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Abandoned about 2/3 in. Life's too short to read sophomoric first-person wannabe Norman Bates narrations depending entirely on plot-convenient amnesia and improbably well-timed diary entries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-akyoO4MqI

Hear ye, hear ye, court is now in session, the honourable judge Mikhail Shishkin presiding.

Taking Izmail is a trial with a thousand witnesses, and it's not remotely fair, but then again neither is the crime... if indeed there is one. Shishkin, writing in exile from New Russia in 1998, puts the entirety of Russo-Soviet history, (self-)mythology, literature and society up there in both the witness booth and the bench of the accused. What is Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union? What was it? What stories does it tell about itself? What does it do to itself?

The witnesses are from two camps: existing literature and Shishkin's own. Large parts of the novel are basically a DJ Shadow-esque samplefest of literature from and about Russia - a sentence from the Nestorian chronicle, a name from Dostoevsky, a section from a party newspaper in 1929, bible bible bible, etc etc etc, all living parts of the soul. (Brilliantly translated into Swedish, with each sample given era-appropriate language.) In between he puts in what at first seems to be short stories, occasionally starring a certain Misha and occasionally being something completely different; people trying to raise children in this, people trying to survive, trying to be what the world expects them to be, all of it so full of allusions, Joycean linguistics and details that it needs 30 pages of notes. And then gradually, over 444 pages, it all starts to gel until that heartbreaking finale.

It's not an easy novel to read. It takes me almost 100 pages before it starts to click what he's doing. But then he really starts to deliver. An exodus retelling where Pharaoh never lets the slaves go no matter how many plagues are visited upon everyone, page upon page of famous last words of people who thought they had more, stories of women who had to keep working while everything else was taken away, story after story after story of things that happened or are retellings of things that happened until it all becomes a choir and the choir finally becomes the single voice of a great author being born.

He's definitely his dad's son, right down to the shitty Swedish translation.

Lots of promising details in Hill's debut, but also a frustrating inability to get to the fucking point - over 350 pages, there are so many horror clichés getting tossed at the reader to flesh out a very straightforward plot. Not that they're done badly, but still. Oh well, as far as rock'n'roll horror novels go, it does what it's supposed to.

There's something to Whitehead's writing that's the antithesis of building tension; sure he saves the big twist for the end - and it's the one thing in the book where I feel like that wasn't necessary - but for so much of the book, he's presenting the atrocities forced upon people in living memory so much in passing, as if he knows that the reader already knows what he's going to say, as if the readers are complicit in forgetting and just need their memories prodded a bit... and leaving it up in the air whether they'll admit to knowing.

HG Wells' Martians try again, only this time they've learned marketing. So much easier to have people sell themselves to you than killing them. Especially people who are used to being told what to do. Just replace their leaders, tell their media what to write, and step 3: profit.

You call it slavery, but every sensible human would consider this a normal business agreement that's profitable to both parties. (...) You talk of the end of culture and civilization, but that's simply not true! I don't even know what you mean. Newspapers come out every day, new books are published, they write new TV plays and the industry is running as usual... What are you missing? They've left you everything just as it was: freedom of speech, independence and the constitution. (...) And last but not least, they've given you a permanent source of income that will never run out and doesn't depend on the economic situation.

I just wish there was a bit more to it, it's all described from the diary of one old guy who doesn't really know - or, seemingly, much care - what's happening.

In 1932, after Das blaue Licht got some bad reviews, Leni Riefenstahl decried Cancel Culture: It was the Jews who gave her bad reviews, these foreigners simply didn't understand German art and wanted to silence her. Once Hitler comes to power, that'll change!

(Or at least that's what people claimed she said 40 years later when everyone very much wanted to not be her.)

I suppose this is what a character like Riefenstahl deserves: A biographer who both takes her seriously as an artist, and calls bullshit on her refusal to take responsibility for her part in making Hitler look like a rockstar, and on culture's tendency to not want to know - either make someone a scapegoat for everything, or absolve them of everything, as long as Normality is maintained.

The only thing I'm really missing is more on the otherartists who did what she did. What happened to them? Why do we only remember the name Riefenstahl?

50 years old, and simultaneously frighteningly up-to-date and hopelessly dated. Arendt picks up issues and dynamics that are still (and maybe always were) relevant in her attempt to define violence and power as not two sides of a coin but antitheses; power can employ violence, but violence destroys the base for power, which based on the situation in the late 60s - Vietnam, student revolts, Prague - asks questions of "Where do we go from here?" that largely remain unanswered, even though several of her warnings certainly ring even more true now. Unfortunately her definition of "power" feels flat and simplistic (not least in her glib dismissal of the Black Power movement and anticolonialism) which sort of makes her whole building shake a bit.

Good summary

The woods are dark and deep and you have no promises to keep, except to yourself. Death In Her Hands takes up the thread from Eileen and My Year Of Rest And Relaxation and reduces it to one woman alone in the woods, increasing paranoia and confusion, finally granted agency when the life where she might have used it is behind her. A demand for a mystery when you can't live with the answers you have? Metafiction that dismisses itself and always returns to the dark woods.

Falling in love, as presented through a never-ending barrage of feverish metaphors, similes and allegories. Curiously, I'm not sure any of them are bad; you could probably read this book a hundred times and get stuck on different phrases every time. But as a whole, it's more exhausting than entrancing trying to penetrate (eh) this mass of words to get at anything beneath it.

Being alone in a cabin in the middle of the woods, cut off from all society, with no one around to help. To Americans, the source of thousands of horror stories; to Swedes, the perfect summer holiday.

The whole "final girl" concept - the one girl who survives the slasher movie, scarred and half-insane - has almost been deconstructed more than it's ever been played straight, much like the Cabin In The Woods setting. (In Cabin in the Woods, for one thing.) It made me expect more of a horror story than the psychological thriller Sager delivers. That said, what she does with the concept works very well; constantly blurring the line between the victim and survivor roles, between admiration and pity and fetishisation, between trauma and experience that's forced upon the women at the centre of the story. Can you truly love someone, with no ulterior motives, whose trauma is publicly carrying the fantasies of an entire country?

So, OK, the ending. Maybe one twist too many. Sager spends so much time setting up how everyone can be hiding something or working from complex motivations, that when the whole thing finally turns into a slasher movie towards the end and all questions get answered it's bound to be a letdown. Maybe it could have used some of that ambiguity the rest of the novel uses so well. Still, a perfect novel to read in one long go in the summer sun.

Chambers closes out her space opera trilogy by returning back home to the humans who, despite making contact, despite having arrived, despite having been (reluctantly) accepted into a multi-species society where they remain the poor country bumpkin refugees, still cling to their generation ships and old traditions. A paean to community, to identity, to long-term thinking and reinvention... yeah, it gets very idealistic, perhaps overly so, and uses a bare-bones plot and far too many narrators to get there. But somehow it feels right that a series as optimistic as Wayfarers ends with a book that's so far into optimism, as a dream of survival against impossible odds, that it feels like a hippy dream. Right now, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Smaller than its predecessor, which doesn't hurt it at all; where The Long Way... literally travelled halfway across the galaxy, this one is about being stuck in one place - either one body or one scrapyard - and having to deal with that. Which not only makes it extra relatable under Current Circumstances, but also allows its characters to live more in this strange, harsh but ultimately optimistic world that Chambers has created. The writing is still more cinematic (or TV-matic) than literary, but it works, and she brings a few angles to the age-old are-AI-people Bladerunner shit that feel fresh. And any book that makes me pick it up before I get out of bed gets an above average grade from me.