Olivia Sudjic

“Packed with tension, pathos, and vitality . . . This is a potent first novel from a formidable talent.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune “The best fictional account I’ve read of the way the internet has shaped our inner lives.” — Guardian (UK) At twenty-three Alice Hare, a loner, arrives in New York with only the vaguest of plans: to find a city to call home. Instead she discovers the online profile of a Japanese writer called Mizuko Himura, whose stories blur the line between autobiography and fiction. Alice becomes infatuated with Mizuko from afar, convinced this stranger’s life holds a mirror to her own. Realities multiply as Alice closes in on her “internet twin,” staging a chance encounter and inserting herself into his orbit. When Mizuko disappears, Alice is alone and adrift again. Tortured by her silence, Alice uses the only tool at her disposal, writing herself back into Mizuko’s story, with disastrous consequences. “A smart and lyrical evocation of that murky emotional terrain between our online and offline selves.” — Vice (UK) “At once a riveting mystery and a literary tour de force, Sympathy had me spellbound from the first page to the last.” — Emily Gould, author of Friendship

Sympathy

Lindy

I wish the rest of it had been as good as the last hundred or so pages.

Moray Lyle McIntosh

Sympathy is virtually impossible to describe, I'm struggling to do so even to myself and it was a struggle I grappled with all the way through. In the end Sudjic's own narrator says it best when she characterises her tale as a “love story that is mostly made up, from memories that are mostly false, between people who were mainly not there.”

Alice Hare has never really known herself. Adopted as a baby she knows little of her birth parents except that her mother is dead and her father in prison. Her adoptive family also offers little stability, her mother telling and retelling, embellishing and rewriting the story of their history so often after her husband disappears that neither mother nor daughter have any real sense what is true. In an attempt to escape what feels like a vortex of uncertainty and parental neediness Alice relocates to New York and the home of her cancer-stricken grandmother Silvia.

As Alice attempts to find her way and herself in a new city and a new life, her perceptions and expectations constantly shaped by the "lives" she observes online she stumbles across Mizuko Himura, a Japanese heiress, freelance writer and constant user of social media. Alice becomes obsessed with the connections and parallels she comes to see between her history and Mizuko's. Parallels that take on increasingly irrational significance until she manages to engineer an entry into Mizuko's real life. This is stalking in the internet age and it is not pretty as Alice becomes increasingly obsessed, harnessing all the knowledge she has amassed online into manipulating Mizuko into friendship by aping her like, her opinions and playing to her character. Alice in an extremely complex and unsettling character, incredibly self-involved and yet almost entirely lacking in self-awareness and despite her disturbing penchant for manipulation she is almost endearingly naive to the fact that Mizuko's consciously-curated online identity is no more genuine than her own.

Despite Alice's flaws, her obsessive and possessive tendencies, her selfishness, her guile it is testament to Sudjic's talent that she somehow forces a little sympathy, unpicking these unpleasant characteristics in a way that reveals the sad fragility and vulnerability that underpin her neuroses.

The narrative structure is really quite mind-bogglingly clever. Alice's fragmentary, disjointed and unreliable reminiscences deliberately invoking those long, convoluted "rabbit-holes" (her name is no accident) with which anyone who has ever accidentally lost hours of their life to the internet will be disturbingly familiar. We follow Alice through many, often fascinating, digressions, from particle physics to the 2011 Japanese tsunami to the disappearance of flight MH370. These labyrinthine tangents draw us in an out of the main narrative forging unexpected connections and consequences that make Alice's bizarre focus on coincidences seem less and less absurd. Because Sympathy is all about our lives online and how the constant presence of undiluted, unsubstantiated data can potentially affect and warp our opinions, our thinking and our identities, you find yourself becoming just a little Alice.

Sympathy is an impressive, immersive and ultimately addictive experience, disorientating and irresistible and Olivia Sudjic is, without a doubt, a young author to watch.

Nico J

I understand why people wouldn't like this book, and why you would even drop it. There's not a triumphant payoff, necessarily, but if you enjoy meandering, the narrative language, the observations of what social media can do to our interactions and how it alters the playing field for building relationships, this is a good read. There's no denying that not many of the characters are particularly likable, and truthfully it's interesting to watch people with bad traits try to outdo other people with equally loathsome ones.

"Origin stories make us feel secure; untangling them can undo us."

This reflects the main character's entire story, really, a choice line of foreboding: She spends time creating her reality with her obsessions with Mizuko, her past and childhood, not knowing who she is and trying vainly to create a backstory for herself and mold it all into a sculpture that's secure. Her tenuous grip on reality is lost in social media.

"That is the thing I liked best about Japan: all the soothing acts of ceremony and little rituals, which made me feel like no moment was too small for me to hold and keep." 

Not only is this deeply reflective of Alice's continuous search for her story, this is something familiar about Japan to me, too, having spent time there. A very interesting way of giving weight to each present moment, which I think is difficult to do in modern society and on a personal level.

"'She has such a beautiful profile,' Mizuko whispered, her breath warm milk." I just wanted to point out how gross this is to me, and all of the times they mentioned milk or dairy in conjunction with breath, honestly, I just want to gag. This is such a gross description to me.

More things I had marked while reading:
"My boyfriend at that time had told me that very week that love is really the feeling of atoms from exploded stars reunited after billions of years."

"At the time, despite Mizuko's insistence on this digital divide, I was sure her mind worked like mine. Her thoughts were nonlinear, a lattice, and this predisposed her to getting distracted. She would get lost in Wikipedia wormholes, so lost that she would sometimes have to disconnect the Wi-Fi or give her doorman her electronic devices."

There are a few musings I had here. One, Mizuko displays that she's also similarly obsessed with having poignant, specific Instagram and social media displays, which outs her as a hypocrite at best and painting herself as a removed artist at worst. The part about the mind being a "lattice" is fairly relatable. These two are both emotionally bereft of what they feel they need and instead try to play with one another to try to find it, uncover it. The discussion earlier on this same page about gamification is fairly apt as well, especially in city populations (also a familiar environment for me) and the constant piecework of social profiles and races to try new and better things to participate in the digital list-making and to-do list completing. This is further explained here:

"I did enjoy taking pictures, even if the medium constituted a small betrayal. I wasn't sure it was the same level of joy that qualified pursuing it professionally, so that a name like photographer could be mine, but it made me feel like I was participating in the city. Each picture implied a kind of fantasy life beyond it, like a window, and every time I posted one, I felt that it added a new room around the window and each room housed another self. It made the whole city more manageable, another way to take apart the pieces of the machine." 

I think it doesn't need further explanation. Overall, there are a lot of great discussions in this book and it's disappointing that many people didn't finish it or end up appreciating it for how offbeat or even unlikeable it was, if that makes sense. This would be perfect to dissect for a book club and have discussion questions.

Penelope

An electrifying novel of blood ties, online identities, and our tormented efforts to connect in the digital age At twenty-three, Alice Hare leaves England for New York. She falls in love with Manhattan, and becomes fixated on Mizuko Himura, an intriguing Japanese writer whose life has strange parallels to her own. As Alice closes in on Mizuko, her 'internet twin', realities multiply and fact and fiction begin to blur. The relationship between the two women exposes a tangle of lies and sexual encounters. Three families collide as Alice learns that the swiftest answer to an ancient question - where do we come from? - can now be found online. Olivia Sudjic was born in London in 1988. She studied English Literature at Cambridge University where she was awarded the E.G. Harwood English Prize and made a Bateman Scholar. She started writing her first novel, Sympathy, in 2014.

Sympathy

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