Tag: English

The Dragon’s Village

Numbers are hard. I realized sometime in November that I had miscounted my progress in my “ten books I already own” goal and began scouring my shelves for something short that I could knock out.

Enter the dragon. Or technically: YuanTsung Chen’s The Dragon’s Village.

This is yet another stop on the “selections of bookstores” past tour: I picked it up from What The Book? in Seoul in its glory days, at the airy and well-lit second-floor location overlooking Itaewon-ro. Pour one out. Press F to pay respects.

An image of What The Book's old storefront on Itaewon-ro.
From Derek Versus Lonely Planet

In my mind’s eye, I can still see the shelf where I picked it up, and I can remember that my decision to buy it was because I knew nothing about Chinese history generally, recent or otherwise, and that reading about the land reform and the Great Leap Forward seemed like it would be a good self-improvement project.

It just took a while!

The Dragon’s Village languished unread in my library for over a decade. I started a couple times but couldn’t get into it. Now with my arbitrary deadline looming, I got to work and pushed through my initial resistance to finish the book.

The setting is 1949 China. The 17-year-old narrator, Guan Ling-ling, joins a revolutionary theater group and is sent to the remote village of Longxiang in northwest China to help carry out the land reform. The Dragon’s Village follows her trials and tribulations as she works alongside party cadres and sympathetic villagers to establish what they hope will be a better, more just, more equitable world. Chen frankly describes the misery of peasant life and the bleakness of the landscape, setting the context for why—at least in certain regions—the promise of land and wealth redistribution could gain the foothold it did. She also bluntly chronicles the obstacles and setbacks she and the other party cadres face, and equally sets the context for why the redistribution plans didn’t gain even more of a foothold. Through the novel we become witness to a pivotal moment in time, full of potential, when things might still have been otherwise but yet were not. It ends before anything has truly been settled, on a note of optimism and hope that still carries the weight of historical inevitably, as Ling-ling is speaking to an elderly and utterly destitute village woman:

“Da Niang, come. Come and get your land. It’s time.”

Chen’s style is hard to enjoy for its own sake, and even when I was deep into the story I was reading on despite the prose, not because of it; at best it didn’t get in the way. As far as I can tell, Chen wrote the novel in English, so there’s not a matter of translation at play here (officially, anyway). The phrase I kept thinking of to describe her style was “flat affect,” where the emotional tenor is always subdued almost the point of nonexistence. The other thing that put me off at first, but gets better as the novel progresses (mostly because people just talk less) is the tendency for characters to infodump during dialogue in a way that doesn’t sound like how anyone would actually talk.

Chen is very clear that this is a novel that draws from real life. “The story is fiction, but it is true,” is how she describes it in the foreword: a roman à clef. How real are the peasants we read about? How have their stories been refined, joined together, teased apart to become the people that Ling-ling meets? While the specific character we read about known as “the virgin widow” might not have a one-to-one correspondence with a single person who lived and died on this earth, the circumstances of her life were no doubt real for countless women. As an amalgamation of their biographies, the fictional virgin widow becomes true.

Or, maybe, in this case Chen drew on one very specific person she met in her land reform experience. Who knows!

This kind of blurred line, or overlap, between fiction and true didn’t bother me as much as it did in, say, Ali Smith’s Summer. Actually, it didn’t bother me at all. The Dragon’s Village is a novel but it reads more like a documentary or a diary of historical experiences and events, while Summer is a fictional plot specifically crafted to deliver a rhetorical (dare I say political?) point. “Based on a true story” is a lot easier to swallow if what follows at least gives the appearance of neutral documentation rather than rhetorical posturing.

(The more I reflect on Summer, it seems like the less I like it. Ouch.)

Of course, as an account of one of the major global political events of the twentieth century The Dragon’s Village can’t really be read non-politically. I don’t know the background to the novel’s publication, or the waters Chen had to navigate to get it published, but I have to assume it was tricky. Ling-ling is presented as an idealist who believes in the revolution and who wants to help the people she sees living in abject poverty, but she also clearly distances herself from the extremes of Maoist cult of personality. At one point she is distressed to see that her elderly hostess Da Niang has replaced an image of the kitchen god on the wall with an image of Chairman Mao. Not because Ling-ling has any allegiance to the folk traditions encompassing the kitchen god—she considers them all superstitions—but because she is wary of what the single-minded adulation of Chairman Mao might lead to.

Zao Jun - The Kitchen God
I went and Googled “Chinese kitchen god” so you don’t have to.

