Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Sympathy
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1988
WEBSITE: http://www.oliviasudjic.org/
CITY: London, England
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1988, in London, England.
EDUCATION:Cambridge University, graduated (with first class honors).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Previously worked as a copywriter and strategist at UK newspapers.
AWARDS:E.G. Harwood Prize for English and Bateman Scholarship, Cambridge University.
WRITINGS
Contributor to publications, including the London Sunday Times’ Sale, FT Weekend, Elle, London Observer, Harper’s Bazaar, as well as websites, including the Debrief, Hunger, and the Gloss.
SIDELIGHTS
Olivia Sudjic is a British writer and former journalist. She has worked as a copywriter and strategist at publications in the United Kingdom. Sudjic has been a contributor to the London Sunday Times’ Sale, FT Weekend, Elle, London Observer, Harper’s Bazaar, and to websites, including the Debrief, Hunger, and the Gloss. She holds a degree from Cambridge University, which also honored her with the E.G Harwood Prize for English and a Bateman Scholarship.
Sympathy is Sudjic’s first novel. Released in 2017, it tells the story of Alice Hare, a young British woman living in New York. She becomes obsessed with a Japanese author named Mizuko Himura and stalks her online, eventually meeting her in person. Over time, Alice reveals other connections to Japan. It was there where she and her parents spent a rare happy period of time and also the site of Alice’s travels during her gap year.
In an interview with Abbe Wright, contributor to the Read It Forward website, Sudjic explained the book’s title and how she became inspired to write it. She stated: “When I was still at university, I came across this seventeenth century English polymath who was obsessed with mystical, scientific, strange, and in this case bogus, medicines. One was called Sympathy Powder. This was when the word sympathy didn’t have the same connotations it has now to empathy. Back then, it was simply meant as a connection—the correspondence between things.” Sudjic continued: “The belief was that this medicine could link people and things across time and space. I fixed on Sympathy Powder as the starting point for a novel, the idea that people from the past could connect. Since it was my debut novel, I thought: ‘How can I get taken seriously?’ My solution was to use something from the past, ideally about medicine.” Sudjic added: “I originally was thinking of medicine as a metaphor for technology, our current day sympathy pattern—the way that we can suddenly be in a room on the other side of the world or we can track back to every message we’ve ever sent to someone. We can obsess. We can feel like we’re living in all these different alternate realities all at once. So, that’s where the novel came from. Obviously, the title therefore stayed, but the setting and everything became very different from what I initially imagined.”
Reviews of Sympathy were mixed. A critic in Kirkus Reviews described the volume as “a story that’s hard to follow even though it moves at an incredibly slow pace.” The same critic noted that the book featured “an intriguing premise delivered in turgid prose.” Pamela Mann, contributor to Library Journal, remarked: “Readers less attached to social media will find it hard to sympathize with the main characters.” Other assessments were more favorable. “While some readers will find the ending confusing and unsatisfying, none will be bored by this frenetic, timely story of digital fixation actualized,” asserted a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Writing on the Minneapolis Star Tribune website, Malcolm Forbes commented: “Sympathy is fact-filled, but it is also packed with tension, pathos and vitality. Whether in New York or on detours to Texas and Tokyo, in conversation with Mizuko or alone with her curdling thoughts, Alice proves a captivating narrator, candidly sharing her passions. … This is a potent first novel from a formidable talent.” Carl Wilkinson, critic on the Financial Times Online, suggested: “Novels often handle digital culture gingerly, as a strange new world that is somehow alien to our own and to that of the written page. Sudjic’s achievement is to incorporate this world at a granular level; it provides both the mechanisms necessary to propel her plot and the texture that defines her characters and their experience of New York.”
Reviewing the book on the London Guardian Online, Hermione Eyre stated: “Rarely do novels so ostentatiously of the moment succeed so well at gesturing to the universal. This book is packed with the ‘now’: site-specific promenade theatre, grubby dating apps, ancestry-testing kits, puns on Pinterest and Pinteresque. Alice when she is bored and waiting even physically resembles a download symbol, ‘buffering’ on the pavement as she swings round a scaffolding pole. And yet the tone on occasion rises to sagacity.” “Sympathy is a knotty—sometimes confusing, but always smart—dissection of intimacy and interaction in the digital age,” wrote Lucy Scholes on the London Independent Online. Scholes added: “Sympathy isn’t a mystery thriller in the traditional sense. Rather it’s a gripping odyssey into one woman’s online-addled inner life that shrewdly ties together the age-old hubris of youth with a particular sort of new digital naïveté.” Kaitlin Phillips, contributor to the New York Times Online, opined: “Sympathy is self-consciously clever, riddled with a network of allusions similar to that of Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics—also a story about a seemingly precocious girl with a missing father that could be mistaken for a particularly engaging young adult novel.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2017, review of Sympathy.
Library Journal, February 1, 2017, Pamela Mann, review of Sympathy, p. 76.
New Statesman, June 2, 2017, review of Sympathy, p. 47.
Publishers Weekly, February 6, 2017, review of Sympathy, p. 42.
ONLINE
Elle UK Online, http://www.elleuk.com/ (June 2, 2017), Daisy Murray, author interview.
Financial Times Online, https://www.ft.com (June 2, 2017), Carl Wilkinson, review of Sympathy.
London Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com (May 26, 2017), Hermione Eyre, review of Sympathy.
London Independent Online, http://www.independent.co.uk (April 26, 2017), Lucy Scholes, review of Sympathy.
Minneapolis Star Tribune Online, http://www.startribune.com (May 26, 2017), Malcolm Forbes, review of Sympathy.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com (April 13, 2017), Kaitlin Phillips, review of Sympathy.
Olivia Sudjic Website, http://www.oliviasudjic.org/ (October 31, 2017).
Read It Forward, http://www.readitforward.com/ (November 21, 2017), Abbe Wright, author interview.
Vogue Online, http://www.vogue.co.uk/ (May 1, 2017), Hayley Maitland, author interview.*
Olivia Sudjic was born in London in 1988 and studied English Literature at Cambridge University (2007-2010), where she was awarded First Class Honours, the E.G Harwood Prize for English, and made a Bateman Scholar. After graduating she gained editorial experience at two UK newspapers, before working in the arts and culture sector as a strategist and copywriter. She’s written for publications including the FT Weekend, Elle, Sunday Times' Style, The Debrief, Hunger, The Observer, Harpers Bazaar and The Gloss. Her agent is Emma Paterson at Rogers, Coleridge & White.
‘Sympathy’, first published in April 2017, is her debut novel, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (USA/Canada), ONE (UK), Kein & Aber (Germany), Minimum Fax (Italy), Planeta (Mexico), Habitus Kitap (Turkey) and Wydawnictwo Czarna Owca (Poland), as well as Amazon’s Audible.
Her UK Publicist is Tabitha Pelly. For enquiries contact tabitha@pushkinpress.com
She also has an online alter-ego on Instagram.
@babynovelist
Five Minutes With...Olivia Sudjic
If last summer's must-read debut was Emma Cline's The Girls, this year it's undoubtedly Olivia Sudjic's remarkable Sympathy - a psychological thriller about a British graduate who moves to Manhattan and becomes obsessed with a writer 10 years her senior. The 28-year-old author sat down with Vogue to discuss her reading habits, eyebrow grooming and love of Reese's Pieces.
by HAYLEY MAITLAND
01 May 2017
What is the most-read book on your book shelf?
Either King Lear or The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis.
What is the one thing you wish you could tell your 16-year-old self?
Don’t touch your eyebrows. Take way more risks in other areas of your life, however.
What are your guilty pleasures?
Reese’s Pieces, Uber, plucking stray hairs from my chin.
Who would play you in the film biopic of your life?
Maggie Gyllenhaal or Winona Ryder. For the gracefully aged version of me, Anjelica Huston.
