Tag: Book Reviews

First Chapter Thoughts: One Hundred Years Of Solitude

October 25th, 2022

It’s been so long since I did one of these! I’ve been slacking on my reading this year (for, ah, fairly good reasons) but I’ve been meaning to read my magical realism classics for a while. I started House of the Spirits a while ago and promptly… put it down and forgot where it went. But this is my first go at One Hundred Years of Solitude, and… wow.

The book, strikingly, starts with a man facing a firing squad. The rest of the book – or at least, the chapter, so we’ll see where it goes – is about his thoughts right at the end of his life. Quite literally, his life flashing before his eyes. This man, Colonel Aureliano Buendía, grew up in a small village called Macondo somewhere in the Andes; cut off from the rest of the world and connected to the idea of a wider world only through the visiting gypsies. These gypsies bring all sorts of fascinations to the village, which whip up his imaginative father’s fancy, despite their warnings otherwise.

Obviously, I’m not fond of the word ‘gypsy’, but between this being a book in translation (it’s a Colombian novel, so originally written in Spanish) and being published in 1967, I’m willing to let it slide. I’m also willing to let it slide because the depiction of the gypsies is fascinating. The main Romani character in the first chapter, Melquíades, warns Aureliano’s father time and time again against his fantasies. The first time, Melquíades shows off an immensely powerful magnet that pulls all sorts of iron and steel towards it — and Aureliano’s father immediately buys it and tries to use it to search for gold, despite Melquíades warning him that it won’t work for that. The second time, it’s a magnifying glass that Aureliano’s father wants to repurpose as a weapon, and in a wonderful bit of characterization, after this also fails, Melquíades gives him the money back in exchange for the magnifying glass, and gives him a map. (So often, Romani characters are immediately depicted as shady and dishonest; the only comment I have is that it’s a little funny how much time the narrative spends on ‘no, no, they were super honest and super forthcoming about this’. Goes to show how deep the assumptions run.)

Ultimately, Aureliano’s father wants to set off and explore the world, and only his wife Ursula manages to dissuade him from it — because, for one, he’s absolutely terrible at it. (He manages to, through some extremely bad navigation, convince himself that Macondo is on a peninsula with no way forward. He’s, uh, wrong.) Two, his sons need attention – so the next time the gypsies come to town, he takes them down with him, and it’s together that they discover the ‘latest’ invention; ice.

I’ve always loved magical realism, but there’s something about reading one of the first books to establish the style to really ground what it means. ‘Dreamlike’ is correct; but also the sense of dislocation, the blurred lines between reality and fantasy, where it’d be just as easy to believe this is a fantasy world where Aureliano’s father really is discovering that the world is round and witnessing the invention of ice. The writing is gorgeous, too, and such a huge part of establishing the tone — some of this, obviously, is thanks to the translation. One day I hope I get to read it in the original Spanish, but even in English, the prose is just… so so good. And all of it’s colored with a bit of darkness, the knowledge that Aureliano dies by firing squad; and we don’t know why.

I’m excited to read the rest – keep your eyes peeled for my full review! This went up 24 hours early for my Patreon supporters.
First Chapter Thoughts: Authority by Jeff Vandermeer

September 8th, 2020

I recently finished Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer (read the review here), and while I’ve gotten mixed input from others about the rest of the trilogy, I can’t help but be immensely curious. So I’ve picked up the second book, Authority, and we’re already off to an interesting start.

For starters, despite many of them being dead, the surveyor, the biologist, and the anthropologist are all back at Southern Reach headquarters. So THAT’S a hook. I’m immediately wondering about the movie’s ending and how much it pulled from this, but we’ll see.

Our new POV character, with a name this time, is Control – the new director of the Southern Reach. I’m admittedly a little sad to go back to a third person, male POV, and I think something of the first book’s character is lost in the process, but the external perspective on the biologist (terse is definitely one way of describing her) is fascinating. Control also seems interesting in his own right, albeit not particularly likeable. He’s got people to please and a mystery to get to the heart of, and underneath that, a family legacy to support. Fascinatingly, this is one of those sequels where we know what’s up, or at least part of it, because we’ve read the first book; so we know more than he does.

I’m not sure where Authority is going just yet, but it seems we’re going to be learning more about the Southern Reach, and not just Area X itself.
The Gremlin’s Library: Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

September 3rd, 2020

Read my First Chapter Thoughts on Annihilation here!

When I first read some of Annihilation (in the Nebula 2014 collection), I wasn’t impressed. But now that I’ve read the whole thing, in its incandescently weird glory, I’m looking back at 2016 me and whispering, you silly prat. In my defense, Annihilation starts off slowly; it’s almost deliberately stereotypical at first, invoking old 50s and 60s military sci fi. Then it starts dropping clues that things are a little stranger than you think – for example, the whole cast are women, and the book doesn’t particularly care, but the fact that the book doesn’t care that much is exciting enough on its own.

