February book log pt. 2
Feb. 24th, 2021 09:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseaux- No One Is Talking About This, the debut novel of Patricia Lockwood, who has written a number of things that are not novels, including the memoir Priestdaddy, poetry, and such viral tweets as "@ parisreview so is Paris any good?" and "me, lightly touching miette with the side of my foot: miette move out of the way please so I don't trip on you / miette, her eyes enormous: you KICK miette? you kick her body like the football? oh! oh! jail for mother! jail for mother for One Thousand Years!!!!"
The novel's unnamed protagonist is, like Lockwood, a writer who is Extremely Online, catapulted to "airy prominence" by a viral tweet (can a dog be twins?) and subsequently made a career as a public speaker about social media and a generator of absurd quips. For the first half of the book, the internet (specifically, but not exclusively, Twitter) is to the narrative what drawing rooms are to Austen's; the second half chronicles the earthquake shocks of a family tragedy.
I spent most of the first half of the book resisting the urge to screenshot every other line because it was one of the funniest things I've ever read. I cried steadily through the last 20 pages. The second half of the book reminded me of Miriam Toews' All My Puny Sorrows— as a portrait of the type of loss where grief looms like a tsunami wave long before the actual loss occurs (in Toews' novel, a sister that's spent a lifetime not wanting to live; in Lockwood's, an infant niece whose brief and beloved life is spent fighting against the improbability of her own body); as a story inspired by the author's own life. (The biggest difference between Lockwood's family and her protagonist's is that she makes the father a police officer rather than a priest (long story.)) Both books have a certain... not lightheartedness, but lightness of soul, even (especially?) at their most devastating. Life will out, even in hospital rooms and funeral homes. (There is also lightheartedness, at less devastating points.)
At some point within the past couple of years I read a 19th century English novel - it might have been Thackeray's Vanity Fair? - that drove me slightly bonkers with its repeated references to shaking someone's fingers (possibly finger, singular?) rather than hand, because behind that loomed a galaxy of tiny details lost in translation— references, or phrasing, so normal to a contemporary audience they wouldn't have blinked but 150+ years later I was just sitting there like, what???
Anyway, I thought about that a lot while reading this— I kept envisioning a distant-future re-release packed with footnotes explaining the references to caucasianblink.gif and galaxy brain and Harambe (I'd forgotten about Harambe); the appendix would be twice as long as the book itself. Honestly, a lot of the references are probably just as inscrutable to a modern reader who is less Online; I've never read a book for which I was so specifically the intended target audience. (If anything, I was maybe only just Online enough?) It clearly wasn't forced internet humor, either, but the organic humor of someone who speaks the language, as it were; the stream-of-consciousness of someone whose brain the culture of the internet has wired in a certain way.
(The line that made me snort-laugh and give in to my impulse to screenshot and send it to five different friends was "NOT my america, a perfectly nice woman posted, and for some reason she responded, damn, I agree... we didn't trap george washington's head in a quarter for this." Take from that what you will.)
tl;dr 10/10 loved this one.
- Embassytown by China Mieville, a fantastic - in both meanings of the word - and creepy sci-fi novel that I unfortunately cannot describe without spoilers, so under the cut it goes.
The titular Embassytown is a (mostly) human enclave on a planet of double-mouthed aliens who can only speak literally and with intent; they can use similes, but only things that have actually happened, even if they need to arrange it themselves. (The narrator, Avice, is a simile: the girl who ate what was given to her.) Since their language requires two mouths and one brain, only Ambassadors - think human clones engineered for drift compatibility - can speak it and be understood as saying words rather than making random mouth-sounds. It turns out the clone part is important— when a new Ambassador arrives who is simply drift compatible (as it were), the effect is just off enough that the aliens find their words literally intoxicating, and addicting. The consequences are apocalyptic.
...is the basic premise, anyway. A bunch of stuff happens, some of it involving cults and political intrigue; Avice eventually teams up with a band of scrappy outsiders from both sides of the looming war to stop it, etc.
The world that Mieville creates is fascinating and I was disconcertingly unable to picture it— I felt like someone who's colorblind trying to imagine red. I kept picturing the ariekei (helpfully described, at one point, as "insect-horse-coral-fan"-looking) as giant ants; the ariekei's living organ of a city was right out.
- Still reading David Copperfield! I'm about 70% of the way through. David's courtship of Dora Spenlow has gone from amusing to nails-on-a-chalkboard, and Uriah Heep's sinister plan is in full swing, but overall, the ratio of humorous to bleak has shifted in favor of the humorous.
The novel's unnamed protagonist is, like Lockwood, a writer who is Extremely Online, catapulted to "airy prominence" by a viral tweet (can a dog be twins?) and subsequently made a career as a public speaker about social media and a generator of absurd quips. For the first half of the book, the internet (specifically, but not exclusively, Twitter) is to the narrative what drawing rooms are to Austen's; the second half chronicles the earthquake shocks of a family tragedy.
I spent most of the first half of the book resisting the urge to screenshot every other line because it was one of the funniest things I've ever read. I cried steadily through the last 20 pages. The second half of the book reminded me of Miriam Toews' All My Puny Sorrows— as a portrait of the type of loss where grief looms like a tsunami wave long before the actual loss occurs (in Toews' novel, a sister that's spent a lifetime not wanting to live; in Lockwood's, an infant niece whose brief and beloved life is spent fighting against the improbability of her own body); as a story inspired by the author's own life. (The biggest difference between Lockwood's family and her protagonist's is that she makes the father a police officer rather than a priest (long story.)) Both books have a certain... not lightheartedness, but lightness of soul, even (especially?) at their most devastating. Life will out, even in hospital rooms and funeral homes. (There is also lightheartedness, at less devastating points.)