The story is fiction, but it is true. Does this moment in the book reflect an exchange or insight Chen had in the moment? Was it a flourish she was encouraged to add to a novel that might otherwise land as not hostile enough to Maoism?

Chen’s other books also seem to be largely autobiographical (The Secret Listener and Return to the Middle Kingdom), and with The Secret Listener (published in 2021!) the criticism leveraged against her seems to be based in this blending of fact and fiction. I want to have something intelligent to say here about who is criticizing her for what and what any given audience expects out of an account of Maoist China but I’m fresh out of brain. An interview with the New York Times only vaguely mentions that it’s men calling her a “fabulist,” but no names or further details are given, and I’m too tired to research. As it stands, for me The Dragon’s Village is a valuable primary-ish source for a very singular moment in history. When I decided to really sit down and finish the book, I assumed I would toss it on the giveaway pile afterwards. But there is something about it that I want to keep in my library. Warning? Reminder? Enigma?

All three?

This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt is Shaping the Twenty-First Century

A guest on an episode of one of my favorite podcasts a few years back mentioned Mark and Paul Engler’s This Is an Uprising and it went on to the TBR. I managed to find a copy at Judd Books during my trip to London this past summer, and recent events have made it seem especially relevant, or more relevant than usual.

This Is an Uprising is a handbook and history lesson in nonviolent revolt, looking at various twentieth century case studies through the lens of nonviolent protest theory and evaluating notable successes as well as failures. The Englers review the two traditional models of protest activism, organizational-based and movement-based, and then propose a third model that combines the strengths of both of them for the best possible outcomes: momentum-based. The Englers did their homework and there are a lot of references to names like Saul Alinsky, Gene Sharp, and Frances Fox Piven. (Which also meant that, despite clearing one book of my TBR, I’ve now added four others, but that’s what the best nonfiction always does.)

This was also a welcome counterweight to Weil’s meditations on force. The Englers devote a whole chapter to outlining what they call discipline, that is, the commitment of individuals and movements to nonviolence. They highlight how violence—which they specifically describe as “whatever the public perceives as violence”—makes widespread acceptance of a movement more difficult, and how violence is often the wedge that allows state-sponsored infiltrators to compromise groups. From local criticism of Black Bloc members in Occupy Oakland to FBI infiltrators hosting bomb-building workshops for environmental activists to the habit of guerilla fighters of installing yet another military dictatorship, the Englers make it clear that nonviolence is an essential part of the revolt they’re detailing. While there’s a lot of compelling evidence in This Is an Uprising for Weil’s argument that force eternally begets force, the book also shows that transcending force—often by tactically submitting to it in the hope of garnering support or changing public opinion—is achievable by more than just two or three people in the course of human history, and that it can have serious and long-lasting outcomes.

Could the tactics outlined in this book have worked against Hitler and the Nazi party, though?

I’m not convinced.

While the Englers did a fair job highlighting mixed successes or outright failures (and explaining them according to their failure to implement the most important principles of momentum-based activism), I don’t think they ever tackled the hardest possible cases. Situations where the status quo to be changed is the absolute bones of how our society runs, the underlying principles from which everything else springs.

The successful protests in here, even the most impressive case of Otpor and the ouster of Slobodan Milošević, were all leveraged against situations that can be considered something like social byproducts of the deeper, more entrenched forces guiding the world. I’ll be less cryptic and tip my political hand by more explicitly defining those “deeper, more entrenched” forces as “the profit motive of capitalism as it overlaps with the state.” Segregation and Jim Crow laws were not inherent cogs in the profit machine. Nor were there any obvious financial incentives to banning same-sex marriages or the callous treatment of HIV and AIDS patients. These are huge, important, material concerns for millions of individuals that can have serious, even life-or-death consequences, absolutely. I wouldn’t wish to suggest that they were unimportant. But at a higher level, one could make the argument that these issues were always political footballs at the end of the day, kicked back and forth to show allegiance to this or that team, means to the true end: acquiring and maintaining a hold on political power and wealth.

Think of the cynicism with which the Republican party made abortion a huge issue for American Christians so that they could ensure a reliable voting bloc for themselves and the ability to, not make any laws about abortion out of a fervent true belief, but to craft legislation and economic models that would keep wealth and power consolidated with an elite ruling class (with a few token abortion decisions here and there). A ruling class you could, for example, call “the 1%.” Abortion was and is rarely the endgame for many (most) Republican politicians, which is why no one should be surprised when the same Republican politicians urge their daughters or mistresses to seek out abortions if a child would be politically inexpedient. It’s just the means to an end. The minute they can’t use abortion as the same galvanizing topic to get sympathetic voters to the polls, they’ll drop it and pick something else. Abortion I guess is still on the table now, but segregation no longer is. (Weirdly, with the “your body, my choice” meme, it seems like abortion has mutated or grown to become, not necessarily a purely Christian thing, but also specifically a feminist backlash thing. But anyway.)

