novels – Page 5 – Koba English

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Hands up who read “The Lottery” for English class at one point.

Yeah, me too.

And that’s about where all of my Shirley Jackson reading stopped off. The Sundial was a selection for the Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club a while back and I didn’t really care for it. Even now I barely remember it (which is why I like to keep this little book blog going). But We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a title people mention all the time; moreover, it was esteemed enough a book to remain in one half of my Austin hosting couple’s library after several years of purging and downsizing. Based on that, I figured the odds (please insert your own joke about odds and lotteries here) were pretty good that I’d enjoy the book. If nothing else, reading it would allow me to partake of a very particular moment of a friend’s life and a specific facet of their personality, and that alone is worth it.

A Tweet from @lastpages_ that says "'I read this book you recommended' is a love language." — Verily it is.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle did not fail to deliver!

Following the death of their family from an unsolved case of arsenic poisoning, Mary Katherine (Merricat) and Constance Blackwood, sisters, have secluded themselves in the ancestral home together with their Uncle Julian. Constance no longer leaves the property beyond her garden, leaving Merricat in charge of going into the village—whose residents have long been hostile to the Blackwood family and who are all convinced of Constance’s guilt in the arsenic case—to fetch groceries and items as necessary. This comfortable norm is interrupted by the arrival of cousin Charles, who has decided to reach out to this estranged branch of the family after the death of his father (brother to Uncle Julian and to the late patriarch of the Blackwood family). Charles and Constance strike up a relationship while Merricat immediately dislikes this interloper and does everything she can to drive him away.

Now that I’ve finally read the book once, I’d love to read it again and chart exactly how Jackson manages to ratchet up the spooky and the tension. (How appropriate that this review is going up as we gear up to enter Spooky Season!) I think the two hardest things to write are comedy and horror, because what people find funny and what people find terrifying are pretty personal at the end of the day. When a book succeeds in one of those genres, I think it’s worth paying extra close attention to figuring out why.

Turkish Tag Team: Requiem över en förlorad stad during Cold Nights of Childhood

I was debating whether to make this one post or two, and in the end decided to make this a single post for a variety of reasons:

In terms of sheer practicality, my posting schedule and reading schedule are such that my usual rate of posting will have me bleeding 2023’s books into 2024, which I emphatically do not like.
These are authors that are in a kind of dialogue with each other, or rather one of them is clearly inspired by the other.
The books themselves were even very similar in terms of mood, themes, structure, etc.
I didn’t have much to say about either book on their own.

So, first of all, which books are we talking about?

The first was a Swedish translation of Aslı Erdoğan‘s Requiem över en förlorad stad. I read an interview with her in an old issue of Karavan that I brought with me on vacation for airplane reading; in the end I was so taken by how insightful and interesting and brainy she was that when I got back to Stockholm I immediately grabbed what book of hers I could from the library.

The second book was a recommendation from a American friend now residing in Turkey that served to underscore an author I had apparently added to my Storygraph TBR (probably mentioned in the same issue of Karavan): Tezer Özlü. An English translation of her Cold Nights of Childhood was published this year, which I was able to track down at the Stockholm library.

My process was something like this:

Read Erdoğan
Solicit an opinion on her from a bookish American friend in Turkey, who recommends Özlü
Read Özlü

As you might guess from that turn of events, I wasn’t entirely taken with Requiem. It’s a lot of mood and imagery and lovely turns of phrase, but nothing I could really sink my teeth into (or that I can remember now, at the time of writing, a week or two later). Trying to summarize the book is a struggle: “unnamed woman wanders around an unnamed city at night”? I guess?

My best explanation is that Requiem functioned as a sort of literary therapy for Erdoğan, and therefore concrete experiences are abstracted into an etheric dream world rather than relived in all their terror. Art as a process rather than a product, written for Erdoğan and not for an audience. The end result is that I would finish each chapter unsure of what happened and without any sense of the human being behind the words, and that last point is ultimately the make or break thing for me.

