I tried to give this book a chance, but I just could not get into it. I had to give up about a quarter of the way through.

Sympathy

by Olivia Sudjic

And now, for something completely different. This debut novel, which I agree evokes the writing of Haruki Murakami (in a good way), among others, was one of those where I'm not too sure if I am actually too old to read it. (answer, yes, that's correct) When I find myself relating more to the poor decrepit grandma dying, wholly ignored, on the couch than to the 20-something protagonist, I have to figure that maybe this one wasn't meant for me. Having said that, I thought the writing was strong, I just didn't really care about the characters all that much. To be fair, they didn't care about a whole lot either, except for some over-the-top obsessive longing that never really feels honest. "Tormented efforts to connect" from the summary, though, seems apt, the idea that there are connections of any kind here seems grossly overstated.

Based on the fact that the book was compared to Murakami, I expected a different dimension to the book (not quite literally, though certainly his stories go there); I felt like the plot sort of teased the edges of a line I expected to be crossed. I'm not sure if that makes any sense, but I think that is kind of how I feel about this — sadly, I didn't have a lot of sympathy. But I will say that it is still an impressive debut, and I wouldn't hesitate to read what comes next.


For Goodreads:

Why I picked it — It got a lot of good press, and was on a lot of "Best of" lists for 2017
Reminded me of… it didn't remind me of any books, but it reminded me of the "I am too old for this" feeling I got watching the first and only episode of the show "Girls". Sorry.
For my full review — click here

I was lost from page 1 and after 80 pages gave up.

I was pulled in by all the buzz surrounding the book and it was my desire to explore the relationship between our narrator and her friend that compelled me to continue reading. Ultimately, though, I found the writing uneven -- overwrought and tough to connect with at times, strikingly sparse and affecting at others -- and the narrative's tendency to dart about and flit from focus to focus a barrier to connecting with the characters.

Sympathy is one of those books that I might never have read if not for an interesting short summation and the opportunity to read an ARC from NetGalley. Rarely do I feel I should put a book down for a week or so and then reread it, but this story is challenging to describe and I really felt the need to go back and ensure I hadn’t missed anything vital. Alice Hart probably summed up the story best when she said “the story was mostly made up.”
What is known, according to Alice, who may or may not be the most reliable story teller is that she was adopted, her father left the family, and her relationship with her mother seems tenuous at best. Understanding what happened to her father and her life before that event and after with her mother is problematic, as it seems Alice may have learned the art of fabrication from her mother. An invitation to come to New York to visit her ill paternal grandmother seems a perfect solution for Alice. Perhaps Silvia can provide Alice with insight into her son, Alice’s adopted father or at least assist Alice in finding a direction for her life.

While the severity of Silvia’s illness seems to at times ground Alice into feeling and acting responsibly, just as often she seems overwhelmed or uninterested in the fact that her grandmother is dying. Silvia, when not heavily medicated or suffering severe pain, encourages Alice to go out, explore New York and make a life. There were brief moments when I thought Alice might actually escape her perceptions of what was wrong with her life and just live, until she revealed her obsession with Mizuko Himura, a Japanese writer and frequent social media devotee. Alice believes they have too much in common for there not to be an instant connection, if only they could meet. Her cyber stalking allows her to know everything about Mizuko, or so she believes since she never considers that what one posts on social media and the truth, may be two entirely different realities.

Alice’s obsession costs her relationships with “real people” and ultimately even the phantasy world she creates through social media goes horribly wrong. I kept wanting her to put down her phone and look at the wonder of New York and beyond, but like many people addicted to a life spent lamenting the perceived happiness of others through their words and pictures posted online, Alice is unable or unwilling to look further than what she sees through her online filters. I enjoyed the journey, rooted for a different destination for Alice, and ultimately am interested to see where Olivia Sudjic’s writing goes next.

