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the complete review - fiction

Talking to Ourselves

by
Andrés Neuman

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : decent, if not entirely convincing novel of grief and communication

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "This is writing of a quality rarely encountered, which actually feels as though it touches on reality, translating something experienced into words, without loss of detail or clarity." - Jane Housham, The Guardian
  
  
• "(A) profound meditation on illness, death and bereavement and brilliantly illustrates literature’s ability to help readers confront and understand mortality. (...) Impeccably translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, Talking To Ourselves is a wonderfully articulate novel about a vast and painful subject." - Lucy Popescu, The Independent
  
  
• "Appealing to both intellect and emotion, this splendid novel from Neuman grapples with important questions and features well-developed, nuanced characters." - Publishers Weekly
  
  
• "Talking to Ourselves is a slim novella that’s neither a road story nor a grief memoir, though it inhabits and distends both genres. Its main concern is death in all its complexity -- as a source of anger and eroticism, of messiness and sorrow, of shame and self-loathing, and as a thing to be resisted (and possibly defied) through writing. (...) The book does not attempt to find coherence beyond each narrator’s individual account, which is precisely what makes it so affecting." - Jessica Loudis, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Talking to Ourselves is three-voiced novel, alternating chapters presenting the perspectives of a husband and father, Mario, a wife and mother, Elena, and their son, Lito. While written in the first person, these are not entirely interior monologues: for all the 'talking to ourselves' each of the characters does, they constantly mention and describe their conversations and exchanges (via telephone texting, for example) with each other ("hey, son, hey, are you listening to me or not ? Yes, yes, I reply"); occasionally they'll even address each other ("Dear Mario", Elena writes -- albeit with no expectations of a response). Yet even here the failures of communication and connection are made all too clear -- Lito, for example, repeatedly noting how he only hears or understands parts of the exchanges between his parents, or Elena confused by the abbreviations Lito uses in his text messages.
       The novel begins with a terminally ill Mario wanting to take his ten-year-old son on one last father-and-son road trip. Each of the characters deals with the present-day situation differently: Mario just wants to give his son a good memory of time spent together; Elena tries to deal with her husband's rapid decline (and the looming drastic change in her life); and Lito is kept in the dark (and ultimately sent away to live with the grandparents as Mario's decline accelerates).
       Elena's sections are by far the most compelling, as she is well and truly torn by what is happening. She admits: "As I write this I despise myself, but sometimes Mario's body disgusts me" -- and, when Mario takes the kid on the road, she goes wild with a doctor, Ezequiel (who: "suggests we do things that, until only recently, I would have considered reportable" -- things she then seems to enjoy losing herself in).
       The Elena sections are also interesting because she chooses not to always speak for herself. As she explains:

     When a book tells me something I was trying to say, I feel the right to appropriate its words, as if they had once belonged to me and I were taking them back.

They raised me in an atmosphere of tolerance, respect, and communication. In other words, they left me alone with my traumas.

- M.A.Orthofer, 2 April 2014

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Links:

• Farrar, Straus and Giroux publicity page
• Pushkin Press publicity page
• Alfaguara publicity page
• Punto de lectura publicity page
• Buchet & Chastel publicity page
• Agencia literaria Schavelzon information page

• Aire Nuestro (Spanish)
• análisis digital (Spanish)
• A bride abattue (French)
• By the Firelight
• El Cultural (Spanish)
• La Esfera Cultural (Spanish)
• esQuisses (Spanish)
• The Guardian
• The Harvard Crimson
• The Independent
• Kirkus Reviews
• The Lady
• Moi, Clara et les mots (French)
• The Mookse and the Gripes
• Ojoseco (Spanish)
• Patrulla de salvación (Spanish)
• Publishers Weekly
• Three Percent
• Tony's Reading List
• La Vida en Sorbos (Spanish)
• Winstonsdad's Blog

• Official site

• [Traveler of the Century]

• See Index of Latin and South American literature
• See Index of Spanish literature
• Other books from Pushkin Press under review

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About the Author:

       Andrés Neuman was born in Argentina in 1977 and grew up in Spain.

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© 2014-2021 the complete review

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