As Bookish American friend in Turkey tactfully put it, Erdoğan’s literary reputation might be overstated due to her (obviously important and brave and impressive!) political activism. But I also get the sense that Requiem is a very different beast than her earlier books, so perhaps I don’t have an entirely fair picture of her work. The same bookish friend also tipped me off that Tezer Özlü had finally been published in English for the first time, in an off-the-cuff follow-up to her estimation of Erdoğan that implied a comparison in Özlü’s favor.

What bookish American friend couldn’t have known, or maybe she did, was that Requiem reads like a riff on, and a response to, Cold Nights of Childhood. Both books ground a woman narrator in a city (or several cities) as she wanders not only through space but also through time, emptying their memories on the page the same way you empty your pockets before throwing a pair of pants in the wash. But if Requiem is an etheric and abstract dream world, then Cold Nights is waking life, or maybe better put a lucid dream. Instead of fuzzy, surreal abstraction, Özlü names everything with precision and clarity: people, streets, cafes, flowers. The same clarity holds throughout, even as the narrative skips through time or across space; she eschews poetic metaphor and favors stark depictions of her external circumstances and experiences, whether it’s stays at psychiatric wards or adolescent sexual desire or family gatherings in their cramped rural home. I might not have learned anything about Özlü by the end of Cold Nights, but unlike Requiem I still felt like I had met her. All of the English summaries make comparisons to The Bell Jar and it’s honestly a pretty apt one.

Both of these books raise the question of I’ve been taught to expect in stories, not only through school and writing advice, but also in the kinds of stories available for consumption in popular culture. Building expectations through repetition is another way of teaching, after all, and the stories in most conventional media usually have story arcs, character arcs, conflicts, changes, a sense of narrative unity. By the end of the story, situations and characters should be different from how they started, and we should be able to clearly trace the progression of those changes. How many of these expectations can go unmet and a story (a book, a movie, a TV show) still be satisfying? How else can we look at stories? What other shape can they take? What other purpose can they serve?

State Tectonics

State Tectonics marks the first time I’ve finished an entire new trilogy since I finished The Obelisk Gate back in 2017? 2018? (And we’ll overlook, as well, A Desolation Called Peace, which is so bound up with A Memory Called Empire that I’m pretty sure the two novels started as one gigantic tome.) Genre fiction as of late has the bad habit of turning everything into series of some kind or another, and when my reading life is already navigating the tension between the scope of my ambitions and the limits of my time, series are the last thing I need. But I was so taken with Malka Older’s cyberpunk-y political thriller and the complex electoral near-future she had imagined that I went ahead and finished the next two books, though at this point if she comes out with further installations I will declare myself done. Not because I doubt they’ll be good, but because I only have so much time on this earth.

Like she did with Null States, Older jumps ahead to a few years after the previous book left off. It’s election time again, the same as in Infomocracy, and this time the sprawling tech giant Information itself is under attack. Rogue physical assaults are being launched against Information servers and hubs around the world; unsanctioned communications channels designed to go undetected by Information have been figuratively as well as literally unearthed; mysterious individuals are roaming around cities and handing out self-destructing paper copies of “local guides” that claim to be better sources of information than Information itself. Who is responsible? What’s their end game? Is it an inside job? How will all this affect the upcoming election? Again, like in Null States, Older expands perspectives to include secondary characters we haven’t spent much time with before—Maryam, a Muslim lesbian techie who first appeared on the side in Infomocracy; Amran, a young and inexperienced Sudanese Information employee introduced in Null States—while touching base with previous perspective characters like now-married, now-pregnant Roz from Null States and Mishima from Infomocracy.

I would recommend reading all three books in pretty close succession, if only to keep the rather large cast of characters straight in your head, particularly the side and secondary ones. My timing didn’t quite work out, so while I read Infomocracy and Null States back-to-back, I took six weeks off in the middle of State Tectonics to go on vacation (and I wasn’t about to bring a hardback library book with me in my carry-on luggage). Whatever nuance I failed to grasp because I forgot who was a member of which political party who had broken up with whom wasn’t enough to make the broader strokes of the action impenetrable to me, and quite frankly I just plain have fun spending time in the world to which Older has obviously given an incredible amount.

