Death Valley A Novel
Reviews
I read most of this book in one sitting so it took me some time to process, but I ended up really liking it. It’s a funny, depressing, and honest portrayal of grief and the concept of navigating the many complex emotions that come along with it without a guide. The main character becomes literally lost in a desert while struggling to cope with her father’s declining health (compounded by many other things in her life). The narrator had a great voice. The only thing holding it back from being 5 stars for me is that I was hoping for more of certain things, like more information about the main character’s past and and a deeper dive into some of her relationships. But I also believe that it was the author’s intention to just provide us a snapshot of this moment in her life, so I wouldn’t use that as a reason to hold anyone else back from reading it.
devoured.
My favorite read so far this year !
Quick read, quite a page turner! And so weird. In the best way. I knew in the first chapter I was in for a treat. It keeps getting trippier and trippier… up until the very end. An interesting way to examine life and death and living✨
it was a book
a fever dream;
yet a relatable story on having a dying father.
honest and funny.
exactly what i needed when i needed it
I am honestly disappointed—really felt like this story promised much more than it delivered.
Some great statements and single lines. Enjoyed when Broder got a bit more lucid as I think it let the overall concepts shine. Really appreciated the moments exploring anticipatory grief and navigating a romantic relationship when one partner has a debilitating illness. But the entire middle desert section dragged on uneventfully. Not a good sign when the climax of the story feels like the driest and most insignificant part.
WAY too many asides using parentheses. This just broke up the writing way too often and made it clunky. Such short chapters too! Some flowed right into the next as if it was just a paragraph break, making the sectioning completely unnecessary. It felt like these were trying to lengthen the book more than anything, which was just distracting.
Realizing I really dislike writing that so blatantly dates itself in the current present (“ghost-emoji shaped log;” “if they were cryptocurrency, I’d be a rich woman;” etc.). Makes it feel like a gimmick to get a cheap chuckle rather than telling a story that will hold up long past the 2020’s.
Overall, I was expecting a lot more surrealism. Somewhere, I got the idea that this was meant to be influenced by Alice in Wonderland (crawling through a cactus and all hell breaks loose as the protagonist explores all the themes of grief and spirituality in a trippy, desert-fueled parallel dimension! I mean come on, that would be incredible!). But this felt like a very dumbed-down Murakami-esque story to me.
Sadly a bit more dull than the dust jacket implies. I didn't find this novel astounding or poignant at all. And I LOVED Melissa Border's Milk Fed. Focusing entirely on the protagonist was a mistake, IMO, and the whole stuck-in-the-desert section (second half of the book) was so dry, uninteresting, lacking propulsion. I did love every scene with the Best Western employees, and there were some interesting observations on anticipatory grief. But overall this wasn't my favorite.
Melissa Broder can do no wrong
Highlights
I want to be unafraid. I want to be stupid and brave. I think I have the stupid part down (woman walks into desert with less than a gallon of water and doesn't tell anyone where she is going). Id like the bravery.
To the rabbits, I suppose theres no such thing as sameness.
For them, and their heightened olfactory consciousness, life is probably a stream of new and exciting fragrances. But for me— senses dulled by a constant deluge of opinions and judgments-every moment is a house of oppressive thoughts to be escaped.
This is human life in all its strangeness.
“It keeps going. It keeps going and also it will end.”
They are the same word, love and is, yes, love and is are the same. To be with. To be there. Of all the love languages, I think the greatest is to be there, the greatest of the languages, to be here for, to have been there with.
Seek and ye shall seek.
I don't feel like a forty-one-year-old woman. I don't even feel like a twenty-one-year-old woman—the age I was when my bond with my father began to change, when I realized that it could change (and would change) because ld become an adult, and he was tired, and adults, with their adult demands for intimacy, their expectations and judgments, made him more tired, and that I would be treated like any other adult—any other person whose presence weighed more heavily on him than the small, light universe of a child.
…so content to be left alone, and I see it now: he has always been a self-contained universe! To wish it otherwise is to ask him to be a different person. Not really a fair thing to ask. Can you be other than you are?
Love floods into me: oxytocin, dopamine, sticky souls, the cleave of spirits, norepinephrine, bone and light, a covenant behind the ribs—whatever love is made of, I love this child. It's a love tinged with loss, or the anticipation of loss, the way I love my father the grown-up. To miss a person when the person is right beside vou.
It's not silence as the absence of sound, but silence as the presence of many sounds: bedrock and space, fauna and flora, all coming together to create an orchestral quiet.
The next book I read was a novel, described as the tale of woman "unraveling" after the death of her wife. All I could think was, Who unravels this neatly? There was no mention of fear. Zero messes or catharses. If a feeling did surface, it was an elegant dribble, pristine, assonant. Was this really the inside of a person's head?…
It was clear that the author had never, herself, unraveled. Also, she seemed to disapprove of humor in any form, which was another problem, because how could a person unravel so humorlessly and not die? If I saw no humor in my unraveling, I’d have been dead long ago.
Maybe I don't have the self-esteem to feel angry.
If ever I attempt to make the inside of my skull a softer place to live…
It is easier to have an intimate relationship with the unconscious than the conscious, the dead than the living.
"Help me not be empty,” I say to god in the Best Western parking lot.
Doom is maybe just a trapped sob, I tell myself. Remember that.