The End We Start From

Books like these, which are not driven by plot but by language and style are always a bit tougher to discuss.

I loved reading the first couple of pages, the first person narrator's description of giving birth in this witty and detached style, somewhere between prose and poetry.

There are two plots from then on, the narrator's son's first year from baby to toddler and a journey through a country thrown into violent turmoil but a flood catastrophe. The country is actually the UK, but that matters none, because all particularities are abstracted away, along with all the names of novel characters. There is an echo here of Saramago's "Blidness", which took a similar approach.

The issue is that this style-based approach gets somewhat strained even in a short novel like this. To phrase the problem differently: A first person narrator who can keep that level of poetic detachment no matter what is actually going on the the material world outside seems an implausible invention.

Plot wise, the "quest" is how she and her son get reunited with "R" the boys farther, but that is also something which just "happens". I do like the carefulness and the indirect approach to emotion, but the author takes that so far, that I cannot help just letting the narration float by, stanza after stanza.

The antipode of this novel has to be "The Road" by Cormac Mc Carthy: Where the reader has to live through the post apocalyptic world's gritty material reality and any form of detachment from it is hard-won both by the reader and the novel's characters.

I keep waffling between 3 and 4 stars. Maybe it should actually be 4?

My ratings are (almost) always based on how much I actually enjoyed reading the book and how they made me feel, not literary quality. (This goes both ways; I have books rated highly that I think are actually bad in a number of ways, but I enjoyed reading them - this is not the case here, though.)
I find this book hard to rate. Some of the literary devices (like the mystical italic passages interspersed with the main storyline) didn't work for me; they seemed contrived. I (and data on actual real-life catastrophes) disagree with the author's pessimistic outlook on overall human behaviour in disasters.
But on the other hand, I read the book all the way through in one go, and I am happy that I did; I found it very gripping. Reading this story is like getting to see the events only in patches through a thick mist, or partially through a small hole in the wall, but that is actually genius! This way, the narrative can focus on the essentials - emotions and human bonds - instead of inventing extraneous detail to explain things.

So I do recommend this! It's a very quick read, so even if you like it less than I did, it's low risk to give it a go.