Alphabet of Thorn by Patricia A. McKillip
My rating: 5 of 5 stars Language, Stories, Magic, Gender, Love, and Identity The transcriptor Nepenthe was found as an orphan baby left on the cliffs on which perches the country-sized palace of the kingdom of Raine, which rules twelve “crowns” or sub-kingdoms, and she’s been raised by the librarians and scholars in the city-sized library deep inside the cliffs. When Patricia A. McKillip’s Alphabet of Thorn (2004) begins, Nepenthe has lived all her sixteen or so years inside the library translating old books in obscure languages and is only vaguely aware that the King of Raine has just died, leaving a young and inexperienced daughter, Tessera, heir to the empire. Bourne is a handsome student from the Floating School for mages hidden inside a fantastic magical wood, both of which change shape and appearance and contents depending on the magical power and or emotional condition of the person who enters them. When he gives Nepenthe a book to translate written in an alphabet of thorns no one can read, he and she become lovers. Bourne discovers new magical abilities inspired by love of Nepenthe and neglects to do cloak and dagger work for his uncle, who wants him to learn magic to use to usurp power from the inexperienced queen Tessera. Vevay, the old mage advisor to the deceased King of Raine, meanwhile, becomes frustrated while trying to educate Tessera in the full range of queenly duties necessary to hold the twelve crowns together: their representatives and families and retainers continue hanging around because they don’t know whether the new queen is strong enough to hold them together. Tessera seems unable to rule in the practical and straightforward manner of her father, for, unknown to Vevay, she has powerful magical abilities and desires to be free from court protocol. As the novel progresses, and Nepenthe starts learning the language of the alphabet of thorns, she starts falling under their spell and that of the story they tell about a legendary world conqueror named Axis and his magician Kane, both of whom lived and subjugated the entire world together three thousand years ago and became subjects of epics and poems. Interestingly, while in all the known tales Kane is the male best friend of Axis, in the alphabet of thorns book she is his self-denying female lover. What language is the alphabet of thorns? Who wrote the book in thorns? What is the true gender and nature of Kane and his/her relationship with Axis? Why does translating the book so obsess Nepenthe, even to the point of ignoring her usual duties and Bourne? To answer those questions, McKillip increasingly intertwines the past plot about Axis and Kane with the present plot about Nepenthe, Bourne, Vevay, Tessera, and Raine. And McKillip guides the whole thing to a surprising, satisfying, and moving conclusion. As in her other novels, McKillip’s fantasy explores and reveals the human heart. Magic is driven by desire, so that whatever you want badly enough, you can do, whether instantaneously traveling between two places or times or turning invisible or lifting the entire Floating School. In the case of this novel, her fantasy is also about language and its power and the power of old tales and epics (fantasy!) and so on to affect the present and to express desire and magic and love and history. It’s also about finding your own way for yourself and the ones you love and who love you rather than for political or economic ambition. Partly because McKillip doesn’t write big scale special effects laden Hollywood-esque battle scenes, she can focus on her character-driven fantasy without bloating her books or turning them into series. This, like all her novels apart from her Riddle Master trilogy, is very much a stand-alone. And the novel has more wonder and magic in language and image and event and artifact than most contemporary fantasy series can muster in all their volumes. The conception and description and use of the Floating School, its wood, the Library, Axis’ growing empire, magic, language, etc., are all imaginatively and wonderfully rendered and strategically handled to develop character, theme, and plot. And McKillip’s prose is a pure pleasure to read and savor. So many wonderful descriptions, always guiding the themes and story and setting along. It’s a very funny book, too, with lots of charming or funny touches throughout, and enough gritty life here and there to ground the fantasy. Along with her FIRST novel (!) Forgotten Beasts of Eld (1974), this one is probably my favorite of McKillip’s works, because I find it the most moving and complex in plot and character and because it shows McKillip at the top of her writing game, as in this innocuous early passage where dreaming Nepenthe hears her name: That night she woke with a start to the sound of her name. She answered instantly, pulling herself upright out of a stupor of dreams: “Yes.” Then she opened her eyes, puzzled. The world was so still that it might have vanished, swallowed by its own past or future. The name was already fading; she could only hear the backwashed eddies and echoes of it in her head. Outside her door, the stone corridors were silent; no one had called Nepenthe. Neither the drowsing embers in her brazier nor the single star hanging in the high narrow window shed any light upon the matter. Yet someone had dropped a word like a weight on a plumb line straight into her heart and she had recognized her name. (view spoiler)[Tessera saves the day by hiding! Can you believe it!? What a nice touch! And it is so sweet when Kane has had enough living for Axis and his World Domination desire and chooses Nepenthe instead and comes back to her daughter finally calling her name Nepenthe and not the name she gave her at birth, signaling her acceptance of Nepenthe having her own identity. (hide spoiler)] View all my reviews
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Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Sweetest Little Inchoate Lyctor in the World Nona is such a sweetie! She loves her caretakers (the cavalier Camilla and the necromancer Palamedes taking turns in Camilla’s body and Pyrrah a female necromancer’s mind in her male cavalier’s body) and the gang of juvenile delinquents at school, where she’s a Teacher’s Aid for the science teacher the kids call the Angel, oh, and Crown, an extraordinarily beautiful ex-necromancer now apparently working for the enemy. Although everyone else is unhappy there, Nona loves their chaotic, violent, disintegrating city jammed to bursting with refugees and lacking enough food and terrorized by Blood of Eden wing factions, “zombies,” and a sublime Resurrection Beast. Nona looks maybe nineteen but is only six months old. She can’t read or write and is ignorant of many things, but she can sure do physical and verbal language, understanding people’s moods and agendas from their micro-gestures and speaking any language anybody speaks to her. She prefers eating pencils and erasers to normal food. She loves swimming in the sea, where she’s invulnerable to toxic jellyfish stings. For that matter, any wound she gets instantly regenerates, so she’s not supposed to get hurt for fear