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| 3.82
| 12,224
| Mar 23, 2021
| Mar 23, 2021
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really liked it
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This book has fucked me up in subtle ways I might spend months if not years untangling. C.L. Clark has written a kind of book I have always wanted to
This book has fucked me up in subtle ways I might spend months if not years untangling. C.L. Clark has written a kind of book I have always wanted to write, a fantasy novel speaking to the present day even as its secondary world setting remains a colonial, nineteenth-century one. With unlikeable protagonists and unenviable no-win scenarios, The Unbroken is a deliberate hot mess. I didn’t love it. I didn’t even want to like it. I ’t stop thinking about it. Touraine is a lieutenant in the Balladairan colonial army. Kidnapped from her home country of Qazāl as a small child, she is part of the Sands, a unit comprised of her fellow foreign conscripts. Now the Sands have returned “home,� their unit accompanying Balladaire’s bloodiest general and Crown Princess Luca, eager to make her mark as a leader so that she can finally unseat her regent uncle and accede to Balladaire’s throne. Circumstances lead to Touraine and Luca starting as allies before becoming enemies and then allies (frenemies?) again. And then enemies. And then � look, you get the idea. Let’s start with just how many notes The Unbroken hits perfectly. ’s a queernorm fantasy that’s nevertheless full of discrimination, conflict, and hatred. ’s a postcolonial fantasy that has a sympathetic monarch main character even as it critiques that entire institution without an ounce of clemency. ’s a story of never coming home, finally coming home, wishing you hadn’t come home, and fucking everything up trying to come home. Purely by chance, I read this immediately following Empire of Sand . I’ll repeat what I said in my review of that book: we are in renaissance of fantasy. And I’ll add: that renaissance is largely driven by authors of colour, who have been hard at work reshaping mainstream fantasy from a fluffy, sanitized version of Europe into something with teeth. From N.K. Jemisin to Tracey Deonn, and now Tasha Suri and C.L. Clark—fantasy proliferates now with incredibly diverse voices that aren’t afraid to break down the status quo of the genre. When I was younger, I had this whole idea for a fantasy novel—I won’t explain it here, mostly because one day I still might write it, but suffice it to say it included the protagonist plotting revolution against a queen who happened to be her best friend because, you know, democracy. At seventeen, I understood it was weird my favourite genre could tell beautiful stories about Good triumphing over Evil, yet they still always ended with a feudal society full of class divisions and ruled by a monarch. So it shouldn’t be a surprise I am loving postcolonial fantasy and how it gives zero fucks about pretending a functioning monarchy is a good place to live. In this way, Luca is a difficult character to like in The Unbroken. As Touraine quite rightly says to her face at one point, she is the epitome of privilege in this world. Her complaint is that her power-hungry uncle isn’t giving power to her, basically. Clark expertly portrays her as a kind of well-meaning white saviour: she thinks she can “help� the people of Qazāl, but only within the framework of empire; her worldview doesn’t let her imagine anything different. Touraine, then, becomes the perfect foil. A survivor of colonial abduction, deprogramming herself in her homeland even as her own people treat her with suspicion, Touraine seems like a natural candidate for heroine as well as protagonist. Except she sucks just as bad as Luca! To be fair, her flaws are probably more personal than political, but her role in the story means her personal flaws have massive political consequences, so it all comes out the same, basically. It has been a long time since I have yelled at a book as much as I yelled at Touraine every single time she was at a fork in the road and took the worst possible path down each. Every. Time. She is the Jon Snow of this world, and like Jon Snow, she knows nothing. Also like Jon, she fails upward. So with two unlikeable protagonists who mess everything up, why is The Unbroken so good? Because Clark clearly means it to be a mess. I’m sure there’s some readers who will ship Touraine and Luca as a disaster couple, but honestly, I don’t think we are supposed to read them that way. They are just disasters, full stop, individually and together. This is a fantasy novel that truly embraces just how chaotic the disintegration of empire is while at the same time telling a coherent story, and it works really well. I don’t want to read the next book. But I also ’t look away. That’s what I am trying to say here: The Unbroken seared itself on my soul because it does so much right that even as I want to plug my ears and say, “Nope, not interested, give me the cozy fantasy again please,� I ’t help myself. I’m part of the revolution now. Let’s go. Originally posted on . ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 16, 2024
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Sep 25, 2024
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Oct 06, 2024
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Paperback
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| 0525534903
| 9780525534907
| 0525534903
| 3.54
| 2,311
| Jun 28, 2022
| Jun 28, 2022
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liked it
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First, some praise for the simplicity of this title. Too often novels think they need to be cleverer by half and jam entire sentences into their title
First, some praise for the simplicity of this title. Too often novels think they need to be cleverer by half and jam entire sentences into their titles or create cute, quirky subtitles in emulation of the eighteenth century. Thrust is as prosaic a title as its contents are poetical. Lidia Yuknavitch says in the acknowledgements that she wanted to play with the novel as a form, and that is evident throughout. Now, I like me a straightforward novel, so in that sense the artistic and literary boundaries that Thrust probes didn’t work well for me personally. At the same time, I can recognize good literature when I see it. Laisvė is a teenager living in The Brook, a post-apocalyptic part of New York City sinking into the rising sea. Her father works on repairing the partially submerged Statue of Liberty. Meanwhile, she is a carrier—she has a rare ability to bring objects (and even people) through time via waterways. Laisvė visits people out of order across American history, some of them connected to each other throughout their lives, bringing them objects like pennies and rope. Along the way, Yuknavitch tells us stories within stories: of birth and death, childhood and senescence, of loss and finding. The architect of the Statue of Liberty corresponds with a one-legged woman in the States who oversees not so much a brothel as a kink parlour. A young man runs from a violent past towards a baby girl he found and then gave up. Oh, and there are turtles and whales. There is also a lot of sex and sexual imagery. I’m asexual and sex-averse—I don’t mind reading the occasional sex scene, if it is well written. Honestly the stuff here is pretty tame, just a little florid (on purpose), but for people who are more sex-repulsed or just don’t enjoy explicit writing, you won’t like it. This book was lent to me by the same neighbour who lent me Signs Preceding the End of the World . She, in turn, borrowed it from a coworker. I commented to my neighbour that she “likes weird books� and observed the similarities between these two titles—both involve a young female protagonist who undergoes a journey through space/time that is itself a metaphor for death and rebirth. Laisvė ability also reminded me of The Water Dancer , by Ta-Nehisi Coates. But the closest comp I can make is actually a TV series: The OA produced by Netflix, has extremely similar vibes to Thrust. These connections don’t surprise me. Yuknavitch is undoubtedly trying to decolonize the novel here (as much as a white woman can decolonize anything). Laisvė’s heritage is Sakha (Yakut); there are Kanienʼkehá꞉ka (Mohawk) characters as well, and several times the languages and democracy of the Haudenosaunee is referenced. Laisvė’s journeys into the water have her talking to animals such as turtles, whales, and worms, all lamenting what the colonial parts of human civilization have wrought. The ongoing epistolary plot between Frédéric and Aurora and the hulking presence of the Statue of Liberty throughout problematize coloniality and the idea of the triumph of modernity. Aurora’s ending, in particular, and the gift she returns to Frédéric, seems to symbolize a rejection of a mechanistic, transhumanist philosophy in favour of one rooted in harmony and nature. Now, I have complicated feelings about all of this, but we will get there. Let’s talk a little more about form and style first. Ever since I finished university, I’ve tried my best to hang up the hat that was my pretensions about literature and, as they say, slum it. After all, my first love has and always will be epic fantasy, including the works of David Eddings, who was fairly vocal about how he was just slapping plots together (with a lot of initially unacknowledged assistance from his wife, Leigh) using formulas. The same goes for my other first love, mysteries in the style of Agatha Christie. So as much as my minor in English and love of Regency and Victorian novelists might have you envisioning a classy lady in a monocle and top hat sipping tea while she writes reviews (well, the tea part is at least correct), really I just like a good yarn. So I guess Yuknavitch has triggered this tension within me between the recovering English lit student and the exhausted teacher who just wants to escape into a straightforward story. I would love to just throw this novel across the room (metaphorically, of course, since this book is borrowed), cross my arms, and slide down against the wall while muttering, “literary fiction, ugh.� Alas, that is an oversimplification of my feelings about Thrust and perhaps literary fiction altogether. ’s cool that in 2022 novelists continue to experiment with the form. Literature, like all art, must continue to evolve as our societies evolve. Poetry often gets the most attention when it comes to being avant garde; I think this is a mistake. I love prose, and the novel in particular, precisely because its apparent structure belies an inherent chameleon-like nature. Novels are empty vessels into which authors pour and then sieve their consciousness. So with all of that in mind, I respect what Yuknavitch is doing with Thrust. ’s not a book that I would necessarily have picked up all on my own—but that is why it’s good to have friends whose literary appetites overlap but do not perfectly match yours! However, it’s always nice to once in a while stretch the mind and see how authors are playing with form. There’s a lot going on here: epistolary chapters, first person, third person, ethnographies, prose poems, time slips, streams of consciousness � Yuknavitch doesn’t make it easy on the reader. I pity the translators! In that sense, if I were to offer serious critique of Thrust’s form and style, it has to be how it feels overstuffed with experimentation. Yuknavitch has put so much into this short novel, transforming it into a kaleidoscope of storytelling that is not so much dazzling as it is dizzying. I prefer my experimental literature to be far more precise; the messiness on display here makes me recoil. I also found it very challenging to connect with our main characters. Of all of them, Aurora was probably the one who felt most tangible to me with her letters and other perspective chapters. Yuknavitch’s heavy reliance on metaphor and other figurative language left me at a loss when it comes to characters like Aster. This is why, as I mentioned earlier, I’m ambivalent about the endings of so many of these characters. With so much going on, despite the intricate intersections created by Laisvė’s travel and storytelling, the characters� disparate stories did not always come together for me. On the other hand, I really appreciate how Yuknavitch challenges readers with what a novel’s structure should be. In particular, a lot of what she is doing reminds me of Indigenous concepts of circular storytelling—Lee Maracle explains this exquisitely in her essay . Again, I temper my praise in this regard given that, ideally, we should be reading Indigenous authors who are doing this. But I think it is important to remark on how Yuknavitch is deliberately tapping into our existential dread of climate change through a structure that questions the colonial aspects of our society while championing storytelling that deviates from the dominant, Eurocentric norms of Western literature. Oh boy. All of that in 1200 words simply to say, Thrust is a calculated and messy story that makes for an ambitious read. One of the blurbs on the back cover of this edition calls it “trenchant,� which is a fantastic word, and I agree. If you like intense, evocative sexuality, circular storytelling, anticolonial rhetoric, and vibrant explorations of violent grief, this book will appeal to you. Just don’t expect it to make a whole lot of sense the first time through. Originally posted on , where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 26, 2023
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Jul 2023
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Jul 11, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0345807464
| 9780345807465
| 0345807464
| 4.32
| 395,468
| May 14, 2013
| May 14, 2013
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really liked it
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Unlike Half of a Yellow Sun, which is a historical novel, Americanah is a more literary offering. Adichie examines how where we live—where we grow up,
Unlike Half of a Yellow Sun, which is a historical novel, Americanah is a more literary offering. Adichie examines how where we live—where we grow up, where we work, where we find relationships—affects how we relate to other people. In particular, this is a book about race and Blackness as a construct of American society. Trigger warnings in this book for anti-Black racism, anti-Semitism, suicide, infidelity, sexual harrassment. Ifemelu and Obinze grow up together in Nigeria, each other’s first loves. She moves to the United States; he moves to England. They struggle to adapt to their new countries—or rather, their new countries try to adapt them. Ifemelu meets with more success, albeit perhaps at greater cost. She becomes, in the eyes of some of her fellow Nigerians, an eponymous Americanah: someone who adapts too well to her American setting, so that she isn’t fully Nigerian any more. Obinze has a rougher time with his immigration status, eventually returning to Nigeria years before Ifemelu finds her way back there. Adichie tells the bulk of the story in a flashback mode—we begin with Ifemelu leaving the United States for Nigeria, and then we flash back to hers and Obinze’s childhood together. We watch them grow and grow apart and see the trials they face before they are reunited. But even then, finding happiness is far from assured. There’s a lot about this novel that isn’t my thing. The on/off romance, the relationships between the characters � this is why I usually prefer genre fiction, which offers more to its plot than a narrator telling me why a character is unhappy at this point in their life. But what makes Americanah a little more interesting, of course, is the way Adichie weaves nuances of race throughout the story. While in the United States, Ifemelu writes a blog called Raceteenth, where she teaches non-American Blacks about life in America. In this way, Adichie creates a distinction that many non-Black Americans (or Canadians, in my case) might not think about: Black people who grew up in the United States are quite different from Black people who immigrate from elsewhere. Ifemelu points out that, until she came to the United States, she didn’t have any conception of race or of Blackness. What Adichie is doing here is gently explaining to readers this idea of racialization. Someone is racialized when their race, as determined by our society, is the minority in a given place. Consider how race versus ethnicity functions: in the United States, Ifemelu is seen as Black—she identifies more closely with other African Black people more so than African Americans—and her ethnicity as Igbo is largely irrelevant. In contrast, when she returns to Nigeria, her Blackness is entirely unremarkable, and her status as Igbo matters more. So, I obviously ’t speak for how Black people of various origins would interpret this novel. As I white woman in Canada, I wanted to observe the way Adichie discusses race, and particularly Ifemelu’s experience of race in Nigeria. There are two white characters who caught my attention: Kimberly and Laura. Kimberly hires Ifemelu to be a babysitter/nanny for her two children. She does charity/NGO work related to Africa, and she is one portrait of a well-meaning, progressive white person: she always tries to say the right thing, try to be respectful of Ifemelu as a person—but as Ifemelu observes, she is anxious to please in this way. Laura, Kimberly’s friend, is another portrayal of a progressive white person: she’s too confident of her own wokeness, too ready to make pronouncements that Ifemelu can belie from her own experiences, offending Laura’s white fragility in the process. I like how Adichie carefully shapes these distinctive white women to show us various ways that white women treat Black women (and in particular, African women) in the United States. This richness of the interactions of characters of various races and racializations is what makes Americanah so interesting, at least to me. There are many other examples: Ifemelu’s interactions with the other African women who work at the salon she visits; Obinze’s relationships to other Nigerians who go to England to make their fortune; Aunty Uju’s tenuous attempts to find another husband, to raise her son well in the United States. And so on. I wasn’t all that bothered by the underlying romance between Ifemelu and Obinze, but I was very happy to explore all these nuances of race. A little long and drags a little in parts, Americanah is nevertheless thoughtful and quite successful at what it sets out to do. It showcases Adichie’s endearing talent at creating characters who move beyond the single story, as she cautions against in her TED talk. And it remains relevant in a post-Obama America, which is not a post-racial America like some hoped or pretended. As we challenge and dismantle white supremacy, it’s worth remembering that race (and in particular, Blackness) is not a universal, monolithic idea. Like any social construct, it is real, but its meanings and barriers and boundaries are fluid, and that must be taken into account. Originally posted on , where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 11, 2020
