A Few Thoughts on ‘No One is Talking About This’

I will not call this a review, because to review something you need to completely understand, process & form opinions about what you have read. No One is Talking About This is truly something else, defying boundaries of sense, prose & purpose, some times in a good way but some times in a bad way.

While the premise of this book is beyond promising, it doesn’t quite achieve what it sets out to be. There is too much happening in it which is not only disconnected from the next sentence, but also which doesn’t exactly convey any message to the wider audience.

Part One of this book talks about a lot of things, few of which I admired & mulled over in depth. A few of these include the Climate Crises, Politics, and simply the human behaviour which isn’t so different from one person to the next.

Part Two of the book was more structured, because I was able to stay with the hint of a story throughout. This is the segment which talks about the Proteus Syndrome which reflects in the title of the book because no one is talking about it. This part was impactful, emotional & powerful in its entire essence.

Even though the book is quite short, it could’ve been shorter if only one of these two parts were solely chosen as the topic of study and elaborated in depth. What we have here are 2 parts which belong to the same book, but which might as well be 2 separate books. I usually have trouble reading books like this with an unstructured prose, random musings, sort of like a diary full of Eureka moments. But given that this one’s nominated for the Booker Prize 2021, I had expected this level of eccentricity from it.

If you decide to read this book, you need to keep an open mind because this is not your casual light read or intense historical fiction or even psychological thriller. As Goodreads has mentioned astutely, it is indeed a genre-defying novel. I have rated it at 3.5/5 stars!

Until next time,