The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Clear, Concise, Appalling, and Relevant Roman History In The Storm Before the Storm (2017) Mike Duncan recounts the chaotic and important years in the Roman Republic from 146 to 78 BC, because, he says, that era just before Rome became a full-blown imperial empire contained the seeds of its later decline but has not yet been given enough attention. His account begins with the nearly simultaneous sacking of Carthage and Corinth in 146 BC, which made Rome the preeminent Mediterranean power, then sets forth some of the problems besetting the fledgling empire (unhappy legions, bitterly opposed Patrician Senate optimates and Plebian Assembly populares, transformation of many independently owned small farms into vast oligarchical farms, ever thorny question of citizenship for non-Roman Italians, restive provinces, migrating barbarians, etc.), and then relates the increasing breakdown in the Roman political process to include ever more thuggish behavior and mob violence as the optimates and populares became ever more at odds over social and political reforms. Interesting figures that Duncan introduces include the Gracchi (Tiberius and Gaius), Gaius Marius, Sulla, Cinna, and Jugurtha. Outstanding wars that he recounts include the two Servile Wars of Sicily, the Jugurthine War in North Africa, the Cimbric War in Gaul and Northern Italy, the Social War in Italy, the war against Mithradates in the east, and the Civil War between Cinna’s and Sulla’s factions. I was mostly ignorant about all this history, having learned more about Rome from Augustus to the decline and fall, so I found Gaius Marius and Sulla compelling, as well as the descent from traditional rules into demagoguery and violence in the Roman political sphere, with street-fighting, stone-throwing, assassination, massacre, and the like becoming common (with victims being murdered in sacred temples, heads being posted in the Forum, and bodies being dumped in the Tiber). It doesn’t seem SO far from what might have happened on January 6. Sulla’s reign of terror is truly appalling… Marius the sexagenarian stubbornly doing morning calisthenics in the forum to show (the jeering) people that he’s not too old to take a command of legionaries on campaign is cool. The long-suffering massive horde of Cimbri (northern “barbarians” from around Denmark) showing up on the edges of Roman influence just wanting a place to live in peace is sad… Duncan is a popular podcast host, and his concise and clearly communicative prose is a virtue of his history book. He defines key Latin terms when first introducing them, keeps us grounded in the timeline, and injects some dry humor now and then. Perhaps I sometimes found his idiom a bit too modern and colloquial, as when he says things like, “Every slave in Sicily now believed their ticket to freedom was in the mail,” or “The effective strategy caught the Romans with their togas down.” But he also has some fine lines that ring true and that from 2017 apply prophetically to the post-2020 election travesty in America: “But this was an age when a lie was not a lie, if a man had the audacity to keep asserting the lie was true.” View all my reviews
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The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Memories, Museums, Objects, Time, Love, and Istanbul “All these years later,” the Istanbul businessman narrator Kemal is recounting the time in Istanbul when, despite having had a compatible cosmopolitan fiancée named Sibel, the happiest moment in his life (though he didn’t know it at time) was when he was entering his distant relative (or in-law) Füsun from behind and biting her ear and losing her earring, which accessory “is the first exhibit in our museum.” It must be the Museum of Innocence, but what kind of museum is it? And what kind of “innocence”? And who is “our”? That in 1975 Kemal was a wealthy thirty-year-old member of Istanbul bourgeois society and Füsun a poor eighteen-year-old shop girl does not speak well for him. However, he is so frank in his account of his helpless and obsessive love and luxuriates so bittersweetly in his memories that he gained my sympathy. (Though if you’re unable to sink into his loving minutia, you may be bored.) The novel relates his relationship with Füsun, what happened when he lost her after his engagement party, what happened after he found her again, and how those things affected his relationships with his fiancée, friends, and family, his love dominating his life and leading him to collect (or pilfer) objects relating to her (berets, quince graters, salt shakers, cigarette stubs, china dogs, etc.) and to hit on the idea of making the Museum of Innocence. Kemal likes details (“The smallest detail demanded the most exacting examination”), especially sensual ones, like “I embraced her with all my strength and breathed in the scent of her neck. It was a mixture of algae, sea, burnt caramel, and children's biscuits, and every time I inhaled it, a surge of optimism would pass through me.” And he revels in the agony of lovesickness, for him a physical pain like acid radiating from his stomach, eating his organs, and shooting up to his head or down to his feet. “I would awake to the same pain, as if a black lamp were burning eternally inside me, radiating darkness.” Mixed throughout the novel’s exploration of universal human nature (love), are many exotic details of Turkish (Istanbul) culture. Ataturk; raki; stuffed zucchini and fried eggplant and yoghurt, baclava and halva; Galata Bridge and Galata Tower and Kadikoy and Beyoglu; leftists and rightists killing each other and coups imposing curfews; the poverty of the nation. Surnames being introduced in Turkey in 1934, and people basing them on their apartment buildings and vice versa. The complex feeling of admiration, criticism, and rivalry for western things like museums, movies, and morals. The circumscribed lives of Turkish women, dependent on men for careers and on traditions for good reputations. And descriptions like “that familiar Istanbul smell of sea and moss, pigeon droppings, coal smoke, car exhaust, and linden blossoms.” It’s not, by the way, a pious