The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic by Leigh Bardugo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Come help me stir the pot” Leigh Bardugo’s The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic (2017) is a well-written collection of six fairy tales set in her secondary world of the “Grishaverse.” Each story is a vivid and clever modern adaptation (pot stirring) of a different kind of fairy tale. Bardugo likes to trick the reader with twists wherein she revises or reforms traditional fairy tales by, for instance, making the apparent monster a protector and the apparent victim a monster. The stories have some gruesome bits but mostly feature relatively happy endings (though the reader can’t get TOO comfortable). Here is an annotated listing of the stories. “Ayama and the Thorn Wood” might be called, “Ugly and the Beast.” OK, Ayama is not really ugly, though people (including her family) treat her as such, maybe because her voice is hard on the ears. The story is reminiscent of Angela Carter’s reworking of “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Tiger’s Bride,” with some Scheherazade action for good measure (featuring three stories, not 1001). The story features a pair of overlooked second siblings, a slimy king, a greedy grandmother, a forest full of thorns, and an enchanted pool. The point of the story is that truth rules, especially in stories, so feel free to change the traditional lame happy endings according to your own experience of life. “The Too-Clever Fox” begins as a beast fable and ends as a human monster hunt from the point of view of animal victims. The story features a scrawny, ugly, clever fox (Bardugo likes telling stories about physically unattractive, intelligent, and plucky protagonists), a helpful nightingale, a super hunter and his mournful sister, and a scary revelation and climax. “The Witch of Duva” plays with Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel, featuring a long famine, a serial killer of girls, a shape-changing spirit, a witch in the woods, and a daughter who says she wants to go home. It has delicious listings of foods and some creepy gingerbread and crow magic. “Little Knife” revises the traditional fairy tale where the ruler (here a duke) sets increasingly impossible tasks for his daughter’s suitors to perform before he’ll let anyone marry her. Add to this scenario an obedient but finally independent daughter and a helpful but finally independent river and some selfish men who won’t listen to good questions, with even a dash of Shel Silverstein’s *appalling* The Giving Tree, and you get an idea of this tale. “The Soldier Prince” is an interesting take on the Nutcracker fairy tale, featuring a clocksmith who makes marvelous human automata who do bad things, a dreamy tea merchant’s daughter who wants to live in a world of fantasy, and a nutcracker who has trouble thinking of himself and his own desires (until he’s visited by the Rat King). It has a satisfying resolution. “When Water Sang Fire” is a vivid adaptation of Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” or rather is an origin story for a key character in that story. The themes about the creative and destructive power of desires as well as the imagination of the undersea world of the merfolk and their relations with mortals ashore and the climax are compelling, though I lost patience with the protagonist a few times. Bardugo writes potent descriptions, like “Her throat was dry as burnt bread,” “The night their second son was born, the full moon rose brown as an old scab in the sky,” and “Weeks in the sun had turned his skin gold, his hair white. He looked like a petulant dandelion, gathering breath to throw a tantrum.” The best similes she writes are suited to the settings or situations or personalities of her characters, as when the sea folk prince Roffe tells Ulla, “I can smell your ambition like blood in the water.” Some stories have effective morals, like “to use a thing is not to own it” and “sometimes the unseen is not to be feared, and sometimes those who should love us most do not,” and “There is no pain like the pain of transformation.” The stories in the printed book feature lovely marginal illustrations, and each story has a color code, red or blue, for both illustrations and font. The audiobook obviously lacks the colors of the physical book, but does feature a capable reader in Lauren Fortgang, who does some neat voices for some extreme characters (like the Beast and the Rat King) and doesn’t try too hard to be male for male voices and enhances the stories. I hadn’t read anything by Leigh Bardugo before but may try more after this. View all my reviews
0 Comments
The Marvellous Land of Snergs by E.A. Wyke-Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Here! Who are you calling a dwarf?” “It is fortunate for children, and for grownups too, if they can manage it, when they do not concern themselves greatly about the future possibilities of a calamity. Sylvia and Joe were of this kind, especially Joe.” On the coast of an inaccessible enchanted island, the warm-hearted, educated, and upright Miss Watkyns and her fellow women of the Society for the Removal of Superfluous Children (S.R.S.C.) oversee a colony of 478 previously neglected and or abused children now living in cozy one-story houses with fences to keep out the too-affectionate cinnamon bears. About a day and a half walk through dense woods lies the town of the Snergs, a short, broad-shouldered, long-lived, pixie-related people (do NOT call them dwarves) who work in batches for Miss Watkyns and co. in return for presents from the outside world. Down the coast a bit from the S.R.S.C. is a community of cursed, apparently immortal 17th-century Dutch sailors led by Captain Vanderdecken (“vulgarly known as the Flying Dutchman”), who’ve stopped sailing around in their dilapidated ship to live in huts by the shore. The heroes of the story are two troublemaking children, impulsive Sylvia and disobedient Joe. Sylvia was ignored by her society mother, Joe abused by his circus rider father, so the S.R.S.C. spirited them away. They are chums, sharing everything, including their pet puppy Tiger. The plot gets going when Joe throws a half-brick into the Dutch sailors’ cauldron, splashing six of the men with hot soup, so that although Miss Watkyns won’t let the Dutch keelhaul the boy, she punishes him by locking him in the turret room with bread and water, so he and Sylvia run away with Tiger, aiming to visit the village of the Snergs, where no S.R.S.C. child has ever ventured before. The kids quickly meet the real hero of the novel, the most foolish and feckless of all the Snergs (and that’s saying something), young Gorbo, only 273 years old. Gorbo tried to be a potter, but because the pots he provided the S.R.S.C. promptly broke, Miss Watkyns told him to “potter off.” Now he’s gormlessly walking around when the runaways run into him. While Sylvia and Joe remain inveterately reckless (“It is indeed terrible to think that all this fuss should be caused by the folly and disobedience of two shrimps like Sylvia and Joe”), Gorbo has potential. There follows an episodic plot featuring whimsical fantastic things like an uncrossable river, a set of magical doors, a forest of giant fungi, a reformed ogre, an unreformed witch, an intimidating clowder of black cats, an ill-equipped knight errant, a court jester with poor judgment, a tyrannical king of ruthless fame, an expeditionary force of Snergs and Dutchmen, and more. Despite the narrator’s promises, the story doesn’t, finally, prove any useful moral: “For however reprehensible the children were in their disobedience and irresponsibility, it cannot be denied that the general results of their conduct were beneficial.” Wyke-Smith’s book has vivid, humorous descriptions, like “The rope was more than good enough for Snergs, who can climb like startled cats,” and “In appearance it [the