Tech itibaren Natun Bastopur, Bangladeş itibaren Natun Bastopur, Bangladeş

I'm not sure why I play these weird games with myself. I had triumphantly gotten my most-highly-anticipated book of the moment, Swamplandia!, right before I left for a week-long beach vacation. But I wouldn't let myself start it before I got on the plane, and so I had a gap of like a day, and so I had to pick up something else to read first. Why did I pick such a long book? Why did I pick such a long, strange book? This one wound up taking up my entire damn vacation (I admit, there was a lot less reading-on-the-beach time than I'd anticipated, but still). In a way it wasn't so bad, because this book was awfully engaging, and of course it turned out later that Swamplandia! was a huge fucking disappointment, but still. But still! Stupid, stupid. Shall I say something about this book? It's weird as hell. Heidi Julavits has stuff to do with McSweeney's, so I was expecting something maybe a little twee-er, maybe a little quirkier, maybe a little more wide-eyed and upbeat. This book is instead really really twisty, in that backwards-forwards way (I should have been tipped off to this by the title) where it starts glancingly in the present, then shoots way back into the past, then slowly boomerangs itself back and forth and back and forth until the past catches up and we're all in the present. But the "present" parts never really got fully explained, and I was either too sun-blind or too stupid to quite connect all the necessary dots, so I finished it feeling a bit unsettled. But. It was still very polished, very engaging. Great characters and dialogue. Really evocative settings and atmospheres. Tons and tons (maybe too much?) of internal struggle, where things are explained and re-explained, looked at over and over by a very introspective and very slightly suspect narrator. Heidi is super smart, obvs. I'll definitely read more of her. But probably not on vacation.