The Eye of the Sheep in Aussie Readers

Dec 02, 2017 PattyMacDotComma rated it it was amazing

Shelves: australian-author, award-win-listed, aa-ce, kindle, brain-mental-autism, favourites-adult, fiction, aa

5★
“The same network that was in my mum, the same network that was in me, in plants and leaves and machinery and all shops and underground in the earth’s core. It was the whole inside of all living things, but on the outside, and that’s where my dad worked. There! In that refinery!

. . . On the other side of the grass and the stream, way in the distance, the flame leapt from the refinery pipe – like the light in the sheep’s eye, it never died . . .

The wetlands air had a potion that came from th ...more

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Apr 01, 2014 Brenda rated it it was amazing

Shelves: aussie-authors, contemporary-fiction, 2014-release, own-read

Jimmy Flick lived with his dad Gavin, older brother Robby and mum Paula. But Jimmy was different – different from Robby and different from all the other kids. His mum was the only one who understood him, who could help him when his cells got out of control and he started running, racing, careening all over until he was stopped with a big, gigantic hug. Then Jimmy’s cells would slow to equal the pace of his mum’s heartbeat. At night when Jimmy couldn’t sleep his mum lay beside him and they counte ...more

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Apr 11, 2017 Kathryn rated it it was ok

Shelves: fiction, reading-list-2017, australian-authors, bookclub

Warning in advance: this is a rather long review! And I know a lot of people have loved this book, but I was not one of them. (I hope my GR friends who loved this are still friends with me after this…)

I was seriously underwhelmed by this book and bemused by what other people have seen in it (although I intend to read some reviews after I post this to see if I can work out what I missed!). I’m not sure whether I had expected too much of it, given that so many of my GR friends gave it 4 or 5 stars Warning in advance: this is a rather long review! And I know a lot of people have loved this book, but I was not one of them. (I hope my GR friends who loved this are still friends with me after this…)

I was seriously underwhelmed by this book and bemused by what other people have seen in it (although I intend to read some reviews after I post this to see if I can work out what I missed!). I’m not sure whether I had expected too much of it, given that so many of my GR friends gave it 4 or 5 stars and raved over it, or whether the writing style (from the POV of Jimmy, a little boy with autism) didn’t sit well with me, or whether there was something else at play preventing me from loving this book, but I didn’t love it, and I don’t even really think I liked it that much.

The style it was written in certainly felt like a lot of hard work - Jimmy describes things in ways which are difficult to understand, in varying degrees - sometimes he says that someone’s “pipes are overflowing” when he’s talking about them tearing up or crying, which is reasonably easy to understand, but at other times, I was at a complete loss to understand what he was trying to describe. Perhaps the book is written in this style because living life for someone with autism feels like reading this all the time, but it certainly didn’t make the book any more enjoyable… Perhaps I should have realised this when the GR blurb included a quote that was a bit wishy-washy, but I thought it might make sense in context. It didn’t. Some further examples:

“Dad was staring into his open fridge. He was the centre and the light from the fridge came out in rays around him. All of the rest of the shed was in shadow. Soon he closed the fridge without taking anything out. He stood up and leaned against his workbench, his back to me. Everything in the shed radiated from him. The spanner, the saw, the rope, the car parts, the posters on the wall, even the dust particles, all joined to him by lines.”

“I woke up in the middle of the night caught in a black circle box. Everything had stopped. There was no next thing, but I was still alive inside the circle box. It held me tightly inside itself. Even if I exploded, my cells were trapped within the walls of the box. There was no escape. I couldn’t move."

“For the first time that night I slept, as if my father had a power that ran through his inner liquids and was potent with sleep. The steam came through like osmosis and travelled through the lids of my eyes, heaving and drooping them so that I fell into a place both empty and full, where up was balanced by down, and down by up.”

Maybe I'm just being too literal, but none of this makes any sense to me!! And I never even fully understood the significance of the title of the story. His mother taught him to count sheep to help him get to sleep, and he would see the light in the eyes of the sheep, but I couldn’t see what the relevance was to anything else in the story. Perhaps I missed something in my irritation at not understanding things that were happening.

The story is incredibly sad, with Jimmy’s dad being a violent drunk - a fairly good man, if he could keep off the whisky, although his patience threshold was low (although I could sympathise with him) and he felt driven to it by certain situations, and his mum being a good and patient mum, but a comfort eater - “Mum bought cheese, lemon sponge, apple crumble, Monte Carlos, frankfurts, mayonnaise, ice cream, frozen potato puffs, peas, chops, caramel sauce, toffee squares and milk.” And as a result, she sounds like she is a lot heavier than a healthy weight, has trouble getting around easily at times, often has asthma attacks and is setting a poor example of eating for Jimmy. I can understand both Jimmy's mother’s and father’s ways of coping, although I doubt that I could be as patient as his mother in her circumstances - I would be more impatient, like Jimmy’s father.

Because as I read this, I thought if I was actually there, Jimmy’s running in circles and repeating things over and over again, and his insistence on unknowable answers (and then sometimes even the questions he asked didn’t make sense) would have driven me batty, and I probably would have snapped at him as his father did.

