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داخل وخارج حوض السمكة الذهبية
كتبت المؤلفة هذه الرواية وهي في السابعة عشر من عمرها، وفيها تصور بشجاعة وجسارة فتاة صغيرة تشب في عائلة يمزقها العنف الأسري والكحول والمخدرات. يتتبع صوت الراوية بضمير المتكلم قصة ريبيكا تريجيانّي وهي تحاول استكشاف الطفولة والصبا مع أم مدمنة على الكحول وأب متعسف غائب وزوج أم معتدٍ.
هذه الرواية المكتوبة بموهبة فطرية والمنطلقة من العاطفة الخام والوحشية، تتجاوز مونولوجها الداخلي المعقد لشخصيتها الرئيسية كي تتفحص الصعوبات الموجودة أمام منطقة جنوبي ويلز بأكملها. لا نرى كثيرا من ندوب الانحدار الصناعي بقدر ما نرى الجراح المفتوحة المبتلى بها هؤلاء الذين يصارعون المشكلات الاجتماعية-الاقتصادية للتسعينيات من القرن العشرين، وسط أصداء موسيقى البانك والهارد روك.
ورغم أن الرواية -شبه السيرة الذاتية- صاغتها المؤلفة من الخبرات البائسة لطفولتها وصباها لكنها تظل قادرة على أن تنتزع الضحك من قلب الظلمات. يغدو استكشافها لموضوعات المحظور والممنوع أقوى من خلال خفة الدم الجافة واللاذعة؛ ولا نعدم حسا بالحنان والعاطفة أيضًا.
إن رواية "داخل وخارج حوض السمكة الذهبية" لا تزيح فقط النظارات الوردية التي ينظر بها أهل ويلز إلى منطقة الوديان، بل تنتزعها وتحطمها تحت الأقدام.
هذه الرواية المكتوبة بموهبة فطرية والمنطلقة من العاطفة الخام والوحشية، تتجاوز مونولوجها الداخلي المعقد لشخصيتها الرئيسية كي تتفحص الصعوبات الموجودة أمام منطقة جنوبي ويلز بأكملها. لا نرى كثيرا من ندوب الانحدار الصناعي بقدر ما نرى الجراح المفتوحة المبتلى بها هؤلاء الذين يصارعون المشكلات الاجتماعية-الاقتصادية للتسعينيات من القرن العشرين، وسط أصداء موسيقى البانك والهارد روك.
ورغم أن الرواية -شبه السيرة الذاتية- صاغتها المؤلفة من الخبرات البائسة لطفولتها وصباها لكنها تظل قادرة على أن تنتزع الضحك من قلب الظلمات. يغدو استكشافها لموضوعات المحظور والممنوع أقوى من خلال خفة الدم الجافة واللاذعة؛ ولا نعدم حسا بالحنان والعاطفة أيضًا.
إن رواية "داخل وخارج حوض السمكة الذهبية" لا تزيح فقط النظارات الوردية التي ينظر بها أهل ويلز إلى منطقة الوديان، بل تنتزعها وتحطمها تحت الأقدام.
- GenresYoung Adult
197 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2001
4 people are currently reading
101 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
May 17, 2011
In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl is autobiographical and horrific, and felt quite realistic and vivid, but I'm not sure it was a good idea for me to read it, and I'm not sure I could ever say I enjoyed it. It's about rape and abuse and drug-taking and suicide and self-harm. Suddenly, at the end, the protagonist's grandmother's death and writing save her. It didn't work for me, at that point, and the rest of it wasn't -- to me -- enjoyable.
April 24, 2012
Heartbreaking and thought provoking, Rachel Treziese has a way of getting all the way under your skin. Trezise writes brutally honest about her upbringing in the Rhondda valleys of Wales, UK. It's a "childhood" full of alcohol, drugs, violence, abuse, incest, loneliness and distrust´of the adults and the system that is supposed to look after you.
Rachel Trezise has a unique way of writing, from the perspective of the child at the beginning, in a way so very innocent, but at the same time so very grown up. She makes great use of stream of consciousness which only add to the quality of the book, and is part of the reason why she really gets to you. She writes beautifully, poetically and lyrically and so incredibly uniquely.