turret room] resembled the more despicable forms of lighthouses, and it was quite useless for anything practical, being so narrow that a grown-up person ascending the stairs had to writhe up like a snake, and the chamber atop being so small that Miss Watkyns had considered the question of turning the whole business into a pigeon-house.” It has funny dialogue, like: “And it did not occur to thee, thou farthing rascal, to lead them back to their little home by the sea?” “N-no, O King, I-I didn’t think.” “That we believe, thou worse than worm.” And neat lines, like: “We may be forced to introduce battle, murder and sudden death into these parts.” (That’s a play on the Oxford Book of Common Prayer’s “From battle and murder, and from sudden death, Good Lord, deliver us.”) The narrator is hands on, commenting on the action, like this: “Gorbo, that lout, had really done it this time.” Or this: “To those who know from experience, as I confess I do, how painful it is to have one’s sparkling verbal efforts received with cold unappreciative looks or smiles in which pity lurks behind a mere pretense at mirth, will really appreciate how Baldry suffered from this really pointed meanness.” I hesitate to bring this up, but Wyke-Smith’s treatment of Sylvia may be dated. The girl has more agency than poor puppy Tiger (a prop schlepped around), but she is more easily daunted and discouraged than Joe, already knows how to use her feminine wiles to get what she wants, and perks up when looking at a wedding dress. On the other hand, the witch and Miss Watkyns are the most formidable figures in the novel. About the audiobook, once every half hour lively orchestra music jounces in to end a scene. More importantly, although Peter Joyce may overdo the base narration by drawing out—almost singing—key vowels in key words, as in “and JOOOE (Joe) was gone” and “the AIIIIIR (air) was full of wooden chips,” he relishes reading the story, doing prime character voices, especially the whiny ogre, the snide witch, and the sweet numbskull Gorbo (I love it when he moans, “Oh, no!”). Unfortunately, the “unabridged” audiobook CHANGES the original text (at least) whenever the narrator addresses the “reader” and Peter Joyce instead says, the “listener”: Original: “a narrative which should not be without improving effect on the minds of my younger readers.” Audiobook: “a story which should not be without improving effect on the minds of my younger listeners.” In addition to dumbing down the book by replacing “narrative” with “story,” it’s a violation to change the original “reader” to “listener”! It makes me wonder what other changes the audiobook producers made to the original text. Finally, a fusion of Peter Pan, Oz, Arthurian romance, traditional fairy tales, and and Wyke-Smith’s quirky touches, The Marvellous Land of Snergs (1927) is a delightful pleasure. I recommend it to anyone who likes vintage children’s literature. Hey, Tolkien and his kids loved it! The Snergs—no taller than the average table and fond of feasts—influenced Tolkein’s hobbits, and I bet that the genteel, intrusive, tongue-in-cheek narrator influenced Tolkein’s narrator in The Hobbit. Wyke-Smith wrote other books, and I’m sure curious to read them. View all my reviews
The Story of Freginald by Walter Rollin Brooks
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Who’s a Sissy? OR Too Much Circus, Not Enough Plot, Depth, or Freddy Rather than the usual protean porcine protagonist, the fourth book in Walter S. Brooks twenty-six book Freddy the Pig series, The Story of Freginald (1936), centers on a young male bear called (at first) Louise. Louise’s father wanted to call him Fred and his mother Reginald, but his grandfather, thinking he was a girl, named him Louise. The girl’s name ostracizes Louise from his fellow bears (“We don’t want to play with girls!”) and leads him to become a natural poet, composing poems to deal with his loneliness. Early in the story, Leo the lion recruits Louise to join Mr. Boomschmidt's Colossal and Unparalleled Circus, because they need animals with unusual abilities to satisfy their audiences, and a bear called Louise is unique. And when Mr. Boomschmidt discovers (and exploits) the bear’s poetic talents, the circus enters a new era of success. The only problem that a young girl elephant also called Louise and the bear dislike each other, because the other animals like to call “Louise!” and watch both animals come running. Eventually, the bear changes his name to Freginald, joining the two names his parents wanted to give him. The novel is episodic, a series of exciting and comical adventures leading to a big climax and a satisfying resolution. Freginald recruits a cantankerous mouse to perform as an expert diver; Freginald and Leo are captured by a band of wild southern plantation domesticated animals still fighting the Civil War; a boy shoots at Fregninald and Leo (it’s America after all); Freginald has trouble with a tall, dark man with a long, black mustache; a rival circus tries to drive Mr. Boomschmidt out of business; Freginald enlists Freddy as a detective; etc. In addition to the circus competition, there is a fair amount of American capitalism here, grounding the whimsy in details like circus tickets costing twenty-five cents, photographs of Freginald selling for ten cents, mistreated animals going on strike, better work being found for them with a contractor, and so on. Brooks finishes the book by saying that if we tell Freginald we know the author, we’ll get a free pass to see Mr. Boomschmidt’s circus. Like other Freddy books, there is much humor here. There’s a cute scene where Freginald tries to convince Leo that it’s impossible to jump on one’s shadow: “But you never get anywhere arguing with a lion.” And there’s a funny moment where Freginald receives a cryptic message from Freddy, because his typewriter is missing the n, i, and y keys, so he substitutes m, w, and j for them. There’s slapstick humor like with Jerry the rhino, who’s so near-sighted that when you want him to charge something, you’d better point him in the right direction. There are exaggerated character traits, like “it would have been pretty hard to tell whether Mr. Boomschmidt was awake and singing or asleep and snoring.” Much of Brooks’ whimsical humor derives from humanizing his animals (who speak English with other animals and people and have human names) while retaining some of their natural traits (Freginald tries but can’t stay awake in winter and finally hibernates in his circus wagon till April). Brooks’ narrator provides quirky facts about animals like, “It is no use trying to explain to an ostrich, though few people realize it. It isn’t because they are really stupid, but they are so vain they won’t listen.” Throughout the book, Brooks dispenses dollops of wisdom. A man explains that clowns paint their faces “Because there ain’t anybody can tell the same jokes over twice a day, week after week, year after year, and not get pretty sour.” Louise gives Freginald some writing advice (that Brooks himself follows): “Louise noticed that when she used ordinary language she said much more interesting things. He tried it with his poems, and he found that the simpler they were, the better people liked them.” Fregninald also learns “that suspicious people are the easiest to fool.” The monochrome illustrations by Kurt Weise enhance the charm of the book. His animals are far from Disney, being realistic rather than cartoonish. As a result, the anthropomorphisizing of Brooks’ text forms a pleasing mismatch with the art. At the same time, the pictures have as much whimsy as the stories, and are funny and apt. The humor in the book concerning masculinity and femininity becomes a theme: be yourself and don't worry what other people think. Freginald doesn’t mind being Louise, while Leo doesn’t feel his masculinity compromised by getting his mane permanented into beautiful long curls. However, the message