Anna Burns

A Novel

Milkman

WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018 SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2019 SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2019 SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION 2019 'Blazing.' Daily Telegraph 'Outstanding.' New Statesman 'A triumph.' Guardian 'Utterly compelling.' Irish Times 'The best Booker winner in years.' Metro In an unnamed city, where to be interesting is dangerous, an eighteen-year-old woman has attracted the unwanted and unavoidable attention of a powerful and frightening older man, 'Milkman'. In this community, where suggestions quickly become fact, where gossip and hearsay can lead to terrible consequences, what can she do to stop a rumour once it has started? Milkman is persistent, the word is spreading, and she is no longer in control . . .

Lili

Chris Dailey

DNF. Could not get past the wall of text on each page, with a minimal narrative to drive it along. I'll give it credit for a unique approach, but it proved to be a deadly mix of challenging and uninteresting.

Laura Mauler

From the first page I was filled with rage and fear and contempt. Then about halfway through things started shifting, there were some unexpected turns, I was still afraid but the rage was less and the contempt was near gone. By the last page I was addicted, swooning, riding that what-an-awesome-book high.

Gavin

Unlikeable, admirable portrait of a diseased society, the disease signified by unbearable harassment of one of its young members. The book's unlikeable because it's realistic. In Burns' telling, 70s Ulster feels like ISIS in miniature, a taste of Maoist China: the complete infection of private life by horrible politics, slander, cruelty, and doom. The disease radiates out from the death squads and Gestapo fuckery of the "traditionalists" and the delusional gangster sociopathy, the kangaroo courts - the lash for women, and six-packs for men - of the "renouncers".

Decades of fear and vengeance bring out our worst, give psychopaths a foothold:

  To the [IRA] groupies too, it wasn't so much these men should be fighters for the cause as that they should be the particular individuals wielding substantial power and influence in the areas, They didn't have to be paramilitaries, didn't even have to be illegal, could have been anyone. It so happened though, that in the set-up of the time, in each of those totalitarian enclaves, it was the male paramilitaries who, more than anyone, ruled over the areas with final say...

He had to be leader, Number One, making her in turn Number One Attachment.



The sickest part of the book is the way that gossip feeds on itself, floats free of reality - her ordinary stalker accuses Maybe-girlfriend of "aggravated harassment"; she's seen "with" [being harrassed by] a Big Man, so she becomes tainted/anointed with his aweing disrespectability; later, after he threatens to kill her boyfriend, the grapevine instead has it that she'd "tried to evade retribution for cheating on him with a car mechanic". A rape of social standing, of identity.

Burns gives out great lines, poetic heft, to everyone, even vicious people like Ma and Milkman. 

  Why can’t you take on board you’re not wanted, that your advances are not to be accepted, that it’s thanks but no thanks? You mean nothing to us, we don’t even think of you and another thing, you can’t just act with impunity, carrying on as if it didn’thappen, as if you didn’t start this, as if you didn’t stir things up. You’re a cat – that’s right, you heard us, a cat – a double cat! We don’t think you’re up to the level of even being a cat. But don’t you push us so far because this is aggravated harassment



Maybe-girlfriend's own register is a little tiring, bright and arch and digressive (but not enough to keep the the pall of her surroundings lifted). It might be an attempt to balance out the setting with comically out-of-place lyricism, but if so it works strangely:

  'But understand, daughter,’ went on ma, ‘I'm not saying my rear cannot now fit in the chair because the chair's become too tight for it. It can still fit in. It’s just that now it encompasses a certain amount of extra inches or fractions of inches to which it has never acclimatised and which in the old days didn’t used to be.'
'I knew now, of course, what she was driving at, though unsure still how to respond.... My response therefore, should be comparable to her own words, should be of like tone and weight in order to acknowledge and to respect her older status, even her originality indelineating the depth of her rear condition in relation to the chair she was speaking of.



The Community hates the depressed and the upbeat ("shiny"), the chaste and the promiscuous, the deviation:

  And that was the trouble with the shiny people. Take a whole group of individuals who weren’t shiny, maybe a whole community, a whole nation, or maybe just a statelet immersed long-term on the physical and energetic planes in the dark mental energies; conditioned too, through years of personal and communal suffering, to be overladen with heaviness and grief and fear and anger – well, these people could not, not at the drop of a hat, be open to any bright shining button of a person stepping into their environment and shining upon them just like that... 

