queer – Koba English

Kyra Kyralina

This was an international WhatsApp book club pick because Panait Istrati seems like an interesting guy, and Kyra Kyralina specifically occupies a niche as the first Romanian novel with a gay protagonist and the first novel in Istrati’s Adrian Zografi cycle. A landmark novel in many respects.

Landmarks aren’t necessarily a fun read, however, and it was a struggle to grasp what Istrati was trying to do. It’s a bildungsroman of sorts, but with a rather disjointed chronology and a lack of interiority. Despite the book’s inclusion in the Adrian Zografi cycle, here Adrian is only a side character. Kyra Kyralina is really the story of Stavro, né Dragomir, as told to Adrian on different occasions over the stretch of several years. The first section focuses on Stavro’s most recent past: the story of his unhappy marriage. The second section then goes all the way back to Stavro’s earliest childhood, and the third and final section fills in the gap between that childhood and the unhappy marriage. The first two sections are narrated rather close in time to each other, with only a few days in between. Adrian doesn’t hear the last section until several years later when he happens to meet Stavro in Egypt.

To put it chronologically: Stavro was born in Braila, Romania, and spent his earliest days with his mother and sister, the titular Kyra. They were wealthy largely due to his mother’s inheritance, though his father and older brother ran a very successful wagon business. The latter two eventually move to the other side of the city to be closer to the wagon workshop, but they periodically make visits to the other home. In their absence, Stavro’s mother and Kyra live the good life, dressing up and hosting parties full of dance and music, attended by young suitors. Young Stavro’s job is to keep a lookout for his father and brother, so the suitors have time to escape out a back window. During these visits home, and just about every day before relocating to the other side of the city, Stavro’s father beats his mother.

The turning point comes when Stavro’s mother decides to throw the party to end all parties, perhaps because she can sense that things are about to take a turn for the worse, or perhaps because she has some kind of death wish. Either way, it turns out as she expects and Stavro’s father beats her within an inch of her life, blinding her in one eye. Kyra is locked in a wardrobe and Stavro taken back to the other house by the workshop. He manages to escape and to rescue Kyra and his mother, and they flee Braila.

Stavro is around twelve years old at this point.

Stavro’s mother leaves him and his sister in the care of her brothers while she seeks medical treatment for her eye and disfigurement. That’s the last we see of her, and given her declaration that she was determined to kill herself if she ever lost her beauty or ability to enjoy life, it’s safe to assume that she takes her life at some point off screen.

Kyra, meanwhile, immediately spurs their uncles into avenging the violence enacted on the family, and the uncles agree. Their older brother is killed in the ambush, but their father escapes and Stavro and his sister are sent to a safehouse. It doesn’t take long for them (or for Kyra, at least) to get bored with their new life, and they are soon kidnapped. Their kidnapper sells Kyra to a harem (which is only mentioned in an aside), while Stavro remains with him as, it is heavily implied, a sex slave.

(So ends section two.)

He manages to escape after a few years and immediately sets about Istanbul looking for his mother and his sister, to no avail. It doesn’t take long for another creepy old man to abduct Stavro, luring him in with false promises of helping to find his family only to once again keep him as a sex slave. More years pass and Stavro once again manages to escape, get some papers (this is the point where he becomes Stavro rather than Dragomir), and then get robbed. One day he ends up in Damascus, and sees a cart pass with a woman who looks rather like Kyra. Stavro tries to get her attention, following the cart all the way to a villa. He’s denied entry, of course, and that’s where an elderly salep vendor finds him and takes him in. They spend many happy years together, even after Stavro serves a stint in prison and is exiled from the city, until the older man’s death.

(So ends section three.)

