50books_poc | 2: Angélica Gorodischer - Kalpa Imperial (tr. Ursula K. Le Guin)

There are heroes and villains and clever cowards and tricksters and betrayals and battles and emperors and ascetics and madmen. If you like things that are beautiful and crazy epic, put this one on your list.

Gorodischer works the aesthetic of HUGE, on a level I've only seen China Miéville and Hal Duncan function at, and it is a stunningly fine thing. Come for the razor-sharp characterization, stay for the mindblowing historiography and meta-narratives about the nature of storytelling.

So Kalpa Imperial. It's a cycle of disconnected stories about the emperors and commoners and genii loci of that greatest of empires, whose name need not even be mentioned. (You know how these things go.) It is almost as old as I am in Argentina, but wasn't released in English until 2003. You know how Le Guin rolls, so the prose is gorgeous. Being unable to engage the original, I can't say anything about the translation, other than that I'm inclined to trust Le Guin's judgment in these sorts of things and that it reads well.

Pretty much all the stories are individually wonderful, and a few of them left me on the verge of tears (special mention to "The End of a Dynasty, or: The Natural History of Ferrets" and "Concerning the Unchecked Growth of Cities"), but the gestalt and the interstices are where the project qua project gets really interesting. See, for almost the entire cycle, there isn't any overlap. There are references within each story that seem like they should link up and let you orient, but they never point to anywhere you've been or will go before the book's out. The effect is one of massive elbow-room, a history so large that a multitude of histories can dwell within and not impinge on each other. Furthermore, it eschews any teleological idea of "progress"—the first story tells you right off the bat that any technological/political milieu can exist at any point in the Empire's past or future—which makes the feeling of spacious time still more intense, sets you even further adrift in the infinity of history. (Oh, and each story except the last has its own quite-present storyteller, so they all actually cover at least two time periods in duplex.)

Back up: Like I said, there isn't any overlap for almost the entire cycle. The next-to-last story has a single recognizable reference, like a clearing of the throat for what follows. The last story makes me want to write papers.

You remember how, in Super Mario World on the SNES, if you beat the entire secret world you'd get dumped out back where you were except all the enemies now had Mario's face? This is the literary equivalent of that. It turns the structure of the rest of the book completely inside-out. Instead of having a storyteller providing the reader interface to the story, it's written in an interface-less third person; there is a storyteller contained inside, but he's telling stories that exist outside the Empire's history. In fact, the whole thing is flowing backwards: instead of providing the real-world audience with an interface to the Empire's story, the storyteller seems to be providing the Imperial characters an (imperfect and distorted) interface with the real world, stealing our stories for the entertainment of his fictional comrades but getting the details intriguingly... wrong? Right? Priam played by the great bear Orson Welles and Clark Gable as Odysseus and Jameses Dean and Bond as Meneleus and Agamemnon, the good ships Brigitte Bardot and Ava Gardner and Betty Davis, the roofless towers of the house Charge of the Light Brigade burning (and you see what I meant about the Mario heads?), and an eye that sees the world into being. It's a totally unexpected mutation of the project that makes explicit the flow of Gorodischer's heretofore implicit argument re: the relationship between stories and reality, and it does so in a really intellectually exhilarating way while also telling a totally ripping yarn about a caravan and the life's work of a desert guide and royalty in disguise and love and protection and nobility and the fate of a dynasty. No shit.

In short, this book owns.

EDIT: The publisher's buck-a-book sale is over, but it looks like they have some $7 (media-mail included) copies of KA kicking around the office if you don't feel like dropping full price at Amazon.

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From:

mirrorshard.livejournal.com

Ooh. Want.

caboca.livejournal.com

I've not wanted anything as much as this book since I was seven in the chocolate factory, and I've never read anything as awesome as this review never ever ever.

Thank you immensely for writing it and for the Mario reference, and I don't even like Mario much in the first place.