Paromita’s Reviews > Borne > Status Update

Words only Vandermeer could write:
"There comes a moment when you witness events so epic you don’t know how to place them in the cosmos or in relation to the normal workings of a day. ...Troubling because each time you acclimate, you move on, and, if this continues, there is a mundane grandeur to the scale that renders certain events beyond rebuke or judgment, horror or wonder, or even the grasp of history."

"But what was endurance and shared diminishment if not devotion?"

Just wow.

"That’s the problem with people who are not human. You can’t tell how badly they’re hurt, or how much they need your help, and until you ask, they don’t always know how to tell you."

Such powerful words.

Exquisite writing.
"It was what my mother said sometimes—to be mindful that the universe beyond still existed, that we did not know what lived there, and it might be terrible to reconcile ourselves to knowing so little of it, but that didn’t mean it stopped existing. There was something else beyond all of this, that would never know us or our struggles, never care, and that it would go on without us."

The plot is dragging a leetle but it doesn't even matter because the writing is so good.
"That was the moment I knew I’d decided to trade my safety for something else. That was the moment. And no matter what happened next, I had crossed over into another place, and the question wasn’t who I should trust but who should trust me."

First reread. Vandermeer's writing continues to enthrall.
"but this was always the test of our relationship. Were we symbiotic or parasitic?"
and
" What had been created from extremes of loneliness, of need, had moved beyond mutual comfort into friendship and then toward some amorphous frontier or feeling that could not be love—that I refused to call love."