Stavro ends up in Bucharest, a sort of itinerant merchant and maybe still selling salep. He boards with a family for a while and becomes infatuated with their daughter, telling her stories of his travels. This escalates until they are engaged to be married, but tradition dictates that newlyweds are obligated to prove that the marriage has been consummated (by means of some bloodied sheets). Stavro cracks under the pressure to perform, and under the pressure of his own presumed homosexuality, and promptly faints and then falls ill. His wife is understanding and compassionate about it, and the community at first see him as an invalid, potentially the subject of a curse. But days, weeks, months go by without any sex, and their patience runs thin. Stavro is once again a prisoner of sorts. Neither he nor his wife are permitted to leave the house, and Stavro in particular has become persona non grata in their quarter of Bucharest. The couple makes plans to leave the city, since they’re still otherwise happy and fond of each other and can imagine a life together. Then, mere days before their escape, his brothers in law find an old traveling companion of Stavros, presumably also a lover, who immediately outs Stavro. (Every translation in the WhatsApp book club seemed to use an interrupted slur for a gay man in this reveal. In Swedish it was rendered as “b—”, presumably short for “bög.”) The escape plans come to nothing, Stavro is driven out of the house, and his bride drowns herself in the river.

(So ends section one.)

The framing device is Stavro’s invitation to Adrian to come help him and another man, Mikhail (I think) sell watered-down citric acid as lemonade in another distant town. Adrian has encountered Stavro somewhere out in town, and we get our first impression of the man: a tragic figure, a bit of a buffoon but intentionally so, someone who is hiding something. His scheme requires some kind of go-between and he thinks Adrian is right for the job. On their first night on the road, the three men spend the night in a hayloft and Stavro makes an attempt to seduce, or at least fondle, Adrian. Adrian is a bit naive, while the worldly Mikhail knows immediately what Stavro is trying to do and berates him for it. By way of apology, Stavro then begins his tale of woe, as if to explain why he has become such a creature so burdened with vice. (“Vice” is the specific word used in the Swedish translation, at least, and is used again and again by Stavro to describe himself and by others to describe him.)

Stavro is a tragic figure. Any joy, any pleasure, any human connection he’s ever had is almost immediately tainted with tragedy. That much is clear. But it’s hard to situate Stavro in a narrative. We don’t see a progression from naive to embittered, or ignorant to more worldly. The inside-out chronology means that the book ends in the middle of Stavro’s life, a very deliberate narrative choice that immediately invites speculation. Why does this episode have such an ultimate ring of finality to it?

Putting aside the larger question of the disjointed timeline, it’s hard to like Stavro. It’s hard to like any of the people we’re supposed to feel sorry for. Yes, Stavro’s father is a petty, violent tyrant, but his mother and sister come across as party girls with no interest in taking care of themselves. Of course I’m reading Kyra Kyralina through a different lens than the original audience, in a different social context, but the way that Stavro’s mother insists that she is a creature made to enjoy luxury, love, pleasure, and that she cannot be other than what she is hits a sour note for me. I managed to find an English translation of exactly the passage I’m thinking of:

I was made by the Lord for the pleasures of the flesh, just as he made the mole to live underground without light. And just as that creature has everything it needs to live in the earth, I was lacking nothing to enjoy my life of pleasure. I made a vow to kill myself if I were forced by men to knuckle under and live a life other than what my body and soul dictated. Today, I am thinking about that vow.

From the blog seraillon, who seemed to like Kyra Kyralina a lot more than I did.

Other places describe the story as a picaresque, but it’s hard to read consistently getting kidnapped and imprisoned by different abusers as a picaresque, since much of the time Stavro is confined and not meeting that many people or having that many adventures. Stavro himself isn’t particularly interesting, either. Things happen to him, but we only get surface level emotions in response.

There is also a question of version and translation: Istrati wrote the original in French, but then rewrote it and completely reworked it in Romanian. The Swedish translation, judging by the translator (Barbro Andersson), was from the Romanian version rather than the French. One wonders how much was different between the two versions.

Djinns

Fatma Aydemir’s Djinns was another selection for my international WhatsApp book club. We have a lot of Turkish and German (and expats in Turkey and Germany) representation, so a German novel about a Turkish family in Germany was a logical choice.

