About Uncle

by Rebecca Gisler, Jordan Stump (Translator)

In a small seaside town on the French coast lives Uncle. He shares his house with his niece and nephew, who look after him when they could be doing something – anything – else. A disabled veteran with odd habits, Uncle is prone to drinking, hoarding and gorging, not to mention the occasional excursion down into the plumbing, where he might disappear for days at a time. As the world begins to shut down, Uncle and his niece are forced even closer still. She starts to watch his every move – every bathroom break he takes, every pill he swallows – and finds herself relying on this man, her only companion.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, France, Contemporary, Family, French Literature, Novella

143 pages, Paperback

First published August 26, 2021

Reviews

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you know what's good for you when it comes to books, you've got to read ABOUT UNCLE, which is an artful, eccentric story about a brother and sister who find themselves looking after their... uncle, yes, no surprise there, and living with him during the pandemic. It really shows the nitty gritty of caring for a relative, for the forced intimacy in family and caregiving. It also is funny all the way through (the three Erwans!!), as well as magnificently grotesque. Here's the first sentence. If you fall in love, like I did, then I don't need to say another word:

One night I woke up convinced that Uncle had escaped through the hole in the toilet, and when I opened the door I found that Uncle had indeed escaped through the hole in the toilet, and the floor tiles were scattered with toilet-paper confetti and hundreds of white feathers, as if someone had been having a pillow fight, and the toilet bowl and the walls were stippled with hairs and all sorts of excretions, and looking at the little porcelain hole I told myself, It can't have been easy for Uncle, and I wondered what I could do to get him out of there, after all Uncle must weight a good two hundred pounds, and the first thing I did was take the toilet brush and shove it as far as I could down the hole, through the pool of stagnant brown water at the bottom, and I churned with the brush but it didn't do any good, Uncle might already have reached the septic tank, and as I churned the murky water sloshed onto the floor, carrying various repellent substances along with it, and I slipped and slid and my knees sank into the muck, and it felt almost like walking in the bay just after the tide has gone out, when it's all sludge and stench.

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rebecca Gisler introduces her narrative with extract from a Eugène Savitzkaya piece, a writer known for surreal, unsettling work poised somewhere on the boundary between prose and poetry. A space and a sensibility that Gisler’s novel often shares. Plotless and episodic, it’s narrated by a woman known only as a niece who’s living with her brother and their uncle in a remote house in Brittany, close to the sea. This “commune of idlers” seems to inhabit its own, separate universe. On the surface, their existence may seem random and chaotic but it's actually organised by the relationships between the three, brother and sister taking on a form of caring role for their eccentric uncle. Uncle is former military, once lithe and active, now vastly changed. Uncle is almost obsessively intent on surrendering to the moment, an immediacy that conjures up a sense of return to some childhood state. He relentlessly pursues his desires, many of which revolve around pleasure, sensation, taste and smell. He seldom washes, eats to excess – and only what he craves - and leaves bodily fluids scattered in his wake. His is an overflowing body marked by a mass of stains, drips, spewing and oozing orifices. The niece seems locked into an observer role, while her brother makes futile gestures towards organising their uncle and his environment.

Gisler’s story has a slightly bizarre, fable-like quality at times, indirectly commenting on the absurdities of contemporary society. A world in which both brother and sister can live off the proceeds from writing catalogue copy for a seemingly endless supply of pet products, from treats to toys, while all around nature is decaying. Gisler underlines this sense of the absurd by directly referencing earlier writers, Emmanuel Bove, and Kafka’s enigmatic “The Cares of a Family Man.” A story that features a strange creature Odradek who defies the social order, coming and going as it pleases, disturbing the conformist reality of the father who encounters it. Uncle obsessively buys Odradek-like objects from local supermarkets, odd, pointless, the detritus of capitalism. But he’s also an unruly, Odradek-like creature committed to a form of refusal or perhaps, denial of social expectations. His niece and nephew are also outsiders, literally allergic to the world, particularly when confronted with specific elements of Western culture such as the Switzerland where they grew up. A Western culture with fascistic undertones in which the body is heavily regulated, aspects almost taboo, all traces of its animality censored: shaved, plucked, deodorised, excretions erased or hidden from sight.

