It first came to my attention months and months ago when it went on a table display at the bookstore where I was working, and I think I first picked it up because the cover caught my eye. After reading the back I was intrigued, and I know it was one of those books I was constantly picking up during my shifts there that I eventually added to the book list I'm getting through right now. I ended up with it when I was at the library before Christmas and pulled The Prestige from its dark little bottom shelf; Out was right at eye level when I stood up and turned around. I hadn't had it in mind at all but grabbed it right away since it was there staring at me - literally, as there's an eye on the spine.
I really like reading books that are translated; instead of say an American authour writing a book that's set in Japan it's a completely different experience to read something set in Japan written by a Japanese authour, particularly if it was originally written in Japanese. It's so interesting to read something where the cadence of another language and culture comes through very clearly. Even the thought processes and the way the story itself is told can be very different. It makes a great change.
Out really pulls no punches. It drew me in right away and kept me in it until the very last pages. I loved how the story seems to effortlessly pull you in deeper and deeper, as if it's some kind of water demon pulling you down, all you can do is watch the water get darker as it streams past. The book is full of disturbing imagery that just gets more and more intense.
For me, reading from the comfort of my own living room, it was terrible enough getting the initial picture of the lives of the group of women central to the plot; women who work the night shift at a boxed lunch factory in Japan. Their lives come across as brutally difficult, it is exhausting even to read and think about and know that right now there are women just like them dragging themselves into a similar kind of day all over the world. It is likely this fact that causes the events of the story to fall into place so smoothly, seamlessly; even as the turns are turns you could never have been able to predict, afterwards it seems as if it was the logical thing to happen. There is a kind of matter-of-factness to the whole narrative that adds to its tension and its chill.
Women are at the heart of the book, everything about women, every kind of woman. All the subtleties and nuances of female friendships, relationships, solidarity...all the ways we are are cleverly woven through the book. It's just fantastic. So well executed. I really can't properly describe the way it pulls you so thoroughly into the darkest places you can't imagine to start with, and it does this so well that you don't even realize how deep you've gone til you can put the book down, be away from it for a few minutes and think about where you've really been.
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