Alice Hare, the main character in Olivia Sudjic’s novel Sympathy, is at a crossroads of sorts. Not one perhaps that involves the typical trepidations of a young woman leaving her home in England for the unknown urban jungle that is Manhattan. The crossroads here is one that blurs the lines between Alice’s real life and the one that lives solely in her imagination, which becomes dangerously close to the one that exists behind her computer screen.
Describing Alice as an outcast would be too easy. Discarded by her real parents, stuck in the middle of the dysfunctional marriage of her adoptive parents, Alice doesn’t have anyone to trust or confide in. Although she does travel to Japan, looking for something she can’t find, Alice finds herself without a place in the world, her sense of belonging completely nullified by a mother who doesn’t really know what to do with her. The only beacon Alice finds is her elderly adoptive grandmother Sylvia, who writes to her from New York City asking Alice to join her and serve as a related companion.
Alice’s first experience in New York is awkward at best. She arrives at Sylvia’s house, who seems to have forgotten Alice was coming and is intent on preserving her dead husband’s memory in the apartment at all costs. Alice is at odds with the city, not certain if she has any place there at all as the city moves on relentlessly without her.
Eventually she meets Dwight, a man who suffers from his own bouts of disassociation with reality, and who is for Alice more of a convenient way to lose her virginity. Sylvia’s friend Nat takes an initial shine to Alice, and invites her to join her daughter Ingrid and her husband Robin in their lavish penthouse while Sylvia is reluctantly taken to a rest home due to medical complications. Alice and Dwight are later invited by a reluctant Ingrid to join her, Robin and the children in the Hamptons, at the home of Robin’s debonair associate Walter, with whom Ingrid is seemingly having an affair.
What Alice experiences with Ingrid, Robin, their children, and Dwight who pops in for visits becomes even more complicated with the presence of Japanese writer Mizuko Himura whom Alice has decided is her “Internet twin” and emotional equal. Alice steadily develops an unhealthy fixation with Mizuko after meeting her at NYU and feigning a distant friendship with Mizuko’s boyfriend Rupert, submitting her to unrealistic standards of perfection when the truth is that Mizuko deals with powerful demons of her own.
As her life becomes more in tandem with the bustle of the city she inhabits, Alice’s relationship with Mizuko begins to unravel, becoming disjointed in its impossibility to subsist outside the realm of her fantasies. While Mizuko pulls gradually away from her, Alice desperately cyber-stalks her with messages written in angry caps: “WHERE ARE YOU?” “WHERE ARE YOU?” WHERE ARE YOU?” Mizuko refers to Alice as “Rabbit,” a rather obvious pun of her name, but it becomes clearer that the references to Alice in Wonderland at various points in the novel, is a parallelism of this Alice, falling down her own self-made rabbit hole.
I spoke to Olivia Sudjic about the inspiration for Sympathy and her views on obsessive relationships and technology.

