The Starless Sea By Erin Morgenstern

 

A mandatory Warning- If you are a “The Starless Sea” enthusiast, immediately exit the review, as I can’t help but rant, to regain back my braincells:-/

Beleaguered and with insuperable reluctance, I take total responsibility of all the ranting, raving and griping below (while citing examples from the text!).

Erin Morgenstern, is a craftswoman of enamouring captivating words! But just catapulting a mountain of lurid words, with no solid rhyme-or-reason, is definitely not sufficient to redeem a book!

Pet-Peeves: -

This book is a quintessential of “Pettifogging". I had to extricate all the convoluted knots in my head, post the read!☹

It was the most tedious task, to be subjected to the trial and tribulations of finishing a bulky plot-less book!! No disrespect or hate for this work, as I am not the most read or knowledgeable person, so I might have missed out on something!

This review, is just to vent out the angst and frustration I was subjected to, so pardon me if I go overboard, I am disgruntled!!

It was the most inopportune moment when I was indentured to this book! I wish I could have pre-empted, the decision.

I wish if at that most unfortunate, plaintive moment, I could have buried the book somewhere, just never to be found again! ☹

 

It is a LGBT YA fantasy(I admire the LGBT part!), with a guy named Zachary, stumbling upon a book “Sweet Sorrows” in a library. He discovers the third part of the book, citing his own story and is finally intrigued and sets onto a whimsical journey (just to torment me ludicrously)!

Upto 5 percent of the book, I was all fascinated, captivated, enticed, with the library, books, looking forward to the euphoria and alchemy, but post that, my brain was battered, abused and maltreated at regular intervals.

I kept questioning myself, why am I still reading it? Is it because of the striking cover, or because of the prolific reviews on GRs, or because I wanted to pick it up prior to Night Circus? I wonder, if I will ever be able to muster the courage, to pick up Night Circus, post this tedium! ☹

By the time I finished 25 percent, there was no story, and it stayed the same till the end! But because of the time and efforts already invested, I continued, which was my biggest mistake! I confess!

With no character development, it is the vaguest of the vague!

 

EM definitely, has read exuberantly, and the atmospheric setting is brilliant, but it keeps swaying sporadically from one prose to another, and I simply couldn’t register anything. Just like the sporadic small stories kept swaying without any implication!

 

Fantasy and whimsy, isn’t meant to leave one in angst, frustration or annoyance, but this left me utterly disappointed, disgruntled and fuming! Finally numb.

I could have read 2 other novels, instead of this persecution!

As a child, I would gather cut-outs of newspapers, magazines, to make a collage, and with a gleam in my eyes, admire at my creation!

I think, Erin Morgenstern, has had been collecting all her favourite quotes/prose on atmospheric settings, throughout, dumped all into one book, “The Starless Sea”, with overflowing nonsensical stories! If she would have worked on the storyline, then it would have been a sheer masterpiece!

I skimmed through the last 50 pages, and some 50-odd pages in the middle, as I just couldn’t make anything out of it!

I wouldn’t recite the storyline, as I don’t want to be inflicted with the pain of writing the convoluted, contrived, stories, without being able to connect them, as they are actually not connected! ☹

Sheer Cerebral Attack, with random short stories, suspended in thin air, enough to make anyone lunatic, disgruntled, rant and rave, just like I am ranting!

Moreover, reading the 2^nd half of the book was the most tormenting affair for me. With every chapter ending, I was made to realise that it was a contrived whimsy, and I was hallucinating all the while! Seriously?? Sheer, time-wastage!!!

I was frazzled out with this frizzled out plot! Plot, sorry, there was no plot!

Every metaphor is a metaphor for everything else! It is a labyrinthine of words!

####################

Sharing a few-

“Poetry,” Mirabel repeats. “The weather. It’s like a poem. Where each word is more than one thing at once and everything’s a metaphor. The meaning condensed into rhythm and sound and the spaces between sentences. It’s all intense and sharp, like the cold and the wind.”

“She sat next to me and told me that we were the people that the narrative would have followed out from the party if we were in a movie or a novel or something. We were where the story was, the story you could follow like a string, not all the overlapping party stories in the house, tangled up with too many dramas soaked in cheap alcohol and stuffed into not enough rooms.”

“A book is an interpretation,” she says. “You want a place to be like it was in the book but it’s not a place in a book it’s just words. The place in your imagination is where you want to go and that place is imaginary.”

“Can't make an egg without breaking a few metaphors.”

###############

 

I couldn’t understand the idea/purpose/moral of the book! Period.

I tried to derive; what Erin Morgenstern would have tried to convey, from the below two citations-

In one of the conversations between Mirabel and Zachary: -

“He tells her about moving from place to place to place and never feeling like he ever belonged in any of them, how wherever he was he would almost always rather be someplace else, preferably somewhere fictional. He tells her how he worries that none of it means anything. That none of it is important. That who he is, or who he thinks he is, is just a collection of references to other people’s art and he is so focused on story and meaning and structure that he wants his world to have all of it neatly laid out and it never, ever does and he fears it never will”

Is it about finding own standing in the universe? I applaud the fact of Zachary finding a mate/boyfriend for himself? But is EM, trying to emphasize that one needs to find a human, to find own standing in the world? That’s ludicrous.

 

Next, towards the end of the novel, sharing an excerpt from Kat’s secret diary: -

“I remember wondering if this story was an analogy about people who stay in places or relationships or whatever situations longer than they should because they’re afraid of letting go or moving on or the unknown, or how people hold on to things because they miss what the thing was even if that isn’t what that same thing is now.”

EM had to explain the purpose of the book using Kat’s secret diary, instead of working on the actual storyline.

 

What did Zachary let go or release? I couldn’t find anything he released or executed on his own throughout the book!

 

Without any further belabouring-

 

With a jaded spirit, I give 1.5 stars, for the underground library establishment with books. Books, which made me euphoric initially! And yes, the atmospheric building is laden with prose (but it is just too much, profuse and lurid!)

I totally get when EM, mentions about the readers interpreting each book, her/his own way! But there got to be a dialogue established between the author and the reader. There got to be some storyline or moral, worth to be deciphered. It is highly unfair, just to write a detached jargon of lurid words, and leave it to the readers to interpret their own way, and call it a book/story! ☹

I am jaded and faded! Totally wearied out, forlorn!

I am listening to “Faded” by Alan Walker! ☹

So, lost!