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Searching... McMinnville Public Library | Sudjic, O. | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
One of Entertainment Weekly 's "16 Debut Novels to Read in 2017"
One of the Observer 's "New Faces of Fiction for 2017"
One of Elle UK's "Six Top Debut Authors of 2017"
One of i-D/ Vice 's "10 Brilliant Emerging Female Authors to Read in 2017"
An electrifying debut novel of obsessive love, family secrets, and the dangers of living our lives online
At twenty-three, Alice Hare leaves England for New York. She becomes fixated on Mizuko Himura, a Japanese writer living in New York, whose life story has strange parallels to her own and who she believes is her "Internet twin." What seems to Mizuko like a chance encounter with Alice is anything but--after all, in the age of connectivity, nothing is coincidence. Their subsequent relationship is doomed from the outset, exposing a tangle of lies andsexual encounters as three families across the globe collide, and the most ancient of questions--where do we come from?--is answered just by searching online.
In its heady evocation of everything from Haruki Murakami to Patricia Highsmith to Edith Wharton, Sympathy is utterly original--a thrilling tale of obsession, doubling, blood ties, and our tormented efforts to connect in the digital age.
Author Notes
Olivia Sudjic was born in London in 1988. She studied English Literature at Cambridge University where she was awarded the E.G. Harwood English Prize and made a Bateman Scholar. She started writing her first novel, Sympathy , in 2014.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Sudjic's engrossing debut novel explores how technology dissolves personal boundaries while stripping away true intimacy. Alice travels from London to New York to stay with her sick grandmother during the spring of 2014. Even before she meets Mizuko, a writer who teaches creative writing at Columbia, Alice is obsessed with her. When circumstances align-nudged as far as possible by Alice for the two of them to meet-Alice is desperate for the kind of closeness she's always imagined could be possible between her and the lauded writer. Physical, emotional, and digital boundaries are tested and broken as Alice struggles to replicate her close connection with Mizuko's social media persona in her organic relationship with the real Mizuko. Whether that will happen rests on Mizuko's ever-changing whims, but she simultaneously wields her technological abilities over Mizuko, who is transfixed by social media. Will the flesh-and-blood reality ever fall in line with Alice's Instagram-addled fantasy? Sudjic's story is disjointed, alluring, disorienting, and provoking, touching on many contemporary concerns arising from the pervasiveness of social media. At many moments the character of Alice is rather too inscrutable, and Sudjic's steady, reliable prose is not enough to anchor some of Alice's more dramatic actions. While some readers will find the ending confusing and unsatisfying, none will be bored by this frenetic, timely story of digital fixation actualized. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A first-time novelist considers identity and obsession in the digital age.Alice Hare is no longer quite herselfnot that she ever had much of a self to begin with. Having been abandoned by her father, she has no one but her mother, a woman who is possessive, secretive, and manipulative. As she tries to piece together her own history, Alice becomes fixated on the period of her life she and her parents spent in Japan. A baby at the time, she has no memories of this sojourn, so she's free to invent. Eventually, this attempt to fabricate an identity turns into an intense fascination with the author Mizuko Himura, whom Alice comes to know in real life after stalking her via social media. This would make a great premise for a thriller, but it's quite evident Sudjic has more literary ambitions. The result is a story that's hard to follow even though it moves at an incredibly slow pace. One difficulty is that it moves around in time, and disparate episodes don't build on each other so much as they expose how much the reader doesn't know. This might make stylistic sense for a novel about a young woman tortured by the lacunae in her own life, but it's dissatisfying and disorienting. For example, the novel begins with Alice being shut out by Mizuko, and then it shifts into a long stretch dominated by letters from Alice's paternal grandmother. We learn about Alice's gap year in Japan after she graduated from university, and her momentous first evening with Mizuko happens without any description of how and why Alice became infatuated with her. Another example: Alice makes passing mention of her "boyfriend at that time," which comes as a shock since this is not only the first we're hearing of a romantic entanglement of any kind in her life ever, but it's also the first hint that she's made any new relationships at all since her move from England to New York. It doesn't help that Alice's real-world connection to Mizuko relies on a preposterous series of coincidences. An intriguing premise delivered in turgid prose. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