gets mixed. Later when Freginald visits his home, another bear continues calling him Louise, so he forces a confrontation by calling him Mabel, while Leo strikes a leopard who laughs at him after getting a permanent. Leo says to Freginald, “Sure, Fredg, have a manicure,” only to have a squirrel mock the bear, “Shiny-toes! Sissy-toes!” Leo is a brave, intelligent lion—the right paw of Mr. Boomschmidt—who permanents his mane and manicures his claws, but the few female characters in the story are mostly made fun of. Like other Freddy books, apart from the animals, this one is white. Only one character of color plays even a minor role, a scary Native American called Pedro who has no lines, when most characters talk a lot. The book has offensive touches dating it to the 1930s. Once, Leo says, “We tried dressing up the monkeys in fancy costumes and advertising them as members of the wild African tribe of the Bwango-Bwango, but the people saw through the disguise.” Elsewhere, Freginald convinces a “dull and dowdy” wren that if he made a nest from Leo’s gold hair, his children would be “much brighter colored,” which would give them social advantages: “It’s no good being bright inside if you aren’t bright outside.” The kindle version has typos: misspellings (e.g., Shakspere, coud) weird punctuation (“the ceremony was very. impressive”), random letters (e.g., “wilder and more ferocious I than any wild animals can possibly be”). It’s a pity, because Brooks’ straightforward American prose is clean, unadorned, and fun. At times it waxes almost beautiful: “The countryside was so wide and mysterious under the stars, and the woods through which they passed were so deep and black and yet friendly, too.” Mr. Boomschmidt’s circus appears in several other Freddy the Pig books. It adds humor to the novels (owner and animals being idiosyncratic and amusing), as well as enhances the themes on the humane treatment of animals initiated by Mr. Bean’s farm where Freddy lives. However, a little circus goes a long way, and The Story of Freginald is less charming, funny, and focused than the best of the Freddy books, so readers new to the series should start with the third, Freddy the Detective. View all my reviews
Sin Eater by Megan Campisi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “I guess I'm not a washerwoman anymore.” Needless to say, the worst job in Megan Campisi’s Sin Eater (2020) is being a sin eater. Only women can do it, “since it was Eve who first ate a sin: the Forbidden Fruit.” Sin eaters are shunned and feared: “Unseen, unheard.” If you touch one, you’re cursed; if you talk with one, you approach the ur-sinner Eve. Sin eaters hear (via Recitations) and then Eat (via particular foods) the sins of every dying person and then bear all those sins in silence until they die when, if they’ve been good, they might be able to join the Maker. Although some of the food representing the sins is appealing, like bread (original sin) and cream (envy), some is appalling, like a lamb’s head cooked in ewe’s milk (the rape of a child) or pig’s heart (a murder in wrath). Apart from obvious disadvantages, like never being able to touch or talk to anyone and having to live in the dirtiest, smelliest, and poorest part of town, the occupation provides some advantages, like constant free food and the ability to go almost anywhere and to listen to anyone’s conversations. Apart from sin eating, Campisi’s alternate Tudor world is only slightly transformed from our historical one, as most of the major Tudor players and features appear with slightly different names (e.g., King Harold/Henry and Queen Bethany/Elizabeth, Eucharistian/Catholic, the new faith/Anglican, the Maker/God, Angland/England, and so on. Fairy tales and nursery rhymes are modified: Hans and Greta are lost in the woods and find an old sin eater’s house, while Jack falls in the well and drowns so Jill eats foods for his sins. Foreigners are called strangers, anyone becomes anyfolk, and panto boys pantomime news events in public spaces. The fundamental things are the same, like “virgin” queen surrounded by suitors, harsh life for the hungry poor, superstition, sins, religion, intolerance, and misogyny. Well, Christian misogyny is enhanced, as Eve plays the role of our Satan: when you die, you’ll either go to the Maker or to Eve (“purest evil. Even worse than Judas, who betrayed the Maker's son”). Our first-person present-tense narrator May Owens (WHY is it almost ALWAYS present-tense first-person narrators now?), an illiterate 14-year old orphaned washerwoman, is arrested for stealing bread and sentenced to become a sin eater, having a bronze collar with an S on it locked on her neck and an S tattooed onto her tongue and becoming apprentice to the current sin eater, a middle-aged plump woman who slaps May whenever she tries to speak. May follows her mistress on her rounds, attending Recitations and Eatings in the houses of dying people (e.g., a baby, a teenage girl, an old woman, a rich merchant). The only thing May can say is the prayer to begin each Recitation: “The unseen is seen, the unheard is heard, your sins will be mine. When the food is et your sins will be mine.” The plot gets going when May and her mistress (who have bonded into an “us”) attend the Recitation for the queen’s poisoned old nurse and find that for the Eating a deer’s heart indicating a murder has been put among the sin-foods, though the old woman did not confess to having killed anyone. May’s mistress balks at eating the wrongfully placed food item, is accused of treason, and is taken to the dungeons. At a loss, May eats the deer’s heart, but afterwards thinks that she must tell someone at court about the mistake. But she’s supposed to be “Unseen, unheard.” But her mistress will be pressed! Desperate and naive, May tries to tell the Queen’s favorite, her secretary “Black Fingers,” only to have him try to cut her throat. What began as a Christian misogyny dystopia story has morphed into a court murder mystery, with May the amateur sleuth analyzing clues from Recitations and eavesdropped conversations. We root for the lonely May! She has an observant eye, a sympathetic heart, and an imaginative mind, hearing objects, insects, and animals talk. She’s feisty, nicknaming people Mush Face, the Country Mouse, and the Painted Pig. She tells a good story. She idealizes her da and hates her mother’s vile rogue relatives. She is at first passive (“I follow, because where else can I go?”) and has low self-esteem (“I'm monstrous”). Will she be able to grow and achieve something in her occupation and world? She shows signs of self-empowerment when she starts wielding her ostracization as a weapon/banner (“I am a curse!”) and taking pleasure in making people get out of her way. Campisi’s writing is vivid and marked by impressive similes, like “The others, whose faces had earlier opened to me in wonder, encouragement, and envy, drop away like leeches full of blood.” The bleak, bizarre concept of the novel gives rise to neat lines like, “Can I be forgiven for eating an unrecited heart?” But the book has some flaws... First, Campisi misuses lay a couple times, as in “I lay again on the grave of my da.” (It’s a lost cause, but this is a present tense novel, so please write, “I lie again on the grave ...”) Second, the climax verges on absurdity. (A bucket of two-day-old piss, an outdoor festival, a jakes, a voodoo doll, a red herring, Black Fingers and minions, a chase, a sprained ankle, costumes, a play, a chase, a burn victim, a serious fleshhook, a hot cauldron, a confession—And is this a Christian misogyny dystopia or a slapstick mystery?) Third, given the vital role played by sin eaters in Angland, there’s no way a large town containing the Queen's castle and court would have only one or two of them. (It wouldn’t be possible for one or two to deal with all the Recitations and Eatings, and if the sin eaters got sick or died, how could the dying be absolved of their sins?) Fourth, people wouldn’t be so cruel to a person playing such a vital role for their salvation as a sin eater. (They'd be bad to lepers and beggars and maybe strangers and Eucharistians, but they’d not risk antagonizing someone who’d someday have the power to send them to Eve when hearing/eating their sins; Campisi must REALLY want to isolate May and show how horrible misogyny is.) Fifth, that said, by introducing several “squatters” into May’s empty home—a leper, an ex-actor, an actor, etc.—Campisi softens May’s isolation too much. (I’m glad for May, but it makes me wonder if Campisi lacks the courage of her Christian misogyny dystopia convictions.) Sin Eater has been compared to The Handmaid’s Tale, but the ambiguity in the ending of Atwood’s book makes Campisi’s look like the YA mystery novel that it finally is. View all my reviews The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World and Globalization Began (2020) by Valerie Hansen8/25/2022
