Book Review: No One is Talking about This by Patricia Lockwood

 

Patricia Lockwood turns of words and senteces is beautifying social media experience. From crumbs of words and emoticons she tied together a bundle of disparate beauty. In No One is Talking About This - shortlisted for this year Booker´s among other many mentions and accolades - I felt rolling again and again in a loop of wonderlands made of words. 

´Her most secret pleasures were sentences that only half a percent of people on earth would understand, and thatg no one would be able to decipher at all in ten years´. That´s a pretty good semiotic challenge in the 2.0 world, I think. There is a high poetry of her statements in the book - two parts, made of different paragraphs on random topics, shaped on the equally random ways in which we may write and think under the pressure of the social media - called ´portal´ in the book. But although there are dramatic topics - as per their definition not per the Lockwood´s interpretations, there is the absurdity of the everyday life which remains - Lockwood is not the first and not the last to mention this, and such observations were inspiring literature long before Twitter and Instagram took over out time - no matter if free or not; think about Dadaism, for instance - which at least had an equally powerful visual representation of the words. An example mentioned in No One...: ´(...) the video of a woman with a deformed bee for a pet, and the bee loved her, and then the bee died (...)´.

Many of us - me included - are often living in a simulation of reality, where one can write about no matter what, no matter when, even if there is no one reading it. But the creative force is stronger than its limitations. 

I was mesmerized by the first part of the book. I felt like I couldn´t live any more without those twists of words and about the storyteller - a she-, first person oriented account. But then, 100 pages or so later, there is the second part, which is supposed to be more serious and with a higher human impact - as it deals with the dead of a sick child - inspired of the author´s own experience - and the tone is the same and it is about time for me to figure out the emptiness of word juggling, with no other take outside, words-words-words (beautiful words, still). 

It looks as it was a switch from the general topic to a particular tragic event in the life of the storyteller but there is only the frame that changed as the take is the same. It´s like you have in back-off the same voice with no inflections or changes of tone, no matter what is the topic approached - how to make scrambled eggs, surviving a hurricane or terminal illness. This is the moment when the charms from the first part did not work for me any more. 

Still...that beautiful wording...it will be long until I will find another ´Millennial´ book with such a poetic strength.

Rating: 3 stars