Gisler’s interest in the grotesque echoes Camilla Grudova at times but where Grudova delights in perverse forms of confrontation, Gisler reminded me more of Sara Baume in Seven Steeples - another narrative centred on outsiders. Like Baume’s, Gisler’s story is compassionate, even affectionate in its portrayal of uncle particularly in the connections formed between him and his niece. Gisler draws too on personal experience and memory, there’s a great deal here about family, trauma, generational heritage and lore. Gisler’s background as an author and poet who writes in both German and French also informs her novel: touching on issues of language and consciousness; cultural and linguistic divides and structures. Gisler plays with words and images here, revelling in long, winding, breathless sentences pierced with bursts of striking imagery, so that what might, at first glance, seem debased can also possess an unlikely beauty. Translated by Jordan Stump.

Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher Two Lines Press for an ARC

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uncle always sits in the spot nearest the television, and I always sit in the spot farthest from uncle, and my brother, before he left us, took to sitting well away from the table, and away from uncle and away from me, because he was happier eating on the couch, behind uncle’s back, and sometimes, in those not-so-long-ago days when the TV was working, uncle watched the news as he ate, and when he watched the news he turned up the sound as loud as it would go, and the frightening, sensationalistic news dispensed by the tiny old television distracted him from his eating, and one of his favorite things was to comment on and exaggerate the stories being reported, and he said it was going to be 600 degrees out the next day, and he said a comet would soon graze the coast of Brittany, and he said the virus was spread by fly bites, and he said there were giant ticks on the Belgian border, and I knew my brother was finding it harder and harder to hear uncle spout those absurdities, and sometimes my brother tried to explain to uncle why he shouldn’t believe everything they said on TV, but that’s not how uncle saw it, he said the world was more interesting this way, swollen, inflated, glutted with faraway, murderous happenings, like a low-budget disaster movie played over and over.

About Uncle (2024) is Jordan Stump's translation of Rebecca Gisler D'oncle (2021), the slightly ungrammatical original title (I think De l'oncle) I nod to the fact that French, her mother's tongue, is her second language, choosing this to write her novel for the greater freedom it gave her with language. She translated the novel herself into German as Vom Onkel.

The French original was awarded one of seven 2022 Schweizer Literaturpreise. The citation (in the French version) read:

Ça commence par deux phrases qui font deux pages ; un monde déjà. En son centre de gravité trône l’oncle, solitaire vivant en « colocation involontaire » avec son neveu et sa nièce, la narratrice. Par son verbe précis qui évoque l’entomologie kafkaïenne, mais dont la créature cocasse serait cet ogre ventru digne d’un géant rabelaisien, Rebecca Gisler trouve dans ce premier roman une remarquable justesse de ton : louvoyant entre conte drolatique et réalisme ironique, mais ne cédant jamais au sordide ni au grotesque, elle signe un portrait familial d’une profonde humanité.

ChatGPT renders it, in the form of an English poem:

In two sentences’ span, a world takes flight,
A recluse uncle, within shared space’s plight.
Nephew, niece, and narrator, their tale is spun,
A Kafkan touch, an insect lore, begun.

Rebecca Gisler, in maiden prose, does mold,
Precision akin to Kafka's tales of old.
The creature odd, a potbelly grand,
Her debut's tone, like a maestro's hand.

Betwixt audacious yarns and irony’s jest,
She weaves a tale, of peculiar zest.
No grotesque drift, nor repulsive scene,
Her brush strokes human depth, serene.

which would suffice for a review.

This is a somewhat absurdist tale of a very eccentric uncle, asexual and non-violent, aged in his early 50s when the novel is set (around 2010). He had lived with his parents and he and his sister inherited the family house on their death, but she declines to move in, saying I didn't leave home when I was twenty just to come back thirty-five years later and live with my brother and change his nappies), and instead her children, his niece (who narrates the novel) and nephew, move in instead.

The story's tone alternates between comedy, gross-out and sentimental, which rather echoes the narrator's own feelings and experiences and Uncle's misadventures, hoarding various possessions, maintaining an interesting take on personal hygiene, travelling around on his underpowered scooter (which he insists on calling 'the hog', a nod to his youthful love of heavy metal), working at the garden of a former convent (the only job he has ever had post his army service), listening to his beloved Breton Celtic punks Breton Celtic punk group Les Ramoneurs de menhirs and occassionally getting lost down the loo:

One night i woke up convinced that uncle had escaped through the hole in the toilet, and when i opened the door i found that uncle had indeed escaped through the hole in the toilet, and the floor tiles were scattered with toilet-paper confetti and hundreds of white feathers, as if someone had been having a pillow fight, and the toilet bowl and the walls were stippled with hairs and all sorts of excretions ...