The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began by Valerie Hansen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Is That All There Is? Or, Why the Year 1000? In The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World and Globalization Began (2020), Valerie Hansen is out to prove that “The year 1000 marked the start of globalization. This is when trade routes took shape all around the world that allowed goods, technologies, religions, and people to leave home and go somewhere new.” She also wants to connect how cultures strategized globalization around 1000 with how we are dealing with it today: “living in a world shaped by the events of the year 1000, we are wrestling with exactly the same challenges that people faced for the first time then: should we cooperate with our neighbors, trade with them, allow them to settle in our countries, and grant them freedom of worship when they live in our society? Should we try to keep them out? Should we retaliate against the people who become wealthy through trade? Should we try to make new products that copy technologies we haven't yet mastered? Finally, will globalization make us more aware of who we are, or will it destroy our identity?” But although her book is mostly interesting, it is a little short and thin and doesn’t fully fulfill its “goal … to address those questions.” Hansen starts with an overview of the world in the year 1000, and then writes chapters on the Norse in North America (“Go West, Young Viking”), central, south, and north American cultures (“The Pan American Highways of 1000”), the Rus in eastern Europe (“European Slaves”), African and Islamic traders and cultures (“The World's Richest Man”), Muslims and Buddhists in Asia (“Central Asia Splits in Two”), and 11th-century China (“The Most Globalized Place on Earth”). Throughout, she relates interesting details, for example: On the need for blood to be given to the Mayan gods, for which leaders drew stingray stingers through their penises. (Ouch!) On the importance of coins found in shipwrecks and burial mounds etc. when no written documentation exists, because coins reveal who was trading with whom and how much they traded with them. (Duh!) On the Tale of Genji revealing the importance of aromatics from Arabia and Southeast Asia to the Song Empire and to Heian-era Japanese aristocrats like Genji, who made his own scents by combining different elements, was famed for his particular fragrance which could be smelt long after he left a room, and held a fragrance making contest at the birthday party of his princess daughter. (Cool!) On the 100-meter-long Chinese kilns like dragons rising up mountain sides, the hottest kilns in the world, using up to 1000 workers and making 20,000 or more pieces of ceramics per firing. (Wow!) Here is an example of Hansen’s straightforward (not wholly stirring) writing and her connecting approach to history: “Like Wikipedia entries today, the Chinese descriptions of foreign lands followed a set formula, which included the country’s most important products, the local currency system... and a chronological account of the most important events in the history of that place.” Some of Hansen’s connections between then and now seem a bit forced, like when she says that the conflict between the Venetian, Genoese, and Pisan merchants of Constantinople and the locals of that city were like that between the haves and have nots of today (the 1% and everyone else). Surely much of the conflict in Constantinople back then was because the Latins were not Greek and were not Eastern Orthodox and not just because they had more wealth? Anyway, it is a short book, and I wished for more depth and detail. I didn’t learn as much from it as I’d hoped I would. She gives etymologies that I’d learned from other history books, like slaves coming from the word Slav, because so many of them were enslaved back then. One was new to me: Blue Tooth connectivity deriving from King Harold Bluetooth because he united Denmark and Norway. Her thesis—that people were trading globally well before the 1500s and that many of the trade routes and religious cultural blocks and dynamics of today’s globalized world started by the year 1000 is convincing, but… but then what? A question: Why the year 1000? Given the varying calendars and methods of counting years in the different cultures back then, why not start with, say, 900? In her chapters Hansen often travels hundreds of years before or after 1000. I think it’s OK when she mentions the 1500s and European exploration/exploitation etc., because she’s explaining that they used preexisting trade routes from hundreds of years earlier while cutting out local middlemen and generally imposing their wills on locals, but sometimes one suspects that you could say globalization started much earlier than 1000. Referring at one point to ceramic competition between Arab and Chinese makers circa the year 726, Hansen herself says, “Globalization operated then just as it does now.” Another question: Is that all there is? OK, so globalization started say, in the year 1000, much earlier than we usually imagine, but I don’t think Hansen answers the questions she poses in her Prologue about what early globalization has to tell us about contemporary globalization. In her Epilogue, she concludes that the most important lesson we can get from looking at globalization in the year 1000 is how to react to the unfamiliar: do you open to and learn from it or do you close to and attack it? Doing the former is more likely to bring beneficial results for your culture than doing the latter. That conclusion is underwhelming. The reader Cynthia Farrell speaks clearly but has some dodgy pronunciations: as of products (produx), objects (objex), Kyoto (Ki-oto), Iraq and Iran (Eye-raq and Eye-ran). Even if we don’t mind that kind of thing, her delivery is rather monotonous, rendering Hansen’s prose rather bland. When Hansen starts a sentence with “Interestingly,” or “Curiously,” Farrell doesn't express interest or curiosity. View all my reviews