At some point within the past couple of years I read a 19th century English novel - it might have been Thackeray's Vanity Fair? - that drove me slightly bonkers with its repeated references to shaking someone's fingers (possibly finger, singular?) rather than hand, because behind that loomed a galaxy of tiny details lost in translation— references, or phrasing, so normal to a contemporary audience they wouldn't have blinked but 150+ years later I was just sitting there like, what???
Anyway, I thought about that a lot while reading this— I kept envisioning a distant-future re-release packed with footnotes explaining the references to caucasianblink.gif and galaxy brain and Harambe (I'd forgotten about Harambe); the appendix would be twice as long as the book itself. Honestly, a lot of the references are probably just as inscrutable to a modern reader who is less Online; I've never read a book for which I was so specifically the intended target audience. (If anything, I was maybe only just Online enough?) It clearly wasn't forced internet humor, either, but the organic humor of someone who speaks the language, as it were; the stream-of-consciousness of someone whose brain the culture of the internet has wired in a certain way.
(The line that made me snort-laugh and give in to my impulse to screenshot and send it to five different friends was "NOT my america, a perfectly nice woman posted, and for some reason she responded, damn, I agree... we didn't trap george washington's head in a quarter for this." Take from that what you will.)
tl;dr 10/10 loved this one.
- Embassytown by China Mieville, a fantastic - in both meanings of the word - and creepy sci-fi novel that I unfortunately cannot describe without spoilers, so under the cut it goes.
The titular Embassytown is a (mostly) human enclave on a planet of double-mouthed aliens who can only speak literally and with intent; they can use similes, but only things that have actually happened, even if they need to arrange it themselves. (The narrator, Avice, is a simile: the girl who ate what was given to her.) Since their language requires two mouths and one brain, only Ambassadors - think human clones engineered for drift compatibility - can speak it and be understood as saying words rather than making random mouth-sounds. It turns out the clone part is important— when a new Ambassador arrives who is simply drift compatible (as it were), the effect is just off enough that the aliens find their words literally intoxicating, and addicting. The consequences are apocalyptic.
...is the basic premise, anyway. A bunch of stuff happens, some of it involving cults and political intrigue; Avice eventually teams up with a band of scrappy outsiders from both sides of the looming war to stop it, etc.
The world that Mieville creates is fascinating and I was disconcertingly unable to picture it— I felt like someone who's colorblind trying to imagine red. I kept picturing the ariekei (helpfully described, at one point, as "insect-horse-coral-fan"-looking) as giant ants; the ariekei's living organ of a city was right out.
- Still reading David Copperfield! I'm about 70% of the way through. David's courtship of Dora Spenlow has gone from amusing to nails-on-a-chalkboard, and Uriah Heep's sinister plan is in full swing, but overall, the ratio of humorous to bleak has shifted in favor of the humorous.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-24 04:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-24 01:56 pm (UTC)This is probably my favorite of Mieville's books I've read, too, the others being Kraken and October. (I can't remember picking up on this when I read Kraken - or if, because of the narrator's voice, it didn't come up at all? - but Embassytown definitely showed the same tendency towards absurdly obscure vocab as October, although it actually made sense among the technobabble as opposed to feeling, like, a foot stuck out in the aisle as you're walking by.)
no subject
Date: 2021-02-24 10:17 am (UTC)But he's no advert for 'poor boy makes good'!
no subject
Date: 2021-02-24 01:47 pm (UTC)The evil genius of him is that everything that actually comes out of his mouth is juuuust plausible enough (I just got through that absolutely WRENCHING scene with Dr. Strong) and everyone around him is constrained from calling out his b.s. by their Victorian era social niceties??
no subject
Date: 2021-02-24 02:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-24 10:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-24 01:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-24 02:28 pm (UTC)But colonizing cultures always think we're doing the right thing, or at least we used to. Now we question more. My conference paper was titled "Can the Arieki Speak?" after Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?"
no subject
Date: 2021-02-24 02:39 pm (UTC)I'm not sure if I'd go so far as to say that her ex (Scile?) was right, given the whole cult thing; I think it might be a case of two extremes, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-24 02:49 pm (UTC)I remember watching traditional Westerns as a child, and being told that the Natives were "savages" and the settlers were good -- or Victorian narratives about the noble British carrying civilization to the "dark" corners of the globe. So I'd argue that at the very least things were morally complicated.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-24 03:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-24 01:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-24 01:32 pm (UTC)I may have laid it on a bit thick— it's definitely not, like, incomprehensible garbage if you don't get all the references. This is basically a highlights version of the first couple of chapters, if you want to get a feel for the book (without the sad bits!).
no subject
Date: 2021-02-24 03:18 pm (UTC)I feel I ought to be more interested in how very different different people's experiences of "the internet" are? But I had to give up trying to read this halfway through. (I'm online but not Online, apparently).
no subject
Date: 2021-02-24 03:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-24 04:12 pm (UTC)Trying to read this story actually reminded me a lot of trying to read another zeitgeist bomb, Gravity's Rainbow, which I also completely failed to appreciate. There's a similar density of stressed-out microcultural particles that I just don't feel equipped to try to parse - but it's not just that I don't get the references, it's that the writing is evoking a particular (unfamiliar) mental state that it's difficult for me to stay with. If that makes sense?
no subject
Date: 2021-02-25 04:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-24 02:03 pm (UTC)As you mention David Copperfield later, there’s also:
“Miss Murdstone, who was busy at her writing-desk, which was covered with letters and papers, gave me her cold fingernails, and asked me, in an iron whisper, if I had been measured for my mourning.”
no subject
Date: 2021-02-24 02:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-24 03:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-24 03:42 pm (UTC)