Reviews – Koba English

En rackarunge

My hosts in Dalarna had a fantastic library of children’s literature spanning the interests of three generations. What a curious thing to see the Sweet Valley High paperbacks of my own childhood on the same shelf as authors like Ester Blenda Nordström!

Nordström’s series of children’s books, starting with En rackarunge, is purported to be an unacknowledged source of inspiration for Astrid Lindgren. The rackarunge in question—Ann-Mari—bears a resemblance to Pippi Longstocking in character as well as appearance, and predates the first Pippi book by some years. Admittedly, it’s hard to prove these things either way, so who’s to say for sure.

The Swedish half of the couple saw me paging through the book during my downtime and remarked on the differences between children’s literature now and then.

“I tried reading some of those older books to the kids when they were small, and it’s just a completely different experience. They’re so slow, nothing happens, there’s so much description. Books these days, there’s always something happening. It’s such a different energy.”

Indeed. En rackarunge is also more of a short story collection than a novel. Each chapter is a self-contained little adventure, although there are some recurring characters and situations throughout that (kind of) tie all of the adventures into one loose story. Not to mention it touches on pretty dark stuff for a children’s book of today: one of the red threads throughout the book is Ann-Mari’s friendship with a Josef, young man newly released from prison for murdering his physically and emotionally abusive uncle. He’s only scraping by at the margins of society when Ann-Mari first meets him, a total outcast from his hometown. Nordström’s reportage consistently highlighted the marginalized and the suffering, from her initial breakthrough as an undercover journalist investigating labor conditions for domestic help to her condemnation of the brutality of the bullfights she attended in Spain and her advocacy on behalf of destitute Finns starving near to death in a famine. Josef’s arc in the last third or so of the book is another culmination of Nordström’s concern for the downtrodden, and of course it’s Ann-Mari who decides to help him.

Why did Pippi become such a mainstay, while Ann-Mari vanished into obscurity?

Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back

I picked up Chokepoint Capitalism from my host’s bookshelf in London because I was worried about finishing the emergency book in my purse too early and because I guess I love reading about economics now?

Cory Doctorow was a name already familiar to me, as someone who reads science fiction and is terminally online, and I was glad to see him reined in somewhat by Professor Rebecca Giblin. Not that any of his ideas are distasteful or extreme, or that I even fundamentally disagree with him, but Doctorow’s style when it comes to writing about politics or economics can be a bit over-the-top.

Chokepoint Capitalism is a detailed, academic-based look at how Amazon, Spotify, YouTube, ClearChannel/iHeartRadio, Apple, Live Nation and other behemoths have solidified a hold on their respective markets, what the authors term “chokepoints.” I say “academic-based” because it is clearly deeply researched (no doubt Giblin’s contribution), but the presentation and style is still more in the vein of popular science (popular economics?) than dry scholarly reading. Giblin and Doctorow bring the receipts, as the kids no longer say. These companies have actively removed any other mediator between artists and audiences, and as the only gatekeepers can dictate essentially whatever terms they like, in terms of selling but also in terms of buying.

Part of the reason I write these dorky little book reports is to help me remember what I read. For novels and fiction, it’s simply a matter of not wanting whole hours of my life to disappear down the memory hole. But for nonfiction it also becomes a matter of actually learning something from what I’ve read, which is to say I’ve started this particular dorky little book report when Chokepoint Capitalism was no longer fresh in my mind and almost all of the details and nuance have already vanished.

Fortunately Giblin and Doctorow gave an interview about the book to explain it so I don’t have to.

The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe

I think The Bright Ages ended up on my TBR because I saw a Swedish copy at my in-laws and thought the topic sounded interesting, especially since my knowledge of Medieval history begins and ends with the interdisciplinary unit we had in middle school. While people crack jokes all the time about the perceived uselessness of fields like Medieval studies, familiarity with the period seems like good starting point for understanding how our current economic system got to be the way it is—and I’m sure I’m not the only person with a growing interest in that particular piece of history. Plus, as authors Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry point out in the introduction, a (historically inaccurate) popular understanding of the Middle Ages informs political ideology even today. Educating the public is therefore part of improving the health of our political dialogue.

They have their work cut out for them, no doubt. How well did they succeed?

This is another case where ebook reading no doubt hampered my comprehension, especially since I read it in bits and pieces over a relatively long period. I started it sometime before my trip to the US in May, and I finished it on a flight to London on July 30. Even though each chapter is more or less standalone, focusing on a particular event or development, such a long time in between reading sessions meant all the previous context had long since vanished into the memory hole.