Without getting into serious spoiler territory, I will say this: State Tectonics is an incredibly satisfying ending that is on brand with how the geopolitics in the series have developed and shifted across all three books. People who are better at intrigue than I am might be able to guess where the story is going, but for me the ending was well-earned. Older sticks the landing, no doubt about it.

Les petits chevaux de Tarquinia

One of the pitfalls of my English education is that I ended up with a huge blind spot when it comes to contemporary authors. It’s not anyone’s fault in particular; it’s just how my course load worked out. Though, I don’t know if Marguerite Duras would have ended up on my English curriculum. Maybe French, if I’d taken more than two semesters.

Duras didn’t even become a familiar name to me until a couple of features over on LitHub. Then, browsing a small (and predominantly Farsi?) international bookstore in Stockholm, back in the before times, I noticed a Duras title in the French section: Moderato Cantabile. It also looked mercifully short, something that I could probably manage with my limited French. Manage I did, and so I began scouring Stockholm library for other books by Duras. Les petits chevaux de Tarquinia was the first to meet my requirements of being available in Swedish as well as French.

Not a lot happens in Les petits chevaux. We have five Parisians on vacation together in a sleepy Mediterranean village, two couples (Sara and Jacques, Ludi and Gina) and the freewheeling Diana, stuck in their rut of swimming, bocce, and endless Camparis until they’re knocked out of their orbits when a new vacationer shows up with a boat. Sara is immediately attracted to him, their flirting eventually leads to a tryst, but then in the end Sara decides to go on a trip to Tarquinia with Jacques and Diana rather than to stay behind and have an extended affair. At the same time, they’ve all become involved in looking after an elderly couple in the village who have arrived to claim the remains of their son. He was killed in the course of his work to decommission leftover landmines and now everyone is waiting for the mother to change her mind and sign the death certificate. There’s also a forest fire at some point?

It sounds like a literary Seinfeld episode (“She wouldn’t sign the death certificate, Jerry, would you believe it?”), which is also how I’d describe Moderato Cantabile, but somehow it works. Maybe because of the undercurrent of “will they, won’t they” sexual tension that appears in the first conversation between Sara and Boat Guy and persists throughout the entire book. Maybe it’s because Duras lets her characters have pretentious philosophical conversations that are usually the purview of stoner insights. Maybe it’s because even though on one level, nothing happens, there’s also a lot of nothing that happens: people go on boat rides, go swimming, have dinner, hike up and down the mountain to visit the mourning couple. If everyone just sat around in the bar drinking, it might come off entirely differently.

At any rate, this kind of slow, ponderous, talk-y book is exactly my jam. Which is good since I essentially read it three times (French first, then Swedish to fill in the gaps, then French one last time). I don’t know that I have any quibble with Suzanne Palme’s translation, either. Palme also seems to have passed away, but since her obituary is paywalled at DN I don’t know more than what journalisten.se has to say:

Suzanne Palme
26 OKTOBER, 2000 | Oslo, har avlidit vid 73 års ålder. Hon arbetade en tid som vikarie på Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning innan hon övergick till förlagsbranschen.

I assume that’s the right Suzanne Palme, at any rate. According to boksampo, she has just half a dozen or so translations to her name. They’re a rather scattershot collection; De små hästarna is the only Duras novel there.

Emil and the Detectives

Both of my parents moved at least part of their childhood libraries into our home where they became the foundation for my collection (and my brother’s, for that matter). Some of these ended up being my own favorites while others simply hung about the house, in various common area bookshelves, forever unclaimed and unread by either me or my brother. Not for any particular reason, either; I think I would just forget about them as soon as I left the room or hallway. Such was the fate of Emil and the Detectives, which I finally sat down to read because sometimes the world is a bummer and you just want to read children’s books from a happier time.

Young Emil from the small town of Neustadt is sent off to visit his grandmother in Berlin with a not insubstantial sum of money, but is robbed en route. A local gang of plucky young boys come to his aid, hijinks ensue, and Emil and the detectives get their man. It’s very wholesome without being cloying, which would explain why there are approximately one million (or just five) movie adaptations of it. It’s cute, it’s a fast read, it’s fun, there’s not much else to say.

