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

[roadrunnertwice]

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.

Brain Surgeon, Crowns, Fifty Miles from Tomorrow.

[sanguinity]

(Maybe if I do a bunch of mini-reviews, I'll have a chance of catching up?)

51. Keith Black, MD, Brain Surgeon: A Doctor's Inspiring Encounters with Mortality and Miracles.

This one works best, I think, if you think of it as an extended dinner table conversation. The writing style is somewhat clunky, but the man does have good stories to tell, and I learned quite a bit about brain tumors, brain surgery, cancer treatment, cancer research, and the various concerns one weighs when deciding whether to cut or not. (Which sounds as if it might be dull, when I list it out like that. Except that it's very much not.)


52. Michael Cunningham & Craig Marberry, Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats.

Oo. Lovely photos of women in their church hats, interleaved with reminisces from the women themselves about... the hats, their families, their churches, their communities. Lots of handsome photos, lots of gorgeous moments from people's lives. Go look.


53. William L. Iġġiaġruk Hensley, Fifty Miles from Tomorrow : A Memoir of Alaska and the Real People.

"Alaska is my identity, my home, and my cause. I was there, after all, before Gore-Tex replaced muskrat and wolf skin in parkas, before moon boots replaced mukluks, before the gas drill replaced the age-old tuuq we used to dig through five feet of ice to fish. I was there before the snow machine, back when the huskies howled their eagerness to pull the sled. I was there before the outboard motor showed up, when the qayaq and umiaq glided silently across the water, and I was there when the candle and the Coleman lamp provided all the light we needed."

Memoir of a Native Alaskan activist and politician who was instrumental in the preservation of the Native Alaskan land base. I would be hard-pressed to sum this up, but the first half is a very engaging depiction of Hesley's childhood community and its lifestyle, while the second half is the stressful emotional rollercoaster of trying to make sure that Alaska's newly-created state government, in combination with the federal government, didn't claim all of Alaska's land for themselves, corporate interests, and non-Native immigrants. There was a lot of cool and interesting stuff in here, but a lot of it you get just a glimpse of -- Hensley has had a very rich life, and one book isn't nearly enough to discuss it all.

Bindi Babes, Bollywood Babes

[sanguinity]

54. Narinder Dhami, Bindi Babes.

Sassy, chicklit-style YA about a very close trio of sisters, Geena, Amber, and Jazz. In many ways this is a classic "war against the governess" story, except in this case, the "governess" is their aunt, newly arrived from India. In the classic tradition of these stories, the aunt is firm but loving, and always one step ahead of the girls. If you enjoy the maneuver and countermaneuver machinations of this sub-genre (I do), this is well-executed.

I do wish Dhami would put more description in -- I'm two books into the series, and I still can't figure out if two of the major characters are Desi or not. (I freely admit that more knowledgeable readers than myself may find it perfectly obvious.) The subplot about Kim, I'm sad to say, made me FREAKIN' INSANE. Even before you know where that subplot is going (it goes exactly where you think it's going, but I will be good and pretend that it can be spoiled), the sisters are shown bullying Kim in that horrible "we're popular, we can do anything we want" style. But once you realize where that subplot is going? ARGH ARGH ARGH. 'Twas very difficult for me to remember that I'm supposed to find the sisters sympathetic.

Fortunately, I like the aunt a lot, I find her hugely sympathetic, and I trust her to knock some sense into these girls' heads. Eventually.

55. Narinder Dhami, Bollywood Babes.

I don't have much to say about this one, as I thought it was a weaker than the first. This time, the girls bring in a destitute Bollywood star for their in-house adversary. Again, I find the aunt far more sympathetic and interesting than the girls -- Auntie has the manners and compassion not to use the movie star's poverty against her, but Auntie is also genuinely frustrated about having an imperious houseguest who takes full advantage of Auntie's good manners. As with the first book, I find the girls too callously self-centered to be very sympathetic.

The third book's conflict is supposed to be between the aunt and her aunt, so I'll likely be having a go. Also, there's supposed to be about the maybe-future-boyfriends who until now have been lurking around the edge of the story. I suppose it's a bad sign that I'm reading these for the secondary characters and not so much the primary ones, but eh. They're fun (except when they make me go ARGH), and they're a fast-paced read.

Theme of Japan with very long titles

[clodia-risa.livejournal.com]

From My Grandmother's Bedside: Sketches of Postwar Tokyo. Norma Field.

Dr. Field is the daughter of an American soldier and a Japanese woman who were married for several years after WWII. This book is a series of thoughts, memories, and vignettes that range from stories told about her grandmother's childhood, to musings about art criticism and what it says about the Japanese nationalistic culture. She was raised in Japan but now lives in America, and teaches at the University of Chicago. The main narrative story (as much as there is one) is the story of the three women in her family, Field who only can visit in the summer, her mother who cares for the titular grandmother, and the grandmother herself, who has suffered from her second stroke and spends much of her time absorbed in her private self. "My grandmother is my mother's jewel" is a line that is repeated throughout.

There were times that I wished I was better versed in Japanese history and culture, but for the most part it was clear to someone who has mostly been exposed through anime and manga. It contains many interesting thoughts about Japan, but mostly it was one person thinking about her family. I very much enjoyed it, and would recommend it to anyone interested.

The Legacy of Hiroshima: its past, our future. Naomi Shohno. Translated by Tomoko Nakamura and adapted by Jeffrey Hunter. 

Naomi Shohno was away at college when her hometown, Hiroshima, was destroyed. Fortunately, her parents survived. Not all of her family did. She became a researcher in nuclear physics after graduation, and was involved in the research on the damage and aftereffects of the two atomic bombs dropped in Japan. This is not a fun book. It is, however, concise, well-written and translated, and informative. She does not shy from technical details, but skips over the ones that she knows will be inaccessible to laymen, and explains all concepts so that I, a liberal arts major, could understand them. She balances the facts of the bombs with the human stories very well. The consequences of those two bombs on humans lives are horrific. The weakest two chapters were the final two, in which she covers all of the testing done from 1945-1986 (which was when the book was published) and makes her appeal to get rid of all nuclear weapons. I highly suggest reading this book.