book reviews
Aug. 18th, 2024 10:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenA recent series, where I cross-post any Goodreads reviews I've written recently that I think are worth keeping here, with a bit of context for those who haven't come across the books.
The Water Outlaws, SL Huang
[fantasy martial arts novel] I loved this book. It's a retelling of a Chinese martial arts classic, genderswapped so it's a story about a gang of all-female bandits, and it's rollicking, high-action brilliant romp with lots of amazing characters and a main character in particular who I would have died for on page 2. Oh, Lin Chong, I love her so. The story didn't end quite the way I wanted, but that's not because the story wasn't good; I just loved the characters so very much and wanted slightly different things for them. (To be clear: I wanted Lin Chong to find love.) Highly, highly recommended.
The Lantern and the Night Moths, Yiilin Wang
[Chinese poetry in translation; NB. the author is the person whose translations were used unattributed by the British Museum] I had quite an adventure getting this book (eventually, Guanghwa on Shaftesbury Avenue got it for me along with some signed postcards from the author) so I was a little disappointed that in the end, I didn't enjoy it as much as the quest to find it. It's a selection of poetry by five Chinese poets across a broad spread of history, translated by a Canadian-Chinese translator, with some historical and contextual notes provided. I wanted to have the experience of reading Chinese poetry, noting that Mandarin and English are so wildly dissimilar that it wouldn't be very close to the original at all, but that translation and deep thought can always convey some meaning. And, you know, I got that. So that's good. I was particularly fascinated with the poet Qui Jin, a Chinese feminist revolutionary who died at the age of 32 in 1907. I'd never heard of her or her poetry and I'm very glad I now have.
However, the problem with this book is that it's not a slim volume of poetry in translation and explanatory notes. It contains rather a lot too much of the translator's thoughts and feelings on things. Is that me being cruel? Perhaps. Especially when the translator's thoughts and feelings are about feminism, diaspora, identity, loss: things that are important, especially to me. (A particularly cruel thought from me, the much-less lauded diaspora writer: you're translating poetry in your family's language into English, fuck off with your diaspora problems.) But it's also the translator's thoughts and feelings about other things, which... again. Okay. Fine. Fine, also, that she frames her notes on Qiu Jin as a letter to the poet herself. Cutesy, but fine. Then you read the letter, and you're like, I'm not saying it's not a real issue, but do we really think the nineteenth century matyred revolutionary poet Qiu Jin would have cared that much about the Sinophobia of the modern Western publishing industry?
Who knows. Maybe she would. Maybe I am crotchety and not meeting a work on its terms. And I do love poetry, and I'm glad to have had this chance to read it. There we go.
The Golden Girls Road Trip, Kate Galley
[women's fiction/romance, f/f] This is an odd book. For one thing, it's a queer book about a love affair between two women and the blurb and half of the book itself seem committed to eliding it. The love interest, Alex, is carefully non-pronouned for the first hundred pages; there's a tiresome resurgence of all those nineties tropes about "I don't want to label it" and "it's not about gender it's about love". All the odder for the fact there is no homophobia *in* the book, and the narrator character doesn't seem conflicted about it. (Can't say, of course, if the author is queer, but I suspect not.)
However. I have to admit, it is wonderfully, deathlessly romantic. Connie, our heroine, had this passionate summer love affair at the age of eighteen in 1970 - and then left overnight, leaving her girlfriend deeply heartbroken. And by the time Connie goes back to find Alex, fifty-two years have passed. Isn't that romantic? It's incredibly romantic. And more so, I think, because Alex at seventy is a hot mess, a brilliant artist with a bit of a drinking problem and an extremely shady financial scheme in train; Connie, meanwhile, has never told anyone the circumstances under which she left and is also engaged to a man who's trying to use her as a replacement for his dead wife. I love that the idealised romance of the past has been replaced by two real people trying to get along, and also, that they fall in love again anyway. It's lovely. I do recommend it
[note: I don't reply to comments from people I don't know on GR, but there is one comment on my review for this and it's stupid and homophobic.].
The Inhumans and Other Stories, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay (ed.)
[Early twentieth-century Bengali science fiction in first English translation] I'm counting this as read even though I only read about half of it - mostly this is because I wasn't really enjoying the title story, the long novella. These are all SF stories translated out of Bengali, and The Inhumans, the long one, is an SF play on King Solomon's Mines and its ilk - mysterious lost kingdom in Africa etc - with all the terrible racist tropes about Africa that we're familiar with. So kind of uncomfortable, but I have to say, it is fascinating and validating to hear SF written from an Indian mind in an Indian language, especially when you are an SFF writer in English who is occasionally only in the genre under sufferance. It's not my language, really: I am Bengali-Assamese on one side but my sketchy Bengali is not up to much. But that's not the point, and the remaining three stories were what I was looking for. One is an HG Wells voyage-to-Venus story, quite perfectly dull, until the narrator observes that the skies of Venus are a little alarming to a Hindu-born child who naturally sees the infinite in a certain way, and you remember all at once that this *isn't* Wells; the next story could be SF-ish Conan Doyle, except it's set in Ranchi in an Indian family home where the young daughter wants to play weddings so there's always a baraat going on (!); and finally, the story called "The Martian Purana" is, wonderfully, a wildly irreverent Mahabharata modern AU where they go to Mars in the middle for some reason. I didn't finish the novella, but I am very glad I read this.
