This is, quite possibly, one of the most unique books that I've ever read. Classifying it simply as a dystopian work would be a mistake, as it is so much more than that--part warning, part description of what the world is already going through, this book reads like a horrifying fairy tale. The creative storytelling pulls the reader in and makes them become immersed in order to comprehend the story, which I liked.

Brief and weird, this was a very good speculative/dystopian piece of writing. The writing is succinct and powerful but I found the style a little distancing for my taste and thus found it hard to engage fully with the main character. The premise is solid, intriguing and chilling in equal measures, and the shock reveal at the denouement gives genuine pause for thought. While the brevity gave the narrative a concentrated power, the ideas introduced here could have been explored and expanded in a longer format that might have made this a 5 rather than a 4 star read.

2.5 stars

The future. Near? Distant? It’s hard to say. A woman writes in an old notebook in a forest, hurrying to get everything down. She’s cold, tired, falling to pieces. She and her companions are fugitives from the status quo and the government will find them, soon. They’ve done their best, but is that enough? What does it achieve? There isn’t much time but someone has to record the truth. And so this woman, formerly a psychologist, turns her gaze upon herself: her privileged position as one of the social elite, measured not by wealth or status but by the fact that she has a ‘half’, a clone, identical in all ways to herself, a second body kept in permanent sleep, yet always ready to replace any of her organs or body parts that malfunction. Hers is a story of gradual ethical awakening, of questioning, prompted by the arrival in her office one day of an unusual patient: the ‘clicker’. Darrieussecq’s novel is a curious beast: somewhat half-baked, somewhere along the line between sci-fi novel and ethical fable. It will inevitably be compared to Kashuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, but differs in one crucial aspect: a lack of heart.


Darrieussecq’s narrator, herself called Marie, is writing for her contemporaries, not for the future. Naturally she jumps to conclusions about things they would know – about the way that the human body has been increasingly colonised by technology – about the way one can now search, scroll and read inside one’s own head, using one’s hands as mice to navigate – about the ecological situation – about the colonisation of other planets, mentioned once but never returned to. What stage of development are we at? What has mankind done to itself here on earth? How much remains? Why are people kept within cities? What’s out in the countryside? What is the Generation to which Marie keeps referring? (I think I understood this by the end, but it risks a huge spoiler, so I won’t say anything.) What I’m trying to get across is that there are more questions than answers, and one feels that Darrieussecq has conceived a really interesting future world in her own mind that she doesn’t then fully share with us. From another angle, you could argue that this makes the narration ‘authentic’: there’s no info-dumping and no long paragraphs of world-building. But, while there’s certainly such a thing as too much, there’s also the flip-side: not enough. And I felt as if I was seeing Darrieussecq’s world through a glass darkly, unable to grasp her heroine’s situation fully. Bizarrely it felt too short: a 300+-page novel that skated over the surface as if it were a novella.

The main theme of the story is the ‘halves’ or clones. The ‘lucky’ few who have such a clone are, eventually, allowed to visit them at the ‘Rest Centres’ where they spend their existence in drug-induced sleep. Marie has visited her own half, also called Marie, regularly from childhood, watching this mirror image of herself in a perpetual slumber. She has benefitted from a new lung and a new kidney and is waiting for a damaged eye to be replaced, though this is yet to be scheduled. That was then, of course. We know from the beginning of the book that, in the ‘now’ of the story, Marie and her rebel companions have managed to free some of the halves. But this raises new challenges. What’s to be done with them? The halves are underdeveloped mentally; they have to be taught to stand, walk and talk; they have an almost primitive sensibility. What makes a human being human? Where is the line between human, clone, robot or technologically enhanced human? And what happens next? Here again the novel leaves a gaping void. What’s the plan? Where will these rebels go? What do they want to achieve? Is their rebellion simply a last-ditch attempt to make a claim for full humanity, before mankind is subsumed into a semi-robotic state, bedazzled by implants and bionic additions? Do they have a long-term plan, or do they simply hope to die free?

I felt that too much was left open or unexplained for this to be a truly satisfying book – although perhaps it was just too intellectual and abstract for me to appreciate it. It has potentially interesting ideas and concepts, but we’re never able to explore them in any great depth and the characters aren’t engaging enough to compensate. While I felt Marie’s impotent fury rolling off the page, I didn’t really feel able to empathise with her, probably because I didn’t have enough of a handle on her world to really understand the stand she was making. The book may have more impact if you haven’t read Never Let Me Go, because that deals with similar things in a way that I personally found more engaging and thought-provoking. But this is only my opinion. It may simply require a second read in order to pick up on its greater subtleties – and one thing I will say: I have a horrible feeling that the future is more likely to look like Darrieussecq’s than Ishiguro’s.

