Words without Borders and SF Mistressworks
I’ve recently discovered a new online magazine called Words Without Borders. It publishes stories, poems, graphic stories, etc. that are English translations of works originally written in other languages. (Always near and dear to my heart because I feel my exposure to non-English literature is spotty at best.) Unfortunately, the percentage of women authors featured in the magazine is as strong as I would have liked.
Many of the translations can be viewed side-by-side with the story in its original language. Here’s the page for None of Your Business by Natalia Klyuchareva. I’m fascinated that the original Russian story is so much shorter than the translation. (I think perhaps the end of the story is missing. Otherwise, Russian is a marvelously concise language. Possibly both.)
This is a rather grim story of a boy with alcoholic parents who one day locks his parents out of their flat and refuses to let them back in. Remarkably, it sticks and his parents go on to freeload from friends until they drift away.
Everyone was waiting for Yurka to break. The longer this didn’t happen, the less they sympathized with him. The Krivovs had already attracted the general sympathy.
They lived by migrating among their numerous relatives. They drank, complained about the “monster,” and drank again—until their hosts, out of their wits over their drinking, showed them the door. Then they went on their way. Little by little they moved so far from their own home that even old lady Faya, who knew everything about everyone, lost track of them.
And life goes on for the son who was only in middle school when he evicted his parents – he takes in a lodger and makes ends meet, barely, but the weight of his parents is always in him and something that he carries alone.
The story is rich and grounded in detail, but at the same time almost magical:
When he got back from vacation, Gerka had a gut feeling that something was very wrong. Sparks of a scandal filled the air. Even his hair seemed electrified and stood on end, and his hands, magnetized, stuck to each other.
In the end, family ties are inescapable, and redemption of the parents and the child is, at best, illusion.
On another topic, there’s been a lot of discussion around the internets about the dreadful lack of women in the SF Masterworks series (there are more titles by Philip K. Dick than all women combined) and now there’s a blog devoted to SF Mistressworks (dreadful name, I know.) The only thing I take umbrage with is that young adult SF is not allowed. *shakes cranky old man fist of internet rage* Of course, looking at both proposed Mistressworks list and the Masterworks list, there’s a couple that when I read them I thought they were YA ….
Divergent by Veronica Roth
There seems to be a flood of YA dystopian novels these days centered around teens needing to make a decision (or having a decision thrust upon them) when they turn sixteen(ish). As teens of that age are deep into the whole college application hysteria and the sense that the whole rest of your life hinges on this one thing has to be a large part of why books of this type are so popular.[1]
In Matched by Ally Condie people find out their soul mate. In Delirium by Lauren Oliver, people get their ability to love removed. In Enclave by Ann Aguirre, it’s getting a name and learning her career. I could go on and on.
The latest hot book of this type is Divergent by Veronica Roth. In this particular world, the population has divided itself up into five sects which each focus on a single virtue: Amity, Abnegation, Candor, Dauntless, Erudite. There’s also the sectless – the fringes (and downtrodden) of society who failed their initiation into one of the five sects.
Beatrice was born as part of Abnegation, the sect which favors selflessness. She’s not terribly successful at it and yearns to join one of the other sects. During her testing it turns out that she doesn’t have a natural affinity for one of the sects – rather she what’s known as “Divergent” and those in power fear the Divergent as they are free thinkers who are unpredictable.
Tris (as she renames herself) ends up choosing the Dauntless and for most of the book it reminded me a fair amount of Ender’s Game with its pointless competitions and brutality. There is also the obligatory love interest thing where Tris becomes involved with her initiation instructor. (He’s only two years older so it is less creepy than it might be.)
For the most part, I enjoyed this portion of the book – while a number of the kids might as well have “evil” stamped on their heads, there are some interesting interactions among the new initiates. (In particular, when Tris realizes that her friends are much more friendly when they can perceive her as small and weak, but once she excels their feelings change – one to the point that he assists in an attempt to kill her.) Plus, they abseil off the Sears Tower.
I had just about convinced myself that the book would basically end with the initiation – I assumed there would be another attempt on her life/a big standoff where she kicks the ass of the biggest of the bullies.
What I got instead was whiplash. There is a sudden shift to a revolution where all the Dauntless are mind-controlled by the Erudite and attack the Abnegation. In quick succession Tris’s Mom and Dad both die, along with a number of her initiation mates and former friends in the Abnegation. She is able to steal the code for the simulation and at the end she and her boyfriend are on the run.
This whole sequence felt like it almost could have been its own novel and I definitely thought it deserved more space than was devoted to it. (Especially since the pacing in the first half of the novel is rather lackadaisical.) This rush job of a revolution really didn’t work for me.