But more than that, after I finished the book I struggled to articulate how The Bright Ages had shed new light on the topic (if you’ll forgive the pun). Gabriele and Perry do an excellent job of bringing in marginalized figures into the picture, and they also continually emphasize how interconnected the world was at the time: goods and therefore people traveled across incredible distances, like barefoot Christian monks traveling within the Mongol empire. At the same time, it’s hard to argue that an era was more enlightened or humane than we give it credit for when you’re simultaneously describing book burnings and religious violence. Other points it seems like the distinction was one of semantics more than anything else. Whether or not Rome actually “fell,” it still declined in political importance. Of course, it could be that I didn’t even know enough to be dangerous, as the expression goes, and therefore don’t have a deeply ingrained imagined history to be debunked.

Whatever else, the writing is also always engaging and easy to follow. Gabriele and Perry depart from the typically dry style of academic writing and take a warm, conversationalist tone. As a result, The Bright Engages is a fun and engaging read, and the fact that it took me so long to finish the book is not in any way a commentary on its quality. It’s me, I’m the problem.

Shadow Speaker

Shadow Speaker was one of many, many books that got dumped on my TBR back when I had discovered that book blogs were a thing, so it’s been waiting there about as long as Bel Canto. Discussion with some friends about African mythology in Dungeons & Dragons reminded me of the book, and wouldn’t you know it was available at the library.

Shadow Speaker is set in a kind of post-apocalyptic future Niger, though civilizations in this world came out the other side more or less okay thanks to magic (or juju, to use Okorafor’s own terminology). Our protagonist, Ejii, can see in the dark and communicate with shadows (who take on a very ghost-like quality); other people can fly or control the weather. Ejii travels with a talking camel named Onion. Forests appear and disappear at random. Much of this juju seems to spring from Peace Bombs, devices set off by a radical Haitian environmental group immediately after some cataclysmic nuclear incident.

In addition to triggering juju in people and places, the Peace Bombs also did something weird to the space-time continuum, bringing it in closer contact with fantastic alien worlds. This contact has invited an escalated new threat: interplanetary war. Ginen, the world that seems to be the closest and most intimately connected with Earth, has a beautiful but delicate post-scarcity ecosystem that would be wiped out by the kind of pollution our own Earth has (so far) managed to withstand, and its desperate, reactionary leader is keen to launch a preemptive invasion to neutralize the threat.

This is the huge existential crisis that Ejii is dragged into. The chorus of shadows around her have commanded her to find the imperious Red Queen, Jaa, and join her on a diplomatic mission to Ginen. Also, as it happens, Jaa decapitated Ejii’s dictatorial father right in front of her when she was a young girl.

Nnedi Okorafor is no small potatoes author. She has a substantial body of work to her name, as well as multiple awards (including the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Eisner). But looking at the timeline, Shadow Speaker is early on in her career. It might only be her second novel, if I’m reading the timeline right? There were parts that I loved about Shadow Speaker but in the final analysis, it was just too clunky to really get into.

The good: The vibe of this book is great. Okorafor’s world is highly imaginative on multiple levels: the story requires her to establish not only a post-apocalyptic Niger, but also the rules of the a new magical system as well as the xenobiology of alien worlds. Those are a lot of plates to juggle, and on that level the book is exceptionally coherent. Everything about the setting slots together very elegantly. The world where Ejii has cat’s eyes and can talk to spirits in no way clashes with the world where interplanetary warfare looms at the threshold.

Where it falls down for me is just about everywhere else.

It’s unfortunate the original edition is out of print because I would have liked to compare the two. The most substantial change, from my understanding, is a new prologue for the latest Shadow Speaker, and it does the book a huge disservice.

In the prologue the reader encounters the Desert Magician, establishing a framing device whereby you, the reader, are a visitor in their tent and they are relaying you a story. Except not at all? There’s no reference to the framing device for the rest of the story, and then we actually meet the Desert Magician in the story being told. I didn’t think about the trainwreck of framing devices while I was reading because by that point I had forgotten about the prologue entirely, which is not great praise for the intervening pages.

But more than structural inconsistency, the prologue also sets up false expectations in terms of writing. Shadow Speaker came out in 2007 and the new edition is from 2023. The good news is that Okorafor has clearly grown as a writer, because the prologue has a sophisticated and distinctive voice throughout; the bad news is that the prologue sets the bar way too high for the rest of the writing to come.