of revealing that she’s more than human. Camilla and Palamades are writing down Nona’s accounts of her dreams and trying to get her to do bone magic and generally trying to guide her into becoming (or remembering how to be) a formidable Lyctor. Nona’s mind is mostly occupied, though, by plans for her sixth-month birthday party. Nona is innocent, angelic, and uncanny. WHO is she? Due to clues in the text, we guess early on that she may be Harrowhark or Gideon—or—? Like the first and second novels in Tamysn Muir’s Locked Tomb series, the third book Nona the Ninth (2022) starts disorientingly with a different protagonist in a different place in a different situation. Whereas until now we’ve been in necromantic space opera settings of other planets and outer space and so on, here we seem to be on a dystopic post-holocaust earth. Blood of Eden is divided into different factions, some out to exterminate all necromancers, some out to make deals with some necromancers to try to save the world… Ianthe the super Lyctor is still a player. But where is Gideon Nav? Oh, right, she’s dead… but… Interspersed among the main Nona chapters appear short chapters called Bible-esque things like “John 4:19” and featuring “dreams” in which John Gaius tells someone he calls Harrowhark pieces of his origin story: how on a world recognizably our earth he came to be the first necromancer and then the man who became god after conducting experimental research involving cryogenics in an attempt to save as much of the population as possible, with unexpected results. It takes a while for the suspenseful violent action Muir excels at writing to begin, but when it does, the novel becomes a thrilling page turner. The novel has many virtues! I loved any scene involving Nona, which is basically all of them, especially when she’s with Camilla or Palamades or Pyrrah or Crown or her gang. I like the Angel and her six-legged dog Noodle. There are funny and/or scary and/or moving moments. I want Nona to “live”! I want her to become a Lyctor! I want her to become a composite Harrowhark and Gideon! I want her to kick God’s ass (or at least a Resurrection Beast’s). Great Similes and Descriptions: “It tasted like petrol and felt like sunburn.” “[Hot Sauce] sitting by the blinded-up window, thoughtful and still as a statue in the park, only her head was still on.” “In the dream, they were hiking up a big hill of brown sun blasted grass crunching like paper beneath their feet.” “But she was only smiling at them in the way teachers did when they thought they knew what was going on but didn’t really.” Witty Wisdom: “’What we know is that we don't know anything.’ Nona quite liked this motto. It was an accurate summary of her entire life.” “’Ah, children, they are very forgiving,’ said the Commander, proving to Nona that she had never been around children.” Cool Dialogue: “You were dead. I saw it. Some of your brains came out.” “Yuck. I didn’t know.” Satiric Dialogue: He sighed and said, “We had the internet. We decided to stream.” She said, “What is this internet?” And he said, “See, I did make a utopia.” Poignant Dialogue: “You’ll kill each other.” “We were happy.” Moira Quirk was born to read these books. Her crusty old bitter Crux (“You cancerous gosling!”) steals the show. However, unlike at the ends of the first two novels, I was disappointed by this one’s ending. First, I wanted more trilogy resolution and less cliffhanger-requiring-book-four. Second, I didn’t like Kiriona the Corpse Prince (though maybe that’s the point). Third, I wanted some more Gideon and Harrowhark sugar, and Muir is not into providing it. Fourth, I didn’t understand what the heck happens in the climax, and even after listening to it a second time I didn’t get much more insight into it. Is Muir being too clever for this reader’s good? Or am I being too dense for her story? Hmmm. Either way, I’m surely going to read the fourth novel when it’s out! View all my reviews
Tales of Majipoor by Robert Silverberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Psychological Historical SF on a Sublime Planet Tales of Majipoor (2013) consists of seven novellas and novelettes published originally between 1998 and 2011. It may be the last book of Majipoor Robert Silverberg will write. There are several earlier ones, starting with the picaresque Lord Valentine’s Castle (1980). I really liked that novel and Chronicles of Majipoor (1982) for their big sf imagination, absorbing character psychology, and lack of typical space operatic violent action scenes. Majipoor is an enormous planet with a population of over 20 billion people living in varied mega-cities amid sublime geographical features and exotic flora and fauna. It gives Silverberg an unlimited source of places, people, and plots for his stories. In them, he ranges through the vast history of Majipoor (humans go back 12,000 years, indigenous Metamorphs well over 20,000) and among different genres and moods and modes. In "The End of the Line" (2011), a young, ineffectual prince councilor for the Coronal of Majipoor tries to learn about the indigenous Metamorphs so as to find a way for humans to live in peace with them and uncovers a terrible secret about his Lord and a terrible truth about race relations. 4 stars In "The Book of Changes" (2003), a princely poet of superficial verse travels into the hinterlands on a quest for a new life path only to be captured by a bandit lord who happens to be a passionate but undiscriminating aficionado of poetry. Could Furvain ever write a profound, great work encompassing the vast history of human settlement on Majipoor? And if so, would it derive from his trivial self or from divine inspiration? Whatever you write, you need to tell a tale in a way that illuminates its inner meaning (like Silverberg and Tales of Majipoor?). 4.5 stars "The Tomb of the Pontifex Dvorn" (2011) depicts a pair of young academic friends (a romantic historian and a phlegmatic archeologist) getting sent to the supposed hometown of the legendary founder of Majipoor’s 12,000-year-old human governmental system, the first Pontifex Dvorn, to curate his supposed tomb. Sublime discovery and crushing disappointment ensue amid questions of integrity, scholarship, tourism, and truth. And a roman a clef appearance by Egypt’s controversial antiquities “expert” promoter Zahi Hawass, “played” here by Hawid Zayayil, the four-armed Skandar Superintendent of Antiquities. 4.5 stars In "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (2004), a callow failure at various trades becomes the apprentice of a stern and sexy female fifth-level adept. Against expectation, he finds himself thirstily absorbing magical knowledge while trying to divert his enflaming lust for his teacher into house cleaning. Do the numerous sand roaches under foot imply that she’s a Circe? The wizardly rom com feels a little out of place in such a hitherto science fictional world. 3.5 stars In "Dark Times at the Midnight Market" (2010), a diminutive, tentacled Vroon (who dominates his sensible two-headed Su-Suheris business partner and scorns his hulking four-armed furry-smelly Skandar cleaning woman) tries to save his formerly thriving magical item shop by making a love potion for a scoundrel, wastrel, and idler of a human Marquis. Will the Vroon learn “the great peril in meddling in the romantic affairs of the aristocracy”? 