labingi | Entries tagged with literature

Continuing the Mabinogion Tetrology discussion started here.

Walton's adaptation of the Fourth Branch of the Welsh Mabinogi is her first major book, written in the 1930s, and this may be why it's a bit rough. It also inherits an oddly structured, complex story and navigates it faithfully. It's an ambitious attempt at adding modern psychological depth and realism to this tale, and it's a great idea but not successfully executed, in my opinion. For me as a non-Welsh, lay reader, this is an endeavor that deserves to be redone. The potential is there, but the story falters for two main reasons: too much telling vs. showing and the fact that it's just hard to write a compelling story about unlikable characters.

See my previous post for a spoilery summary. Spoilery thoughts follow...

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I have just finished The Mabinogion Tetrology by Evangeline Walton, compiled novelizations of the Four Branches of the medieval Welsh Mabinogi. I highly recommend this work to fantasy fans who like tie-ins to traditional stories and don't mind a non-scholarly approach from a cultural outsider (Walton was American). It's a very "faithful" adaptation in that it takes virtually nothing out. The Four Branches themselves are just a few pages each, so Walton interpolates a lot, clearly from a 20th-century cultural standpoint (including idolization of "progress" and a surprising amount of Buddhism). One book was published in the 1930s, the others in the 1970s. The whole work is about 650 pages long, with the first three branches being novellas and the fourth a short novel.

Speaking as a cultural outsider and lay reader myself, I think she does this quite well. Specifically, I think she does good work with the First Branch (The Prince of Annwn), and the Second (The Children of Llyr) and Third (The Song of Rhiannon) are among the most engaging and rewarding works I've read in a very long time! The Fourth Branch (The Island of the Mighty, a.k.a. The Virgin and the Swine), which was the first she wrote, is hit and miss for me but still worth reading. The whole work is generally quite feminist; I have no doubt was a huge influence on The Mists of Avalon.Spoilery review follows...

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Happy Bilbo and Frodo's Birthday! (In the great crossover 'verse in my mind, Frodo is 96 this year, I think. My math is bad, but for reasons unlikely to become apparent right now, my reference point is he's 46 years older than me, so.)

In honor of this year's birthday, I thought I'd respond Tolkienesquely to a video I recently watched, LibraryofaViking's "What Modern Fantasy Gets Wrong (and why it matters)," which is interesting and nuanced, and, its clickbaity title notwithstanding, respectful toward fantasy old and new.

Watch on YouTube

Specifically, I want to respond to the video's reference to R. F. Kuang's defense of fantasy (and SF?) being ideological. I have not seen/read her speech. I'm responding to this video's reference to it; folks familiar with the whole are welcome to add context. I gather that Kuang defends ideological fantasy against the common (often rightwing) critique that it's being ruined by being too "ideological" or "political" (i.e. "woke"). As characterized by LibraryofaViking, she argues that it is artistically valid to take an ideological stand and pursue it didactically in a genre novel.

The Problem I See with (Some) Modern "Ideological" SF&F

I agree ideological didacticism is valid (i.e. it should be publishable and socially allowable, and it can have good artistic quality—Jemisin, for me, is an example; I haven't read Kuang). Likewise, I agree the rightwing critique often has a subtext that the problem is not (entirely) being ideological but being leftwing. It's not just critiquing bad writing; it's critiquing values the critic doesn't agree with and casting this disagreement as a question of "writing quality." Side note: these aren't separate issues; values and artistic quality are entangled, but they are also not the same thing.

That said, as someone often annoyed by the didacticism of modern SF&F, for me, the problem is not that it's ideological; it's that it's simplistic.

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This is the first self-published book I have ever read a good chunk of without realizing it was self-published. [EDIT: This is not a dig at self-published writing. I am self-published and hope my books are roughly comparable to traditional in quality, but it is a mountain to climb to do all the traditional publisher work yourself on your own dime, so I'm impressed when a work does it, and I want to uplift that it's possible.] The book is as well written as a number of recent traditionally published books; it’s well edited, proofread, designed, nice cover art. It looks professional.

