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Reading Wednesday
Apr. 1st, 2020 06:05 pmThis week's theme is apparently ensemble novels that involve ghosts and/or fighting The Man.
Finished Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift, which has a sprawling but well-crafted plot spanning four generations of three families across five countries* and some 120 years. It shifts from historical fiction with elements of magical realism to speculative fiction with sci-fi elements.
* Although primarily set in - and first and foremost a story about - Zambia, some parts of the novel take place in England, Italy, India, and Zimbabwe.
Read The Ghost Hotel, a new novel by Station Eleven author Emily St. John Mandel. It's about a Bernie Madoff-esque Ponzi scheme, a disappearance aboard a freight ship, and ghosts, both in a literal "I see dead people" sense and a more metaphorical one: ghosts of the person one used to be, paths not taken, etc. It's set in the same world as Station Eleven, or rather, a version of that world in which the apocalyptic pandemic never happened— at one point, a character idly imagining alternate universes based on the headlines she reads is literally like, wow, imagine if the Georgian flu wasn't quickly contained and became a pandemic of apocalyptic, society-collapsing proportions?? Which feels like the literary version of Staring Into The Camera Like On The Office. One character from Station Eleven even has a slightly-larger-than-cameo role in The Ghost Hotel. This was... a choice? I'd say it was ultimately a neutral choice rather than a particularly good or bad one, but having a character explicitly state that this book was set in an alternate universe of another book by the same author was slightly jarring.
Read The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich. Set on a reservation in North Dakota in the 1950s, one of the two main characters, Thomas Wazhaskh, is based off of Erdrich's own grandfather, a night watchman at a local factory and a tribal chairman who fought against a 1953 Congressional resolution that would disband and relocate his tribe, selling off their land for federal profit. (It was very depressing to finish this book and then immediately see headlines about the current administration's move to "deestablish" the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe in Massachusetts and revoke their reservation status.) The other is Patrice "Pixie" Paranteau, a young woman who lives on the reservation and works at the factory. The two primary plot threads are the tribe's fight against the termination bill, led by Thomas, and Pixie's search for her missing sister, but the overall story is told through the voices of many different characters, both in and outside of the community, who get their own individual arcs.
Read Those Who Knew by Idra Novey. Set on an unnamed, fictional, vaguely Latin American island ten years after the collapse of an oppressive regime backed by the U.S., a university professor suspects that the "accidental" death of a young activist romantically linked to an up-and-coming politician is anything but. Less grim than it sounds.
Finished Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift, which has a sprawling but well-crafted plot spanning four generations of three families across five countries* and some 120 years. It shifts from historical fiction with elements of magical realism to speculative fiction with sci-fi elements.
* Although primarily set in - and first and foremost a story about - Zambia, some parts of the novel take place in England, Italy, India, and Zimbabwe.
Read The Ghost Hotel, a new novel by Station Eleven author Emily St. John Mandel. It's about a Bernie Madoff-esque Ponzi scheme, a disappearance aboard a freight ship, and ghosts, both in a literal "I see dead people" sense and a more metaphorical one: ghosts of the person one used to be, paths not taken, etc. It's set in the same world as Station Eleven, or rather, a version of that world in which the apocalyptic pandemic never happened— at one point, a character idly imagining alternate universes based on the headlines she reads is literally like, wow, imagine if the Georgian flu wasn't quickly contained and became a pandemic of apocalyptic, society-collapsing proportions?? Which feels like the literary version of Staring Into The Camera Like On The Office. One character from Station Eleven even has a slightly-larger-than-cameo role in The Ghost Hotel. This was... a choice? I'd say it was ultimately a neutral choice rather than a particularly good or bad one, but having a character explicitly state that this book was set in an alternate universe of another book by the same author was slightly jarring.
Read The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich. Set on a reservation in North Dakota in the 1950s, one of the two main characters, Thomas Wazhaskh, is based off of Erdrich's own grandfather, a night watchman at a local factory and a tribal chairman who fought against a 1953 Congressional resolution that would disband and relocate his tribe, selling off their land for federal profit. (It was very depressing to finish this book and then immediately see headlines about the current administration's move to "deestablish" the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe in Massachusetts and revoke their reservation status.) The other is Patrice "Pixie" Paranteau, a young woman who lives on the reservation and works at the factory. The two primary plot threads are the tribe's fight against the termination bill, led by Thomas, and Pixie's search for her missing sister, but the overall story is told through the voices of many different characters, both in and outside of the community, who get their own individual arcs.
Read Those Who Knew by Idra Novey. Set on an unnamed, fictional, vaguely Latin American island ten years after the collapse of an oppressive regime backed by the U.S., a university professor suspects that the "accidental" death of a young activist romantically linked to an up-and-coming politician is anything but. Less grim than it sounds.