3.5 stars "The Way They Wove the Spells in Sippulgar" (2009) is told by the collection’s only first-person narrator, a “practical man of business” who, scorning the current boom in religions and paranormal belief, travels to Sippulgar, famed for “its abundance of superstitious creeds and cults,” to investigate the mysterious disappearance of his brother-in-law, who apparently had tried to start a new religion there. Will the “plain worldly man” learn that there are more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in his mercantile worldview? 4 stars In "The Seventh Shrine" (1998), Pontifex Valentine (the protagonist of the first Majipoor novel) visits a 20,000-year-old cursed and ruined (“parched and broken”) Metamorph city where a Metamorph archeologist has been ritually murdered. Valentine must solve the mystery in order to have any hope of integrating Metamorphs into mainstream Majipoor society. Can aliens and aliens ever understand one another or live in peace together? 4 stars The stories may be read individually in any order without having read the other Majipoor works, but would benefit from familiarity with the others. The stories feature different protagonists, some of whom are referred to as historical figures in other stories. He organizes this collection such that the first story reveals the origin of Stiamot, the Coronal who started the war with the Metamoprhs resulting in their banishment to a reservation, while the last story features Valentine Pontifex trying to resolve the Metamorph-Human conflict 8000 years later. Like his other Majipoor stories, these climax with the protagonist learning something that rocks his world. Like his other Majipoor stories, these are marked by vivid sf descriptions and moments, like “The air was parched and crisp with a brittle quality to it, as though it could be torn in one’s hands like dry paper and crumbled to dust in one’s fingers,” and “His vision wavered; his tentacles trembled.” Like his other Majipoor stories, these feature some Jack Vance-like dry wit, like “The logic did not seem entirely impeccable,” and “He finally mistook diminished indifference for actual warmth.” There is much to like here for fans of SF set on other worlds, but it should be noted that there are very few (almost no) large- or small-scale violent action scenes. Stefan Rudnicki reads the audiobook with his usual professional manner and resonant voice. View all my reviews
Beyond the Outposts by Max Brand
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Pulp Western Prairie Bromance Tragedy “It seemed a fitting thing to me that such a man as my father, having gone on his way through the country, should drag behind him a wake of this sort, full of hatred and blind fury. I remember that I rejoiced because of the greatness of his strength—because to a boy nothing seems really worthwhile but strong hands and a stout heart.” Under at least seventeen pseudonyms Frederick Schiller Faust (1892-1944) wrote hundreds of novels, short stories, and poems in multiple genres, including mystery, romance, and medical. His most famous pseudonym was Max Brand, under which he published umpteen early 20th-century pulp westerns like the book that was turned into the classic 1939 movie (with Jimmy Stewart and Marlene Dietrich!) Destry Rides Again. Beyond the Outposts (serialized in 1925) is the first novel of Brand’s I’ve read, and I found it pretty impressive: a compact, serious pulp grandfather to Thomas Berger’s more sprawling and humorous Little Big Man (1964). Brand’s first-person narrator, Lew Dorset starts by saying, “Books are queer things, mostly written by people who want to show how many ways they can tell a lie,” only to claim that “Everything that I put down here is fact, and I hope the doubters will come to me for the proofs. That includes you, Chuck Morris. All that I write is the truth and only half the truth, at that, because how can Indians and the prairie be packed into words?” After that provocative prologue, Lew concisely tells the story of his life from a babe to a twenty-two year old man, including the loss of his mother and father at birth, the abusive upbringing at the hands of his slimy and sadistic uncle, his flight from Virginia to the prairie in pursuit of his outlaw father, his adoption by the Sioux and life among them, and above all his tragic bromance with the aforementioned Chuck Morris, his best friend who, he hints early on, ended up his bitterest foe. The complexity of Chuck Morris’ character and relationship with Lew is neat. When sixteen-year-old Lew first meets the two years older Chuck, Chuck seems more moral and aware because of his passionate denouncement of slavery, while Lew ignorantly and furiously defends “Virginia gentlemen” and their slave system. After recovering from the brutal fight sparked by their disagreement, they become inseparable bosom buddies, with Lew doing a fair amount of hero worship of the older boy, finding Chuck the most handsome man he's ever seen, a hero a young God with a golden head and flashing eyes, and muscle and pride and strength beyond his size. Chuck also teaches Lew how to survive on the prairie and gives him valuable perspective on Indians, pointing out that there are good and bad Indians just like with white men. But as the novel develops, Chuck becomes a self-centered, irresponsible, unethical heel who doesn’t take being criticized or rejected very well and says things like, “It's not what a man is but what he seems to be” that counts. The book is a paean to guns (at one point Lew opines that shooting a rifle is a science using your head like taking pictures with a camera, whereas shooting a pistol is an art using the heart like making an oil painting), horses (the legendary wild White Smoke is glorious), and the prairie (sublime and open, though maybe it had richer life than Brand writes it). Its depiction of Native Americans is often impressively ahead of its times, criticizing the “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” concept, demonstrating how different tribes had different cultures, relating with respect and interest details of prairie Indian culture (from fighting to marrying), and condemning the practice of white people to trade trash to the Indians like poor quality knives, defective guns, and strong, impure alcohol. However, Lew falls in love with a white girl instead of with an Indian girl, he repeatedly says things like, “I had to return to my own kind,” he calls Pawnees and Cheyenne “horse-thieving red devils,” and the Sioux girl Chuck falls in love with, Black Bird, is the most attractive young lady in camp because she’s half white: “No Indian ever had eyes so big and tender or hair so soft.” Finally, much of Brand’s novel reads like a western Princess of Mars, wherein a white man leads a bunch of barbarians to victory against their enemies. Thus, it’s a mixed bag re race and cultural understanding, much more sympathetic to Indians than most other genre works of its era, but still condescending to them. About gender, it’s less impressive. Black Bird is underdeveloped and so is Lew’s love interest Mary. The vivid characters are all male. Chuck and Lew and his Father and Sitting Wolf and Standing Bear are all much more interesting than any female character. Some things get a little obvious in the plot, like the identity of the Pawnee war chief Bald Eagle, which I figured out ten chapters before Lew thinks of it. But Brand writes some wise lines about human nature etc., like “It rarely pays to bribe a person through affection; it costs a part of their love.” And some vivid similes, like “They handled me as if I were a fire that might go out and like a fire that might burn them to a crisp.” And some savory dialogue, like “You sneakin’ wolves… can’t you find no man-sized meat? Have you got to eat veal?” And the ending is bracingly bleak. Kristoffer Tabori, with his deep scratchy weathered voice, is the ideal reader for the audiobook. View all my reviews
