|||
Cover courtesy of Amazon
Do you ever read a book so good that it changes your perspective on every other book you’ve ever loved? As if to give that book 5 stars would, in fact, be a disservice, a travesty, because you’ve rated things 5 stars in the past and they are nowhere near this good? As if, in order to give this book its due, you really ought to retroactively reduce all prior 5 star ratings to 4 stars in a vain attempt to highlight the real intangible difference in quality?
That’s how I feel about This Is How You Lose the Time War five minutes after finishing it. That book sings in my heart and the reading of it was such sweet music. That pleasure-pain of completion, that biting bittersweatness woven throughout like braided copper wiring or a friendship bracelet slowly fraying… I cannot convey but through poor poetry how this book feels.
I want to share it with everyone I know but a part of me wants to squirrel it away from the world so that no one could ever tell me they enjoyed reading it less than I did.
This is going to be one of the ones that sticks with me.
It has left me feeling like an avocado, with someone gently but firmly pressing the sharp edge of a spoon against the inside of my skin leaving me hollow and scraped clean. Not like a plate is cleaned after eating but in a more organic sense like an apple is bruised after a fall. Like something was consumed and violence was done in the consumption.
I have felt for years that I could not be a creative writer because my writing was, in some sense, deeply lacking. There was a hole in the middle and the edges could not hold without. An ache. Some sense of human connection. Just. Not. There.
And yet.
This incredible book looks like my own writing experiments. It doesn’t have much dialogue. It has long, run-together sentences littered with thorny tangles of vocabulary. Action is described at a remove, from a distance.
And yet.
The emotion is so present and so raw. It hit me so hard in ways and for reasons I don’t fully understand.
I love this book. And that is both the truth and also not nearly enough. Perhaps it would be better to say that I have read this book and it is now a part of me and I do not know that I will be the same. You should read it.
