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Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel von Lydia…
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Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel (Original 2014; 2014. Auflage)

von Lydia Millet

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In this hilarious novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet, a honeymooning couple makes friends with a marine biologist who discovers genuine mermaids in a coral reef-and who, the next night, apparently drowns in her hotel bathtub. As a resort chain swoops in to corner the market on mermaids, the newlyweds (opinionated, skeptical narrator Deb and handsome online gamer Chip, the world's friendliest man) join forces with other vacationers-including an ex-Navy SEAL with a love of explosives and a hipster Tokyo VJ-to protect the mermaids from the corporate 'Venture of Marvels' that wants to turn their habitat into a theme park.… (mehr)
Mitglied:NikolaT
Titel:Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel
Autoren:Lydia Millet
Info:W. W. Norton & Company (2014), Hardcover, 304 pages
Sammlungen:Deine Bibliothek
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Mermaids in Paradise von Lydia Millet (2014)

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I skimmed some of the reviews before reading MERMAIDS IN PARADISE, and so approached the ending with some trepidation (having enjoyed the book quite a bit thus far).

Was it the Nancy situation, I wondered, that got people so worked up? I mean, it's not a *terrible* resolution to the murder mystery.

Or the whales? Really? I found that twist rather lovely and poetic.

And then I got to THE AFTERMATH, and yeah. There it is.

As much as I can understand the negative audience reaction, my opinion actually swings the other way: after some reflection, I feel like it's the perfectly right, logical and cynical ending to a story such as this.

There are clues: in the destruction of the coral reefs. The violent reaction (amongst Bible thumpers, anyway) to the mermaids. The Venture of Marvels. Five million years. ("The writing gave us everything all of a sudden, then nothing forever.")

How else *could* this story end? ( )
  smiteme | Apr 21, 2023 |
Deb and Chip are newlyweds. Deb, our dry, skeptical, and opinionated narrator, sets about telling us her story, taking us into her confidence, beginning by telling us how she met Chip (nice guy, jock, gamer…etc), the "kickass" bridal party her best friend Gina put together, the bachelor party Chip had, their wedding, and lastly, their choice of honeymoon location. This is fifty-six pages of very funny/dry/acerbic/bawdy observations of everyone and everything.

Deb & Chip decide to honeymoon in the British Virgin Islands and off they go. But, a romantic moment on the beach is interrupted by the local scientist (parrotfish expert), breathlessly running towards them in her wetsuit shouting about "mermaids!"

She was disturbed, of course—we hardly knew the woman. Maybe it was a schizoid deal, we figured, or maybe a drug problem we didn’t have all the info yet, but the situation had to be handled humanely. If there’s one thing Chip is, it’s game. He’s game for almost anything, and so much the better if, later it might make good material for an anecdote to tell at a party.

The scientist plans and oversees their next diving session, and Deb & Chip and a few others also see the mermaids. Despite caution, word begins to break out, and all hell breaks loose because every governmental, scientific, or money-making entity wants a piece of the action. Here the story becomes a bit madcap at this point, and loses something in the telling that is hard to identify, but this last half of the story seemed less funny and perhaps better suited to television adaptation. Or, it could be just me (I think ‘funny’ can be a personal thing) .

I’ve enjoyed other of Lydia Millet's writing, the collection Love in Infant Monkeys comes to mind, and while this one didn’t entirely please, there’s another of her novels in the TBR pile. ( )
1 abstimmen avaland | May 31, 2021 |
This book is imperfect, but imperfect in utterly fascinating ways. Millet, more than any other author I've come across, is willing to face up to the dilemmas of writing satire within the tradition of realism (or, perhaps, realism in the tradition of satire). As in any satire, some scenes in this book exist only to make an intellectual point, and for laughs. For instance: Deb and Chip stand in for any contemporary, socially consciousness young couple, and Millet could set them up as such in any way she liked. She chose the wedding industry and tough-guy mud running, because those things are deeply harmful to, you know, civilization as a whole, and need to be mocked. She mocks them. The mockery is enjoyable. Deb's friend Gina is an ironic academic for no particularly good reason, except that ironic academics (including myself) deserve mockery. And so it goes. There are mermaids because that gives Millet a way to write about, inter alia, feminism, environmental destruction, capitalism, and tourism, all things she has dealt with in her previous three novels to great effect. Only this is much funnier.