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The Sandman: Act III by Dirk Maggs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Well-Produced, But the Graphic Novels Are Better Sandman Act III is the third Sandman graphic novels adaptation “dramatized and directed for audio by Dirk Maggs.” It is comprised of the stories found in the graphic novel trade paperbacks Brief Lives (1994) and World’s End (1995), plus a few stand-alones. Episode 1, The Song of Orpheus (1991?), integrates into the Sandman opus the tragic myth of the sublime singer and his newlywed newly dead wife Eurydice, casting Orpheus as the son of Morpheus (Dream) and Calliope. The production provides Orpheus’ song, including lyrics and synthesizer music, but I’d prefer to hear it in my imagination in the graphic novel than in my ears in this audio adaptation. That said, the art in the graphic novel is so coarse and ugly that this may be a case when overall the audio version is aesthetically better. 3 stars In Episode 2, Fear of Falling (1992), a Broadway playwright is about to give up on the production of his play in rehearsal when he dreams that Dream gives him another option for his nightmares. It’s short and fine. 3 stars In Episode 3, The Flowers of Romance (1998), an aging, out of place, sad satyr asks a last boon of Desire. 3 stars Episodes 4-12 comprise the main part of Act III in the story arc of Brief Lives (1994), depicting Dream/Morpheus’ development as the gloomy Endless one quests with his unstable little sister Delirium for their jovial AWOL big brother Destruction (“He abandoned his responsibilities”), accompanied by the strange and sudden deaths of a few immortal humans. As the plot inevitably leads him to a devastating reunion with his son, Dream more than once protests too much that he hasn’t changed. The 5-star graphic novel Brief Lives has strange, beautiful, wonderful art and is an example of the original being better than any audio (or even video) version could be. There are pages with mesmerizing layout, color, and form, like the sequence where Dream enters Delirium’s realm, with collaged photographs superimposed on a painted and crayoned background lacking usual panel frames of reference, and like the giant two-page spread showing the small, faint characters walking outside at night with sublime stars above. There are neat visual touches like Delirium’s changing hairdos and Dream’s increasingly attenuated and elongated form as the tragedy unfolds, and the clever strategy of giving the speech balloons of the different characters distinctive colors and fonts to suit their personalities and moods, such that Delirium’s are a riot of color and scribbled letters, Dream’s black with gothicky white font, Bast’s faux-Egyptian “hieroglyphic,” and so on. This can’t be approximated in an audible or movie format. It is only possible in comics. 4 stars In Episode 13, How They Met Themselves (1999), Dante Gabriel Rosetti, his sick wife, and a young masochistic Algernon Swinburne meet Desire on a train, leading to an exploration of what happens if you meet yourself: True love? Death? It’s a neat short story. 4 stars The last six episodes are the stand-alones from World’s End (1995), framed by a reality storm stranding travelers from various worlds and times in an inn, where some of them tell stories. My favorites are “The Golden Boy,” about Prez Rickard, a small-town clock repairer who becomes the youngest and best president in the history of an alternate America, ever rebuffing the attempts of Boss Smiley to “help” him, and especially “Cerements,” about the Necropolis Latharge and the different customs of different cultures for dealing with dead bodies and some visits to a creepy catacombs. “A Tale of Two Cities,” “Cluracan’s Tale,” and “Hob’s Leviathan” are OK, and “World’s Ends” climaxes in a sublime funeral procession for… 4 stars I thought in rereading the graphic novels while listening to the audio adaptation that Sandman and its world are pretty white. An African American chauffeur called Ruby isn’t treated very well by the story. Dream and most characters are also pretty heterosexual, though Desire—like Wanda, Foxglove, and Hazel from A Game of You in the Act II adaptation—are welcome exceptions or ambiguities. (By the way, the “it” and “its” that refer to Delirium in the graphic novel are changed in the audio adaptation to “they” and “their” etc.) Most every word from the original comics (and graphic novel collections) is retained for the audio adaptation, for which the author-narrator Neil Gaiman reads extra descriptions of things like settings and characters depicted by the art in the original. Like a radio drama, the audio adaptation also adds music and sound effects and a full cast of voice actors, most of whom are excellent, especially James McAvoy (Dream), David Harewood (Destruction), and Justin Vivian Bond (Desire). The adaptation rearranges some of the graphic novel issues (especially the stand-alone ones) to make a more coherent overall story. At times the audio version gets everything just right, as with the terrifying chanting of the Bacchante as they approach Orpheus and the subtle and lovely synth music in the background when in Brief Lives Dream returns to his castle after meeting his son, and the total effect is quite moving. However. There are also times when the music becomes too dramatic. I never appreciated the grandiose synthesizer movie type music starting each episode. Barnabas barking now and then before or after he speaks (English) is distracting (as if we’d forget he is a dog). And Gaiman’s tendency to too often too pregnantly pause when the punctuation or rhythm of the prose doesn’t call for any pausing started wearing on me. Like this: Orpheus (pause) is sitting (pause) on a rock. Night has fallen (pause) over the castle of Dream. Lizzy (pause) leaning on the mantel, gazes (pause) at the picture. As a result, I found myself feeling relieved during the six World’s End episodes when voice actors narrated the framed stories instead of Gaiman. After listening to the first three Sandman adaptations and rereading the graphic novels with them, I believe that the original graphic novels are the ideal medium for Gaiman’s story, that the art, layouts, colors, varied fonts, colored speech balloons, etc. are all more impactful (on this reader) than listening to the sound effects and music and talented voice actors and charismatic Gaiman. View all my reviews