I had been wanting to read this book for a while, I was expecting it to be good, but not to be this amazing.
Rachel Trezise has a unique way of writing, from the perspective of the child at the beginning, in a way so very innocent, but at the same time so very grown up. She makes great use of stream of consciousness which only add to the quality of the book, and is part of the reason why she really gets to you. She writes beautifully, poetically and lyrically and so incredibly uniquely.
I had been wanting to read this book for a while, I was expecting it to be good, but not to be this amazing.
December 14, 2012
Not an easy book to read, but impossible to put down.
January 25, 2021
Was inspired to read this after reading Shuggie Bain. Wanted to read a novel set in Wales that deals with similar themes.
“This compelling novel tackles the topics of abuse, rape and childhood trauma on its often stormy rampage through life in 1990s South Wales. Yet in choosing a truly great novel, we sometimes have to recognise that outstanding literature may not always depict the world as we would like to see it. In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl is hardly a glowing endorsement of life in 1990s South Wales, instead it is a glimpse into the wilderness of the 1990s, a snapshot which neatly captures moments of hope and despair at a time of intense political and social turmoil in Wales.”
https://www.walesartsreview.org/great...
“This compelling novel tackles the topics of abuse, rape and childhood trauma on its often stormy rampage through life in 1990s South Wales. Yet in choosing a truly great novel, we sometimes have to recognise that outstanding literature may not always depict the world as we would like to see it. In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl is hardly a glowing endorsement of life in 1990s South Wales, instead it is a glimpse into the wilderness of the 1990s, a snapshot which neatly captures moments of hope and despair at a time of intense political and social turmoil in Wales.”
https://www.walesartsreview.org/great...
November 5, 2018
An engrossing read, in a terrible kind of way. I couldn't help getting sucked into the story, horrified at everything I read, and yet impressed by Rebecca's odd strength, her insightful tone. A terribly story, and yet I felt some hope - the narrative tone is the wise voice of someone who has endured, and moved on. An unflattering image of the Rhonda, painted vividly in all its desperation and lethargy.
January 14, 2024
قصة حقيقية مكرره مليئة بالألم والعنف الجسدي والجنس
واتخاذ دور الضحية
كنت آمل ان تتغير الأحداث لصالح ريبيكا ولكن لم تتغير سوى بالصفحة الأخيرة وذلك بعد وفاة جدتها
لم تكن ممتعه بصراحة ولكن كانت قابله للقراءة
اقتباس
"تماسكتُ بإصرار وأمتُّ كل شيء، ووضعت الماضي في مستقره الأبدي لكنه لم يستقر قط، كان يتجلى دائمًا في حلم أو نكته سخيفه او في الليالي الوحيدة على نحو خاص. هكذا أمتُّ نفسي بالإنكار ، وها أنا اقف وجها لوجه واقعه في موقف هش سببته ازمة شخص آخر وأساه وتنمره" 2/5
تمت💥
واتخاذ دور الضحية
كنت آمل ان تتغير الأحداث لصالح ريبيكا ولكن لم تتغير سوى بالصفحة الأخيرة وذلك بعد وفاة جدتها
لم تكن ممتعه بصراحة ولكن كانت قابله للقراءة
اقتباس
"تماسكتُ بإصرار وأمتُّ كل شيء، ووضعت الماضي في مستقره الأبدي لكنه لم يستقر قط، كان يتجلى دائمًا في حلم أو نكته سخيفه او في الليالي الوحيدة على نحو خاص. هكذا أمتُّ نفسي بالإنكار ، وها أنا اقف وجها لوجه واقعه في موقف هش سببته ازمة شخص آخر وأساه وتنمره" 2/5
تمت💥
January 24, 2018
A harrowing account of a traumatic childhood. Certainly a great contrast to "Coot Club", my previous book.
February 13, 2020
Heartbreaking. Really hard to read but so well written.