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Nov 15, 2020
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Nov 11, 2020
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ebook
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| 0241364906
| 9780241364901
| 0241364906
| 4.27
| 252,274
| May 02, 2019
| May 02, 2019
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really liked it
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Every once in a while, I stop and just think about how everyone else around me is totally engrossed in their own life. I don’t mean in an egotistical
Every once in a while, I stop and just think about how everyone else around me is totally engrossed in their own life. I don’t mean in an egotistical sense. I mean � just as I am wrapped up in living my life, with my own beliefs and struggles, my moments to myself and my moments given to others � everyone else goes through all this too! Except they aren’t me, or I’m not them, and therefore I don’t know what it’s like � sorry, am I getting too deep? Anyway, Girl, Woman, Other is an unconventional novel that basically seeks to remind us of theory of mind. Bernardine Evaristo tells 12 interlocking stories that expose us not just to the lives but to the minds of 12 Black people. In so doing, she reminds us that when we look at someone, when we judge them, when we wonder why they think or behave the way we do, maybe we should stop and consider where they come from—not just in place but in time and society as well. I’m not even going to attempt to summarize each of the 12 stories, because I am lazy. Let’s just say that Evaristo’s characters are drawn from a diversity of backgrounds, yet they also share experiences by dint of how society perceives them. Almost all of them are women (one is non-binary), all of them are Black (although that is complicated and erased for one), all of them are British yet are either immigrants or have tangible connections to immigrant parents or grandparents. Evaristo’s characters span generations, classes, careers, sexualities, and attitudes. They are artists and parents, cleaners and mathematicians, teachers and farm wives. Girl, Woman, Other’s writing is closer to poetry than prose. The paragraphs are more like verses, with capitalization and line-breaks creative rather than conventional. Description dominates over dialogue, which is conveyed at a distance. In this way, Evaristo seeks to provide a sum-over-stream-of-consciousness of histories: her characters grow from girls to women in a matter of pages, learn hard lessons, move through the world and make decisions that set their lives on certain paths. This is beautiful yet also frustrating, this style—I don’t like it, but I also understand its use here, and I don’t mean to say it’s bad. I just don’t make a habit of reading novels like this, and I won’t pretend that it didn’t affect my enjoyment of the book. I appreciate the myriad ways Evaristo interrogates the intersections of sex, sexuality, and race. Her characters are often queer—some of them openly so, some of them only experimentally or quietly. Trigger warnings for this book abound: rape and sexual violence, racism, abuse, xenophobia, misogyny, etc. Part of Evaristo’s theme is this idea that even though these characters explain Blackness and femaleness in very different ways, they are some level united by these identities by dint of living in white supremacist Britain. Meanwhile, these characters are complex and fallible. In a way, these aren’t really even interconnecting stories. They are character sketches, like we’re getting a glimpse into Evaristo’s notebook, plans for a novel not yet writen. I take issue with how Evaristo tells the story of Morgan, the non-binary (“gender-free� in Morgan’s own words). Evaristo begins by using Morgan’s deadname and the pronouns she/her, only switching up after Morgan chooses a new name and switches to they/them. I can understand why Evaristo does this, but as a trans person, I don’t like it. I want people to apply my name and pronouns retroactively—now that I am Kara, I’m Kara in 1989 when I was born, Kara in 2007 when I graduated high school, Kara last year before I came out as trans. It felt weird and compromising to be asked to look at Morgan in a way incongruent with their identity, even if the idea is supposed to be that this is the past. And here’s the thing: in a movie, or perhaps even a more conventional novel, there might be call for such convention—but this is not a conventional novel; this is a perfect opportunity for Evaristo to further her experimental form. Updated: Iliana, a reviewer on the non-binary spectrum, has graciously given me permission to amplify their criticisms of Morgan’s portrayal! (As an aside, Morgan, Shirley, Penelope’s stories probably resonated most with me, since I’m trans and also a teacher. I don’t know what it’s like to be Black in England, but I know what it’s like to teach there!) Indeed, as I considered Evaristo’s portrayal of Morgan, I started to understand the limitations of Girl, Woman, Other. It deserves its praise for the diversity of its sketches, for the complexity of these characters. Yet it also runs into the problem that plagues every author: you cannot possibly represent, with perfect fidelity, the experiences of people whose lives you haven’t shared. I’m pretty sure Evaristo understands this, that this is in fact part of the point of the book—but I wonder if this might go over some people’s heads. Girl, Woman, Other’s greatest strength is, out of necessity and probably by design, also its greatest weakness. In telling 12 stories, it sacrifices its ability to dive deeply into one. Each of these characters could have, do deserve, their own 450-page novel to portray them as fully and deeply as they deserve. That’s what I thought about as I read this book. In a way, I really appreciate that I pushed through its unconventional prose—it’s always nice when a novel gets me thinking about the structures and strictures of literature, about what is possible within the boundaries of the conventions we set, or within the liminal spaces between conventions. Thus, the highest praise I can give Girl, Woman, Other is that it is the best type of experimental novel, in my opinion: it is an experiment born out of empathy, rather than the author’s ego; and it is intrinsically aware of its own limitations. And more broadly, of course, I suspect that this book is a response to the dearth of Black female characters in so-called “mainstream� literature. ’s somewhat ironic (but certainly laudable) that this book won such accolades as the Booker Prize. Mainstream British (and Canadian) literature often ignores the voices of women and Black people, unless they embody Blackness and femaleness in specific ways, in ways that invalidate the autonomy and dignity of their bodies. Evaristo in this book pushes back against such ideas. This is a book filled with Black joy as well as Black pain. Hopefully its success paves the way for more Black women’s voices to tell the stories they want to tell rather than the ones that our literary gatekeepers deem theirs to tell. Originally posted on , where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 30, 2020
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Nov 2020
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Mar 08, 2020
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Kindle Edition
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| 0756415187
| 9780756415181
| 0756415187
| 4.03
| 6,737
| Feb 05, 2019
| Feb 05, 2019
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really liked it
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Ever since the first Binti novella came out, I’ve been hearing all about it. I jumped at this collection when I saw it at the bookstore, then, because
Ever since the first Binti novella came out, I’ve been hearing all about it. I jumped at this collection when I saw it at the bookstore, then, because I find it difficult to grab hold of novellas otherwise. I don’t care if Tor.com pushes them on me for free sometimes: I need it in my hands or on my device or else I just � read other things. And I’m glad I read Binti and its startling, heartbreaking, daring vision of a future in which an African girl aspires to learn and grow beyond the village life she knows. Binti is Himba, an ethnic group in a future Africa in a world parched by climate change. The Himba coexist in uneasy tension with the more dominant Khoush people, who had previously been at war with an alien species known as the Meduse. When Binti leaves home as the first Himba student admitted to the famous off-world Oomza University, she inadvertently winds up in the middle of an interstellar conflict. Her actions propel her into a role of increasing significance and danger, even as her experiences unmake and remake her into someone she never anticipated she could become. Nnedi Okorafor herself , including an excerpt from the beginning of Binti. I encourage you to check it out, as I’m definitely not qualified to dive deeper into the question of what Afrofuturism is. All I can do is share my perspective and interpretation of what I saw in Binti. The story here captivated me from the very beginning. Okorafor wastes no time throwing Binti her first challenge. Her interactions with the Meduse remind me somewhat of the ooloi from Butler’s Lilith’s Brood. There’s something so incredibly uncomfortable about swapping DNA in such a way (I suppose this is probably speciesist of me). Indeed, one of my favourite things about this series is the way in which Okorafor consistently challenges us to consider what Otherness means in the context of science fiction. The species Binti encounters are often non-humanoid. Even the humans she meets are extremely different, coming as they do from various cultures. The [Desert People] are particularly fascinating with their use of an alien biotech communications net. None of those would matter, though, were it not for Binti herself. This is very much, as the titles imply, her story. She is crucial not because of some special talent she has (despite her abilities as a harmonizer) but for an openness, a willingness that others might lack. She has the technological aptitude of the Himba yet lacks the conservative streak of her people. As her story progresses, she acquires different and new artifacts of the various cultures she encounters. She is an envoy, yet an envoy of whom or indeed what is the question. While I found the arc of Binti’s story, up to and including the twist at the end, very predictable, that didn’t make it less enjoyable. Okorafor executes it flawlessly, building up Binti into a character who regrets everything and nothing, whose choices have led her to precisely where she needs to be, even if it isn’t where she wants to be. I also love that Okorafor feels no need to explain how we got to here from where humanity is right now. There are some general allusions to the past, of course, but beyond that, we don’t have a clear sense of how far into the future it is, or indeed, what life is like elsewhere on Earth. We can try to read between the lines—that the Khoush and Meduse could be involved in a war while other parts of Earth aren’t seem to imply a fractured government, or a planet otherwise uninterested in contact with other species. Ultimately, though, none of this is important. None of it matters compared to Binti’s story and the lives that intersect hers. One of the most interesting, most thought-provoking ideas in this story is that individual actions might resonate throughout history, yet always they only matter to a point. Consider how Oomza University’s administration reacts, first to Binti and the Meduse, then later to the story that Binti and friends tell of what happened in Binti’s homeland. In both cases, the administration doesn’t seem all that shaken by the loss of life, for instance. It recognizes that these are constants in our existence, and that there is only so much any one person can do to alter such events. This is an effective foil to Binti’s idealistic burden that she is responsible for igniting hostilities and also somehow capable of resolving them. I could go on. I could discuss how Binti explores the conflict between wanting to be something more and wanting to respect and honour your family and people’s traditions. I could praise Okorafor’s descriptions and depictions of technology: living ships, nanites, mathematical fugue states. This isn’t hard or soft SF; it’s a truly delicious, squishiest sandwich or smorgasbord of SF tropes, and it works so very well. Binti is an example of the glorious storytelling that you can let into your life if you reach out and look for science fiction that isn’t part of the classic white, male canon. Women and people of colour have always been writing badass SF stories. Okorafor is yet another member of both these groups demonstrating the value of diverse storytelling and the ways in which it can truly blow your mind. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 06, 2019
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May 07, 2019
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May 06, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 0993997074
| 9780993997075
| 0993997074
| 3.91
| 1,475
| Oct 01, 2016
| Sep 30, 2016
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it was amazing
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First, huge shout-out to the Oxford comma lurking in this title. Yeah, it’s kind of a big deal. Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time is an anthology of qu First, huge shout-out to the Oxford comma lurking in this title. Yeah, it’s kind of a big deal. Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time is an anthology of queer Indigenous science fiction and fantasy by Indigenous authors. That’s it, and yet it is so much more. I really liked Hope Nicholson’s comment in her foreword about how some stories aren’t meant to be told, or at least, do not need to be shared with just anyone. This is something I've become more aware of as I learn more about the traditions of the Anishnaabeg on whose traditional territory I reside. As a teacher, there is the well-meaning temptation to just grab any old story from another culture and use it in the classroom because diversity! Yet as Nicholson reminds us, there’s more to it. In many Indigenous traditions, stories are associated with particular times and places for the telling, or they are passed on from elders and other knowledge-keepers—you earn the privilege of getting to tell certain stories. So now I’m trying to be more mindful of how I bring stories from various cultures into my classroom. ’s tempting as a reviewer to remark first on the Indigeneity of these stories and then on the queerness, as if these dimensions can be teased apart and separated. That’s not possible. These are not queer stories that are also Indigenous, or vice versa; they are queer Indigenous (or Indigenous queer, whatever order you choose) stories. As Niigaan Sinclair points out in his piece, two-spirit concepts of gender identity and expression are distinct constructs of various Indigenous cultures and don’t easily fit within any Eurocentric models of gender, even ones that recognize queerness. As far as I can tell, from my perspective as an outsider, to be Indigenous and queer is a journey to decolonize oneself, and it’s really something. I ’t say what this book would mean to someone who fits those labels. What I can say is that this book represents so much creativity. ’s science fiction, but many of the stories are subtle in their speculation. I quite liked Richard Van Camp’s “Aliens,� in which the aliens are present but don’t actually figure much in the story (and indeed, if you read the story, you might reach the conclusion that the title doesn’t refer to those extraterrestrials at all). Or “Transitions,� which could probably exist in our present day universe. And then you have more explicitly science-fictional tales, like “Imposter Syndrome,� which I could so see being a very moving short film. It positions Indigenous people in the here and now, or in the future even, which is a very bold thing to do in a present that still very much likes genocide and white supremacy. I love finding stories about Indigenous people that don’t locate them in the past. Moreover, so many of these stories lack intense central conflicts. I’m pretty sure it was Le Guin who turned me on to the idea that conflict is not necessary for a story to work. ’s easy, but it isn’t necessary. These are stories about loving or being loved, either loving others or loving oneself, about acceptance and discovery and healing. There are moments of sadness and joy, downs and ups. But they are universally euphoric in the assertion that they are about people who live and breathe and eat and sleep and shit and love. And it’s this no-nonsense approach to the storytelling, this refusal to capitulate to the settler gaze’s voracious hunger for trauma porn and wise old Indigenous people, that is so exceptional. I’ll conclude with a shout-out to my library, which shelved this book as YA. I don’t know if I agree that it’s young adult. Most of the stories are about adults. Nevertheless, I really do think the YA section is where this book belongs. I hope teens who are trying to find themselves stumble across this slim, approachable volume—or are directed there by a well-meaning, supportive librarian or other trusted voice—and have their minds open to the possibilities that they can be who they are, or who they want to be, on terms of their own making. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 06, 2019