If a change in law or regime happens to align with peak protests, is that really a victory? Is it causation or merely correlation? I suppose, after all, that it takes exactly these kinds of nonviolent protests to shift public opinion in such a way as to make something like segregation or same-sex marriage bans so toxic that it’s political suicide to promote them. I guess my concern is: material as those concerns are to millions of people, does changing them really get to the heart of what’s going wrong at the top? Are we just condemned to constantly putting out forest fires of different forms of social oppression (see: the explosion in discussions on trans rights) as long as elites remain addicted to wealth and power? Are we treating symptoms rather than the disease?

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Otpor’s successful overthrow of Milošević is an example of what could have happened earlier on in 1930s Germany if the right people with the right ideas had deployed the right tactics. But while I appreciate the inherent optimism of This Is an Uprising, I worry that there is a limit to the success of the model the Englers are proposing.

Truth: A Brief History of Total Bullshit

My frazzled brain has recently been unable to focus on the kinds of things I usually enjoy, so I took the opportunity to finally read a birthday gift I received earlier in the year: Truth: A Brief History of Total Bullshit. I like it and breezed through it in a couple of days, but my brain is perhaps still too frazzled to have a coherent thought about it. Let’s give it the old college try.

Author Tom Phillips (formerly of Buzzfeed UK) lays out a tasty little buffet of, well, “total bullshit.” Published in 2019, it’s very much a response to the burgeoning concern with fake news; to the extent any pop history book has a more serious agenda beyond mere entertainment, Truth serves as a reminder that people have been creating and spreading fake news forever, so let’s all take a deep breath and not panic over it.

First Phillips establishes the difference between bullshit and lies, as well as the myriad ways in which we can get things wrong or perpetuate untruths. A bit of theory, if you will. Then the rest of the book covers a wide variety of lies, grouped by topic: news and journalism, hoaxes, specious geography, con artists, politics, business, and finally mass delusions before rounding off with a conclusion about how we can get better at spotting all this.

I mentioned that Phillips was formerly of Buzzfeed UK because the kind of brisk, ironic writing (and occasional profanity) that characterizes popular Internet journalism permeates Truth from beginning to end. It had the nostalgic flavor of Cracked.com circa 2010 or so. Which is not necessarily a criticism! That was exactly the challenge level my brain was capable of at the time and I had a lovely time reading it.

Not that I would have pooh-poohed Phillips’ approach if I felt like my faculties were firing on all cylinders, either. There comes a point with non-fiction where an author has to decide what kind of book they’re going to write and why they’re interested in writing it. Who’s the target audience? What do they hope people will take from it? What’s the best way to potentially change people’s minds, or inspire them to action, or just help them learn something? My own inference is that the dizzying number of anecdotes Phillips presents is not out of a desire to trace the evolution of lying or to make a strong philosophical claim about the nature of bullshit (Harry G. Frankfurt has that covered). I think his motivation for the entire book comes through in the last chapter, with suggestions for how to become more discerning about truth and untruth.

In other words, couched though it may be in jokes and amusing anecdotes, Truth is a book-length appeal to the reader to stop and think for a minute before you share that inflammatory news story you just saw in your feed.

The Josie Gambit

Back in the summer, forces beyond my understanding compelled me to look up The Josie Gambit, a book I read in fourth grade or so. I remembered it as unsettling, with an ending that I didn’t quite get but nonetheless felt a bit grim. Maybe it was the ending that made the book stick in my head better than a lot of things I was reading at that age, who knows. But I would think about it now and again over the years, wondering if I should read it again, and finally I got the idea to check on the Internet Archive.

A note from Future Katherine!

I first wrote this post sometime in July. Just a couple of weeks before I finally hit the “schedule” button, the Internet Archive suffered a massive DDOS attack and was offline for days to fix the issue. The Internet Archive is an invaluable resource, and will probably only become more important as we stumble into an era of deepfakes and unreality. Please consider donating to support their work!

Of course, the juvenile mystery/thriller of your childhood is much less unsettling when you read it again as an adult. And honestly the jury’s out on whether this post will ever see the light of day, because discussing middle grade nostalgia reads seems like filler content.