The plot mostly seems there for the sake of the world. It’s not particularly complex and reads more like a series of disconnected episodes then an unfolding of events, where resolutions to crises have consequences that engender new crises. To name a couple:

The dramatic earthquake at the beginning of the story proper has zero ramifications for Ejii or anyone else in the village. It’s not what starts Ejii on her quest, it’s not what triggers Jaa’s departure from the village, it’s nothing. The one and only purpose it serves is to prompt a homework assignment from Ejii’s teacher that functions as a perfunctory flashback, but authorial necessity isn’t the same thing as plot necessity.

Not long after the earthquake, Ejii gets into a fight with her obnoxious half-brother. He shares their father’s views on the subjugation of women and has been needling Ejii for most of his existence thus far in the book. Like the earthquake, this altercation carries no consequences for anyone. Ejii isn’t in trouble or otherwise prevented from carrying out the quest given to her by her shadows, so the most you can say about this scene is that it establishes her character.

Ejii overhears Jaa asking her mother to take on Ejii as an apprentice, a call to action immediately made redundant by instructions from Ejii’s shadows. And while this is where Ejii first learns that Jaa plans to assassinate the leader of Ginen during the coming talks, this information in no way influences any of the decisions Ejii makes once she joins Jaa’s company. Most of the time it seems like she’s just forgotten it.

And so on, and so on. A secondary character dies tragically in a pointless conflict that functioned neither as a meaningful obstacle to characters accomplishing their goals or as a meaningful victory and development in personal growth. Things seem to happen to Ejii and her friend Dikeogu that mostly serve as fun hijinks rather than as a natural outgrowth of previous actions. It has the tone of a made-for-TV family adventure movie on 90s era Nickelodeon or Disney Channel: the children are the heroes tasked with saving the day, the immediate peril is almost non-existent, whimsy and wackiness is through the roof, the adults are forever cowed or outwitted by children.

The characters, sad to say, don’t make the plot failings easy to overlook. There is the vague shape of a character arc for Ejii—a shadow of one, if you will—but it never really takes form. The book explains to us that Ejii seems to be getting stronger and more comfortable with her powers, and more assertive and sure of herself, during her sojourn in the desert, but it’s never in relation to some incident or even effort on her part. There is an intimation that she feels bad about not being as skilled as her friends, who have had training longer than she has, but this is essentially only mentioned in passing. The challenges that Ejii faces where she’s called on to use her powers are for the most part easily surmountable and have the feeling of the tutorial level in a video game where you learn how to use a new skill. “Stand here and listen to the old man’s inner monologue. Respond appropriately. Achievement unlocked!”

Early on, the escaped slave boy Dikeogu meets Ejii and joins her on her quest, and while Okorafor is clearly trying to use Dikeogu and his backstory to explore how trauma and violent brutalization can leave permanent marks, it never lands as very nuanced (maybe a tall order when Dikeogu is never a perspective character). Mostly his interactions with Ejii introduce a lot of unnecessary screaming or shouting into the dialogue.

The adults around Ejii and Dikeogu seem like they would be compelling and interesting characters in their own stories, but obviously here they’re sidelined for the children. My ultimate conclusion is that the YA designation might have been an albatross around the book’s neck, as the weakest elements of the book seem to stem from attempts to keep it simple and superficial.

“Why are you reading YA books, then? All that stuff bugs you because you’re not the target audience, this is what kids and teens like!”

I mean, true. I just wish there was a version of Shadow Speaker that was like a hundred pages longer and that gave the story the complexity it deserved. Maybe that’s Binti?

Mord ombord (Någon ämnar mörda mig)

During peak corona days, I wandered down to an unofficial little free library someone had posted about in the neighborhood Facebook group to see what I could find. Mord ombord was one of the titles I brought back (on the basis that the title sounded like a fun murder mystery) but then I put off reading it for three years.

Now here we are!

This was the first I’d heard of American mystery writer Helen McCloy, despite several books and honors to her name. She was the first woman president of Mystery Writers and later awarded the title Grand Master by the same organization, in addition to an Edgar award for her literary criticism. Born in 1904, her mystery writing career began with the publication of Dance of Death in 1933 (or possibly 1938? I have conflicting data) and continued until her last novel, The Smoking Mirror, in 1979. She died in 1992, so I can only assume that she spent the 80s in comfortable retirement.

Mord ombord (previously published as Någon ämnar mörda mig) is the Swedish edition of McCloy’s 1947 She Walks Alone, and I have to admit that the English title isn’t nearly as punchy as the Swedish ones. I can only assume it’s a reference to this line from the book:

“Tony, did you ever hear of the Emperor Yao?”

