Juice

       I read Juice and I will admit I could not discern what she was going on about.  I found it to be, not confusing but just plain strange.  I could not make heads or tails of the POINT of it all.  She was rambling about trains and street signs and people disappearing and about someone sleeping with the eighth sleep.  It seemed, to me, that she was trying to inject metaphors and symbolism into situations that did not necessarily need them.  I found it to be very back and forth.  It seemed choppy and not entirely well put together.  There was no description of character, environment or place.  She described something as people assuming the mountains they lived in were in the south based on the way they talked about it, but it wasn't.  Giving no real description to the place.  There were no names of actual characters either.  She had the sister, the lover, the brother.  No real solid characters to grasp, which I believe a short story should have. 

       I find this hard to call a book of short stories or short fiction.  In my opinion, a story needs to tell something, has to have some sort of point to it.  This had nothing.  It seemed to be entirely composed of brief thoughts, and that was it.  They were short  thoughts fluttering by, rather that a narration of  a story.  This was more or less a diary of different people.  Some characters lived in a town where people focused on sleep, with their first and second and third etc. sleep.  I would rather classify this as some  sort of poetry.  I didn't get a lot out of this book either, sad to say.  I spent most of my time reading it, trying to determine what was going on.  I just could not follow it.  I can't say how it all tied together though.  All the chapters seemed to have their own unique take on things.  Translation seemed to be Native American, or some other indigenous early civilization.  Proportion Surviving was about a man who loved drinking juice, then the apples stopped growing or something and he was having great issues, calling it the apple crisis.  No Through Street was about people in a small town obsessing over some street signs the main characters sister painted for the city, who eventually started producing more works.  At the end it turns out it wasn't her sister producing the work, which was kind of confusing.  First Sleep was about sleep.  I couldn't really tell the significance of each individual sleep.  Was first sleep sleeping for the first time or was it the first stage of sleep? There was no description.

       I found it incredibly hard to get through this book.  I kept stumbling my way through it, not really finding any meaning anywhere.  I believe if we were to discuss this in class and dissect it, I may be able to make heads or tails of just, something, anything in this book.  Maybe I'm looking too deep and there aren't any huge details and hidden meanings.  Or perhaps I'm not looking deep enough, only going into the shallow parts of it, barely scratching the surface on something that could be considered a great piece of art.  Either way I hope to gain some sort of meaning from this book, sooner or later.