I went on a short road trip to Denver this past week, and finally used the Spotify audiobooks feature. The bright cover caught my eyes, and I listened to the whole of Remarkably Bright Creatures in the 12 hours on the road.
The book received a lot of attention from the internet, but, frankly, I was more annoyed at the book rather than enjoyed it. It was because the characters, while technically fleshed out, all had personality traits which gnawed at me.
The shopkeeper couldn’t stop gossiping. The main character Tova embodied some of the worst of what I think of as “boomer” traits. The biggest culprit was Cameron, who was arguably the worst man-child that I’ve ever read in any of my books, and I found it hard to listen to his excuses in his chapters. To be fair, it could be that the audiobook did a fantastic job of voicing him.
The plot was also laid wide open before the halfway point, after the octopus revealed he could discern genetic relations (which is…. silly, but this is fiction after all). The book then became an exercise in dramatic irony, with the main question of what sort of small knots the author will introduce before a happy conclusion.
I was… also frankly disappointed at the message. Tova is a character beset by tragedy. Her husband passed a few years ago, and her son passed long before that from suicide. Instead of exploring how her grief interplay in a mentor-mentee relationship, the author put in the twist of making Cameron and Tova related. This seem to be the only thing to satisfy Tova: to find family again. Why couldn’t she live with grief, something all of us must toil through? Should I start donating sperm to have unexpected grand kids in the future?
Maybe, I need to stick with “high” literature for now. Just compared to other books I’ve read recently, this one just seemed so lacking in substance.
I did like the octopus’ sass though. He was awesome.