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Dept. of Speculation
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Dept. of Speculation
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Dept. of Speculation
Audiobook3 hours

Dept. of Speculation

Written by Jenny Offill

Narrated by Jenny Offill

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

Jenny Offill’s heroine, referred to in these pages as simply “the wife,” once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes - a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions - the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art. With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting, though its bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last page.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 25, 2014
ISBN9781629231860
Unavailable
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Reviews for Dept. of Speculation

Rating: 3.7290278615179764 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

751 ratings69 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Parenting poetry, broken marriage haikus and depression doggerel. Plenty of wit and not without charm. In and out in a couple of hours.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is an intriguing book, but quite a difficult one to assess and review. At first it seemed like an almost random stream of disconnected short paragraphs, but it soon becomes clear that the book has a core narrative that tells what would otherwise be a fairly humdrum and universal story of a failing marriage. The plot is the least important thing in this book - it is full of memorable observations and thoughts on a wide variety of subjects.It falls loosely into two halves - the first is told from the woman's point of view, and follows the relationship through the first five years of their daughter's life. There is then a sudden switch to a more neutral third person narrator when the husband has an affair with a young colleague, and this part of the book becomes more focused with fewer digressions, but perhaps less interesting too. Many of the individual paragraphs are very quotable and the book is a pleasure to read.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    It's as if the author was collecting post-it-notes while preparing to write a novel and then just went ahead and published it without ever writing the novel. At first I was completely charmed with the stream-of-consciousness collection of unrelated paragraphs. I laughed out loud and felt compelled to highlight many of the witty passages. But I tired of it quickly, often getting mired in the random pronouns and wondering who the hell we were talking about now. The bed bugs were an unusual idea but she certainly beat a dead horse with that one. The plot is nothing unique, but of course the plot is not what the book is about. I'm reluctant to say it is poetically written, but at times it comes close. The second half of the book was absolutely tedious. She shifts to third person and goes on an on about her husband's affair, obsessing about the mistress and sounding frankly like a whiny victim. At best it's irreverent and well-written and at worst it's self-indulgent and underdeveloped. I never cared for any of the characters at all and was completely unmoved by this book. I did enjoy the sparse and unusual writing style. Mostly I find myself imagining what this book could have been.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a mosaic of short paragraphs and chapters, with some awesome lines and quotes (pick up a highlighter, you will underline a lot!), all of it composed in 46 chapters in just 180 pages.
    It is Intelligent, funny, heartbreaking and full of serendipity. I really love the author's writing voice.
    I read this in one good overnight sitting. A great short read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book stretched my brain and my emotions in exactly the way good poetry sometimes does. The structure is a bit unusual; it is almost like a collection of thoughts, sentences, and anecdotes that, through their juxtaposition, seem awfully profound.
    This is a very short book that will take you a couple hours at most to read, but there's so much packed into these few words that, again, it reminds me of poetry. As one example, the absolute truth of this sentence is somehow heightened by the awkward phrasing: But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.
    Also, there were bits that punched me in the gut. This description of a woman whose husband left her masquerades as trivia, to enormous effect.
    The wife watched her neighbor get fat over the next year. The Germans have a word for that. Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon.
    I have a lot of respect for Jenny Offill's skill with language and voice. Read this.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Great narrative form consisting of short outbursts you might imagine written on index cards or fortune cookies. Oddly I found the random asides more engaging than the main plot, which becomes a bit stale in the second half of the book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is one of the most unusual novels I have read for some time. It is written from the perspective of a woman who is sharing about her marriage: How it starts, progresses, falls apart due to her husband's affair and then follows the attempt to repair the relationship. The story itself is mundane, but the way it is told is what makes it unique. Things are related in short, pithy paragraphs. Sometimes these paragraphs are about actual events she experiences and other times they are musings or even quotes from other sources (the narrator is an English Professor). Prior to her husband's affair she narrates in first person, and then after that in third person, as if the marriage problems cause her to not only disconnect from her husband, but from herself as well.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Unusual moving deeply effective
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Just not my cup of tea at all. While I can appreciate the talent it takes to express feelings and emotions with few words, I just don't enjoy trying to understand it. Call me unsophisticated, but that's just me!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Lee recommended that I read this book ages ago. And dutifully I added it to my to-read list and moved on. An age later, I finally picked up a copy. And put it on my to-read shelf and moved on. Another age had to pass until I was staring at my shelves to make a TBR pile for the Libraries Matter Readathon, and I grabbed it.

    ONCE I STARTED READING I COULD NOT PUT IT DOWN.