For such a slim book, Emil and the Detectives invites a bit of a Wikipedia rabbit hole. The author, Erich Kästner, was the odd duck who was able to remain a vocal critic of the Nazis without being sent to a camp or having to flee the country. While his much more risque and controversial adult novel, Fabian, was the subject of Nazi book burnings, his children’s work was popular enough to keep him more or less out of trouble. Another one of his children’s books, Lisa and Lottie, eventually became the basis for The Parent Trap.

The English translation is another rabbit hole, though a murkier one. It was published thanks to the efforts of legendary children’s book editor May Massee. By all accounts, in addition to her publishing and editing work, Massee also produced the first English translation of Emil and the Detectives, though a later one by Eileen Hall is purportedly the most readily available one in Europe. And yet there’s not much to be found online or in Massee’s biography about any other translation efforts. Was this the only translation she ever produced, a la Alexandra Dick and The Dwarf?

There is lively discussion (read as: this blog post) around the subsequent translations of Emil and the Detectives, and how English translators have approached the question of slang and dialect in the story. My German is several years out of use by this point, though all of this is tempting enough for me to dive back in.

Severance

Ling Ma’s Severance was the Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club’s pick for August, a meeting I was lucky enough to attend in person for once!

“Here’s a question for everyone,” I announced during an early lull in the conversation. “Describe this book as a mash up of two other works.”

My own answer was Station Eleven and My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Other names that came up included The Last of Us, Girls, The Road, Dawn of the Dead, and Sex and the City. A pattern emerges, but to spell it out more clearly:

Candace, our protagonist, is part of a group of zombie apocalypse survivors led run by a cult-guru-in-the-making named Bob escaping New York City to a shopping mall in Illinois. Why a shopping mall in Illinois? Through some weird happenstance, Bob happens to be part owner of the property. Don’t think about it too much.

The zombies, meanwhile, are not only slow zombies—they’re not even particularly hungry or aggressive ones. Spawned by a fungal infection that can sit dormant for ages until it’s triggered, these zombies are entirely docile and stuck in loops of activity until their bodies give out. We see a family in a dining room go through countless iterations sitting down to an imaginary dinner; another character keeps on trying clothes from her closet. Interspersed with the zombie apocalypse narrative, we get flashbacks to Candace’s life right up until the killer fungus: her family’s contentious move from China and lifelong strain it caused, her father’s unexpected death, her mother’s rapid decline into dementia, her lackluster relationships, her job in publishing various glitzy and gimmicky editions of the Bible.

That’s pretty much it. Some people get infected, some people die, and the narrative eventually just…peters out.

Everyone at the meeting agreed that a lot of the public health responses to the fictional virus (or well, fungus) in Severance felt very Covid-y despite the 2018 publication date; my hypothesis is that Ma drew from how epidemics like bird flu and swine flu were handled in Asia when it came time to write about how an actual pandemic would unfold. We were also all in agreement that the book felt very gimmicky with a lot of vague ideas that were only half explored and that at the same time felt like pretty heavy-handed critiques and observations of Our Current Society. Candace is passive to the point of frustration, making poor decision after poor decision, and none of the other characters really have a distinct personality (except Bob the cult leader). To me it read like a novel of the Chinese Immigrant Experience but then someone suggested to Ma that she examine it through the framework of a zombie story instead and…I don’t know. I’m not mad I read it, but it never really coalesced into something coherent.

Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann

Jonas Jonasson’s novels are hard to miss in Sweden, with their striking and consistent titles and cover designs. Yet at the same time they’re nearly invisible, fading into the background, precisely because they’re everywhere: the books that everyone’s read, to the point where it feels not at all urgent because at this point you’ll pick it up via cultural osmosis. So I never gave much thought to Hundraåringen beyond rescuing it from the junk pile at a friend’s apartment just to have it around—just in case—but promptly forgot about it, except to periodically confuse it with A Man Called Ove. What finally got me to pick it up was 1) a personal recommendation from a friend and 2) its appearance as Sweden’s entry in the EuroVision book contest.

“Finally, we’re releasing more than Nordic noir into the world,” I thought.