The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, vol 1 - Sir Richard Francis Burton [modern library classics] by Richard Francis Burton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars An Orgy of Story—a Feast of Fantasy—a Sensual World of High-Stakes Storytelling In Sir Richard F. Burton’s splendid translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1888), clever Shahrazad (who knows countless stories and how to tell them) keeps her head on her shoulders by stringing along her misogynistic Bluebeard of a King husband by starting a compelling story one night so he must let her live the next day so he can hear the end of it the next night, and then starting a new story right after finishing the first, and so on. Many of her stories feature characters who tell stories in which characters tell stories, as when she tells one in which a reeve tells one in which a thumbless man tells one. There’s also poetry recited throughout, quoted from famous Muslim poets riffing on male or female beauty, the vicissitudes of fortune, the perfidy of human nature, and so on. Seemingly everyone can tell an entertaining story or quote an appropriate poem, and often their lives (like Shahrazad’s) depend on it. There are no unreliable narrators or tellers of tall tales: everything anyone says happened really happened, and the more outlandish (“wonderful”) something is, the more it’s believed and appreciated. Just the first volume of ten contains in its thirty-four nights things like the following: Lovesick tailors, clever fishermen, good merchants, miraculous physicians, hunchbacked dwarfs, monocular Kalandars, randy slaves, fickle Caliphs, tyrannical Sultans, treacherous Wazirs, wise Shaykhs, necromantic princesses, ensorcelled princes, calamitous crones, demanding husbands, murderous siblings, envious neighbors, beautiful youths, luminous maidens, troublesome corpses, powerful Ifrits, resentful Jinn, helpful Jinniyah, talking animals, winged horses, flying serpents… And-- Wonder-filled Baghdad, down-to-earth Cairo, blasphemous cities, sumptuous palaces, busy markets, hidden trapdoors, forbidden rooms, unknown islands, giant magnets, couplets in praise of beauty moles (for which Arabic has at least fifty different words!), pomegranate conserve, rose-flavored sherbet, fritters soaked in bees’ honey, and “A bowl of cumin ragout containing chickens’ breasts, fricandoed and flavoured with sugar, pistachios, musk and rose water” (after eating that dish, be sure to wash your hands before making love to your sweetheart)… A-and-- Executions, reprieves, revenges, murders, mutilations, amputations, petrifactions, reversals, reunions, damnations, salvations, transformations, magical combats, shopping sprees, wild carousing, and sex—lotsa sex! In his Introduction, Burton (1821-90) says he’s trying to present as accurate and complete a translation as he can, unlike earlier translators who “castrated” the original. He’s impressively open-minded: “we must remember that grossness and indecency, in fact les turpitudes, are matters of time and place; what is offensive in England is not so in Egypt.” And he seeks to approximate the original “by writing as the Arab would have written in English,” a rich English infused with archaisms and 19th-century slang and everything in between and ranging from the bawdy and earthy to the sublime and spiritual. From this: “Thereupon sat a lady bright of blee, with brow beaming brilliancy, the dream of philosophy, whose eyes were fraught with Babel's gramarye and her eyebrows were arched as for archery; her breath breathed ambergris and perfumery and her lips were sugar to taste and carnelian to see.” To this: “…the first [box] which they brought to him to open was that wherein I was; and, when I felt his hands upon it, my senses failed me and I bepissed myself in my funk, the water running out of the box.” And from this: “Then we sat talking, I and she (and I was drowned in the sea of her love, dazed in the desert of my passion for her), till the merchants opened their shops; when I rose and fetched her all she sought to the tune of five thousand dirhams.” To this: “All this time the Porter was carrying on with them, kissing, toying, biting, handling, groping, fingering; whilst one thrust a dainty morsel in his mouth, and another slapped him; and this cuffed his cheeks, and that threw sweet flowers at him; and he was in the very paradise of pleasure, as though he were sitting in the seventh sphere among the Houris of Heaven.” If Burton is writing a “Plain and Literal Translation,” the original is anything but! Anyway. It is better read as a book than listened to, because 1) there are no unabridged audiobooks of the whole thing, and 2) the unabridged LibriVox reading of Vol. I leaves out Burton’s numerous, detailed, and idiosyncratic notes and is read by different readers of varying quality (most being fine but at least one being excruciatingly monotonous). And Burton’s notes are an interesting treasury of information, from varieties of “tongue kissing” to the Arabic attitude to smallpox. They explain Islamic (Persian/Egyptian/Ottoman) culture (“A large hollow navel is looked upon not only as a beauty, but in children it is held a promise of good growth”), religious references (“The new moon carefully looked for by all Moslems because it begins the Ramazan-feast”), Arabic grammar (“In Arabic the World is female”), Arabic etymologies (“straight stature like the letter I” in a story is annotated, “Arab. ‘Kamat Alfiyyah’ = like the letter Alif, a straight perpendicular stroke deriving from an Egyptian hieroglyph”), and failures in previous translations (“Lane pleasantly remarks, ‘A list of these sweets is given in the original, but I have thought it better to omit the names’ (!) Dozy does not shirk his duty”). The notes reveal Burton’s caustic wit (the note about “the Holy City” reads, “Arab. ‘Al-Kuds’ = holiness. There are few cities which in our day have less claim to this title than Jerusalem; and, curious to say, the ‘Holy Land’ shows Jews, Christians and Moslems all in their worst form”). And his 19th-century biases, (“Debauched women prefer negroes on account of the size of their parts”). His views on “Eastern” and European cultures are mixed, so in one note he’ll criticize “backwards” Eastern methods of hoist-hanging criminals compared to more “civilized” Western drop-hanging and in another opine that decorative Koranic inscriptions on walls are “generally far superior” to “our frescoes.” Although at times I got exhausted by following another narrator’s story inside another narrator’s story, even when the same genre stories are juxtaposed, as with the barber’s tales of his six delusional and hapless brothers, I found pointed variations on a theme. Anyway, the nested fairytale-like stories of the Nights are rich in human nature. I read Vol. I in Tom White’s Kindle version, which inexpensively presents the first two volumes of the full Burton text with all the hyperlinked, easy to navigate notes (though without, alas, illustrations). I need a break from the rich feast of story and poetry but will surely go on to Vol. II and the rest, even if it takes me till the end of my days. View all my reviews
