novels – Koba English

Ormens väg på hälleberget

This was another move in my last-ditch effort to reach my yearly “books I’ve owned for over a year” goal. I doubt I’ll reach twelve (two more by the end of the year? unlikely), but reaching ten is good enough for me. That’s a nice round number.

Ormens väg på hälleberget has a whole cultural cachet that I was unaware of when my mother-in-law gave me a copy. I had no idea about the movie, about Torgny Lindgren, about anything. I put off reading it for years because I knew it would probably be bleak and unrelenting. Not only judging by the blurb on the back of the book but by the fact that my mother-in-law has a taste for the bleak and unrelenting. I think the same mechanism that allows David Lynch to be a relatively normal—even pleasant and cheerful—person while making incredibly disturbing movies is at play in her personality, too.

No surprise, Ormens väg på hälleberget is indeed bleak and unrelenting! But it was also good that I put off reading it for so long, because the novel is written almost entirely in a nineteenth century dialect that would have been incomprehensible to me when I first received it nine or ten years ago.

The story follows Johan Johansson, or often just Jani, as he bears witness to the exploitation of his mother, his sister, and eventually his wife under the insatiable lust of the local merchant family, first the patriarch Ol Karlsa and then his son Karl Orsa. It would be easy for this kind of story to descend into overwrought melodrama, but Jani is so disassociated from what’s happening around him that the tone stays firmly tragic.

Beyond that I don’t think Lindgren needs a review from me. Ormens väg på halleberget is a modern classic, Lindgren was a member of the Swedish Academy, who am I to have anything interesting to say about his work. But if anyone is in the mood for something bleak and unrelenting, it’s available in English as The Way of the Serpent.

Merry Christmas!

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?

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!

En man som heter Ove

I deeply resent that En man som heter Ove made me cry.

I’m inherently distrustful of media that makes me cry and my first instinct is always to take a step back and pick apart the story to see if it used any gimmicks or cheap tricks to manipulate me. (See, for example, Ali Smith’s Summer.) And while Fredrik Backman did a great job with strategically revealing the significant pieces of Ove’s backstory so that each moment hits with maximum impact, that’s good storytelling, not a cheap trick. Likewise certain story elements could have landed as overly melodramatic if the rest of the book wasn’t more or less farcical.

No, En man… hadn’t cheated to get those tears out of me. So why the resentment?

The book follows a man called Ove (quel surpris) in the weeks after being nudged into early retirement/laid off from his job. A chance accident with a car trailer and his mailbox gets him drawn into the lives of his new neighbors, and then gradually some of his older ones. In the process we flash back to the important episodes of Ove’s life up until that point, none of which I’ll go into detail here because they count as spoilers in my view. It’s not a spoiler, however, to note that the climactic point of conflict in the story is a faceoff between agents of the municipal social service authority on one side and Ove and his neighbors on the other. That’s when I had the thought: I wonder how Backman votes.

By that point in the book, it’s become clear that one of the consistent themes in the challenges Ove has faced in his life is “men in white shirts,” which function very clearly as a stand-in for the state. Which is fine and good; I’ve had my own very personal struggles with Swedish authorities and how they have either failed (from my perspective) to carry out their function or how they have enabled (again, from my perspective) individual bad actors to gatekeep access to resources that are essential for a decent quality of life.

However!

I’ve also had experiences where they (from my perspective) carried out their function, and in doing so furthered the best interests of myself or my loved ones. It has been, on the whole, a mixed bag of personal experiences.

The bag in En man… is not mixed; it’s uniformly pretty bad. Sometimes it’s a kind of bad that seems (sadly) pretty likely or reasonable, but other times it’s a kind of bad that made me raise a metaphorical eyebrow. Was it drawing from a lived experience, or was it drawing uncritically from the rumor mill about state overreach?

