The Wake
- Dec 4, 2021
- 1 min read
★★★★★
What do you do when a book is so otherworldly, so hauntingly beautiful, so bleakly poetic that it gets down into your bones, marrow-deep? When the story feels like a primordial part of you, genetic memory, inherited experience? You give it five stars, return the copy you checked out from the library, track down not one but two hardcover copies (just in case), damn the cost, and dream about reading and rereading it again and again. Many readers won’t even take the chance, so daunting will the writing seem (it is written in a hybrid of Old and Modern English), which is a terrible shame, but once you get the hang of the language (readers of Irvine Welsh will have some idea), you’ll be uniquely transported to a time and place as never before. In The Wake, Paul Kingsnorth has crafted truly one of the most unique and compelling novels of our time.
Comments