Granskningar och kommentarer

3.5/5. Like its predecessor, a nasty, bloody, fly-buzzing, creepy-crawly book with some great worldbuilding supporting a none-too-complicated plot. Nyx is a fantastic protagonist - brutal, fucked up, burning bridges to forge weapons from the sooty beams. If the novel gets a bit talky at times, that's just part of it.

For the most part, Swedish translators do a good job with lauded anglophone writers. This time, though, not so much. What I imagine is a tour de force of using language, from Dickens to Kanye, to turn over every rock of American race relations, ends up sounding like a European culture major trying to do a "faithful" examination of What Black Americans Think, never sure of when to use what little Swedish ghetto slang he knows and when to just do literal translations of US terms, and killing the novel in the process. There's still obviously a very good, possibly great, novel in there, but it's exactly the thing that makes it great that makes it hard, almost impossible, to translate into another language.

I keep referencing Against The Day recently, can't imagine why, but you know that bit in there where archduke Franz Ferdinand tries to engage in a game of The Dozens with black Chicagoans ca 1900? The whole novel sounds like that in translation.

Look at Hamlet. Hamlet not happy. Hamlet's daddy dead. Hamlet's mommy mean. Hamlet gets other daddy. Other daddy really mean.


I'm not sure what the target audience for this book is, but I'm in it.

Everyone dead. Goodnight!

Awwww.

A friend told me that this was feel-good sci-fi, and it really is. Not that it isn't clever, because it is. Not that it doesn't ask the reader to think about things like racism, consensus thinking, cultural differences and gender roles, because it does. Not that horrible things don't happen in it, because they do.

But it's just... if the distinction between hard and soft sci-fi still holds, this definitely falls in the latter camp in more than one way. Chambers is happy to throw some technobabble at the obvious problems ("The ship is powered by algae, OK? Somehow.") so she can get past that to the question of how people (humans and others) relate to each other. It's funny how the real-world baseline of the novel - how the internet and worldwide mass media have become the new normal in how we interact (or don't) with each other and the world - would itself have been hard sci-fi 50-60 years ago. And into this world of multiple alien species and cultures trying to co-operate as well as they can, Chambers throws a plucky little Firefly-esque crew of workers doing their job. And it's all just so damn... optimistic. Not carefree, but caring.

My only real complaint is that it feels too short; there are things here I would have loved to dwell on, characters I would have liked to get to know better.

But still: Awwww.

4/5 for content, 2/5 for form. Basically one long interview, with the questions left in. Interesting if you're looking for straight-up information about Harriet and the movies she made (which, honestly, you should be, especially in post-#metoo times) but still just one long transcription.

So I finished Solenoid on Sunday.

And it's... definitely what you'd expect of something that Cartarescu considers his masterpiece. He starts from a simple premise: What if the Narrator (who's never explicitly named but shares a birthday and a first work with MC) chickened out after his first poetry reading went disastrously wrong and never pursued a literary career, instead becoming an uninspired teacher at a junior high school on the other side of Bucarest? And also, what if Bucarest was part of some weird experiment by Tesla worshippers who had installed huge Tesla coils (there's the title) under select houses (including, it turns out, the narrator's own) all over Bucarest? Also, if there was a growing underground placard-waving protest movement asking, no, demanding an end to this ridiculous notion of death? Down with death! Down with aging! Down with sickness! Down with this unfair entrapment within flesh machines with clearly defined spatial and temporal limits that we never had any say in designing! Democratize existence! You know that Bill Hicks gag, "If you're so pro-life, don't block abortion clinics - lock arms and block cemeteries." Cartarescu does just that and he makes it work.