As for the environment, that too, would object, backing up the pessimism of its people, which was what happened where I lived where the whole place always seemed to be in the dark. It was as if the electric lights were turned off, always turned off, even though dusk was over so they should have been turned on yet nobody was turning them on and nobody noticed either, they weren’t on...

So shiny was bad, and 'too sad' was bad, and 'too joyous' was bad, which meant you had to go around not being anything; also not thinking, least not at top level, which was why everybody kept their private thoughts safe and sound in the recesses underneath.



I quite liked the purely-functional names - "maybe-boyfriend", "third-brother-in-law", "longest friend from primary school", "Somebody McSomebody", though I see it's not a popular methodology on here. I think "Milkman" is the only proper name in it. 

She belabours a good metaphor (the sunset from the front cover): even the colour of a beautiful sunset is an ideological matter, for these locals. They've a particular cached thought - "the sky is blue" - and refuse to let a fancy intellectual (a spirited French teacher) make them notice that the sky is currently anything but blue. Blatant wilful error in the face of decisive evidence, maintained to express one's identity: welcome to the species.

Reviewers call it funny, which it isn't really until Chapter Seven, until Milkman is gone and the Carry On-Tarantino part can kick off. There's this:

  Before Milkman, they had shot a binman, twobusdrivers, a road sweeper, a real milkman who was our milkman, then another person whodidn’t have any blue-collar or service-industry connections – all in mistake for Milkman. Thenthey shot Milkman. Then they played down the mistaken shootings while playing up theintended shooting, as if it had been Milkman and only Milkman they had shot all along.


and

  "You’re a female. He’s a male. You’re my sister-in-law and I don’t care how many of his family got murdered, he’s a bastard and would’ve been a bastard even if they hadn’t got murdered." They hadn’t got murdered. Only four had got murdered. The other two had been a suicide and an accidental death.


Very tiring but worthy overall.

Alistair James

Shreya Punj

The number of award this book has won--many.
The number of new words I learnt while reading this book--many.
The number of times I wanted to chuck this book at a wall--many.
The number of awards this book should have won--not so many.

I had high hopes for Milkman, and this state of optimistic naivete carried me through the first hundred pages. Then came Chapter 3 and I got confused--had I perhaps gone back a few pages? I rechecked, but no, I was indeed starting a new chapter but this sense of claustrophobic repetition was something I couldn't shake off. 

After 352 pages, one knows nothing concrete about Middle sister apart from what happens "to" her. Of course, this is a deliberate tool deployed by Burns to let the reader feel just how regimented the society we're reading about is. The malicious gossip, the insidious backtalk and preconceived notions attached to someone who gives off any hint of being "different" are all well captured, and so is Middle sister's growing frustrations at not being believed by her own Ma, at not being able to control her own narrative and at the acceptance of her agency being stripped away bit by bit. 

But other novels have done this too and they've done it well. The needless loquaciousness and the thesaurus-like quality of Burns's prose was just not worth it.

Ben Jenkins

Nelson Zagalo

"Milkman" é brilhante, mas não se oferece a todos do mesmo modo. Facilmente podemos encontrar quem deteste, como acontece com o crítico do New York Times, ou quem adore e lhe ofereça o Booker 2018. Na generalidade fala-se de um livro de difícil leitura, mas ser um livro que exige uma leitura mais lenta e atenta não tem nada que ver com ser difícil. Mais, comparando com outros fluxos de consciência, Joyce ou Woolf, é imensamente acessível, muito mais na linha de um bem-humorado Tristram Shandy. Mas se a escrita impressiona, é o ponto-de-vista interior, como se estivéssemos literalmente dentro da cabeça de uma adolescente de 18 anos que enfrenta um mundo feito de conflitos numa Irlanda nos anos 1970, que acaba a marcar-nos.

[ler com imagens e links:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...]