religious novel. Kemal recounts many instances of going to movies, restaurants, cafes, and bars or watching TV or going on drives, but apart from attending a funeral or two he never goes to a mosque. He drinks a prodigious amount of raki, but although he mentions hearing the call to prayer, he never once prays. In the 1970s, apparently, Bourgeois Istanbul society was secular. As he tells his story, Kemal muses on things like love, happiness, time, memory, objects, museums, novels, Istanbul, and the relationships between all those. In fact, it’s not only a story about Kemal’s obsessive love for Füsun but also of Orhan Pamuk’s nostalgic love for Istanbul. And Pamuk plays a post-modernist role in the story, especially near the end. Pamuk has Kemal talk interestingly (if at times obsessively and even repetitively) about museums and novels and objects and memories. Kemal says that the things in his museum are “objects of memory” and that “guards are there in a museum to tell visitors that they're in a place of worship like being in a mosque,” outside time. Throughout the novel Kemal refers to his (“our”) museum by noting Füsun’s things that are displayed in it or recreated tableaus or scenes from the novel in it. By the way, Pamuk was collecting objects to display in an actual Museum of Innocence (which opened in Istanbul in 2012) while writing them into his novel (which was published in 2008). John Lee reads the audiobook like, well, John Lee, so if you dislike his style, you’ll dislike the audiobook. Although I like his style, it is so distinctive that I find that the books he reads sound as if they were written by the same author. Not knowing Turkish, I have no idea as to the accuracy of Lee’s pronunciation of the many Turkish names here, but he says them consistently and with panache. Despite its agony, the novel is not bleak, “For a novel need not be full of sorrow just because his hero is a sufferer.” And Kemal has a sense of humor, as when he says, “’I'm not indignant,’ I said indignantly.” Or “They were so jealous of her that they would have found a way to drown her in a spoon full of water.” Or, above all, the many times he narrates his helpless love for Füsun, watching TV with her family or going out to movies with her husband and her. Indeed, Kemal feels a strange happiness that grows from his suffering, despite the fact that “No one recognizes the happiest moment in their lives when it happens.” Or maybe he’s happy decades later remembering his past love sickness. “After all,” he says, “isn't the purpose of a novel or of a museum for that matter to relate our memories with such sincerity as to transform individual happiness into a happiness all can share?” View all my reviews
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “You were a joy” and “All gifts are temporary” Early in George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son Willie horribly dies of typhoid on February 20, 1862, after a big party at the White House, and the boy's ghost joins some adult ghosts who tell parts of their stories and welcome Willie into their Oak Hill Cemetery state of denial. Mr. Vollman was brained by a beam before he could consummate his marriage with his much younger wife, Mr. Bevins slashed his wrists in despair over losing his male beloved, and the Preacher’s face is frozen in a perpetual look of terror. All three, like their ghostly compatriots, have resolved to stay in the cemetery instead of moving on to wherever they're supposed to go, because 1) they can’t accept that they’re dead, referring to their corpses as “sick forms,” their coffins as “sick boxes,” and their tombs as “sick houses,” and 2) they have unfinished business with the “earlier place” (the world of the living), an unfulfilled desire, a need for revenge, and so on. The many imagined stories of the lives and deaths of the many ghosts—including people who lived throughout US history and from white and black races and high and low classes etc.—are varied and interesting, ranging from the profane and comical to the sublime and poignant. Kids' ghosts usually don't linger, but Willie has a strong will and is confused about what has happened to him. He wants to hang around his sick house in hopes that his father will visit so he can talk with him and find out what happened, etc. Among the sections of that kind of fantasy (that recall Peter S. Beagle’s A Fine and Private Place and Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book), Saunders interpolates many brief (sometimes lasting only a phrase) excerpts from myriad historical sources on Lincoln and his son and wife and the Civil War: eye-witness accounts, newspaper articles, letters, history books, and the like. The many sources give a composite view of Willie, Lincoln, and the Civil War and ground the fantasy elements. In time the quotations and the source titles cited after them started accumulating into a mass of historicity that convey a hint of the myriad published words and thoughts devoted to Lincoln. Interestingly, sometimes the sources obviously contradict each other, as when different ones say that on the night of the White House reception the moon was full, crescent, or obscured by clouds, or as when different sources say Lincoln was the ugliest man they’d ever met or the handsomest, and so on. For the audiobook, each different ghost and historical source has a different reader--there are 166 of them--so it's a little chaotic, but it works when you get used to it. The 166 readers of the audiobook are mostly fine, especially Nick Offerman as Vollman and David Sedaris as Bevins, and the several readers who are not so skilled or appealing are only a minor distraction. After finishing the book, I looked up bardo, finding that it derives from Tibetan Buddhism and refers to the phase between death and rebirth, which lasts longer or shorter depending on one’s life etc. Saunders implies no rebirth, and I think he’s using bardo as a kind of hellish limbo which lasts while spirits of the dead cannot let go of their former lives or accept their deaths. I really liked the odd book! The fantasy parts are funny, awful, or poignant, the historical parts informative, appalling, or moving. I went through four