Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

An interesting novel, with some interesting ideas. However, one that didn't really hold my attention as much as I'd hoped. I think I would have liked to learn more about the characters, and maybe a bit more of a propulsive plot. But, worth a look if the synopsis appeals.

This was an okay read. There was some aspects I really enjoyed, but it was bogged down by stunted writing. It didn't hold my interest. But if you enjoy a futuristic premise, then this may be for you!

It takes a lot for me not to finish a book. In the past, I've forced myself through novels in the hope they'll suddenly improve, because I hate leaving things incomplete. But now, dear reader, I have been defeated. Perhaps it's my time of life. Being in your mid-thirties brings a deeper awareness of mortality, and the fact that time is finite. Perhaps I have less free time than I used to have, and am disinclined to spend that time on things that don't actually bring me pleasure. Or perhaps it really is the case that this book, like an obnoxious person at a party, just wants to show off that it's far cleverer than anyone else in the room. That's how it felt to me, much of the time. And so, in the interests of a full disclaimer, this is not technically a book review because I've stalled at 30%.

Should you wish to read this book, please read the blurb first. Usually I leap straight into books, knowing nothing about them, but that proved problematic here. I'd asked for a galley of In/Half because I read that it was by a promising young Slovenian author and had won a European book prize. Since I'm trying to read more widely at the moment, I thought this would be a good opportunity. Without the blurb, however, I felt instantly confused; things were only resolved by looking up the book on Amazon, to find out what I was actually reading. So here is what you should know: the book is set 25 years in the future, so the world is pretty much the one we know, with one key difference. Here, global communications were severed in 2011 (the date of the book's original publication in Slovenia). In/Half looks at how people have adapted to a world in which instantaneous knowledge, access, contact, have all been snatched away. One region is isolated from another. Based on the 30% of the book that I have read, it seems to be interested in the way that interpersonal connections are also shrivelling up. Every man has become his own island, strangled by his own desires and unable to relate to those around him as anything more than mechanisms for his own satisfaction. I grant you: in itself, this sounds intriguing. Not a bad idea. The profound difficulty that I faced with this book lies in the execution of that idea.

We encounter a series of extended vignettes, following various characters as they negotiate this rather depressing future. So far I've encountered three 'vignettes' or sections. The first focuses on a single character; the second revolves around a family; and the third seems to embrace an entire city within its scope, careening here and there across New York. Is it significant that the scope seems to be broadening each time? It could be, but I'm not feeling masochistic enough to find out at the moment. Perhaps we stick with these three groups of people. Perhaps the book's scope continues to widen. Maybe the fourth section covers the entire earth; perhaps the fifth takes us out into space where, among the stars, aliens have pretentious debates while stoned on intergalactic drugs. Who knows? Anything is possible. But the major problem with leaping from one character to another is that the reader finds it impossible to build a 'relationship' with any one of them. That becomes even more difficult when the characters are so deliberately unsympathetic as these seem to be.

When dealing with a translated work, it's always hard to judge which of the issues (or successes) are due to the author's original text, and which have been introduced by the translator's rendition into English. Unfortunately my disillusionment with this book was swift: my frustration blossomed on reading the opening lines, in which we see our first character - Evan, a cynical, self-centred and misogynistic theatre director - undertaking his morning ablutions. Every act is described with the careful reverence of a religious rite. Perhaps it's meant to be ironic but sadly, considering the self-consciously intellectual 'artistry' of the book as a whole, I doubt it. This are the first few lines:

"Desire is a rift. Dental floss was stuck between Evan's teeth. Hot water ran from the tap. Instead of a mirror a void on the wall. Jars of cream on the shelf. The toothbrush quivered. Steam rose. We are alone and we are all of us strangers. The rift widens, the hole deepens. A few hairs remained on the comb. Evan's urine was thick and yellow. The water tasted of pipes. The marble was expensive and cold."