“What on earth…?”

“He ruled China in its Golden Age. There is a saying about the peacefulness of his reign. ‘In the days of the Emperor Yao, a virgin with a bag of gold could walk alone from one end of the Empire to the other without fear of being molested.’ Since then, times have changed.”

The murders in question unfold on a ship from a fictional Caribbean country en route to New York. One of the passengers has been killed by a bite from the bushmaster snake under transport before the first port of call, where the ship’s captain brings the matter to the book’s detective, police captain Miguel Urizar. After a brief investigation, the coroner urges Urizar to declare the death an accident, but on a hunch Urizar decides to board the ship for the rest of its journey under the pretext of taking a vacation. This section closes with another death, after which the book skips ahead to give an account of some of the passengers’ whereabouts after docking in New York.

At stake in all of this is a package of $100,000 that everyone on board has reason to want to steal. But who’s willing to murder for it?

She Walks Alone has a somewhat unusual structure. It opens with a substantial first-person perspective, in the form of a letter “meant to be read in the case of my violent death.” This is the letter presented to Ulizar by the ship’s captain in the second section of the book and prompts his investigation into the matter. We follow Ulizar until the second death, at which point the narrative switches to a second letter, and then it ends in another third-person perspective for the parlor scene, which is satisfyingly enough set in an actual parlor.

These changes in perspective not only ratchet up the tension (McCloy knows how to write a cliffhanger!) but also contribute to the mystery itself. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that the shifting boundaries of what is knowable to the reader at any point in time play a decisive role in the mystery. It’s all very natural, however, and doesn’t feel particularly gimmicky.

She Walks Alone is still in print and readily available, one edition in 2014 from the now-defunct imprint Murder Room and another from Agora Books as part of their 2020 “Uncrowned Queens of Crime” series. In their own words:

While Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh have held their own against the men of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction in both sales and acclaim, most average readers rarely venture beyond the four queens. If classic crime ‘best of’ lists are packed full with a variety of men, it shouldn’t be so challenging to find more than just a handful of brilliant crime-writing women.

Agora believes there are female authors from this era whose heads still sit uncrowned. From discussions with the readers of its Crime Classics community to scouring historical libraries and coastal secondhand bookshops, the publisher has uncovered a few women worthy of the title.

But my copy wasn’t one of the new paperbacks; it was a Swedish hardcover edition from 1954 put out by Tidens bokklubb, translated by Erik Wilhelm Olson, about whom there is little to say. He was a literature and film critic for Svenska dagbladet, wrote several novels (I think novels?) and short story collections, wrote and directed a short film in the 1920s, and translated crime fiction into Swedish. His biography on Runeberg.org includes his portrait, so here you go:

Based on the language of the translation and the publication date, I would note some of-the-time racial terminology (which is, if memory serves, almost exclusively in the first-person perspectives and comes across as characterization more than anything else). But McCloy also clearly has some nuanced understanding of “the race issue” (as I assume she phrases it in English, based on the Swedish) in the US and presents the matter and her characters of color sympathetically. It’s hard to comment on the quality of the translation without having read the original, but I can at least say that I enjoyed it. As a writer and critic, it’s natural to assume that Olson had a good sense for what works.

I’ve deliberately avoided going into too much detail here because I think this is a fun, clever mystery and I’d rather prompt someone to pick it up and read it for themselves than pick it apart here and ruin the mystery. The clues are subtle, but they’re all there: this is a whodunit in the “the reader has all the tools to figure it out themselves” tradition. And while yes, Raymond Chandler, “the ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing,” there’s always an element of fun that’s ruined in a mystery when someone’s spoiled the ending for you—no matter how good everything around the mystery is.

Bel Canto

Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto was a long-time TBR resident based on reviews I had read in book blogs, which means I added it sometime around 2014? 2015? and then finally read it in 2024. I would scroll past its cover now and again, debating if I was really still interested in reading it, but every time it made the cut.

Now I’m not sure if it was worth it.

An unnamed Latin American country invites a prominent Japanese businessman to celebrate his birthday and hopes, by feting him with a world-famous operatic soprano, to encourage his investment in the country. A guerilla paramilitary group breaks into the party, hoping to kidnap the president, and when they realize he’s not there, they take the entire birthday party hostage instead. The hostage situation drags on for something like four and half months, until it’s brought to an abrupt and tragic end. Minor spoilers undoubtedly follow, but I’m deliberately avoiding what I consider the real showstoppers.

