Another book that I started at the end of last year and got too busy to read.
Monumenta
Lara Haworth
Olga Pavic’s house has been requisitioned.
The council will bulldoze it.
Her home will become a monument to a massacre.
But Olga cannot ascertain which massacre. Three different architects visit, each with a proposal to construct a different monument, to memorialise a different horror.
Olga can’t allow them to unearth the secrets held in this space, not until she reunites with her children for a final dinner. Her aspirational, distant daughter, Hilde, and her secretly queer son, Danilo, both reluctantly agree to fly back to Belgrade.
Within an atmosphere of razor-sharp political surreality, Lara Haworth spins a tender, magical story of familial love and loss. Via a panoply of perspectives Monumenta compellingly and playfully explores remembrance and how tragedy can be the catalyst for remarkable transformation.
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This was a bit of a wild card pick for me. I like to read books outside my usual genres every now and again, but I felt like I had heard something good about it and decided to give it a shot.
The book explores memory and remembrance through discussions of the proposed monuments to replace Olga’s house and through the characters’ reflections. I found the story quite cryptic at times; it can be very light on details, meaning you have to draw your own conclusions about what is happening.
There came moments when I was trying to decide if we were still in one of Olga’s dreams; the story has a very loose grasp on reality at times. It was a bit mad, the house seemed to be a character too, which I did quite enjoy because houses do hold lots of memories, and I liked that it had a mind of its own.
I feel like the story was intended to make a point, but other than considering the nature of monuments and who we might build them for, I’m not sure if I grasped it. I also felt like the characters were kind of fleeting, which worked in the context of the book, but I did feel like there was a lot left unsaid with every single one, and I did find that slightly frustrating.
everywhere-and-nowhere.com 