For the review, please see my blog.
https://theidlewoman.net/2019/02/05/our-life-in-the-forest-marie-darrieussecq/

Interesting and quirky for a dystopian, have not read another book like it. Highly recommend if you became enraptured in the dystopian craze of 2014 but need something different.

"I can't really enlarge upon our life in the forest. It's a matter of security."

Our Life in the Forest by Marie Darrieussecq, translated from the French by Penny Hueston, is a science fiction novel that's been compared to Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Set in a near future surveillance state with advanced robot technology and human clones (called "halves") that are kept in a comatose state in specialized medical centres and harvested for organs, Our life in the Forest follows a woman, who is living with a group of people in a forest as a form of protest against the unethical practices of this future society. Over the course of the book, we learn what were the circumstances that motivated her to abandon her city life and settle in the forest. The book is written in the form of an intimate confession by the protagonist as a way for her to explain her decisions and keep her story alive for future generations.

Before her life in the forest, she was working as a psychologist and treating patients who had experienced some kind of trauma. One of her regulars was patient zero, the so-called clicker, who visits her to complain about the constant tedium of his dead-end job, which is to teach robots mental associations in order to make them appear more human, so that they could eventually replace humans in the jobs that require empathy.

"You're endlessly performing a task the mind can do but which discombobulates a robot. And which is nevertheless difficult to conceptualise. The only solution is to multiply the links, click, click, click, until the robot has been supplied with everything we could possibly have thought up until now, everything we could have felt, everything humanity could have experienced. 
Blue = sky = melancholy = music = bruising = blue blood = nobility = beheading."

We soon learn that, outside of her job, the narrator spends most of her free time visiting her clone, named Marie, who is kept in one of the vast medical centres. Despite the fact that the narrator has already received several transplants and is in need of more due to her declining health, she begins to feel repelled by the idea of harvesting Marie's organs.

It's difficult to talk about this book without giving too much away since the themes of the novel are closely linked to some of the major plot points. All I will say is that the book explores identity and the ethical questions concerning organ-harvesting. In this near-future scenario, the wealthiest people are able to significantly prolong their lives and their youth by replacing any of their organs with those of their "halves", while the less rich only have jars with the most vital organs, and those, who can't afford even the jars, receive no help at all, so one of the major topics of this book is how this kind of medical advancement might affect people from different socio-economic positions in society.

While the science fiction concept itself might not be that new, Out Life in the Forest felt like a well-crafted story with a clear message that challenges us to think about how such potential technological and medical advancements might affect the future.

I was drawn to Our Life in the Forest for many different reasons. I adore reading literature in translation because it is fascinating to explore a genre through a different culture. I had never heard of Marie Darrieussecq before Our Life in the Forest, but that is another bonus to reading translated literature, you get to discover “new authors”. A big theme in Darrieussecq’s writing has been transformations of the body and that is one of the key theme in Our Life in the Forest that drew me to the book. I went into it with hardly any expectations but was blown away by the book in the end, unwilling for it to end.

Dystopian novels have never held that much of a fascination for me. I love watching those movies, perhaps because I’m more interested in the aesthetics of it than anything else. But I find that reading about our current reality is providing me with enough moments of ‘Where did we go wrong?’ and ‘I never thought we would end up here?’ so that Dystopian fiction usually falls by the wayside. However, Our Life in the Forest managed to sneak in, in part because of its initially innocuous cover which seems so innocent with its lined note, tree foliage and casual body parts. Somehow it did not prepare for what was on the inside and yet it gave me a kind of glimpse at both the simplicity and cruelty that is on the inside. Our Life in the Forest will surprise you at every turn. Every new revelation changes the story, changes how you see the characters and what you think of the world Darrieussecq creates.

In Our Life in the Forest, our recently renamed (by herself) narrator, once Marie and now Valerie, is lying in the forest, close to death. The novel is her final note in which she writes down her story with the awareness her life is about to end. Throughout her narrative she interrupts herself, suddenly aware of how close the end is, and it brings a sense of urgency to her story as she hops anachronistically through her life. We witness her as a young child, a worried psychoanalyst, a moody teenager, a lost rebel, and it all comes together to create a portrait of a tough but worn out woman who has seen too much. The twists and turns of her life surprise even her and there is a freshness to her tone that prevents it from feeling rehashed.

