Assembly

This slim volume packed a punch with its lyrical phrases and soloquies. There were many micro and macro aggressions, with plenty of gas lighting, not to mention the sexual aggressions. This book was full of surprises, not always pretty. The form was both poetry and playwright. Not many writers can pull it off. I recommend to those with a literary and poetic bent.

This was the recommendation of a host in a non-English speaking program of political analysis. I had high expectations of the book because it was recommended there. This was a disappointment.First, the type of narrative was not really good, it felt rushed and never really sticked. Sometimes I did not understand what she was talking about; situations were mentioned out of nowhere. Second, the character development: while we learned something about the main character, it was sort of rushed and I never really understood much more about her. Just a few experiences. She gave a few opinions and that's it.Good things: the description of the boyfriend, the length and the ending.I only finished it because it was less than 100 pages; else I would not have finished it.

The narrator has nothing positive to say about anything or anybody in her world except herself. Really? The author may have ability as a writer, but this shallow broadside against Great Britain and all of the imperialists, racists and chauvinists who live there is not a story.

Natasha Brown is a true literary artist. The language has such depth and poetry. The book is uniquely structured with multiple narratives alternating. A beautiful work of art. Intelligent, profound, poetic, and insightful. Immensely impressed!

Astonishing explication of the constructs that create identity as they limit its form and action. Largesse in such a small book. Bravo!

Natasha Brown's talent as a modern-day writer shines in this book. However, the fantastic style cannot accommodate for a lack in substance. The ideal reader would appreciate the narrative about a Black woman's experience with assimilation and white aggression. The main character receives comments about how affirmative action isn't fair. A worker at the party calls her out for fraternizing with the white elite. She describes awkward interactions with her white boyfriend's parents. She is objectified. These instances seem almost too common to me but probably gratifying to a white audience. I appreciate Brown's poetic touch and loved the organized stream of consciousness. I imagine we'll see more great things from Brown, especially as her ability to create emotional depth strengthens as she grows as a writer.

I often pick up thin books in the “new” section at my library simply to try out authors I haven’t read before or for the experience of a quick read. I knew nothing about Assembly other than that I liked its cover and it only had about 100 pages.Within the first ten pages of Assembly, author Natasha Brown captured my attention and never let it go.Assembly is told from the perspective of a Black woman living in England. She’s successful in the corporate world of finance, yet that success comes with a price. No, this is not the stuff of fantasy or thrillers. This is the stuff of stifling your personality, putting up with loads of reprehensible behavior, ignoring your own desires to honor the sacrifices made on your behalf, and grinding day in and day out to finally achieve what you long ago earned.And yet …Our narrator can’t help but acknowledge the ridiculousness of it all, especially as she visits her “old money” boyfriend’s mansion. His ancestors’ wealth was predicated upon her ancestors’ suffering, and even if a direct line of connection cannot be made, that connection remains even if tangentially so. He does nothing as his wealth grows day by day; she must make her wealth grow day by day.There’s also the issue of her health. She’s young, ascending, and destined for great things as long as she keeps grinding, so of course she has every reason in the world to preserve her health.Or so you would assume.Short, potent, and brutally blunt, Assembly is a little bit novella, a little bit poem, a little bit indescribable, but very well written with a powerful voice.If you’re looking for a book that actually says something, try Assembly by Natasha Brown.

I received this as a birthday gift and was stunned by it. It's rare to stumble upon literary fiction that is incredibly unique but that speaks to a very common experience. Sure, the comparisons to Mrs. Dalloway are valid but I feel that Rachel Kusk's Outline Trilogy is a closer match. If you love internally driven narratives you'll like this. For any woman of color that has had a male manager marvel at her ability--with the context of ethnicity hoovering in the language he uses, or had a manager describe her as "exotic" at a conference table with other colleagues--with no thought as to how bizzare that is, this is your story. I would teach this with Rosie Price's "What Red Was" and a plethora of other novels that speak to the silencing of the female voice. Brown changes the game by elevating the concept of the male gaze to include the racial gaze and all of the depressing tropes that go along with being perceived as "other." The clever insertion of the leery gaze of the boyfriend's mother and sister as a nuanced hint that if you defer, with your own assertion, the hand of white women that you easily perceive as toxic, than your judgement deserves to be questioned. Brilliant. Also, the boyfriend who wonders why the narrator isn't just grateful for being noticed professionally.The pitch towards the end sort of detracts from the steadier hand through the beginning and middle, but no one else has veered into the weeds of the modern, woman of color at work --as this author has. Any woman that has experienced the exhausting dynamics of office politics will see themselves in it.