October 20, 2021
قصة بنوع جديد .. قصة نفسية تعيشها فتاة تتعرض للاغتصاب من صغرها وكيف تحاول اغراق نفسها من خلال امور كثيرة
October 31, 2023
رواية عن فتاة تُدمر حياتها منذ صغرها نتيجة انفصال والدها الوحشي عن والدتها، لتقع الأم في براثن علاقات متعددة، وتدفع الابنة الثمن غاليًا، من جسدها ومشاعرها وعواطفها
October 1, 2012
Every so often a writer comes along who captures the spirit of a generation in all its intensity. Joan Didion managed to do it for the 1960s with Play It as It Lays, and Helen Garner for the 70s with Monkey Grip. Now there is Rachel Trezise, a young Welsh writer who does the same for the UK in the 1990s with her surprising debut novel In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl
This semi-autobiographical account of a harrowing childhood won Trezise a place on the Orange Futures List, which names 21 promising young writers to keep an eye on. Her success continues: Fresh Apples, a collection of short stories, recently won the EDS Dylan Thomas Prize, with an award of £60,000.
Born in the Rhondda Valley in 1978, Trezise began writing In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl when she was seventeen; it was first published when she was only twenty. With this edition, a forceful talent is now introduced to Australia. Gritty, tough and raw, the novel is a dissection of working class life in the post-industrial Welsh valleys. The mines have closed; folks live on the dole and spend a lot of time at the pub.
In spare, benumbed prose, Trezise chronicles an early childhood of broken homes, child abuse and poverty. But it gets worse: at the age of eleven for a period of three years, her heroine Rebecca is repeatedly raped by her stepfather.
Silenced by fear and humiliation, Rebecca escapes her abuser only when her mother, unaware of the rapes, divorces him. The damage is already done, however, and Rebecca is catapulted into a teenage life of punk rock, drugs and casual sex. Abandoned, neglected, forced to shoplift in order to eat, Rebecca is torn between love for her mother and confused indignation. It isn’t only her own parents who have failed her, but the entire adult world. This is brought home later when the rapes become known: a trial, asserting a different version of events, brings further humiliations.
There is a battle is being waged here, and Rebecca is the battlefield. On the one side is the unfairness of life; on the other, a wounded soul trying to make sense of it. She describes herself as living in a glass coffin, “a see-through box, the inside looking out” where “nothing really mattered”. This dazed emptiness is a mask for deep psychological issues, leading her to pursue a series of unhealthy relationships, alternately obsessive and violent. She begins cutting herself, overdosing, attempting suicide. Somehow through it all, Rebecca survives.
It’s reading that first calls her back from the edge of self-destruction. The library becomes an island and books atolls of peace, places to rest from drowning. It’s writing, however, that gives her a voice.
Speaking about an abusive boyfriend, Rebecca says: “He began his one-man brainwash crusade, and slowly chiselled away my personality. Laid my soul out flat and kicked all movement out. He made me speak and tell him why I didn’t like to speak, ironed every crease in my life story.”
This is Trezise speaking through her heroine loud and clear, reclaiming what her own real-life abusers took from her. Though they attempted to silence her, lay her out flat, iron every crease, after a long struggle, Trezise has managed to wrench back her both her body and her story.
She calls In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl “the book she had to write”. For Trezise and her heroine, writing is a form of resistance against neglect, abuse and alienation. As grim and miserable as this story is, it offers hope. Rebecca begins to heal when she recognises the importance words and self-expression have for her life. Books, her dying grandmother’s stories, and her writing are what keep her fixed in the world, giving her the proper distance with which to view it and remain in it.
Trezise recognises, too, that her story serves as a point of hope for others. In the epilogue, she writes: “I am surprised at how quickly my past has dissolved, how quickly it isn’t mine anymore. And what a relief it is, to give an unwanted gift to someone who needs it more than I. And suddenly my mind holds itself together. I do not want superstardom. I am not scared. Suddenly my life is not a precocious baby’s id.”
In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl is a remarkable book. Rachel Trezise has turned the usual pattern of this type of story around. Instead of presenting her real-life experience as non-fiction, she has taken it as the raw material for art, producing a novel that is at once spirited and painfully earnest. More than anything else, she shows that the devastation of the past may be overcome.
