{"id":381,"date":"2024-09-28T11:53:36","date_gmt":"2024-09-28T11:53:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aerowalsh.com\/mountaindevil\/?p=381"},"modified":"2024-09-29T09:56:57","modified_gmt":"2024-09-29T09:56:57","slug":"this-world-does-not-belong-to-us-natalia-garcia-freire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/?p=381","title":{"rendered":"This World Does Not Belong To Us \u2013 Natalia Garcia Freire"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Recommend: No<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a week, Spring clawed its way through the frost in Blackheath. Pale pink petals pushed open from buds that had built steadily on the tops of branches over Winter. The quick darkening of night got lazy, and evening light was allowed to sit longer on the horizon. And under the ground an army of cicadas awoke and emerged. But Spring is elusive, the thaw not completed before the cold crept back, and the cicadas now gather forlornly, quietly, unexpectedly unseasonable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This World Does Not Belong To Us is a gothic story that sits unhinged from a specific place or decade but is crawling with insects. Most of the novel is situated within a hostile mansion, and it\u2019s within this manor that, one by one, a family crumbles after two surly strangers take up residence here. The child of the story, Lucas, watches his mother\u2019s mental capacity decline with great angst, while his father coldly spurns them both in favour of the beastly two strangers that are offered board in exchange for helping reap the haphazardly fertile land around the property. Lucas is suffocating without a maternal presence to soften the manor. He is ignored by his father and his slovenly guests and is treated like a bug that they can\u2019t be bothered to squash.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The interesting tilt of the novel is that, to emphasise the impact of Lucas being denied human family bonds, bugs are the central motif. Unable to communicate to his mother due to her degraded state, and his own debilitating timidity, they relate to each other only through the comfort they feel in the garden, amongst soil and bugs. Lucas\u2019 academic mentor visits the mansion for lessons and provides some form of connection to the human world outside, but is unceremoniously banished, leaving Lucas even more isolated, with only an Encyclopedia-eqsue book on beetles to escape into. With little in the way of human connections, Lucas forms an attachment to arachnids above people. He believes that the plants and the insects have a greater claim to the land than the humans and is motivated to see that belief realised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The novel lacked context (what decade are we in? what geographical region?) and instead of that giving it a timeless quality, it instead meant I was unmoored and unable to connect with the plot. The gothic overtones were implemented well but the prose was overly lyrical and that was a detriment to the dark tension that propels a gothic novel. I disliked the stylistic choice to continuously and explicitly pitch the novel as an address to \u201cFather\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The World Does Not Belong To Us has rooted in my garden, but has grown spindly and unattractive, and I am deciding to abandon it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Over our house shall descend only clouds of flies, coming in search of what is left.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":384,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews_books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=381"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":401,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions\/401"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}