An SFI classmate years ago described Hundraåringen to me as “a Swedish Forrest Gump” and that just about covers it: 100-year-old Allan, as the title suggests, climbs out the window of his room at the senior home on the morning of his birthday because he’s just utterly fed up with living there. (If I’m reading later subtext correctly, it’s more an act of depression than adventure.) Things start happening as soon as he encounters a young man with a suitcase at the nearest bus station, and the adventure afterwards is interspersed with his life story, which is filled with some of the most significant events and people of the twentieth century. There Allan is in the margins of the Spanish civil war, the development of the atomic bomb, the downfall of the Soviet Union, and on and on it goes. Throughout all of this, Allan is phlegmatic and unflappable, escaping from political prisons and dispatching would-be criminals with fatalistic indifference.

Jonasson is careful—or thorough, maybe, is the better word?—to make use of every detail so that simple gags become essential plot elements. These moments would fall flat in a more serious or melodramatic story, and feel like deus ex machina, but because the whole story is farcical from beginning to end it instead becomes just a more elaborate joke, elevated from physical comedy to long-form setup and payoff.

From a translation perspective there are a couple words and jokes that I’m curious to see handled in English, so of course now I have to read it again in English. But by all accounts it seems to land well with English speaking readers.

Null States

Hats off to Malka Older for enticing me enough to read a sequel to a more or less standalone book. Null States is set a couple of years after Infomocracy and tackles yet another crisis in this ever-shifting and adapting “microdemocracy” that Older envisioned in the first book. This time, rather than natural disasters and election fraud, the benevolent-ish Google-esque “Information” organization is up against multiple potential assassination attempts in developing (or up-and-coming) centenals. What’s the end game? Who’s behind the hits?

I probably waited a bit too long to start on this after Infomocracy; there were plenty of character names that were familiar, but I couldn’t always place the name to the person I had first encountered in Infomocracy. It’s not necessarily anything that ruins the book or makes it impossible to follow, and in all honesty I’d rather be a little bit lost than have the author waste time and ink giving a condescending and awkward “last time, on Infomocracy” recap. Older also does a great job shifting the focus outward from the three principal characters in the first to another secondary character rather than just running a concept (or character, in this case) into the ground. My only complaint for both Infomocracy and Null States is a spoiler-y one and has to do with a particular character trope that I dislike. Worth noting, I guess, but it’s also not anything that ruins the books.

Infomocracy

Another selection from Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club! Alas, I had to miss the meeting for this book because sometimes sacrifices must be made to keep the tabletop RPG campaign going.

Malka Older’s Infomocracy opens on the eve of a major international election. We’re in a near but unspecified future, where nation states are (largely) a thing of the past and people instead live in enclaves of 100,000 that elect a governing party every ten years: microdemocracy. This is due in no small part to the machinations of the tech giant blandly called “Information,” which functions as a kind of worldwide ISP mixed with search engine and public media. Somehow the rise of Information-the-service led to the rise of microdemocracy, though exactly how is unclear.

These governing parties are global in scale, so you could have a chunk of what is now Australia and a chunk of what is now Brazil governed by the same party; you could have two adjacent chunks of Australia governed by completely different parties. The party with the most enclaves is declared the Supermajority, which grants them some kind of governing advantage. The reigning supermajority, the Heritage party, is losing votes and looking for a way to stop bleeding out. A renegade reactionary party is blowing up by insinuating that military conquest will be on the docket if they become the new Supermajority. Through all of this we follow three characters with interests that are often unaligned or even flat-out competing as they navigate a tumultuous election rocked by fraud and hacking attempts.

There’s thrills, there’s intrigue, there’s speculation about how technology will continue to develop. Much of the book clearly draws on Older’s experience in humanitarian aid and natural disaster response, which makes her near-future feel much more grounded and connected to the present day than, say, something like Star Trek. Top notch world-building all around. The best example of the complexity and thought that Older put into it is the sheer number of parties that turn up in the book. Only a handful are in focus for the big important plot stuff (Heritage, Liberty, Policy1st), but nonetheless an easy dozen or so come up in passing and yet manage to maintain a distinct personality and agenda. Nestlé is a party in this future. So is PhilipMorris. (Is that any different from today oh ho ho.) Then you have groups like All4One/AllFor1, YourStory, LesProfessionels, 888, Free2B, SecureNation, Earth1st, one that uses Kanji that I’m never going to remember, others that are essentially theocracies, still others that are vestiges of the idea of a nation state (1China), and others that are entirely unknown to our characters as they zoom around the world. A lazier writer would have capped it at four or five, but Older went all in. Respect.