Olivia Sudjic, author of Sympathy. Photo by Colin Thomas.
How would you describe your writing process?
Weathering and erosion, sedimentation, cementation, carving. I need to add polishing next time.
Which authors have inspired your own work as a writer?
Lydia Davis, Paul Auster, Teju Cole, Maggie Nelson, Chris Kraus, Ben Lerner, Miranda July.
Sympathy is an unusual title for a novel that has so many disturbing relationships. How did you decide on it?
It was the first thing I decided. It came about because the novel originally focused on a seventeenth century pseudo medicine/technology called “Sympathy Powder”, which I then updated to the internet. I decided to go ahead with that title when I realised it hadn’t already been taken as a single word, which seemed surprising.
There are several allusions to Alice in Wonderland in the novel, and your main character’s name is Alice Hare. Would you say your Alice has some common elements with Lewis Carroll’s Alice?
The allusions are mainly to Through the Looking Glass, which is a much more ordered world than the chaos of Wonderland. That’s where I took part of my epigraph from – a line about Alice wanting to be a pawn in the chess game, though nearly every time it’s mentioned in a review of write-up it’s attributed to Wonderland. I should have specified.
Like Carroll’s, my Alice wants to be a part of the chess game even if she doesn’t understand the rules, or really know whose moving her about the grid. She slips through a mirror into a world of reflection, moving about as a mirror-version of herself. She seems not to feel like she has much agency or much responsibility for what happens.
The relationship between Alice and Mizuko isn’t truly a relationship, but rather a struggle for the emotional and even psychological upper hand. Would you say this is accurate?
I would certainly agree it’s not an ideal relationship – neither really knows the other, and it is horribly imbalanced. And yes, Alice is trying to manipulate and control Mizuko. I don’t necessarily agree that this dynamic can’t be described as a relationship, unfortunately. Many relationships, whether between individuals, individuals and technology, or individuals and corporations, are like that.
Which character did you find the most challenging to write?
Robin. The husband/father in the family Alice is again transplanted to in New York. During the editing period, I was told I needed to signpost his evil/exploitative tendencies more clearly.
New York City is one more character in the novel, it seems to come alive in Alice’s descriptions of her life there. Would you say this is true?
I hope so. I saw New York as the motherboard. The chess board. The Instagram grid. Cities are places of connection, collision, isolation, atomization. Manipulating it either means a Robert Moses or a Jane Jacobs approach, and this drastically affects the characters who live there.
There was a Jane Jacobs quote I was influenced by while writing Sympathy – “The decay of cities … goes right down to what we think we want.” That rule – of opposites – is present in Through the Looking Glass. And it is present in Sympathy in the way that our manipulations, the technology we create, can achieve the opposite effect or environment to what we intended.
Is Sympathy a story of obsession or a reflection about misconceptions brought forth by technology and the Internet?
It’s about obsession. Superficially, between individuals. Beneath that, between individuals and the internet. In both directions. It’s about how the web, created in order to open up our world, enlarge our experience, free us from physical confines, barriers, and help individuals situate themselves within a larger whole, has begun to close in on us. Stalk us. Our experience narrows the more our web is “personalized”. The more corporations and governments exploit us online, the more we are in the crosshairs of a telescope turned back on us.

Sympathy is a dark, disorienting tale, a tangled web of identities and lives, obsession and delusion. An unreliable narrator leads the reader through one rabbit hole after the other while she attempts to discover her lineage while becoming increasingly obsessed with author.

Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic is a so-so overwritten novel focusing on obsession, stalking, and social media.
Alice Hare, 23, travels from England to NYC to stay with her ill grandmother. Even before she met her, Alice is obsessed with Mizuko Himura, a Japanese writer living in NYC who teaches creative writing at Columbia. Alice's fantasies and thoughts are fueled by her desire to meet and establish the relationship she knows she is supposed to have with Mizuko. Alice stalkes her and manages to meet her in person via a social media clue mentioning a coffee shop, and proceeds to tests boundaries with her relationship with Mizuko.

I could go on with the description, but honestly, I don't like the novel enough to spend more time on this. The narrative jumps around in time, without building a sense of continuity or some identifying theme that allows the readers knowledge to grow with each chapter. The novel is over-long and slow paced, but still feels so disjointed that it wasn't a pleasure as much as it was a chore to keep reading. Additionally I didn't care for any of the characters. If you are going to throw a long, muddled, over-written plot at me with all sorts of obsessive narcissistic social media obsessed characters, at least give me one person to care about. By the end of this novel I was just celebrating the fact that it was over. It is given the so-so rating simply for the final third of the novel.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1993998330
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2017/05/sympathy.html

(will not be reviewing for reasons given to publisher)

What an utterly original debut novel! So current in this digital age, the book follows 23-year-old Alice Hare as she attempts to discover her lineage and, more importantly, how it shapes her destiny. A "chance" encounter with Internet sensation Mizuko whom she believes is her spiritual "twin" reveals her obsessions and her desires to fit in and find a deeper meaning in an age where everyone is connected by digital devices. Her connection to her aging grandmother, though a bit depressing, reveals her devotion and fondness for this woman to whom she is tied through birth. I was entranced by this novel as it follows Alice's relationships and reveals what it is like to grow up as a "digital native" in this internet-obsessed society.

I really wanted to like this book, but unfortunately it turned out not to be something I enjoyed at all. It was very boring, the conversations too flowery and unrealistic.

I spent more time trying to figure out where we were and what was going on. Basically I was confused for the first half and underwhelmed by the end.