Michael Kevane

On the flight back from Burkina Faso I got to read three short stories from old issues of The New Yorker that I found in the FAVL office, leftovers from 2014!

“Story with Bird” by Kevin Canty is an amazing 2 page exercise in capturing a relationship with remarkable style.  I am not sure the “animal eyes in the dark” bit worked.  But much of the writing was like seeing a master technician at work! Tremendous review by Betsey over at Mookse.

“Rosendale” by Paul La Farge.  I was less taken with this story.  Very deliberate writing about writing, this time a horror story.  Stops and starts and breaking of boundaries, and pretty interesting.  But I did find myself skipping about.  She’s writing a book but she’s also a crack-addicted pole dancer?  Trevor did not like it either, over at Mookse, and he has reasonable reasons.

“Ordinary Sins” by Kirsten Valdez Quade.  Really this one went over to Raymond Carver territory big time (or to go the other direction, Breaking the Waves), and was just too much setup for a brief, quiet moment of two people holding each other. Mookse commentators and I part ways on this story.

Last year I start to read Wasp Factory by Iain Banks but I could not finish it: too bleak, too violent, too disturbing.  But I saw a mention of Feersum Endjinn somewhere, and so requested it through interlibrary loan.  What a great book.  Four narratives overlapping a central event in the far future where the humans who remained on Earth after the singularity have renounced AI’s and permanent virtuality, and so exist in “base reality” (where they are essentially quasi-immortal since their brains are linked through implants in continuous time to a giant database (the crypt) and so it they die they can be restarted at last moment of consciousness.  Like Robert Reed’ Greatship.  Anyway, Earth is under threat.  One narrative is a “chief scientist” and the rulers, another a recently deceased members of the ruling class who exists only in the crypt, another the asura, a program that emerges from the crypt as a failsafe, and finally Bascule, written in phonetic Dickensian-English.  The four narratives come together in a reasonably satisfying way (it is a novel, so things have to be tidied up at the end).  The Bascule narrative is what makes the novel special.  The phonetic English forces the reader to slow down.  I found I could only read one section at a sitting.  So Banks manipulates reader time, which is a nice and relevant effect.