maketeaa's reviews
242 reviews

somewhere in this novel, the narrator mentions how it felt to have a fever as a child, the feeling of walls coming up between the real world and her consciousness, a forced introspection from the incapacitation. that is the overarching theme of this book -- reflecting on the details floating inside of oneself so intricately form parts of your being that it can only be seen when you can't see anything else. we first learn of the narrator's ex-girlfriend, johanna, who left her kisses on her lips but also everywhere else, on her writing and book inscriptions and who shocked her in her ability to switch herself, to change her temperature, to be warm one moment and cold the next. we then learn about her friend/roommate niki, with a fascination for the gross, the maggots on the dead rat, with her black and white view of the world and her catastrophic fear of abandonment. and, what to me was a turning point in the reflections of the narrator, we have alejandro, with whom the narrator shared a visceral, passionate affair, where the idea of getting lost in the details and not caring about the what and the how but the who first comes to light. it is interesting how the cast of characters all occupy transitory positions in the narrator's life, and, notably, the narrator's repeated observation that, had their times together been in the present, they would have had some diagnosis of mental illness that had gone uncategorised when she knew them -- as she says, there is no inherent rationality to our actions but is only superimposed onto our memories retrospectively. with the theme of undiagnosed mental health, with people in her life that leave a mark on her but ultimately fade away, only to be recalled in the cloud of fever, this is the sentiment genberg highlights to us: these transitory moments, these memories floating in us, may make no sense when we take them in their raw form, but begin to illustrate something when reflected on, when you consider the who instead of the what and the how. what struck me the most, i think, was the realisation that the last chapter was about the narrator's own mother, an anxious woman who the narrator viewed as a fish among a group of fish, chameleoning herself ad a defense mechanism while losing her own character on the way. birgitte herself feels like another five chapters of transitory characters with the number of phases she goes through, and perhaps there is a metaphor to be found in that the person who birthed the narrator was herself a slideshow of different whos, as if collecting these different whos is simply something in her dna. but the book finishes with the narrator and her longtime friend, sally (which was also a striking detail to me -- sally, who cut the umbilical cord of her first child, a constant in all the chapters but yet without a chapter of her own) walk through the cemetery, and the quote at the top of this review was stated. because while johanna and niki and alejandro and birgitte all, to some extent or the other, focused on the externals, the narrator realises that everything is internal, everything is already inside of us, and that all we wish to be and do exists in the network of people we brush up against in our lives, no matter how briefly.

not a river feels like the literary equivalent of a painting in a gallery - the vivid descriptions, the thematic sequences: in less than a hundred pages she knits the reader into her text, like by reading we, too, have become part of the tiny island the book takes place in, that we are another character in the close cobweb of interactions that define this tiny surface area of a town. above all, this is an exploration of masculinity -- the book opens on a fishing trip with three men, and their very typically masculine hunting of a stingray. it follows with their encounter with two young girls, an invitation to a dance, and the revenge that is seeked on them for having thrown the sting ray back into the river. but what struck me the most was the magnifying glass that almada held up to the relationships in the book, so we could see the very fibres of the bonds between the men, could look at the crass jokes, the insistence of bonds like 'cobwebs', the other things we may view as 'traditionally masculine' through a new lens. because zoomed in, what is clear is the tenderness all the men feel for each other, the bond between them to maintain the routine of going fishing together in the still and quiet river. the final scene demonstrates this especially well, with the older men's immediate concern over tilo ("where's the kid?!") and the note of care that their last scene finishes on. the events occuring on their small island, where all the characters seemed linked to each other in one way or another, makes it feel as though the entire region can be summed up by the relationships we see between the cast, that the complicated feelings of home but not home, of wanting to stay but not to stay, of accepting loss but not quite understanding it, is the entire defining factor of this small area of argentina.

