...[a] spare, stylish debut ... Hunter’s mordant, undeceived narrator alludes to checkpoints, stampedes, and shortages but the peril is largely impressionistic, obscured by the ordinary life miraculously unfolding in front of her eyes: first smile, first tooth, first step. There are delightfully granular observations of babies, as her son first tries to roll over and his efforts look 'like someone trying to turn over a car with their bare hands.' But the real strength of this wonderfully earthy novel is in its sharpened lens on motherhood’s apocalyptic-feeling joys and terrors, and how they can form an all-encompassing world.
With the sparest of prose, debut author Megan Hunter creates a riveting story told by a mother navigating a monumental catastrophe with the most fragile of life carried at her breast ... Building on our natural fear of the unknown, Hunter leaves unspoken much of what’s truly haunting in the tale—but the rising horrors of civilization’s breakdown are perceived nonetheless ... In the wake of recent weather crises and flooding around the globe, Hunter’s writing on the human impact of climate change charges this slim poetic work of fiction with powerful dystopian weight. From refuge to redemption, from retreat to recovery, The End We Start From is an exquisite paean to how we come back from the times that challenge us all.
...the extremity of the setting powers the novel’s central metaphor at the same time as throwing the repetitions and revelations of parenting into sharp relief ... If motherhood now has its own literary subgenre, the same is true of climate-change catastrophe...Hunter sees both subjects afresh, through a sharp eye for detail that is both undeceived and faintly amused, and through the extreme spareness of her narration: the story proceeds in snatches, like a series of stepping stones across the blank expanse of an unknown future ... Hunter walks a fine line, stylistically speaking, between the spare and the sketchy, the profound and the perfunctory. Italicised interludes based on various creation myths are not developed or differentiated enough from the main narrative to work as symbolic counterpoint ... The End We Start From is an effective, unusual and ambitious debut, which keeps the reader pinned to the page: but next time I’d love to see Hunter expand on her aphorisms, and start to fill in some of the gaps.
Most of the characters are nameless sketches, and much is left unexplained, evoking the confusion and constant fear of refugees. The narrator and her baby exist in a small clear eye together at the center of a collapsing world. Hunter writes in condensed, poetic language, with dreamlike alternations between exact perceptions and evocative obscurity. Short bursts of oracular imagery that read like myth or scripture are scattered through the text. This unsettling and beautiful short novel is a vision of how a life can wash out to sea, and then wash back in again, wrecked and transformed.
Like Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation and some of Maggie Nelson’s work, the book is written in tiny intense snippets that are more like scraps of poetry than traditional prose. This can make the book a quick read if you want, but so much emotion is packed into each moment that my advice is to read slowly and savor each section … Interjections work perfectly to connect this brief story to epic tales that came before it. It gives the tiny triumphs and sorrows of the narrator’s new life a feeling of cosmic importance.
A haunting take on modern disaster ... Parents, especially, will recognize the familial exchanges of domestic life, like the transfer of milk from mother to child, rendered as equally consequential to the loss of home. In this new world, the line between the mundane tasks of everyday life and the struggle to survive ceases to exist. Prescient in its depiction of climate change–induced catastrophe and timeless in its cleareyed understanding of love, Hunter’s tale gains impact from its plausibility.
The postapocalyptic literary novel is currently in vogue almost to the point of redundancy, but Hunter’s slim yet sharp debut offers a level of precision and interiority rarely seen in the genre ... Told in a voice that is by turns meditative, desperate, and hopeful, this novel showcases Hunter’s considerable talents and range.