But in retrospect, it had to be self-published because it’s a Silmarillion fan fic with the names changed, and a traditional publisher wouldn’t take it for fear of being sued. Its premise (I’ll just render this in Tolkien terms) is one of the exiled Noldor returns to the Undying Lands after dying (?) in Middle-earth. That’s a fantastic premise for a fic! With some alterations, it’s a great premise for an original story. That’s why I bought it! I don’t think it fully exploits this premise, though. It’s a goldmine for psychological and philosophical development, and it has fairly little of either, in my opinion.

It does have a great original addition in the idea of a male and female elf who are well-matched “professional/vocational” rivals to such a degree they can be almost interchanged with each other. That concept may be the story’s strongest, and again, I felt it wasn’t fully exploited.

But some of my discontents are discontents with the source material (The Silmarillion): 1) the style is, for my taste, too expository—too much “telling,” not enough “showing”; 2) I just don’t get the concept of the Undying Lands on any deep level, because my cosmology is very different from Tolkien’s. Goddard is, I think, trying to follow Tolkien here, and part of my difficulty suspending disbelief may come from my just not getting it. I give her marks, on the whole, for showing respect for Tolkien’s work and not altering his Elves in any bizarre ways.

One the whole, I find the book conceptually fascinating but not developed deeply enough to fully engage me. Spoilers follow...

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Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor was one of the books recced to me on DW recently, and I'm currently almost done with it. Let me start by saying that it was an excellent rec. It's everything I asked for, and it has completely served its purpose in diverting me from our real world; I have generally enjoyed reading it.

I don't especially warm to it as a novel, however, and I've been in an interesting and invigorating discussion of it with

rocky41_7 on

books. I ended up pretty much writing meta I'd planned to write in the comments over there, so I'll post it here too.

Context:

rocky41_7 has been rereading the book with a newfound appreciation and feeling of now understanding why it is so beloved. Reasons why - and I agree all those things are there and are good - include a truly good/well-intentioned hero, realistic politics, realistic supporting characters, and breaking fantasy conventions. I find the book lacking in character development and plot/character arcs, however. Below (with a few, fairly minor spoilers), I explain why with some reference points to other stories, which may contain some very light spoilers.

My Reply to rocky41-7's reply to my reply to their post.

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For those who like the Greek classics, I'm gratified to announce my little one-act play on the death of Orpheus, "Orpheus Changed" is up at Eternal Haunted Summer. Summary: middle-aged Orpheus meets an old woman on a hill and they have a chat that preserves the three unities of ancient Greek drama.

painting of Orpheus holding a lyre, looking downward

painting of Orpheus holding a lyre, looking downward

^{“Orpheus” attributed to Jean Francois Duqueylard (c. 1800)}

I was actually reading Wilde a few months ago, so apologies if my memory is dim. RL busy-ness and chronic pain have pushed updating DW to a back burner. In any case, I had somehow managed to get through life without reading either of these works and am glad I now have. Spoilers for those living in a cave for the past 130-odd years.

Salome

This tale of John the Baptist and Salome is a one act play. It is highly abbreviated and operates at a high level of symbolic removal from realism, which is a nice way of saying I found the characters one dimensional and uninteresting. I'm sure it all depends on how a specific performance handles it. It is also translated into English from French, so kudos to Wilde for being able to write drama in a foreign language, but this might explain why the voice doesn't sound all that much like "Wilde" to me.

I confess I didn't realize that Wilde's play is apparently the genesis of the idea that Salome was in love with John. I grew up with that story as the standard pop cultural narrative, popularized no doubt by Strauss, but it seems Strauss got it from Wilde. So I have to give him credit for rewriting the Bible in a way that, at least to some extent, has superseded the biblical account in cultural prominence. I give it 10/10 for cultural influence and 3/10 for execution.

The Picture of Dorian Grey

Honestly, I had expected to be a bit bored. I somehow had it in my head that this was a slight story made famous because it had a resonant core concept (like Salome?). I was pleasantly surprised to find it a very well written short novel. But what surprised me most was the realization--having just watched season 2 of Rings of Power--that Wilde's moral orientation in this story is much the same as Tolkien's. Who'd have thought?