Kleenexes through the first twenty-seven chapters (the 108 chapters in the novel are short, some lasting only a paragraph or two). I came to appreciate Lincoln more, given Willie’s early death and the intense hatred many Americans felt towards the President back then. The book demonstrates that the mid-war Lincoln was hardly the revered greatest president in the history of the USA that he’s perceived to be today, but rather an isolated, unsure, unpopular, and reluctant war leader. Saunders connects Lincoln’s loss of Willie to the terrible casualties of the Civil War and to the president’s growing sympathy for (or eroding aversion to) black people. Some readers may be bored by the book because “nothing happens.” Indeed, the main plot lasts for only a few nights of narrative time and concerns the development of Willie’s ghost and the processing of his death by Lincoln, but the ways in which Willie affects the other ghosts and Saunders’ imagining of the nocturnal “life” of the cemetery and the personalities and biographies and 19th century voices of Vollman, Bevins, and the Preacher (and other ghosts) are absorbing and pleasurable. It might be an unbearably painful book for people who have lost children, though it also might help them experience a kind of catharsis. I enjoyed, learned from, and was moved by the audiobook. View all my reviews
Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong
My rating: 5 of 5 stars “Here begins our tale. The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.” The mostly historical and partly fantasy novel Three Kingdoms reads like a fusion of The Iliad, Morte d’Arthur, Shakespeare’s history plays, and Walter Scott’s novels, but with a Chinese context and a longer time frame. It begins with the Yellow Turban Rebellion in 184 AD, runs through the disintegration of the Han empire into three rival kingdoms (Wei, Shu, and Wu), and ends with its reunification by the Jin in 280. Its countless councils, diplomacies, alliances, betrayals, reversals, invasions, withdrawals, strategies, battles, and deaths occupy about 800,000 words, 2,177 pages, 120 chapters, and a thousand characters. The reader is encouraged to side with Xuande Liu Bei (Shu) against Sun Qian (Wu) and especially against Cao Cao (Wei). Liu Bei has the most memorable heroic supporters, his sworn brothers Lord Guan and Zhang Fei and his genius strategist Kongming (Reclining Dragon), and he is the least ambitious and most ethical and humane leader in the book, saying things like, “The human factor is the key to any undertaking. How can we abandon those who have committed themselves to us?” But Cao Cao makes a superb antagonist: clever, unethical, scheming, headhunting talent, and laughing after defeats. Except, perhaps, for some notorious eunuchs at either end of the epic, there are no all good or all evil characters: just complex human beings. The long novel demonstrates that anyone, no matter how seemingly wise, may eventually be consumed by revenge or power or make mistakes. Luo Guanzhong wrote Three Kingdoms in the 14th century based on a 3rd-century history book and on later story-cycles. During the 17th century, the father son duo Mao Lun and Mao Zonggang edited Luo Guanzhong’s work, shortening and smoothing it and making Liu Bei look better and Cao Cao worse, resulting in the standard text. Moss Roberts’ excellent 1995 English translation benefits from his 100-page Afterword, which explains things like the background of the author, the sources of his novel, and the ways in which it is a great work of literature. Roberts also provides nearly 200 pages of small-print notes for the epic, telling the reader about changes that the Maos made to Luo Guanzhong’s original work, providing much of their keen analysis of its artistry, and explaining to readers relevant points about Chinese history, culture, and literature, like “Nine is an ideal number and is used to represent the whole,” “Chinese with the same surname, though unrelated, are wont to say that they belonged to the same family five hundred years past,” and “His name is, literally, ‘Water-mirror.’ Water, like the mind, reflects accurately only when calm.” Unfortunately, the version of Roberts’ translation I read published by the Foreign Languages Press Beijing lacks a pronunciation guide, leaving readers to guess how to say the many exotic names. Furthermore, although for the non-Chinese reader some names stand out (like Cao Cao, Xuande, and Lord Guan), many are difficult to distinguish let alone remember (like Liu Zhang or Zhang Lu; Yue Jing or Yu Jing; Yuan Shu or Yuan Shao; Sun Qian or Sun Quan; and Zhang Xiu or Jia Xu). The main flaw in the edition is its myriad typos, whether misspelled words like adn, principels, and pheraps, or correctly spelled wrong words like age (not ago), lost (not lose), seen (not seem), form (not from), filed (not field), wound (not would), and MANY more. Anyway. Three Kingdoms is FULL of compelling action, from diplomatic missions, assassinations, and subornings, to duels, battles, sieges, ambushes, rescues, and tricks. Between the battles appear memorable moments: a poor guy without an animal to butcher killing his wife and serving her to a starving Xuande; Zhang Fei shouting Cao Cao off his horse while holding a bridge against his army; Zhao Zilong fighting through an army while protecting Liu Bei’s baby under his cuirass; Sun Ce executing an immortal miracle healer because he stubbornly believes the guy is a fake; Cao Pi giving his drunken brother a poetry challenge to decide whether to execute or demote him; the wife of a prison guard burning the legendary medical book of a legendary doctor; Kongming playing a zither on the wall above an open city gate to make an enemy army of 100,000 retreat by assuming he is trying to lure it into an ambush when he barely has 5,000 soldiers; two generals putting their armies through elaborate formations and counter-formations to see who’d win if they really fought; and more. There are also some fantastic scenes involving ghosts, weather magic, divinations, and the like. There are many remarkable features in the novel, like the de rigueur duels by commanders in front of their respective armies before battles; the