Le Comte de Monte-Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Sprawling Tale of Love, Hate, Crime, Culture, Money, and Revenge Things are looking up for nineteen-year-old merchant seaman Edmond Dantès: he’s just returned to Marseilles after a long voyage, he’s going to be made captain, and he’s earned enough money to marry his beautiful Catalan sweetheart Mercedes. So naïve, happy, and well-liked, Dantès has no idea what’s about to happen to him! He’s envied and hated by the ship’s sneaky accountant Danglars and by Mercedes’ murderous friend Fernand, so Danglars writes an anonymous letter falsely accusing him of being a Bonapartist (the exiled ex-emperor is planning a return from Elba), and Fernand delivers it to the authorities. The ambitious prosecutor Villefort has Dantès arrested during his engagement party, interrogates him, and to protect his own family secrets and career has him tossed—without trial—into the notorious island prison Chateau d’If. As the years of solitary confinement pass, Dantès morphs through hope, despair, faith, and unfaith. He’s starving himself to death when he meets a fellow prisoner, the learned, wise, humane, and resourceful Italian Abbé Faria. Faria starts working with Dantès’ on their escape while teaching him everything he knows, including science, philosophy, languages, and the location of a vast treasure hidden on the uninhabited rocky island of Monte-Cristo off the Tuscan coast. After his fourteen-year imprisonment, Dantès starts playing God, rewarding those who tried to help him and scheming to punish those who destroyed him. Is he angel or devil? He’s an Oriental Byronic vampire! He’s got unnaturally cold white skin, long black hair, a beautiful sad or sardonic smile, night vision, unlimited wealth and knowledge, exquisite taste, devoted servants and slaves, fine hashish, and endless energy—especially for weaving webs of long-term revenge. To that end he dons multiple personas: smuggler-sailor Simbad, humanitarian Italian Abbé Busoni, philanthropic British nobleman Wilmore, and mysterious Comte (Count) of Monte-Cristo. Are they all Dantès? Or has he died and been reborn as the protean, cosmopolitan, calculating Comte? It’s a stretch to imagine that no one (except Mercedes?) would recall Dantès when the Comte shows up in Paris disguised only by name, wealth, and twenty years of aging, though Dumas is demonstrating that Dantès was destroyed by the kind of men who’d forget him. It’s also a stretch to imagine Dantès so expert in so many fields (medicine, cuisine, finance, art, horses, telegraphs, guns, etc.), though Dumas is setting us up to be surprised by his uber-man’s mistakes. Dumas writes other interesting characters: Caderousse (a coward who turns convict), Noirtier (a paralyzed old Bonapartist who communicates by blinking or shutting his eyes), Benedetto (an amoral young monster who thinks somebody’s watching over him), Villefort (a strict law man who is finally akin to Hawthorne’s Dimmesdale), and Eugenie (a masculine young lady who’d rather be an independent artist than a wife). Maximilian and Valentine are sweet “Pyramus and Thisbe” lovers. Mercedes has moments of dignity and remorse, while her son Albert is a dilettante rich boy who gains gravitas. Dumas taps into human drives like love, hate, greed, ambition, REVENGE, and forgiveness and depicts moments of intense emotion: eyes bulge, faces sweat, hands tremble, and people collapse. Check out this description of paralyzed Noirtier: “In this moment all of the soul of the old man seemed to pass into his eyes, which were infused with blood; then the veins of his throat swelled, a bluish tint like that which invades the skin of an epileptic covered his neck, his cheeks, and his temples; he only lacked in this interior explosion of his entire being a cry. This cry exited so to speak from all of his pores, dreadful in its muteness, heartrending in its silence.” Because we care about the characters, the story is often suspenseful, as when Dantès gets in a body bag, when the Comte hosts a dinner party, when Noirtier changes his will, when Maximilian waits for Valentine at night, and when Mercedes visits the Comte. Many chapters are moving, like the one where Dantès returns to Chateau d’If and prays for a sign: “Monte-Cristo raised his eyes to the sky, but he couldn't see it: there was a veil of stone between him and the firmament.” Dumas is often funny, as when the Comte enjoys seeing what a spoiled brat Villefort’s eight-year-old son is, when Villefort questions “Busoni” and “Wilmore” for intel on the “Comte,” when Caderousse catches up with Benedetto, or when Roman bandits overcharge Danglars for chicken, bread, and wine. He writes proto-Wildean lines: “An academic would say that the parties of the world are collections of flowers that attract inconstant butterflies, famished bees, and buzzing hornets.” He writes witty dialogue: “What do you want to do with me?” “That’s what I'm asking you. I tried to make a happy man and I only made an assassin.” Dumas is a master of irony. He writes sarcastic asides, like, “Let’s return now to that dutiful son and that loving father” (a pair of conmen playing lucrative roles). He writes dramatic irony, as when Villefort doesn’t know who the poisoner in his house is but we do, when adulterous-ex-lovers don’t know that a criminal is their illegitimate son but we do, or when the generous gift of a jewel leads to murder and theft. His writes many prime insights into human nature, like these: “Moral wounds, especially those we hide, never close up; always painful, always ready to bleed when one touches them, they remain sharp and gaping in the heart.” “In the history of humanity, ghosts have done far less harm than living people do in a single day.” “Alas, said Monte-Cristo, it’s one of the prides of our poor humanity, that each man believes himself more unfortunate than another unfortunate who cries and moans right beside him.” Dumas assumes much cultural knowledge in his reader, referring to Greek/Roman myths and history and to 1001 Nights, and to the works of Dante, Shakespeare, Racine, Byron, and to many kinds of opera and art. He also must’ve been obsessed about money! The novel is longer than necessary. And I have problems with its ending. (view spoiler)[First, the month-long “death” of Valentine is too contrived and lasts too long. Maximilian is a self-made officer who already values life and his family and Val, so he needs no such tough love adversity training from the Comte. Second, I don’t buy Haydée (the Comte’s Albanian princess-slave) and the Comte sailing off together as lovers. Dumas doesn’t develop her character and relationship with the Comte enough to make her an equal partner, so I was hoping that he and Mercedes would end up together as weathered lovers. (hide spoiler)] But the virtues of Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (1844) far outweigh its flaws. The novel is entertaining and moving and potently demonstrates the corruption of the wealthy and powerful. (If Dantès’ enemies had only sinned against him, he’d only be a petty revenger.) I’m glad I finally read it—in French—though it took me four months□. View all my reviews
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “And if I can die having brought any light…” The Autobiography of Malcolm X As Told to Alex Haley (1965) was absorbing and illuminating. At times it made me uncomfortable: Am I a white devil? It often moved me. Because I knew that Malcolm X was assassinated shortly before the book was published, for example, it’s poignant when, only about 39, he tells us in the first chapter that “It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence” and in the last chapter that he’s learning Arabic and hoping to learn African languages and Chinese, but that “I live like a man who is dead already.” His autobiography recounts growing up early as Malcom Little in Lansing after the brutal murder of his father and the psychological decline of his mother, becoming the “mascot” of his all white junior high school, moving to Boston and getting involved in the night and dance scene and conking his hair with lye and wearing loud zoot suits, moving to Harlem and hustling as Detroit Red (e.g., numbers, drugs, and “steering” men to prostitutes), returning to Boston and starting a burglary team, being arrested and sentenced the full ten years because of the involvement of his white girlfriend and her sister, being called Satan in prison but then discovering the dictionary and books and the Nation of Islam and its leader Elijah Mohammed, leaving prison and joining the Nation of Islam (as Malcom X), becoming its most prominent spokesperson and preacher and promoter, becoming envied by other NOI officers, learning of Elijah Mohammed’s several illegitimate children, becoming friends with Cassius Clay, getting exiled