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Recent reading
Mar. 5th, 2023 08:05 pmRead two novellas by Sarah Tolmie: All the Horses of Iceland and The Fourth Island. Both are historical fantasy— in the 9th century, a Norse trader in Central Asia encounters a ghost; in the mid-19th, the residents of one of the Aran Islands cross paths with another, secret island that exists outside of time— and less than 70 pages and absolutely brilliant; now I understand the concept of Short Perfect Novels as discussed in Louise Erdrich's Sentence, although I suppose these are more properly Tiny Perfect Novellas. As well as the supernatural, language/translation is a theme in both stories.
Re-read Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones and, with Northanger Abbey still fresh in my mind, I was struck for the first time by similarities between the two: the opening passages of both books are a tongue-in-cheek wink at the cliches of a particular genre (Gothic novels, fairy tales); both Catherine and Sophie go nosing into someone else's business with the expectation of finding something terrible (murder! a wizard's hoard of stolen hearts!) and find the explanation is actually mundane (a tragic but normal loss; the country of Wales). Of course, the different genres and the protagonists' different personalities— Catherine is a 100% genuine ingenue; Sophie thinks she is self-aware and genre-savvy but really she's just built herself emotional armor out of fairy-tale cliches— means that the basic similarity of "protagonist thinks she knows what's going on; she does not" plays out in very different ways, but like, here are two dots, I've connected them.
( Read more... )
Re-read Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones and, with Northanger Abbey still fresh in my mind, I was struck for the first time by similarities between the two: the opening passages of both books are a tongue-in-cheek wink at the cliches of a particular genre (Gothic novels, fairy tales); both Catherine and Sophie go nosing into someone else's business with the expectation of finding something terrible (murder! a wizard's hoard of stolen hearts!) and find the explanation is actually mundane (a tragic but normal loss; the country of Wales). Of course, the different genres and the protagonists' different personalities— Catherine is a 100% genuine ingenue; Sophie thinks she is self-aware and genre-savvy but really she's just built herself emotional armor out of fairy-tale cliches— means that the basic similarity of "protagonist thinks she knows what's going on; she does not" plays out in very different ways, but like, here are two dots, I've connected them.
( Read more... )