What are the most treasured items in your wardrobe?
A denim jacket from Margaret Howell which I bought this week to celebrate my novel coming out. Less obviously, a pair of green lace-up plimsolls from the Sixties that belonged to my granny. She gave them to me when I arrived in New York to try and write a novel. I walked around the city in them, wearing holes in the toes. Now that she’s gone, I wear them on certain occasions for good luck.
What three films could you watch over and over again?
Little Women, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Gladiator.
If you could raid anyone’s wardrobe, whose would it be?
Phoebe Philo or Grace Wales Bonner.
Tell us your favourite quote of all time.
I don’t have a favourite. It depends on what’s going on in my life. The line I read most recently that seemed useful is from the artist Louise Bourgeois. “Once I was beset by anxiety but I pushed the fear away by studying the sky, determining when the moon would come out and where the sun would appear in the morning.”
Which album would be the soundtrack to your life and why?
The soundtrack to Everyone Says I Love You. The Chiquita Banana Song especially… YouTube it now if you don’t know it. She’s a sexy, strong, knowledgable banana with the voice of Monica Lewis who wears a beautiful flamenco outfit and her wink at the end is how I’d like to quit this life.
Where is your favourite place in the world, and what makes it so special?
Clerkenwell and its immediate surroundings. My grandparents live there, and I used to go to school in the Barbican so it feels like home. I love the modern buildings alongside historic parts of the city, like the churches and remnants of Roman wall.
What would the title of your autobiography be?
Whelmed.
Which three things would you save from your house in a fire?
Assuming I’m already wearing the green plimsolls: a small (portable) painting my Aunt Harriet made for me when I went to university, two small pink clay vases I bought in New York that are the most beautiful things I own and sit together perfectly (but I’ll cheat and say they count as one), and a brass Japanese tea caddy I got for my 28th birthday.
If you could invite four people – living or dead – to the ultimate dinner party, who would they be and what would you serve?
The idea of inviting famous people makes me feel socially anxious as well as paralysed for choice so I’m going to invite female relatives (a direct line of great grandmothers) from the 19th, 18th, 17th and 16th centuries. I’d serve clam spaghetti and gin cocktails.
What was your life goal aged 10?
To be an author and an illustrator. Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake in one.
Olivia Sudjic Talks To ELLE About Her First Novel 'Sympathy', Navigating Social Media And Being A Millennial Rent-A-Voice
'I'm millennial clickbait. Click me.'
Olivia Sudjik
INSTAGRAM IMOGEN FREELAND
BY DAISY MURRAY
JUN 2, 2017
37
I was surprised to find Olivia Sudjic on Instagram.
The 28-year-old is something of a self-proclaimed 'tin-hat wearer' when it comes to social media. Her official 'author' page was easy enough to track down (it's public). But a few clicks into one particularly late-night social media crawl (don't judge, guys) and my blue-glowing screen lights up with her private, personal profile.
I tapped, watching the white box turn grey and awaited her response. 'Follow' transformed into 'Requested' and I paused, briefly, before returning to my home screen.
It was then I recalled the opening chapter of Sudjic's novel Sympathy. The speaker agonises over an almost identical scenario:
Follow, once white, was now an arresting grey, the word replaced by Requested. I felt this new word did not convey proper urgency. For a start, I did not like the past tense. I glared at the word as I lay in bed, certain that my envoy was not requesting hard enough.
Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic
OTHERS PUSHKIN PRESS
We've all been there, right? Which makes Sudjic's debut novel - and first foray into creative writing since school - all the more timely. The plot follows Alice (nicknamed Rabbit) Hare (the Carroll reference and Updike dig are intentional) fall in something-like-love with a writer, slightly older than herself, over Instagram and orchestrates a not-so chance meeting.
And there I was, having found a (slightly older) writer over Instagram, sending the elusive follow request, hoping to orchestrate a meeting myself.
Whilst I am yet to become so enthralled with an account I choreograph a run-in using their location tag, the deep sensation of knowing someone through their Instagram page is familiar; the desire to meet and make real the digital relationship you tend to is tangible.
And that's the real kicker about Sympathy; the book is geo-located to your reality circa 2014, firmly rooted somewhere around the Ice Bucket Challenge and guiltily stuck in your throat like a two-hour Instagram hole. You can see why it's being hailed as the first great Instagram novel.
Don't worry, this isn't a two-dimensional lecture proclaiming the ills of the social media age. It's more an exploration of our uniquely connected era, asking one (admittedly, complicated) question: 'Do we know what we're getting ourselves into?'
A notification: oliviasudjic (Olivia Sudjic's personal handle) had accepted my request to follow her. A quick scout around her Twitter had also bore fruit in the form of an agent's email. The meeting was set. I placed down my phone and switched it for Sympathy.
One week later, 28-year-old Sudjic and I are nursing caffeine together, discussing how she has come to become the go-to millennial rent-a-voice for all things social media, tech and well, millennial.
Considering the novel's onus on privacy, how have you found the public interest in you personally since the book's release?
I'm happy to write about personal things, but I'm not willing to throw people around me under the bus.
Otherwise I feel as though I'm falling into exactly the same trap as in the book. Where you let all this stuff out into the world and you have no idea how random trolls will take it.
I have become a lot more cautious - there's a reason why I have two Instagram accounts. Otherwise I would have had to go backwards and sanitise everything.
Do you think sexism is at play when it comes to female artist's personal life and their work?
It's a distraction. It's something men don't have to deal with as much as women. A man can write the most personal-sounding story that completely overlaps on their life and it's about the universe, but when a woman writes about the universe, everyone thinks it's really about her.
You have said that the internet reflects, or is in fact just an extension, of the world and therefore is an inherently patriarchal structure. That being said, do you think that the internet can be used to dismantle that?
Well, if we get more female coders then maybe.
I feel like the internet is where we were in the workplace 50 years ago. It's so male-dominated. They're not marginalized. They're not a black, gay, transgender person who's experiencing any form of cyberbullying.
For example, Facebook used to label videos of rape as 'controversial' and the mechanisms for reporting sexual abuse received online was that you had to report each incident separately.
That puts the burden on some woman to report each case and it's dealt with as though each one is just one individual incidence.
A MAN CAN WRITE THE MOST PERSONAL-SOUNDING STORY THAT COMPLETELY OVERLAPS ON THEIR LIFE AND IT'S ABOUT THE UNIVERSE, BUT WHEN A WOMAN WRITES ABOUT THE UNIVERSE, EVERYONE THINKS IT'S REALLY ABOUT HER.
Do you think there is hope for the big bad internet?
We have got the web now but we need to build the web that we actually want.
With the internet, it reminds me of that scene in Green Wing where she's always getting the sexy computer IT guy to come and help fix her computer. She's like: 'I can't, my computers frozen'.
I just feel a bit like we're all saying 'call the IT guy or let the people in Palo Alto sort it out, they know what they're doing'.
You're young, a woman and have just written very a zeitgeisty book - is it weird answering all these questions on the ethics of the internet?
To quote Lena Dunham, 'I'm a voice of a generation.'
I'm millennial clickbait. Click me. [laughing]
It does feel, though, like there's a strong shift in how we see things. People are thinking about choice and information a lot.
With Brexit and Trump people are finally like: 'wait a second, what is under this internet of which we speak?'
Did you know the internet can not show flats or apartments for rent to people the internet identifies as black?
They like Beyoncé on Facebook and a certain type of rap music and they've eaten friend chicken a certain number of times.
It's illegal but it's so unregulated the legality does not extend from the real world.
Olivia Sudjik
Olivia Sudjik
OTHERS PUSHKIN PRESS
People think the internet is a fantasy digital crèche in which you can act out any desire and play a second life and it's not real, whereas our generation is much more in tune to the fact that those two worlds are essentially the same and there isn't really much distinction anymore.
