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Blood. Schoolgirls. What else d'ya want? Not the most original plot, but it's got spunk.

Fucked up Lovecraft/Burroughsian description of a repressed outsider teenager forced to go on a class trip in Ceaucescu's 1973, and hating every second of having to live with his horny, drinking classmates so much he escapes into nightmares... The imagery just as vivid and putrescent as in Orbitor, sometimes absolutely stunning and there are promising themes in there, it's often too concentrated and too self-obsessed to make it worth digging for them in the general nastiness. It's an unpleasant novel; I'm not sure that makes it a bad novel, but it also doesn't automatically make it a good one.

Read here: ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/u/uzanne/octave/end/

Yes, Uzanne is taking the piss, but 120 years later he seems remarkably prescient; the exact technology aside, he gives a decent description not only of where the publishing and news industry has been and is going in the early 21st century, but even outlines why; the excess of information, the need to have it available at short notice, the ability of anyone to get published on their own terms... He even acknowledges that with the death of the book comes an even greater availability of books (or novels). It's remarkable how, everytime something happens that leads someone to declare the book dead, starting with Socrates through Gutenberg to Edison to cinema to the computer to the e-reader, we also get access to far more literature than we had before the book "died".

At some point, when you stop making things, when you stop selling things, when you stop creating things, the only thing that remains is the experience industry. Theme parks, gaming products, memory enhancements, prostitution. The product: making the client feel good about him- or herself. (Or let's face it, in most cases, himself.) Promising a unique experience to every one of the hundreds of thousands of clients being herded through. How's that for a metaphor of the American dream, hmmm?

The stories in CivilWarLand In Bad Decline are set in a US about to collapse, or shortly afterwards; not quite The Road, but not a million miles away either. Those who still have (or who can take) can buy clean consciences, either in exchange for cash, or simply by knowing how to justify themselves. And others play along, because pointing out that they're being used would be admitting that the dream is a lie, and that's worse. So you focus on yourself and your nearest and dearest, and squeeze as much as you can out of everyone else. Tell them to rely on themselves, while taking their means for doing so.

"You've known me your whole life," Joel said. "I'm your friend."
"Not a Pepsi," said the billy-club man. "Not a spoonful of relish. Not a sugar packet. The time has come for me to look out for me and mine."
"I am you and yours," Joel said. "We were schoolfriends. Remember the caroling parties? Remember when Oscar called sister Nan a tub? Remember?"
"No," the billy-club man said.

But his heroes are the no-hopers operating the rides, the ones whom the dream tells us must at some point get a lucky break and be compensated for their misery/drudgery/slavery, but whose salvation only lies in realising that it's not possible.

Have I achieved serenity? No. Do I have a meaningful hobby that makes the days fly by like minutes? No. I have a wild desire to smell the ocean. I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures and cheers them on like a brainless dad as they run roughshod over the rest of us. He gives us a need for love and no way to get any. He gives us a desire to be liked and personal attributes that make us utterly unlikable. Having placed his flawed and needy children in a world of exacting specifications, he deducts the difference between what we have and what we need from our hearts and our self-esteem and our mental health.

And if that sounds depressing, it is, but it's also very darkly funny; funny as in Kafka, funny as in Vonnegut rewriting Candide. Earlier this year I read Cory Doctorow's Makers which deals with a similar setting but completely misses the point of it. Saunders, on the other hand, ends it with a quiet call for resistance. One that he knows is hopeless... but still.

There's an old saying (well, it's starting to sound old) that if the 19th century with its optimism and progress ended in 1914, then the 20th century of dictatorships and great wars ended in 1989. The wall fell, the oppressed cut symbols from their flags, the experiment was declared a failure and we started over. Everyone (well, every European, which is what counts) was free and could live as they always wanted, with democracy and justice for all.

No one had taught us what freedom means. We'd only ever learned how to die for freedom.

But then there's the reality of history. Right or wrong, the Soviet Union stood for over 70 years, for better and worse, but always there as an idea, a utopia that people actually lived in. And overnight, they were told that not just the execution but the entire idea was wrong. Everything they'd fought and died and killed for, everything they believed in for four generations, abolished and replaced with the word "freedom", to many so vaguely defined that it couldn't trump the "freedom" that the powers that be had spent decades convincing them they already had. Freedom to be unemployed, freedom to be at the mercy of clever gangsters, freedom to be run from your home if you were of the wrong ethnic group, freedom to vote for several corrupt politicians instead of just one, freedom to eat at McDonald's or buy Russian-made jeans if you can afford it. If you don't have cash you can always earn it.

I worked in a perfume factory. Instead of a salary, we were paid in perfume and cosmetics.

In Time Second Hand, Alexievich finishes the mega-epos about Homo Sovieticus that she began more than 30 years earlier, with a series of interviews made during the 20 years after that moment when Boris Yeltsin stepped onto a tank and put the USSR out of everyone's misery. She tracks the death of Great Ideas, revolutions and the fall of empires by shutting up and letting people talk about themselves, letting the reader piece it together from a patchwork quilt of lives. Interview upon interview with old Soviet citizens and their children who get to speak, uninterrupted, stumbling over their words, trying to express what it means to lose something everyone tells them they're supposed to just forget. How they move on.

Or don't. Many of the interviews are with the surviving family of people who've killed themselves; the general who hung himself rather than stand trial for the 1990 coup that created Boris Yeltsin, the old WWII vet who threw himself in front of a train crying for Stalin, the woman who waited until her daughter was old enough to survive on her own, the schoolboy who just did what he'd been told was the most noble thing one could do...