This semi-autobiographical account of a harrowing childhood won Trezise a place on the Orange Futures List, which names 21 promising young writers to keep an eye on. Her success continues: Fresh Apples, a collection of short stories, recently won the EDS Dylan Thomas Prize, with an award of £60,000.
Born in the Rhondda Valley in 1978, Trezise began writing In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl when she was seventeen; it was first published when she was only twenty. With this edition, a forceful talent is now introduced to Australia. Gritty, tough and raw, the novel is a dissection of working class life in the post-industrial Welsh valleys. The mines have closed; folks live on the dole and spend a lot of time at the pub.
In spare, benumbed prose, Trezise chronicles an early childhood of broken homes, child abuse and poverty. But it gets worse: at the age of eleven for a period of three years, her heroine Rebecca is repeatedly raped by her stepfather.
Silenced by fear and humiliation, Rebecca escapes her abuser only when her mother, unaware of the rapes, divorces him. The damage is already done, however, and Rebecca is catapulted into a teenage life of punk rock, drugs and casual sex. Abandoned, neglected, forced to shoplift in order to eat, Rebecca is torn between love for her mother and confused indignation. It isn’t only her own parents who have failed her, but the entire adult world. This is brought home later when the rapes become known: a trial, asserting a different version of events, brings further humiliations.
There is a battle is being waged here, and Rebecca is the battlefield. On the one side is the unfairness of life; on the other, a wounded soul trying to make sense of it. She describes herself as living in a glass coffin, “a see-through box, the inside looking out” where “nothing really mattered”. This dazed emptiness is a mask for deep psychological issues, leading her to pursue a series of unhealthy relationships, alternately obsessive and violent. She begins cutting herself, overdosing, attempting suicide. Somehow through it all, Rebecca survives.
It’s reading that first calls her back from the edge of self-destruction. The library becomes an island and books atolls of peace, places to rest from drowning. It’s writing, however, that gives her a voice.
Speaking about an abusive boyfriend, Rebecca says: “He began his one-man brainwash crusade, and slowly chiselled away my personality. Laid my soul out flat and kicked all movement out. He made me speak and tell him why I didn’t like to speak, ironed every crease in my life story.”
This is Trezise speaking through her heroine loud and clear, reclaiming what her own real-life abusers took from her. Though they attempted to silence her, lay her out flat, iron every crease, after a long struggle, Trezise has managed to wrench back her both her body and her story.
She calls In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl “the book she had to write”. For Trezise and her heroine, writing is a form of resistance against neglect, abuse and alienation. As grim and miserable as this story is, it offers hope. Rebecca begins to heal when she recognises the importance words and self-expression have for her life. Books, her dying grandmother’s stories, and her writing are what keep her fixed in the world, giving her the proper distance with which to view it and remain in it.
Trezise recognises, too, that her story serves as a point of hope for others. In the epilogue, she writes: “I am surprised at how quickly my past has dissolved, how quickly it isn’t mine anymore. And what a relief it is, to give an unwanted gift to someone who needs it more than I. And suddenly my mind holds itself together. I do not want superstardom. I am not scared. Suddenly my life is not a precocious baby’s id.”
In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl is a remarkable book. Rachel Trezise has turned the usual pattern of this type of story around. Instead of presenting her real-life experience as non-fiction, she has taken it as the raw material for art, producing a novel that is at once spirited and painfully earnest. More than anything else, she shows that the devastation of the past may be overcome.
February 24, 2010
Rachel Trezise was born in the Rhondda Valley in 1978. In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl was written, then, while she was in her late teens into the beginning of her twenties, a desperately young age to be producing a novel of such raw power. Autobiographical in content and tone – Trezise has admitted this in interviews – In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl was an Orange Futures Winner, and in October 2006, Trezise won the inaugural Dylan Thomas Prize for her book of short stories, Fresh Apples, describing life in the mining valleys in South Wales. The Rhondda again providing backdrop, and of this bleak post-industrial landscape Trezise is not kind.