DID YOU KNOW THE INTERNET CAN DO THINGS LIKE NOT SHOW FLATS OR APARTMENTS FOR RENT TO PEOPLE THE THE INTERNET IDENTIFIES AS BLACK?
Alice, the book's protagonist, thinks some truly terrible things - there's a hilarious scene where she goes to a talk about the Holocaust with her online crush and the entire time she is thinking completely about herself.
I was worried my editor would read it that scene and just think I was a terrible person.
But then I realised, my favourite types of books, TV shows and films have quite terrible people in them.
Luckily my US editor was both Jewish and amused, so it was fine.
But I love Fleabag for that reason. The best scene is when you discover that the person who has been leading you along the whole time is actually the villain of the piece, but you're complicit.
PEOPLE THINK THE INTERNET IS A FANTASY DIGITAL CRÈCHE IN WHICH YOU CAN ACT OUT ANY DESIRE AND PLAY A SECOND LIFE AND IT'S NOT REAL.
I definitely see the links to Chris Kraus' I Love Dick. Both books are almost epistolary and an exploration of female abjection. They suggest that love and obsession can be an act of endurance art.
I thought of Alice doing some strange performance art like Marina Abramovic, but then when I read I Love Dick I realised Alice could be completely offering herself through text messages.
I SPENT A CONSIDERABLE AMOUNT OF TIME STRESSING ABOUT WHAT WHITE MEN WOULD THINK OF ME WRITING THIS BOOK.
The idea that the only way to regain some sense of dignity after being ignored is to turn it into art. Men don't really have to encounter shame in the same way as women.
The reality is sometimes I feel proud and other times I feel deeply ashamed. That's my daily experience of life.
Sympathy is available now from Pushkin Press.
QUOTED: "When I was still at university, I came across this seventeenth century English polymath who was obsessed with mystical, scientific, strange, and in this case bogus, medicines. One was called Sympathy Powder. This was when the word sympathy didn’t have the same connotations it has now to empathy. Back then, it was simply meant as a connection—the correspondence between things."
"The belief was that this medicine could link people and things across time and space. I fixed on Sympathy Powder as the starting point for a novel, the idea that people from the past could connect. Since it was my debut novel, I thought: 'How can I get taken seriously?' My solution was to use something from the past, ideally about medicine."
"I originally was thinking of medicine as a metaphor for technology, our current day sympathy pattern—the way that we can suddenly be in a room on the other side of the world or we can track back to every message we’ve ever sent to someone. We can obsess. We can feel like we’re living in all these different alternate realities all at once. So, that’s where the novel came from. Obviously, the title therefore stayed, but the setting and everything became very different from what I initially imagined."
A Conversation with Olivia Sudjic
The author of Sympathy gets real about girl crushes, Google stalking, and not being Facebook friends with your spouse.
BY ABBE WRIGHT • 5 MONTHS AGO
While Sympathy is Olivia Sudjic’s debut novel, her success is more than just beginner’s luck. This electrifying story of obsessive love, family secrets, and the dangers of living our lives online has already been named by Entertainment Weekly as one of the 16 debut novels to read in 2017 and the New York Times Book Review called it “an uncomfortably contemporary tale of unrequited love in the internet age.”
At twenty-three, protagonist Alice Hare leaves England for New York. She becomes fixated on Mizuko Himura, a Japanese writer living in New York, whose life story has strange parallels to her own and who she believes is her “Internet twin.” What seems to Mizuko like a chance encounter with Alice is anything but—after all, in the age of connectivity, nothing is coincidence. Their subsequent relationship is doomed from the outset, exposing a tangle of lies and sexual encounters as three families across the globe collide, and the most ancient of questions—where do we come from?—is answered just by searching online.
Read it Forward’s editor Abbe Wright chatted with author Olivia Sudjic about her novel Sympathy, New York City as a character, and 17th-century portraits as the first Tinder profile pictures.
Read It Forward: Where did you get the seed for your novel Sympathy?
Olivia Sudjic: It’s quite specific actually, which is funny because now it’s almost not really visible in the book at all. When I was still at university, I came across this 17th century English polymath who was obsessed with mystical, scientific, strange, and in this case bogus, medicines.
One was called Sympathy Powder. This was when the word sympathy didn’t have the same connotations it has now to empathy. Back then, it was simply meant as a connection—the correspondence between things.
The belief was that this medicine could link people and things across time and space. I fixed on Sympathy Powder as the starting point for a novel, the idea that people from the past could connect.
Since it was my debut novel, I thought, “How can I get taken seriously?” My solution was to use something from the past, ideally about medicine.
It was an accident that I was in New York to write it. I quit my job because I needed fear in order to get it done. My parents thought I was crazy, which is ironic because they’re both in the arts, too. But I think you learn that when parents say they want you to be happy, they really just want you to be safe.
RIF: Exactly. Don’t have any debt.
OS: I came to New York to stay with my grandmother, and to get away from my friends in London to protect my time. Whilst I was here trying to write this idea about this medicine, New York was like a strangler fig that just took over the story and eventually became the book itself.
RIF: The story evolved once you started writing in New York City?
OS: Yes, I used New York as the setting for the novel. I also let go of the idea that it had to be set in the past and that it had to have a third person voice. Given that the protagonist is a girl around my age, I was reluctant to use the first person. I didn’t want it to sound like it was me.
After a while, I thought that shouldn’t be my consideration. I shed that self-consciousness as I went along. And I don’t think a male writer would have had that worry.
RIF: Yeah.
OS: I originally was thinking of medicine as a metaphor for technology, our current day sympathy pattern—the way that we can suddenly be in a room on the other side of the world or we can track back to every message we’ve ever sent to someone. We can obsess. We can feel like we’re living in all these different alternate realities all at once. So, that’s where the novel came from. Obviously, the title therefore stayed, but the setting and everything became very different from what I initially imagined.
RIF: So, New York strong-armed its way into being a central character?
OS: Exactly.
RIF: And reading it, I felt like the city really embodies Alice’s searching and longing for connection.
OS: I think that’s important because in some ways it is a love story, or more like a girl crush story. Because she doesn’t really know the person that she’s so obsessed with. And so, in that sense, I think Mizuko represents New York or this place that Alice is trying to fit into. How do you root yourself in a place? You find a person that to you represents that weird, double-bind between loneliness and connection, fear and love, all that stuff. She sees Mizuko and she’s like, “right, that’s a bite-sized piece of my idea of what New York is and I will use that to latch on and find a way in.” New York is very key to the book, which is ironic given that it was going to be set in Japan [Laughing].
RIF: Did the thread of Alice coming to New York from London to stay with her grandmother, did that arise out of your own experience?
OS: Definitely. I felt like it was so phony to be trying to write this book without some explanation of how I was here and what I was doing. Then the story could take off but I needed that framing narrative to make myself feel like it was real. Otherwise, it felt too “Once Upon a Time…”
RIF: “…this girl finds herself in New York…”
OS: Right. I wanted to shed those pretend layers of “I just found this message in a bottle and it arrived as the story.” I needed to have myself on an observation platform near it, or in the story somehow.
I also wanted to have a character who was not part of the immediate present, who felt like she belonged to a slightly different world that was increasingly being marooned. A lot of the stuff in the book isn’t really new. You could set it in any age, in a way.
But technology has sped up to the point of one generation in the space of about ten years can suddenly have this immense shift. I now feel very different from a 12-year-old.
We have completely different experiences. It used to be like, nothing changed for years and then the car was invented. And then nothing changed for years and then something else was invented. Now it’s like every iPhone generation brings with it huge changes in the way that you interact with people.
RIF: Right. So, what are you saying about the difference between the carefully crafted sort of personas that we put on line versus reality?
OS: I think we have always—throughout history—created personas.
RIF: You can do that in a letter, I guess.
