Feb 02 2020

Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney by Dennis O’Driscoll

So now I want to read all of Seamus Heaney’s poetry. I want to start with Death of a Naturalist and see what set him apart from other poets getting started. I want to follow him up North to see how he both did and did not address the Troubles of his native Northern Ireland. I want to see the sets of sonnets that seemingly sent themselves, hear how he took up a longer story of Sweeney, make out the light of The Haw Lantern, travel a new line with District and Circle, and all of the others before, after and in between.

Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney

It will be a sideways entry to his poems. I read and loved his Nobel lecture, Crediting Poetry, when it was new, and I have gone back to it again and again through the years. I have also read and enjoyed his Beowulf, yet I have never read a volume of his original poems. That will soon change.

Stepping Stones is a book-length set of interviews between Heaney and Dennis O’Driscoll, a fellow Irish poet who was 15 years Heaney’s junior. They were conducted over a series of years and, at Heaney’s request, “principally in writing and by post.” (p. viii) Some items from 2003 and 2006 originate from conversations that O’Driscoll and Heaney had in person, the latter before an audience in London. Stepping Stones is also the closest that Heaney came to leaving an autobiography. After two introductory chapters about Heaney’s early life, O’Driscoll organizes the rest of the conversations around published collections of Heaney’s poetry. “I wanted to avoid a slavishly chronological approach; collection-centred questions fostered variety and flexibility, allowing for a blend of contemporaneous commentary and retrospective recollection.” (p. ix) O’Driscoll and Heaney work through the collections chronologically, but within the chapters they range back and forth through time, and across many different themes.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/02/02/stepping-stones-interviews-with-seamus-heaney-by-dennis-odriscoll/

Jan 31 2020

The Bride Test (The Kiss Quotient #2) by Helen Hoang

Some books are like a long cool drink of water on a hot day: to be consumed greedily because it just feels so good going down. Obviously, since I brought it up, one of these books is Helen Hoang’s The Bride Test, which has just dethroned its predecessor, The Kiss Quotient, as my favorite contemporary romance novel, shoot maybe even favorite romance novel, of all time.

The Bride Test follows My, a half-Vietnamese half-American hotel cleaner who dropped out of high school when she got pregnant with her beloved daughter, to the dismay of her ultimately supportive single mom and grandmother. It’s while cleaning a hotel bathroom that she runs into Nga, a Vietnamese-American who’s come back to the motherland in search of a bride for her autistic son, Khai. Nga thinks that My would be the perfect candidate for daughter-in-law. My isn’t as into the idea but her mother persuades her that a no-strings summer in America getting to know a handsome if aloof single dude will also give her time to look for her father, who left Vietnam before My was even born. And so My reinvents herself as Esme and prepares for three months in a brand new world.

Khai, of course, is completely horrified when his mother tells him what she’s done. It isn’t so much that he protests the idea of an arranged marriage as that he hates the idea of marriage altogether, not out of any absurd hatred of the institution but because he’s convinced that he’s incapable of love. So he’s completely thrown for a loop when he meets the delightful Esme and finds himself increasingly drawn to her. Guys like him, who’ve been accused of being stone-hearted all their lives because they don’t display emotions the same way neurotypical people do, can’t fall in love… can they?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/01/31/the-bride-test-the-kiss-quotient-2-by-helen-hoang/

Jan 28 2020

Diamond City (Diamond City #1) by Francesca Flores

Man, I dig a morally ambiguous lead character as much as the next person (V. E. Schwab’s Villains series, the badass coven of Hannah Capin’s upcoming Foul Is Fair) but this was waaaaay not that. Aina Solis is an orphan whose parents were killed for practicing their pacifist religion in Kosin, the titular Diamond City. After years of living on the streets and sniffing glue, she’s recruited by the Blood King, Kohl Pavel, to became a member of his crew, more specifically an assassin known as a Blade. Fast forward six years and Aina has become Kohl’s right hand. He promises her permission to open her own tradehouse (basically, her own gang) if she completes one last lucrative job for him: assassinate Kouta Hirai, one of the richest men in the city.

Naturally, things go wrong, and Aina soon finds herself discarded and worse by the man she’s always looked to as a role model and object of affection. Determined to prove herself to him, she enters into a treacherous alliance with Ryuu, Kouta’s youngest brother, to fulfill her mission and regain Kohl’s trust and the future he’s promised her.