Darrieussecq’s writing throughout Our Life in the Forest is very clear and straight forward. She writes in brief sentences that get to the point. Despite her situation, Valerie doesn’t become dramatic and manages the explain the complexities of just what has happened with stunning brevity. What I occasionally dislike about Dystopian novels is just how much detail the authors feel they have to give in order to justify how their world looks. Darrieussecq does the opposite and lets the ordinariness of her narrator speak for itself. Her story feels so normal that it is horrifying in its own right. What scares me more than anything is the mundanity of evil, how simple deceit is and how blindly we trust that the truth we know is the truth. Darrieussecq picks up on these themes and manages to weave a narrative that is both enlightening and scary.

I was sucked into Our Life in the Forest almost immediately, first because I was trying to figure out what was happening and then because I had secretly become invested in what is happening. Darrieussecq’s novel is an exploration of physical and emotional transformation, of loss and of trust. For anyone open to mindbender, please read Our Life in the Forest!

I think I wanted to like Our Life in the Forest more than I actually did like the book. Marie Darrieussecq has created an intriguing world in the near future where humans are more connected than ever, and cloning has advanced to the point where most people have at minimum a "jar" of spare organs, and those who are luckiest have full clones (called their "halves" to replace any little body bit that may be needed.

Told in the style of an almost stream of consciousness journal in which a woman is describing snippets of her past mixed in with a description of her present, where she has joined a resistance group living in the forest. Without access to the medical technology needed to replace some of her failing organs, she is slowly falling apart. Although she is down to just one eye, she's finally beginning to see a clearer picture of the world in which they all live.

I really like the world that Darreussecq has created, but for me, the was a bit slower than I wanted it to be, and although I understand the style of this writing worked better without them, I was irked throughout at the complete lack of chapters. I think people who enjoyed the deliberate slow pacing and intrigue level of Foe or Station Eleven will probably like this more than I did.

Badass Female Character score: 3.5/5 -- The protagonist is a bit wishy-washy about things, but when push comes to shove, she has managed to join the resistance!

Thank you to NetGalley and Text Publishing for providing me with a DRC of this book.

A compelling (if not astoundingly original) concept told with a level of detachment that was a bit too arm's length for my taste. It's definitely working with the same concepts as Never Let Me Go, which probably doesn't do this novel much of a service as that is a small masterwork, but if you enjoy that kind of speculative fiction, have at it.

Set some time in the future where people have "halves" they use to extract organs for transplant into themselves, this story is told by one woman who is writing her life story. She now lives in a forest with a group of other people, and she looks back on how she got there and what happened to her before that point.

This was a really odd book to me. It was relatively short, and the narrative was winding and full of tangents, so it was quite hard to follow. I think this was intentional, as the narrator was not exactly compos mentis, but I found it quite distracting and I had to think carefully to decipher what was going on at times.

I would actually put this book alongside old-school sci-fi books by those such as Fritz Leiber or Kurt Vonnegut - to me anyway - who had really crazy and brilliant ideas, but their way of writing is sometimes almost cryptic and definitely intellectual. The idea for this book was really fantastic and ingenious, but the reading of it did take concentration, and there were still a lot of things which were unclear, questions left unanswered.

Although I have suggested this book belongs among the greats of sci-fi, actually it reminds me of them but falls somewhat short. I was expecting a lot from this book, and found myself to be slightly confused and disappointed by the end. I just didn't connect with it fully and in the end I just wasn't satisfied.

I requested Marie Darrieussecq’s novel Our Life in the Forest from NetGalley because the concept was intriguing. Marie -- both the author and the main character, our narrator -- describes for us a future world in which wealthy humans of her generation have “halves,” or breathing but unconscious humans that are available should they need spare body parts. If you’re less fortunate, you’ll have a “jar” instead, holding just a backup heart and pair of lungs.

It’s a bleak future, and it’s one that Marie has decided to escape with several others. They have taken their halves and are hiding in the forest, where the drones can’t spot them through the dense treetops. The story is translated from French (a wonderful translation) and Darrieussecq’s writing style is direct; we are treated to very little extraneous description.