The premise of Annihilation is this: an all-women squad of scientists are sent into a strange place known as Area X, a slowly-expanding area closed to the public that has something happening to it. Several expeditions have disappeared into it; any of them that have emerged have died shortly after, whether by suicide, cancer, or other means. The team is made up of a biologist (our narrator), an anthropologist, a surveyor, and a psychologist; there was originally a linguist who disappeared at the border. The biologist narrates as they explore a tower that seems to plunge into the earth – and upon inhaling some strange spores, she realizes that the psychologist has been hypnotizing them, and that she is now immune to the hypnotic suggestions.

This is the third of Vandermeer’s novels I’ve read; Borne and Dead Astronauts are both significantly stranger than Annihilation in that they wear the fascination with Weird Biology on their sleeve. Borne has a giant flying bear destroying a city and a starfish morph… thing, and Dead Astronauts is, um, well, Dead Astronauts. (Where do you start with that book? The duck? The person made of salamanders? The time-travelling lichen lady?) In comparison, Annihilation is slow to build up to its true weirdness, but that’s also part of its strength; the biologist is discovering the weirdness, rather than the reader being plunged straight into it. Both are very different reading experiences, and Annihilation also has a very personal element to it that Borne and DA don’t quite have; perhaps because it at least pretends to be set in our world, and because of the biologist’s first person narration.

Ultimately, I think my favourite part of Annihilation is exactly that – the personal, emotional element. It’s understated, especially if you’re used to narrators with strong, vivid emotions, but that’s exactly what makes the unnamed biologist so interesting; she’s not somebody with strong emotions about other people, or who opens up easily. She’s quiet, internal, calculating, happy with her own company, and not the kind of character who usually gets to drive a story by herself or tell her own story.

I highly recommend Annihilation to fans of Vandermeer’s other work, Wilder Girls by Rory Power and/or Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber – and of course, the inverse is also true, especially if you like weird biology and plants that are trying to eat you.

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The Gremlin’s Library: Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson

August 20th, 2020

The first few pages of Midnight Robber feel like being dropped into a brand new language – and realistically, you are. If you know the language. you’re fine. It takes a little readjustment, sure, but only the same amount of adjustment that a speaker of Received Pronounciation British English needs to do for the terms in Lord of the Rings. If you don’t… it takes a little longer.

That’s a good thing, though. The language that Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber is written in is a blend of Trinidadian and Jamaican Creole – two Caribbean English dialects, with a few others sprinkled in. For me, somebody who’s never spoken or read Creole, it took a chapter or two to really get the hang of it. I jotted down words I wasn’t sure about, googled them if the context didn’t give it away… And after a while, I didn’t have to anymore. The greatest trick of language, after all, is that it teaches itself to you. And Hopkinson is more than just a writer in this way; she’s a storyteller, and the storytelling uses the language and its rhythm to give you the context of everything without so much as pausing for breath.

Midnight Robber is a science-fiction tale, set on a distant planet called Toussaint (after Haiti’s revolutionary hero) and following – initially – the marital troubles of Antonio and Ione, an upper-class couple in Jonkanoo. After Ione cheats on him, Antonio challenges her lover to a duel and kills him with a poisoned machete blade; after realizing he is going to be sentenced to a life sentence on the prison planet New Half-Way Tree, Antonio escapes to run there on his own, taking his daughter Tan-Tan with him. And ultimately, this is Tan-Tan’s story, not Antonio’s – stolen from her mother and a life of relative privilege, away from a world with AI nannies and eyes everywhere to the “uncivilized” forest of New Half-Way Tree.

Hopkinson’s worldbuilding of Toussaint versus New Half-Way Tree is fascinating. Toussaint is a planet colonized by Afro-Caribbean people instead of White European, and so all of the technology has West African and Caribbean names instead of Greek or English ones; Granny Nanny, and my personal favourite; the AIs that inhabit and run dwellings, as well as living in the minds of its inhabitants, are called eshus. Eshu is the name of a Yoruba trickster deity, and as Nalo Hopkinson says in an interview, he “can be in all places at once… is the ghost in the machine.” By contrast, New Half-Way Tree is Toussaint before it was colonized – a thick jungle, full of creatures beyond Tan-Tan’s ken and all sorts of strange plants. Chichibud is a douen, the indigenous people of New Half-Way Tree and he takes a particular liking to Tan-Tan and a disliking to Antonio, in large part because Tan-Tan is willing to listen to his expertise about his own planet, and Antonio is an arrogant dipshit who doesn’t want to. (Oh gosh, this isn’t commentary at all. Relevantly, I adore Chichibud.) The worldbuilding is so detailed and – this made me laugh – gross at times. At one point, Tan-Tan goes to live with the douens for a while and she can’t digest their food or use their toilet properly! I always get a kick out of worldbuilding that accounts for these things.