Of course, one could argue that the focus on mundane minutiae tells us something about Evan as a character, and his unjustifiably inflated ego. I wasn't able to focus on the story, though, because the disjointed sentence structure started to feel rather like Chinese water torture. Luckily, a few longer sentences did wrestle their way into the mix eventually, but by that point I already felt that the point of the book was to be experimental rather than to be enjoyable. It's an impression that was, alas, compounded by other sections. First, however, we follow Evan as he drifts through the monotony of his day, self-absorbed and arrogant, inwardly smirking at his superiority to everyone around him while craving his next score. Exploitative and scornful, he is trapped in an ex-pat limbo of his own choosing. Next up we meet the Wolf clan, holding a birthday party for the head of their family. It's meant to be a happy occasion, but the long-standing grudges between various members of the group turn this dinner into chaos. We don't spend long enough with any one person to be sure who will take the story forward. Instead we ricochet from one to the next, trying to understand what we're meant to be gleaning from this deeply uncomfortable reunion.

Finally (in my reading, anyway), we move to New York. Here the book seemed to be in its element, reporting snatches of stream-of-consciousness, diving in and out of various characters' lives and offering up snatches of completely bewildering dialogues. At the centre of it all is Zoja, a reclusive but internationally famous poet, who has agreed to give a rare live reading to a starstruck crowd. While she has absent-minded conversations with her new lover, the organiser of the event waits, anxiously, for everything to come together and for his name to be made. And then we have other occasional viewpoints, such as that of the repulsive Ludovico, who keeps frozen cats in his apartment and enjoys tormenting prostitutes. All three storylines in the novel (so far) are connected by the receipt of mysterious plane tickets - which may end up reuniting together people who have been so profoundly separated from one another. Again, I really don't have the energy to find out. Why else should I care about these people, other than the fact they've all been sent plane tickets which might as well have written on them, 'Be excited! I am a plot device!'? None of the characters felt remotely interesting to me, and they are mummified within prose which is too busy being 'profound' to bother telling a good story. All three sections are peppered with statements like this:

"Closing ourselves into the mould of bourgeois relational form leaves us lonely, weak, worthless and at the same time firmly convinced of the illusion of control over our own existence."

And characters tend to fall into conversations which don't sound like anything a real person would actually say. I lost patience with this kind of thing a long time ago. Here is a sample:

" 'Would you rather see ... everyone immersed in their own imperfection? Humanity as a long procession of mourning ruins? Isn't an intervention into reality possible also from a position of brokenness? The way I see it, everything's a projection. You see yourself torn, along with the uniform. You could simply change perspective. Say that identity is a leaking ship and the person, through intervention, is the vehicle of coherence. You just have to permit yourself to intervene. Then it doesn't matter whether or not you're dispersed'. "

It's a flaw in my own intelligence, clearly, but I don't find this rewarding. I feel bad saying it, but I found large parts of the book alienating and smug, and I don't really want to hang around to find out what happens in the next two-thirds. I can usually tell if I'm going to 'get on with' a book by the end of the first page (so I should have paid attention to my misgivings stated above). By a third of the way in, I should be gripped, or at least have a clear sense of where the book is going. Ideally, I should also feel some kind of human connection with the characters, and I stress, that doesn't mean I have to like them: in the past, I've happily engaged with characters who are total bastards. I didn't feel any of that here. Instead, I felt that neither the characters nor the narrative had the chance to breathe, being overshadowed by the book's attempt to be ever-so-progressive and experimental. Cleverness at the expense of soul.

I have been harsh with my rating, I admit. And I have toned down my original draft post, which came from a place of extreme exasperation. But this is a personal opinion: this is the only book I've ever requested from Netgalley that I have not finished (as opposed to not read yet - bit of a backlog), and that has to be acknowledged in the rating. The book has won prizes, so there are clearly people out there who enjoyed it (or who said they did, thinking it'd make them look smart). But I'm not one of them. Nor am I the only dissenting voice. There are plenty of other people, on both LibraryThing and Goodreads, who simply don't get it. This seems to be part of a trend with prize-winning books in the last few years. I'm not sure which criteria are used for the prizes, but in several cases I've felt that a much-garlanded novel fails at the most basic level of 'good' literature, in the sense of something that enriches the soul and captivates the mind. This is one such case and, despite my best efforts, I've decided to put In/Half aside. I'm sure there will be glowing critical reviews, but life is too short to force myself through something which is actively frustrating me. I love my Kindle far too much to throw it across the room.

If anyone has made it past 30%, please do let us know if it was worth it. I hear that the final chapter is a whole other level of WTF, so you've got a treat in store if you're determined to make it to the end.