Assembly is about a young black woman who has worked hard to get where she wants to be. She has everything she has been striving for, including a successful career in the City, and now she is preparing to attend a garden party at her old-money boyfriend's family estate in the country.There's some excellent writing, and it's a great story, but unfortunately the stream of consciousness style just didn't quite chime for me. It makes the main character seem very self-absorbed and all the secondary characters rather two dimensional. Although it does serve to highlight the constant microaggressions she suffers on a daily basis as she makes her way in a world dominated by white men. She works twice as hard, swallows the insults, keeps quiet and blends in.All in all, it's a good first novel, but I think Natasha Brown has better yet to come.

One reviewer said they'd read this short book between breakfast and gym. This doesn't do it justice, and in a way is exactly what it's about. The male dominated, white dominated, capital dominated world shaped by SPEED, EFFICIENCY, NO TIME TO THINK, NO TIME TO DIGEST: TARGETS TARGETS TARGETS. Natasha Brown focuses in on this by focusing in on the way the white ruling class in this book masticate their food in great detail, mirroring the way their rules and their economic system is consuming all alternative cultures and the biosphere. Also orally, she shows how white power is maintained by control of discourse, by control of language, by control of terms of reference. There is no independent language or tool set with which to attack this self-perpetuating supremacy of the West, or rather, the White. The education system is likewise enrolled: I was disgusted to learn of Operation Legacy; something, appropriately, whitewashed out of the national curriculum, which favours a shiny citizenship view of Britain and empire. An important book. I gave it four out of five stars as it is more polemic than narrative. But it does deserve five for the message, even in the diction of the race dictators.

I read this when re-reading andstudying Virginia Woolf 's 'Mrs. Dalloway ' and found it fascinating. To compare it with its inspiration, which if you elect to transpose a famous novel to the present day, is what you invite readers to do, is to be slightly disappointed. The novella is both approachable and literary but lacks the pulse the dream-like inhabiting of the characters which flows with such fluidity in Woolf's work. Perhaps that is because the almost obsessive note taking, rewriting and editing which gave rise to Virginia Woolf 's work would be very difficult to produce while continuing a successful modern career. Perhaps the fine tooth combing needed to produce the shifting dance of repeated imagery of the earlier book just is not in the style of modern writing.However, DO READ THIS BOOK. It is a clever way to explore the dissatisfaction of a intelligent, successful, young professional, black woman meeting the inherent racism and anti-feminism of British society. It's a quick read that demands a long reflection. They made a film of Michael Cunningham 's 'The Waves'; I'd love to see a TV film of this. READ IT!

Hat mir gut gefallen der Schreibstil und die Geschichte die eher skizzenhaft aufgebaut ist und hauptsächlich aus der Introspektion einer Frau besteht die sich verzweifelt bemüht akzeptiert zu werden von der Gesellschaft und ihrem Land.

The issues of racial microaggressions and the problems of "succeeding in the system" explored in this book are interesting, but this is fundamentally a pretty weak attempt at a novelised version of Claudia Rankine's massively superior book of poetry (mostly prose) Citizen. That book allowed space for contemplation and left a lot of its ideas to resonate and sit uncomfortably in the mind of the reader. This one creates a protagonist character who experiences myriad microaggressions over its course, but as a result is completely unbelievable as a protagonist if we're to read this as a novel trying to communicate a *person* (because there are simply zero positive experiences here - even if she's meant to be having a breakdown, it still loses force as a result), and if the person is meant to be a non-realistic embodiment of these experiences then the novel fails to engage the reader as a result, as they could simply dismiss this as not believable. The fragmented form doesn't help because frankly the end of it is just a bunch of unconnected notes, often stated far too directly to feel like the narrator's thoughts as opposed to the novelist directly telling us stuff.The sections about her boyfriend are by far the weakest - I get the idea that the containing racist system in Britain might encourage black people that marrying into power is a good idea politically, but the boyfriend here seems to be some kind of Tory advisor figure and it is simply not possible that someone who is not actually on board with that ideology - i.e. not just the UK system of "success", but actual British Conservatism - would put up with this nobhead and his nobhead family, let alone decide to marry him (even if the payoff is she's going to die soon?). And if the narrator is meant to be a Tory then nothing in this novel works either since so much of the anger is (correctly) about the Go Home vans which were a Tory gimmick.