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Jul 06, 2019
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Nov 14, 2018
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Paperback
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| 1487002009
| 9781487002008
| 1487002009
| 4.46
| 314
| Sep 09, 2017
| Sep 09, 2017
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really liked it
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While I was not a fan of the last collection of Massey Lectures that I read, the brilliant thing about this series is that every year is very differen
While I was not a fan of the last collection of Massey Lectures that I read, the brilliant thing about this series is that every year is very different. Each year brings a new speaker, a new topic, and an entirely new way of approaching the topic and the format. (I am very excited for this year’s lectures delivered by Tanya Talaga, author of
Seven Fallen Feathers
). Last year’s lectures by Payam Akhavan work really well as a collection. His writing clear, conscientious, and moving. In Search of A Better World: A Human Rights Odyssey is extremely on point for the world we currently inhabit. This was probably not the best book to read the week I chose to read it. I’ve been in a little bit of a slump lately, both in reading and in general. At one point while reading this book, a friend messaged me to ask how I was doing, and I had to say, “Um � not well � probably because I’m reading about the Rwandan genocide again.� (I keep reading about the Rwandan genocide, and every time I do, it destroys my heart. More on this later.) Akhavan does not mince words, and he doesn’t sugarcoat the enormity of the crimes against humanity that he recounts, both historical and present-day. This is a book about humans committing atrocities against other humans, about the toll of hatred and bigotry, about the insufficiency of political will to do good. It is provocative and heart-wrenching. And it probably won’t change a damn thing, but I have to give Akhavan kudos for trying. The first chapter is the most personal one, as Akhavan traces the history of oppression of Bahá’ís in Iran and how his family fled to Canada to avoid persecution. From there, he discusses the establishment of the International Criminal Court as an offshoot of the Nuremberg Trials, which then leads into various genocides, particularly Rwanda’s, and the failure of UN peacekeeping efforts. Much of what Akhavan describes reminds me of what people like General Dallaire and Samantha Powers have said and written about the subject: the people who have been to these places, who have seen this happen, recognize the human suffering; yet the politicians in charge worry more about votes and political will. And even now, in 2018, Canada continued to ship arms to Saudi Arabia for its war against Yemen. This is what Akhavan is getting at in In Search of a Better World. His final chapter heats up and becomes the most polemical—up until this point, he stays comfortably in the pre-2001 world of the distance past, and most of his comments are fairly uncontroversial. After he describes his personal connection to the terrorist attacks of September 11, and the way this lead to a paradigm shift in the world, he advances extremely anti-imperialist criticisms of Western (and particularly US) foreign policy. He points out that countries like Afghanistan, Rwanda, Congo, etc., are fucked up precisely because of colonialism and imperialism, and that this is an ongoing phenomenon. He even mentions the ways in which the intergenerational trauma of residential schools is an inexcusable blight on Canada’s human rights record back home. This last chapter is perhaps the most important—as much as the other chapters are variously enlightening and depressing, this is the one that reminds us that these problems exist now. Just as climate change isn’t some doomsday event that will happen in our future, human rights abuses are not these sad stories from the past. Both phenomena exist, and both are largely the result of more than just individual actors—that is to say, while we can obviously do our part as individuals to help resolve both issues, what we really need is large-scale—like, global—political will. That is very difficult. Akhavan believes it is possible, however. I’m not sure this book is going to persuade anyone who isn’t already concerned about human rights abuses the world over. That is to say, as the Onion article goes, I’m not sure how to convince you to care about other people. But if you’re already on that same page, this book is going to give you more to think about. Akhavan asks you to really consider what a commitment to defending human rights looks like, not just personally, but at a societal level: how do we need to change the ways in which we operate, the politics of our time, to avoid tragedies happening because it was more economically or politically expedient to do nothing? These are tough questions, made all the more intense by the fact that Akhavan is definitely not an armchair philosopher in this, given his relevant and practical credentials as a human rights lawyer. In Search of a Better World is a high-level book but it doesn’t demand a high-level understanding of history or politics. It is heartfelt and genuine, yet it is also backed with extensive knowledge, experience, and a recognition that passion alone cannot make change. This is not a “bleeding heart� book, yet it is extremely empathetic and compassionate. I leave it with the sense that Akhavan, for all he has thought and said and done so far, desperately wishes he could do and had done so much more. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 07, 2018
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Aug 13, 2018
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Aug 07, 2018
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Paperback
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| 1338331787
| 9781338331783
| 1338331787
| 4.19
| 1,475
| Sep 12, 2017
| Jul 30, 2019
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really liked it
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Hey, it’s your girl Kara, reading the sequel to a book four years after I read the first book, and the real tragedy is that this is not unusual for me
Hey, it’s your girl Kara, reading the sequel to a book four years after I read the first book, and the real tragedy is that this is not unusual for me! So when you hear me say that I struggled to get into Shadowhouse Fall, it’s not because of the book itself. Rather, I literally forgot everything about the plot of the first book and had to lean on my review and some plot summaries to help me out! Indeed, despite such deficits on my part, the fact that I still enjoyed this book as much as I did is a testament to Daniel José Older’s storytelling. Sierra Santiago is now the leader of the shadowshapers in New York. She learns this actually makes her the head of Shadowhouse, and that there are other supernatural houses vying for spiritual power. Her main antagonist is the House of Light, led by the Sorrows. They want control over the Deck of Worlds, a literal deck of custom-painted cards that shift to reflect the state of this power struggle and also lends power boosts to the various representatives of the different houses. But the generational gap in Sierra’s understanding of shadowshaper lore makes it difficult for her to mount an effective defence (or offence). She is torn between protecting her people and embracing her destiny. The other forces at play might not give Sierra much of a choice, however. What struck me immediately about Shadowhouse Fall is the way Older employs vernacular in a seemingly effortless way. This is a dialogue-heavy book, and most of the characters are teens, and they sound like teens (particularly, Black and Latinx teens in NYC). I don’t just mean in terms of vocabulary either—Older has the cadence, the style, down as well. For an older (and whiter) reader like myself, that might make reading the dialogue more challenging, but it’s also rewarding in how it makes the characters come alive and feel far more real than if everyone were speaking a dialect with which I’m more familiar. In the same way, Older pulls no punches in portraying the brutal racism suffusing these teens� experiences. There’s police brutality, from random stops to unlawful arrests. But there’s also the everyday humiliation of metal detectors at the entrance to their schools and harassment from security guards. Again, as a white reader this is valuable for me because it reminds me that the racism I engage with largely as a theoretical construct is something that teens like these characters face as part of their everyday lives. When adults like myself dismiss racialized teens because of their youth, we erase their very real experiences. When I review YA novels, I often say something like, “I didn’t like this but can see how a younger reader would.� I say this because I like to acknowledge that I am often not the target demographic for these books, and I try to reflect that in my review and my rating. Shadowhouse Fall (and its predecessor) is a YA novel I did enjoy, and it’s also one I really hope young adults will enjoy too. Older’s writing style is electric, engaging, and most importantly, never condescending. As for the plot: well, again, it took me a while to get back into this world given my four-year absence. But I made it! I love how Older drives this narrative through a combination of Sierra’s curiosity and the mounting threats to her and her shadowshapers. The resolution, wherein Sierra attempts a courageous gambit to outwit the Sorrows, is something else—it’s hopeful and inspiring and reminds readers that even when destiny comes calling, you can look destiny in the eye and tell it you’re creating your own path. The ending left me feeling fulfilled, like I was on this journey with Sierra and her allies and now I can watch them grow beyond whatever limitations or strictures Sierra’s forbears thought they could place on this magic or this way of life. Because that’s ultimately what this book is about: the tension between tradition and innovation. Shadowshaping is hereditary and wrapped up in traditions and beliefs from previous generations. Some of these result in strong, positive connections like how Sierra is growing closer to her mom. Others are more harmful because they seek to circumscribe the choices the shadowshapers can make. As with any culture, the youth will always make their own mark on our practices, and Older makes that very clear here: Sierra is a shadowshaper, but she’s also a teenager navigating herself into adulthood, and that is going to shape the shadowshaping itself. What an exhilarating ride. Originally posted on , where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Nov 08, 2021
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Nov 10, 2021
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Nov 07, 2017
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Paperback
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| 0062449680
| 9780062449689
| 0062449680
| 4.00
| 14,530
| Aug 16, 2016
| Aug 16, 2016
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liked it
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There are so many things I take for granted because I grew up in Canada. Clean, running water (though that isn’t always guaranteed here, given the dep
There are so many things I take for granted because I grew up in Canada. Clean, running water (though that isn’t always guaranteed here, given the deplorable conditions on many First Nations reserves). Safety from imminent threats, like militants and terrorists. Justice, hot and cold running justice, served up to me on a fine platter of rights and due process. Oh, plus I have the bonus of being a man, and therefore getting treated like a first-class citizen. In A House Without Windows, Nadia Hashimi examines the precariousness of living as a woman in Afghanistan, and how events beyond one’s control can shape and redefine one’s life in terrifying ways. Zeba is married to an abusive man. When her children come home one day, the oldest finds Zeba in the back garden, holding the corpse of her husband, a hatchet wound to the head the obvious cause of death. Accused and essentially convicted in all-but-name of this murder, Zeba goes to Chil Mahtab, a women’s prison, to await her “trial�. The other main character, Yusuf, is assigned as her defence lawyer. Born in Afghanistan, Yusuf and his family relocated to the United States before September 11th, where he grew up and flourished. He has returned to his homeland with the aim of doing good and helping his country and his people—but of course, it is never that simple. He soon discovers a society torn between the old ways and the new, a people stripped bare by the repeated incursions of other countries in the names, alternatively, of war and peace. Yusuf wants to help Zeba, but Zeba isn’t sure she wants to be—or can be—helped—and once you grasp some more about these aspects of Afghan culture, can you blame her? I want to start by talking about judging other cultures. Hashimi’s portrayal of the treatment of women in Afghanistan is very critical. But there’s a difference between Hashimi, a woman of Afghan descent, and me, a man of European descent, expressing such criticisms. There is an element of white supremacy lurking within this discussion: it’s very easy for white people to look at other cultures with a Eurocentric lens and look down on those cultures, judge them, call them “backwards� or “oppressive� while simultaneously declining to keep their own house in order. We shouldn’t be wringing our hands over the treatment of women elsewhere in the world when women here in Canada still experience sexism and violence daily, when Indigenous women go missing and are murdered disproportionately. We are not better; we aren’t even all that different. We’re just brought up being told we are. So, yeah, as I read this book and watched how Zeba and other women were being treated, I felt a mixture of resignation (that people in the world have to go through this) and disgust (that women have to endure such treatment). And I had to sit with this and think about how much of this reaction was genuinely about the women on these pages and how much of it was internalized white supremacy bleeding through. The manifestations of oppression might be different in different cultures, but at the end of the day, the patriarchy sucks no matter your race, country, or religion. One passage in particular jumped out at me: No spell would change the fact that a woman’s worth was measured, with scientific diligence, in blood. A woman was only as good as the drops that fell on her wedding night, the ounces she bled with the turns of the moon, and the small river she shed giving her husband children. Some women were judged most ultimately, having their veins emptied to atone for their sins or for the sins of others. This is so true, this relationship between women and blood—but what really caught my eye was the phrase “with scientific diligence.� With that simple expression, Hashimi connects the dots between modern Afghanistan the modern West: modernization does not equate with liberation or equity. As our scientific knowledge has increased and advanced, there have always been those who seek to use science to quantify and justify oppression. Science, being a human endeavour, is very much political. Just because a society cloaks its oppressive attitudes with scientific language instead of religious language does not make it more progressive. So, as a story about the oppression of women, A House Without Windows is thoughtful and moving. Hashimi explores the ways in which women find freedom within the constrains of their culture: Zeba’s mother, and now Zeba, take on the role of jadugar, one who can work spells and magic to help (or hinder) others. Then you have women like Latisha, who find life in Chil Mahtab far preferable to a life outside the prison, where she might be forced to marry. Hashimi contrasts these women from more conservative walks of Afghan life with women like Aneesa and Sultana, who were lucky enough to receive more liberal educations and have a drive to change their country. What Hashimi strives to make clear, however, is that even the women in Chil Mahtab want to change their country in their own way. The fact that they do not have a university education or degree, that they are mothers and wives but not lawyers or journalists, does not change their ability to mock, critique, and subvert the system. As you might have glimpsed in the quotation above, Hashimi’s prose is lush. Indeed, at times it feels almost purple. I have not emerged a huge fan of her style—at the beginning of the book, I was a little bored by the amount of exposition, and no amount of careful descriptions of settings and characters is going to compensate for not moving along the story. Once the plot really gets going, and you become more invested in Zeba and Yusuf’s individual stories, the novel picks up. Yet I still never fully embraced Hashimi’s way with words. A House Without Windows has within it a certain power and gravitas, and if you like rich description and careful characterization, then you might find this captivating. Although it did not have quite so powerful an effect on me, I still enjoyed its story and the way Hashimi shows us a post-occupation Afghanistan with nuance and sincerity. There is no romanticizing happening here. There is ebullient hope but also carefully learned despair, and Hashimi’s greatest achievement in this book is managing to balance them in a way that seems believable. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 26, 2017