OS: You can do that in a letter. In the 16th and 17th century, they did that through painting portraits. A king wouldn’t meet a bride necessarily until he’d seen a miniature picture of her. And then you know she’d arrive at the castle and look nothing like it. My favorite piece of history in England is Henry VIII having his German wife arrive and he’s like, nope — she looks nothing like her picture. Send her back. [Laughter]
So, public image fashioning has always been a crucial part of the human psyche and the private world that you retreat back into. Now the blur between them means that you aren’t necessarily even just fooling other people, you’re often fooling yourself.
You can forget what your external persona is versus your internal private world. For example, if I am reminded by Facebook that this photo happened ten years ago today, and I look back at it and it’s of me and my ex, it suddenly brings me right back to that moment. It makes me maybe feel weird about who I’m seeing at the moment.
RIF: Oh, god, I hear you. Right.
OS: You know? And suddenly that ability to see yourself as you once were or the way that you present yourself to somebody else or whatever it is, it collapses those selves and for a moment you’re like, wait a second, who am I right now? What’s true to me right now? I think the main difference is that we used to be conscious of our separate lives and be able to manage them and keep them separate whereas now they intrude on each other all the time.
And we don’t have any control over that. The irony obviously being that we designed these technologies but as with all tools, I think the things that you design end up designing you back [Laughing].
RIF: Yes!
OS: They start to alter the way that our brains work. For example, I mentioned the word “ex,” and I think it’s relevant to the book. How do you decide when a relationship is over when it’s all present still? Everything is recorded. All the images are all around you. You can just so easily slip back in. You know you shouldn’t be able to know what your ex is doing right now [Laughing].
RIF: You should sever ties, yeah, but you can’t if their profile is still public!
OS: Yeah, but that public self that they’re putting out there and your public self you’re putting out there—it all just starts to smush into this very confusing soup. And you don’t necessarily have a linear line of progress of you moving into the future and shedding the self that you used to be five years ago and becoming someone new.
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Even the way now that you can Google a date that you’ve never met before. You might be looking at photos that have no bearing on who they are now. You assume you know them but it’s a different them.
There’s a speed and a collapsibility and an ease with which we can now access those different selves. It used to be like when I go outside my front door, there we go, there’s a clear marker. Whereas now we don’t have that because our personas follow us wherever we go.
RIF: Do you think that the internet makes it harder now to become close to new people or be surprised by them?
OS: I definitely think both of those things are true. We assume that we know them and we assume nothing can surprise us because we’ve done our homework. It turns us all into these little spies and it’s somehow become normal to know what their parents do, where their grandma lives, who they went on holiday with, all that stuff. Everything about their jobs is on LinkedIn. But you’re not really getting to know them in a more real time, honest way. And so, for example, the person I’m seeing at the moment, we have a no Facebook, no Google rule.
RIF: Nice. I like that!
OS: Because I wrote this book, I started feeling creeped out. [Laughing] I wanted a date to tell me things and me to learn about them that way and vice versa. I didn’t want to feel like I read about them already online somewhere or looked at their pictures and then formed an opinion that they then had to disprove.
I think that now there are things like post-internet art, and I do wonder if there are post-internet relationships.
I have a friend who a year ago met someone on Tinder. And now they’re actually engaged but she straight away took him off Tinder and then has refused to ever become his Facebook friend. She also says that when they’re married, they will not become Facebook friends. It’s like putting up a firewall to control the medium.
I do think it makes it harder to know and be surprised by people in the sense that you assume you can’t be surprised and you assume you do know them.
RIF: Right.
OS: The surprise is that then something comes up and you’re like, “That did not flash up when I was stalking you!”
RIF: Exactly. That was not on my newsfeed!
OS: Yeah [Laughing].
RIF: And even Alice, when Mizuko is telling her this subtext about the short story that she’s written, which Alice has already read so many times, it’s still illuminating to hear it from the author’s mouth.
OS: Exactly, and then suddenly she panics. That should be an opportunity not for her to fake it, but to actually have some level of truthful interaction to ask questions, really get to know her, but she’s more concerned with being ahead of her at every turn. It’s like a game, right?
RIF: Yeah.
OS: She doesn’t understand that maybe it’s nice to be asked questions and for someone to actually tell their answer. She assumes the way to flatter someone and to get Mizuko to be interested in her is to know it all already. So, to me, their relationship is a version of how we now expect machines to know us. Like the algorithms that have recorded all this stuff about us and then, in a blunt instrument way, give us back what they think we want to know.
At the moment, despite not having Googled pregnancy tests in quite some time, I’m getting constant advertisements for pregnancy tests. I must just be that age. That’s my demographic and Facebook is constantly saying are you sure? [Laughing] You sure you’re not pregnant? I think I’m sure, Google. What do you know that I don’t?
RIF: I love the love in this book because it’s obsessive and it only seems to go sort of one direction, although Mizuko surprises us sometimes and there are flashes of it from her end. Do you think this sort of intense admiration and obsession happens in relationships between women, whether it’s in friendships or romantic relationships? How is it compounded when romance is involved?
OS: I think any girl who’s ever had a girl crush on an older girl will have experienced that weird level of intensity that comes with it. In a way, it’s easier to have that intensity when sexuality isn’t a part of it. It’s almost like your brain goes into overdrive because your body’s not even involved. Your brain does all the obsessing and it’s not even really thinking about the physical part of it. I remember so vividly when I was 12, at school, I was so keen on this 18-year old who at the time felt like so mature [Laughing]. She used to wear her hair in a certain way and I was just obsessed with that small token. I think it’s easier for girls to develop that with the less input they get from that idol. From afar, it’s way easier to obsess because you’re not getting any real sort of interaction, so your mind goes into overdrive.
But, when you say Mizuko sort of occasionally surprises, I think it’s not necessarily clear to the reader even if that’s always true. Sometimes when I was writing it, I wasn’t sure what was real and what was Alice’s most wished-for fantasy version. The fact that she is often caused pain by it suggests that there are parts of it which must be real. But I wanted to have brief moments when it seems like they could be getting closer and closer to something happening but maybe it’s not really happening. The action is primarily happening in Alice’s head, and it’s similar to the way that digital takes away the physical.
So, I do definitely think girl crushes are more intense. [Laughter] And those physical moments happen between Alice and Mizuko, they almost confuse her feelings more. She’s almost happier living it out in her own head. When the physical moments come, she doesn’t really know how to interpret them. Certainly, when she has physical moments with men in the book, they don’t do much in terms of enhancing her understanding of the person. They exist almost like roadblocks.
RIF: Everything is seen through Alice’s filter, and if we were to interview Mizuko about it, who knows what she would say, “Oh that girl who was following me around…”
OS: I’ll say it’s first-person narrated, but Alice is physically writing this as an account. I think the reader is perhaps unsure at various points whether it’s revenge and it’s an attempt at reconnecting, or some penitent act of, regret or whatever it is. There are points at which you can’t really tell what her angle is, why is she putting it out there.
I think it would be unkind to suggest that Alice is necessarily this malicious, manipulative person at all points but I think definitely at times you should be unsure that maybe Mizuko wasn’t like how Alice presents her.
RIF: That actually touches on another question. The narrative plot thread unfolds very slowly. You find out secrets very slowly and deliberately and then all at once and you’re like, “Ahhhhh. This is so interconnected!”
OS: I wanted it to start like almost a Great Expectations–style novel. I wanted it to feel like you thought you knew the storyline, but then…
Novels are comparable to social media or crafting online profiles because you begin and you think you’re going to know this person. But this person isn’t real. It’s all made up, and you’re projecting yourself onto it. There’s so much that’s comparable.
One of the few things that the novel still has over other forms is that you don’t have to know all that much about the characters. For example, you don’t what Alice looks like for a long time. And in the first chapter, you don’t necessarily know that she’s a girl. All kinds of things come out slowly. Almost like Alice’s catfishing. [Laughter] But by the end, all the plot threads do come quite rapidly. I wanted it to feel a flood—like this wave is slowly coming in and by the end, it’s all happening at once.
