Michael Kevane

I was skeptical before starting China Miéville’s The City and the City.  I had read and enjoyed Embassytown, but he did go on and on towards the end and I found myself skimming a lot.  The City and the City was far more gripping, until the final quarter when it descended into conventional detection (really almost Agatha Christie) genre resolution.  “The old man did it, Scooby!”  I guess, what else can you do?  But until then, an amazing concept of the city and the city unseeing to each other.  You could discuss for hours (well maybe 30 minutes?).  My loss, I stingily read books from the library, years after everyone else has read them, and they no longer remember nor do they care.  The mood of this novel will linger.

I checked this collection by Gardner Dozois out from the library (yes I still do that).  Science fiction generally holds its own: 20 years later most of the stories in the collection read like they could have been written now.  Here are my highlights (and I did not read all of the stories in the collection, and others fell into the “Ugh, what an awful story.” category.).

• Tony Daniel, A Dry, Quiet War.  This was an exceptional story, I thought.  A line I will remember for a long time: ‘”Don’t you worry, skyfaller,” he said, “I know exactly where I stand now.”‘  A bit heavy-handed on the long time frame angle (billions of years) and the reluctant duty of the soldier.  But I fell for it.  I loved this line too: “In that moment, I spread out, stretched a bit in ways that Bex could not see, but that Marek could…”  I like how he used spread and stretched to try to convey the sense of the ability to “read/see” into multiple dimensions.
• Maureen McHugh, The Cost to Be Wise.  Blogged about this when I read it, I really enjoyed the anthropological-style immersion.
• Gregory Feeley, The Weighing of Ayre. A very nice historical sci-fi story, wonderful evocation of Holland in the 17th century and the discovery and uses of the microscope.
• Michael Cassutt, The Longer Voyage. Very reminiscent of the sci-fi I read as a youth, about taking that voyage.  I guess it is the opposite of Joyce’s Eveline?
• Nancy Kress, Flowers of Aulit Prison.  I really liked the story, even though there were seeming oddities in internal consistency.  I looked her up, but maybe it was a tawdry covers of her novels, or the plodding plot summaries of Wikipedia, but they did not seem as interesting.  I’ll try something else of hers, just in case.
• Gregory Benford, Immersion.  A decent read, but the whole psycho-history trope, endlessly looped back to, was a bit risible to a social scientist like me. And pretty stale for sci-fi I would think.

I was out for a long run yesterday on San Jose’s wonderful Guadalupe Park… well maybe not so wonderful but a nice place to run very convenient to our house. Half of the run is alongside the airport, and you do wonder what you are inhaling. Anyway while running I listened to Sebastian Barry read James Joyce’s story Eveline, produced by The Guardian’s short fiction podcast.  Barry tended to “shout” the story out, so I was not so impressed.  Or maybe it was Joyce’s story itself, which seemed very humdrum.  Perhaps at the time it was very innovative in form, but it is hard to see that now.  Certainly the chains of family and place continue to bind.  But relentless storytelling on television and movies and 100 years, since Dubliners, of stories make Eveline read like a soap opera cliché rather than the profound insight that it may have been in 1914.

I’ve always thought Chocolat by Claire Denis to be a wonderfully complex film (even if the Norwegian pastor is cringe-worthy).  Since then it has been all downhill for her unfortunately (Except for Beau Travail which is, well, at least interesting), and I almost never can finish one of her films.  A kind of arrogance of the critic/réalisateur I suppose that she refuses to learn or listen.  Leslie and I tried to watch Les Salauds the other day (streaming on Netflix) and after about 40 minutes we had no trouble turning it off and since then I have no trouble not returning to it, and reading the Wikipedia summary I am very glad I did not waste another hour watching it.

I agree that this is a long way from Claire Denis’s best, and like you I think she’s one of the greats. It’s almost as if Denis decided to make a kind of anti- 35 rhums, rejecting all the warmth of that film and going flat out to portray the most awful set of family relationships conceivable (based in part on Faulkner’s Sanctuary, it seems). The result, unfortunately, is a film almost any director could have made by piling on the menace and horror right up to the end.

comment from the comments section of Bastards (Les Salauds) – review | Peter Bradshaw | Film | The Guardian.

I was running and listening to Joseph O’Neill reading Muriel Spark’s “The Ormolu Clock” in a The New Yorker fiction podcast and halfway into the story my battery died and suddenly there was silence. But why do we care about the Ormolu clock? I practically screamed.  When I finally got around to hearing the rest of the story today, well, it was in the end a small jewel like the clock itself I suppose.  Treisman and O’Neill have a nice discussion but neither mentions what I thought my own rather heavy-handed interpretation: Herr Stroh gazes intently with his binoculars at the writer (narrator is writing at the time, maybe tapping his head with his pen).  The writer will tell the story. In the story, Stroh’s reality may well be inverted, and the passive slob becomes the transcendent victim.  It isn’t time that erodes Ozymandias’ empire, but the story tellers.

I got this through my university inter-library loan and read it during a trip down to Los Angeles to visit with my mother.  I had no idea what it was going to be about.  It is a tri-cross between a cloning novel (Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro is now the reference novel, even though it came out 3-4 years after Nekropolis) and a novel about grinding life in poverty (my list of novels about poverty) and a novel about the human condition (as Lucky Dube put it, we are born to suffer).  In the end, where Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is grim, grim, grim, Nekropolis is almost unendurably sad, sad, sad.  Great reviews over at Goodreads.

Read this last night. Definitely a good story, once you get started you just keep going all the way to the end, and when you get to the end you immediately go back to sections of the story, the way a good story compels you to try to unpack it right away.   Not many stories can leave you with a sharp picture, and at the same time a feeling of ‘Wait, what just happened there?” and this one does.  A few false notes in the dialogue, I though.  But what do I know about how people in farming towns talked 150 years ago?   Mookse offers some excellent commentary, as usual.

I really liked Maureen McHugh’s “The Cost to be Wise,” and would assign to a class if I were teaching a fieldwork oriented anthropology class.  It made me think of Doomsday Book, but told from the point of view of one of the “primitives.”A nice review is here.  Apparently expanded and published as a novel called Mission Child.