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Apr 28, 2017
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Apr 26, 2017
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0545591619
| 9780545591614
| 0545591619
| 3.75
| 10,744
| Jun 30, 2015
| Jun 30, 2015
|
really liked it
|
Would watch the movie, like, yesterday. You get on that, movie-producing people. Shadowshaper is one of those books I loved from page one, and it only Would watch the movie, like, yesterday. You get on that, movie-producing people. Shadowshaper is one of those books I loved from page one, and it only got better. Daniel José Older’s command of character, culture, and language results in a breathtaking contemporary urban fantasy. This book reminds me a lot of Charles de Lint’s work. The protagonist is thrust into a world she doesn’t quite understand, one built on myths and legends only half-shared or half-remembered, and she has to focus her natural talents while trying to learn as much as she can along the way. There are antagonists who seek only power (Wick) as well as the formidable natural foes backing these (the Sorrows). And even your family, if they don’t get it, can stand in your way. Sierra Santiago loves painting murals. But when she notices someone else’s mural changing, and fading, and when her senile grandfather starts apologizing over and over to her, Sierra starts to wonder what’s up. As more and more people from a group photo with her grandfather start to go missing, only for some of their corpses to start chasing her whenever she hits a party, Sierra soon finds herself embroiled in a decades-old story of love, magic, and betrayal. She has to decide if she can trust Robbie, who knows more about shadowshaping than herself, and which of her friends will be ready to stand with her against those who would take and twist shadowshaping for their own ends. The first half of the novel, despite being exciting, occasionally feels repetitive. I wish we could get into the intricacies of shadowshaping earlier. There’s something to be said for delaying exposition by interrupting your characters with an attack—but it happens once too often. This novel has decidedly leapt the fence and left the “realism� out of magical realism, yet Older eschews much controlled use of magic in favour of magic happening to and around Sierra and her friends. It isn’t until much closer to the end of the book that Sierra, Robbie, et al actually get to use shadowshaping as a means towards their ends. Also, many of the high-energy moments of this book feel very similar. Lots of monsters or pseudo-monsters chasing or terrorizing our protagonists. I would have liked something that feels a little less episodic or padded and little more like it’s building towards a much more dramatic confrontation. The intensity and energy in Shadowshaper somewhat makes up for this. In Sierra, Older gives us a protagonist who is fallible while remaining confident and witty. I just loved watching Sierra’s interactions with everyone, from Robbie to her friends to her family. She takes no shit, but at the same time, she is able to admit when she is over her head or out of her depth and in need of assistance or allies. In particular, I love how Sierra and her best friend disagree on numerous things (Bennie is very scientifically-minded and sceptical about the spiritual stuff that Sierra picks up on right away), but when the chips are down and it counts the most, Bennie is there for her, no doubt. Sierra’s relationship with her family is similarly complex. She loves and cares for her grandfather, even though she discovers he was holding out on her. She loves her mom too—but, as with many teenage girls, they are hot and cold as her mom tries to sway Sierra along certain lines for her own good. My favourite interactions, though, are between Sierra and her brother Juan. He shows up unexpectedly and then just doesn’t go away, and he’s a delightful sidekick to balance out the romance of Robbie. Older’s diverse cast works so well together. The dialogue is crisp—I particularly like how the non-English words aren’t italicized like they’re some kind of exotic spice sprinkled among the sentences. I ’t comment on the verisimilitude of the way Older depicts the experiences of Sierra and her friends and family, but my friend Christina shared her thoughts on that. As a white folk, I just appreciate every YA novel that isn’t “magical white girl/boy is chosen to save their dystopian society from the plague of sameness adults have forced upon us all�. This is a story which, at its roots, is about family and one’s connections to one’s ancestors. The triumph Sierra arrives at isn’t vanquishing the antagonist but learning about and accepting her role in the continuity of this magic and spirituality. Can I also say, please, that there is something magical about how Sierra sneaks into a university library to do research. Can I please, please, please have more novels where the protagonist goes to a library? Libraries are valuable sources of information, and it’s so refreshing. ...more |
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Oct 30, 2017
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Nov 2017
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Jan 04, 2017
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Hardcover
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| B0DWV99MCL
| 3.78
| 3,972
| Jan 07, 2017
| Jan 03, 2017
|
really liked it
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I want to start with the author bio at the end of this book: “Chibundu Onuzo was born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1991.� When I read this, I did a doubletake
I want to start with the author bio at the end of this book: “Chibundu Onuzo was born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1991.� When I read this, I did a doubletake, because that makes Onuzo only 25 years old and 2 years younger than me. I had just assumed she was much older, because her voice sounds so much older, so much richer in terms of experience and worldliness. I am in awe, and in no small part envious, of this 25-year-old’s talent. I first encountered Onuzo and her writing quite recently, when I read and used it for a summarizing exercise in one of my classes. I had no idea she was also a novelist, but then I stumbled across Welcome to Lagos on NetGalley! I appreciate Faber and Faber making it available for me to read. Last year National Geographic published (NB: National Geographic is fantastic and remains so despite its purchase by Rupert Murdoch; my grandparents continue to give me a subscription every year and I love it). Robert Draper describes the same Lagos seen here in Onuzo’s novel. On the one hand, it’s a city rife with corruption. Everyone is on the take, hustling, from the lowliest person selling and buying on the street to the highest government officials. The level of corruption is so staggering it’s stupefying how the country functions at all. Yet it does, and on the other hand, Lagos is a vibrant city, economically and culturally. People start businesses here, become huge successes. The various tribes celebrate their traditions both different and common—both Draper and Onuzo mention the colour themes at Nigerian wedding and the expectation that guests all dress in the chosen colour. Onuzo’s meditations on Lagos and the entire country’s political situation are unequivocal. She lays the blame for the country’s situation on the doorstep of colonialism and ongoing imperialism: “the whole of Nigeria’s fortunes rose and fell on what foreigners would pay for her sweet crude�. Later, in the book, someone jokes about how Western leaders want to “impose democracy� on the country—except it’s not really a joke. I love postcolonial fiction, but I don’t read enough of it about Africa. As a native of Lagos, Onuzo is in the best position to explain and portray her hometown’s history and situation. I loved learning about it from her, seeing it through her characters� eyes. Lagos is a complicated, paradoxical city, and Welcome to Lagos captures that. Its characters, for the most part, are outsiders to the city. They come in from the hinterland: Chike, a soldier who has deserted an army unit after becoming disillusioned by the brutality of his commanding officer; Fineboy, a militant more interested in radio and deals than in violence; Isoken, a woman who has lost her family and came too close to losing her autonomy; Oma, a wife fleeing an abusive husband but still tethered, spiritually, to the idea of her marriage; Yemi, Chike’s right-hand man, an illiterate and less educated soldier who nevertheless displays a deep and abiding interest in his country’s history and welfare. As these outsiders meet for the first time and begin navigating Lagos together, Onuzo introduces us to the city’s complicated character. None of them are 100 per cent adapted to navigating it. Fineboy is very adaptable but needs guidance, a goal, something bigger than himself and his own dreams. Chike is also searching for purpose, though he is more practically minded and will settle for a job first. ’s kind of your standard motley crew of nobodies coming into their own. In this case, Onuzo drops a disgraced Minister of Education on them. With the money they confiscate from Chief Sanday�, they start renovating and resupplying one school at a time in Lagos, ironically putting the money to its originally intended use. Sanday� himself has mixed feelings about this, and I love this portrayal: he is upset, naturally, that his plans to flee have been stymied by this group of squatters in his abandoned Lagosian home; yet he is also intrigued by how swiftly Chike et al put that money to good use where, after a year as Education Minister, he met only frustration. Onuzo indicts the paralysis gripping the corrupt government of Nigeria, something underscored more terribly when, after Sanday� reveals the names of the schools they helped, the police swoop in and arrest the principals involved. Part of the brilliance of Welcome to Lagos is how softly it speaks. There is not a great deal of action in this book. Aside from the opening, and then later on towards the end, any confrontations or threats of violence tend to happen off the page and are recounted, theatre-style, by a character to the others. In this way Onuzo takes up the spaces between violence, focusing on the ever-present possibility of a situation becoming violent if the people with the guns, or the money, or the oil, or whatever leverage is potent at the moment, aren’t satisfied. Like any good writer, Onuzo also investigates the role of the written word in revolution. Ahmed Bakare is an intriguing revolutionary editor: so dedicated to justice, to hard reporting, yet also strangely impotent. I love the observation of the futility of his continuing to print newspaper: He would not bring down the government with the Nigerian Journal. Those days were gone, when newspapermen were feared and hounded and despised and worshipped for their recklessness. Mmm, oh, it just feels so relevant to journalism everywhere in this, 2016, the year of the Trump. Ugh. Because the line between Nigeria and a country like Canada is a thin one: we have freedom of the press, but is it really free? Nigeria just does away with the pretext, makes it very clear that if people in power don’t like what you’re saying they will burn your building to the ground and make your secretary disappear! Ahmed flees the country into the welcoming embrace of mother England only to find that the news cycle there is different from how he operates, and of course, corruption in Nigeria only has so much currency as a story. This tension between what is newsworthy and what should be reported to the public as a matter of human interest and empathy is a minor but important theme in Welcome to Lagos. Onuzo rather uses Lagos as a microcosm for the decisions that happen around the world to shape what we see, what gets reported. The report the BBC World Service runs is different from the story that Sanday� tells David West which is different from what actually happened; along each link in this causal chain the distortions build like constructive interference. The BBC is interested in a different narrative from the one Ahmed champions or Chike encounters on a day-to-day basis. While these differing narratives share similar issues and facts at their cores, their distinct perspectives influence the opinions that form around them. I’m hearing a lot about how we’ve suddenly entered a “post-truth� or “post-fact� era. And I ’t help but think the Western world is overreacting, at least in the sense that what’s happening now is somehow new or unimaginable and has never happened before in the history of the world. Onuzu aptly demonstrates here in her novel that Nigeria is plenty familiar with a post-truth society—everyone knows one truth but is careful to state another, and this is a feature common to dictatorships, failed communist states, and basically anywhere that corruption or bureaucracy has outlived a sense of duty and integrity. And so while Welcome to Lagos does comment on how the colonialism of the past got Nigeria to where it is today, it also holds up a mirror to the continuing colonialism now impelled by international coalitions of oil companies and news services instead of the British empire. This form of colonialism might be subtler, at least to the outsider’s perspective, than what previously went on, but it is no less insidious as a result. But by the end of the book, Onuzo tightens the focus again to examine the effects these national events have had on our heroes. Are they scarred? Battle-worn? Wiser? She offers us no easy or simple answers; this is not a Hollywood film “based on a true story� where the main character conveniently dies an honourable death and everyone else pairs off and keeps their memory alive. Nope. Relationships continue to inch ever forward, one day at a time, and whether they flourish or wither is not for us to know. Each one of the protagonists has to make decisions about who they want to be, how they want to slot into life in Lagos. This is a book that captivates, that grabs your attention. It is, as I observed earlier, soft-spoken—but that does not mean it waters down its words. On the contrary, aside from the intensely interesting light it sheds on Nigerian politics, this novel is just beautiful prose from start to finish: As always, there was too much food. The table was heaped for guests that would never arrive: his dead sister, her imaginary husband and their six obese children. Onuzo wastes no words and deploys them with unerring accuracy, weapons of mass description that always find their target in the reader. Her imagery is impressive—and I say this as someone who generally ignores such things, since I don’t visualize when I read. Nevertheless, I found myself almost able to imagine the heat of the day, the sweat, the dust and grime, the absence of power and the noises of chaotic traffic. She plucks you from the familiar world, the world where your assumptions hold true, and transports you to Lagos, where everything is both the same and different. Welcome to Lagos will hopefully challenge your complacency in your knowledge of the world even as it entertains and moves you with the characters who come alive on its pages. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 22, 2016
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Dec 24, 2016
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Dec 22, 2016
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ebook
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| 076538342X
| 9780765383426
| 076538342X
| 3.81
| 1,022
| Jun 14, 2016
| Jun 14, 2016
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really liked it
