![]() ![]() ![]() This may be why this book crept up on me slowly, unlike Offill’s last novel Dept. Climate change disrupts stories and the way they’re told. This trajectory – the repetitive dullness of a woman’s caring life, and her escape through flirtation, an affair – is the stuff of drama in literature as in life, but here, coupled with Lizzie’s mounting anxiety over climate change, it makes for a strangely muted kind of narrative unfolding. Her only release from the pressure of these many competing demands is the prospect of an affair. Weather quietly animates these questions – the ungraspable heft of climate change, the weight of caring for others – through the daily round of its narrator, Lizzie Benson, in her demanding roles as university librarian, mother, wife, daughter, sister, friend, neighbour and paid email correspondent for her former professor turned futurologist. With its themes of climate change in the immediate present and the mostly thankless emotional labour of women, Jenny Offill’s Weather feels uncomfortably close to home in 2020, a year when the domestic realm has become newly prominent – and Covid 19 has thrown the most urgent issue of our time, climate change, into the background of the news cycle and conversation. ![]()
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