Lord Henry is pretty much in the position of a Second Age Sauron here, filling the role of tempter and purveyor of bad advice. Of course, Lord Henry is a much more human-feeling character than Sauron, dealing with his own disillusion and--interestingly--the one to voice a lot of classic Wildean aphorisms. But both advocate a self-centered approach of what is metaphorically "shiny," power, beauty, etc. Both are radically divorced from basic human empathy (though Lord Henry has some for Dorian and enough vestiges of it left to sometimes understand well how others think). Both lead those who listen to them into misery and tragedy by prescribing selfishness at the expense of care of one's fellow people.

I was surprised a while ago to learn that Wilde was quite a devout Catholic convert, though I can only imagine in a somewhat non-dogmatic way. I wonder if there is an underlying Catholic orientation I'm sensing in this similarity to Tolkien. In any case, it's not what I expected to unearth.

I admit it: I was intrigued by the thought of a book by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville, so I bought The Book of Elsewhere hot off the press, and I liked it quite a bit. Here’s a little guide to it.

Brief description: John Wick if he were 80,000 years old. (Not a spoiler; this is all over the advertising.)

tl;dr: I recommend this book to people who like SF&F that thoughtfully explores the experience of a preternaturally old protagonist (and who don’t hate John Wick).

Spoiler Free Review

This book follows the adventures of an 80,000-year-old protagonist with super fighting powers, trying to figure out how to become mortal. Nominally set in the present day, about half of it is flashbacks to various points in our hero’s timeline, which do a nice job of fleshing out his experiences and how he has affected the lives of others.

The book’s great strength is its protagonist, who is genuinely interesting and thoughtfully developed. Its great weakness is plot structure, of which is has little, and what it has is not very compelling. These two things are related. This book reminds me of nothing so much as God Emperor of Dune in following a very powerful, very old protagonist who, due to his power and age, just doesn’t have much at stake emotionally. This makes sense. In both cases, the protagonist has enough experience and wisdom to take things in stride and not be deeply fazed by just about anything from life to death to torture to betrayal, etc. The price of this plausible and thought-provoking characterization is low plot conflict and relatively little story momentum. The lack of momentum leads to a fairly week ending, though I think part of its weakness is also due to somewhat shallow exploration (and setup) of themes.

I think both these books could have pulled it off better, but not by all that much. This difficulty is partly baked into the concept. Actually, in both cases, my personal revision recommendation would have been to increase the prominence of the female presence—I’ll be vague to stay spoiler free.

The book gets extra points from me for the character of the pig, which is an excellent example of a non-human animal character who is not (much?) anthropomorphized but—as an animal—is an important character (like, for example, Moby Dick). Well done.

( Spoilery Review )

( Two Sociopolitical Critiques )

The Forgetters is a story collection by Greg Sarris, chairman of the Federated Indians of the Graton Rancheria (Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok). This collection is a companion to his earlier story cycle How a Mountain Was Made: Stories. Both are centered on Sonoma Mountain, California. Both are framed by the crow sisters, Question Woman and Answer Woman sharing stories. I highly recommend both as works attempting to share Indigenous knowledge with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people who have "forgotten the stories."

How a Mountain Was Made shares a set of stories inspired by traditional stories from the time when animals were people. The Forgetters foregrounds recent historical memory, with most stories set between the 1860s and 1960s. While How a Mountain Was Made exists in a sort of mystical reality (for want of a better expression), The Forgetters delves into the details of its historical setting, often invoking the dispossession, impoverishment (literally and culturally), and exploitation of Indigenous people reduced to working as day laborers or servants for the white settlers who have stolen and mangled their ancestral lands.

The story structure, however, echoes the earlier book, providing morally didactic stories on the overarching theme of people "forgetting" the lessons of how to live well with each other and the land. Individual stories take up themes such as greed, envy, ostracism, and subtler forgettings like lost humility and failure to comprehend another's needs (even in a very good, moderate people). Though centered on Indigenous experience, the text explicitly encompasses non-Indigenous people too, and they occasionally appear as protagonists.

The final story ventures into Indigenous futurism, depicting how stories continue on a Sonoma Mountain ravaged by climate catastrophe.