Djinns is a quasi-multigenerational story, where each member of a Turkish nuclear family living in Germany stars in their own sections. The book starts with the father, Hüseyin, who has finally retired and moved to Istanbul, to the new apartment he’s managed to purchase through years of hard work and meticulous savings and where he imagines his family’s future happiness. From there we spend a section with each of the children (Umit, Peri, Hakan, and Sevda) and end with the mother (Emine). That’s a very dry description of a very involved, serious, sensitive book, but any more details than that and I would spoil the whole thing. It’s a masterpiece, and the English translation by Jon Cho-Polizzi is very thoughtfully done, with a foreword on various racialized terms and slang as well as a glossary of untranslated Turkish (and possibly also Kurdish?) terms in the back.

The Turkish-Kurdish owner and bartender at my local watering hole is probably around the same age as Hüseyin. He’s hospitable and very chatty, and if you show up with any regularity, you get to know him pretty quickly. His wife and kids are a recurring topic, and they must be about the same age as their counterparts in Djinns. They’re also a recurring topic between myself and my Njals saga book buddy and fellow patron: what’s it like to grow up as a secular Swede with a father like Ali, we wonder. What’s it like to be married to be married to him?

So I wonder if the secrets and relationships in Djinns are something Ali and his family would recognize. From my perspective, Aydemir captures how the tension between two cultures exacerbates the normal stresses and conflicts that arise in any family. No-No Boy is a comparison that comes to mind. But without that lived experience, of course, it’s hard for me to say for sure.

Notes of a Crocodile

Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin was another international WhatsApp book club pick and I was the only one who liked it!

It’s a short book, and a bit weird, but still relevant thirty years later as reactionary ideologues exploit anxieties over gender and sexuality to consolidate power. It follows the trajectory of Lazi, a character who would be classified as a “disaster lesbian” in my corners of the Internet, as she and her queer circle of friends try to survive university in Taipei and find their place in the world. Lazi’s chapters alternate with those about crocodiles who fit in to society by wearing human suits, an extended metaphor for closeted homosexuals.

That’s not the best summary—somehow I’ve made it sound more melodramatic than it actually is. But several book club members said that it felt very much like a YA book to them, so maybe there’s more melodrama in the story than I realized while reading. A better summary would be that it’s like the Taiwanese version of Kris. It’s full of surreal imagery, never really going anywhere, just people trying to come to grips with themselves. I think this description from translator Bonnie Huie in an interview very perfectly captures its essence:

Notes of a Crocodile is not about how “it gets better”; it’s about living in permanent wartime. A vicious cycle begins when you lose the ability to feel, then the ability to tolerate discomfort. Qiu handed down a book of memories that preserves these essences so that you can use them like smelling salts.

Notes of a Crocodile first came out in 1994, but no English translation was available until Huie’s was published in 2017. (As far as I can tell, at least. I did not devote hours of detective work to this little book report.) I’m not qualified to comment on her translation, of course, but she’s done us all a favor by rendering these smelling salts in English. Good to have on hand when it feels like, thirty years later, we’re still living in permanent wartime.

The Safekeep

Yael van der Woulden’s The Safekeep was an International WhatsApp Book Club pick, and with a publication date of 2024 it’s probably the newest book I’ve read so far this year. It even came right on the heels of Filosofins tröst from 523 CE for a bit of chronological whiplash!

Set in the Netherlands in 1961, The Safekeep focuses on Isabel, who is living in a house her family happened to acquire during World War II. (“Happened to acquire” = yes, you can look at that timeline and probably guess the means by which they came into it.) Isabel’s situation is rather tenuous, however; the house is actually willed to her brother Louis in the event he ever decides to marry and start a family, and Isabel is understood to simply be the caretaker until then. While things look promising for Isabel on that front—to quote the immortal bards LMFAO, Louis is “running through these hos like Drano”—it’s still no guarantee.

A series of incidents leads to Eva staying at the house with Isabel while Louis goes abroad for work. The two women could not be more different: Isabel is aloof, distant, and proper, while Eva is gregarious and uninterested in following rules. Sparks fly, the tightly-wound Isabel finally lets her hair down, and the two women begin a passionate love affair.

