We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves: A Novel (Pen/Faulkner Award - Fiction)

This story starts in the middle, instead of the beginning. The problem, with the author’s approach, is that it fails to draw the reader in initially. At first the tale seems trivial, disconnected, and certainly, uninteresting.How many of us have read stories of dysfunctional families? In this case, the parents believe they are a close family; they are convinced that they all talk to each other about their feelings, and that they are all very happy and content. Dysfunctional families get tiresome. In the rather boring third of this book, I was not intrigued.However, even in the first third of the book, Fowler writes some brilliant phrases:“An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album. Eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture”. If the reader perseveres and reads on, the story unfolds slowly but beautifully, and we learn how appropriate this phrase is to the rest of the story. Yes, Fowler’s story is more profound than I thought initially.We hear the story through Rosemary’s eyes. The year is 1996. She is a twenty-two year-old college student at the University of California, Davis. Rosemary is in her fifth year of college; she is unfocused and drifting. She describes a rather juvenile scene in the college lunchroom in which a young woman, Harlow, throws a tantrum, in which she throws food and smashes dishes. Rosemary is pulled into this, and they both end up in jail. I was rather irritated by this behavior and did not look forward to reading more of the book. However, the significance of this lunchroom disturbance becomes apparent later in the story.The two women become friends. Apparently, Rosemary has blocked out her childhood, and her friendship with Harlow allows her to unlock those memories little by little. Her memories of the past are painful, and she wonders what is real and what is not.We learn that Rosemary had a sister, Fern, and an older brother, Lowell, who disappeared; these facts are surrounded with mystery. Lowell left home when he was still in high school; their parents tried in vain to find him. Fern disappeared when Rosemary was five years old. Was Fern kidnapped? Did she die? All of this is unclear initially. We then learn that Fern is a chimpanzee. The official story is that Fern was sent to a new family on a farm, a wonderful happy place with other chimps. As more and more of the family secrets are revealed, the reader, as well as Rosemary, puts the pieces of the puzzle together. I expect Fowler hid the fact that Fern was a chimpanzee, so that the reader would think of her as a sister. The author succeeds in this, because I did think of Fern as a human; obviously, Rosemary and her brother did as well. Rosemary was only a month old when three month-old Fern came to live with her family. The two were treated as if they were twins. Fern was raised as if she were a human child. Fern and Rosemary were together throughout the day and night and communicated well with sign language. Fern understood quite a few words, but she did not learn to speak herself. She grew to expect Rose to speak for her. The two often played exuberantly; the whole family felt the excitement. Rosemary’s mother would say, “We are all completely besides ourselves”.Rosemary’s father was a psychology professor at Indiana University. Rosemary and Fern were experimental subjects. Her father and a number of graduate students collected data to analyze the differences in human and chimp learning and behavior. Ultimately, could chimps learn to communicate with language?Rosemary loved Fern, but she was also jealous of her. She thought her mother loved Fern better than she did Rosemary. Fern could do many things that Rosemary could not do. Fern was physically stronger and learned some skills faster than Rosemary did as an infant. Rosemary tried to find things she could do that Fern could not do. Rosemary could talk, so she talked a good deal and used big works to impress people. Rosemary’s imaginary friend, Mary, could do everything that Fern could do and even more.The winter after Fern disappeared, Rosemary went to kindergarten. Rosemary’s kindergarten teacher said Rosemary was “impulsive, possessive, and demanding”. The other children called Rosemary “monkey-girl”. She had spent five formative years with Fern and had taken on some of Fern’s behaviors; Rosemary was exhibiting chimp traits. She was like an imitation human and made the kids uncomfortable. She was an outsider and was bullied.With Fern and her brother gone, Rosemary grew up very much alone. Her mother had a nervous breakdown after Fern and Lowell left; she came out of her bedroom periodically to function as a wife and mother. Rosemary’s father made a limited attempt to take care of his daughter, but he was cold and unfeeling. Rosemary missed Fern and was jealous of the other chimps that got to play with Fern on the farm. She imagined that Lowell was taking care of Fern and that her big brother would someday come back home to take care of her.When Lowell unexpectedly visits her at college, she learns that there was never any farm. Fern was sent to a psychology lab. She was put in a cage with other chimps and treated like an animal. Lowell had been doing as much as he could to protect Fern but was being pursued by the FBI for animal rights activities. He came to ask her to try to help Fern.After initially boring me, this book took a powerful hold on me. Is it right to raise a child and animal together as siblings and then take one of them away when the experiment is over? Rosemary, Lowell, their mother and Fern were all traumatized by this experiment. How moral is it to put an animal in a cage and submit it to psychological and/or medical tests? As Lowell said when he first saw Fern in a lab cage, “That’s my sister in that cage”.