For me personally, the story that moved me most was (semi-coincidentally?) the one that centers a protagonist I take to be white (due to the absence to racially marked experience). The story concerns being a parent of an older adopted child, and for me as such a parent, it rang very true and brought (good) tears to my eyes.

I really enjoyed Quality Culture's video on the movie, Atonement. Disclaimer: I have not seen the movie or read the book, so my thoughts purely based on this video.

Watch on YouTube

I really appreciated the narrative the video highlights of moving from a univocal perspective to a dialogic perspective as a way of presenting human beings with sympathy and without judgment. I also understand there's ambiguity and irony in this, since the dialogism is entirely authored by one (problematized) voice. But I also appreciate ambiguity and irony, and overall, the story this video explores expresses why a dialogic approach to storytelling--and life, really--is so central to me.

One commenter on a YouTube video said Leto II was their favorite character in literature. I liked him, too, when I read the Dune books back in high school, and that prompted me to pick up God Emperor again, as it is the main book telling his story. I enjoyed the book moderately, both then and now but can better articulate a response now. So here goes.

Spoilers for Dune books up to God Emperor.

My “Grades” for God Emperor of Dune

Concept: A
The idea of Leto as a human-Worm composite and a preborn identity with billions of lives in his head across thousands of years, working to shepherd the human race through a possible extinction event and onto a future where humanity will be equipped to survive in perpetuity is unique and endlessly fascinating.

Character of Leto II: A-
Great concept and mostly executed well, convincingly preternaturally knowledgeable yet in a cobbled-together way that is different from the wisdom of a Buddha, who has progressed as a single identity across millions of lives. He sometimes comes off as petulant/egotistical/immature, and I can’t quite tell how much of this is intentional vs. a weakness in writing. (More behind the cut below)

Other major characters: B/B-
They’re okay. They have consistent, individual identities. They sometimes say intelligent things. They almost necessarily come off as ignorant kids next to Leto, a tricky writing problem. (More below)

Worldbuilding: A/A-
The Dune universe is one of the best created out there. This book carries that on. It feels internally consistent and plausible. The A- is for a certain lack of detail and some stuff that just sits odd, like humans are going to colonize multiple universes? Maybe a word on how?

Prose: B
Herbert’s language is functional and flows well, often with nice turns of phrase, idioms, sayings, etc. He writes omniscient POV with lots of barely announced flashbacks, like “He thought of the other day when...” and the next several pages are a few days before the scene you were just in. I find this a bit jarring, but I’m sure he had his reasons.

Plot: C-
This book has no momentum, no (effective) rising action, setbacks, turning points, moving up to a clear climax, all that stuff. If a good plot is like a symphony building to a crescendo, this plot is like the same tune played over and over with occasional higher and lower notes. I have thoughts on why below the cut.

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If you have almost three hours to spend on intellectual unpacking of Twilight, I highly recommend Natalie Wynn’s recent video on Twilight, escapist literature, sexual fantasy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, TERFs, the Dao, and much more! One of her contentions is that some critiques of the Twilight novels are misplaced because they conflate escapist literary fantasy with reality: Edward and Bella are not supposed to be a realistic blueprint for a healthy couple; they are supposed to a female-tilted romantic fantasy—fun escapism.

Watch on YouTube

Her observations made me reflect on something that’s re-occurred to me over the years: my readerly “escapism” seems different from most people’s. The normative use of “escapism” seems to denote enjoying the unrealistic: the fantasy that Edward and Bella are a healthy couple, the idea that it can be sexy to be sexually assaulted, that it’s fun to be an assassin, etc. [1] But I’m one of those people who may often be caught kvetching that these works are not realistic and this makes them frustrating and stupid.

So do I just not read for escapism? Au contraire. The feeling of escaping into literature has been one of the highest pleasures of my life since I was very little. I’m a lifelong fantasy and science reader, and very rarely really enjoy novels set in the fairly recent real world. So I must be longing to escape some part of reality.

But what do I find escapist; i.e. what stories have carried me away into the catharsis of other worlds and other lives? Here’s a fairly random list of some of my A-list: The Brothers Karamazov, Great Expectations, The Lord of the Rings, the Iliad, Mirage of Blaze, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Last Unicorn, Trigun, Wuthering Heights (repeatedly referenced by Wynn). What do all of these works have in common, besides not being set in my contemporary real world? Well, they are all stories in which life is really hard, and it’s hard, in part, for internal psychological reasons that point to deficits in the main characters. And those psychological profiles make sense: they feel psychologically realistic.

