Olivia Sudjic

between 2.5 and 3. this is really well written but a bit overlong and dense. (i'm not sure what i'd take out, though.) it's not hard to read, but there are a lot of details that pop back up later, and if you don't remember exactly what she was talking about, you miss a connection or a point the author is making. there's a lot in this book, and it's interesting both from a story perspective and a social commentary perspective, but i'm not sure i enjoyed it for the first half or so. it got intense and fast then, and lots from the first half became more clear, but i think readers would be better served with a more chronological account. or at least not jumping back and forth, a week here or there, again and again. i'm not sure what purpose that served. maybe just to disorient us, like alice was feeling. (the time jumps aren't typical, and certain periods of time are repeated a few times, so it's not just back and forth between two periods of time; it's kind of all over the place.) her statements about how social media is in our life, and how it jumbles what should be shown outwardly versus inwardly (and how people handle that messiness) were the most interesting part of the book for me. ("Man had such impenetrable means to stop the outside world from coming in, and so little to stop our inside world from surging out...") the way that writing something down (in a letter, sure, but specifically on social media) makes it real, and erasing it therefore makes it go away, or erases that part of someone's life and identity. there was lots more - on identity in particular, on adoption, on stalking/obsession, on relationship, on responsibility, on genetics, on sex, on physics, on events happening in early/mid 2016. i feel like i'd like this book more if i read it again, but i don't know that i want to. and i wouldn't say that i enjoyed the read, but it was interesting and lends to good discussion.… (more)

I read it for the Lesbian Book group. We all agreed, that it was NOT a lesbian book. Most people did not like it, and disliked all the characters. I wasn't sure, going into the group, how I felt about it. I knew that I didn't exactly like it, the characters were not very likeable, and the book somewhat creeped me out and interfered with my sleep Monday night (when I finished it, late at night, because I wanted it read for the book group.)

The book centers around a young woman, Alice Hare, who is dealing with a lot of complicated identity issues and who is very unconnected to other people. Through the internet, she develops a stalker-ish relationship with a Japanese woman writer, Mizuko. Alice does some really not-good things in pursuit of this relationship.

In the end, I decided that it was a good book. Lots of room for thought, and I figured anything that made me feel that uncomfortable, must have had some depth. The book does have a non-linear and sometimes repetitive format. That bothered some people, I thought it was a reflection of how Alice moved through the world, and so I was OK with it.… (more)

Sympathy is virtually impossible to describe, I'm struggling to do so even to myself and it was a struggle I grappled with all the way through. In the end Sudjic's own narrator says it best when she characterises her tale as a “love story that is mostly made up, from memories that are mostly false, between people who were mainly not there.”

Alice Hare has never really known herself. Adopted as a baby she knows little of her birth parents except that her mother is dead and her father in prison. Her adoptive family also offers little stability, her mother telling and retelling, embellishing and rewriting the story of their history so often after her husband disappears that neither mother nor daughter have any real sense what is true. In an attempt to escape what feels like a vortex of uncertainty and parental neediness Alice relocates to New York and the home of her cancer-stricken grandmother Silvia.

As Alice attempts to find her way and herself in a new city and a new life, her perceptions and expectations constantly shaped by the "lives" she observes online she stumbles across Mizuko Himura, a Japanese heiress, freelance writer and constant user of social media. Alice becomes obsessed with the connections and parallels she comes to see between her history and Mizuko's. Parallels that take on increasingly irrational significance until she manages to engineer an entry into Mizuko's real life. This is stalking in the internet age and it is not pretty as Alice becomes increasingly obsessed, harnessing all the knowledge she has amassed online into manipulating Mizuko into friendship by aping her like, her opinions and playing to her character. Alice in an extremely complex and unsettling character, incredibly self-involved and yet almost entirely lacking in self-awareness and despite her disturbing penchant for manipulation she is almost endearingly naive to the fact that Mizuko's consciously-curated online identity is no more genuine than her own.

Despite Alice's flaws, her obsessive and possessive tendencies, her selfishness, her guile it is testament to Sudjic's talent that she somehow forces a little sympathy, unpicking these unpleasant characteristics in a way that reveals the sad fragility and vulnerability that underpin her neuroses.

The narrative structure is really quite mind-bogglingly clever. Alice's fragmentary, disjointed and unreliable reminiscences deliberately invoking those long, convoluted "rabbit-holes" (her name is no accident) with which anyone who has ever accidentally lost hours of their life to the internet will be disturbingly familiar. We follow Alice through many, often fascinating, digressions, from particle physics to the 2011 Japanese tsunami to the disappearance of flight MH370. These labyrinthine tangents draw us in an out of the main narrative forging unexpected connections and consequences that make Alice's bizarre focus on coincidences seem less and less absurd. Because Sympathy is all about our lives online and how the constant presence of undiluted, unsubstantiated data can potentially affect and warp our opinions, our thinking and our identities, you find yourself becoming just a little Alice.

Sympathy is an impressive, immersive and ultimately addictive experience, disorientating and irresistible and Olivia Sudjic is, without a doubt, a young author to watch.… (more)