many fake retreats followed by ambushes; the innovations like Kongming’s wooden bulls and ten-bolt crossbows; the vital role played by strategists; the interpretation of and belief in omens; the prizing of virtue, honor, loyalty, and bravery; the chaos and fluidity of the era, with enemy leaders claiming to be loyal to the emperor and accusing their rivals of rebelling, cities switching sides right and left, and no one’s homeland being safe because no sooner do you invade one land than an army belonging to an enemy, friend, or family member will invade yours; and above all the sense of long history, as characters regularly quote from or invoke historical figures predating them by centuries. Not all 2000 pages are riveting! Sometimes I skipped lists of generals’ names or skimmed cursory accounts of later battles similar to earlier ones. It is a man’s world: the main characters are male, and good wives are expected to die rather than survive their husbands. Focusing on negotiation, planning, and action, the novel has little detailed description of scenery, cities, buildings, and characters etc. compared to western historical and epic fantasy novels, but there are fine moments of vivid writing, like these: --The Great River lay slack, like a bolt of white silk unrolled. --Xuande thawed the frozen hairs of the brush with his breath and unrolled the writing paper. --“Thief! Traitor who wrongs our Emperor! Execution would be too light. Murderers of my father and my brothers! We two are ‘enemies who cannot share one sky.’ If I catch you alive, I’ll chew your flesh!” --“Cheap sandal maker!” Another great element in the novel is the frequent insertion of famous classical poems about key scenes and figures, like when Kongming decides to join Liu Bei: Across the realm his words created storms. Juggling stars that held men's fate, he smiled. Dragons ramped, tigers stalked, sky and land stood calmed; Time itself can never waste his name. Or when a traitor gets his just deserts: Thwarter of able men, betrayer of his lord, Hoarder of gold and silver—all for naught! No glory for his house, his death a shame-- A laughingstock for all and for all time. It’s difficult to overestimate the cultural and literary significance of Three Kingdoms. It’s the oldest and most famous and influential novel in Chinese history and is popular in Japan and other Asian countries in translations, manga, movies, and games. Chinese people refer to the names, personalities, and episodes of the novel in daily conversation. Best of all, it’s an entertaining and absorbing work, with cliffhanger chapter endings, exciting action, cultural texture, and thematic depths, as when Kongming is thwarted yet again in his efforts to lead Shu to conquer Wei, and he quotes, “’Men devise, Heaven decides.’” View all my reviews
Mother Go by James Patrick Kelly
My rating: 3 of 5 stars "She is NOT my mother!" Mother Go (2017) by James Patrick Kelly is an entertaining and moving space opera set during the 22nd century, when humanity is just getting ready to explore and spread beyond the solar system. There are space stations, lunar habitats, starships, anti-matter drives, cryo-sleep, a wormhole (made by a mysterious and absent race of aliens called the Builders), printed clothes and foods (“I like my food printed, the way God meant it to be”), neural “mind feeds” (“She’d almost forgotten the tingle it made on her scalp, like her hair was happy”), persona bedrooms, clones, body alterations for different environments, and much more. (But there are no sf weapons or super soldiers or violent action scenes, etc., for it is NOT a military space opera.) Ten human economies compete or collaborate: Mars, Moon, Titan, Sweet Spot, United Habitats, the Belt, and four great corporate states of earth. Complicating those relationships is the cultural clash between Spacers (who want to spread human colonies throughout space) and Firsters (who want to take care of humanity living in the solar system first). All of the above space operatic elements are grounded by everyday concepts like boyfriends, teenage rebellion, and fraught parent-child relationships. The teenaged protagonist, Mariska Volochkova is, as she puts it, “an immature dumbass” and “a selfish jerk,” living in a habitat on the Moon with Sal, a licensed father under contract to raise her. Oh--and Mariska is a clone of her famous spacer mother Natalya, who before Mariska was “born” left on a long mission through a wormhole into the Galaxy of the Builders and finding a near perfect planet for humanity to colonize. Planet D (for Destination) is now the goal of an ambitious, costly, and controversial mission to which the starship Natividad, AKA Mother, will take crew and frozen colonists, assuming that the politics, economics, and engineering etc. can be worked out. Mariska wants to find her own identity and life path without being manipulated or interfered with by her “controlling bitch” mother. She doesn’t want anything to do with Natalya, never replying to her communications and snapping “She’s not my mother!” whenever anyone happens to mention her. She sure doesn’t want to join her mother on Mother’s mission: “It's not fair!... she can't drag me off to some stinking rock like a jillion lightyears away!” There is nothing really new in all this. And I suppose that a few times Kelly cheats by eliding key scenes by taking us right up to a crucial moment (like when Mariska is supposed to give a make or break media conference) and then cutting the current chapter to start the next one after the scene is over, and he makes Mariska’s genetic modification to hibernate (from ground squirrel genes) too iffy, but he excels at getting in the head of a teenage girl and at immersing us in his 22nd-century world of wonders and flawed people, especially Mariska and Natalya and their relationship. It’s a clean, sure story in which to lose oneself for eight hours. The novel was first released as an audiobook, and the production gets everything right: no music or sound effects, except for a faint echo quality when characters are communicating to each other via mind feed, and occasional laughs or sniffs when a character is amused or smelling something, etc. The reader, January LaVoy, does fine with all the characters’ voices, male or female, young or old, Lunar or Martian, etc. I particularly enjoyed Mariska’s green-skinned Martian boyfriend’s stressed-out gasps while talking (his body was adapted for the thin air of Mars, so when he’s in “normal” environments, it feels like he’s breathing soup). The ending wraps up the plot while leaving room for future installments in a series. Should Kelly write more, I would probably listen to them. View all my reviews