Character-wise, I found the first part of the book less enthralling – I was there for the worldbuilding and sheer curiosity. Antonio sucks, and I wish he wasn’t the focus for the first few chapters! But Tan-Tan is a joy – she’s got a strong sense of justice, and her identification with the Midnight Robber mixes that justice with a childlike wonder that she never quite loses. Hopkinson mixes Caribbean folklore with science fiction invention and created fable to make something that sits between cyberpunk and fairytale, with a dark edge.

MINOR SPOILERS AND TRIGGER WARNINGS:

Some of it occurs far enough into the book that it is unfortunately a de facto spoiler, but: This book HEAVILY features:

-Child sexual assault/rape
-Teenage pregnancy
-Victim-blaming
-Kidnapping
-Murder
-Anti-indigeneity (unpacked and very much making a Point)
-Minor body horror

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The Gremlin’s Library: Dead Astronauts by Jeff Vandermeer

August 13th, 2020

Well. WELL. WELL.

I was confused, mildly curious and definitely tempted by the first chapter. I was not prepared.

God fucking damn.

Dead Astronauts is the literary equivalent of that one scene from Neon Genesis Evangelion – well, okay, there’s multiple. But the one that I can’t stop thinking about is the notorious “mind rape” scene with Asuka. Honestly it has a non-zero number of similarities with NGE, thematically and in terms of being surreal in a way that somehow, impossibly, makes you care.

Sitting back for a moment, this book makes the Borne universe all the better. I haven’t read Strange Bird yet, but I remember being slightly dissatisfied with Borne’s ending. Dead Astronauts, however, takes this ending and runs with its implications – the idea of multiple Cities, multiple Companies, the disease of capitalism winding its way through multiple universes. The “dead astronauts” of the title are Moss, Chen and Grayson, three lovers of infinite potential and strange powers. Grayson is the actual astronaut of the three; Moss is some sort of time-travelling lichen-ish being, and Chen is part salamander. (Or something. This is Vandermeer.) The three of them are trying to stop the Company and prevent its destruction of the world, and in a more normal or standard story, that’d be what they do.

This is a more complicated story that that. it’s told non-linearly, and is less concerned with the ultimate fate of the Company than with how it got there. Moss, Grayson and Chen are all important, but so is the blue fox – one of the Company’s creations that broke free – the broken-winged bird that serves as its sentinel, and its current owner Charlie X. The book gets more and more demented as it goes, and some sections are more coherent than others.

Here’s where Dead Astronauts surprised me, though; Vandermeer’s horror always mixes the human with the strange and biological, but Dead Astronauts goes full throttle. Sarah comes up about midway through the book, and she is schizophrenic and homeless, as well as the survivor of some absolutely horrendous child abuse. This pales in comparison – SOMEHOW – to what Charlie X was put through at the hands of a father who enjoyed killing things only to bring them back again…because he enjoyed the act of killing. The disjointed, psychotic writing style just makes this hit all the harder, with literary tricks like five or so pages of “first they killed me. then they brought me back. then they killed me. then they brought me back.” over and over and over again. It’s a character study book, set against a backdrop that serves as a fiery diatribe against capitalism and the destruction of the natural world just by its existence.

So, a full trigger warning for this book, which is long enough that I did not put it in front of this review:

-Child abuse and murder**
-Tricking a child into killing somebody else**
-Gaslighting
-Ableism (specifically sanism)
-Religious delusions
-Forced… cannibalism? Consumption of sentient things? It’s bad yo**
-Mind control and influence
-Suicide
-Unreality
-Sense of inevitability
-Animal abuse and torture**
-Experiments on animals and people**
-Brain trauma/injury
-Body horror**

I also need to emphasize that most of these, but particularly the ones with ** on them, are not minor – they’re significant parts of the plot and can’t be skipped or tuned out of. If these are going to trigger you, don’t read it! You will live if you don’t, so please don’t upset yourself.

Dead Astronauts is an incredible, time-jumping, heartbreaking novel that really should be advertised as literary horror as well as science-fiction. Highly recommend – with provisos.

Tag: Book Reviews

First Chapter Thoughts: One Hundred Years Of Solitude

First Chapter Thoughts: Authority by Jeff Vandermeer

The Gremlin’s Library: Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

The Gremlin’s Library: Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson

The Gremlin’s Library: Dead Astronauts by Jeff Vandermeer