Another note from Future Katherine! The time for filler content has come.

Our protagonist is twelve-year-old Greg, who’s spending the school year with his grandmother out in Idaho while his single mom travels for work. He’s long been friendly with the neighbor family, the Nolans, whose patriarch taught him how to play chess. Now his friend Josie Nolan is having a rough patch with her friend Tory. Things get weird and dramatic, Greg joins the school chess club, and he finally cracks the case of why Tory is acting so weird.

Reading The Josie Gambit now as an adult in 2024, it is immensely Of The 80s. Single moms! Divorce! Scandal over implied drug use! I mean just look at that cover!

But what sets it apart is Mary Francis Shura’s pitch perfect narrative voice for Greg and also the seriousness with which the book takes chess. Greg’s thinking about chess and observations of chess games is what helps him figure out why Tory is acting the way she is, and the narration is peppered with the kind of insights into chess strategy that you would expect from a preteen who was pretty serious about the game. There’s even an appendix (still written from Greg’s perspective) to explain the basic rules and mechanics.

I get now why I thought it was unsettling, but as an adult it’s not really the stuff of nightmares. A fun read if you come across it somewhere!

Karavan: Alla dessa trådar

The theme for issue 2/2024 of Karavan was “text och textil,” which led to an interesting mix of fiction focused on textiles as well as how textiles have functioned as vehicles of meaning and narrative.

This issue’s author interview was with Nicaragua’s Sergio Ramírez, and as a result two more books ended up on my TBR (Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea and The Sky Weeps for Me). You don’t usually see commercial genre fiction like mystery thrillers get a lot of discussion space in fancy literature circles (unless they’re Raymond Chandler) so I’m especially curious to see what The Sky Weeps for Me is like. Maybe an exception was made because Ramírez was very clear in the interview that the genre was the best tool he had for conveying political upheaval as he wanted to. Who knows! The other big author feature was a memorial piece on Maryse Condé, who passed away earlier this year. Luckily for me, several of her books are available at the Stockholm library, including a few in the original French.

This issue’s Diary of a Translator feature was from Anna Gustafsson Chen, who is at work on a Swedish translation of Liu Qing’s History Through Words. History is a sprawling novel of political upheaval in 1920s and 1930s Manchuria, so Chen describes her dive into Chinese advertisements, propaganda posters, and the numerous anti-Japanese resistance movements of the time.

The long-form reviews included  a pair of novels from Benjamín Labatut, Shehan Karunatilaka’s extremely hyped and much-lauded The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, and a few novels from César Aira. The Labatut review was pretty lukewarm, but I’ve heard a lot about Seven Moons in a lot of different places, so I could be tempted into picking that one up. Aira’s novels were also pretty well reviewed and the one that sounded the most interesting ended up on my TBR. Less a review and more of a news item was a brief piece on the publication of letters between some of the titans of Latin American literature in a collection called Las Cartas del Boom. Interesting to note but currently only available in Spanish, so not much I can do there!

None of the shorter reviews caught my interest, though apparently The Three Body Problem has finally come out in Swedish! (Translated by Anna Gustafsson Chen from the earlier “Diary of a Translator” segment.) The state of science fiction and fantasy published in Swedish, whether originally or in translation, is a bit anemic so it’s encouraging to see huge titles like this get a Swedish release. Less encouraging that it only came out in 2024 (the original was published in 2006; the English translation came out in 2014), but more encouraging again that it’s a translation directly from Mandarin rather than indirectly via the English.

The themed selections took a surprisingly wide and educational tack. The first was a revised and expanded essay from Maria Küchen, originally broadcast on OBS P1, on weaving, stories, and memory: the Andean record-keeping knots known as khipu that we no longer know how to interpret, Malian bógólanfini, the core rope memory that helped send American astronauts to the moon, death shrouds from Windover pond.

The next piece was another author memorial, this time in the form of an interview with author Ericah Gwetai about her late daughter Yvonne Vera, also a writer. Karolina Jeppson visited Gwetai at her home in Zimbabwe to discuss Vera, sewing her own clothing, and the similarities between writing and weaving. Vera’s The Stone Virgins also ended up on my TBR.