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Oh my god give me more of these books right damn now. I don’t normally do this, but can we just stop for a moment and look at this utterly gorgeous cov Oh my god give me more of these books right damn now. I don’t normally do this, but can we just stop for a moment and look at this utterly gorgeous cover by Mike Heath? I was going to read Steeplejack from the description alone, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t the cover that caught my eye while I was browsing the New Books shelf. Everything about this cover is amazing. The entire shot is from an off-kilter perspective, neither horizontal nor vertical, forcing us to look at everything from a weird angle. The font is gorgeous, perfect for the book’s milieu and atmosphere without feeling stereotypically steampunk. Plus, the letters are perfectly aligned with the direction of the tower in an awesome perspective effect that creates a compelling sense of motion. Like, it looks like a still from the movie of the book: open on Ang climbing a tower as the credits zoom past her. I am not a visual person; not only do I not tend to judge books by the cover, but I also tend to ignore cover art entirely, despite the amount of work and passion that cover artists put into it (sorry). But I cannot ignore this cover. ’s great. I just want to stare at it forever. Fortunately, A.J. Hartley has written a book worthy of such a cover. Like so many of the titles I’ve raved about this past summer, Steeplejack took me a while to warm to—but when I did, boy did I ever. Ultimately, it is the humanity and vulnerability of the protagonist, Anglet Sutonga, that got me. She is capable but far from competent at everything she tries in this novel, and the people arranged against her vary from evil and racist merely to opportunistic and bitter. And through Ang, Hartley broaches issue of class and race in a way that could have been preachy but somehow isn’t. At its heart, Steeplejack is an investigation into the death (murder?) of an unremarkable young boy, Berrit. Ang didn’t know Berrit—he was supposed to become her apprentice, but he turns up dead instead. Indeed, it becomes a running “joke� (unfunny one) that everyone is so surprised Ang keeps poking into Berrit’s death, because “she didn’t know him�. This leads to Ang’s Crowning Moment of Awesome: Why does everyone keep saying that?� Why does whether I knew him or not matter? He was a child, a boy you murdered. I have to avenge him because I didn’t know him. Because he will never have what other boys his age look forward to. He was snuffed out, all his possibilities ended by your knife, and I am not supposed to care because I didn’t know him? This is a powerful moment, Ang confronting Berrit’s killer and finally getting to explain why she feels so driven to bring the killer to justice. This is the culmination of days of Ang continually being subjected to more and more stress from every direction. Something has gotta give—and indeed, many things do—but she always remains true to her core desire for justice. It takes a long time to get to that moment, and I forgive anyone who doesn’t see what I see in Steeplejack. Ang is an incredibly poor detective. She doesn’t follow leads properly, is terrible at playing a part and blending in to other parts of societies, and she always bites off more than she can chew. As a result, her investigation is frequently snarled and tangled up in side-quests. This is a little frustrating, as a reader, even though I appreciate that Hartley does not give us a Mary Sue character around whom the entire world turns. The fact that Ang, while being a kickass climber and courageous person, generally bungles her detecting and has trouble taking care of a newborn child, shows the richness and roundness of her character. Indeed, Steeplejack ultimately won me over for two reasons. First, Ang is such an interesting character. Second, Hartley’s depiction of race politics is more subtle than I expected. I’ve already discussed Ang’s desire for justice and how terrible a detective she is. I appreciate that we get to see so many different sides of her character. On the one hand, she perseveres incredibly at solving Berrit’s murder. On the other hand, she eventually admits she made a mistake trying to raise Rahvey’s child (and I agree with her on this). The result is very interesting, for Hartley does something rare here, particularly in YA: we get to see a protagonist who both never gives up and quits at something. Kelly Jensen recently wrote about , and I agree with her. Seeing Ang come to the realization that she is not ready to act as a mother, that she cannot both pursue Berrit’s murder investigation and halfheartedly care for a needy infant, is one of the most powerful parts of this book. Race is the second powerful motif here. The book’s cover copy mentions the way three races cohabit in Bar-Selehm. And Ang gets into the consequences of being Lani fairly early on in the book. This being a YA novel, I was a little concerned that the book would beat us over the head with its ideas. I was concerned that the portrayals of the Mahweni would be a little too stereotypical. Fortunately, Hartley does a good job depicting the diversity within races as well as between them. We meet plenty of Lani, and they none of them see eye to eye. Similarly, the sharp divide between the rural Mahweni and urban creates a source of conflict as well. Despite this being a fairly short book, Hartley does an admirable job adding depth to all three races and their involvement in the city. The same can be said about how Hartley portrays women. There is a diverse cast of female characters here. In addition to Ang, we have: Rahvey and Vestris, Ang’s sisters, each different from Ang and the other in a great many ways; Daria, sister to an important politician; Florihn, a Lani midwife with whom Ang finds herself at odds; and Sarah/Sureyna, a newspaper hawker whom Ang helps actually become a reporter. Each of these women has her own little story, her own goals and motives. They don’t always agree or want the same things. They talk to each other about stuff other than men (yes, this book passes the Bechdel test with flying colours). I particularly love Daria; Hartley introduces her seemingly as a background character, a well-bred lady there to sniff at Ang and look down at her. But then he gives her so much more life, such a great personality, and her relationship with Ang changes for the better as the two come to know each other. My one disappointment when it comes to such relationships would be with the one between Ang and Vestris. This is only because Hartley makes so much of it while Vestris is off the page. I somewhat understand what he’s doing here, because the point is that Ang has romanticized her memories of Vestris as the glamorous, ne'er-do-wrong older sister, and reality is so very different. Nevertheless, because we don’t actually know Vestris very well until she finally shows up, the revelation regarding her true goals lacks the sucker-punch impact it was likely intended to have. I’ll end by commenting that Steeplejack, in my opinion, is many things, but it is not steampunk (and I have a fairly broad definition of steampunk). This book does not feature impressive clockwork or steam-driven apparatus. As one blurb puts it, it’s kind of an alternative Victorian South Africa, which is an accurate description of the technology level. Aside from the weird mineral luxorite, there isn’t much in the way of magic or anything different from our world aside from different animals and geography. This is not a criticism or praise, mind you, just information for those who come to this hoping for steampunk (or are steering clear because they want to avoid steampunk!). Steeplejack fits the drama of its exhilarating cover art: it is exciting and intense, and I really enjoyed it. I cannot wait to read whatever is coming next in this series. My reviews of the Steeplejack series: Firebrand � ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 15, 2016
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Sep 17, 2016
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Sep 17, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0140272852
| 9780140272857
| 0140272852
| 3.82
| 597
| Nov 01, 1997
| Nov 25, 1997
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it was ok
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Sentences you thought you’d never read: Amistad (the movie) reminds me of Tropic Thunder. This seems like as good a time as any other to read Amistad, Sentences you thought you’d never read: Amistad (the movie) reminds me of Tropic Thunder. This seems like as good a time as any other to read Amistad, the novelization of the 1997 Spielberg film now played in high school history classes the world over (including in my Grade 12 history class). With only fuzzy memories of the film, I decided the $2 for this book at the library-affiliated used bookstore was a bargain. This past week in my English class of adult Indigenous learners, we’ve been talking about stereotypes and, in particular, Black Lives Matter and racism. Amistad tackles these very issues in a fictionalized version of the United States just a few decades before the Civil War. I don’t remember much about the movie—it’s on Netflix, so maybe I’ll re-watch it at some point—except that it wasn’t half-bad despite starring Matthew McConaughey. That’s why the movie reminds me of Tropic Thunder, which is another exception to my general rule that I just don’t want to watch movies with McConaughey in them. I ’t explain my completely irrational dislike of him, but there you have it. Anyway, I recall the movie as being “good� in that nineties-message-movie kind of way, plus-or-minus the hastily shellacked layers of historical commentary applied to the characters and sets. The movie and book are both very much aware that they are a story about slavery and freedom, and they are also very self-aware of the wider historical continuum, including the Civil War. The result is a kind of anachronistic imposition of twentieth-century ideas about nineteenth-century attitudes towards abolition and slavery. This book bills itself as “brilliantly narrated by Alexs Pate�, and I spent some time trying to figure out if those awards were for writing. (Based on what I can read from his website, it looks like he’s gotten some awards for some of his other books, so maybe his writing was just constrained by an attempt to reproduce the screenplay too faithfully.) Amistad reminds me why I tend to avoid novelizations, because it feels brutally like one: all telling, no showing, with an omniscient narrator who spills everyone’s thoughts onto the page with the subtlety of a gossip columnist: Van Buren cared about the future of America. Slavery was too complicated and too interwoven into the fabric of American life to think that it could be eradicated by simply being against it. What good would that do anyway? This is simply execrable writing. ’s so patronizing; it sounds like someone trying to explain these issues to children. Not only overly simplistic, it’s just so obviously hammering on the book’s theme. I don’t have an issue with didactic novels, but there is a point where the narrator’s intrusion into the story becomes grandstanding on a soapbox. Pate is approaching Doctorovian levels here, but unlike Doctorow his characters lack anything in the way of depth or a twinkle of humour—and unlike the movie, they don’t have the performances of actors like Anthony Hopkins and Morgan Freeman to enjoy. ’s tempting to think that peeks inside the minds of characters like the narration above is adding depth to them, but it doesn’t. Instead these tidbits merely turn the characters into caricatures of their historical personae: Van Buren is a career politician who cares only about re-election; Calhoun is a dyed-in-the-wool slaveowner; Adams is an abolitionist who doesn’t like calling himself that, etc. While all or some of these representations might be accurate (I don’t know enough about the history to judge), they are still one-dimensional. A single story, no matter how true, is still just a single story. Worse still, Amistad’s voice speaks to us from a position of hindsight. The narrator keeps dropping hints about looming Civil War, as if it were obvious to all the politicians at the time that war was going to happen. Again, not a scholar of American Civil War history here—and I’m sure that there were some politicians at the time who recognized and worried about the growing tension between the northern and southern states. But this is twenty years prior to the war, and while the Amistad played a role in exacerbating those tensions, there was still so much more yet to come. The book also grandstands on the idea that Amistad was this huge turning point in the American abolitionist movement, that it was somehow precedent-setting and opinion-changing in how people saw slavery. The narrator puts a “weight of history� tone into the storytelling, emphasizing the supposedly inherent backwardness of the anti-abolitionists and how it’s only a matter of time before the country finally does away with slavery. Some of these flaws are faults with the movie and screenplay, and so perhaps it is unfair to criticize a novelization for replicating them. But that presumes a novelization cannot fix or expand upon what happens onscreen—isn’t the kind of the point? Novelizations can be strong companions to a movie. Indeed, this book manages to bring depth to one group that isn’t well-represented onscreen: the Africans of the Amistad. They do not speak English, and so for most of the movie they lack a voice—or the voice is mediated through a translator, later on. This makes for an uncomfortable situation in which a movie about the humanity of Black people is told through a white saviour lens, as a bunch of landed white guys debate in the finest traditions of imperial Rome. Because he doesn’t have to use subtlitles, Pate has an opportunity to flesh out individuals from within the group, to emphasize differences in tribe and character—and he uses this opportunity to great advantage. Not only do we get a much better idea of what makes Cinque such a determined figure, but we also see the differing opinions among the Africans and their perspective on the matter. Still, even this small benefit is not really enough to save the book. I ’t recommend the novelization of Amistad. The movie itself, while far from perfect, is pretty entertaining and moving. The book, with its flat and surprisingly bad storytelling, doesn’t come close to capturing that. There are far superior works of literature available that deal with these issues in more interesting and complex ways (feel free to recommend some to me in the comments). ...more |
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1
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Jul 21, 2016
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Jul 21, 2016
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Jul 22, 2016
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| 4.34
| 172,980
| Sep 12, 2006
| Sep 04, 2007
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really liked it
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s writings have, in various forms, influenced my life for a few years now. I often show her TED Talk “The Danger of a Single
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s writings have, in various forms, influenced my life for a few years now. I often show her TED Talk “The Danger of a Single Story� in my English class, particularly as we embark on studying stereotypes. Yet this is the first time I’ve read a novel by her—and it was a treat. Half of a Yellow Sun brought me back to my youthful summer reading of other postcolonial fiction, particularly that set in India. I picked the right time to read this, too: finally, a warm and sunny weekend in May here in Thunder Bay, where I could relax on my deck and allow myself to be drawn into the 1960s world of Nigeria and Biafra that Adichie recreates here. Set in the 1960s, Half of a Yellow Sun follows a small ensemble cast through the Biafran War of 1967�1970. If, like me, you are a white person of a certain age and therefore hadn’t even heard of the Biafran War, well, that’s OK. But in that case, this book represents a fascinating glimpse at that unknown, underappreciated moment in history: an African state, created by colonizers, fractured by tensions among the various nations within the state, attempting to reforge itself according to its own destiny and not one determined along white supremacist lines. As much as it is fascinating, and as much as Adichie captures the optimism and political fervour of the Biafrans, she also reminds us of the horrors that always attend any theatre of war. The characters in this story endure hardship after hardship, in a variety of forms, and they are forever changed by those years. This is neither a happy nor a sad story, overall, but it is certainly moving and at times very difficult to read. Trigger warnings in this book for extreme violence, including against children; sexual assault and rape; anti-Black racism. The power of this book comes from the diversity of characters Adichie gives us. It opens on Ugwu, a 13-year-old Igbo boy from a poor village brought into Nsukka by his aunt to become the houseboy to Odenigbo, a mathematics professor at the university. Immediately, the contrast between this uneducated rural boy and this incredibly intellectual, academic man creates an interesting dynamic. It reminds me a little of The Remains of the Day , where the butler is present for these intense political conversations among his master’s circle, yet he is not actually a part of those conversations. Yet Ugwu does not remain static: as the years go by, he receives an education, and his world begins to open up. This dynamic grows richer when Olanna moves in. We see how Ugwu often interprets events using the wisdom passed down to him by his elders. When Odenigbo’s mother shows up, Ugwu talks of her using magic to hex or curse Olanna—something Olanna dismisses, even though the result is the same regardless. I love how Adichie portrays the ways in which these characters� various upbringings dramatically alter their view of the same world in which they live. Olanna’s personal passions are tempered by this circumscribed view of what’s possible in the world—as much as she supports Odenigbo’s passion for a free Biafra, she is too close to the corruption within her father’s/Kainene’s realm of business to share his naive idealism. And then there’s Richard, the Token White Guy of the novel. He comes to Nigeria looking to write about a certain style of artwork. Eventually he ends up staying for deeper reasons. I love how Adichie shows his evolution. Richard doesn’t start off as this “woke white guy� who totally gets the Igbo perspective. He is every bit as naive as you’d expect a British expat to be. ’s only as he starts to get to know Nigerians, and through his increasingly serious relationship with Kainene, that his viewpoint can change. He becomes an ally first and then even more than that, as he actively participates in the Biafran cause—literally putting his career and even his body on the