I've also been rereading The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (the John Le Carré classic spy novel), without feeling the need to tell Goodreads about it. I think I've only read it once and that only in the last few years, which is odd, as it was my dad's favourite book by his favourite author. (He was always vaguely disappointed that I was never tapped on the shoulder at Oxford. I did tell him, well, maybe I'm lying to you about it. I applied to MI6 in the ordinary way a little later but he said it wasn't the same.) It's very good! If... weird, now. Misogynist as hell, and sometimes just too wildly frustrating in terms of what stunted humans the main characters are. But what I have always wanted to do is a fantasy novella rewrite of the story with a woman in the lead role who's rather cleverer than Alec Leamas, in terms of what use she could make of the girl who's in love with her. (In my mental version of the story, it's this same lead who becomes Control: at least her successor, as perestroika begins.)
And, the thing is, the original is, also, a fantasy. Both because of the passage of time--the flat where Leamas ends up is grotty and cheap and miserable, in Bayswater; see also making your living as a down-and-out homosexual by translating pieces about English country life for the German press--and because the Circus, as Le Carré described it, could never have existed. Human people have human emotions. Sorry, Smiley and co. I'm pretty sure there were dour British intelligence agents throughout the twentieth century and I'm pretty sure at least some of them had feelings, kisses, favourite books, good days where they didn't worry too much, and children.
Anyway. Not sure that one will see the light of day, but I'd like it to.
I've also just read another book by Emily Tesh, The Incandescent, which comes out May of next year, and went on Bluesky to express all my thoughts and feelings about it, but the takeaway message for that was: brilliant, absurdly relevant to me in particular, but honestly just brilliant. I read it twice in three days. A gift.
The Water Outlaws, SL Huang
[fantasy martial arts novel] I loved this book. It's a retelling of a Chinese martial arts classic, genderswapped so it's a story about a gang of all-female bandits, and it's rollicking, high-action brilliant romp with lots of amazing characters and a main character in particular who I would have died for on page 2. Oh, Lin Chong, I love her so. The story didn't end quite the way I wanted, but that's not because the story wasn't good; I just loved the characters so very much and wanted slightly different things for them. (To be clear: I wanted Lin Chong to find love.) Highly, highly recommended.
The Lantern and the Night Moths, Yiilin Wang
[Chinese poetry in translation; NB. the author is the person whose translations were used unattributed by the British Museum] I had quite an adventure getting this book (eventually, Guanghwa on Shaftesbury Avenue got it for me along with some signed postcards from the author) so I was a little disappointed that in the end, I didn't enjoy it as much as the quest to find it. It's a selection of poetry by five Chinese poets across a broad spread of history, translated by a Canadian-Chinese translator, with some historical and contextual notes provided. I wanted to have the experience of reading Chinese poetry, noting that Mandarin and English are so wildly dissimilar that it wouldn't be very close to the original at all, but that translation and deep thought can always convey some meaning. And, you know, I got that. So that's good. I was particularly fascinated with the poet Qui Jin, a Chinese feminist revolutionary who died at the age of 32 in 1907. I'd never heard of her or her poetry and I'm very glad I now have.
However, the problem with this book is that it's not a slim volume of poetry in translation and explanatory notes. It contains rather a lot too much of the translator's thoughts and feelings on things. Is that me being cruel? Perhaps. Especially when the translator's thoughts and feelings are about feminism, diaspora, identity, loss: things that are important, especially to me. (A particularly cruel thought from me, the much-less lauded diaspora writer: you're translating poetry in your family's language into English, fuck off with your diaspora problems.) But it's also the translator's thoughts and feelings about other things, which... again. Okay. Fine. Fine, also, that she frames her notes on Qiu Jin as a letter to the poet herself. Cutesy, but fine. Then you read the letter, and you're like, I'm not saying it's not a real issue, but do we really think the nineteenth century matyred revolutionary poet Qiu Jin would have cared that much about the Sinophobia of the modern Western publishing industry?
Who knows. Maybe she would. Maybe I am crotchety and not meeting a work on its terms. And I do love poetry, and I'm glad to have had this chance to read it. There we go.