[1] I assume wasn’t just me who felt like this.
Wings by Aprilynne Pike
Wings is the sort of book that doesn’t need to exist. I don’t mean that in the “wow, this book is horrible[1]” way but in the “if only the characters had acted like any rational person, the plot would have been about three pages long” way.
So the question I put to you is if you had piles of riches hanging around[2] (and magic powers) and you really wanted a plot of land not to be sold to potential evildoers, what would your crafty plan be:
a) offer some of those riches to the current owner of the property in exchange for said property.
b) Decide that the best way to gain control of the property is to leave a small child on the owner’s doorstep in hopes that they will adopt the child and some day the child will inherit it.
Please note, the owners have been dying to sell the property and the people with the piles of riches have been brainwiping the prospective buyers so they forget they were interested.
I bet you can guess which choice Pike made.
Anyway, Laurel was left on her parents’ doorstep when she was three and the happy adoption plan worked but now she is sixteen and just starting a new school. She is (of course) totally beautiful (because one of the messages of this book is that ugly people trolls ugly people are evil) and immediately the hottest guy in town wants her.
In a shocking reversal from Twilight, she is the supernatural one, though she doesn’t know it yet. She finds this out when a big flower blooms on her back indicating that she’s ready to birth some offspring. (She’s a fairy and apparently fairies are plants despite looking just like people. They also eat and breath and fuck like people though sex is the safest around because they can’t get preggers. Oh, and in case you might think she was a regular fairy, of course she is one of the rare and super special ones.)
While she’s back on the special land where she grew up she runs into another fairy because none of these books is complete without a rival love interest of unsurpassable hottness, who can also infodump some important history to her.
Anyway, her parents are selling the magic patch of dirt to someone evil (i.e., ugly.) And the evil guy made her dad really ill (ok, that is pretty evil) for reasons that are about as logical as the whole fairy changeling plot since they were already selling the magic dirt to him.
Do you care why the dirt is magical? No, me either. Anyway, I’m sure you will not be surprised to hear that eventually some fairy who is not a total idiot realizes that if they give her parents money they won’t sell the magic dirt. Also, have a free cure for your dad.
But wait! Did I say there was a supernatural love interest? I bet you were wondering if he is a creepy stalker. All signs point to yes:
“I’ve watched you for years. Watched you grow from a little girl to a full grown faerie. We were best friends when we were little, and I’ve been with you almost every day for the last five years. Is it so unreasonable for me to have fallen in love with you?”
[...]
“You’ve waited for me this long?” she asked in a whisper.
Tamani nodded.” And I’ll wait longer. Someday you’ll come to Avalon and when that time comes, I’ll show you what I have to offer you in my world, our world. You’ll choose me. You’ll come home with me
OR ELSE. (ok, he doesn’t actually say that last bit. But you know creepy stalker fairy is thinking it.)
You too can read this book for free if you click the link. I’m not actually suggesting you do so.
[1]Mind you, I’m not actually saying the book is good. Because it is not.
[2] “It’s such a perfect piece of earth that nature is not the only abundant resource there. Gold and diamonds are as common as sticks and stones“
[3] I call this the “Goblet of Fire” syndrome – because of course you need a really complicated plan to kidnap Harry Potter rather than just kidnapping any of the nine million other times you have him alone once you’ve had your agent replace Mad Eye Moody.
The Other Place by Mary Gaitskill
It isn’t often I get annoyed a story exists – sure many, many stories are not very good, but that’s ok, I don’t have to read them, and while sometimes I might be annoyed I spent time reading them, I rarely want them erased from existence.
“The Other Place” by Mary Gaitskill is one I’d like to have erased. It is a deliberately creepy story of a middle-aged man who fantasizes about hurting women and sees the signs of the same in his son.
Mostly, though, he draws pictures of men holding guns. Or men hanging from nooses. Or men cutting up other men with chainsaws—in these pictures there are no faces, just figures holding chainsaws and figures being cut in two, with blood spraying out.
My wife, Marla, says that this is fine, as long as we balance it out with other things—family dinners, discussions of current events, sports, exposure to art and nature. But I don’t know. Douglas and I were sitting together in the living room last week, half watching the TV and checking e-mail, when an advertisement for a movie flashed across the screen: it was called “Captivity” and the ad showed a terrified blond girl in a cage, a tear running down her face. Doug didn’t speak or move. But I could feel his fascination, the suddenly deepening quality of it. And I don’t doubt that he could feel mine. We sat there and felt it together.