The biggest conflict out of all the “men in white shirts” conflicts is where a man in his 60s with pretty profound Alzheimer’s will spend the rest of his days: at home with his wife or institutionalized? For maximum drama, during this scene the Bad State Dude is present with three other assistants to (implicitly) physically overpower the elderly wife who wants to take care of her husband in their home herself. The state has a monopoly on violence, yes, yadda yadda yadda, but the intimidation here is so blatant that I had to wonder: in a real life version of this situation, is this how things would go?

(Contrast this scene with a recent story from Hem och hyra about how elderly individuals currently residing in regular apartments who apply for a spot in senior living facilities are often denied one, including people with severe dementia, Alzheimer’s, or depression. The state isn’t coming to kidnap people out of their homes but is rather refusing to let them move into one that they feel would be much more suitable.)

Backman also includes scenes with the inverse dynamics, so to speak: problems that could potentially be solved through the intervention of a state or municipal authority are instead addressed by individuals. The municipality refuses to build a wheelchair ramp at a school for one of the teachers, or to provide wheelchair adaptations for her kitchen, so Ove builds all of that himself. An abusive husband gets beaten up by Ove and another neighbor, after which the abuser just disappears out of his victim’s life forever, never to return*. After trying and failing to get problem tenants evicted, the same neighbor plants some narcotics on the property and then calls the cops. (I guess you can split that last one either way, since at the end of the day involving the police is a way of involving the state.)

*Rarely how it works out in real life situations of domestic violence!

It’s a bit like re-watching Ghostbusters with an adult’s political understanding and sensibilities: all those scenes with the suit from the Environmental Protection Agency have a tone that’s more than just comedy. Subtext and all of that.

That said, Sweden is not the US. A plot point (or recurring theme) in a novel about the uselessness, incompetence, or even malice, of municipal authorities maybe is less toxic or remarkable here because you don’t have the same years and years of toxic discourse in the culture. I’m not sure how all that works.

Therein lies the resentment, I suppose: the vague feeling that I got judo’d into agreeing with an implicit argument I wouldn’t have agreed with if it were presented more explicitly in something like an essay or opinion piece. That I had maybe fallen for a form of propaganda. The fact that I really liked the book despite myself.

Another contributing factor to the resentment for me is probably also the portrayal of Ove’s fat neighbor, Jimmy. While Ove’s fixation on the size of Jimmy’s body and constant narrative comment on it can be attributed to coming from a perspective character with certain beliefs about the world, it’s the author who chooses to portray Jimmy as constantly either eating or about to eat (and always too much, is the implication). This is presented as incidental comic relief, but it’s not particularly clever or original. None of the other secondary characters—the neighbors Ove ultimately comes to befriend—are reduced to such a flat trope, so Jimmy’s treatment feels out of place.

None of this is to be read like I think Backman has some kind of agenda with En man…, either. I emphatically do not. If he did, then the book wouldn’t have been nearly as good as it is because agendas ruin (most) books. But stories arise out of our beliefs about the world, from the grand to the banal, and there are enough recurring themes in this story that it makes me wonder if I can see the beliefs behind them. There’s even an extent to which I think I would probably agree with him in some of those beliefs. Way before I was ever wondering about Backman’s politics, I had the thought: is this the collective Swedish cultural fantasy? “This” being: wanting a friendly stranger to just land on your doorstep with nearly aggressive kindness and to forcibly include you in a social group.

It’s not at all surprising that En man… struck such a nerve with Swedes. Zakrisson mentions the book by name in Grannskapsrevolutionen and the research that she presents there supports the general background feeling in the novel: that the average person (Swede? Stockholmer?) feels isolated and lonely and disconnected from the people around them. And unlike some of the conflicts with the “white shirts” Ove has throughout the novel, the solution to that problem is maybe only possible at a grassroots, individual level. There’s no municipal authority that can come and declare by fiat that this or that collection of buildings is a community. Individual actors have to decide to say hello, or help change a bike tire, or whatever else. The happy ending of En man… no doubt reflects the world a lot of its readers wished they lived in, where they felt like part of a meaningful social network.