So it is a wonderful thing that there are some people who are very good at helping people like Jimmy. His story is still a sad one, however, but leaves us with a nugget of hope at the end. There were parts where I enjoyed the story more than other parts (perhaps they were the parts that were easier to understand…?), so I gave it an extra half-star for those parts, but overall, I can’t really say that I found it much more than “just OK”. 2.5★ ...more

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Aug 04, 2014 Michael Livingston rated it really liked it

A beautifully constructed book, told stunningly from the perspective of a young boy whose perspective on the world is odd. He's a brilliant character who feels complete and whose struggle to understand the workings of his troubled family and the world around them is deeply compelling. The over-arching narrative (alcohol, violence, family breakdown) is nothing new, but Jimmy's point of view is original enough to lift this book to new heights. ...more

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Aug 03, 2015 Magdalena rated it it was amazing

Sofie Laguna is particularly adept at writing childrens’ voices through pain. In One Foot Wrong it was Hester Wakefield who gave us her luminous voice through a painful cycle of the ugliest abuse. In Laguna’s latest novel The Eye of the Sheep, the special voice is that of six year old Jimmy, a rather wonderful boy protagonist whose perspective is coloured by his Asperger’s-like combination of being both highly gifted in his uses of perception and linguistic skills, and disabled in his ability to Sofie Laguna is particularly adept at writing childrens’ voices through pain. In One Foot Wrong it was Hester Wakefield who gave us her luminous voice through a painful cycle of the ugliest abuse. In Laguna’s latest novel The Eye of the Sheep, the special voice is that of six year old Jimmy, a rather wonderful boy protagonist whose perspective is coloured by his Asperger’s-like combination of being both highly gifted in his uses of perception and linguistic skills, and disabled in his ability to negotiate the mores and rules of everyday living and relationships. Jimmy is keenly aware of this in himself: “When I was slow I should have been fast, and when I was fast I should have been slow.” (32) Though he suffers from sensory over-responsiveness and becomes easily anxious and hyperactive from situations that are distressing, confusing or exciting, Jimmy reads appliance manuals for pleasure, and is able to see through skin and through situations to perceive pain, the links that bind people together, and sometimes even to the atoms that make each of us up. Jimmy can even hear the sounds of his mother Paula’s “tenacles” (alveoli perhaps) trying to breath through dust in her “air ducts”, and can also hear the sounds of leaves drinking and people’s thoughts and emotions (“the invisible world”). Jimmy is understood best by his mother Paula, who has asthma and who is fully aware of how intelligent Jimmy is, though she also knowswhat a handful he is, particularly when his chaotic energy gets out of control and he becomes dangerous:

‘Spit! Spit! Spit! Spit!’ I shouted, all of me fast, my cylinders and cells revolving, my tubes turning, molecules colliding…I was as fast as the helicopter when you pull the string and off it flies, rotors spinning fast enough to cut off a head. I was too fast for my skin to hold. If something spins that fast, speed turns it invisible and all the invisible silent languages come at you in a rush and blow you apart, like a bomb.” (16)

Jimmy’s dad Gavin has a weakness for Cutty Sark whisky, and when he’s drunk, the violence that runs through his own family line becomes uncontrollable, mirroring Jimmy’s spinning molecules.

The novel doesn’t flinch from some fairly graphic descriptions of domestic violence, alcoholism, eating disorders, familial and governmental neglect, and the way in which our most vulnerable members of society are treated. Despite the intensely sad moments in this book that shine a light on some of our worst failings as humans, the story never loses the powerful forward thrust of the narrative. Jimmy is a perfect narrator, and though there are times when he goes into the darkest places of himself, he never becomes self-pitying, and is always vivid in his imaginings, often funny and beautiful in his perceptions. The inner world of Jimmy is as lucid as poetry:

I don’t know how much time passed. I never did. Sometimes one minute was longer than one year. Sometimes a morning was longer than a night. Time was increasive, like elastic. The bus drove on and on and on, though time itself could have been stopped, or moving so fast it couldn’t be counted. (272)

I’m not sure that any of the characters around Jimmy who fail in their duty to care for him can be let off the hook, even though there are positive and transcendent moments between Jimmy and almost everyone he interacts with. It’s not just the characters that descend to their lowest level in this book. It’s also the medical profession, governmental welfare programs, and Mobil Oil where Gavin works scraping rust off pipes. However, Laguna never lets the characters – not even the most peripheral – slip into stereotypes. The Eye of the Sheep is a tender and delicate novel, rich with sympathy and understanding, even when it becomes almost unbearably dark. By the end of the book, it’s Jimmy who reminds us of our own beauty as a human race; the near Buddhist perspective he brings to every moment of his life:

The cool wind that blew over me was the same wind that blew in over the water and across the cliff and over my mum and my dad in the picture. Time didn’t change it; the currents moved around planet Earth, cleaned by the rainbows after the rain, passing over the same places, new and ancient. I heard the music of the sea as water rose and fell, changing the shapes of rocks, pounding at the cliffs, wearing away the sea floor. (275)

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Mar 10, 2019 Tango rated it it was amazing

A beautifully written and incredibly moving book. I cried for the last hundred pages and could not stop reading until I reached the end.

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Jul 14, 2015 Rachel Watts rated it really liked it

There are so many high points of this novel. The tone of Jimmy’s narration, its unique tenor and view of the world speaks so many truths. The quiet threads of domestic violence, inherited violence, weave together so subtly you barely notice them until they’re everywhere. The characters are real, believable, Jimmy’s world is tangible and his losses are painful to watch.

Full review: http://leatherboundpounds.com/2015/11... ...more

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