line. Richard’s palpable frustration, towards the end of the book when he is talking to the other foreign journalists, really stands out for me. He’s suddenly starting to understand what it must be like all the time for Black people interacting with whites—and of course, he is still getting a diluted experience because of his privilege. I love the little bait-and-switch with regards to the authorship of the book. ’s so appropriate, of course: not only does Adichie reject the idea that a white person (any white person, even a well-intentioned one who has chosen to live within this world) should speak for the Biafrans, but it’s someone who has literally started from a place of very little privilege and grown up and experienced so much. Ugwu’s voice is unquestionably the core of this experience, the quintessential example of someone whose life has been inexorably shaped by colonialist forces since birth, yet whose awareness of those forces has only recently come into focus. Moving away from the characters as individuals, though, let’s take a moment to think about the politics in this novel. Adichie captures the ugliness of revolution and fighting for a cause. Nigeria’s history and economics are inextricably linked to Britain’s colonial strategies for control. Whether or not one thinks the Biafran struggle for independence was justified or a good idea, it stems from tensions created by or exacerbated by the international community that colonized and exploited the African continent and peoples. So even though, on the surface, this seems like a very isolated, localized struggle—hence why I never heard about it in school or anything like that—it’s actually one of a much longer line of localized struggles set off by wider, international influences. And if, like me, you are trying to understand the ways in which patterns of colonization committed by your ancestors have affected the whole world, then this book is a good read. Adichie employs an interesting narrative structure here. The first and third parts of the book take place in “the early sixties� while the second and fourth take place in “the late sixties�. By flashing back to the earlier period in the middle of the story, Adichie effectively juxtaposes what has happened to our characters in the “present� with how they used to live. We abruptly revert to the safety and security of a reasonably well-off household in Nsukka, which is a far cry from the refugee camps and bunkers our characters find themselves in after the declaration of independence. In this way, Adichie shows us how even the most comfortable and secure parts of eastern Nigerian society were shaken. At the same time, we learn that those in the western part of the country barely felt or saw anything different—for them, the war might as well have been happening even farther away, if it weren’t for the news and rhetoric on the radio. Olanna, Odenigbo, Baby, and Ugwu go from having so much and living so comfortably to literally eking out the most minimal existence. It is stark and frankly somewhat disturbing, but it is such an effective depiction of how war rips apart a country. We get to see it from every level, from the professors now high-up in the Biafran directorates doing their best to keep the bureaucracy together long enough to fight this doomed war, to the civilians and soldiers struggling with day-to-day necessities. ’s not a question of morality now, of right or wrong, good or evil—it’s about survival. Half of a Yellow Sun is brutal and beautiful simultaneously. The writing is every bit as compelling and carefully crafted as I have come to expect from Adichie’s speaking. The characters are complex, and their setting a rich one—both in terms of its descriptions but also the political and historical situation. This is exactly the kind of summer read I want: something thought-provoking, moving, something that makes me a little bit uncomfortable, even as it wraps me in the warmth created by such a well-balanced story. ...more |
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1
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May 17, 2018
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May 21, 2018
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Jul 21, 2016
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Paperback
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| 0802139590
| 9780802139597
| 0802139590
| 3.70
| 5,701
| Jun 1997
| Dec 26, 2002
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it was ok
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Britain had some whack ideas. Remember that time they colonized an entire continent with convicts? That was whack. Gould’s Book of Fish is the epistola Britain had some whack ideas. Remember that time they colonized an entire continent with convicts? That was whack. Gould’s Book of Fish is the epistolary adventure of William Gould, a convict imprisoned on Sarah Island. Somewhere along the way he picked up enough painting skills to become an artist, and he starts painting fish for the island’s science-and-status–obsessed Surgeon instead of working on the chain gang. I enjoy books ( The Luminaries comes to mind) set in this frontier period of the colonization of Australia and New Zealand. Like The Luminaries, this book has a somewhat pretentious structure and style as Flanagan attempts to use Billy Gould to plumb the depths of human suffering and soul-searching. Each chapter is headlined by a particular fish from this book that Gould is working on, and the fish becomes a metaphor for the philosophical ramblings of that instalment in Gould’s life. Basically this book is an account of Gould’s suffering on Sarah Island, and of the various strange and nonsensical happenings that he witnesses there. Since we’re being told this all from Gould’s perspective, there are some serious unreliable narrator issues here. So it’s not possible to take the events of the story at face value, to say, “this happened,� and use that certainty as the metric by which we can judge Gould’s rambling. Case in point: the characters of this book aren’t so much people as they are examples of types of excess that afflict the human experience. (This is confirmed, in the most postmodern of ways, by the “afterword� note.) Each character is a facet of Gould’s madness—a madness that might have been exacerbated by his imprisonment but maybe has lurked there all along, lurks beneath all of us. Two things that I loved about this book. Firstly, Gould’s narrative voice is rich. ’s one thing to write a book set in a historical period and another thing to write with the voice of someone from that period. Through diction, sentence structure, and punctuation, Flanagan makes Gould’s voice come alive. This makes the book entertaining despite the darkness inherent in Gould’s experiences. Secondly, just when you think you’ve seen all Flanagan has to offer, he manages to change things up and deliver an even crazier situation. He certainly has imagination, and it shows on every page here. This is a very creative book, and that made it more enjoyable. So what stops me from singing more than dull praises? Is it the weird ending? The bizarre use of a frame story that Flanagan never returns to (except with one passing reference)? Or the constant parade of deaths, either real or metaphorical, without much in the way of happiness? Gould’s is a very Hobbesian view, mixed in with a certain amount of postmodern irony. Humans are just other animals, full of natural and atavistic urges. We pretend we suppress those urges, but that’s a lie. And that’s apparently the source of our unhappiness. This is a book that tries to be deep, and I suppose if you are willing to spend the time to study and analyze and prod it, you’ll find those depths. Maybe I’m just growing impatient in my old age. Maybe I’m losing my enjoyment of subtext. Whatever the reason, Gould’s Book of Fish was an adequate way to spend my time. But neither Gould’s voice nor Flanagan’s capacity for storytelling surprises could quite compensate for the almost desultory atmosphere that pervades the text. Maybe this will be the intensely philosophical, brooding text that you have been waiting for—I ’t discount that possibility. It just didn’t speak to me. I know this because I’m not particularly proud of the quality of this review. I could have spent more time talking more deeply about the philosophical underpinnings of this book. I just don’t care enough about it to do so. I’m going to go buy tea now instead. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 17, 2015
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Aug 20, 2015
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Aug 17, 2015
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1553654021
| 9781553654025
| 1553654021
| 4.41
| 32,485
| Jan 27, 2012
| Jan 01, 2012
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it was amazing
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So earlier this month, the , announced that the residential schools program was a program of “cultural genocide� ag
So earlier this month, the , announced that the residential schools program was a program of “cultural genocide� against indigenous peoples. If you’re looking for some background and a good beginner discussion to this, check out the . Desmond Cole and Andray Domise break it down with the help of two expert guests. Unfortunately, despite the release of this report and so much other activism over the past few years, our federal government continues to ignore the needs and opinions of Canada’s indigenous peoples. Prime Minister Harper and his party’s lack of respect for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis nations and their citizens is manifest. And it’s sad that a government so interested in nationalistic chest-beating and touting Canada as a role-model for other countries is still not mature enough to recognize these problems and set aside the colonialism that is in place even today. Oh, didn’t expect me to get so political? Sorry (not sorry). But you ’t not get political with a novel like Indian Horse, really—or at least, I ’t. I mean, yes, on one level Richard Wagamese tells a compelling story about an individual’s struggle with the effects of abuse, his love for the game of hockey, and his journey into and out of the oblivion of alcoholism. This book is intense and very personal, narrated as it is in Saul’s matter-of-fact, pull-no-punches style of descriptive delivery. Yet if I drew the line there, and ignored the fact that Saul is an Ojibway man taken from his family as a boy, forced to attend a residential school, abused and “lucky� enough to leave the school before it killed him, only to further experience systematic and personalized discrimination at the hands of others while he plays hockey � well, I’d be ignoring a handy chunk of subtext of this book. I’d be doing exactly what Harper is doing: erasing and negating the struggles of indigenous peoples because it’s inconvenient to the narrative that Canadians are nice and polite. And he is not the only one—hence his actions, and words, because politicians are not big on leading the charge. He’s just making it a little easier for people like Richard Gwyn to . So let’s get political. No, scratch that. Let’s get angry, hmm? I’m not going to start quoting statistics or link to reports. There are Wikipedia articles for that. Humans are bad at numbers. ’s why we find movies like Schindler’s List more compelling than a dry recounting of how many concentration camps there were and how many people died each day. We are more attached to narratives than numbers. That’s why Indian Horse matters: it packages the depth of Canada’s racism in the twentieth century into a form our brains can grok. And it does so in a humanizing, deeply empathetic way. I think I need to make that clear. I am angry, for a whole bunch of reasons I’ll elaborate on later, but Indian Horse the novel is actually not an angry book. It is a compassionate book. It is not a book about how all white people are guilty, guilty, guilty and bad, bad bad (and I don’t think that either—again, more later). Rather, Wagamese demonstrates how Saul experiences systemic racism as a result of what the culture and policies were like in the 1960s and 1970s. But even though the events in this book are often dark and, frankly, disgusting, the ending is one of optimism and hope. ’s the same reason we have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, not a Blame and Bad Feelings Commission. What matters is that we listen to people when they talk about their experiences and believe them, even if that means we feel horrible. It is good that we feel horrible, because that means we are empathetic human beings—if you listen to someone talk about all the people they lost to a residential school, or their own experiences therein, and you feel nothing, then something is wrong. Feeling horrible is a natural reaction—but just because something makes you feel bad is not a reason to ignore and erase it. That’s a childish reaction, to be sure. We need to accept the past before we can move on. Such is the theme of Indian Horse. For Saul, the past includes not just his time at residential schools but also his relationship to his ancestors. I’m given to understand that many indigenous cultures believe strongly in an ongoing connection to one’s ancestors. Even if they are dead, their spirits can still guide you. Wagamese shows this with Saul’s visions later in the book when he returns to Gods Lake. It is incredibly important that Saul’s journey of reconciliation with his past led him not just to St. Jerome’s but also to Gods Lake. Like many indigenous men his age, he had his connection with his heritage brutally severed—only to find that—surprise!—the society that had severed it was never planning to accept him. So he has to reconnect not just with the memories of residential school that he pushed down so deep he didn’t tell us the first time, but also with the memories that maybe hurt as much, if not more, because they are of a family he can never get back. That is the unrelenting and unforgivable nature of the cultural genocide that happened through residential schools and other means. Despite Gwyn’s protests that residential schools were successful because, decades later now, more aboriginal youth are entering university (I’m feel vaguely nauseous even typing that paraphrase), the veracity behind any claims, religious or otherwise, that residential schools were for the improvement of indigenous peoples is totally irrelevant. No matter how you spin it, assimilation was never going to work, because even if indigenous peoples went along with it, gave up their culture, and became culturally white, other people would still kick them out of the white club and treat them differently. Wagamese demonstrates this through the incredibly appropriate arena of hockey. A bit of a personal disclaimer here: I don’t watch, follow, or even really know much about hockey. I know the names of some of the positions, the fact it tends to get played in three periods, and that there is a puck and a stick and goals and � oh yeah, ice (usually). So as Saul ticks off the names of hockey legends, indigenous or not, and describes the inherent beauty and grace of their skating or his, of their shots or his moves and speed � well, none of that resonates with me on a personal level. But that’s OK. Wagamese is a good enough writer that I still managed to get sucked into the descriptions. I still got a tingling sensation and a rush of adrenaline as Saul talks about the Moose’s first game against the Chiefs and how he contributes to their come-from-behind win. Moreover, it’s just clever for Wagamese to take the utterly Canadian game of hockey and use it for these purposes, appealing to people who might not otherwise find themselves open to reading a story like this. Saul is a hockey natural. Everyone says so. Yet his pure enjoyment of the game is marred by the misbehaviour of white players and fans who view him as trespassing on a whites-only game. In this way, Wagamese makes Saul’s experience into a microcosm for the attempts to assimilate indigenous peoples. It doesn’t matter if Saul adheres to the stereotypes of an Indian or not—some people just ’t get past the colour of his or his teammates� skin. Wagamese belies the myth of meritocracy: even as numerous (white) people believe that Saul has NHL potential and help to elevate him to another level of play, the rampant racism that pigeonholes him as the Rampaging Redskin pushes him away from the sport he once loved. This is why meritocracies ’t exist the way some people want to believe they do: it doesn’t matter how good you are, if people don’t see you, just their prejudices about you. All those countless micro-aggressions, as I’ve heard some people talk about recently—and for Saul and other indigenous people in the 1960s, and today, let’s face it, it’s more like actual aggression—wear Saul down. He’s one guy, and he has lost the one thing in his life that was giving him happiness. So he gives in. He wallows in self-pity and the stereotype and the solace of the nothingness of the bottle. I don’t drink. I only understand, on the barest intellectual level, why people might become drunks. But Wagamese does an excellent job explaining, through Saul’s paradoxically poetic prose, the lure of alcohol in its capacity to make time and memories slip. This is what cultural genocide does. It forcibly takes children from their families in the name of “educating� them—actually no, let’s be honest, and call it “civilizing� the savages, as Saul so accurately relates it during the chapters at St. Jerome’s. It subjects these children—the most vulnerable and innocent members of our society—to abuses that literally send chills down most people’s spines, driving some insane, or to suicide. While inflicting these psychological (and physical) scars, it punishes the children if they speak their own language—because