Synopsis

Area X is a mysterious location cut off from the rest of the world. A secret organization called the Southern Reach is the only entity that knows something about this Area X if anything. It periodically sends expeditions into Area X with disastrous results. The latest expedition, the twelfth expedition consists of four women - A biologist, an anthropologist, a surveyor, and a psychologist. How successful will this expedition be? Will they find what Area X really is? or will Area X claim them as it did with people from other expeditions, forms the crux of the story.

Ruminations

Ok, I DID know, going into this book, that, this was a strange one. No kidding! Honestly, I cannot elucidate more on the point of reading this book. I did not gain any new story, perspective or information.

I feel like I have no memory of what I knew before reading this book and what I learned after reading this book. There's nothing in between, no change before and after reading this book.

Every book is an experience. Even a thrashy romance novel gives us experience. What exactly did this book give? Honestly, I have no clue. I read it for the sake of reading it and strangely enough, I didn't want to DNF it. Does that say something about me or the book?

I really want to talk to people who liked or disliked this book. Because as I said, I didn't feel a thing. The first book that made me feel a sense of detachment was this. I could honestly not feel any emotions. Even boredom felt like an emotion wasted on this book.

For starters, there is not much of a story. Most of the book felt like a philosophical rambling of a broken, seriously delusional and damaged mind.

Guess that's the thin line between an enlightened being and the delusional ones. People who come in contact with them most certainly think of them as crazy.

I am from India so philosophical, deep ramblings are nothing new to me. Even an average person has this sense of real & unreal. Illusion and reality. People are aware of these concepts. But this book felt incomplete and seeking in every sense.

It looked like the Author turned his personal diary into a novel. Like I got a discrete look into somebody's seeking. It was jarring, unreal and honestly, I felt like a person who got caught reading somebody's diary. What do you do if you do read a person's diary? I probably might ignore it and that's what I am going to do with this book and it's contents. I have no idea what else to do with it. I have no way of compartmentalizing this book into the obvious shelves of my mind. So I dump it in a corner and hope to forget it over time. 

Sometimes people write books for the sake of sounding deep with not much value addition. I couldn't place the genre of the book nor its intent. The only word I can commit to this book is: Strange. This book was strange. Neither was it useful nor useless. Neither was it filled with information nor devoid of it. Neither was it entertaining nor unentertaining. It was a book that could have very well existed and not existed. It wouldn't have made a difference either way.

Would I recommend this book? Yes and No. Yes, if you want to get your brain jerked off from your usual routine and dropped off into an alternate crazy universe for a few hours. Read it to experience the state of not understanding and understanding at the same time.

I confer that writing a book that balances the dualities delicately is an art but I am not mature or intelligent enough to comment on if this author has done that.

I do consume my share of "strange/weird" fiction/non-fiction books, but I guess I too have my limits. This book was one such. It was not too much in any sense but I felt like it didn't serve me any purpose at any level, be it at an intellectual/emotional/spiritual level. I didn't even get a simple sense of fulfillment that you might get reading, say, a chick-lit or a cool high fantasy.

I liked the font & size, it made reading so effortless and easy. The language too was quite unassuming and it let me focus on the plot and story instead of on the writing &/or its flaws. The description of the scenes was too good, they were quite visual and I was instantly transported to whatever hell/heaven he was describing.

There was a feeling of hopelessness, not fear, not terror, but a feeling of hopelessness throughout the book.

I liked the way the protagonist saw and observed the habitats. The belief that there are multiple universes gained some validity here. For the organisms living in the habitat that's their universe, a universe within a universe. Your universe is only as much as your awareness stretches isn't it? That was profound and I loved reading about it.

This book is the first book of the Southern Reach series and I am not sure if I'll continue with the series. I Will let you know if I do.

Conclusion

Read it if you want to mess with your brain and perception a bit, not much, but a little. It might not give you the satisfaction of reading a good story or of learning more about characters and their idiosyncrasies. But, you may experience a different kind of world and you may experience a sense of hopelessness and pointlessness like never before. This is most certainly a different read. Give it a try if such books are your cup of chai.

Review, recommendation, and rating

It is a Freebie-grade book, a book worth reading if you receive it as a freebie, giveaway or as a gift.

GoodReads rating - 3 stars.

"Annihilation" is a deeply disturbing exploration of the truly alien. It's a difficult book, not because it's hard to read but because it's hard to stop, no matter how uncomfortable reading on becomes.

From the very beginning, this story is a quiet nightmare that won't let you wake up. It's a vivid hallucination with a pervasive sense of threat, a compulsion to continue and a heightened awareness of your own helplessness. 

The writing is vivid, the narrator fundamentally unreliable and the nature of the narrative is literally mind-bending.

The story is told from the point of view of a member of the twelfth expedition into Area X, an all-female, four-person team made led by a psychologist (which immediately removed my trust - who puts a psychologist in charge?), and consisting of an anthropologist, a surveyor and our narrator, the biologist. What Area X is, what the mission objectives are, even why the fifth member, a linguist, dropped out is all left not just unexplained but proactively obscured.