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A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) by David Lindsay is the best book I have read in a long time (sci fi or otherwise). It’s an odd duck: never a huge success but never out of print, influential for many, apparently including C. S. Lewis in his Space Trilogy, but often absent from the Great Works of Science Fiction lists. Until I happened on a YouTube video about it, I had never heard of it or Lindsay.

Perhaps all this isn’t surprising because the book really is odd; it may be a quintessential example a very well-written “niche” work, destined to be admired by a few and passed by by most.

Like The Space Trilogy, A Voyage to Arcturus uses a science fiction setting to stage a philosophical exploration of the meaning of life, morality, and so on. This staging is so similar, in fact, that I initially expected the book to be an allegory or thought experiment on Christian cosmology. It is not. In fact, while it echoes themes from real-world religions and philosophies, the cosmology it seems to settle on is not quite like anything else I’ve encountered. (I won’t say more here due to spoilers.)

I find this book hard to understand. I could not predict where it was going, even up to the last page. And while I found the ending a bit anti-climactic (maybe I just didn’t get it), I like all that. I like being surprised; I like being perplexed. I would take that a hundred times over being bored by sameness. I am also in awe of Lindsay’s worldbuilding. Overall this book is immensely ahead of its time. It was published in 1920, but I would have readily believed it came from the 1950s, or even a less gender-progressive corner of the ‘60’s or ‘70s. It’s that far-thinking. Spoilers below the cut

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Virtually all the commentary I see on this film says it’s amazing, and I agree it is in many ways, but I was frustrated by it more than I liked it. In the face of so many rave reviews, I want to talk about why. For context, I am a fan of the poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I’ve read it twice, I love it dearly, but I am by no means an expert on it, and I haven’t read it in quite a while. Nutshell: I think this movie used gorgeous aesthetics to tell a story far inferior (in all but one way) to the poem’s.

First some things this film executes perfectly: almost everything that has to do with the senses: the cinematography, the color scheme (which is almost a character itself), the music, the costumes. I did not love the CGI fox, but that’s probably just my anti-CGI bias. I am glad they went with practical effects for the Green Knight. Also points for capturing a real sense of late Roman Arthurian Britain: the bigness, the danger, the “wastelands,” the cold stone, the bad teeth, rapid aging (Arthur as Gawain’s uncle is probably only about forty, but he convincingly looks utterly exhausted and on the way out). I also think there’s a good balance of magic and gritty reality.

The acting and directing are universally excellent, and the dialogue is very well written on the level of diction: it does a nice job of sounding both archaic and casual-modern, giving a sense of culturally different people being their everyday selves—and I’m a tough critic in this area. The whole speech about “green” is wonderful. It also does good “representation...”

(spoilers for poem and movie below the cut)

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I’ve been conflicted about posting this because I’m aware it’s harsh, and it violates the Buddhist instinct I’m trying to cultivate to not use my words negatively. I guess you could say I’m having a battle between my internal Vash and my internal Knives, where my internal Vash says, “Leave the poor woman alone. She’s put a lot of work into writing a book reflecting good social values,” and my internal Knives says, “But there are injustices here that need to be exposed.” And I’m compromising by locking this post, which feels like a lose/lose: still negative and not circulating real points I’d like to put out into the world. Ah well.

Everina Maxwell’s far-future, m/m romantic science fiction novel, Winter’s Orbit, is, I think, trying to “give the people what they want.” It seems to have succeeded in that it has been well received, but I wanted to like it more than I did. (This is my typical response to 95% of recent SF, as I’ve mentioned before, so put much of this down to taste.) Some aspects of this book I really do like. Early on, I thought I might even become a fan. For reference, I don’t think I’ve really fanned over a new (to me) book since 2017, so that’s a high compliment. But I think as a work cultural fiction it fails, and the characters and romance ultimately suffer as a result. Massive spoilers lie ahead and warnings for discussion of abuse

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Fascinating video on dating stories about the Pleiades and Orion:

Watch on YouTube

(FYI, tagging this "literature" to co-locate posts about old stories, though this is mostly about oral traditions.)

