Book Round-Up 19/09/2021

Shortly after our last exciting round-up I started on a new migraine medication, which has allowed me to consistently read books more often without getting headaches. I have since gone mad with power, becoming as like unto a god. Here are the terrifying results.

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli

This got a fair bit of buzz when it was initially released, being longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize (which it should have been shortlisted for, if not won outright, in my opinion) but it was recently pushed back into prominence here in Ireland specifically after winning this year’s Dublin Literary Prize.

It’s easily the best thing I’ve read this year, a strange and atmospheric combination of family drama, adventure fiction, literary criticism, and...text-based audiography, I guess? The closest thing I can compare it to isn’t actually another book but the interactive fiction portions of the video game Kentucky Route Zero, which similarly concern themselves with the echoes of lost things and places.

The story’s first half is a little draggy at times, but then it abruptly shifts gears and becomes downright gripping, if not harrowing; the final stretch is one of the only times I’ve been seriously tempted to skip to the end of a novel, just to see whether or not the characters were going to make it out okay. Even if the journey can be a little slow at times, it’s more than worth it for the destination: a single-sentence chapter where the internal walls between reality, fiction, past and present collapse and the story’s multiple narrative threads come together in a moment that feels like some sort of religious experience. 

Highly recommended.

10 Minutes, 38 Seconds In This Strange World by Elifa Shafak

I was admittedly biased against this from the start, as it’s one of those 2019 Booker shortlisted novels that stole Lost Children Archive’s rightful place, but I tried to put that aside and meet the story on its own terms.

I enjoyed the first two thirds quite a bit, even if they are just straight-forward historical fiction with a slightly twee framing device. But then the final third pretty much switches genres, becoming a zany, semi-comedic heist story with the characters getting up to Wacky Antics while trying to retrieve a corpse, and the whole thing kind of lost me. Still worth checking out for the good parts, but it didn’t stick in my mind long after I turned the last page.

The First Woman by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

I picked this up having previously enjoyed Makumbi’s debut novel Kintu quite a bit. Unfortunately, The First Woman couldn’t hold my attention the whole way through. The scope of the story is a lot smaller and more personal than Kintu, which isn’t necessarily a problem in and of itself, but I also found that the book’s pacing dragged badly. 

Still, I find Makumbi’s combination of mythology and contemporary fiction very appealing, so I’ll be ready to check out whatever she writes next even if this book didn’t do it for me.

Wolf Hall & Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Jumping onto the hottest literary craze of 2009, because I like to stay on the cutting edge of things. I liked Wolf Hall as much as all the critics did, if not even moreso, but Bring Up The Bodies was a bit of a dissapointment, being a more conventional historical fiction novel with more conventional prose compared to the first book’s artsier approach. The relatively short time between publication might have had something to do with this, so hopefully the eight-year gap between Bring Up The Bodies and the last installment will yield a satisfying conclusion.

Dissolution by CJ Sansom

After finishing the first two Mantel books I was still in a Cromwellian mood, but wanted to dip into something a little lighter before tackling the third installment, which is a significantly chunkier boi than the first two. Luckily I had Dissolution, the first novel in CJ Sansom’s Tudor detective/lawyer series waiting for me.

Reading it right after Mantel’s Cromwell books makes for an interesting contrast, as Dissolution features many of the same people and events but presented from an alternate--and much less sympathetic--perspective. I found it absorbing enough that I plan on checking out the sequels at some point, although the identity of the primary killer is a little bit too obvious.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

Yes, I’m one of those people. Yes, yes, I know, Murakami’s books are all wildly self-indulgent and have a vague, unpleasant whiff of creepiness about them whenever it comes to sex and women. But I just can’t stay away from the guy. It’s those l i m i n a l  v i b e s, he does it better than anyone else. 

This book’s vibe content is perhaps stronger than in any of Murakami’s other works, constructing a surreal and at times eerie landscape out of the empty lane between a row of houses. Of course, the problem with Murakami is that at some point he has to stop vibing and start telling an actual story, and the conclusion of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’s mystery(?) plotline feels particularly half-baked and underwhelming.

But still. Those vibes, man.

Broken Stars edited by Ken Liu

I’m not familiar with any of the people involved in this--not Ken Liu, not even featured superstar author Cixin Liu whose Remembrance Of Earth’s Past trilogy kickstarted the wave of translated Chinese SF that this compilation is riding. After seeing what’s on offer here, I might have to remedy that.

As with any short story collection there are hits and misses, but my interest was maintained consistently due to the stories generally all going for fairly soft science-fiction (soft as in focused on the social and personal impact of science fictional premises, not soft as in “uwuu cinnamon rolls”) rather than more beep-boop material that I tend to bounce off of.

In particular the first story, Xia Jia’s Goodnight, Melancholy, is almost worth the price of admission alone (you can actually read it for free here, but I’m still happy I paid for it). It’s one half exploration of depression in a future where robots, AI and virtual reality allow people to reach across the gulf of loneliness in new ways, and one half treatise on the development of artificial intelligence via an alt-history biography of Alan Turing’s final days. If that doesn’t sound interesting, I don’t know what to tell you.

By contrast I found Cixin Liu’s story Moonlight to be one of the weaker entries. It’s got a cool premise--an engineer gets a phone call from his future self, who gives him the technological means of averting climate change--but it feels like it would have needed much more space to turn that premise into a compelling story. The attempt at injecting a human element revolving around the protagonist’s doomed romance is particularly undercooked.