    I don't know how its fragmented structure was so effective, but it was. Aren't our lives made up of fragments? Small memories, that interesting article you read, an anecdote about a saint you learned about in school that comes back to you all of the sudden with shocking relevance.

    And it is definitely the writing with this book, not the plot. The plot is every American marriage with a few standard specifics thrown in: bed bugs, a child who breaks both wrists, a husband who has an affair, a wife wondering why she traded in her chance for art, for greatness, for single-minded pursuit of her muse for the above.

    Most notably, this book filled me with an incandescent rage at the cheating husband, the gutless weenie he cheated with, all of society that enables this bullshit, etc. A rage that bubbled over and spilled on all sorts of other things. A rage that was barely (not really) satisfied by the reconciliation at the end of the novel. But this is life, right? Messy, and fractured, and compromised.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Fragments of possibility lie scattered around Offill's Dept. of Speculation: a would-be astronaut, a would-be boyfriend, maybe a should-not-have-been lover. However, it is the structure of the novel that is, perhaps, most striking, and the prominence of the literary style as a central player may or may not appeal to a reader's taste. This style, too, is fragmentary: short paragraphs that mostly coalesce, but sometimes do not, to form the narrative. Initially, these are more haphazard, like shooting stars; occasionally derivative, occasionally direct quotations, always pithy. Later, the pearls are strung together more obviously. Midway, the general pattern breaks from first person to third person (perhaps emotional distance; perhaps a shift from reality to speculation), and it is the narrator's thought-process that is now revealed as more obviously the root cause of the fragmentation. The subject-matter of a failing relationship (and a wounded psyche) may have been tested to breaking point in stories, but here at least there is a literary texture to enhance the journey.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I'm not usually into stream of consciousness books, but wow, this one is incredible.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It took about a 1/4 of the way through for this book to grow on my. This is the story of a marriage, told entirely from the wife's point of view. The story is presented in a series of short stories, impressions, stream of consciousness and random poetry. Like I said, it took some getting used to!