Let Me In by John Ajvide Lindqvist
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “It can happen to you, too” Twelve-year-old Oskar is the class target for sadistic bullies. He’s incontinent and so for accidents keeps a pee sponge in his underwear, dreading its discovery by his tormentors. He’s also imaginative, embarking on vivid daydreams, often involving gory payback on the bullies. He keeps a murder case scrapbook, and muses about becoming a murderer himself in the future. He lives with his over-protective but permissive divorced mother (his father is an alcoholic). He lives by a forest in the Stockholm suburb Blackeberg, in a protective circle of apartment buildings. He has a kind of friend there, a sixteen-year-old closet juvenile delinquent called Tommy who steals and sells electronics goods and sniffs glue. And then new neighbors move in next door: Eli, a girl who seems to be about Oskar’s age, and a man who seems to be her father. She is strange, smelling so strongly of infection that Oskar has to breathe through his mouth when they talk in the playground area of the apartment complex. She has huge black eyes, matted hair, and a complexion of smooth polished wood. She only comes out at night, doesn’t mind the freezing Swedish October, sees in the dark, can’t remember her birthday, and sometimes talks like a grownup. Of course, pretty much from the start of Let the Right One In (2004), also called Let Me In, author John Ajvide Lindqvist lets us know that the “girl” is a hundreds of years old vampire and that her “father” Hakan is her Renfield, an ex-teacher painfully attracted to boys and a reluctant killer for his “beloved,” hanging up the bodies of his victims so as to catch their blood and transport it to Eli (who needs fresh blood to “live”) in return for her agreeing to say she loves him or to let him sleep beside her all night, and so on. What will Hakan do about her growing friendship with the clueless Oskar? The book is populated with “All these pathetic lonely people in a world without beauty”: abused and abusing fatherless kids shoplifting and stealing and bullying and daydreaming; divorced, lonely, alcoholic, eccentric adults meeting at a Chinese restaurant and fantasizing about going to the Canary Islands. Even the policeman Staffan who’s dating delinquent Tommy’s mother keeps his oddly clean and well-appointed home filled with his collection of barometers and weather telling doodads, Christian artifacts, and shooting trophies. And then there’s Oskar and Eli, an odd couple that becomes odder and more interesting together as the novel progresses. Lindqvist convincingly gets into all of his characters’ heads (including a bully and a squirrel), and he alternates among their various points of view and trials and tribulations in such a way as to make this reader spellbound with morbid fascination. I think it can only end horribly, but I want to find out how long it will take for Oskar to learn what Eli really is and then to see what will happen after that, or to see how long the repressed and desiring Hakan will restrain himself from doing something to keep Eli for himself or from acting on his intense desire for her, or to see Oskar’s bullies receive some righteous comeuppance. Whatever happens, and a lot does over a short period of narrative time, maybe just a few weeks at the end of October and the start of November, it will be an odd combination of unexpected, painful, moving, and funny. The novel takes place in 1981, and there are many popular culture references and details suitable for that year that would be familiar to American readers of a certain vintage: Stephen King’s Firestarter, Goosebumps books, KISS, Muppet movie, Dallas soap opera, Star Wars, Rubik’s Cube, Sony Walkman, Atari game set, etc. At the same time, there are plenty of Swedish touches, like unease about immigrants taking advantage of the social system, cold autumns, certain kinds of sweets, names, book titles, music group names, ice skating in autumn, anxiety over a grounded Russian nuclear submarine, etc. Finally, Lindqvist does what many writers of vampire stories do: pick and choose which elements of traditional vampires to retain or modify to make his story interesting or his plot work. He retains the hostility of the sun to vampires and their need to drink blood and their superhuman strength and agility and speed and their virtual immortality and especially their need to be invited into a victim’s home. It’s meant to represent how dangerous it is to let anyone in to our lives, probably (“Let a person in and he hurts you,” muses a character in a non-vampire context), but if the infection is a parasitical life form attached to our heart and thinking its own thoughts and making the hosts drink blood etc., why would it need to have victims invite the hosts in? It works thematically for the novel (although many of the people who hurt other people in the book sure aren’t invited in), but it also seems like more picking and choosing from among the vampire traditions, along with the stake through the heart and fire or prolonged sun exposure being the only ways to kill them. Lindqvist does not add too much to the genre, apart from his sharp focus on how awfully kids are treated by adults (the account of how Eli became a vampire is particularly horrible) and on the degree to which Eli is a child or a monster or something else. I think that if the book were set in a more familiar place like America, it would not have been as compelling. As it was, I was absorbed by Eli and Oskar’s relationship in the gritty but exotic Sweden depicted. It is no utopia. Early on there’s a neat exchange by Eli and Hakan that exemplifies where the novel is potent: “You only love me to the extent I help you stay alive.” (Hakan) “Yes. Isn't that what love is?” (Eli) View all my reviews
