Chouette - Claire Oshetsky - ★★★.¼

AUTHOR: Claire Oshetsky

GENRE: Literary Fiction

RATING: 3.25

In a Nutshell: This is, by far, the weirdest book I have ever read in my life! But I still found it thought-provoking, and to a certain extent, I liked the questions it raised.

Story Synopsis: (Golden Rule for this story synopsis and everything else that follows: don’t question any content with ‘How is that possible?’ I have no answers.)

Tiny has had a one-time dalliance with her secret owl lover. (I know…I get ya…read on.) She is now pregnant, and is a hundred per cent sure that her baby is an owl-baby, something her husband only sees as one of the mental side-effects of pregnancy. When Chouette is born though, Tiny is proved correct. Small and predatory, Chouette proves to be a very difficult owl-baby who functions as per her own adamant demands. But Tiny is a mother, and she vows to do the best she can to make her child happy, even if it means going against her husband and the rest of the world, and even if she ends up bloodied and bruised by her screeching child. (Yup, screeching, not screaming.) When her husband decides that he wants to seek a “cure” for their child, the time comes for Tiny to make tough decisions.

The story is written in the first person perspective of Tiny. Here’s one line said by Tiny to Chouette midway the story, and it best represents the essence of the book:

“Here’s the crux of it, owl-baby. Your father wants to fix you, and I want us to love you as you are.”

As is very evident, this isn’t your run-of-the-mill story. The entire content can best be viewed as metaphorical. Only this way can you make sense of what’s happening in the story. I am so stumped about how to review it because my usual reviews have a clear structure. For a book that is entirely unstructured, I have no idea how to proceed. So here I go with a list of random thoughts that come to my mind when I think of this book. (If you think my review is confusing, wait till you read the book!)

👉 This is a very short book, just a little more than 200 pages. So it’s a decently quick read. You won’t be able to whoosh through it though. The content doesn’t allow that. As Tiny herself says, she has “undiluted thoughts spiralling out of control.” And we are the ones reading those thoughts. So it’s almost stream of consciousness in its style at times.

👉 The writing is so beautiful though. I could go on and on pasting the various passages I highlighted. Some are hilarious while others are poignant. One of my favourites was “Housekeeping is nothing more than a losing encounter with entropy.” How true is that!

👉 The title “Chouette” means “owl” in French. There is a fair bit of French content in the book but not so much as will hinder your comprehension. For me, it worked as a nice way of testing my rudimentary French skills.

👉 I don’t know what genre to put this book under: horror, fantasy, magical realism, literary fiction, psychological drama, gory thriller… It has bits of all of these.

👉 This is by no means an easy read. Especially in the first 40% or so, the content is so meandering and absolutely random in its arcs that I kept wondering where the heck the story was going.

👉 Some of the adjectives that came to my mind as I progressed with the book: disturbing, weird, gory, shocking, weird, funny, sad, bizarre, tense, weird, hopeful, devastating,… did I say weird?

👉 I'm a very visual reader so I really struggled to picture the owl baby and the owl lover. How I wish this were an illustrated book!

👉 The metaphors within the narrative:

- Tiny’s story can be seen as a metaphor on the difficulties of parenting and motherhood. It also rises the themes of social conformity and acceptance, adherence to social norms rather than retaining your individuality, and fitting in predefined standards. (In a way, it seems to question the entire educational system that remoulds every individual imaginative thinker into a generically required skillset.)

- Do we need to conform to societal expectations in order to lead happy lives? At the same time, is it possible to survive in society by being a total non-conformist? Tough questions with no easy answers. But I liked the metaphor used by the author for these two elements. The nonconformists were ‘owls’ – wild & individualistic - and the conformists were ‘dogs’ – tame and loyal. (As I love dogs and owls, I felt torn between the two similes.)

- Chouette’s arc can also be seen as a metaphor for children with extreme mental disorders and how parents and others struggle to behave with such kids, who don’t deliberately behave outrageously but it is how they are.

👉 The parenting issues:

- Tiny’s character is a tough one to process. There are shades of various emotional problems: a bit of PTSD, a bit of under-confidence, a bit of melancholia, a bit of defensiveness,… You will root for her and yet dislike her adamant insistence of doing everything single-handedly for Chouette. Kind of like a helicopter parent, who means well but ends up destroying the child’s independent development.

- As the story comes from the mother’s perspective, it is very easy to say that this is a commentary on the extent to which mothers can go for their children, “In extremis”, as the blurb declares. But the role of Chouette’s father in this story is equally crucial. He stands for all that is straightforward and within societal norms. He wants the best for his daughter, so as to ensure a happy future for her after her parents are no longer alive. Is that wrong? I don’t think so. A part of me felt very sorry for him, especially as I know most readers will consider his character the villain of the story. But as a parent, I sympathised more with him than with Tiny. He stood by his wife and daughter during the worst of times and didn’t give up on them. He deserved a greater credit for his intentions, even if they didn’t always work out to plan.

👉 The ending is open to your interpretation. While I don’t mind open endings as long as they are well-written, in this case I was a bit disappointed. The end left me with many questions, and didn’t provide a closure to many queries raised earlier in the book. Such as the childhood of Tiny and what connection she had to birds earlier. How and why did she break away from owls to attach herself to a dog family? I can see book clubs debating over multiple points in this book and that ending. But I would really have enjoyed things to be tied together more neatly at the end.

Overall, Chouette is a metaphorical dilemma of wanting what's best for your child versus making your child fit in what society wants from it. It is a mentally tiring and emotionally exhausting experience to read this story. And even after you complete it, you can’t be entirely sure of what you just read. All the above points are based on my interpretation of this highly subjective narrative. You will definitely derive your own exposition of the story.

I usually try to provide recommendations about who might enjoy the reviewed book best. This time, I have nothing to say. I simply don’t know what category of readers will enjoy this. So I will speak to you as an individual.

- Would you enjoy a book that will provide you with a more visceral experience than an intellectual one, one that is more metaphysical than physical, one that doesn’t give you answers but raises many questions? You may try “Chouette”.

- Would you love a story with a beautifully tied-together ending, a direct commentary on the difficulties of parenting, a solution to the problems raised, a literal book that says what it means and means what it says? “Chouette” may not click with you.

- Those who are sensitive about gore or animal abuse would do well to avoid this book.

I have been dilly-dallying between 3 and 4 for this book. As far as its themes are concerned, it is a certain 4 for me. But because of that open ending, the gory content, and the abundant number of oddities in the tale (which might work well for some readers but weren’t really my cup of tea – I’m more of a dog than an owl, regardless of what my profile pic on some sites says!), my rating settles at 3.25 – “I liked it”.

My thanks to Little, Brown Book Group UK and NetGalley for the ARC of “Chouette”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.