There's a flavour here of The Good Soldier Švejk, particularly Uncle's fond memories of his traumatic time in the Swiss army defending the country from the ever-present threat of an invasion from France. But two other explicit literary references from the narrator provide more of an underpin to Uncle's character and the novel's themes:

- Emmanuel Bove's brilliantly crafted Mes Amis (my review), which she recommends to Uncle as a guide as to how he might make friends (perhaps the first time this has been suggested as a self-help guide since it's publication in 1924!)

- Kafka's Die Sorge des Hausvaters and the 'Odradek' - which she things of as the model for the horde of rather useless objects Uncle accumulates from the bargain aisle of the local supermarket, but which the reader might take as a model for Uncle himself, particularly the ending of the story (not referred to in the novel but surely in the author and narrator's mind), which in the
translation by the Muirs reads:

In vain I ask myself, what will happen to him. Can he die? Everything that dies has once had a sort of aim, a sort of activity, which has worn it out; this is not the case of Odradek. Will he therefore one day tumble down the stairs before the feet of my children and my children's children, trailing a line of thread after him? It's clear he does nobody any harm; but the notion that he might even outlive me is almost painful to me.

Read 26-27 December, 3.5 stars rounded to 4

[Caroline]

Read in one sitting. The writing pulls you along irresistibly. Having spent the last few years helping care for my mother during her decline into dementia, and watching friends nurse loved ones for years, I found this a compelling portrayal of how humans care for one another through the most challenging physical conditions. Even when the rewards of interaction fade and the one you’re helping is unable to behave responsibly. I don’t think the young woman narrator could even explain why she’s sticking it out.

The very understandable range of decisions by other family members about whether to devote full time care to the uncle is shown sympathetically. The book certainly raises questions about what we owe to others, and what we can take for ourselves. In an aging society these are fundamental questions.

The novel also illustrates the hardship of giving care in a poor rural area, where there is little outside support or friendship available to relieve the constant watchfulness. For a different view of such a situation see Now and at the Hour of Our Death by Susana Moreira Marques. It is a beautiful, contemplative nonfiction description of a hospice nurse’s rounds among patients in poor rural Portuguese villages that are themselves dying.

[jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

one night i woke up convinced that uncle had escaped through the hole in the toilet, and when i opened the door i found that uncle had indeed escaped through the hole in the toilet, and the floor tiles were scattered with toilet-paper confetti and hundreds of white feathers, as if someone had been having a pillow fight, and the toilet bowl and the walls were stippled with hairs and all sorts of excretions, and looking at the little porcelain hole i told myself, it can't have been easy for uncle...

rebecca gisler's about uncle (d'oncle) is a strange and humorous little book, sharing an absurd playfulness with writers like juan josé millás. poor uncle is a mess and your feelings for him may vacillate between pity and frustration, empathy and exhaustion. with long, winding sentences, the swiss poet and author tells the tale of her taxing and untidy titular lead, narrated by his niece (and now roommate!). about uncle has a charming way about it and with its greasy grip on reality, it manages to at once both delight and disgust. (he's more cousin eddie than uncle buck)

*translated from the french by jordan stump (ndiaye, modiano, chevillard, volodine, mukasonga, et al.)

[Anya · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has no plot, and is more of an “experiential’ narrative. The writing is astounding yet I grapple to explain why. It describes a rather disgusting uncle with whom the protagonist (his niece) and her brother live. The descriptions come to life and are riveting despite their banality. I think the tone adopted by protagonist is the amazing thing about this book and why I give it 5 stars. Her description of emotions, the understated references to the relationships are like tiny gems covered by mundane life. She states what happens, in vivid detail, yet somehow remains non-judgemental and there is some sort of love of the deepest kind behind her words, lack thereof, and her (and her brother’s) actions. As if this young woman (niece) has a deep understanding of what it can mean for different people to be human, and how there is no one right way to live, or that not everyone is capable of “doing their best” or observing norms in a conventional sense. Despite the objectively awful realms of Uncle’s life, it is his and is complete in its own filthy nonsensical way. I think this book should be widely read! It’s my first read from the pereine press subscription that I bought my mum for Christmas- I am now looking forward to the rest!