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars A Contemporary Epic Fantasy with a Generic Nemesis Tane is an apprentice dragon-rider from Seiiki in the East. For her, dragons are divine, wise, beautiful beings of air and water. Ead is a mage-agent of the Priory of the Orange Tree sent to secretly bodyguard Sabran Queen of Inys in the West while serving as one of her maids in waiting. In the West, dragons are demonic, malevolent beings of fire and earth. To Tane, Ead’s people are wicked wyrm-killers, while to Ead Tane’s people are wicked wyrm-lovers. If Tane and Ead’s cultures and religions were seeing the same creatures according to different prejudices, Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree (2019) might be more interesting than it already is, but in fact they are seeing different species who only share great size, strength, and age. The dragons of the East are benign beings who fly via organs in their heads called “crowns” and breathe air, while the dragons of the West are evil monsters who fly via wings and breathe fire. And while the eastern dragons are foes of the Nameless One, the western dragons are the Nameless One’s minions. The Nameless One is a Satanic figure who was bound down in the Abyss a thousand years ago and whose apocalyptic liberation is rumored to be at hand. Can the different peoples unite to save their world from the apparently inevitable return of the Nameless One and his draconic army? Involved with the millennia-long conflict are two celestial jewels made from and for two kinds of magic (earth and star), a powerful sword composed of both magics, three magical trees (hawthorn, mulberry, and orange), and multiple religions. With its rival religions, Elizabethan, Africanesque, and Asiatic cultures, sublime dragons, talking birds and ichneumons and vivid descriptions (e.g., “Her voice was war conch and whale song and the distant rumble of a storm, all smoothed into words like glass shaped by the sea”), Shannon’s world is well-imagined. The chapters of the novel rotate among four point of view characters (two female, two male) in different regions/cultures of the fantasy world (west, east, south). Shannon features more than one sympathetic gay character, as well as a post-racial world in which no one looks down on anyone else for having a different skin color, of which there are plenty. In addition to dragon-riding warriors like Tane and dragon-killing mages like Ead, there are many other strong female characters: the Gloriana-like Queen Sabran of Inys, the Golden Empress leader of 40,000 pirates, a princess trying to rule behind her demonic dragon-possessed father, a thousand-year-old witch of the wood, a younger sister who’s tougher and smarter than her big brother, and more. The male characters are less interesting, but there is a fine one, the exiled gay alchemist Niclays Roos, still mourning his high-born lover, still seeking the elixir of immortality, and still nursing a grudge. The reader, Liyah Summers, does a good job of enhancing the text. Although she tends to get in a similar rhythm during the narration, she uses a variety of English accents (e.g., RP British, northern British, Caribbean English, and even, I think, American South) for characters from different cultures, doesn’t try too hard to make male voices sound male, and does pretty cool ichneumon and dragons and ancient witches. The most disappointing part of the novel is the generic, one-dimensional satanic dark lord nemesis, the unimaginatively named Nameless One. There is no explanation or exploration of his motivation to turn the world into a burnt wasteland or of that of his “draconic army” (dragons, wyverns, cockatrices, basilisks et al). Milton’s Satan makes the Nameless One look empty and boring. And when you think of Cob in Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore or the Crippled God in Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, or even of Voldemort or Sauron, Shannon’s Nameless One is disappointing. I would prefer something interesting happening whereby, for instance, it turns out that there is no Nameless One, that he is a product of religious fanaticism driving war among the human cultures, instead of a real bogeyman driving the humans to cooperate. Other disappointing features of the book are the not infrequent times when Shannon employs glaring authorial plot contrivances or sleights of hand to put her characters through extra hard challenges or to get them from point A to point B on her map. She makes Tane and her dragon way too conveniently strong or weak depending on plot requirements. Although it is a relief to find a one-volume stand-alone epic fantasy book these days, I often got the feeling that the novel should either have been longer or shorter. Some of the other rulers apart from Sabran maybe didn’t need to be introduced or should have been introduced earlier with more to do on stage. The Golden Empress (queen of the pirates) feels like an untied loose end. It does require an investment of time and mind to get into ANOTHER secondary epic fantasy world with its own history and cultures and so on, but once several chapters in, the compelling characters and their various situations take over, and it becomes a page turning experience with some surprisingly moving moments. The climax was neat in being compact and exciting. But I did find that several weeks after finishing it was a rather forgettable book. View all my reviews
All Systems Red by Martha Wells