closing this book and seeing the title again feels like completing a puzzle. because the whole book reads exactly like that -- a short collection of things the narrator does not want to think about. the story opens with the unnamed narrator and her twin brother as children, and takes us through the entirety of their complicated relationship through adulthood, the narrator's desire to keep her brother close, to not drift away, and her brother not feeling the same way. the overall story reminded me a lot of a little life, particularly the sentiment of loving someone who are fighting their own battles with mental health, and i guess because of that it did sometimes feel like there was nothing that really hit me that hard. but i can appreciate from a literary standpoint the ideas that arise from their relationship as twins, of one being 'smaller' than the other, the older one needing to be 'destroyed' first. i wish the themes in this were explored a little deeper, especially the recurring idea of taking up space in a person's life. but i did enjoy the overarching exploration of disappearance, of the right to erasure, of what it is like to want to disappear when another person so strongly wants you to stay. to truly disappear means being unable to come back -- so can the narrator's brother disappear leaving her behind?

this installment was a little bit... eh, which is kind of disappointing. i think after three books the repeated paragraphs and sentences becomes less of an effective way of sharing the theme of the café and rather becomes a bit exhausting to read. while i still loved the general premise the series is based on, the collection of stories in this one felt rather confusing and unclear, and while it explored the idea that there are probably things we don't know about our pasts, it didn't have the same feeling of epiphany as the first two books.

third installment of a series which, as it goes along, becomes clearer and clearer that reflecting on the past is good as long as it helps us move forward in the future. through the stories of a young woman who feels abandoned and wishes to meet her dead parents when she was a baby, a comedian who wishes to show his dead wife that he won a comedy contest before he takes his own life, an older sister suffering from severe anxiety after her younger's sister's death going to see her one last time, and a young employee at the café returning to visit 'the one that got away' before she leaves for america, the resounding message is that we don't know what the future holds for us, but, just like yayoi's mother wanted to see the future she desired, we, too, can create our own future. however, with the theme of death still running through the book, it's evident that the future itself may not be what we desired either way.

nanako, despite reiji's hope to marry her in the future, still passes away

. but what is important is to have hope, hope to fuel yourself to keep going, to see whether that next day will come, to fight for the feeling that a promise of better days gives you.

i liked the overall message of this one but the change of location and new characters felt a little confusing. found it hard to feel as invested as the last installment!! but still very sweet and enjoyable

i thought, at first, that maybe the rest of this series would just be a repetition of the original book, that it would just be a reiteration of the lesson that the past is something to make peace with rather than change, and while this story was an extension of that, it certainly wasn't a redunant collection of stories. in 'tales from the café', kawaguchi takes a closer look at death and bereavement, expanding on the final story from the café between kei and miki and the message of wishing happiness for miki beyond the grave. we meet a man wishing to meet his dead best friend, whose young daughter he adopted after his death, a son wishing to meet his dead mother while he himself considered suicide, a lover wishing to meet his old girlfriend after he passed away from cancer, and an old detective wishing to pass on a birthday present to his wife after she was murdered twenty-two years ago. throughout, we see miki, the widowed nagare's young daughter, bringing light and life into the café, symbolising new beginnings and rebirths through the excitement of a seven-year-old, in her songs about spring and her ever-changing phases, and kazu, who we learn is the daughter of the ghost in the chair. all the former characters share one thing in common -- a desire to hold onto the past, to punish oneself for their loved one's death, and an inability to dig themselves out of their bereavement. going back to the past, for them, means going back to make amends, to do what they believe will absolve them of their guilt -- for the man and his best friend, it is to take a video revealing to his daughter that he is not her real father,  for the son, it is to turn himself into a ghost after the death of his mother, for the lover, to make sure she is happy in the future, and for the husband, to pass on the present. but what each character learns that it is not necessary to make amends, to 'fix' anything to absolve them from their guilt -- the best way to give meaning to each death is to continue life in a way to make themselves happy. the time that the person they have lost spent in their lives is time that was spent with love, and thus, instead of using their legacy to live in sorrow, they should live with the memory of the joy they felt to experience being alive at the same time as them. a truly touching second installment to a very sweet series❤️

genuinely one of those books that just feels like a warm hug. funiculi funicula is the perfect set for a time travelling café: underground, lit by old-fashioned lamps, with no phone signal, and only a smattering of customers at a time. the urban legend says that patrons can time travel, but there are rules attached -- they must stay seated in the specific chair to travel through, they cannot change the present from the past, and they must return before the coffee gets cold, lest they turn into a ghost. in this smattering of customers, we peer inside their hearts to see what they would use their singular chance to travel through time for, what is is that means to them enough to experience one last time without being able to change the present.