Anyway thank you for coming to my TEDtalk about a goofy comedy novel that clearly didn’t deserve THIS much critical analysis.

Doktor Glas Daily

One of the few books I have left of my personal library at my parents’ house in the US is a Swedish paperback copy of Doktor Glas. It’s an early testament to my Swedish studies, with penciled notes covering the first page (after which point I gave up taking notes). I flipped through it while I was home, without anything else in Swedish except Min är hämnden—which was of course dependent on how quickly I could get through the French first. As my eyes fell over the opening paragraph, I remembered the email newsletter that I’d heard so much about: Dracula Daily. In case you missed it, web designer Matt Kirkland got the idea to set up a Substack that sends subscribers bite-sized (har har) chunks of Dracula to people via email. Dracula is an epistolary novel, so the episodic format of an email newsletter pretty neatly aligns with the original structure of the novel. On the dates of the letters (or newspaper articles, etc.), the newsletter sends out the corresponding chapter by email. It’s become quite popular. There are memes.

Then I noticed that the date of the first entry in Doktor Glas, June 12, wasn’t too far behind the actual calendar date.

Wouldn’t it be fun to do a version of Dracula Daily with this?

Thus I read Doktor Glas for the third or fourth time, this time in brief extracts, letting the story unfold for me in real time at the same pace as it unfolds for Tyko Glas.

I’d previously done a short walking tour of Stockholm based on the book as well. It was a fantastic idea, but presented through a bloated app that was a bit too gimmicky for the source material and that just about drained all the battery life out of my phone in little over an hour. Maybe one year I’ll combine the two and attempt to be in the right places on the right dates to get my reading done.

I mention all of this because October 7 is the date of the final chapter in Doktor Glas. This year’s reading is now over, and I can say that reading a book in this kind of controlled release format had a surprising effect on the entire experience.

Normally when you read a novel you’re compressing days, months, years of time into a few hours of a reading experience, or quite possibly extending a day or even just one or two hours of events into a reading experience that’s much longer than twenty-four hours. (I defy anyone, for example, to get through all of Ulysses in a single day.) But when you move through the story at the same speed as the character does, it becomes embodied in a very specific way. You have to move through the same stretches of time as them, waiting just as long as they do for something to happen. With the specific combination of Doktor Glas and living in Stockholm, the setting around you cycles through the same seasons that Glas describes. (Climate change reading of Doktor Glas: how do his descriptions of weather in Stockholm from June to September compare to what the equivalent period is like here now?)

On a spookier note, at times the practice took on a spiritual dimension, not dissimilar to what Zoltan describes in “Reading Jane Eyre as a Sacred Text.” There were even moments when it felt like outright bibliomancy. On a day when I felt absolutely terrible, for example, because I felt like I had made a fool out of myself in matters of friendship, Glas addresses the jilted Fru Gregorious: “Du måste komma över det. Du skall se att livet ännu har mycket för dig. Du skall vara stark.” Coincidence or not, there was something comforting about stumbling across those exact words in that precise moment.

The Dracula Daily format is also a fun exercise in patience and delayed gratification in a world where the default habit is to consume an entire book, show, series, whatever as quickly as possible. On the one hand it can make a big important classic less intimidating, but for something as relatively short as Doktor Glas it has the opposite effect, slowing you down and preventing you from reading the whole thing in just a few days. You pay closer attention. If all I have to read today is this paragraph, then I might as well look up this or that word that I can kind of guess at but don’t know for certain. I might as well read the whole section two or three times. Several weeks go by without any entries, building anticipation; other times the next chapter is no longer the inevitable forward momentum of a story but a pleasant surprise that you had nearly forgotten about.

This was a rewarding exercise and I’m grateful to Matt Kirkland for inadvertently giving me the idea. I look forward to applying it to other books.

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.

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?

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.