Ah, rich people problems. To have a flat in London, sitting unoccupied. To jet off to Greece at the behest of a relative, and on a moment’s notice, because work, what’s that? To stay in a fancy Greek hotel, eating out at restaurants, and sure, it’s the off-season, but really? Come on.
And here we are, trapped inside the head of our nameless narrator, who, separated from her husband, still goes to Greece at her mother-in-law’s order, to find him. Her thoughts are banal because, like most people, her thoughts are banal and not in need of having every single on detailed. Her husband is rich and a playboy, and they separated because of his numerous infidelities, and I have used banal twice already but it is so banal and we have two hundred pages plus of this banality of our cipher narrator searching after her cipher husband with cipher locals poking about and there is absolutely nothing there. I can tell you nothing about the narrator or her personality or her likes and dislikes. Ditto everyone else in the book. Ditto why this woman would undertake this task. Ditto why this book got such accolades (amazon tells me Named a best book of the year by the New York Times, NPR, Huffington Post, The A.V. Club, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, Refinery29, Town & Country, Harper’s Bazaar, NYLON, BookRiot.). Obviously, there are far worse written books out there, but this is just a flat, monotone where I don’t care about anything, at all, ever.
A Separation by Katie Kitamura went on sale March 23, 2017.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.