page. That's about all there is to them. And they managed to get married?

-- Miri was the first to grate on my nerves because she just would NOT stop having fond flashbacks of their relationship interspersed with pity parties about how difficult it is to carry on a normal life... while her literal WIFE is literally falling apart right in front of her face! And I'm supposed to believe she truly loves Leah? Coming right up, folks: one loved one who can't get her head out of her ass long enough to save yours from becoming sea foam! I can already hear the Centre employees applauding in the background. Wait, they were supposed to be the main antagonists...?

-- Leah had no personality. I really, really wanted to like her to make up for my growing hatred of Miri, but I just couldn't - there was hardly anything of note I could even begin to like. Most of Leah's chapters consist of (1) flashbacks - childhood flashbacks, Miri flashbacks, please stop with the flashbacks, and (2) marine biology and submarine facts. The latter is my only takeaway from this book, and I'm sorry to say that reading Thor Heyerdahl's Wikipedia page (which appeared to be summarized in one of Leah's lectures) held my interest longer than this novel.

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2 - Plotting/Pacing.

-- The entire plot can be summarized as follows: Wife 1 comes home, exhibits signs of no longer being human, disintegrates into water, and Wife 2 allows it to happen. I think we can safely retitle this book as Our Neglected Wives Under the Sea.

-- I know this might not have been the author's intention, but couldn't Miri have tried a little harder to follow up on the Centre in the months since Leah disappeared? I mean, doesn't she love and care about Leah, and if she doesn't (though we're constantly reminded that she does), shouldn't she at least try to find closure? Juna certainly tried for her sister Jelka, who disappeared on the same dive as Leah, and I'd expect at least that much from a relative, let alone a spouse.

-- The Centre was unfortunately such a background detail, and their plot was way too easy to see through. They were set up as a shady mystery facility, which initially contributed to the suspense factor, so why couldn't we get more answers at the end? But no, they just wink out of existence, and partly because Miri does absolutely nothing beyond calling their receptionist, and somehow not even remembering crucial details about where they're located, etc.

-- Leah's chapters lag significantly behind Miri's in terms of timeline, and it's only late in the book where we realize Leah somehow wrote everything down while stranded on the sub, while regularly blacking out and forgetting large chunks of her human existence. As a result, it was a bit hard to believe she could spout facts Wikipedia-style during this time, let alone write down sequential events coherently. And Juna - persistent little Juna who nearly came to blows with Centre employees trying to find her sister - was given Leah's manuscript and couldn't track down Miri to provide it until the very end? Am I supposed to assume foul play? (And Miri needed that manuscript to finally realize that Leah hadn't disappeared for 6 months by choice? Send help.)

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3 - Specially Selected Stupid Moments.

Exhibit A. You Did WHAT?
-- LEAH: (Magically turns up after a 6-month disappearance. Has no trace of her former personality. Behaves like a shell of a human being.)
-- MIRI: (Aside) Why aren't you telling me anything? Where did you disappear to for 6 months? Why did you abandon me? Why can't we have a normal conversation?
-- LEAH: (Slowly turns into a translucent watery creature)
-- MIRI: How could you behave like this? I can't even anymore. (Scrubs scale residue from the bathtub and proceeds with her day)

-

Exhibit B. The Mega-Effective Sea-Legs Cure
-- LEAH: (Loses feeling in hands and feet. Struggles to walk and breathe on land. Only feels comfortable when submerged in salt water.)
-- MIRI: Hey honey, let's GO FOR A WALK!! (Grabs LEAH and hauls her outside, where LEAH proceeds to faceplant on a hill. Someone offers to help, and MIRI refuses. Everything seems to be in order.)

-

Exhibit C. Nappy Time
-- LEAH: (Struggling to breathe as she sinks into her salt water bath)
-- MIRI: Hey honey, COME TO BED WITH ME!! PLEASE!!! (Grabs LEAH and tries to lift her bodily from the tub)
-- LEAH: (Struggling to breathe, struggling to stand)
-- MIRI: (Lowers LEAH back into the tub) I don't know what's going on anymore. My life sucks.

