I am, at the moment, kitten-sitting in Oakland, California. I took this photo yesterday with the book for scale to try and show just how small this little cat is, but I don’t think I succeeded.
Euphoria is one of the two books I brought with me to upstate New York and didn’t start, so now having brought it on a second trip (on which, of course, I have picked up a few more books) I decided I really needed to read it so I didn’t keep carrying it around with me. I originally picked it up a couple years ago after it was recommended in Molly Young’s “Read Like the Wind” newsletter. I have considered starting it multiple times, and it was I think the mention in some other newsletter I get of a new book by Lily King that prompted me to do it now (or approximately now). It’s set primarily in early 1930s New Guinea among a trio of anthropologists, inspired by Margaret Mead. I think it was the phrase “love triangle” on the back cover that turned me off from reading this on the previous occasions I considered it. It’s hard to say exactly why; I’ve surely read many books that featured love triangles, so I think it was actually the phrase itself more than what it suggested that rankled me. I sort of wish the book were less blatantly inspired by Margaret Mead because I found it hard to think of the characters as characters, if that makes sense, and yet I know very little about Margaret Mead and so now I’m probably terribly misinformed. In any case,
Euphoria was a gripping read. The advertised love triangle was more complex than it seemed and did not go quite how I expected it would. Novels about anthropologists in the field is sort of a micro genre of its own, of which I believe this is the fourth example I’ve read and one of the ones I’ve enjoyed the most. They’ve all had a similarly lingering sense of terror — the sense that things could turn bad at any moment (and probably will); the threat always coming both from without (the people being studied) and within (the anthropologists themselves). It’s a natural set-up for a compelling read, and
Euphoria was that.