Anna Burns tinha 56 anos quando escreveu "Milkman", apenas o seu terceiro livro. Escrevia com dores de costas horríveis enquanto vagueava pela Inglaterra tentando pagar as dívidas e alimentando-se da caridade dos bancos alimentares. O manuscrito foi recusado por múltiplos editores, para depois ganhar o Booker, o maior prémio britânico, levando Burns a dizer que "Era bom sentir-se solvente". Admire-se a persistência e enorme resiliência da autora, para ver o seu talento reconhecido a caminho dos 60.

Raparigas preparando cocktails molotov. Derry, 1969

Sobre a sua escrita, posso apenas dizer que é imensamente virtuosa. Demonstra uma competência ao nível de Lobo Antunes, pela capacidade de manipular o texto como quem manipula a oralidade de um monólogo interior. O tom é certeiro, se Salinger nos oferece um Holden Caulfield com uns verdadeiros 16 anos, Burns oferece-nos uma verdadeira adolescente com 18 anos, sem nome, numa cidade também sem nome. Enquanto fala, esta sem nome, transporta-nos para o interior de uma teia pegajosa composta de um mundo psicologicamente denso, torrencial, perspicaz e previdente. 


Crianças assistem à queima de veículos anti-motins. Belfast 1976

A caracterização da protagonista é fundamental para o que Burns pretende dar a ver, ou melhor sentir, que é a tensão vivida numa cidade em guerra, em que ninguém confia em ninguém, menos ainda nas instituições dependentes do governo. Diz Burns, "vejo tudo como uma ficção sobre uma sociedade que vive sob extrema pressão, com a violência a longo prazo vista como a norma". Ao que se acrescenta um olhar profundamente feminino que dá conta das relações e expectativas sobre cada género nos idos anos 1970, numa sociedade profundamente conservadora. Não raras vezes somos impactados com descrições da protagonista como estando esta a ler nas entrelinhas o subtexto do que é dito pelos outros, nomeadamente comportamentos, olhares e trejeitos, tudo enfatizado pela enorme consciência das regras e pressões operadas pela sociedade nas suas diferentes facetas e relatadas como perfeita normalidade apesar do absurdo e do grotesco. 


Publicado, imagens e links, no VI:
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Sonja H

Stellt Euch vor, ihr taucht für einige Wochen in den Körper einer anderen Person ein. Ihr könnt nichts tun, nur ihren Gedanken zuhören, die ihr unkommentiert ertragen müsst.

So ergeht es einem beim Lesen von „Milkman“. Wir befinden uns sozusagen im Kopf einer 18-Jährigen, die Ende der 70er in Belfast lebt, was nie bewusst erwähnt wird, was man sich aber anhand der Erzählung und in Anbetracht der Nationalität der Autorin erschließen kann.

Auch ansonsten bleibt mehr ungesagt als gesagt. Die Personen sind namenlos und tragen nur symbolische Titel, politische Zustände und gesellschaftliche Probleme werden weitschweifig umschrieben – für alle, die es beim ersten Mal nicht verstanden haben, sogar mehrfach im Laufe der Geschichte.

Die Protagonistin bemüht sich, so weit wie möglich unter dem Radar ihrer Umgebung zu leben, zu der sie sich nicht stark zugehörig fühlt, deren Regeln sie allerdings in großen Teilen verinnerlicht hat.
Selbst als sie ungewollt ins Rampenlicht gerückt wird, verhält sie sich passiv und wird zum Spielball von Gerüchten.

Für mich war dies die Story einer etwas überheblichen Antiheldin, deren Schicksal mich bis zum Schluss nicht wirklich interessiert hat und deren Gedankenstrom mich lähmte und langweilte.

„Milkman“ mag stilsitisch ungewöhnlich sein und historische Ereignisse aus einer neuen Perspektive betrachten, aber dennoch konnte mich der Inhalt nicht begeistern.

rida

Bríd Brennan

Fraser Simons

While this is a very clever and effective—especially in the cast of characters being archetypes so it can be applied to basically any community/social structure—I found it retreaded ground too often. It felt like a point was established and then was reiterated many times. Probably this was to parallel the slow, insidious nature of gaslighting and this kind of particular abuse. But it gave the novel a sense of not much helping despite when thinking about it and realizing things seemed to have clipped along alright. Perhaps the strong beginning of strangeness eventually becomes something you acclimate to? I’m not sure. 