[Adam Ferris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Under the radar great stuff from Two Lines Press by Rebecca Gisler and a wonderful translation by Jordan Stump. About Uncle tells the story of a brother and sister who have naturally ended up taking care of their ailing uncle who lives in his decrepit and slothful existence. With Gisler's amazing poetic prowess and hypnotic sentences, she weaves her way through family, the absurdity of consumerism, the ownership of domestic animals, hoarding, and many bodily functions. I mean the first paragraph brought to mind a scene in Trainspotting and pulled me in and the story didn't let me go until it was finished with me; flushed and pleased.

Sifting through the layers of family history and relations, the niece narrator walks the line of curt realities mixed with empathetic sentences, that even though parts of this story are physically revolting, I couldn't help but feel compassion for the characters. Gisler has written what is often very hard to do, and that is to write an emotional story with revolting imagery and chock full of great word play such as "Kafkaesque merchandise", "dreaded cataplasam, the revolting ectoplasm.",
"a bottomless pit, a vertiginous list", "narrow mountain paths overlooking unsoundable abysses", "I trusted in my foreboding, and I followed his footsteps.", "dandelion-level locomotion, that caterpillar's eye-view" and so many others. About Uncle was a five-star enjoyment for this guy both pleasing as a reader and a writer.

"From our earliest childhood our mother made garlic compresses to put on our eyelids and un- der our arms but my brother and I went right on scratching ourselves, and sometimes we look at each other in horror, surprised and saddened by the wounds and scars we inflict on ourselves, surprised and horrified and saddened by our scabby, red, or livid skin, the result of years of compulsive scratching, and in the end, and after much hypothesizing, it seems there's no hope of discovering the cause of what we have no choice but to call our illness, and, we're both convinced, that hopelessness is no reason not to ponder and speculate and periodically pin the blame on pol- len or mites, dust, damp, the fur of certain ani- mals and the saliva of certain people, and when we run out of hypotheses, when our imagination starts to falter, we always come back to impa- tience, and you may ask What makes you impa- tient?, and I believe that's where we get close to our ailment's real cause, because nothing makes us impatient, that impatience is the impatience of nothingness, and that, we sense, is where it comes from, from nothingness, from the empti- ness deep down inside us, from the stirring and throbbing of the emptiness inside us, and that's what turns us into these louse-infested beasts, these fleabags, these bundles of nerves that no balm can soothe, but enough whining, because it's also true that scratching when you have an itch, even if it's all the time, where you have an itch, even if it's everywhere, brings an intense pleasure and a deep satisfaction, and we could easily devote our days and weeks to it, reducing ourselves to sawdust and shavings with finger- nails and rasps and anything else we might find at hand, never thinking of the consequences, not thinking of anything, thinking of nothing, the very nothing that binds my brother and me, the reason we're never at peace."

"Animals can't read, and in my brother's and my opinion the work we do serves no purpose, because what we do is translate packaging and catalog descriptions of products intended for animals of all stripes, instructions and descriptions that will never be read by the consumer, the animal, which will thus find itself forced into consuming certain products by our translations' true addressee, its master, who will choose everything according to his own tastes, and his habitat, and the color of his curtains or his couch, and maybe more than anything else the colour of his pet."


"I was expecting to find dead mice and cockroaches in the armoire among my uncle's underwear, some fo which, given the size, must have come from when he was five years old, and I was expecting to find a bunch of spiders that had taken advantage of this vacuum-free zone to build the biggest web in the history of spiders, but my brother said no lifeform could have survived that room, not a single one, except Uncle."



"It's always the same, the more you look into the distance the more the horizon blurs into the sea."

[Andy Weston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Evermore conscious that she should be making her own way in the world, an unnamed young woman, along with her younger brother, finds themselves moving to a small town on the Brittany coast to care for her uncle. Uncle is an obese and disabled war veteran with unpleasant habits, not least his excessive drinking and eating. When the world starts to shut down, Uncle and his niece become closer than ever.

