I at once loved Dept. Of Speculation by Jenny Offill and had to acknowledge that I had never read anything quite like it. It’s so beautiful and well done that frankly it has rendered me bereft of words to describe it.
To tell you what this story is about, hardly seems to do it justice for its subject matter sounds so mundane: the downturn of a relationship. A couple meet, marry, have a child and begin to change. Unhappiness and dissatisfaction fill their lives and yet…. I know, it sounds like a thousand marriages you have heard about and maybe it even sounds like your own and yet, it’s not what the story is about that makes it so special, but how it is written and the beauty of the expression of its language.
Jenny Offill writes minimalistically, each short paragraph a beautiful concise vignette that moves the story on and yet at the same time spots around. The novel itself doesn’t take more than a couple of hours to read, but is guaranteed to rock your literary world.
For fear of my review being more verbose that the book itself, it’s best I stop, but please dash out now and buy it. This book fills up your soul and will, I am certain, give you one of the best reading days you have enjoyed of late.