I have finished Gormenghast (i.e. book 2 of the Gormenghast series) and am quite impressed. Below are random reflections and a discussion of why I find myself choosing to read older SF&F vs. recent works. tl;dr: I’m finding recent works, as a generalization, overly didactic. Trigger warning for discussion of sexual assault in fiction, and spoilers through book 2 of the Gormenghast series.

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Back in what Wikipedia informs me was the year 2000 (sounds about right), I watched the PBS adaptation of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, having never before heard of the books. The commercials had me really excited: it looked atmospheric, weird, and otherworldly, and I'm always hungry for a story that can transport me like that. So I eagerly sat down to watch it and was very quickly bored and disillusioned by an unbroken host of unlikable, one-dimensional caricatures who seemed a sad waste of the visually enthralling world they'd been set down in.

From that day on, I dismissed the books as "not my thing," until a few weeks ago, I came across a tattered copy of book 1, Titus Groan, in a little free library and thought, "Why not. I'm curious what it's like." tl;dr: The book is better. I may even have turned into a mild fan. Spoilers for Titus Groan follow

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Tomorrow, I'll be moderating an author panel for the Portland Book Festival on the anthology Dispatches from Anarres, science fiction and fantasy stories inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin, in which I'm fortunate enough to have a story featured.

While I have not yet read all the stories in the collection, my four fellow panelists offer a wide range of material, each touching on different things Le Guin's writing meant to them. I will shout of hear to Jason Arias's "JoyBe's Last Dance," a chilling yet hopeful almost allegory about racial and class oppression and changing perceptions to see new possibilities.

I have just finished the novel Master and Commander, the first of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin novels, and I can assert O'Brian has a new fan. I had attempted this series before, 15-20 years ago when my dad was obsessed with it, and it didn't grab me. I guess sometimes the time has to be right. I wanted to write a big essay on it, but finding myself generally exhausted (by life, not the book), I'll content myself with some quick takes instead.

Summary
In the year 1800, English naval captain Jack Aubrey meets Irish physician and naturalist Stephen Maturin and persuades him to join his ship as its surgeon. They proceed to develop a friendship in the course of naval adventures in the Napoleonic Wars.

Light spoilers may follow...

Stuff I Liked
There's next-to-no setup and payoff. Okay, there's a little, but largely the book feels like it's just people going about their lives in the Napoleonic Wars, and what setup and payoff there is feels largely like natural life consequences. Now, I do believe the strongest narratives have good setup and payoff, but it's considered a "must" for almost everything today, and there's something refreshingly natural about just seeing people about their lives with a minimum of narrative contrivance. The ending is terribly anti-climactic and, you know, I'm okay with that.

The narration does not coddle the audience. O'Brian's descriptions can be very detailed when he's scene setting, but he rarely adds a spare word about feeling, motivation, or unnecessary scene transition. In fact, scenes can change between one line of dialogue and the next with no break in the text and no immediate indication that it is now four hours later and everyone has gone to dinner. You just have to catch up--and I'm fine with that. In fact, I really admire how he drops in character-building moments, like So-and-So received a letter, with no fanfare and little explanation and just allows the reader to connect the dots as to what this means. It creates good suspense (sometimes) and good opportunity for reader participation (always). Oh, and the sea jargon is incomprehensible to me. O'Brian makes little effort to explain it--and I'm okay with that too.

It's a nice mix of historical verisimilitude and modern literary license. O'Brian is famous for having done his homework on everything from naval maneuvers to Austenian-era language, and it shows. I feel convincingly transported to the British Empire in 1800. At the same time, this doesn't read like an Austenian-era book. As a novel from the 1970s, it's allowed to be more vulgar, more straightforward, and more political, and that, too, lends a kind of realism. This textual honesty is probably best on display in the quiet but persistent context of Irish oppression. Several scenes feature two Irishmen remarking on their English friend/captain, and the gulfs in privilege come across well without preaching: the way the Irish have to understand the English but the reverse is not the case feels very authentic and pointed.

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