Most people, I think probably everyone of a certain age, have at some point found themselves tumbling into an Instagram hole. It's when you find a particular account or a particular tag you like and you just start scrolling, almost absent-mindedly, flicking through pictures until suddenly you realise what you're looking at is from 2012 and half your lunchbreak is gone.
This odd combination of obsessive yet distracted behaviour crops up frequently in Olivia Sudjic's debut novel Sympathy. The central character, Alice, is regularly found doing this, scrolling for hours and then sat refreshing, refreshing, refreshing. Sometimes it seems that it's harmless, sometimes it feels very familiar, but gradually I began to question the perspective I was being shown, and how many filters had been applied to it.
Alice is hard to pin down, despite her voice being so strong, and I was surprised at how while writing this I couldn't visualise her despite this being such a visual novel. This is likely because of the direction of the gaze throughout. Alice is hard to see, because she is looking so intensely at Mizuko, a Japanese writer living in New York with a vivid online presence. Their relationship loops through the novel, moving back and forth in time, often with the same scene appearing more than once but looking different because we have learnt more about the two of them inbetween visits. It reflects keenly the contrast between what is shown online and the flesh and blood human bodies that reside behind the tiles of images, without coming across as contrived.
The quote on the front from Elle calls it 'beautiful and raw' and it's hard to come up with a better comparison for the way the book is split, between the real and virtual worlds, though it's up to the reader to decide which adjective applies to either world.
Robyn
Comments
Post a Comment