I worried that readers who aren’t so used to social media would have trouble with the idea of being able to go back in time and look forward. I wanted the plot to have an elliptical feel so she scrolls back and forth almost between moments. But I hope it’s not too confusing [Laughing].
RIF: No, it illuminates it for the reader. Because you’re like, “Oh okay, this actually happened right when Alice got to New York. But we already know what’s coming in Alice’s future, because we’ve seen the news feed, as it were.
OS: Yeah. Exactly. I wanted to have that balance between a character and plot-driven sort of narrative. I think Alice says at one point when she’s reassuring Mizuko about the place of the novel and its continuing relevance, she’s saying something like… it’s like a game of chess and you know all the moves that your opponent can make but it’s about working out what they’re going to do and then in what order.
RIF: Hmm, yeah.
OS: Mizuko’s worried that the plot is over because in any story now, it’s like why didn’t she just Google it? [Laughing] It’s easier to set a novel in the past because now we just expect them to resolve everything quite quickly with an app.
But you know what she’s saying is that, yes, you know all the possible permutations of what could happen but it’s about what you reveal and when.
RIF: There are many mentions of women’s health and reproductive rights in this book, including an incredible scene at Planned Parenthood.
OS: I think Alice, as she goes through the book, feels more and more like the city is becoming responsive to her. Except it seems like Mizuko’s getting more and more resistant.
As everything else becomes more pliant, it stops feeling like we’re actually making these choices for ourselves. It becomes, “hang on, did I make that choice because I really felt that way or it’s what I wanted? Or because somewhere, some software designed at Google has given me what feels like a menu of options but it’s actually an algorithm based on what it knows about me already, giving me what I want?”
I wanted to explore that feeling of choice, being pro-choice. We think we’re making so many more choices on our own volition at the moment. We feel like we have agency through technology, but at the same time, it’s quite mysterious. There’s this coded language behind it that none of us really understand.
Google has an ethicist who used to be a magician actually. He talks about how it’s all a magic trick, where you feel like you’ve got this choice like pick a card, any card. But actually, it’s all designed and you’re just not sure how. So, I wanted the interactions around Planned Parenthood to feel like Alice was making a choice but then somewhere along the line that choice turned into an assumption.
The point about choice is that you have a right to get an abortion and you have a right not to. It’s your choice. No one has any control over your body. There’s a line between your public and private self—we were talking about this earlier about the threshold of a door—whatever it is that you use to mark what is your real self and what is this persona. She talks about the body being a natural barrier. That’s how you keep the outside world out and how you keep your inside world in and no one should have any control over that.
It’s a very visceral, physical part of the book. She’s been gliding through the book almost weightless. At one point, when she’s still in England before she comes to New York, her body starts to almost feel like it’s not really a part of her. She has this very strange like post-graduate sort of illness phase where she just locked herself in her room. When she gets to New York, she feels lighter and lighter and she’s not really eating and she’s sort of floating down the street and she doesn’t have to make many decisions, she can just go left or right, and the grid just takes her places.
But then things start to tie her down to her body like, “oh, I have another body inside me or an illness.” Mizuko’s fever and all these moments start to bring her back down into her body. That’s scary at points but equally, it’s when she achieves some of her moments of agency. It starts when Sylvia goes into hospital and suddenly physical bodies are vulnerable. I think that’s where the reader is more sympathetic towards Alice, having viewed her with a bit of skepticism up until that point.
RIF: When Alice is grounded, the reader really feels her. There’s the whole thread of physics in this book. Was that something that you were drawn to?
OS: I think the reason the physics felt relevant was because of this whole question of where did the internet come from? What’s the origin of this thing that is now so daily and thoughtless, like breathing? I do feel like if you’re going to talk about the physical world versus the digital world and what’s real and what’s not and all your different many universes that you live in, either as multiple versions of yourself or other people’s little universes that bump against you in the street, you know, whatever it is, how is that rooted?
After a while, you can talk about the internet for ages and ages and you just get more and more abstract. More and more confused. I wanted to find a way to root it somehow to the fundamentals.
I wanted it to have all these layers—like passing through layers of the Earth—how do you get at the very core of what is all of this, what did it all mean?
I wanted Alice to be as unpredictable in her interests as possible. I wanted to steer as far from stereotypes as I possibly could. So, she is possibly gay, mixed race, adopted. You can’t pin her down.
But, I was also concerned about not making it too intense, like I have to get my footnotes out every single time I come up against it.
RIF: No, it was cool that Alice was touched by physics through her father’s job. It felt organic.
OS: There was a time I was so into physics I had read everything I could that was for laymen. I felt very strongly that all the supersymmetry versus multiverse felt like if you massively reduced and simplified it, that is what everyone is struggling with on a daily basis. What am I supposed to do—is that one path to me or is it an accident?
RIF: Exactly. Is there one person for me or is it totally random?
OS: Are we on this path that is unfolding without us really having to do much and it’s all happening as it should? Or are we going through life making random mistakes? Everyone is fighting their way to work this stuff out.
Author Photo: Colin Thomas
Sympathy
New Statesman. 146.5369 (June 2, 2017): p47.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 New Statesman, Ltd.
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Set in New York, this novel follows Alice Hare, a 23-year-old who becomes fixated with her "internet twin", Mizuko Himura, an older, fashionable writer. After finding strange parallels between Mizuko's life and her own, Alice engineers situations in which the two might meet and their relationship takes a dark turn. Sympathy explores the peril of living mostly online, but with the internet referred to as "the worldwide web" and Instagram collages described as "the modern equivalent of lovesick needlepoint", it does so from a curious, anthropological distance.
One, 416pp. 14.99 [pound sterling]
QUOTED: "While some readers will find the ending confusing and unsatisfying, none will be bored by this frenetic, timely story of digital fixation actualized."
Sympathy
Publishers Weekly.
264.6 (Feb. 6, 2017): p42.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Sympathy
Olivia Sudjic. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25
(416p) ISBN 978-0-544-83659-4
Sudjic's engrossing debut novel explores how technology dissolves personal boundaries while stripping away true
intimacy. Alice travels from London to New York to stay with her sick grandmother during the spring of 2014. Even
before she meets Mizuko, a writer who teaches creative writing at Columbia, Alice is obsessed with her. When
circumstances align--nudged as far as possible by Alice for the two of them to meet--Alice is desperate for the kind of
closeness she's always imagined could be possible between her and the lauded writer. Physical, emotional, and digital
boundaries are tested and broken as Alice struggles to replicate her close connection with Mizuko's social media
persona in her organic relationship with the real Mizuko. Whether that will happen rests on Mizuko's ever-changing
whims, but she simultaneously wields her technological abilities over Mizuko, who is transfixed by social media. Will
the flesh-and-blood reality ever fall in line with Alice's Instagram-addled fantasy? Sudjic's story is disjointed, alluring,
disorienting, and provoking, touching on many contemporary concerns arising from the pervasiveness of social media.
At many moments the character of Alice is rather too inscrutable, and Sudjic's steady, reliable prose is not enough to
anchor some of Alice's more dramatic actions. While some readers will find the ending confusing and unsatisfying,
none will be bored by this frenetic, timely story of digital fixation actualized. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Sympathy." Publishers Weekly, 6 Feb. 2017, p. 42+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480593816&it=r&asid=a9c3a1fccdea28f0c3d5c1f6fbf8e70b.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A480593816
QUOTED: "a story that's hard to follow even though it moves at an incredibly slow pace."
"an intriguing premise delivered in turgid prose."