Either way, it was my only issue with the book. The cadence is lovely. The portrayal of Ireland in the troubles from this perspective is novel. I just recently read Say Nothing, and this perspective in conjunction with a more top-down approach like that novel really does a good job of illustrating what those times were like, and the effects it had in every day life.

Judith Van Laere

Ik snap waarom het een Man Booker Prize heeft gewonnen, maar de stijl is niet voor mij. Wel qua inhoud interessant om eens stil te staan hoe gewelddadig het leven niet zo lang geleden, niet zo ver van ons was

Shameera Nair Lin

Truly unbearable to listen to -- that might have been part of the problem. Listening to 'Maybe Boyfriend' being verbalised about at least a hundred times drove me up the wall, and the narrative itself went absolutely nowhere.

Jasmine Lawrence

When I first started Milkman I was enthralled. I love the style it was written on and the story. However as the story progressed I fell out of love with it. The main character’s inability to communicate with those around her and the style it was written in began to annoy me. This isn’t fault of the author, and I can see why so many people loved this book, but for me it’s a pass. It ended to neatly in my opinion. 

Jeff Brown 

Ooh-boy. This book is difficult to categorize.

It was based in a location and time in which I have a lot of interest -- Northern Ireland during the Troubles of the 1970s. The author did a great job conveying the fear, distrust, anger and violence of the times. Given her age, the book most likely displays a lot of her life as a teenager.

The problem with the book is HOW she presented it. She decided to use what was initially an interesting device -- she used no names of the many people in the story. The narrator was a young woman (called "Middle-Sister" by her family -- we can call her Young-Woman) in her late teens. Other than Ma and Da (which are sort of names), we had Older-Sister, First Brother-in-Law, Second-Youngest Sister, Maybe-Boyfriend (which made the narrator Maybe-Girlfriend) and so on. She was pursued by a man (sometimes men) called the Milkman -- who wasn't a milkman. It was a local description of members of the IRA, as the family were actually from the south and were being constantly watched. She did eventually get involved with an actual Milkman (still not an actual milkman).

But late in the story enters Real Milkman (who actually WAS a real milkman -- thank goodness), plus we had Tablet-girl (who tried to kill the narrator), Tablet-girl's sister (with whom she warily becomes friends with) and Longest-Friend (who is ..... well, you know).

On top of all of that, the story is done in a constant series of run-on sentences. As I read by audiobook, I can't be sure, but I'm sure there are massive paragraphs in the book. As a result, there are many times that I just drifted off after so much rambling in a sitting.

I could have given the book an extra star just for the audiobook narrator. Her N. Irish brogue was captivating and she did a fantastic job of keeping all of this ..... book together.

I can't recommend NOT to read it, because the dizzying nature of the Young-Woman's story does have real appeal deep, deep, DEEP inside of all of the ramblings. But, ooh-boy, it IS an ordeal to take on.

Emma Nash

In a place that resembles the occupied Northern Ireland of the 1970s (though the setting is never actually named), the 18-year-old narrator (referred to only as 'middle sister') becomes subject to the predations of a middle-aged paramilitary called Milkman. The mere fact of his speaking to her—accosting her, one might say—turns middle sister into a person of interest within the town; soon enough, everyone believes that she and Milkman are having an affair, and nothing middle sister says or does is enough to persuade them otherwise.

Amid the daily violence of the Troubles, the subtle violence Milkman inflicts on middle sister—an abuse of power without obvious physical force—goes unnoticed; in a place where the political conflict with Britain ('that country over the water') sucks all the air out of the room, and discussions of women's issues are thus considered beside the point, middle sister struggles to describe the nature of this experience. The novel depicts, among other things, her gradual feminist awakening to this other form of violence (a form we might call...discursive? not sure). It is also, more generally, interested in how people respond to their own powerlessness and hopelessness—how they learn to diminish themselves while talking around the truth.

The novel takes its idiosyncratic narrative voice in part from middle sister's refusal to be thus diminished. Her digressive, highly idiomatic narration cuts through the means by which others prevaricate and dissemble. It would be easy for something so laden with stylistic peculiarities to tip the scales and become gimmicky, and it perhaps occasionally does—but the whole thing works, I think, because it remains grounded in the character and reveals something of how people actually think and talk. While rumors of the novel's difficulty have not been exaggerated (it took me a month to read the first 150 pages, and three days to reading the remaining 300, so go figure), it's also funny (like, laugh-out-loud funny) and surprising and unlike anything else. I maybe loved it?