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is a tremendously well-written, fascinating, heartwarming, bizarre, and somewhat frustrating book, but I couldn't stop reading it.It's the story of the Cooke family—Mother, Dad, Lowell, Fern, and Rosemary. Fern and Rosemary, only a few months apart, are inseparable, constantly imitating each other, getting themselves into trouble (and telling on each other), and participating in studies conducted by Dad's graduate students in psychology. Life seems idyllic—although young Rosemary never seems to stop talking—until Fern disappears when Rosemary is five, and this disappearance strains the family, eventually leading to Lowell's departure."Though I was only five when she disappeared from my life, I do remember her. I remember her sharply—her smell and touch, scattered images of her face, her ears, her chin, her eyes. Her arms, her feet, her fingers. But I don't remember her fully, not the way Lowell does."The thing is, Fern wasn't just any sibling, and she didn't just disappear. Fern was a chimpanzee, raised by the Cookes as part of a study that "twinned" a baby chimp and a human baby, to determine the effects on the development of both. There were times when Rosemary felt outshone by Fern and what Fern could do, but she still felt like she mattered. And when funding for the study ended, and the Cookes began to have concerns about Rosemary's safety and the safety of others with Fern, she was taken to a university laboratory."One day, every word I said was data, and carefully recorded for further study and discussion. The next, I was just a little girl, strange in her way, but of no scientific interest to anyone."But while Fern left when Rosemary was five, Fern's presence and her disappearance affected Rosemary's life tremendously, from the way she interacted with others more like a chimp than a human, to the destruction of her relationship with her older brother, as well as the end of her father's career, and her family's happiness. As she grew, Rosemary became a person more comfortable with silence, one more interested in blending in unnoticed than standing out. And as a college student at the University of California, Davis, some people didn't even know that Rosemary had siblings.This is the story of secrets and things left unsaid. It's the story of an experiment with noble purpose that left a family worse for wear, and affected the trajectory of each of the members' lives. It's also the story of the unreliability of human memory, how what we believe isn't always what happened (nor is what we're told). And it's also the story of someone determined to set the record straight, to unravel fact and remembrance into a coherent thread.I thought Karen Joy Fowler did a great job creating the Cooke family and fleshing out both the experiment that brought Fern to their family and the aftereffects of her departure. The dialogue, the characters, and the emotions they felt and conveyed were moving and compelling, and it hooked me on the book pretty quickly.I felt at times, however, that the book didn't know if it wanted to be simply a novel or a novel with a message about animal testing and cruelty to research animals. This is a topic that needs serious attention but the details provided about the Animal Liberation Front didn't really mesh with the rest of the plot. I also felt as if an entire thread of the plot that involved one of Rosemary's fellow students (and a ventriloquist's dummy) was distracting and didn't quite fit, nor was it fleshed out the way it could have been.On the whole, though, I really enjoyed this book. It was completely not what I expected (I feared it was going to be bizarre) and it really warmed my heart. It's not perfect, much like the characters whose stories it tells, but that is part of what makes it affecting."My brother and my sister have led extraordinary lives, but I wasn't there, and I can't tell you that part. I've stuck here to the part I can tell, the part that's mine, and still everything I've said is all about them, a chalk outline around the space where they should have been. Three children, one story."

El producto resultó ser tal y como se especificaba. Vendedor recomendado. Recomendable si bien no se trata de una de las mejores novelas del autor.

It would have been an interesting story, if only it hadn't been quite random. The narrator is talking about herself, and directly to the reader, except halfway through the story she forgets about it, then she remembers again. It isn't easy to understand if it's meant to be a dramatic story or a funny one. The narrator herself is quite an annoying character, her actions are frustratingly nonsensical, she seems to have very little personality, and the characters around her, like her flatmate or the girl she meets at the beginning of the book, don't feel realistic.Near the end of the book there's a tirade on animal cruelty, so suddenly it turns political, and the ending is rushed to the last chapter when all of a sudden she's a 60-year old woman (or something, I forgot the details), reflecting on her life.Quite a disappointing read.

A different book that is beautifully written and is also heartbreaker at times too. Loved it. It has an unexpected twist that you can sense. Really recommend it.

but some moments are not necessary to the story, so they become a silly burden to carry till the end. Anyway, it is a moving story of love running in a family, which leaves the reader with wet eyes and a hearth full of love.

It's a very origianl and different book. Though not everything that's original is good, I recommend this one. I don't want to tell very much about the story but it will probably make you think about relationships in general and about what make us human. Excellent book.