For the review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2019/11/13/in-half-jasmin-b-frelih/

3,5 I think.
It definitely was written by a Slav. Gloomy, gray vision of near future which is very characteristic also for Polish speculative literature. Or any other genre, really ;)
Story: Blurb was really encouraging and interesting. Concept is brilliant. Still, it's not action based but internal and external (relationships) character development. Sometimes it's very (but not straight forward) philosophical and reminds me early cyberpunk novels. Which is kinda interesting when You realise that there is no "cyber" in this world, all "cyber" is lost.
Writing: sometimes it's heavy and I had to really try to stay focused. I must admit that I don't remember some parts of this novel already. Also, in English it tends to sound really juvenile but I think it's a matter of translation Slavonic language to English. It sounded much better when I translated it to Polish (another Slavonic) in my head, I swear ;) It's not a matter of poor translation skills, but grammar nuances, I think.
Overall: not for everybody.

I didn’t finish this, but felt I still wanted to give a review rather than not provide any feedback. It simply wasn’t my cup of tea yet I wonder how much that has to do with my impatience as opposed to taste. I think classifying this as sci if/fantasy perhaps invites the wrong kind of reader to this novel. It is undoubtedly a literary novel, and for those who are proud to be the owners of saintly levels of concentration, I think this would make a great read.

Perhaps I need things spelled out clearly for me, and I thank Antonomasia G for the wonderful and enlightening review. I hope this book finds its way into the hands of readers who will appreciate the complexity and craft of such a novel.

I did not finish the book but my friend loved it so don’t write off the book right away! You may enjoy it.

Evan's chapters are nice. For the rest it is just a Bruce Sterling's wannabe...I don't see the science fiction point of view and I don't see the link between the characters in the book...

I just didn't like anything about this. I thought it started really slowly, with drawn out descriptions, and unlikeable characters. I just couldn't get into the story. Abandoned without finishing. Sorry.

[2.5] <i>In/Half</i> is described as being set 25 years in the future, but too much of it reads as if it were written 25 years in the past.

The current blurb gives the impression of a story in which Millenials find themselves hit by the breakdown of the internet when they are middle-aged. Which sounds pretty intriguing.

<i>It is twenty-five years into the future, and a glitch in the global communications network is ripping a previously united world apart at the seams. The millennials find themselves hardest hit ... As they prepare to celebrate their fiftieth birthdays, the three</i> [main characters] <i>find themselves hurtling through a disconnected world filled with the debris of past histories...</i>
(blurb 2 months pre-release)

But what we actually have here is a novel set in 2036,<i>in a world where the internet shut down on 17th December 2011</i> (a premise which, if offered upfront, would set reader expectations more fairly). The book was written when the author was 25, in 2011, and first published, in Slovenia, in 2013.

I don’t think it helps, either, to associate this story in the English-speaking market with the word ‘Millenials’. These three characters have little to do with the sets of traits, opinions and interests which, in the 2018 Anglosphere, are associated with Millenials. They pass more convincingly for Boomers from UK and US novels written in the 1970s-1990s (and by no means do they always act like 50-year-olds). Perhaps they don’t resemble Millenials-as-we-now-know-them because they didn’t experience the last 7 years of the internet. But there isn’t very much looking back to the time of the internet that would connect them with the idea ‘Millenials’. And, whether it’s due to different cultures in Slovenia and the UK, the influence of novels the author read, the degree of change in social attitudes between 2011-2018, or all three, there are a lot of ways in which the characters don’t have much in common with the sort of UK/US Millenials likely to pick up translated literary fiction.

So I think the blurb could really do with a rewrite. I spent most of the first half of the book feeling like it wasn’t doing what it says on the tin, that it was, to paraphrase Updike’s rules of reviewing, failing to achieve what it attempted to do. But that was actually down to blurb, and authors don’t write blurb - nor did Frelih set out to create those expectations when he was writing the novel six or seven years ago.

90% of <i>In/Half</i> comprises three sets of three chapters about the three main characters: first there is a chapter about Evan Z--, then one about Kras Wolf, and finally one about Zoja, and this sequence repeats three times. The chapters are consistent in length, each taking up about 10% of the book.