    But I was really surprised to find myself liking the book as much as I did.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    As with many, I read this in one sitting and experienced a variety of responsive emotions to the author & the work (as opposed to the story/characters)... annoyance, understanding, respect, and then, in the end, just a little bit of disappointment (thus 4, rather than 5 stars). I have lots of unformed thoughts at this point, so I'll postpone any more review....
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Ah so beautiful! The author managed to create such a clear picture of the narrator and her life with a collection of short paragraphs describing snippets of her life. It was impressionistic but precise at the same time if that makes any sense. Definitely precise in its descriptions of feelings re: bed bugs, parenthood, Brooklyn and marriage. I loved it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Full of beautiful aphorisms, and I could empathize with the narrator’s dilemma of having a happy nuclear family vs. being an “art monster,” but the story of a marriage ultimately left me cold.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A slight but wonderful book. Beautifully written, the author makes words sing. Highly recommend.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is the moving fictional memoir of a marriage. The author juxtaposes diary entries with tidbits from a wide range of writers and philosophers. The strength of this novel lies in the quality of the writing and the structure. They combine to leave the reader with the sense of having journeyed through a single couple's life together, with an honest view of what it takes for a marriage to last.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I had forgotten how great it is to read a book straight through in one sitting, to experience the book’s totality without interruptions and those fuzzy moments, when you are pushing yourself for just a few more pages before sleep takes your mind. Though this novel’s pages reveal a lot of white space—with wide margins and multiple segments on each its less than two hundred pages—this is one very remarkable book. The segments are most all short, with only a few lines, or up to half a page’s worth at most. Some are quite philosophical, posing thoughtful questions, and others seem to be quoting great thinkers of our times or earlier. Then there’s the storyline that appears here and there, telling of the book’s characters. I found that the writing was best when not forced, as it felt wrong to concentrate too much on what was happening. That old line about letting something flow over you, came to mind. After reading many segments, I would find myself amused, intrigued, and always interested in where the author was taking me, how it all fit together. When a segment was too centered on telling the story (yes, there really is a storyline), it almost seemed too conventional. However, the sheer beauty of Offill’s writing is that she so cleverly varies the pace, the variety of what each segment was about, and attempting to show. Or, maybe she was just having as much fun putting so many different parts in play, because she knew that the most readers would love the feeling of her words flowing over them. There were so many small points of literary enlightenment and amusements in this book, that I could not resist smiling and laughing. The story includes a philosopher (perfect for this story), a sister, and the female narrator who tells much about the man who becomes her lover, her husband, and the father of her child. Then, shall we say, their relationship evolved, but hell, I can’t tell you everything. Offill also cleverly plays with the point of view of the book. There are many of the things of life (friends, jobs, a kid, social events, and long sleepless nights) but don’t even start to think the style changes into any sort of a straight-ahead narrative … it’s exceedingly clever to the very end. The author is not only very clever in style, point of view, pacing, but she is a fine writer that wowed this reader. This will be a fun book to reread, to see how a second wave of it flows over me.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In wistful mode the female narrator of this novel charts some of the events of her life, her youthful romances, encountering the man who would become her husband, the birth of her daughter, and the rupture that draws her life forward through change. The narrator is a writer and teacher of writing and sometimes a ghost-writer. Already she has given up on her first goal in life, which was to become an art monster. Because of him. And because of her, meaning her daughter. Her husband is a musician, a composer of jingles for advertisements, and sometimes of songs for her and her daughter. But he’s also the source of the rupture. Which is unforgivable. Perhaps.The writing comes in short bursts, as though snatched from the breeze. Or maybe it is the writing that conforms to the tiny moments of private thought afforded a young mother. It creates a kind of distance between the protagonist/narrator and her life. As though her life were being obliquely observed. That works well as we waft along in the first half of the novel, and doubly well when the rupture provokes more erratic thoughts and emotional excesses.There is wit and charm here and a surfeit of deeper thought about life and art and the art of life from art monsters and philosophy monsters and poets. I enjoyed it immensely but feel as though I should read it again almost immediately so that none of it slips away unappreciated.Highly recommended.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    The style aims to be pithy and aphoristic, reminding me a little of Douglas Coupland - but it just didn't work for me. I wanted to like it because it sounded like the author was trying to do something different - but I didn't feel interested in the characters, the plot or the ideas and overall it fell massively short of expectations. Maybe that is part of the problem - all the 5 star reviews and superlatives on the back cover give the impression that you cannot but fail to be wowed by it, but I was distinctly underwhelmed. I'm pleased for all the people who clearly loved it to bits, but I think the reviews over at Amazon offer a better range of opinion than the reviews here - so maybe check those out before deciding whether this book is one for you.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I really liked this a lot, but I can see where it might be a tough sell. It is a short and oblique look at a marriage from the point of view of the wife. It's told in very short paragraphs, often only tenuously connected to one another. There is a narrative arc, but if you like books with lots of plot movement this is not the one for you. It is beautifully written, though, and an interesting reflection on marriage.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I suppose Ms Offill has something significant to contribute, but I think I'm not the person to receive the contribution. Too contemporary for me. I'm invoking the Nancy Pearl rule and quitting this early. I really look for something that goes to greater depth than this book, which seems to be just a large series of very brief observational comments.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    It's written in an extremely eccentric and coded manner, there is no setting the scene, and it's so incohesive. It's just random. It's random observations and thoughts about the most random things in random order. An eccentric waste of time.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A lot of really poignant moments in this book. I loved the style and it brought about a lot of good discussion in my book club.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    her unique writing style is easy to digest while still dazzling.a mother, wife and writer struggles with her own demons and the conflicts within her life as it relates to her publishing career.filled with little nuggets on marriage, relationships, creativity and parenthood.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It's not so much a novel as a series of a character's thoughts, memories, and observations mixed with quotations that takes the shape of one side a a relationship and marriage. I think one of the more interesting parts of the book is the switch from first to third narration mirroring the deterioration and the restoration(?) of the relationship.I feel like I could have gotten more out of the book if I was married or at least in a long-term relationship of my own.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    interesting quick read, unusual style with very little information, a first hand report of the disintegration of a marriage
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This work is an experimental novel about a writer in Brooklyn, her marriage, and parenthood. It's written in a series of short chapters and vignettes. Sometimes it feels like the narrator is going on about little things, but then sometimes there is a sentence or two that pithly captures a truth about the human condition. No one in the story has a name - just the wife, the husband, and the daughter. The child grows and changes, the husband commits adultery, they move to the country. Everything is kept at a distance only to be periodically punctured by pain and regret. I appreciate what Offill is trying to do, but on the other hand this book didn't really resonate with me.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I loved this book and am very impressed by the depth of character development the author was able to achieve with this style of writing.This is the story of a woman who gives up her career aspirations and becomes the mother of a colicky baby. When her husband has an affair, her life shatters and she struggles to continue to be a good wife and mother. The author masterfully allows the narration to flow from first person to third person as the woman tries to distance her emotional pain. So beautifully written...this is the kind of book that could easily be read in a single sitting, but it shouldn't be. The ideas and words should steep in your brain a while so you can enjoy the full emotional flavour of this work.