Lapvona is a fantasy book. Marek is the crippled son of shepherd Jude, his mum Agata is missing presumed dead. There are peasants in the village, bandits in the mountains, and a lord in his castle on the hill.
But the prose style is very different from most fantasies. Lapvona is mostly written in short, declarative sentences: "They boiled lamb's milk and covered the pot with a cloth to keep the flies away while it cooled. Marek picked the bugs off some potatoes and plunged them and a few apples in the fire. They were old apples from the fall harvest. Jude had eaten only lamb's milk, bread, apples and potatoes, and wild grasses his entire life. Like the rest of Lapvona, he didn't eat meat. Nor did he drink mead, only milk and water. Marek are what Jude ate, always saving a few bites for Go: he knew that sacrifice was the best way to please him." This simple third person past tense narration included the explication of characters and their motives. There is very little left for the reader to infer.
Furthermore, the narration was done as a sequence of events: first this, then this. There seemed very little connection between the events; any causal connections were straightforward. There was never any nuance.
I quickly found this monotony of style extremely irksome; I was swiftly bored. It seemed to me that the only way the author could keep my interest was to ramp up the weirdness. The story is full of bizarre, frequently grotesque and horrible occurrences.
Yo be charitable, one could argue that the style suited the content. It reminded me of how Kafka narrates Metamorphosis ("As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”). It had a fairy tale feel to it. Perhaps a deadpan, direct narration is the best way of recounting weird stuff, as if the plainness of the style is the only way to add verisimilitude to what would otherwise be unbelievable. And a lot of fairy tales are full of violence and childish, crude, cruel humour. So to write as if one is writing for young children (although the content is frequently adult, with sex, starvation, mutilation, death, cannibalism and spontaneous lactation) is perhaps the only way to persuade the reader to suspend their disbelief.
It didn't work for me. I began to long for a difficult word or even a subjunctive clause. I didn't care about the characters, I didn't believe the setting, I had no involvement. I did wonder why the author was so keen on the word 'pubis' but this was the most interesting aspect about this book.
Having read a selection of other one star reviews on goodreads, I find that most of them condemn the book for its focus on things likely to cause disgust. I prefer to review a literary work on its style rather than its content.
Selected quotes:
- "A puddle of ink had pooled under the pen." (Summer) A rare moment of metaphor.
- "Flesh was mortal. God was not. Got was not alive. God was life itself." (Summer)
- "One stray germ and the Second Coming wouldn't come." (Winter)
- "Should I put the horseman in the stockade?" (Winter) I think the author means 'stocks'.
August 2023; 304 pages
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