July 6, 2023

Notes on “A Strange Country”

Posted in Uncategorized tagged , , , , at 3:09 pm by chavisory

So here is one of those things where I can’t tell whether a piece of media hit me in a way that it didn’t for anyone else, or whether people were or are talking about it in the ways I’m craving but I simply can’t find them.

I’m finding myself newly obsessed with a book I read almost three years ago–Muriel Barbery’s A Strange Country, which was the sequel to her 2015 book The Life of Elves.

I was mystified by it in ways that make me just want to talk about it with someone else.

And like, I’ve read reviews of it. I’ve read Goodreads comments and Amazon comments and a lot of charming blurbs of it. I’ve seen comments by people who loved it and hated it and who are just like “I didn’t get it.”

And I can’t tell whether I just didn’t get it, or whether I was disappointed in it, or whether something vital about it got lost in translation from the original French. Or whether I’m basically correct in feeling that the second half of the book was just underdeveloped, or that she needed a third book to do what she tried to do in two, or that her editor should’ve asked for another round of revisions.

But everyone loved it, hated it, or didn’t get it, but doesn’t seem to know how to talk more about it. Or tell me what I’m missing.

What, for instance, was even going on with the alternate timeline of WWI & WWII we’re introduced to at the top of the book but that then seems barely referred to?

And if we’re six years into the longest war humanity has ever known at the top of the book, are we in fact in an alternate timeline where the Hundred Years War, or the Wars of the Roses, never happened?

I adored the setup of The Life of Elves, and I just wound up feeling like it wasn’t fulfilled or supported by A Strange Country in ways that it could’ve been.

I don’t even really know why I’m now feeling so compelled by this book that I’m not even sure I liked that much.

So…anyone want to talk about it?

(If it’s easier for anyone to comment/reblog from Tumblr, here’s my original post over there.)

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