The third piece finally delves into literature, with a short story from Karavan favorite Xi Xi, translated into Swedish as “Blusen”: a fantastic monologue from a cotton blouse to its new owner. Karavan features a lot of poetry from Xi Xi that I’ve struggled to enjoy (including this issue), but this little story was a gem and I loved it! Unfortunately, it’s unclear if the collection it was taken from has been translated in its entirety yet, so…that’s all, folks. The final Xi Xi piece in this issue was a collection of teddy bears Xi Xi designed and sewed herself, based on figures out of Chinese history and stories, selected from The Teddy Bear Chronicles.

Back to nonfiction, this time with an essay and artist statement from Marcia Harvey Isaksson. She combines weaving with performance art, and I’m disappointed that I’ve missed some of her most interesting installations.

Some more poetry, this time from Tamer Fathy’s poetry collection Yesterday I Lost A Button. All of the poems are from the perspective of clothing; one of the ones featured in Karavan is available in English: “When Clothes Were Small.”

The next short story was “Mattan,” from Narine Abgarjan, which was so good that I immediately put Abgarjan’s full-length novels on my TBR.

More weaving and multimedia art, this time from Eva Vargö‘s collection of paper weaving. It shouldn’t surprise me that people weave with paper, but there you go. Vargö goes into some detail about the differences in different kinds of paper, and focuses a lot on traditional paper materials from Japan and Korea.

Usually I skip the children’s literature sections, but this time it caught my eye: an interview with Christian Epanya about his latest book, Les rois de la sape, a picture book about sapeurs and La SAPE (Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes). La sape is a cross between a fashion trend and a social movement originating in Congo-Kinshasa and Congo-Brazzaville that has become a part of the larger African diaspora, usually compared to dandyism. It’s even been codefied (somewhat) into, for example, ten commandments of La SAPE.  While I don’t have any particular reason to read the book, the article did send me down a fascinating rabbithole and I learned something new.

The education continued with an article from Tina Ignell on different forms of dying and patterns in textiles, from shibori in Japan and bandhani in West Bengal to grave goods in Peru and neckerchiefs in Mora, Sweden.

The next short story from Irenosen Okojie was a Swedish translation of “Synsepalum” by Birgitta Wallin. I don’t know that I cared for it much, but that might have been a matter of translation, so I’m glad that Minor Literature has the English original up for free for comparison.

The final piece on the textiles theme was an essay by Lars Vargö on costumes in kabuki and noh theater, and how their use reflects the different theatrical styles and traditions.

Solid issue! Too many books! Can’t hug every cat!

Synners

A chapter out of Pat Cadigan’s Synners appeared in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, and I enjoyed it so much I decided to read the whole book.

The whole book, it turns out, is a bit of a tome: 496 pages of a tome, to be exact. That’s a full two hundred pages longer than Neuromancer, its cyberpunk partner-in-crime and most apt comparison. Can the center hold?

For me, I’m not so sure. There’s a lot going on in Synners and I’m not even sure what happened.

We have Visual Mark and Gina, two music video creators working for a corporate behemoth called Diversifications, Inc. after their scrappy little independent studio was sucked up in a merger. We have Gabe, an adman also working for Diversifications, Inc., who is addicted to playing hyper-immersive video games (think Star Trek holodeck style) and the company of two AI? imaginary? personalities. We have Sam, Gabe’s estranged and emancipated teenage daughter and wunderkind hacker, returning to LA from a retreat in the Ozarks after receiving a mysterious data dump from her hacker friend Keely. That information, it turns out, is high-level top-secret corporate espionage material from Diversifications, Inc. pertaining to the next product they’re getting ready to launch: sockets that will allow people to connect to the Internet directly from their brains (Neuralink, essentially). The sockets work well enough…at first. Then crisis hits and Gina, Gabe, and Sam have to team up in virtual reality to halt the march of a deadly stroke-inducing virus.

I’m pretty sure that’s what I read, anyway.

In between those important plot points is a lot of stage setting to build the atmosphere of Retrofuturistic Cyberpunk LA, which I’m sure hit a lot different in 1991 than it does now.

This is where I’m of two minds. Cadigan has the imagination as well as the work ethic to really build a fantastic and immersive world that’s fun to spend time in, but the actual plot spends a lot of time stumbling around. The initial pacing of everything had me expecting a story about how our ragtag group of heroes would hack the planet, expose the corporate greed and malfeasance at Diversifications, Inc., and send the bad guys to jail.  But then somewhere around the halfway? two-thirds? mark, Diversifications, Inc. wins their much-needed approval from the Food, Drug, and Software Administration and the sockets become a fait accompli. Okay, well, now what?

