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Milkman novel book review5/29/2023 ![]() ![]() “Their creative imaginings would reach my ears slander by gravitational slander. It is a deeply feminist work, a compelling and significant look at how the regular life of a young woman is. ![]() ![]() “All this made sense within the context of our intricately coiled, overly secretive, hyper-gossipy, puritanical yet indecent, totalitarian district,” she writes. Milkman is a deft and triumphant work of considerable intelligence and importance. Recently, in talking to some teenagers in the U.S., I realized. The whole town is engaged in a culturally enforced conspiracy of gaslighting. I am a bit late in coming to Anna Burns 2018 Man Booker prize-winning novel, but so glad I did. “At the time, age eighteen,” she says, “having been brought up in a hair-trigger society where the ground rules were - if no physically violent touch was being laid upon you, and no outright verbal insults were being leveled at you, and no taunting looks in the vicinity either, then nothing was happening, so how could you be under attack from something that wasn’t there?” What’s worse, her community, even her family, assumes that she’s to blame for enticing the milkman away from his wife. The story is told through the voice of a teenage girl known only as middle sister, who is coming of age in the most arduous of circumstances. But what makes him so destructive to the narrator’s mental health is that she has no vocabulary with which to resist or even describe what’s happening to her. Anna Burns ’s Man Booker-shortlisted novel, Milkman, is a powerful fictional account set during in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. The milkman is a character of mysterious power amid a vast network of spies, bombmakers and killers. ![]()
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