BOOK REVIEW: THIS MUST BE THE PLACE BY MAGGIE O'FARRELL

3.5 stars (would've been 3 stars had it not been for those beautiful last chapters) 

"The older, longer, sluggish Marithe had looked up at the stars and asked her mother, who was sitting in the chair opposite, whether it would come back, this sense of being inside your life, not outside it.

Claudette had put down her book and thought for a moment. And then she had said something that made Marithe cry. She'd said: probably not, my darling girl, because what you're describing comes of growing up, but you get something else instead. You get wisdom, you get experience. Which could be seen as a compensation, could it not?

Marithe felt those tears pricking at her eyelids now. To never feel that again, that idea of yourself as one unified being, not two or three splintered selves who observed and commented on each other. To never be that person again."

just beautifully articulated.

I wanna begin by saying that O'Farrell is a talented writer. Sure, her writing occasionally veers towards the ostentatious, but I'd say on the whole it's considered and reflective of the characters she's representing. My issue with this book was not with its writing, but with its structure. To put it simply, This Must Be the Place felt more like a collection of short stories than one cohesive story. Normally I wouldn't have a problem with books being a collection of interconnected short stories—The Tsar of Love and Techno, for example, is one such a collection which I thought was expertly done. The thing with this novel, though, is that it didn't feel like O'Farrell set out to write a set of interconnected short stories. Instead, it felt like she wanted to use that short story format in the service of a more traditional beginning-middle-end story. Ultimately, though, I don't think she accomplished that goal. What I got instead was just a bunch of disjointed snippets of characters' lives. It's all well and good to know a character's feelings during a particular past moment in their life, but at some point you're forced to ask yourself, why should I care about this? A thing happened to character X in the past, OK, but so what? I didn't feel like I needed to be shown such separate parts of characters' pasts to understand how they acted in the present. O'Farrell could've just integrated their pasts into their present narratives. Sure, it would've been more traditional, but then again the traditional isn't always bad—broadly speaking, it works for a reason. The word that keeps coming back to me when it comes to this novel is disjointed. Some chapters were well-written, sure, but others just felt blatantly and completely useless. I'd be so into the story then BAM I'd have to read from the POV of a character I couldn't care less about, thinking who the hell is this? can we get back to the main story pls? Just because you can write from a character's perspective, doesn't mean you should.

I might decide to try some of O'Farrell's other novels later, but for now I think I'm gonna try my hand at reading some other, non-O'Farrell, stuff.