If deus ex machina is the name for a pat and unsatisfying solution to a plot problem, what’s the name for a pat and unsatisfying problem introduced into a story to drag it out? The deus ex machina problem here is the virtual reality stroke virus: its connection to everything that happened before is tenuous at best, which makes the final climactic fight? showdown? feel slapped on and irrelevant. This is the stuff that seems most interesting to Cadigan, and she could have started everything right after the introduction of the sockets to slow burn the tension through growing numbers of unexplained deaths until we arrive at the existentialist showdown with the source of it all. So why didn’t she?

Synners was published in 1991. If I’m inferring correctly from Cadigan’s dedication, it was more of a “long time coming” novel than a “frantic and immediate burst of genius” novel, and that tracks with just how much The 80s come through in the story. It’s like a cross between MTV, the Sprawl trilogy, and a romcom, all in a Clockwork Orange-level patois.

Positive reviews from recent years enthusiastically declaim Cadigan’s vision of the future as “spot on” but you really have to squint to get Cadigan’s ideas and our world today to line up. People in Synners are still walking around with offline camcorders and connecting to the Internet through physical landlines; music videos, of all things, have gained primary cultural import; their online world has that distinctly visual/spatial paradigm the 80s futurists assumed things would take, with goggles and sensor suits and the like. It’s all extremely dated.

Of course, if you tilt your head sideways you can reinterpret music videos as the omnipresent video content on places like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, and people like Visual Mark and Gina as a kind of influencer, but even then it’s an unsatisfying fit because the ultimate climax of the book comes down to the naïve chestnut of But What Does It Mean To Be Human When You’re A Machine. Mark and Gina’s relationship to their audience, and even to the videos they create, isn’t really a topic of concern or at all relevant to the plot. The condensation of online content ownership and delivery into a small number of huge corporate overlords is the one thing that maps pretty neatly on to today, but it’s not much more than background radiation, the inciting incident that kicks off the actual plot.

Much as I love the spirit of linguistic playfulness in the slang throughout Synners, it did a lot to get in the way of the book for me. Not only in understanding what was happening, or what characters meant, but also in just enjoying the book. What’s fresh and exhilarating in a single chapter (in, for example, an anthology like Flame Wars) is exhausting to keep up for close to five hundred pages. For all of Cadigan’s focus on music, and groove, and rhythm, the language itself is often choppy and awkward. Even (tragically) in dialogue, where flow and sound is especially important. Or puns or slang that feel like a stretch. “Synner,” for one, short for “synthesizer,” as in people like Gina and Visual Mark: that one is just too cutesy and too much of a reach to really land for me.

All of that said, this is the rare book I can understand reading again. Going into things a second time, with foreknowledge about the shape of things to come, could well be a better experience than the first time around.

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.

Karavan: Minne

The theme for 2024’s first issue of Karavan was memory, and included a fair number of biographical essays from Julie Otsuka, Maaza Mengiste, Ann-Marie Tung Hermelin, and Nona Fernández. Otsuka’s The Swimmers and Mengiste’s The Shadow King went on my TBR as a result.

This issue also featured rising stars within Brazilian literature. In addition to Jeferson Tonório, who was the subject of a feature length précis by Balsam Karam in the previous issue, Isi de Paula highlighted several other names: Geovani Martins, Itamar Vicira Junior, Luciany Aparecida, Stênio Gardel (The Words that Remain), Micheliny Verunschk, Carla Madeira, Aline Bei, and Mariana Salomão Carrara. de Paula also sat down for an interview with Tatiana Salem Levy (The House in Smyrna).

“Kino Karavan,” the recurring movie column, highlighted the animated film adaptation of Sultana’s Dream, El sueño de la sultana.

The translator’s diary column focused on Meta Ottosson’s work on Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor‘s Dust. I always find this segment to be an interesting peek into the lives of others, since literary translation is such a different beast from what I do. Ottosson chronicles her attempts to find the right words for things like buses, pole dance terminology, and Kenyan state officials and legislation; meanwhile, I’ve never had to cold email Nordiska Afrikainstitutet to answer a terminology question for me. The diary was followed by Ottosson’s translation of Owuor’s story “These Fragments.”

And then the grand finale, the reviews. The author interviews are always interesting, but the downside is that authors can be a lot more interesting than their books. Reviews, on the other hand, are always about the experience of reading a particular personality rather than conveying the personality, making them better indicators of what I might like or not. From this issue I took note of:

  • Rien ne t’appartient, Nathacha Appanah
  • Hardly War, Don Mee Choi
  • The Naked Eye, Yoko Tawada

The pile grows higher faster than I can read through it!

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?