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Entertaining, Page Turning, Posthuman Space Opera Murderbot is not a people person. The Imitative Human Bot Unit is introverted and doesn’t do well in social situations involving human beings, believing “murderbot + actual human = awkwardness,” because “I know I’m a horrifying murderbot, and they know it, and it makes both of us nervous, which makes me even more nervous.” Murderbot’s head is “standard generic human,” but the rest of her is a fusion of organic and mechanical elements. And she’s most comfortable in opaque armor that hides her face. Because murderbots can regrow their damaged organic parts and replace their mechanical ones, they are not much given to finesse in combat, attacking straightforwardly while trying to damage their opponents out of action before the same can be done to them. That doesn’t mean Murderbot isn’t without stratagems and tricks, most of which it has learned from its tens of thousands of hours watching TV dramas, giving it an advantage over run of the mill muderbots. One of the most compelling parts of Martha Wells’ All Systems Red (2017), the first novella in her Murderbot Diaries series, consists of Murderbot working through its habitual negative self-image and fear of humans into a liking for “my humans,” the small group of survey team scientists she’s working for as a security murderbot on their exploration of a supposedly uninhabited planet, except for supposedly just one other survey team way off on the other side of said planet. And then suspicious and dangerous glitches start showing up in their data and network and “hoppers” and so on. One would almost think their mission was being sabotaged by someone… The story is pretty much non-stop action and suspense of an imaginative, vivid, and page turning sort, because Wells is good at concisely sketching convincing characters and putting them in extreme situations. And Murderbot is a compelling first-person hero. It has hacked its “governor module,” freeing it from being compelled by programming to obey its human bosses and wanting to keep that a secret so it won’t be reprogrammed or scrapheaped etc., and it reckons that one of the only reasons it didn’t become a mass murderer of human beings is because it found a way to access the entertainment channels and to watch TV dramas like Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. (Having no gender and not being a sexbot in a brothel, Murderbot finds sex scenes boring.) Wells imagines a future space opera world of companies in competition for exploitation rights to new planets and start up cultures and governments like the one Murderbot’s current employers belong to, Preservation Alliance. The major players rent muderbots to perform dangerous tasks as expendable labor. In addition to “normal” humans and murderbots, there are also “augmented humans,” who are better adapted to deal with computer issues, and complex marriages with multiple partners and children. The novella diverted me during a hospital stay, exciting me, making me laugh, and even moving me, and I’m curious to find out what Murderbot will do with itself in future installments of its diaries. View all my reviews
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Witty Moral Story about Decadence Artist Basil Hallward is hosting his cynical, charismatic, and wealthy young Oxford U friend Lord Henry Wotton, smoker of “heavy opium-tainted cigarette[s]” and opiner of provocative paradoxical epigrams, and they’re talking about Basil’s recent painting of an incredibly handsome young man, Dorian Gray, an Adonis or a Narcissus. Basil doesn’t want to show the painting cause he’s put too much of himself in it. Henry misunderstands and laughs, as Basil doesn’t look anything like the painting. Basil explains: Dorian Gray has transformed and inspired all his art, so he’s painting better than ever before Dorian became his friend. He does not want Henry to meet Dorian for fear that Henry will ruin him with his amoral philosophies. Dorian of course immediately calls, and he and Lord Henry hit it off, Dorian falling under the spell of the Lord’s mellifluous, insidious banter. Henry embarks on a “strange panegyric on youth, [a] terrible warning of its brevity,” concluding that while the plants and trees will reborn each season, Dorian’s youth will last three more years, with the result that, when Basil finishes his latest portrait of Dorian, his masterpiece, Dorian loathes it, because it will never age while he will. He petulantly declaims that he’d give anything—even his soul—to reverse that process. Basil gives him the painting, and the ways in which Dorian’s desperate prayer comes true and with what costs to Dorian and the people he touches provide the matter of Wilde’s famous morality play. Wilde targets, among other things, the decadence of the British upper crust (whose members occupy themselves with “the serious study of the great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing”) and the eternal nature of beautiful art and the transient nature of life—and the moral costs of trying to reverse that relationship. Although Wilde’s famous Preface says things like, “The artist is the creator of beautiful things,” “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book,” “No artist has ethical sympathies,” and “All art is quite useless,” his novel is intensely moral and ethical and hence useful (it reads as if written by a decadent, European Nathaniel Hawthorne). It is also of course witty, appalling, and beautiful. The artist who paints the wonderful portrait, Basil, plays the conscience of the conscienceless Dorian. Basil sees too much good in his friends, believing, for instance, that although Lord Henry may say amoral things, he never does anything bad, and that Dorian is full of innate goodness. Basil’s fate is one of the most painful parts of the novel. Another is the touching and ironic experience of Sibyl Vane, a teenaged Shakespearean actress who plays the roles of Juliet et al with inspired genius—until she falls in love with Dorian in real life. My focus flagged during the long chapter where Dorian decadently indulges in various arts (perfumes, jewels, tapestries, etc.), and I thought his complete lack of outward change for over a decade should be more noticed by his aging friends, but throughout Lord Henry is so witty and so vile and Dorian so inhuman and human and Wilde’s writing so beautiful and convincing that I did enjoy rereading the novel, even though I knew how it would end. The psychological realism by which even Dorian’s attempt to turn good fails to improve his portrait because, after all, it’s only another vanity of his, is prime. The novel has interesting questions to ask about art. Is its goal to reveal the beautiful? Is it possible to live one’s life as a work of art? Is performing a role as real as living it? Can art reveal the human soul? And though it’s less than H. G. Wells, Wilde even engages in some social class criticism. Lord Henry, who would sacrifice anyone for an epigram, has memorable lines, like-- --“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” --“The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.” --“I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable.” --“A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he doesn't love her.” --“All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is criminal.” Simon Prebble gives his usual appealing and understanding reading of the book. No simpering for female characters, no great change of voice for any characters, but perfect emotional inflections for each scene. However, I was not sorry when The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/91) ended. View all my reviews