The concept was bizarre, though not entirely original -- many people have said it’s reminiscent of Never Let Me Go, and I agree. The format is also experimental, a la The End We Start We Start From. The story is told through Marie’s journal entries, in a very matter-of-fact, scientific way.

While I didn’t love Never Let Me Go and really disliked The End We Start We Start From, I did like this one. Despite her writing style, Darrieussecq is able to paint a complete picture of the future world, elicit emotion and raise thought-provoking questions. It’s a short read that would be perfect for a book club discussion.

Our Life in the Forest, by Marie Darrieussecq, is an experimental future dystopian novel for those who loved The End We Start From. A future where the lucky ones have a ‘half’, an identical body lying in storage from which they can harvest spare body parts as needed. Less fortunate humans have a ‘jar’, just a heart and lungs as a back up. The poor have nothing.

Marie is the name of both the author and the central character. Marie the character tells the narrative as a stream of consciousness and is clearly a very confused individual. Marie has woken and rescued her half – also named Marie – and escaped to the forest.

Her story will make sense for a while, then jump, then regroup, then wander off on another tangent. The style is very dry, there’s very little emotion guiding her thoughts. Empathy is not encouraged in Marie’s world, process is king.

From a personal perspective I found my own emotional reaction to Our Life in the Forest quite disturbing. It says a lot about the state of the world today that I found myself mostly just shrugging.

Mega wealthy exploiting the poor for their own gain, largely through digital means? Meh. Yeah that sounds about right.

Disturbing methods of persuading the masses to be complicit in their own oppression? That’s just western capitalism isn’t it?

But a group of individuals who have broken through all the rhetoric to come together and try to destroy the system? Even though there’s very little hope they’ll succeed. Even though they’ll probably just die out there in the forest and nothing will actually change.

Well that’s a bit different.

It’s easy to oppose an injustice if you don’t benefit from it. Easier still if you suffer as a result of it. But if the injustice makes your life easier and you’ve been told all your life that it’s just the way of the world and nobody is really hurt by it? It’s so much harder to step outside of your known world and take action to end the injustice. What motivation do you have other than empathy with the oppressed?

Our Life in the Forest is a short read at just 192 pages. Translated from French, on first reading I was a little baffled. The concept doesn’t seem particularly original and the writing, while solid, is nothing particularly astonishing. It’s only on reflection that you realise what a horrifying future the book describes, more so because it feels like a very close future.

I began reading this when I requested it, but something was amiss. The story didn't hold me as well as i thought it would. Although I loved the writing, I'm glad it was short since I felt that nothing was actually going on.

But the cover is beautiful! x

The description of this story is what got me to request it. But I feel there was a bait and switch. This story had interesting moments but most of it was quite boring and I almost quit on it a few times. Thankfully it’s short. It just wasn’t for me. Maybe something got lost in translation?

I am a huge fan of dystopian novels, especially when they don’t initially appear dystopian. Our Life in the Forest is a tale of a world where people have spare parts. Spare parts in jars, spare parts in living, breathing humans.

Viviane writes us a journal. A journal of her life living in the world as a “Generation” child. Living in the world where she has a cloned twin that is used for spare parts. Parts that will go to Viviane as she needs them. The story begins with Viviane explaining how her twin, Sissy, came to be with her in the forest. It then takes us back to the beginning. To her life before the forest. To her life before knowing she had a twin.

It’s a well woven story. Translated from the French novel, it has overtones of France, but really this could take place anywhere in the world. This world where cloning is the rule, not the novelty. This bizarre world where Viviane is a trained counselor, or shrink. She helps people try to make sense of their lives, when she can’t even make sense of her own. We meet her dog (cloned) and one of her patients, better known as The Clicker. He trains the robots to think.

This novel is very reminiscent of Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go”. It is well written and entirely plausible in its tone, which is sometimes lost in dystopian themes. Viviane is someone that can be related to - bored with her job, her life - wanting more. Her little bit of happiness seems to be with her twin, Marie.

Far from being a happy novel, it is an interesting trip through another time and place similar to but different from our own. The life in the forest is a tough one, but it’s a story of perseverance in spite of circumstances. A story of survival in a harsh world.

This book reminded me of never Let Me Go and an old movie I remember from the 70's called Clone, I think. These kind of stories just creep the bejesus out of me, but I finally finished it. Clones raised for spare parts...grisly. This is that sort of tale with a twist. The originals and their clones take off to hide in the woods, but the clones aren't very mature. Like I said, creepy. Loneliness is more the theme than any, but still the cloning for parts just clings....It's well written and who knows, maybe someone will turn it into a movie at some point.