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Sudjic, Olivia: SYMPATHY
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
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Full Text:
Sudjic, Olivia SYMPATHY Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Adult Fiction) $25.00 4, 4 ISBN: 978-0-544-83659-4
A first-time novelist considers identity and obsession in the digital age.Alice Hare is no longer quite herself--not that
she ever had much of a self to begin with. Having been abandoned by her father, she has no one but her mother, a
woman who is possessive, secretive, and manipulative. As she tries to piece together her own history, Alice becomes
fixated on the period of her life she and her parents spent in Japan. A baby at the time, she has no memories of this
sojourn, so she's free to invent. Eventually, this attempt to fabricate an identity turns into an intense fascination with the
author Mizuko Himura, whom Alice comes to know in real life after stalking her via social media. This would make a
great premise for a thriller, but it's quite evident Sudjic has more literary ambitions. The result is a story that's hard to
follow even though it moves at an incredibly slow pace. One difficulty is that it moves around in time, and disparate
episodes don't build on each other so much as they expose how much the reader doesn't know. This might make
stylistic sense for a novel about a young woman tortured by the lacunae in her own life, but it's dissatisfying and
disorienting. For example, the novel begins with Alice being shut out by Mizuko, and then it shifts into a long stretch
dominated by letters from Alice's paternal grandmother. We learn about Alice's gap year in Japan after she graduated
from university, and her momentous first evening with Mizuko happens without any description of how and why Alice
became infatuated with her. Another example: Alice makes passing mention of her "boyfriend at that time," which
comes as a shock since this is not only the first we're hearing of a romantic entanglement of any kind in her life ever,
but it's also the first hint that she's made any new relationships at all since her move from England to New York. It
doesn't help that Alice's real-world connection to Mizuko relies on a preposterous series of coincidences. An intriguing
premise delivered in turgid prose.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Sudjic, Olivia: SYMPATHY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479234682&it=r&asid=f48213b4a8f2e987d7a7d04e232e2276.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479234682
QUOTED: "Readers less attached to social media will find it hard to sympathize with the main characters."
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Sudjic, Olivia. Sympathy
Pamela Mann
Library Journal.
142.2 (Feb. 1, 2017): p76.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Sudjic, Olivia. Sympathy. Houghton Harcourt. Apr. 2017. 416p. ISBN 9780544836594. $25; ebk. ISBN
9780544836624. F
The narrator of Sudjic's debut is an online stalker who befriends the object of her obsession. Alice is visiting her
grandmother in New York when she becomes infatuated with Japanese author Mizuko Himura. The obsession starts
after Alice contrives to meet Mizuko in a coffee shop (location posted online). Social media plays an enormous role in
the novel and both women's lives. Mizuko uses her social media presence to publicize her work bu't spends more time
curating her online persona than writing, while Alice uses social media primarily for stalking Mizuko. Mizuko is
everything to Alice, and Sudjic succeeds in creating a self-destructive, desperate narrative of passionate infatuation.
The novel is unrelenting in its description of Alice's suffocating need to possess Mizuko. That need drives the story
forward at an increasingly frantic pace as the potential damage becomes more obvious with each mistake Alice makes.
VERDICT Recommended with reservations. This is a good choice for book clubs, but readers less attached to social
media will find it hard to sympathize with the main characters, whose narcissism and need for external validation cause
real harm to the people around them. [See Prepub Alert, 10/31/16.]--Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Mann, Pamela. "Sudjic, Olivia. Sympathy." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 76. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479301225&it=r&asid=42e3de87033b9064dfed10cd3972a7a0.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479301225
QUOTED: "Sympathy is fact-filled, but it is also packed with tension, pathos and vitality. Whether in New York or on detours to Texas and Tokyo, in conversation with Mizuko or alone with her curdling thoughts, Alice proves a captivating narrator, candidly sharing her passions. ... This is a potent first novel from a formidable talent."
Review: 'Sympathy,' by Olivia Sudjic
FICTION: This striking, timely novel follows a young woman's obsession with a Japanese writer in New York.
By MALCOLM FORBES Special to the Star Tribune MAY 26, 2017 — 10:27AM
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LAURIE HERTZEL, COLIN THOMAS
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Olivia Sudjic’s smart, savvy debut novel is a digital-age cautionary tale about liking too much, following too intensely and unraveling while striving to connect.
“Sympathy” comes with an epigraph from Lewis Carroll and features a protagonist called Alice. Her wonderland turns out to be cyberspace and birthplace. But as Alice loses herself in each, she becomes entangled in family ties, infatuated with a soul mate and increasingly unsure of her sense of self.
After growing up in England and floundering after university, Alice returns to New York to discover “who I was and what it was I was supposed to be doing.” Prising herself away from online porn, internet gambling and virtual friends, she sets out to re-engage with real life and real people. She walks, writes in her journal, takes and posts pictures; she bonds with the Rooiakker family, dates former Mormon Dwight and finds a kindred spirit in Mizuko, a Japanese writer.
Slowly but steadily, this recluse who has lived her life through screens manages to venture out and “fall into place.”
But halfway through her narrative, Alice explains that this point marks “that exact moment of dissolution — when the obsession began.” Suddenly, she wants Mizuko all to herself. She trawls her phone, raids her photos, reads her messages and stalks her online. Their friendship strengthens, particularly when Alice learns that Mizuko’s “origin story” is similar to hers.
However, just when we wonder if “Symmetry” might be a more apposite title than “Sympathy,” both women start to come undone and veer off on divergent paths, one succumbing to illness and the other to paranoia, hallucination and shattered illusions.
Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic
Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic
Sudjic excavates the dark depths of the soul, but she also hits us with regular bouts of comic brilliance. Dwight, an app-happy tech guy with an “insatiable appetite for new experiences,” is hilariously awful, while Silvia, Alice’s no-nonsense, cancer-riddled grandmother, delights with her endearing quirks and stubborn resolve. “She said she had no need for eyebrows anymore anyway,” Alice reveals, “as nothing surprised her.”
This is a fresh, topical, switched-on novel. “You have the zeitgeist,” Mizuko tells Alice, and so does Sudjic. Unfortunately, while the book is in tune with the age of information, it is also in thrall to it. Some pages are clogged with unprocessed data on everything from tsunamis to black boxes to particle physics. Alice talks about her generation being adept at “gleaning information at the touch of a button.” Having gleaned it, Alice distributes it in chunks.
“Sympathy” is fact-filled, but it is also packed with tension, pathos and vitality. Whether in New York or on detours to Texas and Tokyo, in conversation with Mizuko or alone with her curdling thoughts, Alice proves a captivating narrator, candidly sharing her passions, jealousies and heartache, together with her views on fate, coincidence and “the hidden connections between things.” This is a potent first novel from a formidable talent.
Malcolm Forbes has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist and the Daily Beast. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Sympathy
By: Olivia Sudjic.
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 406 pages, $25.
QUOTED: "Novels often handle digital culture gingerly, as a strange new world that is somehow alien to our own and to that of the written page. Sudjic’s achievement is to incorporate this world at a granular level; it provides both the mechanisms necessary to propel her plot and the texture that defines her characters and their experience of New York."
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Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic — online presence
A young woman is consumed by obsession in a thrilling debut that skewers our digital culture
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JUNE 2, 2017 by Carl Wilkinson
We’ve all been there. It’s not spying, as such; just sort of peering into other people’s carefully edited lives from the removed safety of social media — Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. But most of us have left it at that. In Sympathy, Olivia Sudjic’s engrossing debut novel, Alice Hare doesn’t. She keeps going down and down the rabbit hole.
Twenty-three-year-old Alice was born in New York and adopted as a baby by Susy, an illustrator, and Mark, a physics professor. She has lived in Japan and England, and is now back in the Big Apple, staying with her infirm grandmother Silvia in her apartment on the Upper East Side. Gliding uneasily around the city, she struggles to make connections until Silvia introduces Alice to her friend Nat.