Isabel’s erotic fixation on Eva is simultaneously very obviously telegraphed but also very in character. Right at their first meeting at an awkward family dinner, Isabel zeroes in on all of Eva’s physical failings: the roots that need a touch-up dye, the way the buttons on her dress gap, the shoddy hems, and so on. It’s clear to the reader that Isabel is hyperaware of Eva’s body and Eva’s looks, even if it’s not immediately clear to Isabel herself. Whether or not readers enjoy that kind of signaling is a matter of taste. Are you the kind of person who relishes the obvious ignorance of the protagonist to their own desires, or does it just try your patience?

The other plot twist, which is late enough in the book that I would consider it a spoiler, had similarly obvious telegraphing but that I found to be much less satisfying. It’s a delicate balance to strike for van der Wouden, trying to find the balance between too many hints and not enough. The difference between the two cases for me is that 1) Isabel’s disconnection from herself at the beginning of the novel is part of her characterization and 2) the love affair resolves much, much earlier on in the story. This is a pretty horny book at times.

In the end I wasn’t blown away by The Safekeep, but I was glad I read it. I appreciated the focus on post-war Netherlands, a particular piece of history I know very little about. There is a precision and an exactitude to van der Wouden’s prose that I enjoyed, plus the shift of perspective in the penultimate section proves that she’s quite versatile as well.

Conflict is Not Abuse

While I was browsing Što čitaš? after I dropped off The House of the Dead, my gaze fell on Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair by Sara Schulman. What a relevant and potentially controversial premise! Praise on the back from Claudia Rankine and bell hooks! The only problem is that it was a bit of a chonker; moreover, the original English edition was easily available at the Stockholm library. Really, it wouldn’t have killed me to wait. But I was impatient and wanted to leave the store with something, so I figured, why not? As it turns out, Schulman’s Gentrification of the Mind was already on my TBR anyway. So it kind of counted, right?

Schulman’s thesis here is a bit complex. Her first argument is that the structure of private relationships, such as those in families or between lovers or friends, is the basis or model for the relationship between citizens and then state. Interpersonal and political conflicts are therefore analogous, or can at least be analyzed in similar terms. The second argument is that we often conflate “being uncomfortable” with “being in danger” (“overstating harm,” in her words) which leads to the claim Schulman makes right in the title of the book: many forms of “being uncomfortable” that are considered “being in danger” (whether by an abuser, the state, or a victim) should instead be thought of as either 1) literally Nothing (as in, one of the parties involved being triggered by something completely innocuous because of their own personal history), 2) Normative Conflict, or 3) Resistance. Overstating harm, Schulman argues, renders us unable to actually address the root of the issue. Her third argument is that the usual responses perpetuate more harm than whatever the inciting incident may have been.

With all of that established, Schulman then goes through four different approaches to conflict resolution that she believes provides a better alternative—historical psychoanalysis, Al-Anon, mindfulness, and pop psychology. A disparate group of frameworks, to be sure, but Schulman argues that all of them provide space for 1) pause and reflection in the moment (rather than immediate reactivity) as well as 2) accountability to a larger community. Throughout the book she illustrates her arguments with various case studies, from domestic violence and sexual assault to HIV disclosure laws in Canada to Israel’s occupation of Gaza, to demonstrate the various levels at which overstating harm and its consequences play out.

At this point, I will note that Schulman is not writing out of any particular academic discipline; her background is as a writer of literature, though also of nonfiction as well. She is up front about this and introduces the book and her argument as ideas she is offering up for consideration rather than a traditional academic examination (though she occasionally cites research and statistics when appropriate and includes a Works Cited section as well as citations by page).

Conflict is Not Abuse ended up being one of those books where the more I thought about it, the more mixed my feelings became. Schulman is very clear about her progressive bona fides right from the start because I think she’s perceptive enough to know that, at least from an unexamined surface level, her arguments are going to sound reactionary, or that she’s going to be excellent ideological cover for conservative talking points. (“Look at how this particular leftist is saying the same things about the left that we are!”) A quick Google leads to a glowing review from Heterodox Academy, for example, a group that I would feel safe saying is not in alignment with Schulman’s own values. It’s impossible to prevent that kind of reading or use of a text, however. The best you can do is what Schulman did: make it clear that you’re arguing from a specific position, in her case a queer leftist position including advocacy for people living with HIV and AIDS.