All we see is the landscape, unspoilt apart from the things left behind by previous expeditions.

What follows is an exploration of Area X that shows the duplicity of the people sending the expeditions and the deeply alien core that defines Area X and makes the people who send the expeditions afraid.

"Annihilation" deals with the truly alien. Not the well-they're-a-little-like-us-except-they-do-this- and they-think-that-and-they-look-funny. What we and our narrator come to understand is that the truly alien is unknowable. It is literally incomprehensible.

The more we are driven by a curiosity sharpened by scientific method and the habitual identification of patterns and the garnering of knowledge, the more painful it is to be confronted with the obviously present but incomprehensible.

That kind of contact forces us to look inwards, towards the familiar, the known, the human, so that we can tear our vision from the insanity-inducing contact with something that we cannot process.

Our narrator, The Biologist (we never learn her name but we know that she tolerates her husband calling her Ghost-Bird, a reference to her emotional distance and disengagement with the people around her) has the perfect background for encountering the alien and still having the potential to survive. She is someone with a strong, although not necessarily positive, sense of self, who has, since childhood, preferred solitude and welcomed the opportunity to slide her consciousness into a deep embrace with whatever ecosystem she is studying The Biologist is an Uber-introvert who is highly resistant to and suspicious of, outside influence.

Early in the book, in the journal she records this narrative in, she comments:

That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.

The telling thing here, I thought, was the Biologist's view that we choose the reality that we live in.

It soon becomes clear that The Psychologist and the people who sent the team on this mission have taken steps to shape the reality the team sees, even going as far as to implant strong hypnotic suggestions. That our narrator spots and resists this seems to central to her character. She is someone who naturally joins teams or shares her life. Her Ghostbird nickname was earned in part because of her inability to share herself with her husband. At one point, she writes in her journal:

It may be clear by now that I am not always good at telling people things they feel they have a right to know,

The biologist has a gift for letting her focus widen, letting her mind still and waiting for patterns to emerge. She is someone for whom imagination and knowledge are both routes to understanding. This changes the way she sees Area X and gives her a perspective previous expeditions have not been able to achieve.

When she thinks about the motivations of her superiors, who send the expeditions, she comes to the conclusion that, while they perceive Area X alien and threatening, they are unable to let themselves fully understand what that means and so have become locked in a pattern of behaviour that does not offer a way forward. She says:

our superiors seemed to fear any radical reimagining of this situation so much that they had continued to send in knowledge-strapped expeditions as if this was the only option.

I found The Biologist as fascinating as Area X. I can see that her dispassion, her tendency to obsess, her ability to be so fully present in the moment that she fades into it, and her emotional toughness would make her seem strange to many, but she is not alien, only different.

When making life or death decisions in the face of imminent personal threat, she says:

You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what’s left to you.

I admire the pragmatism of that. Yet she is not an emotion-free logician but rather is driven by an emotional connection with the world around her. Her scientific training as a biologist provides with a mother-tongue but it is her connection with her environment that turns the words into poems.

She has often failed to have her field assignments renewed because her form of focus is seen as a lack of discipline. She says:

I had gotten sidetracked, like I always did, because I melted into my surroundings, could not remain separate from, apart from, objectivity a foreign land to me.

The Biologist's up close and personal encounter with the animus of Area X is mind-bending and beautifully wrought. There are no easy answers here, only a recognition of our limited ability to know and the dangers of trying to exceed those limitations. She describes part of the encounter by saying:

But the longer I stared at it, the less comprehensible the creature became. The more it became something alien to me, the more I had a sense that I knew nothing at all—about nature, about ecosystems...

...And if I kept looking, I would have to admit that I knew less than nothing about myself as well, whether that was a lie or the truth

I particularly like the last clause. The Biologist is never in doubt that reality is more malleable than truth.

I highly recommend this book if you're in the mood for a thoughtful and sometimes challenging read, filled with strong emotion and beautiful prose.

This is a quiet nightmare. A vivid hallucination with a pervasive sense of threat, a compulsion to continue and a heightened awareness of your own helplessness. 

Not cheery but hard to look away from.

Incredible writing with unforgettable scenes and complex characters. There's so much about this book I love, and it's truly unique. Much better than the Southern Reach Trilogy in my opinion.

Audiobook

Mutant giant bears - for some reason I didn't get that scared of them. The author must though. One of the book covers looks more like an ape than a bear.

Although this book is centered on a small portion of the human population trying to survive, the beginning was kind of sweet. Bahni Turpin did a great job with the narration. And it's opinion that I don't think anyone could have done a better job actually because the voices she gave, especially Borne, were so good. I was surprised at how things changed SPOILER!! [with Borne], which I thought was really sad because I just loved that character. The ending kind of scared me. What if it changed again? I loved the book. I would recommend it.