Ooh, it made me heart sad, The Exploded View. It’s overwhelmingly beautiful, but absolutely sad (exception of first story about a Nice Guy™, which almost every woman in the world knows means he’s really a creep, although I guess while it fails the beautiful moniker, it’s still sad, since I’m sure if you asked creepy dude, he’d say he’s in love, not creepy at all.) And beautiful is wrong too — it isn’t vistas and sunsets, but beautiful in some other, intangible way that writing sometimes is when it’s describing sadness and potential and how we fail each other. The stories are all loosely tied together via a housing estate in South Africa (and by loose, I mean loose. Sometimes the tie is that the housing estate is off in the distance). And it ends with the looming threat of death, and the stories hang over you like that, days (months — I am so far behind in reviews) later. Death is overhanging me.
The Exploded View by Ivan Vladislavić went on sale March 28, 2017.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.