Book Review: "The Details" by Ia Genberg

This is one of those books where I browsed the bookshelves for about a minute before landing on something that felt more Virginia Woolf than linear narrative. The Details is a story about love and grief, a family that isn't liked and a family that is quite literally chosen. It's about sickness and emotional destruction, it has a main character who is constantly trying to make sense of their past. Like the book I Wished by Dennis Cooper, this book feels like a stream-of-consciousness where we are invited into the world of the main character, we are pulled into their thoughts and even though we have only just met them, we are sitting and holding their hand as they speak to us from a sickbed, from a bedroom or even from a reel of photographs representing each important memory.

Our story starts off with us learning about a woman who has suffered a sickness and is basically taken out by it. We read about the fact that she was going to visit someone but ended up literally almost dying herself. The prose is not really graphic, but instead it presents sickness as something that requires reflecting on. This links nicely into the past of the character, who wishes to reflect on her relationships. She revisits a novel, a story from the past that has a lot to do with this love, mentioning that they both loved the same sorts of books and commenting on the fact that though there would be books they liked to read, they could always tell when they were struggling with their literature.

I liked the comment which tells us that slow reading doesn't necessarily means they are enjoying the book and taking it in, but rather they are having difficulty just getting to the next page. I don't want to say anything too revealing about myself, but Milan Kundera is mentioned about here and I have to say, I agree. I can't read Kundera's works without feeling like I'm going to die.

Johanna is the name of this past love and when she is remembered, some may say (as I have read in various reviews) that nothing actually happens in this section of the book and that's the whole point. This part of the book is about learning of who this character is and how she helped our main character to grow as a person who exists with a literature. It kind of reminds me of the various sections about literature in Kafka was the Rage by Anatole Broyard, another book where I have heard the line 'but nothing happens'. Yeah, that's the point - nothing has to happen all the time. It's about what's not said, not just about what's there on the page.

The novel is quiet in the way that Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf is. It is quiet and sad. It has these flash images of something, but then again we don't know how important these memories are until they are gone. It sort of reminds me of that idea I had when reading Jacob's Room: you will die doing nothing important. Things will be left undone, unmade and unsaid. You will be in the middle of something and at the same time, nothing in particular. When we get on to the section in The Details that deals with Niki - we see something a little bit louder but not by much. Niki is more hateful of herself, she doesn't like her name so she changes it to 'Niki' and this is because she doesn't like her parents. We learn that this is more unstable than the relationship with Johanna and, being before Johanna but after in the narrative, it makes perfect sense.

The writing is poetic and beautiful. The book is short and wonderful. It is a flashlight of a life, a picture that only exists for a second and it is a story of a person who wants desperately to share these quiet moments with someone else. I think a cross between Virginia Woolf and Anatole Broyard is the best way of describing it and yet, it is so completely original. I cannot express enough how much you need to read this book, especially if you're looking for something short and fleeting.