Bel Canto was already going in at a disadvantage because I read it as an ebook. I’m not trying to be a print purist; in fact I’m grateful for the many advantages of ebooks! I can bring a near-infinite library with me in my pocket when I travel (or end up unexpectedly hospitalized), I can continue to patronize my US library from overseas, I can keep up with time-sensitive publications without running out of shelf space. However, I also know that my focus can suffer with ebooks, especially with Patchett’s style of writing: slow, reflective, internalized. Format was undoubtedly a contributing factor to my overall negative experience of the book. But even if I had read the book in print, there were several authorial decisions that would have still broken immersion for me.

The biggest unforced error out of all of these was conflating translators with interpreters for the entire book. (Translators work with the written word, interpreters work with the spoken word.) One of the main characters is Gen, an interpreter for the Japanese guest of honor who ends up interpreting for the entire collection of hostages and guerillas thanks to his facility with some half a dozen languages: Japanese, English, French, Spanish, Russian, German, maybe others. I realize that people often use the words “interpreter” and “translator” interchangeably (or rather, just use “translator” for everything), and from any of the other characters this usage wouldn’t have bothered me at all. But any interpreter I’ve ever known has always made a point of 1) thinking of themselves as an interpreter privately as a matter of vocational identity, 2) calling themselves an interpreter when discussing themselves and their career with others, and 3) correcting people who call them translators. Spending a whole novel with an interpreter who thinks of himself as a translator, and calls himself a translator, and sees absolutely nothing wrong with being referred to as a translator, broke immersion for me.

A couple of smaller, fuzzier details that rang weird for me had to do with the Swedish accompanist. His death from diabetic coma checks out (source: my Type 1 diabetic brother), but his name—Christopf—is well weird. Of course, since the hostage situation was based on the Japanese embassy hostage crisis in Peru and the soprano was based on Karol Bennett, for all I know Christopf is also based on someone else Patchett knew in real life and I will put my foot in my mouth by criticizing his name as unrealistic. I’ll just point out that there are zero hits for “Christopf” on either Hitta.se or Ratsit.se, which goes to show how widespread the name is in Sweden. There was also an offhand description of Swedish that initially struck me as odd, but upon rereading I’m willing to retract the criticism.*

That said!

It did make me more critically reflect on how Patchett describes the other languages in the book and there is a dodgy, hand-wavy ambiguity about how they’re described—even from the perspective of Gen, the gifted interpreter—that lacks the specificity of someone who feels comfortable speaking them. It’s unfortunate that this hand-waving is set up against the clear familiarity that Patchett has with opera. And if Patchett is comfortably fluent in any of those languages, then it’s even more unfortunate because she comes off as the exact opposite.

Speaking of the opera, it’s time to bring up one of my least favorite tropes: the healing power of music.

It’s maybe surprising that I would be annoyed by this trope since I’m a music person (see: the violin feels from Light From Uncommon Stars), but I would argue that it’s actually not at all surprising. It is the direct opposite of my lived experience that most people have the breathless, awestruck response to classical music that the characters in Bel Canto have. Of course there are opera lovers present at the party, and of course they love Coss’s voice, but Patchett imbues this soprano with an unearthly quality that entrances everyone present, including the guerillas holding them captive.

Or maybe I just have alto (contralto? tenor? my vocal range is sad) beef because sopranos already get all the love.

Anyway, I’d be willing to overlook those things but for one larger, underlying issue: MFA fiction.

A bookish friend and I have taken to using “MFA fiction” as a shorthand for a particular kind of overrated novel that I’m finding it difficult to describe now except: the purpose of MFA fiction is to show you, the reader, how enlightened the author is. Not just smart, necessarily. Not just educated. But also how emotionally transcendent they are. The narrative tone carries “a certain kind of false timidity” (to quote my friend), a self-conscious restraint and ironic distance. Outline is another great example of what we both consider MFA fiction. I think a lot of literary prizewinners are populated by this kind of writing because the judges like to think of themselves as equally enlightened beings.

Of course, I don’t have any specific illustrative quotes to present here, just “the vibe.” At this point I’ve totally failed at death of the author. Most of this review, most of my response to this book, is more or less based on what I assume Patchett’s motivations and background and intent to be, rather than the text on its own. The cool thing is that I’m just writing for this weirdo little blog and so it’s perfectly acceptable for me to fail at death of the author! Sorry Ann Patchett, you’re a more accomplished writer than I’ll ever be and I’m sure you’re a lovely person, but Bel Canto wasn’t doing it for me.

*Minus points for Gen learning Swedish from Bergman movies, though. It’s a cliche unworthy of what Patchett is attempting here.

Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture

If I wanted to depress myself, I would do a series called “In Search of Lost Bookstores” and feature books in my library that I purchased at stores that have since shuttered.

Just kidding, I’ve already depressed myself just by thinking about it!

One of those entries would be this thirty-year-old collection of academic writing on the nascent online culture of the early 90s. In high school, anything at all related to Cool Cyberpunk Hacker Shit was instantly my bag, so I picked up Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture on one of my many youthful browses of the Lion Around bookstore (RIP). It was already ten years out of date by that point, but no matter! I read a couple of the essays right off the bat; I gave most of the others a pass as uninteresting and highly technical. . Nonetheless I kept the volume through several purges, sensing that one day I would have enough of a brain to actually engage with the content. That day was today, the year of our Lord 2024, a full thirty years after its initial publication—an ice age ago in online time.

How does it hold up?

In some aspects not very well at all, or maybe more fairly: it’s clearly a book of its time. Lots of ink is spilled over Mondo 2000, reminding us that people once took it seriously as a cultural forum. (Though I guess its ghost still haunts the Internet in the form of BoingBoing.) When discussion focuses on the intersection of technology and sexuality, it’s as awkward and dated as you’d expect (did anyone ever actually call it “compu-sex”?) and HIV/AIDS as an existential threat is a very present issue. In much of the discussion, sexual and otherwise, the underlying assumption is that VR is going to be the thing pretty soon and that people will be using that to have safe, gratifying casual sex—but for now, typing will do. Thirty years later, it’s safe to say that VR didn’t pan out like any of these authors were expecting.

There are also selections that, even without the retro-futurism, kind of stumble. The performance art group Survival Research Laboratories is still running to this day (would you like to subscribe to their Patreon?), but the account Mark Pauline provides of a show in Austria fails to articulate anything interesting beyond the deathwish of one of their local assistants. (The numerous photos of the Austrian show/exhibition were black and white; maybe full color would have helped.) Another essay on virtual reality as a plot device in fiction feels like a puffed-up excuse for Marc Laidlaw to showcase his own writing. Halfway through the piece, Laidlaw confirms this suspicion and explains that he was originally asked to submit a selection of his fiction, but felt whatever he submitted would be out of context, so he wrote an essay about the topic of virtual reality and then included his own writing in the essay. The other piece of fiction, an excerpt from Pat Cadigan’s Synners, was simply presented on its own as a piece of fiction and functioned just fine without context. (And in fact, I promptly added the whole book to my TBR after I finished the chapter.)

The more abstract, theory-based, and otherwise philosophical essays, on the other hand, still feel highly relevant. Editor Mark Dery’s interviews with Samuel Delaney, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose (collected in the chapter “Black to the Future“) are a goldmine of thought that I will definitely be revisiting, moreso because Dery chose to interview extremely intelligent people rather than because Dery provided much insight himself (sorry). Likewise with Claudia Springer’s “Sex, Memories, and Angry Women,” which touches on an interesting tension in the portrayal of women within cyberpunk but that also requires me to refresh my memory (hah) of the works in question before I can really have anything to say about it. I don’t know enough about the state of neural networks and AI research to know if Manuel De Landa’s “Virtual Environments and the Emergence of Synthetic Reason” is still fresh, but Gary Chapman’s* “Taming the Computer” still feels as relevant as it did in 1994. Perhaps—cliché be damned—even more so.

Cue the ominous music.

Overall, despite some dated, now-irrelevant concerns and speculations, a solid collection to have on hand in 2024.

*This is Gary Chapman the technologist and academic, who died in 2010. He’s not the Gary Chapman famous for the Five Love Languages, but sadly only the latter has a Wikipedia page.

La Vengeance m’appartient: Review

Marie NDiaye’s La Vengeance m’appartient came into my life following a positive review in Karavan (which I’m very var behind in my reading!). I had the good fortune to find it in my top three languages: the original French, and then translations in Swedish and English. I have enough thoughts there that I think they would detract from talking about the novel qua novel, so that’s a separate post.

While Maître Susane has risen from the working class to become a lawyer, she’s not quite the picture of unmitigated success that her friends and family assume her to be. After leaving a larger, much more prestigious firm to start her own practice, Maître Susane has struggled financially, taking on banal cases that only just barely cover her bills. All of this has the potential to change when Gilles Principaux walks into her office and asks her to represent his wife, Marlyne, who is currently awaiting trial for the murder of their three children. This would be an incredibly high profile case and the first major one since Maître Susane started her own practice.