The Golden Girls Road Trip, Kate Galley
[women's fiction/romance, f/f] This is an odd book. For one thing, it's a queer book about a love affair between two women and the blurb and half of the book itself seem committed to eliding it. The love interest, Alex, is carefully non-pronouned for the first hundred pages; there's a tiresome resurgence of all those nineties tropes about "I don't want to label it" and "it's not about gender it's about love". All the odder for the fact there is no homophobia *in* the book, and the narrator character doesn't seem conflicted about it. (Can't say, of course, if the author is queer, but I suspect not.)
However. I have to admit, it is wonderfully, deathlessly romantic. Connie, our heroine, had this passionate summer love affair at the age of eighteen in 1970 - and then left overnight, leaving her girlfriend deeply heartbroken. And by the time Connie goes back to find Alex, fifty-two years have passed. Isn't that romantic? It's incredibly romantic. And more so, I think, because Alex at seventy is a hot mess, a brilliant artist with a bit of a drinking problem and an extremely shady financial scheme in train; Connie, meanwhile, has never told anyone the circumstances under which she left and is also engaged to a man who's trying to use her as a replacement for his dead wife. I love that the idealised romance of the past has been replaced by two real people trying to get along, and also, that they fall in love again anyway. It's lovely. I do recommend it
[note: I don't reply to comments from people I don't know on GR, but there is one comment on my review for this and it's stupid and homophobic.].
The Inhumans and Other Stories, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay (ed.)
[Early twentieth-century Bengali science fiction in first English translation] I'm counting this as read even though I only read about half of it - mostly this is because I wasn't really enjoying the title story, the long novella. These are all SF stories translated out of Bengali, and The Inhumans, the long one, is an SF play on King Solomon's Mines and its ilk - mysterious lost kingdom in Africa etc - with all the terrible racist tropes about Africa that we're familiar with. So kind of uncomfortable, but I have to say, it is fascinating and validating to hear SF written from an Indian mind in an Indian language, especially when you are an SFF writer in English who is occasionally only in the genre under sufferance. It's not my language, really: I am Bengali-Assamese on one side but my sketchy Bengali is not up to much. But that's not the point, and the remaining three stories were what I was looking for. One is an HG Wells voyage-to-Venus story, quite perfectly dull, until the narrator observes that the skies of Venus are a little alarming to a Hindu-born child who naturally sees the infinite in a certain way, and you remember all at once that this *isn't* Wells; the next story could be SF-ish Conan Doyle, except it's set in Ranchi in an Indian family home where the young daughter wants to play weddings so there's always a baraat going on (!); and finally, the story called "The Martian Purana" is, wonderfully, a wildly irreverent Mahabharata modern AU where they go to Mars in the middle for some reason. I didn't finish the novella, but I am very glad I read this.
I've also been rereading The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (the John Le Carré classic spy novel), without feeling the need to tell Goodreads about it. I think I've only read it once and that only in the last few years, which is odd, as it was my dad's favourite book by his favourite author. (He was always vaguely disappointed that I was never tapped on the shoulder at Oxford. I did tell him, well, maybe I'm lying to you about it. I applied to MI6 in the ordinary way a little later but he said it wasn't the same.) It's very good! If... weird, now. Misogynist as hell, and sometimes just too wildly frustrating in terms of what stunted humans the main characters are. But what I have always wanted to do is a fantasy novella rewrite of the story with a woman in the lead role who's rather cleverer than Alec Leamas, in terms of what use she could make of the girl who's in love with her. (In my mental version of the story, it's this same lead who becomes Control: at least her successor, as perestroika begins.)
And, the thing is, the original is, also, a fantasy. Both because of the passage of time--the flat where Leamas ends up is grotty and cheap and miserable, in Bayswater; see also making your living as a down-and-out homosexual by translating pieces about English country life for the German press--and because the Circus, as Le Carré described it, could never have existed. Human people have human emotions. Sorry, Smiley and co. I'm pretty sure there were dour British intelligence agents throughout the twentieth century and I'm pretty sure at least some of them had feelings, kisses, favourite books, good days where they didn't worry too much, and children.
Anyway. Not sure that one will see the light of day, but I'd like it to.
I've also just read another book by Emily Tesh, The Incandescent, which comes out May of next year, and went on Bluesky to express all my thoughts and feelings about it, but the takeaway message for that was: brilliant, absurdly relevant to me in particular, but honestly just brilliant. I read it twice in three days. A gift.
no subject
on 2024-08-18 08:38 pm (UTC)V excited to hear there's a new Tesh coming - I just re-read Some Desperate Glory for my book group.
no subject
on 2024-08-20 07:57 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2024-08-18 08:57 pm (UTC)(also, thank you for the reviews, I'm extremely interested in the Chattopadhyay)
no subject
on 2024-08-20 07:58 pm (UTC)If you do read the Chattopadhyay I will be absolutely fascinated to know what you think of it, it's such a remarkable concept.
no subject
on 2024-08-20 12:43 am (UTC)no subject
on 2024-08-20 08:00 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2024-08-22 05:13 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2024-08-22 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2024-08-26 04:10 pm (UTC)