I mean, if this is meant to be a book about not trusting people who promise you whatever you want in some hazy future so long as you accept abuse in the present, then I guess it’s job well done (tho it legit boggles my mind that she thinks he’s going to allow her to set up a rival shop in the same city. Maybe in another city, but in the same one? There’s just no way.) And there are moments of reflection that are truly insightful, into the welter of teenage emotion and romance and class consciousness. But oof, the lack of rigor that went into building, well, everything else.

First, Aina is a terrible assassin. She’s hyped up as this super badass but all you see in this book is her botching mission after mission while Kohl’s often conflicting advice plays in her head. But she’s given incredibly stupid opponents to make her look better, like the guy who comes looking for her in the bar. No way in hell would a guy who runs a gambling den a) do his own dirty work, especially if b) he doesn’t even know how to use the gun he’s waving around. We keep being told she’s awesome despite evidence to the contrary, which is just as annoying as her constant musing over whether her “life is sacred” parents would be proud of her work as an assassin. I’m gonna guess that’s a hard no, Aina!

And she wears a scarf that she constantly dyes in the blood of her victims like that isn’t super disgusting, both stink- and hideous brown-grey color-wise. She wanders around in it and no one gags and points at her all “wtf?!” Instead, she actually gets compliments over the color, which is mind-boggling to anyone who’s ever had to stress over period stains. Actually, a lot of the attitude to dress here makes no goddamn sense, as she pretty much swans around in the same outfit whether crawling through sewers or attending a high-class ball, all in the same night, and no one fucking says anything! The world-building details also make no goddamn sense, especially in the technology: photography is rare but used for cleaning crew ID (but not security guard ID?!) and plastics are used primarily to make the bags that addicts use to sniff glue. Oh, and she can dodge bullets. No bog-standard human, no matter what setting, can dodge bullets, not without some sort of physical augmentation. The world-building is entirely one of convenience for the protagonist’s journey, and it makes me livid. Just because it’s a fantasy novel doesn’t mean the laws of logic don’t apply.

Also? I found Aina’s sense of tribalism incredibly off-putting. She kills dozens of people, innocent or otherwise, in this book but the only time she shows mercy is when her intended victim either shares a background or religion with her. That is literally as gross as a mass shooter not wanting to hurt someone because they’re also white.

Diamond City tries for edgy but just ends up flat and unbelievable, to the point of ludicrous. The writing itself isn’t terrible, and there are some decent ideas in there, but someone really needs to hold Francesca Flores to a minimum standard of sense-making.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/01/28/diamond-city-diamond-city-1-by-francesca-flores/

Jan 26 2020

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson has all of the receipts. Setting out to understand the Great Migration of African-Americans out of the South and into other regions of the country, she drew on scholarship, she drew on hundreds of interview, she drew on the archives of dozens of organizations, and she arrived with a great work of synthesis, a book whose pages encompass the most significant domestic migration in the history of the United States. It is, she writes, “three projects in one. The first was a collection of oral histories from around the country. The second was the distillation of those oral histories into a narrative of three protagonists, each of whom led a sufficiently full life to merit a book in his or her own right and was thus researched and reported as such. The third was an examination of newspaper accounts and scholarly and literary works of the era and more recent analyses of the Migration to recount the motivations, circumstances, and perceptions of the Migration as it was in progress and to put the subjects’ actions into historical context.” (p. 540)

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Wilkerson not only interviewed a vast swathe of people before selecting her three protagonists, she “confirmed or clarified [the protagonists’] accounts through interviews with the waning circle of surviving witnesses, cohorts, and family members, through newspaper accounts in the South and North dating back to 1900; and through census, military, railroad, school, state, and municipal records. (p. 541) She spoke with the people “for dozens, if not hundreds, of hours, most of the interviews tape-recorded and transcribed.” (p. 541) She not only spoke with as many people as she could find to tell and corroborate the stories she relates, “I then reenacted all or part of each subject’s migration route, devoting most of my time to the migration of Robert Foster.” (p. 541) She has been there and done that, seen every bit of the journey, gotten it all down and made as much sense as one person can of a movement so vast that it touched practically every corner of a continent-spanning nation.