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “It wasn’t a game for knights.” It's mid-October and Philip Marlowe, private detective, has donned his powder blue suit: “I was neat, clean, shaved, and sober, and I didn't care who knew it.” Why the dress up? He’s calling on “four million” in the person of rich old General Sternwood. The first thing he sees upon entering the Southern California gothic mansion is a stained-glass panel featuring a knight in armor not really trying to untie a maiden garbed only in her modestly concealing long hair. Before he can get to see the General in his orchid hothouse, he’s approached by twenty-year-old Carmen Sternwood, with her “little sharp predatory teeth.” She notes Marlowe’s height (“Tall, aren’t you?”) and looks (“Handsome too”) before biting and sucking her finger-shaped thumb and falling into his arms. Marlowe coolly tells the smooth old butler, “You ought to wean her. She looks old enough.” Marlowe is duly hired by rich, old, declining, and (to Marlowe anyway) appealing Sternwood to deal with some guy trying to blackmail his younger wayward daughter Carmen. He also lets slip that his older wayward daughter Vivian’s husband Terry Regan has gone missing, but refrains from asking Marlowe to find him. Neither daughter “has any more moral sense than a cat.” It’s quite an opening to Raymond Chandler’s first Philip Marlowe hardboiled detective novel The Big Sleep (1939). There will be smut and gambling. There will be a two-bit chiseler and a big-time underworld type and a seedy unsavory blonde and a classy charismatic blonde. There will be some gay types. The book is homophobic as befits its era: in one uncomfortable scene, Marlowe feigns an effeminate voice suitable for a fay book collector (“If you can weigh 195 pounds and look like a fairy, I was doing my best”), and in another uncomfortable scene a young gay man ineffectually punches Marlowe, for “a pansy’s punch” lacks a certain force). There will be some rather clean (given the city and the era) police captains and DAs and such. The Sternwood femme fatale daughters are “cute,” trying to insult or seduce Marlowe by turns, succeeding only in making him say things like, “the rich can go hang themselves” or “I was sick of women.” There will be terse and cool dialogue, as when Marlowe is threatened by a gangster on the phone and says, “Listen to my teeth chattering.” There will be many similes, some of which fail awfully (e.g., “The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work show-girl uses her last good pair of stockings”), most of which succeed finely (e.g., “His Charlie Chan moustache looked as real as a toupee”). Chandler’s good at a vivid, seedy poetry of observation, like “The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty, meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket.” Or like “The world was a wet emptiness.” He writes some nice lines, too, like “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.” Chandler’s also good at making Marlowe withhold his suspicions and conclusions about cases until he suddenly reveals them through conversations with clients and suspects and enemies and the authorities and the like. This keeps us guessing long after Marlowe has figured something out. The biggest achievement of Chandler is to present in Marlowe a cynical loner who drinks, plays chess, and says things like “the knights don’t belong in the game” and sees things like stained glass knights failing to rescue nude damsels in distress and thinks things like “Me, I was part of the nastiness now,” but who despite it all remains above the sordid sump of Los Angeles (and the USA) by sticking to his “professional pride,” whereby a Private Investigator keeps his clients’ personal information private and where he refuses to take advantage of amoral women who literally throw themselves at him and where he stubbornly tries (at financial and other costs to himself) to protect the gradual deathwards decline of a rich old man. He’s satisfied with his $25 per day plus expenses. On the other hand, Marlowe is not above smacking a troublesome girl on the side of her face: “Probably all her boyfriends got around to slapping her sooner or later. I could understand why they might.” Audiobook reader Ray Porter does female voices too high, whether it’s a Jewess with a “smoothly husky voice,” a spoiled and decadent rich girl, or a character played in the movie by Lauren Bacall. Porter is no Bacall! He's fine with male characters and most importantly with Marlowe, but he is sure poor at female voices, and listening to him try is unpleasant. One problem I found with The Big Sleep is that I didn’t really care about the characters, apart from or wait even occasionally including Marlowe. As an early example of the hardboiled detective genre, The Big Sleep is “cute” in the way Carmen Sternwood is cute: unsavory, taut, bone-scraped face, predatory teeth, inane giggle, liable to show up unannounced and naked in your bed one moment and ask you to teach her how to shoot a gun the next. But it is great nonetheless. For “What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill. You were dead. You were sleeping the big sleep.” 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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