Before they can make any decision, the pandemic hits, and any liberation is impossible. Gisler’s prose is dry and witty, not shying away from the worst of Uncle’s lavatorial lack of etiquette. Its strength is that it is also disturbing, affecting and a very human depiction of family obligations.

[Liz Hein · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was weird, and gross, and very good.

[Salty Swift · Rating 3 out of 5]

Young (unnamed) woman moves to a small French town to look after her sick uncle. Together with her brother (and occasionally mom), she struggles daily to make his life more comfortable. She's intimately familiar with his pill regiment. She know all about his nightly bathroom trips. When he's admitted to a hospital, she cleans out his incredibly filthy room. In lieu of a complex plotline, we have a story of loneliness, acceptance and difficult family relations.

[Larissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dieser Debütroman beeindruckt mit eigenwilliger Sprache und sonderbarem Figureninventar!

[Rob · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF at 50%. Mind-numbing. There was a good and accurate passage describing eczema, but that was the only highlight.

[SamB · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this. Gloriously weird, and the writing, full of long run-on sentences that really pull you along and suck you into the narrative, is just fantastic. The kind of book I'd love to be able to discuss in a book club, to pick apart some of the weirdness, share interpretations and (inevitably) be keyed into things I've missed.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird, kinda gross, hard to follow- everything I look for in a book tbh. The writing is really witty and I enjoyed the way sentences and thoughts blended together. I think this is for sure a niche read that won’t be for a lot of people, but I’m in that niche.

[Dallas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rebecca Gisler has now become one of my favorite authors. If you love contemporary fiction and WEIRDNESS you will love this book. I’m sad that this is the only book that she has written. This book is definitely NOT for everyone, but if you have the same taste as me, you will smile, laugh, cry, be disgusted, etc. This is the type of contemporary book that gives you EVERYTHING. I strongly suggest giving it a read! Even if you don’t like it; it’s a short read, and I promise it will be worth your while.

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

This strange little book from Two Lines Press was a bit of a slog despite its brevity. While clever and at times mildly funny, I could never seem to synch up to the tone. I didn't dislike it, but I doubt I'll remember a thing about it in a month.

[Kelsey Edwards · Rating 3 out of 5]

phew- this was the book that ended my reading rut (which has admittedly gone on for most of the year).

[CJ Alberts]

Dnf wasn’t feeling it

[Vlad · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.75 - great writing but)

[Charlie Haselden · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intriguing concept for a book, but a little flimsy in its delivery. Gorgeous prose though!

[Franziska Nyffenegger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Auf Empfehlung einer Freundin gelesen und das, obwohl ich die Kolumnen von Rebecca Gisler in der WochenZeitung (WoZ) nicht mag, zum Glück, denn hier haben mir die langen Sätze, die Satzkaskaden, gefallen und auch die Geschichte, der Onkel, der Bruder, die Ich-Erzählerin und dass immer offen bleibt, ob das alles "wahr" ist oder "surreal". Ja, dem Buch lässt sich Schreibschulstil vorwerfen, bestimmt, doch erstaunlicherweise fand ich ihn gut, über weite Strecken, diesen Schreibschulstil, vor allem aber mochte ich die Geschichte und wie Gisler sie erzählt. - "Meine Mutter fragt uns regelmässig, wie man das Alter einer Katze berechnet, sie meint damit, wie man das Alter einer Katze in Menschenalter umrechnet, weil das Katzenalter an sich offenbar nicht wirklich zählt (…)."

[Johan D'Haenen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Deze eerste publicatie van 2024 in de Peirene Novella Series is een zware teleurstelling. Goed verteld en geschreven, dat wel, maar inhoudelijk zo saai als maar zijn kan. Op die manier kan absoluut iedereen een boek schrijven vol feitjes en beschrijvingen die zich aaneenrijgen doorheen het dagdagelijkse bestaan.
Neil Gaiman zei ooit dat de kwaliteit van een verhaal zich laat aftoetsen aan de vraag: "En dan? Wat gebeurt er dan?" Wel, in dit geval is het antwoord simpelweg "Niets. Absoluut niets". En daarmee is ook alles gezegd.