what we learn is that, while we can't change the present from the past, we can choose to do things differently. we can re-evaluate how we imagine our memories -- both past and future -- and change how we behave to be happier. every character travels to a different time in order to receive some kind of truth that they crave, some kind of curiosity to be sated, and while nothing substantial changes in their reality, their expansion of awareness changes their life itself.

and i think what's also quite poignant is that, for each person, the people they wanted to meet in the past (or future) loved them very much. fears of resentment, of abandonment, of anger against them turned out not to be true at all. i guess it's just a very sweet reminder that things are never as bad as we think they are, or will be.

such a sweet and emotional book! i definitely teared up in the last conversation between kei and miki.

this satire is just painful to read

i hestitated to pick this up because i've definitely heard some interesting opinions about it, to say the least. i've heard people say it's one of those books that are sad for no reason, that pile on the trauma just for the shock value. and, while on one hand, i can see where opinions like this come from, i can't disagree more. the sadness is there for a purpose. maybe not in a way that the characters can see, but in the way that we can see -- the purpose of showing us that no matter how much meaningless sadness, the unfairness of pain we have in our lives, the people who love us will always try to fight for us to stay alive, and, at the same time, how this fight may, at the end of the day, be for nothing, and yet it doesn't stop us from fighting. yanagihara explores friendship, love, and devotion, the decision to keep loving someone, the decision to make someone 'less sick' if they can't make them get better. heartbreaking in the futility of efforts, in the decades-lasting scars from experiences jude had no control over, in the complications in all his relationships, the people who want him to stay, and the trauma in him that makes it so hard to stay, we see that loving people isn't necessarily about how easy it is to be with them, but about how much we are willing to try.

four stars in terms of content. but the commentary of said content... hm.

i think this is incredibly well-researched and very, very detailed. walker takes us through the historical landscape of northern nigeria, the petridish in which boko haram was cultivated. from the early political divisions between the fulani and hausa people, to the first colonial excursions, and the christianising and subsequent secularisation that came with it. we see the fallout of this, the fear of losing one's indigenous identity leading to a banding together of northern nigerian muslims against the threat of losing their perceived right to being subject to sharia law, and the anger against democracy across the rest of nigeria. then, he shows us what he describes as the 'crisis of epistemology', giving examples of how grassroots politicians are nowadays elected on the basis of personal favours because people lack trust in them to make substantial changes, the aspect of 'godfathers' between government members, and the manner in which communication and journalistic reporting does not always provide a clear-cut answer to the questions of the populace. overall, his thesis is that there is so little we know of boko haram and why boko haram continues to proliferate because of the lack of transparency there is, because there are so many conflicting claims and perspectives which seem to be pushed based on each ethnic group, religious group, or political party's agenda. he gives the example of stephen davis, one of the only people who managed to talk to boko haram and try to negotiate for the chibok girls, only for them to be taken back by the group before they could be rescued due to the delays in the rescue team.

and i think it IS valuable to take a look at the layers in nigeria's conmunication system making so many of these things confusing and opaque. but there were certain times where the author sounded like he was some travel writer venturing into the depths of the Politically Fraught Africa, you know? i'm thinking specifically of a line where he was watching disputes sprout among a crowd exiting a political meeting and simply ended the passage with 'i stood back and watched'. like? make the commentary, sure, but treating an entire nation like it's characterised entirely by 'chaotic idiocy' (THOSE WERE HIS WORDS) is just very bad taste imo. at least from someone who is NOT nigerian themselves.

anyway, regardless, still a very informative book. i do certainly have some gripes about the reductive way he sometimes referred to islamic beliefs but that's a whole other story.