Our Life in the Forest is a dystopian novella about a female therapist who has run from the society that she lived in to live in a forest with fellow dissidents. She has also rescued her "half", a term for a genetically-identical body kept at rest for the purpose of organ transplantation should the need arise.

The brevity of Darrieussecq's story gives it quite an impressionistic feel; circumstances and backstory are more hinted at than expounded on, and a lot is left to the imagination. Still, there are a couple of plot twists that she delivers like a gut punch, wrenching the story in an unexpected direction and casting all that had gone before in a new light.

When I first saw Our Life in the Forest, it was in a Read Now email from NetGalley. What attracted me to the book, before reading the blurb, was the cover. This is one of the more original covers that I have seen. I didn’t get why the human body parts were mixed in with trees and flowers. But, having read the book, I understand 100% now. When I read the blurb, I felt that this would be a book that I would enjoy.

I didn’t enjoy reading Our Life in the Forest. Which was a huge disappointment to me. There were no chapters, which was a huge thing for me. That led to me having issues following the plotline. Maybe I am old-fashioned but I need for a book to have chapters. I need those small breaks. Mainly to adjust to anything that was thrown at me during the last chapter.

I did like the storyline and thought it was original. Not a lot of books I can say that about. I liked how the author had Vivianne remembering her life before the forest. I got a good feel for her character and why she did what she did. Now, I didn’t like Vivianne. I thought she was selfish and self-centered. I do believe that the author wrote her that way on purpose. It made what was happening around her come more into focus.

I am not going to get into the ending. I will say that there is a huge twist in the book that I didn’t see coming. One that made me go “WTH” when I read it. I was not expecting what I read and it stuck with me after I finished the book.

What I liked about Our Life in the Forest:

A) The cover

B) The storyline

C) The ending

What I disliked about Our Life in the Forest:

A) No chapters in the book

B) I had an issue following the plotline

C) Vivianne. I didn’t like her

I gave Our Life in the Forest a 3-star review. This is a compelling dystopia. It is not an easy read for me. There were no chapters and I had issues following the plotline. The ending did save the book. It was a stunner.

I would give Our Life in the Forest an Adult rating. There is sex but it isn’t graphic. There is language. There is mild violence. I would recommend that no one under the age of 21 read this book.

I am on the fence if I would reread Our Life in the Forest. I am also on the fence if I would recommend this book to family and friends.

I would like to thank Text Publishing and NetGalley for allowing me to read and review Our Life in the Forest.

All opinions stated in this review of Our Life in the Forest are mine.

**I chose to leave this review after reading an advance reader copy**

Tagged dystopia, fantasy, Marie Darrieussecq, Our Life in the Forest, science fiction

Published by Jolie
Book reviewer, mom to 3 View all posts by Jolie

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If I read or watch fictional dystopias, it’s not as often as a lot of people these past few years, and I go for scenarios in which society breaks down, not those in which it becomes more totalitarian. It was only because <i>Our Life in the Forest</i> is very short (if you also think in Kindle counts, it’s around 1200) and eligible for next year’s Booker International, that I requested an ARC. I never expected to find a book I would connect with so strongly.

A cover thumbnail had drawn me in a few weeks earlier, with its ostensibly attractive foliage pattern, but on closer inspection made me shudder at its inclusion of severed body parts – the effect was like a particularly gory example of those Timorous Beasties wallpapers that were fashionable in the 00s. I’ve never been able to read more than a few pages of <i>Never Let Me Go</i>, but the brevity of this book, and the fact it was told from the point of view of a recipient who rejects society, (rather than a farmed human victim/forced donor) made me think I might manage this one. And it interested me that the protagonist was a psychotherapist in debilitatingly poor physical health.