It’s an instrumental meeting. Alice moves in with Nat’s daughter Ingrid and her British husband Robin. The couple are architects building “an incubator space for digital nomads” on Roosevelt Island. On a visit to the project, she meets Dwight (“Innovation Consultant, App Developer, Apiarist” reads his business card), who is an early adopter and brand consultant for an app called TriMe, which hopes to do for threesomes what Tinder did for dating.
She starts a relationship with Dwight, but it is Mizuko, a Japanese writer teaching at Columbia University, with whom Alice becomes totally infatuated. “It’s hard to explain how an infatuation actually starts,” she writes. “It’s a state so all-encompassing that it’s almost impossible to remember how it felt to live inside your own head before it began.”
Alice first spots Mizuko online thanks to a coincidence — or, more accurately, a connection — again sparked by Nat, that drives the novel’s psychological thriller element. Before they actually meet in real life, Alice has dissected Mizuko’s entire digital footprint; she mines Instagram images for clues (her boyfriend, her cat, her favourite books) and fills in the blanks. The internet “became a tool designed for the sole purpose of observing her [Mizuko],” Alice admits. “It was the only way I could have been brave enough to approach her in real life, having dissected the pictorial equivalent of her DNA in advance.”
The online stalking becomes more complex. Alice feigns ignorance of certain details of Mizuko’s life to lead conversations, and attempts to distance her from her boyfriend Rupert and her friends by controlling her access to her “device”. Their relationship becomes increasingly claustrophobic.
Thanks to the internet, seemingly random news items appear to be relevant or even fated
Novels often handle digital culture gingerly, as a strange new world that is somehow alien to our own and to that of the written page. Sudjic’s achievement is to incorporate this world at a granular level; it provides both the mechanisms necessary to propel her plot and the texture that defines her characters and their experience of New York.
No one is unaffected by the reach of digital culture — whether it is her aged grandmother and her friend naively outside the online world, or Dwight, a digital pioneer for whom connectivity is filled with boundless promise, or Mizuko, who has carefully shaped her image on Instagram. Current events are also woven into the fabric of the novel — tsunamis, earthquakes, missing planes. All the seemingly random news items that roll on endlessly around us are given greater meaning thanks to the internet, which makes everything appear relevant or even fated.
Alice is drawn deeper and deeper into these webs of connection — real and imagined — that join her friends and family. “I noticed that there was a difference between just taking [pictures] and posting them so that they were public. The first made me feel okay. The second made me feel good. Like bursting a bubble in bubble wrap, or plucking a hair from the root, but after a while, when more random fitness gurus and a few strange men with pictures of their cars and weird personal mottos started following me, I felt like I had joined up with something bigger than myself.”
Yet in connecting with something bigger, Alice is also losing something vital: her sense of self, perhaps, or even her mind. Sympathy is an intelligent and absorbing literary thriller that promises much for the future.
Sympathy, by Olivia Sudjic, One, RRP£14.99/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt $25, 416 pages
QUOTED: "Rarely do novels so ostentatiously of the moment succeed so well at gesturing to the universal. This book is packed with the 'now': site-specific promenade theatre, grubby dating apps, ancestry-testing kits, puns on Pinterest and Pinteresque. Alice when she is bored and waiting even physically resembles a download symbol, 'buffering' on the pavement as she swings round a scaffolding pole. And yet the tone on occasion rises to sagacity."
Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic review – up-to-the-minute debut
A smart story of obsession and technology investigates what smartphones are doing to our souls
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Hermione Eyre
Friday 26 May 2017 02.30 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 20 September 2017 05.33 EDT
This debut has been acclaimed as the “First Great Instagram Novel”, and what it does is both new and strange – and deeply familiar. From the infancy of the industrial revolution, novels have thrived on technological change, dramatising the aesthetics of machines as well as the changes (usually deformations) they make to the human soul. The pantheon of post-industrial writing is Humphrey Jennings’s Pandaemonium: The Coming of the Machine 1660-1886, and if there were to be a sequel for our digital age, Sympathy would earn a place in it for its exquisite, sustained observation of our use of smartphones. When the narrator, Alice Hare, takes possession of her loved one’s device, she says: “It felt kind of like holding her brain, and I held it like that, my palm flat, my right index finger light and quick, as if the phone were jellied or slimy.”
Full of these casually creepy, very 21st-century observations, Sympathy is an astute, quirky, slow-burning satire on emerging codes of behaviour, intergenerational differences, globalisation, the tech industry and the vortex of the dark web. Alice tumbles through an online rabbit hole of absurdities and dream-like connections that ultimately leads into a nightmarish mise en abyme and an illegal, orgiastic rave – rather a long way from Lewis Carroll.
The novel’s structure spirals like a sick rose. With each chapter we step not forwards but sideways, oblique petals of information giving way until we reach the cankered heart of the story. It is a warning against the illusory intimacy offered on social media: a “love story that is mostly made up, from memories that are mostly false, between people who were mainly not there”.
In New York ‘you can go completely mental and no one gives a shit’.
In New York ‘you can go completely mental and no one gives a shit’. Photograph: Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters
Alice is an intelligent but amoral 23-year-old graduate, unmoored on an extended holiday in New York, where, as she says, “you can go completely mental and no one gives a shit”. (Her vernacular is either curtly casual or laboured with poetic similes, resulting in a tone that feels a little lurching.) Her fan-girl passion for a Japanese writer, teacher and artful Instagram self-fashioner called Mizuko Himura propels the plot, and there is many a Highsmithian frisson as Alice insinuates herself, like a social media Ripley: “As with all her favourite things, I already knew what and where they were, so I mentioned it [a bookshop] before she did.”
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Their first “date” prompts Alice to feel “bliss expanding from my chest and sliding down the rest of my body, collecting in my shoes like warm pools of butter” – this during a lecture about the Holocaust, in which she is completely uninterested except as a vehicle for getting closer to the object of her infatuation.
Her powers of observation, extended by obsessive digital habits, have leached her powers of sympathy. A child of the age of algorithms, she notices everything but knows the value and significance of nothing. Facts and random impressions are scattered through the novel like so much debris, and the Japanese tsunami of 2011 is a leitmotif of disorder. This makes for a book that is baggier than it needs to be, even though an otiose expedition to the Hamptons pays off for its descriptions of the obligatory whiteness of everything, from white eggplants to white linen cases on the fire hydrants. (As the daughter of design guru Deyan Sudjic and former Condé Nast Traveller editor Sarah Miller, the author is well placed to know.)
Are we, as Pandaemonium foretold, becoming internally digitised, losing our perspective, our heart? The age-old fear that we are turning into machines is refreshed here for our time: Alice is a flâneuse who sees herself “gliding” around New York “like a robot on the ocean floor, from point to point on the city grid”. Calculation replaces real emotion. Her walks are undertaken mainly so she can post the pictures she takes. She has a boyfriend whom she tolerates: “He provided a lot of material and a lot of likes for Instagram.” The anomie of the narrator infects every character, every situation – an impressive feat of authorial commitment.
Rarely do novels so ostentatiously of the moment succeed so well at gesturing to the universal. This book is packed with the “now”: site-specific promenade theatre, grubby dating apps, ancestry-testing kits, puns on Pinterest and Pinteresque. Alice when she is bored and waiting even physically resembles a download symbol, “buffering” on the pavement as she swings round a scaffolding pole. And yet the tone on occasion rises to sagacity as when, for example, Alice consoles herself that her looks have drawn her love-object closer: “It can sometimes be good to be plain-looking, because it is a temptation to those who pride themselves on having a good eye.”
Samuel Butler predicted in Erewhon, published in 1872, that we might become “machine-tickling aphids” – parasites upon machines. This novel convincingly updates and extends the idea that what we think we are using may, in fact, be using us. Shudder – and then post about it. The abyss beckons.
• Sympathy is published by One. To order a copy for £11.24 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
Hermione Eyre’s Viper Wine is published by Vintage.