What Wilkerson is too modest (and too smart) to remark in her notes that discuss how she put the book together is that the stories she chose are riveting. Wilkerson is aware of the scholarship and draws on it, but as she writes, “I began this work because of what I saw as incomplete perceptions, outside of scholarly circles, of what the Great Migration was and how and why it happened, particularly through the eyes of those who experienced it. Because it was so unwieldy and lasted for so long, the movement did not appear to rise to the level of public consciousness that, by any measure, it seemed to deserve.” (p. 539) She describes three goals for the book: to describe when the Great Migration took place, to depict where it occurred, and to show some of the people who comprised it. “I wanted to convey the intimate stories of people who had dared to make the crossing. I wanted to capture the vastness of the phenomenon by tracking unrelated people who had followed the multiple streams of the Great Migration over the course of the decades it unfolded.” (p. 539)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/01/26/the-warmth-of-other-suns-by-isabel-wilkerson/

Jan 24 2020

Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune by Roselle Lim

I picked this up thinking it would be a sweet romance featuring Asian-American characters who cook, and while it definitely has the latter, the former is merely an uninteresting subplot featuring the dreaded insta-love. This is definitely more contemporary fiction than romance, which made my genre-loving heart sad. Actually, a lot about this book made me sad, but before I get there, a quick description of plot:

Natalie Tan always wanted to run her own restaurant but her agoraphobic single mom did everything to discourage her teenage dreams. Natalie rebelled by saving up money to go to culinary school, but after flunking out in her first year, took off to travel the world and gain culinary experience by cooking in order to fund her travels. When her mother unexpectedly dies, Natalie returns to their home in San Francisco’s Chinatown to discover that she’s been left her grandmother’s legendary, and long-shuttered, restaurant. At first mistrustful of the neighbors whom she believed neglected her and her mother as she was growing up, she comes to realize that she’s a necessary part of the neighborhood and strives to help rebuild it, saving it from gentrification through flights of magical realism.

Sounds amazing, right? My first clue that something was off about this book was the fact that the food descriptions did absolutely nothing for me. I am a reader highly susceptible to writing-induced food cravings, so to only feel a slight stirring of “hmm, I should go get dim sum” towards the end of a book about Asian cuisine, the food I grew up with and crave most, is disquieting to say the least. I also found myself irritated with the chef’s recipes included. It’s fine that they don’t include measurements, but to then insist that any one recipe will make a set amount of food is disingenuous at best. I don’t know how much experience Roselle Lim has with working in a restaurant but, food aside, some of the stuff in here was utterly mind-boggling. By the time I read that Natalie didn’t think she needed anyone but herself (no waitstaff, no host, no dishwasher) in order to run her admittedly small restaurant, I was absolutely done with the culinary aspect of this novel.

So what about the fantasy aspects? Could they save the book from its astonishing lack of food realism? Alas, too much of the fantastic stuff felt strictly by-the-numbers. Natalie cries tears of salt crystal that her mother collects in a bowl, but aside from that and the one big plot twist towards the end (well, “twist” if you don’t read much speculative fiction,) no one sees the admittedly cool effects except for Natalie herself. That’s less magical realism than a vivid imagination.

But the worst thing about this book was the fact that the characterization made no sense. It was truly shocking to me that no one line read this book and pointed out the many inconsistencies. Like, I get giving a pass to the cooking, since not everyone has cooked professionally, and the magical stuff, since not everyone magicks professionally either, but honestly trying to make us believe that Miranda Tan, Natalie’s mother, was her biggest cheerleader when she’d done SO MUCH to make her kid not believe in herself? I appreciated the depiction of Miranda’s agoraphobia and depression and how little understood those are in Asian culture, but being mentally ill doesn’t automatically make you a strong person. Being a restless perfectionist like Qiao, Miranda’s mom, doesn’t make you a strong person either. I understand Natalie wanting to forgive her mother and get to know her grandmother better via the writings they left her, but her antecedents were mildly interesting at best and seriously problematic at worst. It also bothered me that Natalie got so much shit for sticking up for herself. As an Asian-American, I understand the guilt that comes with leaving the nest but maybe it would have been nice to see an acknowledgment of reciprocal culpability from the people representing Asian culture around her, and not in the form of an extremely unlikely speech from the worst of them?

Maybe I’m being too hard on this book, but I’m just so disappointed. I was really rooting for it because it boasts all the elements I love but it kinda sucked.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/01/24/natalie-tans-book-of-luck-and-fortune-by-roselle-lim/

Jan 23 2020

Wintry Slowness

Sueddeutsche Reihe

Last February, I read 17 books in a month, which is a lot for me, if not for Doreen or Laura (or indeed Jo Walton). Now, I seem to be on the opposite side of that coin. Of the three books I finished in December, one I skimmed a great deal of, one was quite short, and one was finished on the last day of the year. So far in January, I have finished one.