There is a catch, of course. Maître Susane believes to recognize in Gilles a certain influential teenager from her youth. One fateful day, at the age of ten, she accompanied her mother in her work as a cleaning lady, and spent the afternoon in the bedroom of the family’s teenage son. Much of what happened that day is lost down the memory hole, including the name of the family, but Maître Susane firmly believes that whatever it was set her on the path to becoming a lawyer.

What happened that day? Was it Gilles that Maître Susane encountered, or someone else?

Alongside all of this, Maître Susane is also negotiating a complicated relationship with her own cleaning lady (a not insignificant expense that she can barely afford), an undocumented worker from Mauritius named Sharon. Maître Susane is desperate for Sharon’s approval, maybe even her friendship, to the point of growing resentful when her advances are rebuffed. The relationship is only further complicated when Maître Susane volunteers Sharon as a babysitter for her beloved goddaughter Lila.

As Maître Susane prepares Marlyne Principaux’s defense, the rest of her life spins out of control. Her parents, distressed at her renewed fixation on what happened that day in her childhood, eventually cut off contact with her; Sharon reveals that she has been taking Lila with her to other cleaning jobs during the day, including the elderly widow Principaux (perhaps the same Principaux?) and Maître Susane is convinced that the girl is suffering; even her own memory of recent events starts playing tricks on her (or are the people in her life trying to deceive her?).

There is a lot to unpack in this book and quite frankly I don’t think I’m capable of it (writing two weeks or so after I finished reading it). I loved this book and my review cannot do it justice, but I’ll try anyway.

In a way, La Vengeance m’appartient has a lot of the trappings of noir, even though I don’t think it could be strictly classified as such. Psychological thriller? Raymond Chandler once claimed that “the ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing” and that’s what you get here. None of those seemingly urgent questions in the above summary are answered conclusively; we are presented with a life in turmoil that is only partially resolved by the end of the story. The point is not the meticulously pieced together mystery but rather the externalization of the subtle dramas and tensions of interpersonal relationships. The chaos that Gilles introduces in Maître Susane’s life had really already taken root inside of her long ago. She seeks approval and understanding from everyone—from her parents, from the teenage maybe-Principaux, from her ex (and father of her goddaughter), from Sharon, from Lila—and fails to obtain it anywhere.

Maître Susane is, in the parlance of our times, “hashtag ‘relateable.'” Her ambivalent relationship with her parents—simultaneously yearning to unburden her heart to them while also sensing that they would only be equally ambivalent about such a confession—is a familiar one, likewise her demanding urges with Sharon. On one level Maître Susane is magnanimous and forward thinking with Sharon: she is handling Sharon’s visa case for free, she pays her fairly and on time, she doesn’t have excessive demands in terms of labor. But she also clearly expects to be repaid for these favors with a more personal relationship, thereby crowning her (and here I’m using my own phrasing, not NDiaye’s) a Good Ally TM.

Part of the reason La Vengeance m’appartient might have been such an experience for me was that I read much of it while I was visiting my own parents, so I was already swimming in all those kinds of feelings already. Now that I’m well into adulthood, am I living up to my parents’ expectations for me? Their hopes? Am I even living up to my own? Maître Susane and I are around the same age, after all. There are absolutely biographical reasons that I was so taken with this book. But regardless, NDiaye touches on a lot of contemporary suffering and struggles with a deft, elegant hand.

Summer

I have a vague memory of being recommended Ali Smith’s Summer last year by a friend of a friend who teaches English at the university level, but my memory of his recommendation (“It’s like the book version of what we’re doing right now, people having conversations just like this”) so misaligns with what happens in the book that I wonder if I missed something. Or maybe Summer ended up on my TBR for other reasons and the English professor’s recommendation was something else entirely. I also learned, long after I finished it, that Summer is the last of a quartet and that several of the characters had appeared in the previous installments.

Basically, I came in to this book all wrong, so this is going to be an extremely…unfair? confused? unhelpful?…review for anyone who actually has the full context for the book. Sorry.

A pair of siblings—teenage environmental activist Sacha and her proto-edgelord younger brother Robert—end up befriending a pair of adults and, along with their mother, make a quick trip in a post-Brexit, mid-Covid England to return a lost/stolen item to its rightful owner. Based on what I’ve read in other reviews, most of what happens in Summer builds on stories and characters established in the previous three books and maybe? maybe not? ties up some loose ends.

Despite my clearly misguided expectations, I really liked Summer. Smith balances a relatively large cast of characters well, keeping their internal monologues consistent with how they’ve behaved from other character’s perspectives.