I had no idea that Marie / Viviane (she decides to change her own name to give her ‘farmed’ counterpart, who’d previously shared her name, an individual identity) would also be a specialist in EMDR. I did partial counsellor training in the past, and having found EMDR highly effective as a client, I was at that time thinking of going into it myself as a practitioner. I’ve also read a number of professional textbooks about EMDR. (The narrator was herself a client before becoming a therapist.) I don’t think I’ve ever seen EMDR in a novel before. I was for the most part extremely impressed with Darieussecq’s research. The narration was convincing as the voice of someone with psychotherapy training, and who still has to deal with significant problems in her own life - but from a different society. There are a few points on which she diverges from the literature, which I found easily attributable to the protagonist’s society demanding the not-quite-possible (notably trying to do EMDR on someone who hasn’t left the traumatic/stressful situation about which they are doing therapy) and to French psychology itself, which may use some slightly divergent approaches, and possibly has a corpus of different research studies and results. (I certainly don’t know all the ins and outs of how French psychology culture differs from Anglo-American, but there are some pretty major ones, such as the continued prevalence of Freudian-style psychoanalysis even in public sector offerings, and a low acceptance of autism and ADHD. What was undoubtedly French here was the unspoken norm of a public health service of wide scope, implicitly far better funded than anything in the UK, never mind the US.) I sometimes found that quibbles I had were addressed later in the narrative, for example the assertion that a ‘safe place’ can’t be imaginary, it must be a real place experienced: later the narrator accepts one that is imagined. I wasn’t sure if a couple of choices of specialist vocab made by the translator were intentional or not. Whether in saying ‘attachment disorder’, it does actually mean the particularly severe issue, most common among adopted and fostered children from abusive backgrounds, or one of the much commoner forms of insecure attachment, which can also have far reaching-effects in a person’s life. The translator has, throughout, used the term ‘patient’ rather than ‘client’. In English this has significance about the service and the therapeutic relationship, and it was impossible to tell whether that was deliberate. (‘Client’ is supposed to be more empowering and less pathologising, but it could equally be used negatively in a dystopia, in a Newspeak-like or consumerist manner.)

I loved the clear, often brief sentences in which the novella is written. The narrator communicates everything in a matter-of-fact, yet not emotionless, way, without purple prose or self-pity. A potentially complex situation becomes easier to understand because of clarity of the writing. The style communicates the ordinariness of living in a society run in ways you disagree with, of living with irresolvable medical issues and of doing difficult and painful things alone when you’ve no other choice – people do, to an extent, get used to unpleasantnesses that would make others exclaim when they heard about them. And it made me want to trim extraneous adjectives and clauses from my own writing.

I’d assumed this would be primarily a feminist dystopia, but the underlying themes in <i>Our Life in the Forest</i> are actually about economic inequality under tech-driven capitalism. I hope that in talking about these themes overtly, I don’t make the book sound too heavy-handed. I never experienced it as such; I was always caught up in the immediacy of the story and in relating to the narrator.

It is evidently a few decades in the future, at the latest the early 22nd century. (The narrator, decently, explains cultural references for those who may one day discover her notebooks, and the most recent is "Francis, a 21st century pope".) There are old self-driving taxis which often have mechanical faults with their doors. Most people have mandated always-on smart implants. There are frequent ‘attacks’ maintaining a climate of fear, and meaning that people are reluctant to go out – evidently echoing terrorist incidents in Paris over the last few years. Living spaces are tiny, like the notoriously small central Paris apartments, but many do not even have windows. The only mass lower-skilled job left is teaching emotional and idea-based associations to AI for $2 an hour. It sounds similar to currently-existing tasks like attaching genres to films you don’t get time to watch. (I actually said ‘thank you’ aloud to the writer for this implicit acknowledgement of the world of shitty low-paid online work which is so far from the lives in a lot of literary fiction, and later again when it becomes clear the main character with this job has talents that considerably exceed the remit of his work.) There are high expectations of good psychological health, yet people live in conditions far from conducive to it.

The narrator is a member of ‘the Generation’, a small experimental cohort of middle class people (now adults; the narrator is 40) for whom surrogate twins, ‘halves’, were also created for the purposes of providing body parts for medical situations where transplants may help. The ‘halves’ exist sedated in a hospital-like establishment. Many other people, on a marginally lower rung of society, have ‘jars’ with spare hearts and lungs, probably lab-grown, that are stored for them. And as there is a lot of ill-health, including among members of the Generation, these transplants are used more often than you might assume - and they don’t cure everything. As this is at the beginning of the story, it’s no spoiler to say that the narrator becomes a member of a resistance group that lives in a small area of remaining forest with halves they have freed, trying to teach them to function normally. (Under tree-cover, the drones can’t see you.) The halves, like lifelong institutionalised people moved into the community, have limited abilities. By the end I was reading the narrator’s guilt and wish to improve life for halves, and the impossibility of living with them free in the forest as true equals, as an allegory for being stuck, however much you care and however much you try, in an almost inescapable state of exploitation, whether that’s of animals, or of people in poorer countries making essential goods westerners use.

N.B. THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH CONTAINS SPOILERS.
A final theme, which I also found personally very resonant, only becomes apparent near the end, when a major plot development explains a number of minor inconsistencies earlier in the book. It works better - it generates more empathy - as fiction than as fact. <spoiler>This is the gulf between the middle class and the new super-rich, and how powerless a middle-class person can feel now compared with, say, 20 years ago, when professionals could still feel fairly near the top of society and as if not much was out of their reach. It resonates even more in countries with worse health services than France: technologically advanced medical treatments are created but only the very rich can afford them comfortably and on their own terms, whilst people who had grown up thinking they were middle class may find they are in this respect in the same bracket as the poorest, these treatments totally out of reach.</spoiler>

This is a very short novel which concentrates on a handful of topics, and doesn’t try to cover all major social issues in France or the West. Racial inequality, for instance, is very briefly alluded to, but no more.

I’m not sure I can sell this to lots of friends as a 5-star read: sometimes books simply manage to find readers with the right, unusual combinations of experiences and interests, at the right time in their lives, and that was me and <i>Our Life in the Forest</i>. But as a 4-star, a compelling short dystopia with a narrator who is engagingly human in her coping and aloneness and flaws, and some pertinent political commentary, yes, I think so.

Tapered off reading novels set in a dystopian society a while back when I kept coming across books that were a bit too similar to one another. Our Life in the Forest has happily upended that conclusion.

Set in a world were humans exist to provide organs as spare parts to the mega rich, the main character, Viviane begins her memoir, and through her narration an unsettling, as well as darkly horrific universe slowly begins to emerge.

There's little in the way of action here as you might expect, but the story and world building is more than enough to keep a reader interested.

I suspect this book will stay with me a good while. Highly recommended for anyone looking for something very different

I received a copy of this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

Summary
In the forest, a woman named Marie--but calling herself Viviane--writes in the little time she has left. She is cold, and tired. Her world, and even her own body, is falling apart around and in her. She escaped the city where she lived and worked and was terrorized, and with the help of other refugees in the forest, has gone back and rescued her "half" as well.

In Marie's world, the most well-off people have halves--clones kept in induced comas, waiting as a backup in case the waking half needs an organ or body part transplant, which is increasingly common. Some people only have jars with a replacement set of heart and lungs, and some have nothing, but Marie has a half (also named Marie, of course)--although the half shows no scars, while Marie has lost a kidney, a lung, and an eye.

As Marie lives among the refugees and released and awakened halves, she learns that the world she knew may not have been what she always thought it was, but it may be too late, anyway . . .

Review
Our Life in the Forest is somewhere between a novella and a novel, and is written in one long piece, with no breaks, lending to the illusion that it is the journal Marie has written her thoughts and reflections in as she hid in the forest. She also tends to go on tangents about some topic before coming back to her original point, which both makes her feel more real as well as developing the impression that she isn't thinking clearly and is trying to get everything written down before she runs out of time.

The worldbuilding is handled well, too. Rather than stopping to explain how the world works, she mentions things and talks about them as if they're normal, leaving the audience to take what she says (and doesn't say) and use it to build an idea of her world. It is done well, and feels organic.

While I liked the book, however, there were two things that bothered me--one immediately obvious, the other that I noticed after a little reflection.

The first issue is the parenthetical explanations scattered throughout the book. Occasionally Marie will make reference to some historical figure, and then immediately, in parentheses, explain who they were and why the reference makes sense. Even though I wouldn't have understood most of the references without that explanation, it took me out if the story every time it happened; I would have rather not gotten the reference at all. If the audience understanding references was really important, perhaps the author should have just picked more recognizable names.

The other issue has to do with framing. The story is framed as someone in our future writing a journal that will, presumably, found and read later by someone else. So, how do we have this journal? It is possible to make the concept work; The Handmaid's Tale does the same thing (with audio tapes instead of a journal), and it works because it's framed as people discussing it even further in the future, in a time when those tapes were from the past. Our Life in the Forest provides no additional framing, so I was left wondering how we supposedly found a hidden journal that, in our time, hasn't even been written yet.

Rating
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 4/5 stars

Our Life in the Forest is a great, quick read, and while my issues with it hold me back from giving it a perfect rating, I would still recommend it, particularly to those who love dystopian fiction like The Handmaid's Tale.