Normally, I know why my reading slows: an international move, a job change, some other life event. None of that is happening now, I’m just making like the trees and not doing as much in this still season at 50°N. I have started quite a few books, and mostly big ones, too; maybe that is what is going on. Dhalgren, Gnomon by Nick Harkaway, the new Oxford history of Reconstruction titled The Republic for Which It Stands. I’m nearing the end of a book-length set of interviews with Seamus Heaney, so maybe that will get the momentum going again.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/01/23/wintry-slowness/

Jan 18 2020

Normal People by Sally Rooney

I expected more. While well-written — in the sense that, as with real life, the moments of sublime beauty are interspersed with observations of banal minutiae — it’s essentially a deep dive into the mind of a young, heterosexual white couple. Marianne is a girl from a rich, abusive family. She’s unpopular in the Carricklea high school she attends, because she doesn’t really care about what other people think and has no interest in ingratiating herself, plus she’s smart and argumentative, at least at school. Connell is the most popular guy in school, handsome and on the football team. He’s the only child of a single mom who works as a cleaner to support them, including at Marianne’s family home. Connell and Marianne get involved in high school, but he’s uninterested in being open about their connection. She persuades him to apply to Trinity with her, but their relationship, unsurprisingly, falls apart before they make it there.

The novel follows them over the next few years as they come together, fall apart, rinse, repeat. Along the way, Marianne channels her self-loathing into sex. I’m not entirely sure whether Sally Rooney meant to be kink shaming but as a sex positive person, I felt really uncomfortable with some of the depictions here. It wasn’t quite 50 Shades Of Grey bad but it was enough to make me wonder why any purportedly intelligent millennial wouldn’t at least Google shit.

And while I was inclined to be sympathetic to these characters at the beginning, as the book wore on and the characters kept insisting on miscommunicating, it felt increasingly difficult to care about their self-inflicted issues. At least Connell went to therapy, and I’m glad it wasn’t treated as a shameful thing. Overall, this wasn’t quite MFA nonsense — and it was very readable despite the unconventional punctuation: I crushed it in a day or so — but I still don’t really understand all the acclaim.

Edited to add a link to a review of this novel and the rest of Sally Rooney’s oeuvre so far that I am wild with jealousy at not having written myself. It also references 50 Shades Of Grey, and is gorgeously savage in its takedown: https://thepointmag.com/criticism/normal-novels/

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/01/18/normal-people-by-sally-rooney/

Jan 14 2020

The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin

What’d I miss? The voters of the 2018 Worldcon awarded The Stone Sky the Hugo award for best novel, the first time in the award’s history that any author had won for best novel three years in a row, and also the first time that all three parts of a trilogy had won in that category. (I voted the year before and the year after, but not that year; I’ve read two other of the six finalists from 2018.) Clearly the book is held in high regard by one of its main audiences, one that I am a part of, but, like Doreen, I was not particularly taken by The Stone Sky. So what’d I miss?

The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin

Or maybe instead of asking what I missed, it’s better to consider what I did catch from the Broken Earth trilogy. The Fifth Season saw the world sundered, with vast amounts of death and destruction unleashed deliberately, and human civilization plunged into a Season where the other four are out of kilter and survival is the only law. Over the course of the book, readers saw how and some of why a powerful wielder of earth magic chose to kill millions. It is a bleak but compelling book. The Obelisk Gate shows life during the Season, how some people and some communities meet its tests and either pass them or fail them, with life being the usual stakes. Jemisin shows more of how the world came to be as it is, and how some few of the orogenes, the earth magicians, may access power even greater than the craft that ripped the world’s crust apart at the start of the trilogy. At the very end, she introduces the hope that the world does not have to remain as it is, with civilization coming close to collapse every time a Season strikes.

That question lurks over The Stone Sky: Can the world be redeemed? Should it be? In the third volume, Jemisin shows much more of how the Seasons arose, in a frame that makes answering “No” to the second question at least a possibility. As in the first two books of the trilogy, Jemisin divides her tale among viewpoints: Essun, a strong orogene who was trained at the world’s foremost school of earth magic, and who has gone on to gain even more skill and power from other teachers and experience; Nassun, her daughter, who fled south at the start of the Season and who is now also able to access the world-spanning network of obelisks, and who may be able to end the cycle of Seasons entirely; and finally an initially unnamed narrator to takes readers back to the advanced civilization of Syl Anagist. This narrator shows how the world came to its cycles of destruction and presents one side of the argument at the heart of The Stone Sky.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/01/14/the-stone-sky-by-n-k-jemisin/

Jan 11 2020

The Consuming Fire by John Scalzi

How does a human civilization react to news of its possible impending collapse, with the only option for survival a major upheaval touching every person in it and changing its power structure entirely? That’s the overriding question of John Scalzi’s Interdependency series. The Consuming Fire is the second part of the story, following The Collapsing Empire.