Freddy the Magician by Walter Rollin Brooks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Freddy Does (or Undoes) Magic Freddy is quite the protean pig (poet, detective, newspaper editor, banker, etc.), but when he starts taking magic lessons from Presto, the fired white rabbit of an unpleasant and shady magician called Signor Zingo, who himself has been fired from Boomschmidt's Colossal and Unparalleled Circus after pilfering the petty cash, Freddy realizes there will be some limits to what he can accomplish: “Of course I could never do card tricks; you have to have hands for that and I’ve got trotters. But I bet I could learn some of the others. Maybe I could give performances.” (He is often an optimistic pig, which is one of his charms.) In Freddy the Magician (1947), the fourteenth Freddy the Pig book, then, author Walter R. Brooks demystifies “magic” by humorously anatomizing its trickery, from misdirection and secret pockets and hidden clips and elastic bands to sibling look alike cats and unobtrusive mice. The novel features not one but two climactic magical performances that devolve into duels between rival magicians featuring numerous feats of sleight of hand (or of trotter) and revealing to the audiences the tricks which have been deceiving them. Will Signor Zingo or Professor Frederico get the upper hand/trotter in their feud? Which magician will prove to the people and animals of the fictional New York town of Centerboro and environs that he’s the better mind reader? Will Freddy ever be able to get the unpaying and unwanted Zingo to move out of the town hotel? Why does Zingo want his missing magic hat so badly? In addition to Freddy’s magician’s war with Zingo, the book (like most Freddy novels) features at least one sub-plot: Leo the circus lion has to shave his luxuriant locks and come to terms with his new identity as the Great Bald African Lion, while Jinx the black cat has to deal with his irritatingly boastful sister Minx. In addition to the pleasures of talking animal fantasy as performed by Brooks (it’s a given that animals can talk with each other and or with humans) and of the comical situations he imagines (a fired magician’s rabbit teaching magic to a pig, a lion disguising himself as a pig disguising himself as a boy disguising himself as an Indian, a jail so appealing that released inmates commit crimes to get put back in, a henhouse blown into a tree on the local millionaire’s estate, a department store where the clerks and customers regularly end up deservedly slapping each other, and so on), like most Freddy novels, this one also has plenty of the following virtues: Brooks’ straight-faced, tongue-in-cheek animal facts, like: “Cows are plain and there is nothing they can do about it, but they are very kindhearted animals, and it is a pretty mean man who will deliberately insult a cow,” and “People who don’t know much about pigs are not likely to class them as dangerous animals; but an angry pig is something that no farmer in his senses will tackle barehanded.” Brooks’ humor for adults (as a boy, I read the Freddy books as serious adventures and never laughed at anything in them, but reading them now I regularly smile and chuckle), as when an aggrieved Leo greets Freddy: “Ah, it’s the pig,” said Leo as if speaking to himself. “Come to look his last upon an old comrade. Come to gibe and to sneer, no doubt—to point the finger of scorn and make the dirty crack. Ah, me, the great King of Beasts, to be made a laughingstock for those who, in the days of his greatness, stood in awe before his strength; who, in the words of Shakespeare, ‘smiled at his purr and trembled at his growl!’” “That’s not in Shakespeare,” said Freddy. “I have his Complete-Works-in-One-Volume at home, and there’s nothing like that in it.” Brooks’ quirky wisdom for adults, as when Freddy and Leo the circus lion talk about self-identity and mirrors: “When I see myself, I think I look one way, and then I find out that I look quite different. And it makes me wonder if when I think I look sort of noble I’m not really looking just sort of half-witted. Like when I’m talking to you, now, for instance—I think I look probably worried, but reasonably intelligent. But—do I? I just can’t be sure. Maybe I’m really making idiotic faces at you. You got a mirror handy?” “You, being a lion, I suppose want to look dignified and interesting, with just a little touch of ferocity. I, being a pig, want to look clever and good-humored, with just a dash of romance. Probably neither of us will ever look the way we want to. But if we forget mirrors we may get somewhere close to it. Watching mirrors all the time just makes us look anxious and a little foolish.” Brooks’ flexible and capable style, which ranges from the G-man slang favored by Jinx the black cat to the elevated “poetry” of Freddy when he has some spare time to compose. Brooks’ life lessons for kids, as when Freddy feels sorry for his enemy or accepts the aid of caterpillars and beetles or the narrator opines that “in a fight, or in a contest of any kind, the one who keeps his temper has an advantage that is equal to two shotguns and a small cannon.” Kurt Wiese’s monocrhome illustrations, which are mostly fine, for, in addition to drawing animals more realistically than, say, Disney, he has a knack for choosing the most interesting to see scenes in each chapter. While being an entertaining entry in the series, Freddy the Magician is not perfect. Signor Zingo is too early too clearly a villain (his mustache’s ends turn up like horns!), and with his name is a bit too much of an unsavory non-WASP character. The hotel manager Mr. Groper’s “sesquipedalianism” becomes too much of a good thing: a little “I ain’t mad… Just, as you might say, kind of reduced to the nadir of pessimistic hypochondriasis… the ultimate and nethermost profundity of the abyss” goes a long way. And the story ends too abruptly and incompletely. I recommend readers new to Freddy to start with Freddy the Politician, Freddy the Detective, Freddy and the Poppinjay, or Freddy and the Ignormus, but really any of the books can be read in any order and most of them, like this one, should amuse you. View all my reviews
Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “The point is, there is no point. Choose your own.” As the last book in Anne Leckie’s Imperial Radch Trilogy, Ancillary Mercy (2015) begins, her first-person narrator/protagonist Breq (a former sentient troop transport ship now a Fleetship Captain limited to a single “human” body) has just about recovered from a shoulder injury suffered a few days ago when, in the climax of the second novel, Ancillary Sword (2014), she was almost killed. Breq’s implants enable her to access the thoughts and perceptions of her warship Mercy of Kalr, who simultaneously monitors all its human crew members (“I could see what the ship saw”) as well as those of the friendly Athoek space station. Whenever she wants, Breq can observe the actions and words and moods of her crew, like her Lieutenants, Tisarwat (a seventeen-year-old violet-eyed “baby” Lieutenant), Ekalu (an up from the ranks officer), and Seivarden (an officer from Breq’s transport ship days still in love with her). When you factor in Breq’s keen observation, cool wisdom, and accurate insights into human nature gained by over two thousand years dealing with people, she is basically a first-person omniscient narrator, able to tell us things like, “Tisarwat knew she had won.” Breq is facing a fraught situation. The far-flung Radch empire is disintegrating, as factions led by (at least) two of the many clones of the three-thousand or so year old Emperor Anaander Mianaai, one of which is bent on ever more expansion, the other on consolidation, have begun a hot civil war, whose effects have reached Athoek—its gate, station, and annexed (i.e., conquered and occupied) planet. Both sides of the conflict want Athoek, and the forces of the worst Emperor clone most enraged at Breq have just captured a palace on a nearish world and are probably sending ships to destroy Breq and Mercy of Kalr and maybe Athoek Station as well. And Breq has to visit Athoek Station to deal with the discovery of an apparently six-hundred-year-old “cousin” ancillary enemy of Anaander Mianaai, as well as with the ineffectual and or hostile Athoek System Governor and the troublesomely entitled Athoek head priest (who wants to move undesirables out of the station and down on the planet to make way for aristo citizens). The civil war has diverted unexpected citizens from other systems to Athoek Station, stretching living space too far. Breq must also visit the planet to witness the interrogation of a citizen who tried to kill the asshole aristocrat who tried to force her to kill Breq in the second novel. The planet is seeing plenty of conflict between tea plantation workers and owners, too (hey, the Radch seems to run on tea!). And any number of agents of any number of the Emperor’s clones from any number of her factions may be lurking anywhere around Athoek (station or planet). And the efficiency of two of Breq’s lieutenants is being threatened by their lover’s quarrel. AND another “Translator” representative of the “mysterious and terrifying” alien Presga (whose technology totally supersedes and overpowers anything the Radch have) has just shown up on the scene, with sublime powers, egregious ignorance, and a penchant for fish sauce. A host of problems, then, political, social, cultural, psychological, interpersonal, logistical, and so on, are challenging Breq. Fortunately, her calm intelligence and desire to promote autonomy for all tend to induce AIs, their ancillaries, reasonable people, and even aliens to trust and confide in her. Unfortunately, some people (and maybe some ships) are not in tune with Breq’s agenda, especially not the Emperor of the Radch. Fortunately, Breq is good at thinking up effective plans for any crisis. As one character asks her at one point, “Are you always right about everything?” (view spoiler)[And that is a problem with the novel: the conflict is too easily resolved thanks to Breq’s superior qualities, a Super Gun, and some almost deus ex machina stuff via AIs wanting to be autonomous but really liking their humans so it’s OK and via some super powered aliens that will ensure some of the “bad” humans stay in line. I remember as I got into this novel being at first surprised and then a little disappointed that the whole thing is going to happen at Athoek, like the second novel. The first novel felt more open to possibilities and cultures, the second one introduced a new world of tea plantations, and then this third one just hung around that world of tea plantations. For space opera esque sf, it felt limited. (hide spoiler)] Apart from seeming a little too good to be true, Breq is a neat narrator-protagonist: wise, observant, sensitive, ironic, capable, humane, and given to humming or singing (e.g., “My heart is a fish hiding in the water grass”). In thinking that she’s not human (“I’m an ancillary”) and that no one could love her, while (of course) being intensely human and very likeable, she’s reminiscent of Martha Wells’ Murderbot. Anne Leckie writes some nice SF dialogue, like: “This would probably be a lot easier if we had the right tools.” “Story of my life for the last three thousand years.” And some keen lines, like: “I had learned to be wary whenever a priest suggested that her personal aims were in fact god’s will.” One effective feature of the Ancillary novels is that I usually have no idea what gender the characters are. From hints in the first and/or second novels, Breq is probably female, Seivarden male, but I start forgetting that when for long stretches only female pronouns are used to refer to all characters, and for many like the Eminence, the Station Administrator, the Governor, the various members of Mercy of Kalr’s crew, and so on, I have NO Idea whether they’re male or female or what. It’s a little like how I feel after reading Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. About the audio book reader: Adjoa Andoh does perfect voices for the main characters like Brett and Seiverden and and Tisarwat and Mercy and Station and Sword etc. But she tends to overdo the unpleasant characters like the Emperor and the head priest, so that their high pitched, inane, hysterical voices become excruciating to listen to, which may be the point, but which is overkill given the already plenty unpleasant qualities that Leckie gives them in her text. I loved the first book, liked the second, and was finally disappointed by this third one. View all my reviews
Where We Meet the World: The Story of the Senses by Ashley Ward
My rating: 4 of 5 stars You Can’t Taste Soy Sauce with Your Testicles! *There is no such thing as color. *Our pupils dilate when we’re moved, so we find big pupils warm and compelling, which is why Renaissance women used nightshade (belladonna!) to dilate their pupils. *The key part of our hearing apparatus mediating between the inner and outer ears evolved from the gills of fish. *We lift our hands to our faces once every two minutes of the day, partly to smell them and what they’ve touched. *Coffee has eight hundred different odor releasing molecules, but the brain turns them into one thing, coffee. *Garlic improves our body odor. *We tend to prefer the smell of t-shirts worn a few days by people from our own university to that of people worn by other universities. *Catfish taste with their bodies, flies with their feet. *Our fingers have two hundred nerve fibers per centimeter, our back nine. *When dogs defecate and cattle graze, they tend to line up north to south. *A tick has a limited sensory experience of the world compared to us, but it’s rich to the tick! Those are some of the many savory items in Ashley Ward’s Where We Meet the World: The Story of the Senses (2023), an engaging and stimulating book about how we perceive the world via our five (or fifty-three!?) senses (faculties that detect specific stimuli by means of receptors dedicated to those stimuli). Ward explains how we sense and why and how our senses have shaped us individually and as a species. His