from and or leaving the NOI, going to Mecca and having his eyes opened as to the cross-cultural cross-racial brotherhood of international Islam, returning to the USA and being accused by the media of hate-mongering after having realized that it’s not white people who are universally racist but the American political, economic, and cultural system. At the end of his autobiography, Malcom X expresses his hope that if his book could be “read objectively it might prove to be a testimony of some social value.” I’ll say! I wish I had read it forty years ago. And I’m struck by how many things he said still ring true today, for example, about “the malignant cancer of racism in American culture,” as in the never ending killing of unarmed black people by white police. Malcolm X’s argument that Christianity has been used to keep black people in their places by promising them pie in the sky in heaven hit home to me. But (being an atheist) I had to ask, Why did he need to replace Christian “brainwashing” with another religion’s brainwashing? Especially one like NOI that used a bizarre pulp-sf novelesque “history” to explain racial differences and white evil. He did come to realize that NOI wasn’t where it’s at, with too much worship of a flawed human leader, but he still needed Islam. I found his defense of racial separation (chosen by a group to survive) as opposed to segregation (imposed on a group to exploit them) interesting, though I think (hope?) it’s more feasible and desirable to aim for true integration. I found his explanation of Kennedy’s assassination convincing: the violence and hatred “generated and nourished” by whites against blacks ended up getting out of control and turning on white people, even their own leaders. C.f. the January 6 assault on the Capitol. I found admirable his lack of personal enrichment through his many speaking engagements, such that he had to borrow money from his half-sister to go to Mecca. I loved his direct, vivid, vernacular English with powerful similes and flourishes, like: “If you see somebody winning all the time, he isn't gambling, he's cheating... It's like the Negro in America seeing the white man win all the time. He's a professional gambler; he has all the cards and the odds stacked on his side, and he has always dealt to our people from the bottom of the deck.” “The woman who had brought me into the world, and nursed me, and advised me, and chastised me, and loved me, didn't know me. It was as if I was trying to walk up the side of a hill of feathers.” “This was my first really big step toward self-degradation: when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man's hair. I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are “inferior”--and white people “superior”--that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look “pretty” by white standards.” “You know what my life had been. Picking a lock to rob someone's house was the only way my knees had ever been bent before.” “They wore that ‘troublesome nigger’ expression. And I looked ‘white devil’ back into their eyes.” “I remember one night at Muzdalifa with nothing but the sky overhead I lay awake amid sleeping Muslim brothers and I learned that pilgrims from every land--every color, and class, and rank; high officials and the beggar alike--all snored in the same language.” Laurence Fishburne’s reading of the audiobook made me imagine Malcolm X talking to me, though he may at times inject more emotion and energy into the already potent words than they need. I regret that the audiobook excludes the physical book’s “Foreword” by Attallah Shabazz, “Epilogue” by Alex Haley, or “On Malcom X” by Aussie Davis. Reading the autobiography, I admire what Malcolm X achieved in his 39 years (given the deck stacked against him) and grieve that he didn’t live longer to achieve more. When he says that he might not be alive to read his book when it's published and that “the white man will use me as a symbol of hatred,” I have to admit that, in my ignorance, my image of Malcolm X had been an intelligent, articulate, charismatic, fiery, and scary teller of uncomfortable truths, especially for me as a white man. Yet his book ends with him saying, “I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being, first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” And “But it is only after the deepest darkness that the greatest joy can come; it is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come.” View all my reviews
The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars A Perfect Conclusion to a Great Trilogy The concluding book of Ursula K. Le Guin’s first Earthsea Trilogy, The Farthest Shore (1972), begins with Arren, son of the prince of Enlad, gone to Roke, Isle of the Wise, there to get counsel at the famous School for Wizards for the troubles in his home island: magic is dying, joy fading, luck failing, and disease spreading. Arren is a boy not quite yet a man, not exactly a pampered prince, but thus far in his life a facile player of games. But Arren’s name means sword, and he’s descended from the legendary Morred and Elfarran, and when he meets the middle-aged Archmage Ged, the most powerful man in Earthsea, he takes “the first step out of childhood… without looking before or behind, without caution, and with nothing held in reserve,” falling in (hero-worship) love with the Archmage. And when, “awkward, radiant, obedient,” he offers his service to Ged, we sense that some important destiny has been set in motion for the long-kingless archipelago. Because the disturbing situation on Arren’s home island has been occurring throughout Earthsea, Ged decides to take the youth on a voyage to seek the cause of the draining of the magic from life and world. Told from the point of view of Arren (as A Wizard of Earthsea is told from that of Ged and The Tombs of Atuan from that of Tenar), The Farthest Shore becomes an increasingly metaphysical sea-road story, as Ged and Arren visit a series of islands (including a trade island, a craft island, a hostile island, a raft island, and a remote island) in their attempt to locate the source of what’s wrong with Earthsea. For the reader, Arren is a perfect travel companion for Ged, being eager, brave, and ignorant--providing opportunities for the older man to dispense Le Guin’s gnomic wisdom, about balance and imbalance, being and doing, life and death, good and evil, nature and humanity, and more, as in the following exchange: “Nature is not unnatural. This is not a righting of the balance but an upsetting of it. There is only one creature who can do that.” “A man,” Arren said, tentative. “We men.” “How?” “By an unmeasured desire for life.” “For life? But it isn’t wrong to want to live?” “No. But when we crave power over life—endless wealth, unassailable safety, immortality—then desire becomes greed. And if knowledge allies itself to that greed, then comes evil. Then the balance of the world is swayed, and ruin weighs heavy in the scale.” Such stern lessons wax poetic and bracing: “To refuse death is to refuse life” “Lebannen, this is. And thou art. There is no safety, and there is no end. The word must be heard in silence; there must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.’” “That there is only one power that is real and worth the having. And that is the power, not to take, but to accept.” And Arren learns: “I have given my love to what is worthy of love. Is that not the kingdom and the unperishing spring?” The pair’s journey is not easy. There are dangers: slavers, madmen, drugs, dragons, and above all, the tall man in Arren’s dreams, the king of shadows, the great enemy standing in the dark and beckoning with a pearl of light. There are devastating developments, as when Arren becomes estranged from Ged, or when Ged realizes that something he did when younger is responsible for the current draining of magic and life from Earthsea. Set in the dry land across the wall, the last chapters