"Vera, stop reading him war poems! He just plays war games all the time!" "All boys love war games." "Sure, but Igor wants the others to shoot him, so he'll fall. He wants to die! It frightens me, how happily he falls. He calls to the other boys, 'Shoot me, and I'll die!' Never the other way around." (...) What have we been taught all our lives? That you have to live for others ... for a higher goal ... to end up under a tank or burn to death in a plane for the homeland. The mighty, thundering revolution ... a hero's death ... Death was always more beautiful than life.

It's anything but nostalgic. Alexievich herself often sits absolutely dumbfounded, trying to understand. Sure, the Soviet Union was an oppressive dictatorship, nobody ... well, not many deny that when they think about it. But there has to be an explanation for how someone can return from Stalin's labour camps to find his family executed, and is still genuinely happy to be let back into the party. Someone has to take responsibility for teaching generations to adore the partisans who dove in front of tanks with grenades in their hands when Chechens become suicide bombers. It's the way people work: if millions of people have died of and for something, it can't just be in vain. So to some, perestroyka becomes a backstabbing myth, Gorbachev a traitor who sold his country to CIA, the masons, the Jews, the gays ... Though to most, it's not that easily explained. And it's not that they miss Stalin, but can you really replace him with unwavering faith in Coca-Cola®?

The beloved Russian literature - Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov - gets brought up again and and again, but always in the past tense. A dictatorship based on an idea can be threatened by ideas, shaken by revelations. But a society where everyone knows that the the strongest and most ruthless comes out on top, where gangsters become idols and the only ones in exile are the nouveau riche ... what do words have to offer against that?

They used to send you to jail over The Gulag Archipelago. You read it in secrecy, copying it on typewriters or by hand. I thought ... I thought that if thousands of people read it, things would change. There'd be repentance and tears. And what happened? Everything hidden in desk drawers was brought out and printed, everything thought in secret was said allowed. And?! Now the books collect dust on the tables. And people just hurry past ... (Trails off.)

So what's next? How do you learn from history if all you learn is that it was a Bad Idea Full Stop? Alexievich barely comments on the current situation in the former USSR, that's a different matter - though the regimes of Putin and Lukashenko loom between the lines, using the boogeyman of Bolshevism to justify jailing dissidents, finding other scapegoats to strengthen their power, Alexievich doesn't write about them but of the hole they're trying to fill. Of how people try to resolve a double life, to reconcile the great ideals of solidarity and equality they fought for with the reality they actually lived with and the willingness to ignore the difference. Quite possibly, that's the story of the 21st century.

A few years ago I read Tadjo's Queen Pokou: Concerto for a Sacrifice, which remains one of the most intriguing - not necessarily best, though it's very good, but intriguing - ruminations on the idea of myth I've read. It takes an old West African folk tale and starts retelling it, turning it inside out and reimagining it in every standard plot available, looking for a way out, looking for a story that won't trap her...

Far From My Father is in a way a very different novel, a completely modern tale of a young French-Ivorian woman who comes back to a war-torn Cote d'Ivoire to bury her father after he dies, and comes to realise she knows a lot less about both him and her supposed home country than she always thought she did...

Yet it's once again a story of a story, of the malleability and inscrutability of history. It's first and foremost a deftly told family saga, two generations caught in changing times trying to balance where they come from with where they're trying to go. Nina's parents are of a generation who changed everything; the free-thinking French girl who chose her own way, the educated post-Colonial Season Of Migration To The North-style African who looked to build a new world... and yet they can't simply draw a line and say the new world starts here, neither discard the past or live in it entirely. It's a confusing legacy they leave their children, caught between two worlds, a revolution half-finished and ripe with corruption as everyone tries to make their own way. You can ask questions of the past, but you have to fill in the answer yourself.

Don't forget to put your own oxygen mask on before helping others.

And damn, Tadjo's prose is neat - "Outside, the sun shone with impunity."

Much as with Beijing Baby, I'm tempted to remark that if this is the sort of thing that passes as dangerous dissidence in the PRC, that probably says more about the state's attitude than about the actual criticism... But then, Han makes the same point himself several times over: if China is really as powerful, just and fair as the official story claims, why do they need censorship? Why do they need to block search engines? Why do they need to command demonstrations against foreign interests while banning them for domestic issues? What are they so afraid of?

As with any collection of blog posts, there's a lot of "I think" and "In my opinion" here that isn't necessarily of interest, but Han has a good ear for satire ("Would you believe a capitalist country like Australia is so poor, they can't even afford tollbooths on the highways?") and occasionally delivers some quite bitter pills, directed both towards the government and those looking for a simple way of changing it. Of course, he has to work within what he can say and get away with it, which is often half the fun.

You can skip many of the bits about rally driving, though.

Go figure that I should finish this and then stumble over this thread of people trying to justify why raping children isn't as bad as it sounds...

Anyway, Becoming Abigail is the second Abani I've read, and (partly thanks to a better translation) even stronger than Graceland. Short and to the point: Abigail is born, the daughter of a woman who (she's told) was outspoken, active, fierce... and died giving birth to her. So she's named after her mother, and that's her entire life: fitting into others' expectations of what she's supposed to do. It's not that she can't make her own identity, it's that nobody asks for it. She's asked to live up to what her mother was, but not to what she actually (or allegedly) was but what men remember her as. The worst part is that there's not even necessarily any malice in it; the man she loves graciously allows that she can rise above her "dark" past, the women looking out for her best interests dismiss that she could possibly have a will of her own. Abani could have written a long, complicated novel about cultures and immigration and patriarchs, instead he keeps it short, sketching Abigail's story in beautifully detailed moments, capturing every movement of her hands as she tries to manipulate her world.