The chapters about Evan, an arsehole of a theatre director and junkie who has, for some reason, been invited to spend a year staging a play in Japan, read as if they were written in the 90s by a fan of Martin Amis and cyberpunk. Evan’s ill-treatment of his girlfriend, and the character of his agent and drug dealer, who glories in the name Gordon Falstaff, sometimes made me feel like I was reading a parody of a certain type of later twentieth century novel. (But at least there were a few intriguing, strange and original bits and pieces, like Evan’s dentist wife who wore one of his teeth as if it were a locket, and the artificial rain.) The prose is entirely competent but doesn’t fizz like that of Amis <i>fils</i>.

Alongside the egotistical, objectionable middle-aged male writer/artist-character (<i>how</i> much time have I spent reading about these over the last 25 years?), another well-known staple of litfic is the reunion of a fractious, feuding upper / middle-class family. And this is the basis for the second strand of chapters, about former government minister Kras Wolf and the many relatives who gather for his 50th birthday party. The first chapter about them didn’t really grab me, but in the second and especially the third instalments about them, they grew more intriguing, to the extent that I thought a longer piece of writing would have done the characters more justice, showing their relationships and personalities over decades – and with more detail on how the changing conditions they had lived through had affected each of them. (And I really wanted to know how Kras’ aged father had got into modern druidry whilst living in a totalitarian-sounding south-east European state with no internet.) In the space available here, there wasn’t enough space to flesh them out, and they ended up largely as sketches, but they were still interesting enough collectively to help transcend the occasional eyerollingly daft porny scenario of a sort that often turned up in later twentieth-century litfic, like <spoiler>a 17-year old voyeur spying on his considerably older lesbian half-sister and her partner in bed … and a while after being caught, apparently getting a handjob from the partner</spoiler>.

The chapters about New York-based anarchist performance poet Zoja (whom I imagined looking like a composite of Patti Smith and Eileen Myles) could have contained more about her – the bulk of the writing was about the local scene and the people she knew. I found what I read of Zoja very likeable, and there was a lot hinted at that wasn’t explored. The character of Anwar <spoiler>underground for years after his family were killed in a purge</spoiler> was an interesting digression, at least. The scene sounds like all the articles about Brooklyn hipsters circa 2010. It’s 2036 and they still haven’t moved on from Brooklyn. Facial hair is still in for men. There’s even a record-collecting craze, although the last record player "died in 2027".

I was surprised by <i>In/Half</i>'s similarities to British and American fiction, not something that I usually find obvious in translated novels. However, there must also be some Slovenian and other influences going on that I couldn’t pick up on, and which may enable a deeper appreciation of the book in people who know the place - beyond my own assumption that it is implicitly addressing the legacy of the former-Yugoslav wars of the 90s (in which Slovenia itself barely took part). This seemed nearest the surface in the arresting poetic repetition of a litany of death towards the end of the third chapter about Kras.

<i>In/Half</i>, despite its flaws, contains some great passages of writing. There are a few gorgeous landscape descriptions, and I found it hilarious on the two occasions when Evan got his comeuppance for offending well-connected Japanese people. My favourite bit of the novel was 40% in, where these features both occur within a couple of pages.

Most of the book is in perfectly decent literary-fiction prose, but this wasn’t hugely engaging when combined with certain other aspects of the book: lack of detail on many characters, general sense of datedness, and passages of cod-philosophical reflection. A few of these musings I found very wise, although much of it is the sort of stuff that may seem profound when one is aged 15 or 25, but less so by 40.

The social attitudes are markedly un-Millenial, and, whilst I understand Slovenia is slightly more conservative than the UK, and that this would have formed the backdrop to the writing, I don’t think <i>In/Half</i> fits in too well as a 2018 English-language literary publication by a young European, of interest to under-40s. (The translation must have been commissioned a couple of years ago, so the extent to which this would be the case, after the #metoo movement, would have been hard to see.) It only really discusses a resurgence of social conservatism on one issue - porn - and the rest of the time it seems simply to reproduce the attitudes of older novels in the way it gives a lot space to sexist and arrogant and/or disturbed male characters. There are descriptive asides in the narrative that manage to invoke most well-known discriminatory -isms or -phobias at one point or another. (One one occasion, different attitudes in close-3rd person narratives demonstrate that Zoja’s views are not the same as those of an acquaintance of hers, but otherwise these sentences often read as if they belong to a more distant omniscient 3rd person narrative.) It’s been pretty well hashed out by now in Anglo media that there are ways to show a reactionary fictional society whilst narrating in a way that reflects attitudes common among progressive young educated people. I think the book suffers, in a way that the author couldn’t have forseen, from the ‘woke’ shift among many likely UK and US readers between 2011-2018. And besides, these days, if people want to hear about dysfunctional personalities in the arts and politics, they only need to look at a news site to see stories that feel even weirder than fiction, because of their reframing of individuals and offices the public thought they knew about. It is frustrating that so recent a book hasn’t aged well, but perhaps recent-past work is especially prone to that, because one assumes it will still feel recent only a few years later. If something is a couple of decades old, it’s more contexualised. (However, an English language translation also makes the book accessible to readers in many other countries across the world, including places where these underlying attitudes won't seem so out of step.)