obviously that isn’t civilized—erasing their heritage and leaving a void in its place. ’s like they reached in with a scoop and hollowed out Saul � and then when they couldn’t fill that void, he turned to hockey, with mixed success. Those that they did not kill residential schools broke, as people, condemning them to spend the rest of their lives adrift, unattached to culture, in a society overtly hostile to their existence. That’s � I ’t even. Evil is an appropriate enough word that springs to mind, I think. But it’s not all bad news. And I mean that not in the way that apologists like Gwynn would have it—residential schools were all bad news. Rather, it’s good that we are beginning to talk about this. That the Truth and Reconciliation Commission releasing these findings and some people are listening. That Richard Wagamese is writing books like this, receiving national recognition. That people are reading these books. That finally we are maybe, just maybe, open to learning about, talking about, and processing the depths of the injustices in our country, past and present. Because Canada doesn’t just have a history of colonialism: it is an ongoing process. If you don’t believe that, just look at the number of missing and murdered indigenous women. Still not convinced? Then why are there so many First Nations communities without healthy running water? We are supposedly a first-world, developed country, yet we ’t bring a basic need to thousands of people? That is shameful. And if it were any other country it would get international attention and be called the humanitarian crisis it is. Maybe one of those nice democratic countries could send in some troops to help us out. Canada turns 150 in two years. The government in power at the time will spend an unfathomable amount of money on the celebration. The Harper government has made it clear that if it’s still in power, it’s going to do so in a way that glorifies the Eurocentric, white part of Canada’s national heritage and minimize and ignore the part where there have been people living in this land for millennia. That is, after all, the only way to prove we have no history of colonialism: ’t be colonialist if there wasn’t anyone here to colonize, eh? You ’t have it both ways. You ’t take pride in and celebrate the good parts of our nation’s history and heritage and simultaneously ignore the bad stuff, pretending it didn’t happen or pretending it doesn’t matter. That is, as I said, childish. And we are nearly 150, Canada. So let’s grow up, and learn to deal with the bad in our past. Indian Horse offers one, valuable perspective on how to do that. Read it, and read other books and blogs like it, and listen to people as they talk about their history and their heritage. Have this conversation, like the adults we are. I’ll conclude with this: earlier I was careful to make the distinction in this review between the compassionate tone of Indian Horse and the anger I’m feeling, partly as a result from reading it. Being white, I ’t really be angry for the injustice done to “my people� when I read this story. So what do I have to be angry about? What, aside from the fact that this isn’t fiction, but more a fictionalized account of terrible things that happened to actual human beings? That isn’t enough to get angry about? I’m angry because I’m white, and as a result, I don’t know enough about a hugely important part of our nation’s heritage, simply because it either wasn’t taught to me or wasn’t taught very well. I’m angry that Stephen Harper and people like him would like to excise this inconvenient part of our history from the textbooks, just like some elements of American society want to talk about how “some� slaves were “happy� to have masters and work on plantations (again with the near-nausea of writing that sentence). Because that is part of my history as much as it is part of any indigenous person’s. While I don’t feel guilty for what white people inflicted on aboriginal people in the past, I feel responsible, as a person with privilege in today’s society, to help make things better right now, for the people alive today. One way to do that is to talk about why things are so bad today, about how it got this way, rather than simply shrugging and saying, “Nope, no colonialism here—move along now!� I will be angrier still if we continue to let Harper get away with this, if we write him another blank cheque to do whatever the hell he wants to this country, regardless of how much it perpetuates the colonialist attitude he ignores in the most Orwellian of ways. So be the change, right? Read Indian Horse. Read other books. Listen to indigenous activists on the radio and TV and online—or, you know, go to things in person, if unlike me you happen to enjoy leaving your house. Learn more about these subjects. It isn’t the job of indigenous peoples to stand up and educate us about these problems; it is our responsibility, as Canadians, to come together, not out of shame or guilt or blame, but simply common human decency. Canada has a super-colonialist history—but it also has a history with some pretty amazing moments in it. We can celebrate the latter even while we acknowledge and regret and rectify the former. Because we can do better. We must. ...more |
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Jun 09, 2015
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Jun 10, 2015
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Jun 09, 2015
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Paperback
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| 0307356345
| 9780307356345
| 0307356345
| 3.41
| 463
| Mar 25, 2014
| Mar 25, 2014
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liked it
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I read, and greatly enjoyed, The Toss of a Lemon years ago. Now Padma Viswanathan is back, this time with a Giller Prize nomination, again with a book
I read, and greatly enjoyed, The Toss of a Lemon years ago. Now Padma Viswanathan is back, this time with a Giller Prize nomination, again with a book connected to India, but now one firmly grounded in Canada’s history and conflicted mixture of cultural obligations as well. The Ever After of Ashwin Rao is every bit as complex and emotionally sensitive as one might expect from a literary award nominee. While it didn’t quite engender the same lasting sense of enjoyment that I seem to recall The Toss of a Lemon creating, it still manages to be a marvellous work of fiction. Despite its title, I’d argue that The Ever After of Ashwin Rao is not, actually, about Ashwin Rao. He is the nominal protagonist and the first-person narrator for most of the book. And, true, Viswanathan spends a lot of time developing him as a character: the events of the book affect him, and we seem him coming to terms with his own losses. But over time, the story of Seth’s family overshadows Ashwin’s own narrative. Viswanathan shares details he couldn’t have access to—though, I suppose, there is an argument to be made that all of these details are actually part of a narrative Ashwin wrote, as part of his narrative therapy procedure, and do not actually reflect what happened. How’s that for an unreliable narrator? Regardless, my point is that this book is about so much more than a single man working through his grief. Viswanathan’s careful creation of an Indian–Canadian psychologist who is looking to create a book of interviews and stories about those grieving over the , when he himself lost a sister and niece and nephew in the disaster, is clever and heartwrenching to equal degrees. She fixates upon one of the most prominent and tragic events in recent Canadian history, yet she manages to capture the most human elements and reactions to it. Although the trial of the alleged perpetrators is ongoing in the background, it never takes the forefront—it is just setting, a way of establishing the atmosphere and tone in which Ashwin does his work. As humans (sorry, aliens and robots who are reading this in the far future when my reviews are the only remaining corpus of human writing), we all have some kind of experience with grief. We know that grief has strange, unforeseeable and lasting effects on individuals. We handle it in different ways. Some people gather their grief close to their chests, hoarding it as if the feeling alone can somehow compensate them for their loss; others want to share and open up and form new connections as compensation for ones they will never feel again. There is no right or wrong way to grieve, provided your grieving process is right and healthy for you. Ashwin isn’t interested in the grieving process, however, so much as he is interested in the aftermath of that process. With twenty years passed since the disaster, he wants to know how well families have “adjusted� to what happened. The immediate feelings of grief are gone—and what is left? This is the “ever after� of the book’s title: the harsh and inescapable truth that, when people die, we keep going. And like a ripple propagating forward through time after a time-traveller inadvertently steps on a butterfly, this grief has profound but subtle influences on the people it touches. For me, the highlight of this book is not so much any individual’s portrayal as it is the way Viswanathan contrasts Indian and Canadian cultures. Ashwin, Seth, Venkat, and Lakshmi are all Indians who immigrated to Canada (though in Ashwin’s case, he then moved back to India)—they have a “Canadian experience� that has affected them, but they were essentially raised Indian. Seth and Lakshmi’s daughters, on the other hand, are Canadian by birth, Indian by heritage. Their conceptual framework is quite different—and they were so young when the disaster struck that their reactons differ in that respect as well. Viswanathan is sensitive to these differences in her characterization, making for a rich tapestry of human emotions and behaviours. Ashwin draws parallels between the Air India Disaster and the in India, where Indian military forces stormed a Sikh temple that was under the control of resistance forces. This led to massive fallout: Gandhi’s subsequent assassination at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards, and then mob-conducted pogroms against Sikh families in India to which the government and police turned a blind eye. Later in the book Ashwin continues to ruminate on the complicated, fragmented nature of Indian religious consciousness: how Britain divided its colonial possession along Hindu and Muslim lines, leaving the Sikhs out in the cold. Do the Sikhs “deserve� or “need� their own nation? Is it even right or reasonable to silo people by religious identity? Even though I am capable of comprehending and considering these questions from an abstract perspective, it’s impossible for me to understand them in the context that a character like Ashwin, who grew up in India, does. I was reminded, once again, of how my own life and upbringing and privilege to live in a “stable� and “boring� place like Thunder Bay, Canada has influenced my perception of what the world is like. Of course, the Air India Disaster was not really an Indian disaster but a Canadian one, even if our government didn’t seem to take that point at the time. The victims were, by and large, Canadians—that they happened to be of Indian descent, on an Indian-owned airline, was beside the point. The perpetrators, too, were likely Canadian—albeit influenced by Indian–Sikh radical ideologies, sure. But as Viswanathan and my own Wikipedia-fuelled research indicate, it’s not like CSIS and the RCMP were totally ignorant of potential threats. They just didn’t act on them. Then, in the years that followed, a strange silence and reluctance to admit wrongdoing. Two decades before a trial. That idea that the Air India disaster was not the Canadian government’s responsibility because the passengers were of Indian descent is the potent descendent of a much more overt and noxious colonialist streak that runs through our history. Viswanathan invokes the , reminding us that Canada was very much “for white British subjects only� well into its time as sovereign country. I don’t know if it’s because of or in spite of our stereotypical reputation for politeness and fairness that we don’t want to talk about, acknowledge, or make amends towards those sorts of missteps in our past � despite our pretensions towards humility on the world stage, we are not so different from that country to our south (Canada’s sweater), and the close ties we maintained with mother Britain occasionally meant we were worse. The fact that, in 1985, these people didn’t receive better posthumous treatment because of their ethnicity and heritage speaks to the continued conflict within Canada about what it means to be Canadian, to be a citizen, to have “a Canadian culture.� That is a conflict that remains as-of-yet unresolved. This is probably why the book is so affecting, why it’s so difficult to read despite being, on its surface, placid and perhaps even dull in its lack of events to punctuate its equilibrium. It evokes so many ideas, especially uncomfortable ones. I dragged my heels reading this—it’s a reasonable-length book, and I’m reading one that is arguably longer now in about the space of two days—but you need to take your time to let the feelings sink in. I said earlier I didn’t enjoy this as much as Viswanathan’s first novel. That shouldn’t be taken as criticism of this one. Enjoyment probably isn’t the most appropriate term for a book like this. And they are different types of stories: one is a sprawling, multi-generational look at changing attitudes, while the other is a more constrained attempt to chart the vicissitudes of grief. ’s difficult to compare them or judge one against the other, so I don’t want to try. Both are probably worth reading, if this sort of fiction—Indian-Canadian, semi-historical, emotional and literary in tone and breadth—is what you’re in the mood for. ’s heavy; I should have gone for a definitely-lighter book afterwards but seem to have ended up with a similarly moving title instead. Such is life. I don’t want to go into spoiler territory discussing the twist or the denouement that follows. Suffice it to say, I’m not sure I understand the impulse that led Viswanathan to do that—but I understand the sentiment behind those closing pages. We spend so much of our life at the mercy of chance events, of others� actions, of unforeseen consequences that influence our own opportunities. There is an impulse in all of us to act, to move, which can either manifest itself as lashing out or as reaching out, depending on our emotional pique of the moment. Above all else, there is that fundamental and unshakeable truth: time marches on. We ’t go back. We ’t revisit loved ones long gone; we ’t undo mistakes—ours or others�. Like Seth, heading along the beach and into the ocean, we have only one choice: do we walk or do we run into our future? Do we cower, or do we embrace it with open arms? ...more |
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Jan 23, 2015
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Jan 27, 2015
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Jan 24, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 1596065788
| 9781596065789
| B00BNA1BLI
| 3.63
| 4,430
| Feb 28, 2013
| Mar 01, 2013
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really liked it
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My ePub copy of this from the Hugo Voters Packet had really messed up formatting, but I perservered anyway, because this story is awesome. Six-Gun Sno
My ePub copy of this from the Hugo Voters Packet had really messed up formatting, but I perservered anyway, because this story is awesome. Six-Gun Snow White is the classic Snow White fairytale reinterpreted through the lens of the Old American West. Snow White is the ironically-named child of a silver mine owner and a Crow woman, Gun That Sings, who married him against her will so that he would leave her people alone. Gun That Sings dies in childbirth, and Snow White’s father hides her away, embarrassed or uninterested in her upbringing. Then he remarries and his wife decides to “civilize� Snow White. Catherynne M. Valente delivers a tale that is a compelling bundle of postcolonialist considerations, tatters of the fairytale ethos, and feminist musings. Snow White is a complicated protagonist and narrator (and the book is in first person for the most part, so take that into account when ascribing veracity to her account!). Her social interaction has been limited to the few staff her father employed in her upkeep, plus, of course, her oft-absent father and her wicked stepmother. The latter is a perfect role model for any unloved child: cruel, heartless (heh heh), yet stalwart in her misguided insistence that her actions are necessary because she “loves� her charge and only wants the best for her. There’s just so much to unpack from this novella, which verges on being a short novel. Snow White is hobbled from birth by virtue of her skin: too dark to be considered a white woman, too light to be considered Crow; she is an outcast from everywhere. Then, of course, in the setting Valente has chosen, women have very limited social choices, and none of them seem applicable to Snow White. But Snow White rejects this fate. She flees her father’s gilt prison and her stepmother’s nefarious designs. She becomes a fugitive, learning as she goes that the problem with being on the run is that one never stops. It reminds me a lot of Marian Call’s song Six-Gun Snow White is just absolutely enthralling. I haven’t always been a fan of Valente’s style, but Snow White’s one-step-removed tone of narration works well here. It preserves that fairytale aspect of the story even if the events themselves are anything but a fairytale—no fairy godmother, no Prince Charming, just a glass coffin at the end. Brilliant story that definitely deserves its Hugo nomination—check it out. ...more |