Orla Kilroy

Interesting story line, would definitely like to read more books set in this time, but basically horribly written, the naming thing is an okay idea but comes across very GCSE English student trying to be original. Had to give up. Don't know how it won a Booker prize.

Jaime McLean

Francesca G

Okay, so... It took me over a month to finish reading this book because IT DRAG OUT. SO. F*CKING. MUCH.

Honestly, out of those 2 stars I gave it, one of them is for its cover which, in my humble opinion, is absolutely stunning. I could spend days looking at it and not get bored. Easily one of my favourites ever.
The other star goes to the fact that this is a highly unusual book in regards to its style - I would call it a 'syntactically correct stream of consciousness'. I can appreciate that its voice was innovative, and that I have never quite read a book like this. 
But man, I did not like this book at all. It felt like the whole novel was very disconnected in the way its events were narrated and, honestly, no book I ever liked made me feel good about the fact that it ended. This one did. 

Overall would not recommend unless you're up for a challenge.

Alexia

I struggled to get into this book at first, until I switched to the audio version, which is what I would recommend doing. This wasn't what I expected at all, and I mean that in a good way.

Diana Platgalve

This rating comes down just to my personal preference. 

The writing style of the book is just something you buy or don’t buy, personally I didn’t enjoy it. The main viewpoint is rumour controlling a persons life in a chaotic political-religious background (in a mid-sister persona). 
The way the author names characters is nothing I’d call innovative; trying to put “name labels” off and introduce (mostly) feeling-based name (as maybe-boyfriend) did not enhance or affected my enjoyment of the text in any way; rather it somehow put off my reading rhythm. 
When it comes to the main character, I somehow was off by her not having well-reasoned behaviour. I am a person of a REASON, so you better reason well, why you are walking around with a dead cat’s head. In general, I had little relatability with the main character or author’s subjective views. 
Another point that I particularly did not enjoy is language, specifically, the cursing. No matter what point of view/emotions/feelings you try to display, adding spices in this way for your text just shows basic level of wordiness and drags down empathy.
Even tho the book touched upon human darkness and somehow tried to display human condition, the style and language used...makes you put down the book and you will NOT fly through the pages.

Maxime van der Wal

2.5 stars
This... was not easy to read. Objectively speaking I understand the praise: the writing is unconventional (e.g. instead of names, descriptions are used to refer to characters), there is a lot of philosophising and the political setting provides plenty of food for thought for the main character. These reasons, however, are also exactly what made it difficult for me to enjoy this book - it dragged on for way too long for me personally. Situations are used to stimulate thoughts, which lead to other memories and situations, instead of providing a storyline. On top of that, every main character is unlikeable. Reading  Milkman  requires a lot of concentration and I'm still unsure if it was worth it (hence the 2.5 stars).

Jill Swan

This book is just as challenging as everyone says it is. Paragraphs go on for pages at a time, there are almost no proper nouns or names, the time period shifts with the main character's thought patterns, which are mostly in stream of consciousness. I knew almost nothing about The Troubles before reading this, and also didn't immediately realize this was set in the past- it read like dystopian fiction, which says a lot about this time period and Burns's ability to convey a social setting. I'm glad I read this. I usually love books that tell a lot about the culture of a specific time and place, and I like that I now feel like I have an understanding of what it was like to grow up in such a strange environment, but it was not a pleasant reading experience. I got used to it, about 2/3 in, but didn't really find myself enjoying it. I do think it's a powerful book and very well written, but if you read for pleasure, maybe skip this one.

Amanda Wells

Milkman is a difficult book to review... because I really loved it. But I can't place my finger quite on why.

It's prose was musical. The main character's voice was unique. The dancing around within a small period of time, from event now to event before and event after - it developed understanding rather than obscuring it.

The slow revelation of exactly what we were talking about in terms of times and conflicts - and never naming anyone - made me think of such conflicts beyond the specificities of those troubles, and those times. 

I loved it. I'm not sure everyone will love it, but if you're curious: definitely pick it up.

Milkman A Novel

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