A Separation

Not sure what my takeaway is supposed to be — none of the characters had personalities, emotions. detached yet meticulous voice and slow pace. Felt like main character was talking in circles.

'Imagination, after all, costs nothing, it's the living that is the harder part.' this! book! consists of all the things i love and seek in my reading experience. Kitamura's meditation on marriage, separation, fidelity AND grief are raw, sharp and yet there is such detachedness with how she put forward her prose.

** spoiler alert ** ***2.5 STARS*** The description on the back of the book is very misleading. On the back, the blurbs say that it is a suspenseful novel that is between a missing husband and a wife and they both play mind games against one another. This doesn't happen. Instead, the wife (who doesn't care at all about her husband nor does she want to be in Greece but she goes there anyway?) chills out in the hotel where her husband was reportedly last seen and doesn't really put any effort into really finding him. Then all of a sudden, he turns up dead and there was no mind games being played or any suspense throughout the entire novel. One thing that really frustrated me throughout the book was the characters and their emotions. The only character who really had any true emotions was Maria, the "mistress" (if you count her as a mistress since they were going through a divorce when Christopher died). But then again, she really only showed emotion towards the beginning of the novel and by the end, she is seemingly just like the rest of the characters. The wife didn't show any emotions toward her husband throughout the entire novel, nor did she really show any emotion toward her then-boyfriend when he was showing concern for her. At first, I thought she was just going to be an unlikable character but the other characters had the same emotions toward one another and the situation at hand so everything seemed bland and repetitive. I also didn't understand why the wife was so upset and jealous of the fact that her husband was sleeping and flirting with other women when he went to Greece when she was literally dating and LIVING WITH Yvan. How does that make sense at all? The ending also seemed really rushed. It seems as there is a time jump that isn't explained, but the wife seems like she now cares that her husband has passed. She explains this as a different stage of grief, but I don't believe that because she didn't show any love or appreciation toward her husband throughout the entire book, so this made her seem fake and just feel bad because she was able to have his money even though they were going through a divorce at the time. The "reveal" (if you would even consider this a reveal) shows that Yvan, the boyfriend, was the killer and he did it because he didn't want to wait for them to have a divorce. This would make sense if the author expanded on the character, but Yvan was only mentioned once before and the wife didn't even talk about him after that. As a whole, if the characters were expanded on and the motivations were explained more, it would be easier to like this book. A positive for this book is how easy it is to read and to understand. The author chose to not include quotation marks for dialogue, which usually bothers me because it could make it confusing and hard to follow along, but for this one, it was fine and easy to understand. If the characters were expanded on and the plot made more sense toward the end I believe I would've liked it.

I listened to this on audio, which I don't think was optimal for a quieter novel like this.

interesting premise, hypnotic writing...until it wasn't and i honestly got so bored, it was kind of hard to finish interesting insight, though, on relationships/marriage/intimacy

Can reviewers just agree that all books with female protagonists and the slightest hint of suspense or mystery need not be marketed as the next Gone Girl? I can't remember where I heard this book compared to that, but it's off-base. A Separation follows an unnamed narrator's search for her husband after she receives a call from her mother-in-law. The mother-in-law doesn't know that the husband and wife have been living apart, which makes his disappearance even more complicated. This book is beautifully written and kept my attention throughout and I'm glad it was relatively short, as I don't think I would have had the patience for it if it was any longer. The language carried me through the majority of the book but I found myself feeling frustrated in the end. I'm not sure if I had such a problem with it because I was expecting a mystery or even a little bit quicker of a pace. The last few chapters definitely dragged for me, but the narrator is so well-spoken throughout I almost didn't mind.