Infomocracy ends on a bit of a cliffhanger. I say “a bit” because while most of the narrative threads get conclusively resolved, they still set the stage for some further intrigue down the line. So I just went ahead and checked the next two books out of the library and we’ll see if I finish them before my vacation at the end of the month!

Six Wakes

I was excited for Six Wakes in Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club because it sounded like a sci-fi whodunnit, with a fun twist that everyone involved is a clone on a generation space ship.

Turns out, it was a less of a whodunnit and more just an intellectual riff on human cloning. Was the problem with me? Was it in the book? Was it false advertising or did I just make certain assumptions based on my own predilection for whodunnits? Who knows!

Our characters, all clones who are crew on a generational space ship full of humans in cryostasis, wake up to a serious emergency: they’ve all been murdered and one of them is the killer. Unfortunately, their most recent memory updates are from twenty-four years earlier, when they first came aboard the ship. Time to play some real-life Mafia! The book jumps back and forth between developments on the ship and each character’s backstory: turns out their random selection to crew this vessel was not entirely random after all.

Unfortunately (for me), you can’t approach the book from a whodunnit perspective. I’m not a genius at these sorts of things, I don’t always or even often guess the killer before the parlor scene, but you do get into a reading mode where you file away innocuous little details that the author seemingly drops off-hand because they tend to be important clues later. A mug is found wedged under a console and a character muses he must have been getting sloppy in his past life if he was drinking from open containers around the computers. The same character, upon stumbling across his corpse (death by hanging), takes pains to notice that he only has one boot on. Things like that.

Details that turn out to be entirely extraneous!

The mystery in the book is the same flavor of the worst Detective Conan stories: essential pieces of backstory are withheld until it’s too late for the reader to make any use of it themselves. There are no actual clues, just a great deal of foreshadowing. Sometimes, ironically, too much foreshadowing: one character isn’t actually a clone, except the hints that get dropped about their clone-less past are so obvious that I just got frustrated with how long it took the book to confirm it.

As a meditation on identity in the face of cloning and infinite bodies, though, the book also kind of fizzles. While they’re not completely analogous situations, the Trill from Star Trek or the imago machines from A Memory Called Empire do more interesting things with “near-infinite lifespan due to rebooted bodies” than anything that happens in Six Wakes. The juiciest part, philosophically, doesn’t even involve the main characters—it’s a third-act plot twist involving the ship’s AI.

And as for the story, outside of the murder-mystery and philosophical trappings, it’s slightly deflating. Clones and cloning are still controversial on Earth for reasons that feel flimsy at best (all religions take a hardline stance against cloning? really? and seemingly never let up?) and the obvious actual ethical problem with how cloning is set up in the book—the memory backups for clones would basically be like taking a random stranger who happens to look exactly like you and injecting your memories and yourself into them instead of letting them retain their own perceptions or develop their own personality—is never addressed. Maybe the latter is because Lafferty is very frank about how the idea from the story came from a video game mechanic, and once your idea is based on a simple video game technique to reboot a character instead of how cloning actually works, you’re doomed from the start. Other flimsy characterizations and deus ex machina style plot events also feel like Lafferty painted herself into a corner and couldn’t get out, which is never a very satisfying feeling while you’re reading.

I also can’t deal with the cover, at least for the edition I read (pictured above). The body looks like something an art student would have churned out in Blender twenty-odd years ago for an anatomy study in CGI homework assignment. Surely you have more budget than that, Orbit Books! (And, spoiler, no one gets tossed out an airlock into space, so it’s also a bit misleading.)

If you go in with zero expectations and just want something to read on a plane or at the beach, Six Wakes is fine. Good, even. But I went in with high expectations that the story wasn’t able to live up to.