Private Rites

If you ever felt too deeply and felt you stood misunderstood in your family dynamics, this book may be for you. Since I've finished the book, I can't stop thinking about the concept that Julia Armfield presented to us: that your family members will choose to see you in complete fullness in one snippet of your life and maybe never again, and what you were in that exact moment of time is what they will think you only are, which shapes their perception of you and bleeds into every interaction ever after this. I'm aware this book will not click with everyone. It is the kind of story that is more concerned with examining its characters rather than driving the plot. Julia Armfield's writing is grounded but also lyrical and atmospheric.

Julia Armfields beautiful prose juxtapositions with the cold haunting horror of the ordinary: living under capitalism during the endtimes after the climate crisis has brought an ever-flowing flood among the world, the rain never stops, the flood never stops, the horror continues on. But the damp, rainy, chillingly cold city is only the backdrop of another ordinary horror -- the dysfunctional family. The novels opening is already intriguing -- hinting at an unspeakable horror hidden in a childhood home, damp and wet with blood. The main story focuses on three sisters, all of them queer, all of them trying to deal with their own ordinary horror: loosing their mothers in early childhood, growing up lonely with a narcisstic father, growing apart, growing strange, drowning in their own sorrows: failed marriage, failed phd, failed humanity while the city drowns in rain -- and dealing with the aftermath of their fathers death in their adulthood, the inheritance of their childhood home and strange, strange memories of a past almost forgotten coming up to the surface -- disorderly and messy. Armfield is an incredibly talented writer crafting not only an extremly atmospheric backdrop for the story hauntingly ankered in our reality but also telling an almost sombering, vulnerable story of interpersonal relationships rich with complexities. It's a slow read with almost no plot or action -- and yet it still kept my attention throughout. The characters are complex, messy, sometimes almost reprehensible, and yet in their own way likeable and touching in their flaws. There is this incredibly human quality to Armfields characters. My only issue with this book is the rushed ending and while the mystery of their childhood home -- in an classic gothic fashion -- was interesting I do not think Armfield pulled of her vision well. If you expect to read a suspensionful gothic novel unravelling a great mystery -- you might be dissapointed. If you expect to read an uncomfortable and queer story of three sisters dealing with ordinary horrors, trying to find themselves, each other; written in beautiful prose -- you will greatly enjoy it; also a great read for humid, rainy summer days.