[joe]

The narrator in this surrealist tale is simply known as “the niece”. Along with her brother, she takes care of her disabled, war-vet uncle in the small coastal town of Brittany, France. As the three of them live out their days in what portrays itself as an area cut off from the rest of the world, we come to learn about the uncle at the centre of the story and the quirkiness that steers his life.

The uncle is a man who has essentially given up on any sort of future, any portrayal of normality that would allow him to fit in, and instead chooses to indulge in present feelings and pleasures, foregoing anything that isn’t in his immediacy. He piles on weight that leads to him becoming a slob who won’t move from his chair; he doesn’t shower, nor does he wash after going to the bathroom; his home looks like a bomb's hit it, and the natural human instinct to take care of himself is completely eradicated, so that by the end of the book, his whole image blends with that of a pig, a dog, or any other household pet who's reliant on other people to keep them alive. The morphing between human and animal, highlighting a sense of violent self-neglect, could be seen as grotesque to the point of barbarity if handled by an unskilled writer. However, Gisler does well to create a balance between making the reader feel a stomach-churning queasiness at watching the raw events unfold, and then switching almost immediately towards a sense of sadness for the characters as they are being put through their ordeals. The behaviours clearly stem from a deeper place within the uncle, and I appreciate that the author allows the reader to think for themselves on how the uncle came to behave in this way without pushing an explanation down one's throat. The open-endedness allows for an expansion of compassion to be practiced by the reader, refusing to push a fixed feeling onto you.

The language employed by Gisler is striking in its consistent perpetuity, with a poetic flair given to the conveyor belt-like progression as an ailment against possible bouts of boredom. The way in which the narrator relays the information to the reader holds similarities to that of a fable retelling. Coupled with the eccentricity of the cast, as well as the surrealist angles that the sparse story takes, the book’s style sits between fully fledged poetry and previously-told tales by author’s like Camilla Grudova and A.K. Blakemore.

For its thinness, the contents of this book are packed to the brim without its reading experience ever feeling like you’re being shouted down to. Directed in its approach, layered in its themes; a fleeting visitor that you would happily invite again.

[Vaishali · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first glance, “About Uncle” offers a seemingly simple premise: a family tending to a terminally ill uncle whose declining health has become the focal point of their lives. The novel is narrated by the niece, who, along with her brother and mother, struggles with the relentless demands of caregiving. The uncle, a silent yet omnipresent figure, requires constant attention and care, leaving the characters physically and emotionally drained. Their lives revolve around his needs, and their own aspirations and identities seem to dissolve under the weight of this obligation.

However, it wasn’t until I finished the book and took a moment to reflect that I truly appreciated the brilliance of Gisler’s narrative.

“About Uncle” is an intimate portrayal of caregiving, family ties, and the emotional toll of illness. This read demands patience and introspection. This is not a book that offers clear answers or satisfying resolutions, and that’s precisely where its power lies. In a world where the burdens of caregiving are often invisible, “About Uncle” serves as a reminder of the emotional cost that comes with caring for a loved one.

Gisler’s ability to capture the rawness of caregiving, without embellishment, is awe-inspiring. Writers like her remind us of the power of straightforward storytelling to convey deep emotional truths.

Gisler structures the novel in short, often abrupt scenes, reflecting the monotony of caregiving. The narrative lacks traditional plot developments or climaxes, instead offering a slow and disjointed portrayal of how illness reshapes the lives of both the patient and the caregivers. While this may feel frustrating for some readers, it mirrors the uncertainty and emotional exhaustion that accompany caregiving.

Her minimalist style and lack of traditional narrative structure, further, challenges the readers to delve into its layers and find a deeply emotional meditation on caregiving, illness, and the weight of familial responsibility.

She invites readers to sit in the discomfort of duty, to experience the erosion of identity that comes with caring for a loved one.

It is not a novel you close and forget—it lingers, asking you to consider the weight of what it means to care, and what it costs.

For readers seeking a novel that explores the quiet, often unspoken aspects of familial obligation, Rebecca Gisler’s work is a deeply resonant and thought-provoking read.

[Anne-Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This haunting piece of literary fiction plunges the reader into the strange, sensory-rich world of two siblings staying with their uncle; a man who once embodied playful affection but has since deteriorated into a grotesque, impulse-driven recluse. Set possibly during the isolation of a pandemic, the story unfolds through long, stream-of-consciousness prose that immerses us in the narrator’s headspace, capturing the stench, clutter, and emotional dissonance of their living situation.