first five chapters cover the five main senses, the sixth introduces unappreciated senses, and the last explores how perception works. Throughout, Ward uses easy vocabulary, defines the occasional scientific jargon, provides plenty of compelling examples (from human and animal and plant life), cites plenty of interesting scientific studies, and generally entertainingly illuminates perception and the senses. Here are some of the things that I should remember from the book: *Our senses are all interconnected with each other. *There is no universal human hierarchy of the senses (European cultures prioritize sight, other cultures taste or smell, etc.). *We have more than the five basic senses. *Everything about our perception of the world is influenced by our biology, experiences, personality, mood, health, and cultural biases. *Each of us perceives the world uniquely (no one’s “red, bread, or Beethoven” are the same as anyone else’s). *The brain is miraculous in the vast amount of data it processes and interprets and uses to predict and fill in gaps and coordinate based on our different sense receptors and our interior and exterior conditions. *To study perception and the senses effectively, multiple fields are needed, including biology, psychology, economics, and medicine. *We still can’t figure out the relationship between the objective reality of the world and our subjective experience of it. Audiobook reader David Morley Hale is deliberate and clear and has an appealing, vivid north England accent, pronouncing the u sound in words like some, up, us, come, study, just, much, etc. like the oa in soap. I’m grateful to Nataliya for reading and reviewing this book so as to make me want to read it! View all my reviews
City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “…it is my responsibility to see it.” “Did the street just change? Just at the corner of his eye? Though it seems impossible, he’s sure it did: for one second, he did not see the tumbledown building fronts and deserted homes, but rather immense, slender skyscrapers of gleaming white and gold.” Robert Jackson Bennett’s fantasy-mystery novel City of Stairs (2014) has an interesting premise: for seventy-five years, this hitherto enslaved India-like culture has been occupying the formerly dominant and expansionist Russian-like Continent (AKA the Holy Lands), turning the tables by killing their gods, a side effect of which being that the “miracles” the gods had performed or enabled vanished, including, for instance, most of the works accomplished by the builder god, such that whole temples and other buildings and infrastructure instantly disappeared, along with whatever people happened to be inside them at the time. Even the climate changed. The former enslaved Saypur have imposed on the Continent draconian World Regulations, such that no one can worship, research, or even refer to the former gods or attempt any divine miracles or even study Continental history. While Saypur is thriving as the dominant world culture, the backwards and demoralized Continent languishes in poverty and disease. Needless to say, both the people of Saypur and the Continentals hate and Otherize each other. The plot develops from the brutal murder of Efrem Pangyui, a Saypur reformer/historian who’d been living in the central Continental city of Bulikov, supposedly to research their culture and history. Sent to investigate his murder is Shara Komayd, ace agent for the Saypur Ministry of Foreign Affairs and great-granddaughter of the legendary man who found a way to kill the Continental divinities. Shara is accompanied by her “secretary,” a giant northern “barbarian” Dreyling (Viking analogue) called Sigurd who seems made for violence, has preternaturally acute hearing, knows no frostbite, and picks hot coals with his bare fingers to light his pipe. Sixteen years ago, Shara committed an infamous breach of protocol (exposing the corruption of a high-level official) and hence has been unable to return home to Saypur, having to stay permanently out in the field on the Continent doing dangerous dirty work with Sigurd, cleaning up divine remnants or supernatural beings left behind by the main gods. Complicating her murder investigation in Bulikov is the Continental rich man Vohannes Votrov (“Vo”) with whom she’d had an intense sexual relationship in their university days. Plenty of fraught unfinished business between them. One of the nice things about the novel is how Bennett gradually (and efficiently) reveals the back-history of characters like Vo, Sigurd, and Shara through mostly well-integrated flashbacks written in past tense (the main plot occurs in present tense). Violent action starts after a few chapters, when Shara and Sigurd attend a fund-raising party at Vo’s mansion, and fanatical attackers make things interesting for the bored Sigurd and for the primed reader. (Vo is the leader of the New Bulikov faction, dedicated to improving the quality of life and economic health of the city and bitter foes of the reactionary Restorationist faction, who want to restore the “glorious” past.) I found the main characters compelling, the narrative world original, the themes relevant, the writing vivid, and the plot unpredictable. I enjoyed reading the book: a fantasy novel where the protagonist is a thirty-five-year-old bespectacled woman spy-historian with a giant, ultra-capable male “secretary” operating in an occupied city, with some resonance for contemporary situations like Israel and Palestine: “Say what you like of a belief, of a party, of a finance system, of a power—all I see is privilege and its consequences. States are not, in my opinion, composed of structures supporting privilege. Rather, they are composed of structures denying it—in other words, deciding who is not invited to the table.” I liked the questioning of whether gods direct their followers or vice versa; the concept of different realities for different gods and their followers; the complex situation whereby the former enslaved state/people are now occupying their former oppressors; the “miracles” and effects of the gods; the relationships between Shara and Sigurd, Vo, and even the scary cynical Vinya (Shara’s aunt and boss); the dialogue (mostly) and descriptions (especially); and Shara’s increasing unease with her career path as patriotic agent of the state and the cold-blooded status quo forced on her and the Continent by the realpolitik of people like her aunt. I like how the history of the cultures and characters are worked in little by little via flashbacks and chapter epigraphs as the story develops. I liked Bennett’s imaginative fantasy writing: “The sun, bright and terrible and blazing. It is not the huge ball of light she is so accustomed to: it is like the sky is a sheet of thin yellow paper, and someone is standing behind it holding an oily, flaming torch.” Despite a couple kvetches (e.g., it shouldn't take Shara longer than me to identify the villain, and despite the title stairs play no big role), I enjoyed the novel a lot and look forward to the second and third ones in the trilogy. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
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