The problem is that this intellectual, humorous approach clashes rather badly with mainstream literary realism. By the end of the book, it seems that we should really be caring for these characters. Poor Gina is only ironic because her mother died young. Chip might mud-run and play video games, but he's a good guy. Deb might be sarcastic, but she's smart and compassionate. Etc...

As many of the negative reviews here unintentionally point out, that's a very difficult problem, and Millet hasn't solved it. The negative reviews all complain that the characters aren't sufficiently likable (well, it's a satire, so...); or the narrator is unreliable (it's the first person, and Deb is giving her opinion...); or the mermaids come out of nowhere (again, it's a satire, not a love story). I was tempted to write a negative review in which I complain about the characters being too realistic, the mermaids being insufficiently bizarre, and so on, but really, what's fascinating is the craft problem of the book. Can anyone combine these two ways of writing? I hope Millet keeps trying.

****

[Spoiler alert]:

Now, in other news, the ending of this book is fairly ridiculous, and a really good example of how to fail at combining the intellectual/humorous/satirical and the emotional/moving/realistic strands. As you may know, Millet ends the book by kind of mentioning, by the by, that the world is about to end. As an intellectual point, it's not bad: these people have been fighting over some mermaids (will they be commercially exploited, or will they be allowed to live in peace under the watchful gaze of big science?), even though in a very short period of time an asteroid would swing by and obliterate the planet. I.e., your petty squabbles about, say, abortion, pale in significance compared to the actually existing problem of environmental destruction.

This is very nicely done as an intellectual point: lest you somehow missed the point that the mermaids were not mermaids, but a deep ecological symbol for nature as a whole, the asteroid should make it pretty obvious (an asteroid strike we could have avoided, by the way, if we'd only worked together). All these people's activities--marriage, mud-racing, mermaid rescuing--stand in for our daily activities--marriage, mud-racing, reading Lydia Millet books. We're wasting time, and the asteroid/climate change approacheth.

It is not, however, aesthetically pleasing. In fact, it's downright silly, coming as it does in the last two pages of the book. How Deb, who is quite garrulous, could have failed to mention the forthcoming end of the world is not clear to me. Also not clear to me is why Millet, a fabulous craftsperson, could have failed to incorporate this more smoothly. I hope that it's just setting up a sequel, but I fear it's just one more fascinating, failed experiment in bringing together mind and heart. ( )
  stillatim | Oct 23, 2020 |
The narrator on the audio book did a fabulous job! She really captured Deb's sense of humor and the personalities of the other characters. I didn't really like Deb as a person, so it made it hard for me to sympathize with anything that happened to her. I didn't really like any of the characters, except maybe the mermaids and they only have cameos. I'm glad I listened to the book on audio because I would not have made it through the paper version. ( )
  sailorfigment | Dec 27, 2018 |
On their Caribbean honeymoon, Chip and Deb go diving - and see mermaids. A scientist vacationing in the same resort organizes an expedition to film them. Things get out of hand when the resort management tries to capture the mermaids for display. ( )
  lilibrarian | Oct 3, 2017 |
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In this hilarious novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet, a honeymooning couple makes friends with a marine biologist who discovers genuine mermaids in a coral reef-and who, the next night, apparently drowns in her hotel bathtub. As a resort chain swoops in to corner the market on mermaids, the newlyweds (opinionated, skeptical narrator Deb and handsome online gamer Chip, the world's friendliest man) join forces with other vacationers-including an ex-Navy SEAL with a love of explosives and a hipster Tokyo VJ-to protect the mermaids from the corporate 'Venture of Marvels' that wants to turn their habitat into a theme park.

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