Michael Kevane

Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea was an excellent reading experience. A parable-style meditation on dystopia and hope, with the reader constantly wondering whether the dystopia is right now: a future narrator might present our current early 21st century exactly this way, and a character like Fan might emerge who, though prosaic, becomes a focal point or catalyst for significant change (that we cannot even really imagine, and that Lee leaves unsaid). The narrative voice and technique of alternating windows worked for me, though I could see how for some it might come across as tiresome. The episodes, or vignettes, could almost be read as parables, and invite the reader to provide for each a pithy maxim: Experiencing, through reading, the equanimity of a character facing adversity, bends the mind.

Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer. Unless you really, really, liked Annihilation, I would avoid this novel. It has similar elements: rambling, disjointed narrative, foggy-thinking main character, ambiguous setting, lurking menace, muddy philosophizing, eco-themed naturalism…. But, in my opinion is comes across as pretty hurriedly or lazily written. The prose certainly does not sparkle. If I read one more time that the hero called her purse Shovel Pig, I was ready to scream. I did. Then again. All the fucking way to the end of the novel, she was still talking about “Shovel Pig”? No. Any editor worth their salt would have insisted on changing that. Lots of other instances of bad writing in the novel. A big mess. It read like a tossed off screenplay treatment of a “wouldn’t it be cool” TV show… moody dystopian thriller set in the Pacific Northwest.

The Overstory by Richard Powers was a great read in the beginning, partly because I was under the impression that it was a somewhat sci-fi novel, and would transition from the human characters to a more complex novel that treated the trees, and our living world, as sentient but on a different time scale.

Instead, the novel became a “tree whisperer” clickbait novel. The human characters evolved fairly predictably (to this reader) and the trees never did anything (they may have, but I missed it?). The tree in the Amazon that grew the trunk into the shape of the woman… was that important? It seems like it was never mentioned again. So still waiting for someone with the writing ability of Powers to write the novel that I want to read. Lots of didacticism, as if he had been browsing forestry and biology articles for random tree facts, and going on long hikes with long-winded naturalists.

Martha Wells short novella All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries is really more like a comic. I cannot be the first to point this out. Lots of action, centered on a trained killer who has “grown” a conscience. And because the killer is partly AI, there is plenty of room for “strange” perspectives and interactions. Enjoyable short read!

Premier amour by Ivan Tourgueniev is an enjoyable novella. The modern reader finds it a bit overwrought… we can tell that the “other lover” is the young man’s father almost immediately. If the skill of the novel is portraying how the boy might not be aware of that, and might be incapable of apprehending that, then indeed a feat. But I think that at the time the skill was in portraying a young woman who was frankly coquettish, and frankly a mistress, and the social reality of that situation. Why not have told the story from the young woman’s point of view, then? Beyond the writing skill of anyone, I suppose, in 1860. Maybe George Eliot? So amazing that the novel, as a sustained literary ecosystem (with novelists reading other novelists and adapting their writing accordingly), was really less than 100 years old at the time.

I wish that The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin had been a better novel, but unfortunately it is juvenile and humdrum. I love her later work, and the Earthsea novels. My cover calls this novel “an astonishing tale of one man’s search for utopia” and indeed it reads as if Le Guin had read Ayn Rand and wanted to riff off of that and earn some money and fame? But I don’t know whether in early 1970s that was the case? So I would recommend reading something else. And I followed my own recommendation, skimming extensively after about 200 pages.

My neighborhood book club read and discussed Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner. We’re an odd mix, and it is always interesting to see who “likes” and who doesn’t. Leaving the Atocha Station is about as high literary-meta as you can get: a bored precocious poet is writing, and the novel is about how he’s not writing, and how he’s not even sure what writing, and communicating in general, means, especially not in Spanish in Spain. It is very short, and not much happens. The narrator can be deliberately annoying. But everyone agreed it was an interesting deconstruction of the idea of writing. Everyone liked it!

I really enjoyed reading Earthsea by Ursula K. le Guin in French translation by Philippe Hupp. I had previously only read the first volume in English. Maybe reading in translation lends gravity to what might be, in native language, an ordinary young adult fantasy novel? I found the themes of the second two novels to be far more adult. This was an adventure into the mind, and discovering the country of who we are and what gives life meaning. The occasional action sequence is definitely secondary to long scenes of sitting. First, Ged and Tenar in the treasure caves, and second, Ged and Arren on the sailboat. Sometimes the sitting is accompanied by talking, but very often the sitting is a chance for characters to think. They think a lot, and their thinking changes over the course of the novels. Highly recommended!

Very enjoyable, very readable, Katie Mack’s The End of Everything is good cosmology overview of where the field is at on the question of what happens when the universe winds down. Obviously the math is way beyond me, but Mack does a good job helping you think you understand a little bit more than you did before.

Finished Eifelheim by Michael Flynn… a bit exhausting, but the “everyone is going to die” reader anticipation of plague novels is pretty compelling nevertheless. The frame story doesn’t work very well, but the Krenken-Dietrich-Manfred main story is very moving. I’d read a good novella told from Manfred’s point of view.

Reading this sci-fi “empire” novel A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (the new labeling for what used to be called space opera, I guess) was enjoyable. Very good characterization of the two central characters. A decent science-fi idea, though in the end perhaps underdeveloped. A good editor I think could have taken this one step further – there were numerous small grammar issues and repetitions (the main character was “on the verge of a hysterical laugh” enough times that I started noticing the construction). I will admit that I skimmed the last third: denouement is such a hard problem in novel writing. I’m becoming more of a fan of “circular” writing where the ending turns around to go right back to the beginning (influence of reading Pnin, I suppose).