But there were other things that didn’t land well even when situated in that biographical context, with Schulman telling on herself in different ways. The first section, for example, could have well been titled Someone Had A Fight With Sarah Schulman Over Email Once And She Never Forgot. (The vibe was very similar to Bellwether in that vein: “A brash young person once asked Connie Willis to put out her cigarette in the 90s and she decided to write a whole book about it.”) As she sees it, emails and other forms of textual communication are the bane of all interpersonal conflicts today. Telephone calls and in-person conversations, meanwhile, are pure and holy and have never led to a single misunderstanding. This struck me strange as I was reading it, considering that Schulman foregrounds everything with her career as a writer and novelist—how could a professional and successful writer really believe that the written language is somehow insufficient and lacking in nuance? It only became stranger once I came to the section with her proposal for conflict resolution, the foundation of which is delay and reflection: taking a moment to choose words and reactions carefully. Isn’t that one of the advantages of written communication? That we can take all the time we need to say exactly what we want to say and to be able to revise it accordingly? That it can occur, if necessary, asynchronously? But then you realize: Schulman was 58 when Conflict is Not Abuse came out in 2016. Ah hah, Boomers and their predilection for phone calls.

Schulman also punctuates the book with personal anecdotes, both from her own life and those of people she knows. They soon begin to take on a sort of Goofus and Gallant tone, as Schulman always presents herself as an aspirational model of conflict resolution, whereas it’s always other people who escalate things unnecessarily. I understand not wanting to put your own painful or embarrassing mistakes out there for public consumption in a book for all eternity, but you can at least dial it back from being the Sarah Schulman Show and let other people be shining exemplars of conflict resolution. I think talking about the ongoing genocide in Palestine is important, but reproducing your Facebook posts and comments on it for pages and pages is the book equivalent of telling someone about this weird dream you had at length: it’s an exercise in self-absorption that is only interesting to you.

More seriously than just Schulman telling on herself, however, is a key point her larger argument. She (rightly) argues that people almost always have a reason and a motivation for doing what they do, even when the things they do are horrible. But then she pivots on that and argues that sometimes it’s not the person themselves but an outside observer who has the best insight into that reason. I suspect, but cannot prove, that this thesis seems largely uncontroversial to her because of her stated admiration for psychotherapy and psychotherapists; that she has a sort of paradigm where “good friends” (to use her words) are like gifted therapists who know what their friends’ problems are before their friends realize it themselves. That unexamined argument is where the book (partially) falls apart for me, because that’s the backdoor by which you can smuggle in all kinds of toxic nonsense. “You’re not trans, you’re just a tomboy.” “You’re not gay, you’re just brainwashed.” “I know you want it.” This single belief is the pernicious assertion that undergirds everything else toxic in this book.

To that end, someone should have been a good friend (or a good editor) to Schulman and told her: hey, you’re not coming across as your best self here. I don’t think it’s good or necessary to include these anecdotes. Here, I found some experts in these topics you’re covering, would you like them to review your material and talk to you about it? Schulman picked a sticky wicket to tackle, but in the end I don’t think she was quite equipped for it.

Historiskan 1/25

The extended silence here was due to a train vacation throughout Europe—and as usual, another international trip meant time to catch up on my stack of periodicals. First up: Historiskan. Topics included:

The cover story about The Carter Family, the progenitor of country music as we know it today.
The lesbian girlboss and prolific diarist Anne Lister, who nonetheless remained a fervent Anglican Tory her entire life. The duality of man, or something.
Qiyan in the Umayyad Caliphate: women musician, composers and entertainers analogous (though not identical) to geisha.
Continuing on the music theme, the Swedish singer Ulla Billquist. Translating her Swedish Wikipedia page into English looks like a fun project for Future Me.
Women on board the doomed ship Vasa, including a few remains that were misidentified as men. Coincided neatly with an Australian friend’s visit to the Vasa Museum.
La Malinche, the enslaved Indigenous interpreter and consort of Hermàn Cortès.
The Soong sisters, which coincided relatively neatly with my reading of The Dragon’s Village. I’ve been meaning to follow that up with Wild Swans, maybe it’s finally time…
Tillie “the Terrible Swede” Anderson, a pioneering woman cyclist.
The Swedish non-profit organization Svalorna, which still operates today in Latin America and Bangladesh.

