Reading ‘Blue’ by Emmelie Prophete

I’ve been trying to finish ‘Blue’ by Emmelie Prophete, and I tried even harder to stir up enough interest within me to keep reading a few more pages each day… but it didn’t happen. I gave up after reading half the book, because despite the author’s beautiful poetic writing, there’s is no coherent narrative and things start to feel repetitive.

Translated by Tina Kover, it’s written in first person and the narrator starts off by talking about her mother and aunts and what it’s like to grow up as a girl in a country “when it was no place to be born and no place to be female”. She speaks of leaving home, of dreaming of a better tomorrow, of happiness always being a little out of reach. The reader at the beginning of the novel is informed this is a work of fiction, the characters imaginary, yet the words feel deeply personal, like your are thumbing through someone’s private diary meant for the eyes of those near and dear. While works like these can be engaging, here it felt like you needed to know the women personally to care about the narrator’s thoughts. And those thoughts are all over the place.

Blue is like a long never-ending poem, where the poet rambles on and on and on… reading this book is like watching a river flow through a forest, sure, it looks beautiful, maybe even calming, but after a point, you are going to get bored and move on to doing something else.

After over a week of struggling through the first sixty pages, I stopped reading it. So no rating from me. It’s just not meant for everybody. Maybe you’d like it. Or not.