Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
“She thinks before she acts. Or more properly she thinks instead of acts. A character flaw not a virtue.”Dept. Of Speculation is a short novel of a marriage. It's told in 46 chapters composed of short paragraphs and almost aphoristic lines and quotes in 160 compact pages. The narrator, the Wife, goes from being a young woman who considers being an Art Monster, a person who lives solely for the creation of their art, to a wife and a mother. It's set mostly in Brooklyn, but that shouldn't be held
My rating oscillates between 3 and 4 stars. Thin slices of married life as viewed through a microscope, agitated cells of a wife's emotional life swirling on the page. A mix of memories and inner thoughts, striking moments and philosophical quotes, the whole should have risen as a symphony yet it didn't quite do that in the end for me. The book felt a little bit rushed and disjointed and coming apart at the seams. Jenny Offill jumped ahead through the years a little abruptly at times and I often...
This short story reminds me of the first big hill on a wooden roller coaster. That ominous, “click-click-click” as the chain slowly pulls the cars up the steep hill. The suspense builds, but be prepared for that fast, drop, straight down. The nameless characters are The Husband and The Wife. A woman is on the verge of a nervous breakdown as her marriage is imploding. Her story is told in rapid-fire, quick-cut scenes. This gives the reader small, fragmented but intimate glimpses into the couple’s...
6 stars.I'm doing my inarticulate book-clutching thing.
The subject of this book is the same as Elena Ferrante's The Days of Abandonment - the husband strays - yet the writing couldn't have been handled more differently. To write like Ferrante you need a grasp of literature.To write like Offill you need an American education and access to the internet. Ferrante wears her education lightly - there are little, if any references to great writers.Offill doesn't let you forget who she's in touch with.Offill talks a lot about art.Ferrante asks you to judge...
There are so many novels which are really memoirs but are given to us as novels because memoirs are like “oh, what makes you think your life is so interesting I might want to read about it?” and novels are “yay! A new novel!”I will bet one thousand of my British poundsthat Jenny Offill really did have a bug infestation in her apartment and really did have a daughter who broke both her wrists. (Novels I read recently which are really also memoirs are : A Question of Upbringing, The Wallcreeper, T...
Essentially, Offill carries out a kind of emotional autopsy on a young woman trying to divide her energies between bringing up a young child and keeping a husband happy without sacrificing her commitment to succeeding as a writer. The original format of this novel – it’s written as a kind of literary scrapbook of musings, quotes and insights - reminded me at times of Fellini’s brilliant film about the fount of inspiration, 8 ½. Like the film director in Fellini’s film, Offill’s writer is bereft
Ten Reasons Why You Should Read This Extraordinary Book10. Because it has one of the coolest back-cover endorsements (by Michael Cunningham) you will ever see.9. Because by reading you will challenge this 1896 advice to wives, quoted in the book: The indiscriminate reading of novels is one of the most injurious habits to which a married woman can be subject. Besides the false views of human nature it will impart, it produces an indifference to the performance of domestic duties, and contempt f...
I underlined basically the entire novel.
‘If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.’John Berryman once wrote ‘let all flowers wither like a party.’ Nothing lasts, even the things we love most and nurture and care for must pass, but this is not cause for sadness but merely a reason to look into each moment and let ourselves feel the emotion coursing through them. Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill, writer of the marvelous children’s book (and staple of my daughter’s bedtime routine) Spark...
"But what if I`m special? What if I`m in the minority?" As stated in the blurb I did not find this book to be a "portrait of marriage", but instead it was more like being in someone's mind (and heart) and getting an unfiltered, raw and original account of everything being thought of! Each chapter, in fact even most of the paragraphs within the chapters, in Dept. of Speculation are unrelated and kind of disjointed. And, this way of narration made this book interesting! In some, God is portrayed a...
Indulging in my love of audio books has become more challenging since I quit my job, and no longer have a two and a half hour commute to get lost in a dreamy book. I've taken to having a special ME day once a week. The ritual revolves around my complicated and needy hair. The process of pre-shampooing, washing, deep conditioning, detangling, and finally braiding my hair into tiny segments occupies about 3-4 hours sometimes. I used to put it off until I absolutely had a knotted mess on my hands.
The plot depiction is disjointed and resembles the ramblings of a bi-polar patient off his/her meds. Typically it sounds like the ramblings of a person in couples' therapy when only one partner shows up. I would like to talk about the redeeming graces of this novelette, but I could find none, It was like picking up someone's private daily journal -- and finding that it's really only meaningful to the person writing it. Unfortunately, this material just did not engage me. (The text that explains
True confession: I will probably never press a copy of Jenny Offill’s “Dept. of Speculation” into anyone’s hot little hands. It doesn’t matter anyway. The thing landed on, like, every Best Of 2014 list in the universe, probably even half-assedly scribbled onto fast food napkins. But here’s the thing: I didn’t just love this book, I fucking loved it. I felt passionate and heart-beaty about it. I touched words on pages and sighed like they were images in a yearbook or whatever. I turned my copy in...
When I first pulled a copy of Renata Adler's Pitch Dark off the dollar remainder shelves at the Strand sometime in the early 90s, I was intrigued, mystified. ¿Que es esto? I was slaloming between the poles of philosophy and literature at the time and trying to get them to merge in some elegant way or at least not crash into a tree. I was grabbed there on 12th Street by how she alluded to Wittgenstein and Nabokov back-to-back, insisting that they belonged together, not to mention Scheherazade and...
I liked the format of this book, short quirky paragraphs that do not necessarily relate to the last one. Which I found this similar to Bluets. However for me, for this to work I would have liked the book to be a bit shorter and slightly more of an obvious plot so I could read it in one sitting. As it is I felt the need for a short break after reading 25%. What I enjoyed most about this book is that parts which talk of her daughter, her relationship with her daughter or the experience of motherho...
I wrote a review a couple of years ago...sorry --not sure where it is Might show up Mariah!!
There are blowsy baroque behemoths that spill the entire contents of the fridge onto your reading table (and let you do the cooking, and the clearing up afterwards too sometimes), and then there are the delicate offerings, the distilled essence from the alembic, an extract that carries, within a tiny drop, sweetness, tartness, acidity, all at once. Potent. Searing. Jewel-like droplets that set the mouth ablaze and the mind reeling.This is sensational.Offill dispenses with all the conventional tr...
This is an intriguing book, but quite a difficult one to assess and review. At first it seemed like an almost random stream of disconnected short paragraphs, but it soon becomes clear that the book has a core narrative that tells what would otherwise be a fairly humdrum and universal story of a failing marriage. The plot is the least important thing in this book - it is full of memorable observations and thoughts on a wide variety of subjects.It falls loosely into two halves - the first is told
I want to review this book for a number of reasons, partly because it's so small and slight that I fear readers will ignore it. But, like Thomas Paine's Common Sense, its resemblance to a modest pamphlet belies the size of its punch.This book is an excellent character study and an example of what greatness can be achieved when an author trusts her reader and thus avoids the sin of overwriting. These days, many movies seem longer and sloppier and less craftily edited to me. Likewise, it seems lik...