Mostly.

There is a missed opportunity with Sacha and Robert’s mother, the sole Leave voter in the group: when the book comes around to her perspective, Smith doesn’t really bother to speculate her motivations or feelings about Brexit and that feels like a cheap out. Its absence is made even more noticeable when you consider how much time we spend with Robert, who is currently acting out through extremely anti-social behavior.

On the whole, though, the different perspective characters feel distinct. Sometimes authors love the sound of their own voice a little too much and when they attempt an ensemble cast, characters lose all personality when it’s their turn to pilot the ship. Even if everyone has more or less similar politics (Brexit aside), Smith avoids that particular trap.

People who had read the previous three note in their reviews that Covid seems shoehorned in based on everything else, but I didn’t really walk away thinking “wow those lockdown bits were a bit tacked-on and weird,” so perhaps that’s an advantage of coming at the book from the completely wrong angle.

My only criticism, which is perhaps more of a reflection on me and the kind of person I am, is that I felt a bit manipulated by the inclusion of Vietnamese refugee Anh Kiệt. The parallels to the internment of “enemy aliens” in the UK during World War II are enlightening and fair to make, and I don’t begrudge Smith that point at all. However, Anh Kiệt himself gets pretty limited time in the story. Sacha writes to him twice throughout the book (and we see both pieces of correspondence) and we get to read his single reply to her, full of enthusiasm and optimism and hope, in the somewhat limited and uneven language you would expect from someone who acquired English informally and later in life. As far as character development goes, it’s not much, and it comes off as romanticized and idealized. His reply to Sacha is the last chapter of the book, which on the one hands lends it some gravitas, but that doesn’t make it any less flat. For comparison’s sake, the flashbacks to the World War II internments are longer (probably, though I didn’t go back and count up the pages, but they feel longer) and through the perspective of a character with fluent command of English, so his depiction is a bit more detailed and multifaceted. Never mind that this character apparently is the central figure in one of the previous books.

My initial reaction to finishing Summer, with Anh Kiệt’s optimism and nearly Pollyanna spirit, was to get a bit choked up at the goodness of the world and the undaunted spirit of hope etc. etc. Then I got annoyed at myself for getting choked up, because in a book full of research this is still fiction and who’s to say if Anh Kiệt ever existed. It’s the same “too good for this world” characterization of Ali from Där vinden vilar, but the book situates Ali so thoroughly in his community that it’s easy to read this idealized teenager as the hopes and desires of a family, of a village, of a country. Anh Kiệt doesn’t have much of a pre-refugee identity or status, so he feels like a narrative device cynically designed to elicit a reaction out of me, and I hate that in a book.

On the other hand, I read L’elegance du herisson and cried at the end all three times, so I like to think I’m not entirely heartless. What makes it effective there but cynical in Summer? I guess the answer is: the time I spent with the characters in question. We spend a lot of time with Renée in L’elegance du herisson since she’s one of the point of view characters. The same, even, with Ali in Där vinden vilar. But Anh Kiệt only gets his single chapter at the very end.

Or maybe the problem is me.

Soul Mountain

I picked up Gao Xingjiang’s doorstopper from the “leave a book, take a book” library at a hostel in Beijing in 2010. After a couple of half-hearted starts, I finally read it in 2024.

One more for the reading stats!

I liked the pointlessness of it all, how Soul Mountain is basically a collection of stuff without much of a structure and no plot to speak of. I liked the split of “I”/”you” perspectives, I liked a lot of the descriptions of the landscapes. It’s the kind of book I can easily return to again and again: there’s so much rich imagery, reflections, descriptions to get lost in, without having to keep all the threads of plot or character relationships straight because there are none!

I clearly tilt towards books that are thinky thoughts interspersed with nature and travel writing.

What I liked less was how Gao can’t seem to get beyond objectifying women any time they turn up. Either the male narrator (text makes it very clear that “I” and “you” are both men, so even with death of the author etc. I’m comfortable slotting this into “problems of the male gaze”) finds a woman attractive but childish or otherwise laughable, or he finds her unattractive and morally repugnant. Regardless, her sex appeal or lack thereof never goes unremarked. A recurring “she” who is part of the “you” chapters gets this the worst: she starts out as attractive and charming, but as things progress she turns more and more impulsive, childish, and petulant.

Who hurt you, Gao?

I would love to know how translator Mabel Lee felt about those moments in the text, how she thought about translating them, if she thought about them at all. I wonder if women in Gao’s other work fare any better than they do in Soul Mountain.