comprise a harrowing sequence. Arren poignantly becomes the leader and Ged the follower: “I use your love as a man burns a candle, to light his way. And we must go on.” The climactic “boss” confrontation is less surprising than that in A Wizard of Earthsea but is just as sublime and more shocking in its ramifications (developed in Tehanu: The Fourth Book of Earthsea). As the first novel in the trilogy is about accepting our light and dark parts so that we may mature and live good lives, and the second is about choosing the light and life rather than the dark and death, this third one is about being fully aware of life and death and accepting both. Moreover, because the releasing of Ged’s shadow into Earthsea in A Wizard of Earthsea and the opening of the hole in Earthsea in The Farthest Shore both derive from Ged’s having acted in anger and vanity, the third novel bookends the first, and by extending the effects of such ill actions from Ged’s self to his world, it perfectly concludes the original trilogy, which as a whole expresses the idea that our actions influence our lives and world in unexpected ways. Despite being a quest novel, The Farthest Shore demonstrates that being is superior to doing and that even young people—who have much to do and must learn from their mistakes and should achieve big things—should understand that fully aware being is the “greater kingdom.” Or “Dragons do not do. They are.” The book also says that life is wonderful because it ends, that the price we pay for life is death, “That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea,” and that we have sufficient immortality in being part of the natural cycles of the world. The audiobook reader, Rob Inglis, is prime, but I can’t help but feel that he’s reading The Lord of the Rings, with, for instance, Ged talking like Gandalf, and I wish that they’d found an equally fine American reader for the book, like George Guidall or Jonathan Davis. Like all of the Earthsea books, this one is marked by concise, vivid, poetic prose, with each word and each sentence being just right, like this: “The living splendor that was revealed about them in the silent, desolate land, as if by a power of enchantment surpassing any other, in every blade of the wind-bowed grass, every shadow, every stone. So when one stands in a cherished place for the last time before a voyage without return, he sees it all whole, and real, and dear, as he has never seen it before and never will see it again.” View all my reviews
Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Happiness, free, for everyone!” Roadside Picnic (1972) by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky is a reverse image of Solaris (1961). Whereas in Stanislaw Lem’s classic novel humans go to an alien world, study the alien life form there for years but only learn more about themselves, in the Strugatskys’ book aliens have seemingly visited earth for, presumably, a brief stop enroute to somewhere else, leaving behind artifacts, which human beings have been researching (and illicitly stealing and selling) but only learning about themselves and human nature. In both novels, then, despite the most rigorous human science the alien is unknowable. Both works expose the limits of human knowledge. The Strugatsky novel (translated by Olena Bormashenko) begins with an interview with Dr. Valentine Pillman, the scientist whose name has been (undeservedly he says) given to the pattern in which the six alien “Visit Zones” were scattered across earth thirteen years ago. He works for an organization dedicated to preventing the alien artifacts from falling into the wrong hands. The plot begins in the first-person voice of Red Schuhart, a hardboiled 23-year-old lab tech at the Harmont Branch of the International Institute of Extraterrestrial Cultures. Red moonlights as a “stalker,” illegally entering the Harmont zone at night to purloin and later sell alien artifacts. For over a year now, Red has seen his scientist “egghead” friend Kirill fruitlessly obsessing over “empties,” alien artifacts in the form of pairs of rings held in suspension, such that each disc stays just so far apart from the other, without any discernable force keeping them so. Carrying an empty is like carrying 20 pounds of water without a bucket--one of the vivid similes used by the Strugatskys to convey what dealing with the alien is like. Concerned for Kirill, Red guides him on a daylight journey into the zone to bring out a rare “full empty,” an empty with a blue syrup-like liquid between the rings. The zone is full of traps like gravity wells, grinders, and hot spots. Time passes differently inside than outside. Thus, to get out of the zone alive, anyone who enters must follow “rules,” like avoiding straight routes, tossing nuts and bolts ahead to suss out traps, keeping quiet, walking around certain things, not feeling relief when starting the return trip, and being decontaminated after an excursion. There is no moral logic behind who survives the zone: “The zone didn't give a damn who the good guys or the bad guys are.” The alien artifacts are sometimes beneficial, often dangerous, and their true purposes and the science behind them remain incomprehensible. The abandoned houses adjacent to the Harmont zone look normal and well-preserved, apart from the TV antennae being covered with what looks like hair. Are the zones a treasure trove of advanced technology that will, when sufficiently studied by our scientists, usher humanity into a utopian era of peace and plenty? Or are they an open sore, attracting the fly-like criminal and military dregs of humanity to “Satan’s baubles” and hastening our progress to self-destruction? What causes the children of stalkers to mutate after birth, decades-old corpses to reanimate, and emigrants from zone adjacent communities to cause a spike in fatal events wherever they relocate? What was the alien intention in visiting earth and then departing, leaving the artifacts? Are the aliens still here, observing what we do with the artifacts before deciding our fate? What must we do (or not do) to pass such a test? Or were the aliens just having a “roadside picnic” on earth and thoughtlessly left behind their garbage? The Strugatskys don’t answer such questions (“People imagine all sorts of things, and what they imagine has nothing to do with reality”), but they do extrapolate from the presence of alien artifacts to show how human culture would be affected by them. The Harmont zone attracts young men who want to make their fortunes but become disillusioned and leave or become stalkers or Institute technicians. The authorities are setting up a military style perimeter around the zone, in theory to better control who takes what alien artifacts out. Some of the artifacts can be adapted for human use, like “eternal batteries.” Some are better left unexamined, like “hell slime.” Some become legendary, like a large golden ball that becomes a holy grail by supposedly granting any human wish. One of the core themes of the book concerns the nature of intelligence, as foregrounded by a conversation between an amoral businessman and a cynical physicist. The scientist offers definitions that don’t reflect well on human beings, e.g., intelligence is the ability to alter one’s environment without destroying it. Another key theme of the book concerns the alien, and the book says it’s either impossible to understand the alien or a matter of faith (which makes you think you understand everything while knowing nothing). In that context, as the story moves forward several years for each new chapter, it movingly depicts redeeming human qualities, like the love of Red and his wife Guta for their child, whom they call “Monkey” because she’s clever, cute, and covered with silken, golden fur. And like Red’s self-reliant insistence on doing things the right way: breaking stupid rules, staying loyal, and finally sitting in the middle of the