Richly emotive and darkly captivating, with elements of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and the imaginative depth of Margaret Atwood, Elsewhere by Alexis Schaitkin conjures a community in which girls become wives, wives become mothers and some of them, quite simply, disappear.Vera grows up in a small town, removed and isolated, pressed up against the mountains, cloud-covered and damp year-round. This town, fiercely protective, brutal and unforgiving in its adherence to tradition, faces a singular affliction: some mothers vanish, disappearing into the clouds. It is the exquisite pain and intrinsic beauty of their lives; it sets them apart from people elsewhere and gives them meaning. Vera, a young girl when her own mother went, is on the cusp of adulthood herself. As her peers begin to marry and become mothers, they speculate about who might be the first to go, each wondering about her own fate. Reveling in their gossip, they witness each other in motherhood, waiting for signs: this one devotes herself to her child too much, this one not enough—that must surely draw the affliction’s gaze. When motherhood comes for Vera, she is faced with the question: will she be able to stay and mother her beloved child, or will she disappear? Provocative and hypnotic, Alexis Schaitkin’s Elsewhere is at once a spellbinding revelation and a rumination on the mysterious task of motherhood and all the ways in which a woman can lose herself to it; the self-monitoring and judgment, the doubts and unknowns, and the legacy she leaves behind.
No posts yet
Kick off the convo with a theory, question, musing, or update
Your rating:
0 0I picked up Elsewhere because I saw it mentioned in a YouTube video as being like Midsommar. That was incorrect. This is not like Midsommar unless you think that every book set in a mountain town is like Midsommar.
I listened to this in audiobook format and it was gorgeous. The narrator, Ell Potter, is absolutely incredible and I will definitely be looking out for other audiobooks that she narrates. The book is a poetic story about motherhood, identity, and the possibly cyclical relationships between mothers and daughters. Poetic writing aside, I think the book fell apart in the second half and found myself hoping it would wrap up quickly toward the end which is unfortunate because this book has a banger of an opening. I told my sister I was reading a "yummy, yummy book" and that was true at the beginning (the dolls and the dirt eating!) but not by the end.
The story is told to us by Vera who lives in an isolated mountain town completely isolated from the rest of the world, collectively known as Elsewhere. The interesting thing about the town is that mothers are at risk of vanishing. Vera's own mother "went" when she was a young child and so she has grown up with only her father. One day Ruth, a "stranger", comes to town and Vera tells us her observations on this woman, the woman's behavior while in the town, the town's opinion of her, and also the way her time in the town comes to an end. Vera does end up becoming a mother herself and tells us about her experiences in motherhood and life outside of motherhood Elsewhere.
I think some ideas and mechanics of this world could have been fleshed out a bit more. Examples of this would be the affliction or vanishing of the mothers, the significance of the hairpins and their use during sex, and maybe the way men in the town are just sort of resigned to the fact that the mother of their children, sisters, and own mothers might just vanish one day.
0
© 2024 Pagebound