Om det regnar i Ahvaz

I fell a little bit in love with Nioosha Shams at Stockholms Litteraturmässan two years ago in a panel discussion on the phenomenology of reading. I added her only book to my TBR, one of the more recently published books to end up there.

I’m still in love with Shams, but Om det regnar i Ahvaz is not for me. The premise is simple: the first teenage heartache, pasted over that most exciting of times, graduation. And yes, since we’re talking about teenagers, this is squarely within Young Adult territory. Just to pick up a copy, I had to creep in to the Youths TM section of the library like an interloper, past the sternly-worded Official Rules explaining that in order to keep the space friendly for the Youths TM, no one over 25 was allowed to sit and linger in this space. Not an auspicious start, perhaps!

Since I’m an old, and not particularly romantic, the drama doesn’t hit the same. Our protagonist Ava falls in love with the (only slightly) older, glamorous Nadja, a summer love that unravels over the course of the book. Ava also has her two obligatory Teenage Shenanigan Besties, with whom she shares a rather wholesome and aspirational bond, and her younger brother who has been ensnared by a different glamor: gang life. This last point takes up the intermittent B plot, which I would have liked to see feature more prominently (or just have its own book?), I guess because I find stories about navigating familial relationships more interesting than romance.

But if I were a queer teenager, this would have no doubt been fun escapism. The story wasn’t for me, but Shams has a fantastic way with words and populates the book with fun and relatable (if highly idealized) characters.

Kris

My last-minute scramble to read more Swedish before the end of the year led me to revisit Karin Boye’s Kris, a book I first read in 2017. I even wrote about it here! Ah, how embarrassing to keep any kind of public record of one’s life, but oh well. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

In 2017, I felt like I had pretty much conquered Swedish and that the world was my oyster. Yet reading Kris was a struggle. Yes, I was reading several books at the time, but that’s a convenient excuse. The honest truth that I didn’t want to fess up to publicly was that Kris was just really, really hard. If anything, that’s probably why I was reading so many books at once: I needed something to reach for that wasn’t Kris. Each reading session included frequent breaks to count how many pages were left in this chapter, in the whole book. I stubbornly refused to look up new words because there were so many in any given section that any sense of flow would have been ruined. Nor did I have the patience to, for example, note all the words I didn’t know, look them up afterwards, and then read the chapter again. All of this should have clued me in to my immense hubris with respect to my actual functional level of Swedish, but it did not. Instead, I contented myself with declaring the book “difficult literature” and prided myself on having a brain big enough to finish the book at all.

This time around I finished the book in less than a week. Finally, I’m actually a genius at Swedish! (I can’t wait to revisit this blog post in another six years and flinch at the hubris.)

Since the actual reading experience was much easier, I had more brain left over to actually take in everything else in the book: the depression, the anxiety, the theology. Or, more humbly, maybe it wasn’t leveling up in Swedish that made all the difference. Maybe it was also the result of reading such an intense book in the depths of Swedish winter instead during the height of Swedish summer, or fresh war in Europe, or changes in my own personal circumstances. At any rate, it hit different this time around. More personal.

The first (as far as I can tell) English translation of Kris came out after my initial reading attempt in 2017: Crisis. Which means that this post won’t be my last about the book.

Translation State

Ann Leckie’s Translation State was the only book I finished in October. Good thing I read enough during my trip to the US to balance that out!

Translation State is…fine? It’s hard for me to be fair in my evaluation because I recognize that I read it in A Mood, and I also went in with incredibly high expectations because Ancillary Justice was one of the top tier Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club picks not only of the year, but of all time.