unknowable, appalling zone and shouting to whatever (if any) alien (or divine) power might be listening, “I never sold my soul!” Personal victories in the context of human insignificance. In such small victories by overwhelmed people, the novel has a Philip K. Dick vibe. The zone becomes a metaphor for the world, a stalker’s trip to wrest swag from the zone a metaphor for our own run through life, which is also fraught with dangers and opaque to knowing. After the novel comes a bleakly humorous Afterword from 2012, written by the surviving Strugatsky brother, Boris, who explains how he and Arkady came up with the idea for the novel (including what inspired the word “stalker”) and then details their 1970s struggle to publish it, which lasted for over eight years and hundreds of letters to and from editors, publishers, and communist party committee members, including lists of all the things the editors wanted changed, like slang, violence, and drinking. Boris says that the resistance to publishing the novel wasn’t due to it being ideologically off for Soviet readers (its main ideology is anti-capitalist), but rather due to it failing to elevate the nation, being too colorful in its language, and having too much brutal reality in it. Of course, those features help make it great sf. Robert Forster reads the audiobook with throaty energy and a very American accent. View all my reviews
Click to set custom HTML
The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars H. P. Lovecraft Gets a Diversity Makeover N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became (2020) begins as NY (“This wild, incredible, stupid-ass city”) wakes up, birthed as one of a small number of sentient cities in the world. It is a complicated birth, involving six human avatars, one for each of the five boroughs plus one “primary” for the city as a whole, and attracting an “enemy” and its “harbingers” from another universe, out to kill the infant city and or to subsume it by taking out the avatars before they can figure out what’s going on and unite as a composite, powerful, self-aware city. The avatars had been leading more or less normal lives as human beings (city politician, Art Center director, graduate student, homeless graffiti artist, etc.) before suddenly becoming able to switch back and forth between normal “real” human perception and abilities and the at first disorienting “surreal” city ones. This book is urban sf with an overt political thrust. Fitting the diverse nature of NY, its six avatars are a diverse group. Five are people of color (two African Americans, one Native American, and one Tamil and one multi-racial person), four are female, at least three are gay or lesbian, and one is a not an American citizen. In addition to the newly born multi-cultural NY, the two sentient cities featured in this story are South American (Sao Paolo) and Asian (Hong Kong) who manifest as gay “men.” The only one of the six NY avatars to be white and straight is also repulsive (though her controlling, racist policeman father is worse). The malignant multi-dimensional enemy from a universe inimical to ours, meanwhile, mostly manifests in NY as a series of white-clad white women like “philanthropic” businesswomen or obvious Karens while puppeteering numerous sympathetic and “synchronistic” white racist or xenophobic or homophobic or anti-feminist New Yorkers and proliferating a plague of white tendrils, tentacles, feathers, or flowers. Many of the threats to the avatars fantastically exaggerate the daily dangers people of color experience in any American city, like hostile police and suspicious passersby. I don’t want to complain about all this, because the majority of sf (and fantasy) has been written by, for, and about straight white people, and aggrieved and defensive white racism is toxic (“White dude whining as a growth industry”), but the diversity on steroids, including excrescent touches like the roommate of the avatar of Manhattan being a quickly introduced and forgotten trans Vietnamese from London, did start getting a little too much. The novel also affirms creative people, artists, musicians, or mathematicians (though the mathematics of the graduate student Tamil avatar are underused), while condemning city gentrification through the driving out of low-income residents, the replacement of unique local shops with generic chain satellites, and the like. The novel is a love song to NYC and to big cities in general and a plea for them to stay dirty, distinctive, and individual. The writing is vivid, funny, and fast paced, with the entire novel occurring over the course of a few intense days as the new avatars try to get it together while fending off smirking threats and insidious attacks from their enemy. There are no sex scenes. The violence mostly happens on a metaphysical plane and isn’t very graphic. There are some suspenseful scenes of sf horror, in which, for instance, white x-shaped spider things attack a pair of brownstones in Brooklyn, Starbucks chains start attacking a jeep, a toilet stall in the women’s restroom in the Bronx Art Center gets aggressive, and a subway car mutates into a monster. There are many f-words and other salty exclamations. Plenty of pop culture references, too. Most work fine, like, "She looks like an evil mid-career Joni Mitchell” or “a cross between a church lady and a female Colonel Sanders.” Some sound funny, like when the enemy manifests as the Woman in White outside a suburban Staten Island house and warns the NYC avatars, "You shall not pass!" but after initially chuckling at it, it struck me as childish, because why would the enemy want to or be able to imitate Gandalf facing the Balrog at that point? The enemy then says something like, “I’ve always wanted to say that,” but it sounds like Jemisin and not an inimical alien entity from another universe. And lines like “Now it’s just the two of them, living city and eldritch abomination, face to face and ready for the showdown to come,” so obviously playing with Lovecraft, make it difficult for me to care deeply about what’s going on in the story. The concept is intriguing: sentient cities transcending an unlimited number of alternate universes, the personalities of the human city avatars reflecting or embodying those of their cities, and so on. And Jemisin’s varied cast of characters mostly feel convincing. But as I read, I got the feeling that Jemisin hinted at and then summarized too much of the situation as she went, so I found that I knew what was happening before the characters did and then had to wait for them to catch up while getting ever more summaries of the situation to bring them up to speed, so I started thinking that the book could have been edited more tightly. And Jemisin fully indulges in the old overly talkative villain syndrome and in the old employ (or avoid) super abilities to do whatever the writer wants at any moment trick. The City We Became reads like a cross between Samuel R. Delaney (dirty, holy, gay, city street folks), China Mieville (monstrous, hybrid, animated city things), and especially H. P. Lovecraft (multidimensional inimical entity from another universe bringing its proliferating, “wrong,” and sea-reeking tentacles, tendrils, and towers to a city), with a strong dose of diversity and big city-love. I listened to the book read by Robin Miles, who throws herself body and soul into her reading, keeping the voices of the diverse characters distinct and consistent while ratcheting up the suspense. Listeners who prefer restrained readings of books might be turned off by Miles’ energy, but I enjoyed her. Will I go on to listen to the second book in the series? Hmmm. Not right now. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
This blog is for book reviews. Please feel free to comment on any of the reviews! Categories
All
Archives
April 2024
Jefferson's books
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 ...
|
My Fukuoka University