He’s a loathesome sociopathic character who hides behind a façade of normalcy, but by conveying the story as his inner monologue we know how far from normal he is.
And that’s where my problem lies with the story. It focuses on the sensational, the outlier, the guy who is so fucked up that allows society to ignore the violence against women that’s committed every day by normal guys. (I think Gaitskill intended to do the opposite – hint at the darkness that lies in all of us but this guy is too far off the map of normalcy for that to work.)
This is something we see all the time in real life – the most recent example being the house bill (H.R. 3) which attemped to redefine what qualified for rape only into acts which involved violence or the threat of violence. Like the myth that most murders are committed by strangers, there are people who like the delusion of believing real rapes are committed by the man in the ski-mask hiding in the bushes with a gun and not by the nice fellow you went on a date with and asked in to have coffee or a drink and didn’t take no for an answer.
I don’t need to have it reinforced in fiction.
(sorry, been swamped at work – I hope in a week posting will become more regular again.)
Going Bovine by Libba Bray
This story takes place in an Alternate Universe[1] where MTV and Carson Daly are Yo!TV and Parker Day, Star Wars has become the clearly inferior Star Fighter, but mostly things are pretty much exactly the same.
And Cameron pretty much your every day pot-smoking, non-achieving, feels-like-he-only-has-relationship-with-his-dad’s-back sort of teen. Oh, with the perfect sister who is everything he is not – popular, gets good grades, a cheerleader who is dating the former quarterback.
And the whole situation annoys the hell out of him. He’s got a great snarky voice that make reading the first few chapters a delight.
Then the plot kicks in – Cameron finds out that he has Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease and Bray neatly satirizes some of the typical reactions, like the girl who couldn’t stand him getting all weepy and the school holding a pep rally for Cameron.
It’s like now that I am checking out, I actually matter. Ad for some reason, this demands cute baskets loaded with kiwi animals and apples carved into flowers. Calhoun High School has gone into overdrive for me. Rumor has it that the school board fears a lawsuit and they had people in sci-fi-worthy suits tearing apart the cafeteria in case that’s where the BSE came from. I hear the new menu features a lot of tofu. But to make up for the gosh-darn inconvenience of my having a terminal disease, they have organized a pep rally in my honor.
Cameron then embarks on a Don Quixotesque quest from Texas to New Orleans and then to Florida accompanied by his sidekick Gonzo (a hypochondriac gay dwarf) and the spirit of Baldur who has been trapped in a garden gnome. Bray makes allusions to Don Quixote a bit too much for my taste and honestly, I liked the story best when it was felt like it was a road trip, not a quest, with a lot of bickering and bantering and the three guys becoming friends.
Bray doesn’t ever let you forget that this trip is most likely happening all in Cameron’s head but having him hear bits of dialogue from the hospital. Though since there is an infinity of alternate universes there could be one where that’s the form Cameron’s hallucinations take. Bray never closes that door either. The ending is surprisingly satisfying and much less of a downer than I expected.
[1] I always feel like that should be capitalized even though that’s ridiculous. I may be catching random capital letter disease.(tm)
Disassembly by Kathy Fish
I was poking around on the internets and got led to the guernica site because of a a story about the decline of Detroit and then noticed that they also published fiction. New fiction site=same reaction as a feral cat who discovers catnip for the first time, only with less drooling.
I like this story but I can’t really articulate why. It seems to encapsulate perfectly the horror of funerals and the private history that plays such a huge role in families. This story feels true, even if there isn’t that much that happens and in its own way it dribbles off a bit. It hits its mark because of the way life dribbles off a bit.
I give myself extra points for mentioning drooling/dribbling so many times. The story is much better than my comments.
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart
I’m really quite behind on my blogging – there has been lots of reading of books by women, but much less in the way of writing about them – I’ve got stacks of things from Christmas break still to write about.
This book is a gem. Rather than being the story of the ugly duckling who grew up over the summer and gets a boyfriend… Well, ok, it starts off as that story, but it’s mainly the story of Frankie refusing to be a doormat.
Frankie comes back to school and immediately starts dating her crush from freshman year. Her boyfriend (a senior, natch) isn’t all that into her (he likes her, but he’s not interested in her friends or her life – he treats her as an accessory to his life.) She’ll never mean as much to him as his friends and she’s jealous of the bond they share. She’s not happy about it, and decides to get even.
And the best way to get even is to have your boyfriend (and his pals in the secret society) do pranks for you by pretending to be your boyfriend’s best friend. (It’s by email! Not a disguise – it makes perfect sense in the book.) Not only does she outwit the boys, her pranks are strong on social commentary and genuinely funny. (She even shames the administration into including actual fresh vegetables in the salad bar.)