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Jul 23, 2014
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Jul 23, 2014
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Aug 01, 2014
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Kindle Edition
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| 159606837X
| 9781596068377
| 159606837X
| 4.20
| 834
| Jun 29, 2017
| Jun 29, 2017
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really liked it
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I actually read this back when Subterranean Press first published it online. I almost didn’t re-read it when I found it in the Hugo Voters Packet � bu
I actually read this back when Subterranean Press first published it online. I almost didn’t re-read it when I found it in the Hugo Voters Packet � but then I decided that I wanted to write a review of it, and I wanted to refresh my memory. I’m glad I did this, because “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling� is even better than I remember. (I am aware of the irony of this statement given the story’s subject matter.) The subjectivity of human memory is a subject open to endless interesting speculation. It drives one of my favourite devices, the unreliable narrator, and it informs the motives and choices of every person, real or fictional. We all edit our memories, recollect experiences imperfectly, hide inconvient truths or simply blur and half-forget past events. Ted Chiang points out in this novelette that writing has altered the way in which we remember. It is writing, he argues, that was our first step towards being “cognitive cyborgs� rather than any of the lifelogging, search-driven tools that are just beginning to creep onto the public stage today. As a reader and a writer, I’ve long found the development of writing a fascinating subject for study. Our brains are naturally wired for language, yet we must learn to read and write. What is it like not to be literate? I ’t read non-Latin alphabets; I ’t even read most non-English languages in the Latin alphabet—yet, as a result of my literacy in English, I understand the concept of reading for information and pleasure. Through the character of Jijingi, Chiang allows the literate individual a glimpse at a grown person’s journey from illiteracy literacy. The revelation of what words are, and of how writing allows one to compose and order one’s thoughts in a predetermined manner, is fascinating, and it’s not something that those of us who are literate from an early age often consider. We take our literacy and the mindset that comes with it for granted. But what Chiang also explores is the idea, perhaps unsettling, that literacy is a form of colonization. We colonize our past with it, appropriating it and fixing it. In pre-literate societies like the Tiv, history is oral. It requires better memory—something true of most societies prior to the onset of easy access to books—but even the best memories are fallible, as Chiang demonstrates with the squabble over the Shangev’s ancestors. The Tiv view writing as a European idea and therefore view it with suspicion. They do not think it can replicate the “truth of feeling�, mimi, that they use to speak of what is right. And maybe, to some extent, they are correct. Chiang juxtaposes this ambivalence towards literacy with a narrator’s review of Remem, software that contextually searches one’s lifelog. In this way he comments concurrently on many popular trends today in society as well as in science fiction. We live in a surveillance state; the only question is the degree to which we are surveilled. Much of that surveillance is done by the government or its proxies, but almost as much happens on behalf of the individual. We record and photograph and otherwise document and tag our lives—hence lifelogging. We’re just now beginning to understand how this will affect us down the road, when Google produces that embarrassing photo you wish you had never shared. Remem is Google on speed and with impeccable timing, and as Chiang’s narrator explains, it is a tool with great advantages and great disadvantages. Now, Chiang could have written about either of these tools—writing or Remem—in isolation and produced a good story. “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling� excels, however, precisely because of this skilful juxtaposition. Interspersing the narrator’s Remem tale with Jijingi’s tale is very effective. It allows Chiang to make points about both technologies, and as a result, the story isn’t just about our relationship with writing or our relationship with remembering—it’s a combination of both, greater than the sum of its parts. Short stories and novelettes seldom make their mark through their characters or even, often, their events. They are too short to build towards massive climaxes. Their significance lies in the ability of the writer to capture a single Big Idea and whittle it down into a memorable Notion. Chiang showcases that ability here. This story is entertaining and moving, because it has the human elements: Jijingi’s tragic relationship with his own writing; the narrator’s fragile relationship with his daughter. But it also makes the reader think, hopefully in new and interesting ways. This is probably my favourite nominee for Hugo novelette this year, because it comes close to a perfect short-form work of science fiction. So, take that with the grain of salt that you will. ...more |
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Jul 15, 2014
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Jul 15, 2014
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Jul 22, 2014
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Hardcover
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| 0679446230
| 9780679446231
| 0679446230
| 3.74
| 397,207
| 1958
| 1992
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liked it
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**spoiler alert** This is not an easy story for me to love, and maybe even like is not the appropriate word. I can appreciate it, as literature. That
**spoiler alert** This is not an easy story for me to love, and maybe even like is not the appropriate word. I can appreciate it, as literature. That being said, unlike much of the so-called “great� or “classic� literature I have read to date, I do not feel immeasurably enriched by Things Fall Apart. Although at times moving and disturbing, Chinua Achebe’s account of how Europeans stripped Nigeria of its cultural and tribal identity lacks a certain resonance for me, something I put down to a lack of sympathy towards the main character. Achebe presents Igbo culture plainly and unapologetically. There is no hedging and no excuses made for the poor treatment of women or the cruel attitudes towards twins (kill them!) or the warrior cults of masculinity that perpetuate endless cycles of violence among tribes. ’s easy for me, as an heir of the same white, European culture that colonized Nigeria, to condemn these aspects of Igbo culture. At the same time, there has to be some kind of line between cultural relativism and moral relativism. I think it’s to be found in the way in which one speaks of a culture’s less savoury elements. ’s possible to condemn the structural misogyny in Igbo culture without condemning all of Igbo society and its people (much in the same way we today should condemn our own society’s structural misogyny). By the same token, Achebe’s naked portrayal of this culture means that he is not setting up a straw man that the Europeans knock down. This is not the story of "noble savages" succumbing to imperialist aggressors. ’s far more nuanced than that, but it benefits from Achebe’s perspective as an indigenous Nigerian who has also been exposed to colonial education and perspectives. I found most of Things Fall Apart fascinating simply as a result of this portrayal of Igbo society. The title is apt, in that the pace of the book’s plot moves with the gentle transition of seasons rather than the frenetic beat of a narrative drum. Achebe is more concerned with touring and exploring the various facets of life, particularly as he unravels Okonkwo’s complicated relationship with the rest of the tribe and with the Europeans. Each chapter is essentially an episode in which Okonkwo or his kin face a new challenge or experience that prompts them to question or redefine their goals and motivations. Here Okonkwo’s own obstinacy proves to be his undoing, first with the accidental discharge of a gun that has him exiled for seven years, and then later when he attempts to stir the village to war. In both cases, Okonkwo’s restlessness, symptom of a far more complex issue in the village, undermines the stable life he has managed to construct through his skill and perseverance. So Okonkwo is not all bad. He’s a jerk to a lot of people, and he does not suffer fools gladly. But he is, at his core, fair in the eyes of his culture. We might not agree with his code, but one must recognize that he has one: he acts in accordance with a rigidly defined code of behaviour by which he understands what it means to be "a man" in his society. When his eldest son fails to live up to these expectations by converting to Christianity, Okonkwo declares him a "woman" and disowns him. This is not just the petty action of the older generation failing to understand the younger; it’s the logical consequence of Okonkwo’s code of behaviour conflicting with his son’s own understanding of maleness in the new Igbo society subject to colonial rule. This is what critics mean when they refer to the clash of cultures present in the book; though physical confrontation happens as well, there are far more nuanced examples of how European culture begins to dismantle or otherwise set aside the existing ideologies. In this light, I see Okonkwo’s suicide as an allegory for the Igbo people’s choices when faced with the suppression and assimilation of their culture and society by Europeans. Unlike his son, Okonkwo could not accept the new rules and mores imported into Nigeria by Europeans. He must have been aware of the high cost of suicide: never to be buried on sacred ground, name besmirched in the eyes of the tribe forevermore � for someone like Okonkwo, for whom status and prestige were his life’s work, this was not a fate he would have chosen lightly. In this context it’s clear that his suicide is, therefore, an act of a man who thinks he is out of other options. He cannot fight—he does not have the support of the village—yet he cannot surrender either; he is not a "woman" to so peaceably turn his back on his beliefs. Okonkwo’s rigid code runs up against the implacable force of colonial assimilation, and he faces an impossible dilemma. Things Fall Apart, then, is a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions. Okonkwo is a tragic figure trying to keep his family and people together. He is not a hero fighting valiantly against a clear enemy, because Achebe mentions forces other the colonialism at work in the tribe. Even had the Europeans not invaded, there were signs that the Igbo youth were already leaving certain old ways behind them. But the Europeans� arrival hastens these changes and augments them with strange new ones. That Okonkwo is doomed to failure seems obvious early on, probably even to himself (I suspect that his eagerness to engage the Europeans in battle has nothing to do with optimism for victory and everything to do with his expectations for himself to behave like a warrior). What matters, though, is that he must act in this way because to do otherwise would be to betray himself, to be like his father, and that is the one thing Okonkwo refuses to do. I can appreciate Okonkwo’s struggle, even if I don’t particularly like him as a person. Achebe has crafted an intricate but simple story of entropy in the face of colonial expansion. He captures the way in which Europeans dismantle or replace the order and structure of Igbo life with an order and structure more to their liking. And he manages to do so while giving us a taste of what that pre-colonial structure was like, of how their people married and celebrated and feasted and died and held court. Things Fall Apart is equal parts tragic, fascinating, and frustrating. Despite its slimness, it is neither a light read nor a quick one. While I’m not going to place it near the top of my list of postcolonial literature, I’m still glad I’ve read it and had the opportunity to consider a chapter in colonial history that I haven’t otherwise paid much attention to. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 06, 2014
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Jul 10, 2014
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Jul 06, 2014
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my rating |
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| 3.82
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really liked it
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Sep 25, 2024
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Oct 06, 2024
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| 3.54
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liked it
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Jul 2023
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Jul 11, 2023
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| 4.32
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really liked it
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Nov 15, 2020
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Nov 11, 2020
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| 4.27
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really liked it
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Nov 2020
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Mar 08, 2020
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| 4.03
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really liked it
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May 07, 2019
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May 06, 2019
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| 3.91
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it was amazing
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Jul 06, 2019
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Nov 14, 2018
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| 4.46
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really liked it
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Aug 13, 2018
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Aug 07, 2018
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| 4.19
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really liked it
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Nov 10, 2021
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Nov 07, 2017
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| 4.00
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liked it
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Apr 28, 2017
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Apr 26, 2017
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| 3.75
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really liked it
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Nov 2017
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Jan 04, 2017
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| 3.78
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really liked it
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Dec 24, 2016
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Dec 22, 2016
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| 3.81
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really liked it
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Sep 17, 2016
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Sep 17, 2016
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| 3.82
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it was ok
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Jul 21, 2016
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Jul 22, 2016
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| 4.34
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really liked it
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May 21, 2018
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Jul 21, 2016
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| 3.70
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it was ok
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Aug 20, 2015
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Aug 17, 2015
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| 4.41
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it was amazing
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Jun 10, 2015
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Jun 09, 2015
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| 3.41
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liked it
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Jan 27, 2015
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Jan 24, 2015
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| 3.63
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really liked it
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Jul 23, 2014
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Aug 01, 2014
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| 4.20
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really liked it
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Jul 15, 2014
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Jul 22, 2014
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| 3.74
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liked it
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Jul 10, 2014
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Jul 06, 2014
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