Review of The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennet (ISBN: 978-0525536291)

Synopsis

Brit Bennet has written a beautiful narrative about the coming of nighttime on the planet earth. An occurrence that all humanity experiences daily, but which most accept with simple fatalism, dusk represents the changing from activity to passivity, from outward focus to mindfulness, from anticipation to reflection.

Some see dusk as a winding down of the day’s events, while others see it as the beginning of hope for the night’s promise. Those who are nocturnal see the night as providing a comforting solitude, in opposition to the social separation of hectic daytime activity. One can exist in the twilight apart from the scrutiny of daylight.

In other places, the night brings increased social pressure, as preparations for gathering together are made, and costumes are donned to signify hard won public stature.

The dawn, in all cases, brings a revelation; it brings a moment of solitude that forces each of us to examine ourselves apart from others; far from the gaze of the crowd, and into our own, private souls.

This change from day to night, and night to day represents the “Vanishing Half” of our lives, and as we forget for a moment who we have become, and are left with a glimpse of who we are; in fact have always been.

Review

I nearly threw up when I read the table of contents for this book. Brit Bennet has no insight into my soul. He has no basis for understanding my life, and no basis for understanding what goes on in my head.

A little background: Brit Bennet is a Yugoslavian hermit who was educated at Oxford University before earning his PhD from Perth Classical University for the Course Arts. His family served in the Yugoslavian Minor circus culture as security detail for three generations, including a notable stint guarding “Poco the Talking Chihuahua” prior to his untimely death at the hands of Soviet dissidents. During the Slavic cultural revolution, his family escaped to the U.K., aided by author Salmon Rushdie, and finally to Australia, bringing hundreds of valuable works of cubist realism art and pastry recipes with them, with which they funded Brit’s education and their new life as guidance counselors at the Perth Assembly of the Dispersed Preparatory Middle School.

In other words, Brit was a privileged child who knew no hardship. He was raised from an early age to be a proselytizer of cubist philosophy and a teacher of circus mentality. His PhD work in theoretical cubist pastry design shows a mind that is clearly out of alignment with both historic and scientific thinking.

There is nothing in all of Brit’s life that would hint at the possibility of him knowing the difference between day and night, black and white, dawn and dusk, or beginnings and endings. There is nothing in his whole experience that is unique or worth writing about, so he tried his hand at writing about common things for the common person.

In the interest of full disclosure, I could not find this book in English. I used Google Translate’s Serbo-Croato-Slovenian language tools, which have only been released in an Alpha version at the time of this writing.

Conclusions

I don’t see the point of this book. I don’t know why we need yet another technical treatise on the turning of the earth. We see it every day, and don’t need a reminder that night time is coming. I only hope that this book is one of the vanishing half of books that will no longer be in print as of next year.

I give this book zero out of five stars. No, wait; zero out of ten stars.

Until next time,

Cyril Martinelli, for Novel Premise Book Reviews