9. We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Nancy Sissom

Author:  Karen Jane Fowler

Genre:  Fiction, Animals

Info:  320 pages, published May 30, 2013

Format:   Audio Book

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Summary 

We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves is narrated by Rosemary Cooke who had an extremely non-conventional childhood in Bloomington, Indiana, where her father was a  psychology professor and her mother a non-practicing scientist. Rosemary had two siblings, Lowell, who has vanished, and Fern, whose doomed fate is the central mystery of the novel.

 

Quotes

“Language does this to our memories–simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”

“You learn as much from failure as from success, Dad always says. Though no one admires you for it.”

“The world runs,” Lowell said, “on the fuel of this endless, fathomless misery. People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, because you’re the one that made them look.”

“No Utopia is Utopia for everyone”

“The secret to a good life,” he told me once, “is to bring your A game to everything you do. Even if all you’re doing is taking out the garbage, you do that with excellence.”

“You know how everything seems so normal when you’re growing up,” she asked plaintively, “and then comes this moment when you realize your whole family is nuts?”

My Take

While We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves won the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was also short-listed for the 2014 Man Booker Prize, I did not really like this book.  Part of the problem was the audiobook version that I listened to.  The narrator’s voice was so incredibly annoying to me that it cast a negative pall over the whole book.  

But I also didn’t really l for the characters or the story either.  I was never very interested in what happened to anyone and found Rosemary, the main character, to be incredibly self-indulgent.  Needless to say, not a book I’m recommending.