The Consuming Fire by John Scalzi

The Interdependency is an interstellar civilization, a collection of human habitats linked together by proximity to connections in the Flow, an extradimensional medium that allows travel between stellar systems faster than light plodding its way through normal space. The Flow is something like a river: faster here, slower there, not connecting all places. Though it has been stable for the thousand-year history of the Interdependency, the Flow has something else in common with the rivers it metaphorically resembles — it can change course. Over the course of The Collapsing Empire it became clear that the Flow was moving away from Interdependency space. Links that had functioned for centuries were closing up in a matter of weeks or less.

Scalzi has set up the Interdependency as a sort of mercantile techno-feudalism. There is an imperial ruler, the Emperox, in this case Grayland II. She is young and had not been expected to ascend to the throne. The rest of interstellar politics are dominated by trading houses that are great family-run companies that have monopolies on certain businesses and are also hereditary rulers of various settlements. Another key aspect of the Interdependency is that it features only one habitable planet, a backwater known as End. All other human habitations are artificial, on inhospitable planets or themselves in space. Collectively they can support civilization, but individually they would eventually fall apart. Their interdependence is literal, and by design of the polity’s founders. Without the Flow, it will all come crashing down.

The Consuming Fire follows several strands of this star-spanning narrative, concentrating on the highest ranks of the Interdependency. The Emperox, Grayland II, says she has received mystical revelations of how to lead her peoples through the impending crisis. In this, she is following the precedent of the imperial line’s founder, Rachela, whose visions and acumen led to the creation of the Interdependency. But Grayland is bucking the precedent of all of the rulers in between, none of whom claimed supernatural inspiration and who were content to let the established Church tend to the people’s spiritual needs without much intervention. People, especially powerful people, are skeptical of Grayland’s claims, but when another Flow stream collapses exactly as she predicted it would, they begin to believe. This is a mixed blessing.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/01/11/the-consuming-fire-by-john-scalzi/

Jan 07 2020

Lady Hotspur by Tessa Gratton

I guess you don’t have to come into this having already read Tessa Gratton’s The Queens Of Innis Lear, but I’m betting it would be super helpful. And I say that as someone who spent a lot of time looking up both that novel as well as the Shakespearean plays that inspired them (Henry IV Part I for this one, King Lear for its predecessor) in the course of reading this. Which research, along with historical asides, reminded me of all the reasons Shakespeare’s plays annoy me. Massaging the truth for drama is one thing, but then pretending that drama is the truth is quite another. Oh, don’t tell me old Bill was presenting his stuff as fiction, you know well and good he wrote expedient political nonsense.

But I do love a good retelling, and so to Ms Gratton’s latest. Lady Hotspur is a gender-bending, multiracial fantasy based loosely on Henry IV Part I, which itself was based loosely on real history. Hal, Hotspur and Edmund are all women in this version, and best friends who grow to be at odds when Hal’s mother returns from exile to depose the previous king, Rovassos, who had named Edmund (here renamed Banna Mora) his heir. Hal and Hotspur become lovers but as the duties of nobility tear them away from one another and from Banna Mora, more than just personal conflict arises, as the quest to rule Aremoria begins. There’s prophecy and sex and magic and loads of bloodshed, leading to a lovely, unexpected ending that felt rightfully earned. It’s not exactly a spoiler to say that you can understand why Hal forgives Banna Mora, even tho I personally would not have — then again, Hal is a good prince (eventually) and I’m a grumpy book critic.

That said, it can feel like a slog to get to said ending. There is A LOT going on, with a magic system and folklore that constantly reference TQoIL, such that I almost hesitate to call this a standalone novel. Ms Gratton does have a gift for characterization, where a character she presents as being deeply annoying can grow to become not only understandable but heroic. This was especially true for Hal: I spent a long time feeling impatient with her sense of self-pity and had to remind myself that she was still a teenager, and one who hadn’t expected to have such responsibility thrust upon her. I was thus pleasantly surprised at how well she turned out. I do rather wish that some of the time spent on her romance with Hotspur had been spent on fleshing out her relationship with her mother instead, as I was actually quite startled when she expressed her devotion to Celedrix after spending so much of the book trying to disappoint her. I also wish I could’ve sympathized more with Banna Mora’s outright selfishness and sense of privilege, but again, Hal is a far better person than I am.

If you dig medieval fantasy, Celtic-based magic and quasi-history, you could do worse than to pick up Lady Hotspur. If you want queer, feminist stories of warfare and leadership that affirm many facets of a healthy sexuality, definitely pick up Lady Hotspur.

And oh my God, that cover. The artist for this and TQoIL was inspired.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/01/07/lady-hotspur-by-tessa-gratton/