The uncle is bloated, filthy and perhaps cognitively stunted repels and fascinates in equal measure. His degeneration challenges our biases: can someone so unhygienic and indulgent still carry traces of the tenderness he once offered? This ambiguity infuses the narrative with a fairy tale-like unease, where nothing is good or bad, just unsettlingly human.

The siblings’ contrasting reactions, particularly the brother's visceral revulsion, create a psychological tension. All characters are idiosyncratic, fixed in their habits, and wholly authentic, contributing to a world that feels both hyperreal and dreamlike. With its intense visual and olfactory detail, this novel lingers in the senses long after the final page.

A different style of read for me which I appreciated, but did not particularly enjoy.

[bri! · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is only 148 pages, but in that short span of time, it is a wild rollercoaster of feelings. Or to be a bit more accurate, I am juggling and bouncing back and forth between feeling nothing and feeling everything, between bewilderment, digust and bitter nostalgia.

The writing is the real rollercoaster here because I keep rereading sentences over and over, and these sentences are too long for their good like— Are periods not a thing for the writer?

Moving on though, this book is absurd and filthy in so many ways, but it has made me ugly sob in the dead of night in a way that I have never felt before. This just hit all of the memories of my own uncle—who is not too different from the uncle in this book—and it just bubbled up to the surface like boiling hot water.

It's a pretty quick and (somewhat) easy read which I enjoy a lot. The ending is left a bit open-ended though and rereading it now just gives me the shivers. Would recommend if you're the kind of person who's okay with reading very graphic descriptions of feces, urine and absolute insanity.

[Pep Bonet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Voici un livre curieux. Je le trouve intéressant, mais j'ai été perdu un bon moment. L'écriture est très simple, comme très personnelle. On ne sait pas où mène l'histoire, sauf que probablement elle ne mène nulle part. Mais elle se lit très bien. Une chose qui me parle, ayant passé presque toute ma carrière en contact avec les langues, est que l'auteur utilise sa langue maternelle, lorsqu'elle n'est pas sa première langue ou langue principale. Cette situation diglossique m'intéresse. En fait, j'ai vu qu'elle a fait ses études à Fribourg, en Suisse, qui est où les futurs profs de langue aux lycées luxembourgeois ont tendance à étudier, car ils apprennent en français et en allemand en même temps.

[Dree · Rating 3 out of 5]

Young adult brother and sister move in with their middle-aged apparently developmentally disabled uncle to help him after a death in the family. They have great memories of uncle from their childhoods, but his health is much worse than they thought, and while nephew moves on, niece stays Uncle is afraid of doctors so won't go. He cannot follow their instructions. He has been downgraded at his gardening job because of physical symptoms.

His niece does her best--with an uncooperative middle-aged man who is mobile enough and does not seem to understand the ramifications of ignoring the doctor's directions.

This did NOT go where I expected it to go. I found it interesting but it felt more like a section of a novel or an unedited short story than a novel/novella. I would find a big novel of similar "character studies" of different people in this town--seeing how the town incorporates people like uncle, and how the different people all contribute to the town. It could be so interesting!

[Reanna Tremblay · Rating 2 out of 5]

def conflicted with this book. i liked how the characters were written and i always like reading about people doing mundane stuff but, i was just confused. their were all these different things specific to the characters that i thought would come back around and have some sort of deeper meaning but… that never happens. in fact i would say this book was a lot of nothing. but it wasn’t unbearable. i found the writing to be different than what im used to and i honestly really didn’t mind it. it was written in a way that was super easy to digest but it was also descriptive in a sometimes gross way. idk i just feel like i cant see the bigger picture with this book and with lit fic books i always need an important/well done bigger picture

[Emily Li · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got baited into reading this book because it's so small and cute and I liked how the book felt. I really like the author's writing style, but the book felt like a really long character sketch (a good and detailed one tho) until the last 4 chapters. The relationship between the niece, nephew, and uncle really stands out. They care for each other differently, but it's obvious they care a lot. The part when the nephew explodes on uncle and wrecks his own beloved trees after a phone call with his situationship is hilarious and relatable. The weight of all his burdens and all the pent up emotions was too much and he crashed out. Happens to the best of us I guess.