Symphony in White or symphony in shared trauma?

This novel flowed before my eyes. The words a string of birds brushing over the top of my gaze. I am (was, as of now when I sit in front of the draft of my book again) halfway through and I am waiting for the climax, if there is one. 

Turns out, for this Me who finished reading it, there might not be an actual climax at all. The novel ended in a strange way, in a piece of memory, a past tense. I do not feel reconciled with the ending or the whole plot in general. And it is fair for me to conclude now that I did not like this book like the others. It was confusing to begin with, tricky to follow alone. It had this one single piece of puzzle waiting to be uncovered by its readers through some extremely surreal rhetoric (which was almost also the reason that kept me reading intently). And upon revealing the whole picture of this puzzle, I learn nothing glamorous or philosophical, but a heartbreaking, repulsive crime and some trauma. Yes, there is some revenge in the end. But other than that, what else? You are basically telling me the story of two sisters marked by a share trauma of parental sexual abuse, one being the witness and the other victim. Then they all grow up and get married with some unhealthy mentality and all their marriages did not work out well. Then the old lover of the witness goes to live with the victim and they become friends and in the end they sleep together. HEY, excuse me? What is your point? 

I am just quite disappointed, I should have crossed it off from my reading list. According to your posts, Ru from last week seemed a better one to sit with.

Okay, yes. There is some aesthecity in the rhetoric itself. The novel is packed with rich simile, metaphor, personification. Beautiful writing. The landscape of rural Brazil is captured with an exceptional level of detail and sensibility. I can feel that the characters breathe in their homeland, and that land speaks to their history, their traumatic lives. Yes, there is a strong and intimate bond between the person and the land. After all, they all come back to it, like Scarlett going back to Tara it was both forseeable and inevitable. It HAS to END where it all BEGAN. That being said, this is also quite cliche. I am not saying that cliche is not good. But in my opinion, it has to be accompanied with some other novelty, which I do not quite sense in this novel. 

The other thing I at first liked but then disliked was the timeline of the novel and the way it is told. It changes to the perspectives of different characters from time to time almost without any warning. At first it seems interesting, but as I went through chapters, it started to wear me out. Changing perspective is a good trick, however, utilizing it to this extent could pose the danger of losing readers between the lines. Because it is difficult to get immersed in the mindsets of each. Not to mention taht the changes in perspectives are also accompanied by jumps in the timeline. The novel reads to me like an expired dream when someone dozed off on a bus running on a highway. When the bus reaches its last stop you wake up with a dizzy head and horrible hair, you go home and think okay it is over the past is the past good thing i am still alive. That is what I got from the novel. The trauma was not revealed until the last few chapters, the recovery of the victim is carelessly depicted in a fleeting way. 

I do not like characters that I fail to understand. And in this novel, I feel like I am not pampered with evidences or riddles that would allow me to understand why some characters are the way they are. I am just as puzzled as the sisters. Why did the mother put up with the father's violence? Did she know that he is a pedophile? How did Clarice get out of her suicide attempt? Why is Joal Miguel gay and when did he find out??? And why is the book name Symphony in White? What is with this obsession with the color white? I have so many questions and so little interest in understanding them, that is what this novel left me with.

I know we are reading women's writing and that most of them are sad. :) Yes I am a grown-up and I quite understand that, but this sad story got me nowhere. If there is supposed to be a deeper level of criticism toward Brazilian history, then I apologize for not being able to understand it due to my shallow knowledge. However, aren't books supposed to be written in a way that your readers can understand what you are getting at even without the professional knowledge of the subject? I think of All the Light We Cannot See, another novel of interchanging perspectives between two protagonists with jumps in time, it was written in a nice way that even if you are not a history nerd you can feel the cruelty of war. Say if Lisboa did not want to emphasize the political unstability too much, okay, that is fair, but then she does not do a good job -in my opinion- in writing everything else.

This novel reminds me -quite strongly- of another novel written by a Spanish author. Las maravillas/The Wonders by Elena Medel. Both try to tell the stories of women across generations through jumps in time and perspectives. However, the way Symphony in White is written is much more perplexed and confusing. If you are into this style of writing, read The Wonders and it will be worth your while.

Question: Why white? Is it because the girls are never innocent/white again?