This isn’t genre dystopian fantasy with the expectations that carries, but regardless of this being literary SFF, I found the world-building too vague and hint-based. (And with this summer being what it is, the occasional complaints about weather being too hot just felt normal… The future is already here.) I think a lot of the skill and work in imagining convincing near-future worlds is in giving a convincing picture of the political and social situation, and in creating a sense of strangeness with different trends, items and technologies from the present. In the novel’s typical literary focus on individual human drama, these got little space. Several big logistical issues were totally ignored. Outlines of political developments were tantalisingly incomplete. (Part of the point of this dystopian scenario is that people have less access to information, but the main characters are a high-ranking politician and famous creatives who travel internationally, people who would obviously know more than average.)

I was reminded of articles a few years ago which described how authors struggled to incorporate widespread internet use into novels, resulting in the popularity of tricks by which it could be ignored, such as having protagonists move to remote cottages, or setting stories in the past. I wondered if this was another, especially given the similarities to older novels. But the background to the internet switch-off, The Cut, is explained in detail. (Going to spoiler tag this as it’s some way into the book, but I’d have liked to have known it much earlier, and it doesn’t spoil the rest of the plot. <spoiler>Communication services were expected to be endangered by massive sunspot activity, and governments worldwide decided not to do anything to try and protect systems from it, in order to quell the ‘Great Cacophony’of social media.</spoiler>)

During most of the second half, I was sure I’d be rounding my rating up to 3 stars. The final chapter changed my mind. I couldn’t believe <spoiler>it actually shows the three old friends reunited on a mystical plane after death. Two of them appear to be in some kind of dream, not actually dead, but generally this scenario is right up there with the big corny popular fiction clichés. In the scene, the three of them also talk like a bunch of twentysomethings.</spoiler> A really good editor could have got some big changes made in the original here.

I wondered how much of the tone of the writing was created single-handedly by the translator, and how much it reflects the original. It looks like this is Blake's first publication of a whole novel, after translating non-fiction and short stories. It generally feels very well done, and natural without falling into the clichés of work originally in English, but the missed opportunity evident in the phrase “this Adórkus dolt” jolted me into awareness of other possibilities that must have have existed during the translation process. (The scene in question is even in America.)

At least one other reviewer suggests that <i>In/Half</i> may connect better with younger people rather than with those of us nearing, or in, middle age. I would think that might be the case mostly because average twentysomethings haven’t read as many old litfic novels that have trodden similar ground, and therefore may not be bored by the prospect of some of these scenarios. (It will also be interesting to read opinions on this book from other people who have read a lot of this sort of thing, and hear what they got out of it that I missed.)

Oneworld have published some of my favourite books of recent years, including <i>The Sellout</i> by Paul Beatty, and Vodolazkin’s <i>Laurus</i>, and I’m still keen to see what they bring out next - although of course, as this review shows, not every book from a publisher is to any one reader’s taste.

There is more than enough here to suggest that Frelih will produce good stuff in the future and develop further as a writer - even if this book has some issues typical of a first novel (apparent influence of older authors, trying to fit too much in) and hasn’t had the luckiest of timing in its English publication.

This was definitely not for me. I mean, Slovenian science fiction, yay! but even so, I’m not the reader they were looking for. Don’t let that keep you away, though.

As someone who has passed the landmark of fifty a few years back, I found myself unable to relate to the characters. Perhaps it is my experience over the authors perception of age. I also found many of the sentences short and put together almost as bullet points rather than the flowing language I am used to in fiction. Perhaps this is a book for the younger crowd and I am a bit too old for it. I won’t pass judgement on it and will leave this to the younger crowd.