At times, the book veers a bit into the preachy mode – where you feel like the author is telling you how you ought to feel rather than how Frankie does feel, but it’s a minor complaint, and I’m not sure that teens don’t need the sledgehammer approach. (I’m sure I did.)
I totally have a crush on Frankie.
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
One day you may wake up and realize that your parents don’t love each other and that your mom is painfully unhappy. In Rose’s case, this happens while eating her a slice of birthday cake her mother made from scratch.
But the day was darkening outside, and as I finished that first bite, as that first impression faded, I felt a subtle shift inside, an unexpected reaction As if a sensor, so buried deep inside me, raised its scope to alert my mouth to something new. Because the goodness of the ingredients–the fine chocolate, the freshest lemons–seemed like a cover over something larger and darker, and the taste of what was underneath was threatening to push up from the bite. I could absolutely taste the chocolate, but in drifts and traces, in an unfurling, or an opening, it seemed that my mouth was also filling with the taste of smallness, the sensation of shrinking, of upset, tasting a distance I somehow knew was connected to my mother, tasting a sense of her thinking, a spiral, like I could almost taste the grit in her jaw that had created the headache that meant she had to take as many aspirin as were necessary, a white dotted line of them in a row on the nightstand like an ellipsis in her comment: I’m just going to lie down …None of it was a bad taste, so much, but there was a kind of lack of wholeness to the flavors that made it taste hollow, like the lemon and chocolate were just surrounding a hollowness.
Now unlocked, Rose finds that she can feel all the emotions of everyone who contributed to the cake – primarily her mother who baked it, but the ones who picked the lemons, ground the flour – everything and everyone, and the hollowness she feels after eating it threatens to overwhelm her. And with every meal she feels everything that contributes to it. Eating has become a horror.
Rose Edlestein doesn’t live in a happy family, but not one that’s obviously unhappy from the outside either. Her father is distant, uncomfortable with his children and doesn’t know how to connect with them, but does love them. Her mother is the opposite. Intense and focused, and her attention threatens to overwhelm her children, like full sunlight on shade loving trees. She fell in love because she thought there was a sign that her marriage was meant to be, and she never really recovers when she finds out during the best man’s toast at her wedding that “the magical incident” was engineered by her husband. Rose’s brother is shy and uncomfortable with rare moments of affection.
And then there’s Rose, unable to hide from the family secrets that threaten to overwhelm her – her mother’s hollow life, and then guilt and euphoria when she takes a lover, and her bother Joseph’s misery that doesn’t seem to have any obvious cause.
At one point Rose shouts her pain and horror and tries to get her family to recognize what’s gone wrong with them, but her mother denies her problems and they implicitly ask her to maintain face – if no one talks about it, then there’s nothing wrong.
Bender is playful and creative in her writing – you can almost feel her pleasure in crafting the words of the story. At the same time, this book is depressing as hell.
There is a classic strain of family misery story (often very successfully in American literature – think The Corrections), stories that make you thankful that your family is not like this (or makes you weep because it is) and while Bender uses magic realism to illuminate the heart of the despair of an unhappy family, this fits firmly in the tradition.
There is no great healing, and the story is at best bittersweet, but in the end, Rose begins to make peace with her special powers and her family. Her brother is not so lucky, and it’s hard not to wonder that Joseph might have survived better if only his family had been more open with him, and how they struggled with similar things. But, this is family, so maybe not.
The Silence of the Asonu by Ursula K. Le Guin
The strength in Le Guin’s writing has always been her worldbuilding. She seems to have an infinite capacity for creating varied cultures. In The Silence of the Asonu she creates a world in which none of the adults talk and the children gradually lose language.
Children from two to six years old chatter to each other constantly; they argue, wrangle, and bicker, and sometimes come to blows. As they come to be six or seven they begin to speak less and to quarrel less. By the time they are eight or nine most of them are very shy of words and reluctant to answer a question except by gesture. They have learned to quietly evade inquiring tourists and linguists with notebooks and recording devices. By adolescence they are as silent and as peaceable as the adults.
There is little plot in the story – there is a somewhat amusing section where the silence of the Asonu has been given a mysticism by a group of zealots who seem to want to read far more into one Asonu’s utterances than warranted.
The story turns dark when one of the zealots kidnaps a young Asonu child in hopes of getting it to speak longer so that she could teach him the secrets the Asonu hide. Unsurprisingly, this does not turn out well.
Unfortunately, the story collapses for me when Le Guin ends the story with a lame joke.
