ralentina reviewed Humiliation by Megan McDowell
Nine ways to feel humiliated
4 stars
As one could guess from the title, this is a book about humiliation, with each short story exploring a different face of this sentiment. The hints in the blurb that it is somehow about the dictatorship are misleading, and I started to think all Chilean are marketed as dictatorship-related out of laziness or maybe because it supposedly sells. But I am going off a tangent. Almost all the stories are told from the perspective of children. I particularly liked the title story Humiliation (about a girl witnessing his unemployed dad being humiliated, and for the first time being able to interpret what has happened), Talcahuano (about being very young poor but not so unhappy in Talcahuano, and then getting old enough to lose the bless of obliviousness and being disappointed in one's parent and moving to Santiago to lead a poor and not so happy life) and the Last Vacation …
As one could guess from the title, this is a book about humiliation, with each short story exploring a different face of this sentiment. The hints in the blurb that it is somehow about the dictatorship are misleading, and I started to think all Chilean are marketed as dictatorship-related out of laziness or maybe because it supposedly sells. But I am going off a tangent. Almost all the stories are told from the perspective of children. I particularly liked the title story Humiliation (about a girl witnessing his unemployed dad being humiliated, and for the first time being able to interpret what has happened), Talcahuano (about being very young poor but not so unhappy in Talcahuano, and then getting old enough to lose the bless of obliviousness and being disappointed in one's parent and moving to Santiago to lead a poor and not so happy life) and the Last Vacation (about the well meaning efforts to "rescue" a child from poverty and the working-class condition, and the boomerang effect of said child's pride and loyalty to his mum. I was happy to find a good book about Chile.