Blodeuedd's Monday Review: Big Swiss by Jen Beagin

323 pages, Paperback

Published: December 7, 2023 by Faber & Faber

Lit Fic/ Library loan

So this was one of those books that was good without me knowing why. I felt at first like why am I even reading this, but at the same time I could not stop. I needed to continue. The writing is so good, the story is so strange.

Greta is a transcriber. She has fallen in love with a female voice, and then she meets the voice. Lies begin and an intense affair. All told is this strange dark humorous way.

I do not really want to say more because the book just needs to be read and felt. It might not be the book for everyone, but sometimes I just need a weird story. And it was a great one

Big Swiss. That's Greta's nickname for her - she is tall, and she is from Switzerland. Greta can see her now: dressed top to toe in white, that adorable gap between her two front teeth, her penetrating blue eyes. She's a head-turner: including the heads of infants and dogs.

Well that's how Greta imagines seeing her; they haven't actually ever met in person. Nor has Greta actually ever been to Switzerland.

Greta and Big Swiss are not in the same room, or even the same building. Greta is miles away, sitting at a desk in her own house, wearing only headphones, fingerless gloves, a kimono, and legwarmers, transcribing this disembodied voice.

What Greta doesn't know is that she's about to bump into Big Swiss in the local dog park. A new - and not entirely honest - relationship is going to be born.

A relationship that will transform both of their lives. . .

B's Monday Review: Vacuum in the Dark by Jen Beagin

Hardcover, 240 pages

Published April 4th 2019 by Oneworld Publications

Fiction

Library

I honestly do not know what I was supposed to feel about this book. For writing she will get a good grade, but, yeah I do not know.

Everyone seemed to want to sleep with Mona, every man and woman she met.

Then she has flashbacks of her creepy pedo grandpa.

She cleans around with houses, befriends her employers, since everyone also wants to be her friend, and do her

spoiler

Was Dark her father? The end was so unclear and weird. But he had another last name. God, I do not know. This was a effed up book filled with incest, rape and wtf. LIKE WTF  spoiler

Maybe cos I had nothing else to read, but wtf was this book. I do not recommend it. But it was still good, I just wished that it would not have been so creepily sexualized.

Also laugh at loud? What, no, sure she finds poop everywhere in a house, but that is it

Mona is twenty-six and cleans houses for a living in Taos, New Mexico. She moved there mostly because of a bad boyfriend—a junkie named Mr. Disgusting, long story—and her efforts to restart her life since haven’t exactly gone as planned. For one thing, she’s got another bad boyfriend. This one she calls Dark, and he happens to be married to one of Mona’s clients. He also might be a little unstable.

Dark and his wife aren’t the only complicated clients on Mona’s roster, either. There’s also the Hungarian artist couple who—with her addiction to painkillers and his lingering stares—reminds Mona of troubling aspects of her childhood, and some of the underlying reasons her life had to be restarted in the first place. As she tries to get over the heartache of her affair and the older pains of her youth, Mona winds up on an eccentric, moving journey of self-discovery that takes her back to her beginnings where she attempts to unlock the key to having a sense of home in the future.

The only problems are Dark and her past. Neither is so easy to get rid of.

A constantly surprising, laugh-out-loud funny novel about an utterly unique woman dealing with some of the most universal issues in America today, Vacuum in the Dark is an unforgettable, astonishing read from one of the freshest voices in fiction today.