Audiobook Review – Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill (4/5 stars)
Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Length: 3 hours and 9 minutes
Publisher: Random House Audio
Release Date: November 23, 2021
ASIN: B09J1NH9PF
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: Borrowed Audiobook from Library
Rating: 4/5 stars
“Jenny Offill’s heroine, referred to in this audiobook as simply “the wife”, once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes – a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions – the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art.
With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting, though its bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last word.”
Series Info/Source: This is first book in The House Witch series. I borrowed this ebook through Kindle Unlimited.
Thoughts: This was a poetic and intriguing. It’s basically a stream of conscious thoughts from a woman as she deals with falling in love, marrying, a miscarriage, another pregnancy, raising a child, dealing with a cheating husband, and trying to mend everything back together.
It was very well done and a cynical and somewhat depressing look into American society. It does a good job of giving you an American slice of life…but does so from a somewhat depressing perspective.
I did really enjoy some of the obscure quotes and random bits of information that were included throughout. I also enjoyed a lot of the questions that the wife’s daughter asked.
This brief but dense novella echoes a lot of the struggles people deal with as they age. For example, looking back at who you were and your dreams and trying to reconcile that with who you are 20 years later.
The whole thing is written in third person and the woman is known as “wife” and her husband is “husband”. This is an interesting way to do things because it holds that characters at a bit of a distance that seems to mimic the distance the wife feels from a lot of the world around her. I listened to this on audiobook and the audiobook was very well done. The author narrates it herself.
My Summary (4/5): Overall this was a brief and intense look at a woman’s journey from lover to mother in modern American society. It is a fairly bleak story but has glimmers of light. I enjoyed a lot of the random facts in here and seeing American society from this unnamed woman’s perspective. I would definitely consider picking up more books by Offill in the future.