In short: everyman Reet Hluid learns that he isn’t entirely human, but actually the offspring of a wayward member of a terrifying and vaguely cannibalistic alien race, the Presger (or rather, their test tube baby science experiment race, Presger Translators, humanoids cooked up to help the ineffable Presger interface with humans). This entirely accidental revelation of his ancestry rips Hluid from his otherwise unremarkable life to be matched with Qven, another Presger Translator who is on the outs with their society.

What do I mean with that nebulous word “matched”? I mean something akin to “set up with.” Presger Translators are casually cannibalistic, or at least sadistic—we learn from Qven that dismemberments and eviscerations are standard fare schoolyard games among Presger Translator children—but then when adulthood hits, this turns from cannibalism into a merging that no matter how much Qven insists isn’t “doing the sex” still reads as “sex,” where the two parties consume each other? physically merge with each other? and then become some kind of new entity split across two bodies that are now a kind of average of both of them.

Hluid and Qven bond over a cheesy space opera, only to get called up before a tribunal to discuss their legal status under the prevailing galactic treaty drawn up between the Presger and the other races within the galaxy (are they human or not?). Violence erupts and chaos ensues, and we learn a little bit more about what the Presger (or Presger Translators?) can do: muck around with spacetime. Hluid and Qven, after nearly an entire book of misunderstanding-through-an-abundance-of-caution, merge and become a more fully realized Presger Translator Adult in order to save the day. You can’t be mad about that being a spoiler, either, because what we’re reading is essentially an alien romance with neopronouns and political intrigue slapped on for good measure; the happily ever after is a given.

The fact that it’s a romance that snuck in through the back door to a more straightforward and high-concept space opera series like Ancillary Justice is maybe why I don’t like it. I don’t enjoy romance. I don’t watch a lot of TV, trashy or otherwise, so I don’t find it qUiRkY aNd sO rELaTabLe when sci-fi characters do. (Love you, Murderbot, but you’re also guilty of this sin.) And despite the neopronouns and the antagonizing, on both ends, about consent and BUT THEY PROBABLY DON’T WANT TO MATCH WITH ME ANYWAY, the relationship between Hluid and Qven still feels pretty normal and straight, and also not particularly believable. Whatever important conversations they have where they bare their souls to each other seem to mostly happen off-screen, while their on-screen (on-page?) courtship seems to consist exclusively of watching TV together.

The comparison didn’t occur to me while I was reading it, but in summarizing the book just now Translation State has pretty strong echoes of The Gods Themselves, at least in terms of Presger biology. Leckie, at least, has a better handle on gender than Asimov.

If you’re thirsty for more Imperial Raadch adjacent content, Translation State scratches that itch. But I wouldn’t hand it off to anyone as an introduction to the Imperial Raadch books or to Leckie generally. Save it for later.

Are You My Mother?

I am constitutionally incapable of walking into a library without at least paging through something. And so while I was at one of my home libraries in August to renew my card, I took a stroll around the main floor to see if anything caught my eye. My circuit ended in the graphic novel section, where Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? was one of the featured books.

I knew Bechdel by reputation (who among us has not heard of “the Bechdel test” by now?) but not yet by works, even if I had heard of Fun Home and “Dykes to Watch Out For.” A memoir about parents? Well heck, very on brand to read while visiting one’s parents!

Happy families are all alike; unhappy families are all unique in their unhappiness. That’s the mood reading people’s reflections on their own parents. How are mine like theirs? How are mine different? Do we have any of the same difficulties in our relationships with them? Can I learn anything from how this person managed it (or didn’t)? Plus a heaping helping of: thank God my parents are the way they are.

Not that Are You My Mother? is didactic, or instructional. There are a lot of asides about Donald Winnicott and child psychology and Freud, but only because they were Bechdel’s own interests at the time of writing. And lots of Virginia Woolf and To The Lighthouse, as well. I guess one day I should make a real honest effort with that book, but today is not that day.

My dad is not Bechdel’s dad; my mom is not Bechdel’s mom. My relationships with them have different wrinkles and potholes than Bechdel has with hers, though sometimes they overlap or resonate in a kind of harmony. Never enough that the suggestions from her therapists feel like they can apply to me, but enough for me to do the slow nod of recognition.