-

Exhibit D. The Bullshit Meter Asks Politely, Am I Chopped Liver?
(Enter three researchers, LEAH, MATTEO, and JELKA. They have been stranded in a submarine in the deep sea.)
-- MATTEO: (Finds the comms dead, but CO2 scrubbers intact.)
-- LEAH: (Finds an almost inexhaustible supply of food.)
-- JELKA: (Finds that the fresh water conversion facilities are still working.)
-- ALL: We're stranded, the power was cut without warning, but all life support systems are intact. Everything seems to be in order.
(The researchers sit down patiently and await rescue. Six months pass, during which JELKA and MATTEO both deteriorate mentally. In his last moments of lucidity, MATTEO makes a startling discovery.)
-- MATTEO: I don't think they were telling us the truth about this mission...
(He shuts down, unable to utter another word.)

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To wrap this up, I don't think I'll be reading another debut "trending" novel for a long while. So far, all the ones I've attempted have closely resembled Swiss cheese in the number of holes that come with. At least classics have stood the test of time, even if they're less popular than they used to be. If you made it this far and happen to agree, thanks for reading and better luck with book hunting! ( )
  Myridia | Jan 19, 2024 |
Visa 1-5 av 42 (nästa | visa alla)
Death and the ocean beguile Julia Armfield’s debut novel Our Wives Under the Sea, a work that plumbs with striking subtlety what it feels like to live with the mystery of both. The book explores the transformations that test intimacy, ones that are perhaps even more unsettling than the sure fact of death....Blending elements of horror, gothic, and realism, Our Wives Under the Sea takes the bottom of the ocean as a speculative topography on which to explore the terrors of the mysterious gravitational pull we exert on each other....The ocean intrigues us for the same reasons love does: the challenge of knowing someone to their depths seduces us despite — or maybe because of — its seeming impossibility. Armfield’s work is an elliptical, leaky manual on how to live in the half-known life: the in-betweens of intimacy, the flux of not knowing, and the waves of surrealism that inundate the everyday.
 
This is a novel in which one of the narrators says, “For a long time nothing happened,” and she means it. There is little movement here in the fetid atmosphere that drifts between convalescence and hospice.... “Panic is a misuse of oxygen,” Leah warns, but by the climax of this eerie novel, I was misusing it with abandon.
tillagd av Lemeritus | ändraWashington Post, Ron Charles (betalvägg) (Jul 12, 2022)
 
A turn toward horror at the end will satisfyingly rachet up the tension for some readers but may discomfit others. Told in stunning language, Armfield’s heartrending story of two people forced apart by trauma is enough.
 
Gothic elements are knitted throughout (“The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness” goes the tantalising first sentence). Everything that happens on the surface has symbolic, metaphorical meaning beneath. Take Leah’s observation that “things can thrive in unimaginable conditions. All they need is the right sort of skin.” This appears to refer to sea creatures, but the word choice allows for a much wider meaning.... This mode of expression is ubiquitous throughout. The prose is reaching for something, but what? This might be a book about the sea, about depression, illness, grief....We collect information, but there is also the understanding that we can never “know enough to escape from the panic of not knowing”....Indeed, though the writing is relentlessly exacting, Our Wives Under the Sea tends towards the unknowable, which might also be synonymous with death or the uncanny. There is an almost spiritual endlessness to its quest. Like all good novels, it goes deep and then deeper again.
 
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Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.
Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!
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ELLEN BRODY: There's a clinical name for it, isn't there?
MARTIN BRODY: Drowning.
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For Rosalie, on dry land and elsewhere
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The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness.
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“I guess it must be weird,” she says—the sweet plum of her voice, the way her vowels seem to take up more space than the shape of her mouth allows—“living with someone again after such a long absence. I guess it must be weird,” she says, “having to share your space.”
The problem with relationships between women is that neither one of you is automatically the wronged party, which frankly takes a lot of the fun out of an argument.
Rather in the way that it's very easy to kill an orchid, it often seemed little short of inevitable.
Miri said this to me once: Every horror movie ends the way you know it will. If you're watching a movie about werewolves, you can be almost certain your hero will become one by the end. If you're watching a movie about vampires, same thing. Ghosts, too, I think, if the hero wasn't already a ghost to begin with. I thought about this a little, at the end of things.
I'm a Catholic, I said at one point, so I believe in punishment but not reward.
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"Leah is changed. Months earlier, she left for a routine expedition, only this time her submarine sank to the sea floor. When she finally surfaces and returns home, her wife Miri knows that something is wrong. Barely eating and lost in her thoughts, Leah rotates between rooms in their apartment, running the taps morning and night. As Miri searches for answers, desperate to understand what happened below the water, she must face the possibility that the woman she loves is slipping from her grasp. By turns elegiac and furious, wry and heartbreaking, Our Wives Under the Sea is a genre-bending exploration of the depths of love and grief at the heart of a marriage"--

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