Veiled as Rebecca Trigianni, Rachel Trezise takes us to the council estate of her youth where she is unloved by her mother and where her father leaves never to be seen from again. Her mother takes up with a new boyfriend, who sexually abuses her, and so she runs away, only to be returned by the police. In her early teenage years she becomes involved with Daf, the man she thinks her soul mate, and the two enter a destructive and damaging spiral involving drugs and alcohol. Rebecca Trigianni, it seems, is about to destroy her life.
Trezise has a mature voice, and her prose excavates the darkest recess of her memory. At times this work resembles and reads like Trezise working something out: “I drank and took drugs in order to forget things,” and apologia for bad deeds, and in other moments you sense her trying to find beauty in the brutality. Her language is almost always economic, it is pared to the bone, and this only magnifies the violence of her world; you feel the desire to pull this suffering girl from the world and protect her. Yet it is not manipulative prose, nor infantile blackmail. This is a story simple of it is was, and is, for some children in this world.
Veiled as Rebecca Trigianni, Rachel Trezise takes us to the council estate of her youth where she is unloved by her mother and where her father leaves never to be seen from again. Her mother takes up with a new boyfriend, who sexually abuses her, and so she runs away, only to be returned by the police. In her early teenage years she becomes involved with Daf, the man she thinks her soul mate, and the two enter a destructive and damaging spiral involving drugs and alcohol. Rebecca Trigianni, it seems, is about to destroy her life.
Trezise has a mature voice, and her prose excavates the darkest recess of her memory. At times this work resembles and reads like Trezise working something out: “I drank and took drugs in order to forget things,” and apologia for bad deeds, and in other moments you sense her trying to find beauty in the brutality. Her language is almost always economic, it is pared to the bone, and this only magnifies the violence of her world; you feel the desire to pull this suffering girl from the world and protect her. Yet it is not manipulative prose, nor infantile blackmail. This is a story simple of it is was, and is, for some children in this world.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 23, 2021
Set in the 1990s against a backdrop of post-industrial decline in the Rhondda valley, this is a novel which paints a very bleak picture of reality. It is an uncompromising account of nihilistic emotional paralysis engendered within an individual crushed by sexual abuse. Both the protagonist and her home are utterly suffused with hopelessness. As the Wales of the novel cries out for change amid the fallout of the Thatcher years, so too does Rebecca as she falls victim to the sexual abuse of her stepfather. The text deals with notions of identity very interestingly. Identities are slightly amorphous or delicate concepts in the novel - the townspeople of Hendrefadog must negotiate soaring unemployment and industrial decline just as Rebecca must negotiate the residual trauma of her horrific abuse. Both battles - for the townspeople and Rebecca - force them to psychologically implode. The romanticised image of working-class solidarity found in several works of Welsh writing in English is certainly challenged here. Ultimately though, the novel's sentiment is one of hope as Rebecca finds inspiration in the life of her grandmother.
February 7, 2009
The author, Rachel Trezise, won the Orange Futures Award for the most promising young author in the non-American English speaking world. She is a Welsh writer and tends to write gritty stories about the rough world of fading mining towns in South Wales. I thought the book was well-written, but it didn't really expand on the basic idea of a semi-autographical novel about a person who grows up in a tough situation and escapes it by writing about it. I just finished Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary...and it was the same story just with Native Americans. This just isn't enough to make a great book unless the author moves beyond description and makes a bigger claim about the human situation. This book might work well if you are teaching a class on modern British lit because it is set in a part of the UK that doesn't produce many books of note, but I don't think it is necessary for the average reader to take the time.
December 31, 2013
Not my favourite read just lately. The central character, who narrates her 'story', was decidedly annoying at times - just when she got a pretty steady life, she just upped and wrecked it and, despite her 'abuse' history, I just found this a bit hard to swallow at times and just wanted to give her a good shake. Wasn't over-keen on the writing style either - almost like it was a memoir rather than a work of fiction. Not impressed I'm afraid.
January 5, 2015
A good author who writes gritty books
December 12, 2012
Poco approfondito. Il linguaggio crudo non basta a fare di questo libro un buon libro sulla violenza e la spirale di autodistruzione che questa ha determinato.
August 2, 2025
“Ero plasmata da uno stampo fatto da un uomo. […] plastilina”
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews