Saturday, 8 September 2018

The Mars Room - Rachel Kushner



Another of the Booker-longlisted IKEA books, and one for which I really wouldn’t have gone for had it not been for the fact that Don DeLillo was listed in the book’s acknowledgement. According to Oddschecker, it is now the second least likely book to win the award. In spite of that, it’s my own favourite for the year.

The Mars Room is a prison book that manages not to be bad, mean and aggressive. Yet, I believe it does give the reader an actual idea of the daily life in a woman’s prison. It is also about gender (and very much non-binary) and the challenges that women experience when facing unwanted male attention.

Yet again, for interesting that the above things are, what resonated the most with me is the hopelessness of a mother who doesn’t want to accept the reality of having lost her child.

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