QUOTED: "Sympathy is a knotty—sometimes confusing, but always smart—dissection of intimacy and interaction in the digital age."
"Sympathy isn’t a mystery thriller in the traditional sense. Rather it’s a gripping odyssey into one woman’s online-addled inner life that shrewdly ties together the age-old hubris of youth with a particular sort of new digital naïveté."
Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic, book review: It’s a gripping odyssey into one woman’s online-addled inner life
This impressive debut novel 'Sympathy' is sometimes confusing, but takes a smart look at intimacy and interaction in the digital age
Lucy Scholes Wednesday 26 April 2017 11:45 BST
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The Independent Culture
sympathy-1.jpg
Newly arrived in Manhattan and staying with her grandmother, 23-year-old British graduate Alice Hare fills her days wandering the city streets and posting pictures online. “As I didn’t have any followers at this point, taking pictures was really only for my benefit,” she explains. “But I noticed that there was a difference between just taking them and posting them so that they were public. The first made me feel OK. The second made me feel good.”
Olivia Sudjic’s impressive debut novel Sympathy is a knotty – sometimes confusing, but always smart – dissection of intimacy and interaction in the digital age. “I felt like I had joined up with something bigger than myself,” says Alice as she begins to gain followers. “I sensed that whatever I was doing was in some way happening on a grander scale.”
However, as the novel – a “love story that is mostly made up, from memories that are mostly false, between people who were mainly not there” – so chillingly illustrates, what social media actually offers is more often the illusion of connection.
Fittingly, the narrative is held together by a dreamlike disjointedness. Sudjic resists straightforward chronology, the book opening towards the end of the action before backtracking to the beginning, jumping between events as it suits Alice’s, if not unreliable, definitely untrustworthy and obstinately impenetrable memory. Sometimes it’s a bit of a job keeping track of what’s going on, but there’s method here, the reading experience rendered akin to that of losing oneself online. As Alice herself says of her entanglements, “I just have to keep pressing on each link to get to the next; I don’t have to know where it’s going.”
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Her journey down the rabbit hole is no less labyrinthine than that of her literary namesake. Plus, such structural elaboration can be forgiven because the plot itself has a clear propellant: Alice’s search for her origins. Feeling unmoored, she’s returned to the city of her birth in search of information pertaining to her biological parents, or her adopted father, who disappeared from her and her mother’s life years before while in Japan. Instead, she finds Mizuko Himuru, a Japanese-born writer 10 years her senior who teaches at Columbia, and whose life, Alice believes, parallels her own. Obsessed with Mizuko, and, “having dissected the pictorial equivalent of her DNA in advance”, Alice – a sort of Tom Ripley with a Smartphone – inveigles her way into the older woman’s life.
Despite these nods to the genre, Sympathy isn’t a mystery thriller in the traditional sense. Rather it’s a gripping odyssey into one woman’s online-addled inner life that shrewdly ties together the age-old hubris of youth with a particular sort of new digital naïveté. “How did adults of a certain age not understand how the internet worked?” Alice wonders on more than one occasion. “There’s no end to things, no way out ... that nothing stays private and nothing goes away.” In the end though, it’s actually Alice who turns out to be the most unguarded of all.
Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic is published by ONE/Pushkin Press, £14.99
QUOTED: "“Sympathy” is self-consciously clever, riddled with a network of allusions similar to that of Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics—also a story about a seemingly precocious girl with a missing father that could be mistaken for a particularly engaging young adult novel."
In This Tale of Online Intimacy,
the Only Wise Characters Are
Luddites
By KAITLIN PHILLIPS APRIL 13, 2017
SYMPATHY
By Olivia Sudjic
406 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $25.
The internet breeds low-level social paranoia among acquaintances (“She never
‘likes’ my posts”) and artificial security among complete randos (“I’m so glad we’re
finally getting wasted IRL in this dark bar”). It allows us to project legitimate
affection toward our loved ones (from the relationship status to the Valentine’s Day
selfie), but it also allows for sudden repulsion syndrome (“unfollow”).
Olivia Sudjic’s smart debut novel, “Sympathy,” is an uncomfortably
contemporary tale of unrequited love in the internet age. The narrator, Alice Hare, is
an unemployed 23-year-old millennial. The novel takes the form of Alice’s memoir
about slyly weaseling her way into a friendship with her internet idol, Mizuko. (“As
with all her favorite things, I already knew what and where they were, so I
mentioned it before she did.”) She believes their cosmic connection justifies her
impropriety.
We feel for a character so starved for affection. Alice is an orphan unanchored
by her adoptive parents, a missing theoretical physicist and the selfish, charismatic
wife he left behind. Alice leaves England ostensibly to watch over her ailing but
9
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10/15/2017 In This Tale of Online Intimacy, the Only Wise Characters Are Luddites - The New York Times
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severe grandmother, Silvia, on the Upper East Side. (Silvia communicates via mailed
letter; the only wise characters in the book are Luddites.) Really Alice is on a quest
narrative for the creation myth that her willfully cryptic mother has denied her. “I
wanted a single, coherent narrative to explain who I was and what it was I was
supposed to be doing,” she explains. Wishing, perhaps, most acutely for a succinct,
impressive Instagram bio.
Alice is awkward, adrift and portent-hungry — sympathy would be required to
elevate the socially innocuous Alice to “our heroine.” (She loses her virginity quickly
in New York, to an “innovation consultant” who “liked Steve Reich’s music, modernart
museums and Beat poetry.”) Alice is preoccupied with her disenfranchisement.
At airports, she envies those who accidentally swap suitcases, their “futures altered,
their lives entwined forever.”
Not unlike when Alice in Wonderland falls slowly “down, down, down” the
rabbit hole — looking at “maps and pictures hung upon pegs” — Alice in “Sympathy”
tumbles headfirst into a click hole about Mizuko, getting tingles “secretly looking at
her like this, touching her pictures as I slid down, down, down while she slept.” She
laps up Mizuko’s internet persona, “her reading material (Joan Didion) and her
scented candle (Diptyque) and her shell-pink toenails perched on the gold taps at the
end of the tub.”
“Sympathy” is self-consciously clever, riddled with a network of allusions
similar to that of Marisha Pessl’s “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” — also a story
about a seemingly precocious girl with a missing father that could be mistaken for a
particularly engaging young adult novel. The parallels with “Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland” are largely referential, and do not serve as what might have initially
been an ambitious skeleton key for a book that sets itself up to be a novel of suspense
— is Alice Hare a stalker? Is she dangerous? — only to dole out the infatuation as an
episodic soap opera. Mizuko brushes Alice off New Yorker-style: “She repeated this
reason for not spending the evening with me three more times that week. I couldn’t
come because the three different hosts each had a very small table.” (Remember the
Mad Hatter’s tea party: “The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded
together at one corner of it: ‘No room! No room!’”)
10/15/2017 In This Tale of Online Intimacy, the Only Wise Characters Are Luddites - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/books/review/sympathy-olivia-sudjic.html 3/3
Broken-heart syndrome is compounded by the peculiar emotional turbulence of
digital heartbreak. When Alice steals Mizuko’s phone and starts scrolling, “my
fingers felt like my feet once had from continuous walking in Manhattan — blistered
and bleeding, having been unable to stop.” Mizuko is a writer and professor in
Columbia’s M.F.A. program, and Alice commits the ultimate writerly betrayal,
throwing Mizuko’s laptop into the Hudson. Finally, Alice must live with the metallic
aftertaste of the “unfollow.” The Red Queen hypothesis — adapt or die — offers a
particularly dour outlook for those who measure their pulse online. Alice never gains
any Instagram followers. Her extinction is internet invisibility.
Kaitlin Phillips is a frequent contributor to Bookforum.
A version of this review appears in print on April 16, 2017, on Page BR17 of the Sunday Book Review
with the headline: Unfollow Me.