At the invitation of her grandmother, Sylvia, who is dying of cancer, 23-year-old Alice Hare travels from England to New York. Adopted as a baby by Sylvia's son, Mark, a brilliant physicist, and his wife, Susy, Alice was raised by her mother in England after her father disappeared in Tokyo, a mystery that has haunted her so deeply she faked his suicide note when she was 10. New York City brings Alice out of her shell, and her world opens up when she agrees to help Nat Rooiakker, a friend of her grandmother, trace her family lineage. The connection leads Alice to discover Mizuko Humura, a Japanese writer living in New York, whose social media postings and writings awaken deep feelings of kinship in Alice. Mizuko happens to be dating an acquaintance of Alice's, which gives Alice an opportunity to meet Mizuko and work her way into Mizuko's life. Sudjic's first novel has a slow build, shifting backwards and forwards in time, but patient readers will find much to appreciate in this very contemporary bildungsroman.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
AUGUSTOWN, by Kei Miller. (Vintage, $16.) When Kaia, a schoolboy, comes home with his dreadlocks shorn off - a violation of his Rastafari beliefs - his town in Jamaica erupts, setting in motion a reckoning of the humiliations its people have suffered at the hands of the establishment, which they call Babylon. "Each observant sentence in this gorgeous book is a gem," our reviewer, V. V. Ganeshananthan, wrote. THE UPSTARTS: Uber, Airbnb, and the Battle for the New Silicon Valley, by Brad Stone. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $17.99.) Stone, of Bloomberg News, offers a balanced view of these companies' spectacular rise: On one side, the disruption ushered in a new era of freedom regarding the services people use; on the other, the start-ups' growth represents "the overweening hubris of the techno-elite." THE ROMANCE READER'S GUIDE TO LIFE, by Sharon Pywell. (Flatiron, $16.99.) The plot of a purloined novel, "The Pirate Lover," runs parallel to the lives of Neave and Lilly, two sisters in working-class Massachusetts. An unusual narrative device - Lilly's sections are told from beyond the grave - helps keep the story interesting, and Pywell clearly has fun riffing on the romance genre's tropes and overstuffed language. THE STORIED CITY: The Quest for Timbuktu and the Fantastic Mission to Save Its Past, by Charlie English. (Riverhead, $17.) Timbuktu, in Mali, had long been home to thousands of ancient African documents on everything from politics to science to religion. When A1 Qaeda arrived in 2012, intent on destroying anything that did not adhere to its vision of Islam, a heroic effort was started to move and save the manuscripts. English places this story of Timbuktu's libraries in the city's remarkable history. SYMPATHY, by Olivia Sudjic. (Mariner, $14.99.) After Alice Hare, a lonely and adrift 23-year-old, arrives in New York from London, she becomes infatuated via social media with Mizuko, a Japanese writer. As Alice's obsession intensifies, she attempts to force a friendship - to a devastating end. This debut novel deals with the particular heartbreak of unrequited affection and jilted friendship in the internet age. AMERICAN ORIGINALITY: Essays on Poetry, by Louise Glück. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) The author, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former poet laureate, assesses contemporary poetry in this brief volume, with an eye to broader questions of American identity. Our reviewer, Craig Morgan Teicher, praised the collection, writing, "In the guise of a poetry critic, Glück shows herself to be a kind of dark contemporary conscience."
Library Journal Review
The narrator of Sudjic's debut is an online stalker who befriends the object of her obsession. Alice is visiting her grandmother in New York when she becomes infatuated with Japanese author Mizuko Himura. The obsession starts after -Alice contrives to meet Mizuko in a coffee shop (location posted online). Social media plays an enormous role in the novel and both women's lives. Mizuko uses her social media presence to publicize her work but spends more time curating her online persona than writing, while Alice uses social media primarily for stalking Mizuko. Mizuko is everything to Alice, and -Sudjic succeeds in creating a self-destructive, desperate narrative of passionate infatuation. The novel is unrelenting in its description of Alice's suffocating need to possess Mizuko. That need drives the story forward at an increasingly frantic pace as the potential damage becomes more obvious with each mistake Alice makes. VERDICT Recommended with reservations. This is a good choice for book clubs, but readers less attached to social media will find it hard to sympathize with the main characters, whose narcissism and need for external validation cause real harm to the people around them. [See Prepub Alert, 10/31/16.]-Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.