Of course nothing's simple in Cartarescu's world, and yet it all feels so effortless, the way he builds this into a four-dimensional tesseract of a novel that makes Against The Day feel linear. He weaves together detailed realistic (if always entrancing) depictions of life under 1980s Ceacescu or in a 1960s TBC ward with pure science fiction, with surreal flights into the stratosphere or the microscopic alongside straightfaced biographies of authors, mathematicians and esoterics who somehow relate to his story, roping in Kafka and Tarkovsky and Mann and Verne and the Voynich manuscript etc, and doing it so seamlessly that you eventually stop trying to fit it all together and just ride the wave wherever he takes you. It's like watching the actual brush strokes of Jackson Pollock rather than the canvas the dead paint splatters on. I mean, he's so full of ideas, and moves so perfectly between them, that it makes just as much sense for him to wonder whether he really had a twin brother who died as an infant, as it does for him to be Fantastic Voyage-d into a mite Messiah so he can tell his fellow mites about the good will of the enormous person they live on.

What gets me is how easily all this could become just an exercise, just empty metaphor. But it never does. I've never been to Bucarest but I feel like I could navigate it from a Cartarescu novel - maybe not the real Bucarest, but it's there, just as real as the Lovecraftian exhibitions he finds under abandoned factories. The story is, in the end, grounded in so much love and anger and fear (he spends ten pages just writing help! help! help!) and humour and strength and imagination that it takes my breath away.

It's so messy and so broken and so horrific and so hopeful.

At the start, I find myself thinking of King's Rage, except from the other side. A teacher tells her pupils on the last day of class that she's about to retire, but first she wants to tell them why she became a teacher, why she's acted the way she has, and ... that two of them killed her daughter and she's about to take her revenge.

But that's just the beginning of the novel, which then proceeds to go through one Rashomonism after another, handing the microphone to different players in the drama to let them give their take on what happened, what led up to it, and where they're going with it now. Minato goes through the same story again and again, not necessarily changing what happens but how and why, mixing in influences from Burgess to Dostoevsky to Murakami (not the jazz'n'cats one, the Audition one) to examine just how we justify our actions to ourselves.

There are bits about the novel that feel a little too written; since it consists of six monologues, there's the inevitable question of whether someone would actually say or write this, or whether they'd make this and that analysis at that point, or if that's just Minato wanting to set the scene. And anyway, part of her point is that all of the characters are various shades of fucked up and seeing as several of them are young teenagers who take themselves much too seriously, I absolutely buy it.

3? 4? 3? 4? In the end, I'm leaning upwards. Not a perfect novel, but a vicious twisty little slice of darkness anyway.

Korede's little sister Ayoola is young and beautiful and has had men after her every waking moment since she entered puberty.

She's killed at least three of them, claiming self-defense, and Korede (being the older, supposedly wiser, supposedly less attractive sister) has had to help her hide the evidence.

My Sister, The Serial Killer manages to be both a thoroughly entertaining novel (a very quick read, short chapters, just enough flashbacks to set the scene and keep us on our toes until the end) and a biting satire of gender roles. Is Ayoola truly a sociopath, or has she simply learned to live in a world where women are treated as prey, where beauty and compliance with the norm are commodities that have to be sold all over again every single day of one's life? Is the doctor that both sisters are infatuated with the modern sensitive Nice Guy that Korede sees him as, or the shallow temporary entertainment Ayoola treates him as? Braithwaite isn't telling; her narrator may have her ideas, but she's part of it all herself. I love how sneaky the book is; every single everyday social interaction, whether with bosses or cops or boyfriends or fellow nurses or their (now-dead) father, is just slightly off-balance without ever going over the top. Everyone survives an off-balance world in their own way... until the balance shifts too far and they don't.

I'm very much of two minds about this. On the one hand, Winder's history of Germany from ancient times up to 1933 is certainly full of both broad strokes and little anecdotes, told with humour and a personal touch that often serves to package the information well rather than distract from it.

On the other hand, Winder's sense of humour will take some getting used to, and his fascination with kitsch and constant tone of amused contempt isn't the book's strongest selling point.

I don't think any one volume is 100% perfect, but as a complete work it's one of the most intriguing, thematically well-developed trilogies I've read. Which honestly isn't saying a whole lot, but still. Jemisin sets up her world, dropping lots of little details that seem like just worldbuilding, and then bring them all back in different waves.

Coming directly from Baldwin to this worked better than I could have imagined. 4.5/5 mostly because of the way it's so obviously a third of a novel. The whole thing may well end up a 5.