rocky41_7

Halloween vampire classic! Today I finished Carmilla by J. Sheridan le Fanu. This novella is posited as the “first vampire book.” I can’t actually confirm if that’s true or not. But there is a vampire.

Your exposure to Carmilla may be like mine, in that it’s the “old lesbian vampire novel.” While there is truth to this—Carmilla is undoubtedly attracted to the protagonist, Laura—if you go into expecting a torrid lesbian love story, you will be disappointed. On the whole, it’s a lot more “lesbian passionately into disinterested but lonely straight girl” than a romance. At various times, Laura is repulsed and “embarrassed” by Carmilla’s fawning, and although taken by Carmilla’s beauty, never desires more than friendship from her. This is a story of a predator preying on vulnerable and ignorant young women for her own ends. However, if we can romanticize Dracula, which I’m happy to do, we can of course romanticize Carmilla—I just want to be upfront about the actual text.

The story is told through Laura’s written recollection after the events take place. It does a solid job setting the scene of Laura and her father’s isolation and some of the strange goings-on in the area around them before the mysterious Carmilla makes her entry. The abandoned village three miles west, around the ruins of the defunct Karnstein castle, make for a delicious bit of foreshadowing.

It plays up Carmilla’s strangeness and the push/pull of her relationship with Laura as an unknown illness claims the lives of young women nearby. I enjoyed the slowly increasing fear and horror Laura experiences as these inexplicable events in her home and her mind start piling up.

The novel is paced well until the end, which felt jarringly abrupt. I think the book would have benefitted from being longer. I was disappointed not to learn more about Carmilla and the Karnsteins’ history, and that there’s not much room for Laura to consider her feelings about discovering the truth of Carmilla (How would it feel to find out your only friend had been slowly killing you, and had been planning to do so from the start?), or really a denouement at all.

Overall, there’s a lot of tasty gothic mystery and troubling, strange physical + psychological maladies here, and I can definitely see how Carmilla influenced later vampire novels. However, I did find the sudden wrap-up disappointing. I still liked the book though, and it was a very fun October read.

Yesterday I concluded Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Cespedes, translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein. This story was originally serialized in a paper, first published in the 1950s. It is structured as the covert diary entries of a dissatisfied housewife in Rome.

The book deals with various themes of generational conflict, the impact of both World Wars, and Italy’s economic downturn, but the heart of the book is the diarist, Valeria’s, fight to create and maintain a sense of self. Her struggle is contained so neatly in the fact that no one even calls her by her name—to her aging, aloof parents she is always and forever “bebe,” and to her grown children and even her husband she is “Mama.” She has no real friends to speak of.

Valeria keeps her diary hidden from everyone in their too-small apartment, terrified that her husband or adult children might find it. Frequently, she threatens to swear off writing in it and destroy it, emphatic that she’s only become more unhappy since she started it. This is because the more Valeria keeps track of her life, the less satisfying she finds it.

I had originally wanted to listen to this one on audio, but there’s a length at which it just seems more practical to read the paper version, and 23 hours is about there. This chunker of a book clocks in at around 670 pages and it’s an entry in the Arthurian Legends. It’s The Bright Sword, by Lev Grossman.

Any book that long has to justify itself as far as I’m concerned. I might read a mediocre 300-page novel, but I’m not going through almost 700 pages unless it’s good. Happy to report this one is!

I have some familiarity with the Arthurian Legends—in that I’ve read The Once and Future King—but I haven’t gotten around to Le Mort d’Arthur or other more original elements yet, so just some perspective to keep in mind if you are someone more read in this area.

Grossman’s take involves a young wannabe knight, Collum of the Out Isles, who steals armor from his liege lord and runs away to mainland Britain in hopes of the chance to try out for the Knights of the Round Table. He hasn’t even set his goal as becoming one of them really, just the chance to try. Unfortunately, by the time he arrives at Camelot, King Arthur is 2 weeks dead and most of the Round Table is gone too, leaving behind only the less illustrious knights.

I thought it was very bold to center the story on Grossman’s original character, but I think it works. Collum is likeable and interesting and watching him interact with characters we know from the legends is fun.

The Bright Sword obviously comes from a place of love for Arthuriana. This is not a “genre-busting” book, but one that comes from deep attachment to the stories that spawned it. It balances the weight of epic legend well with humor—I laughed out loud a couple of times. It also does a very good job I thought of making the story appeal to a modern audience without copy/pasting 21^st century morals onto a book set well in the past. For instance, there are queer knights at the Table (And really, how could there not be? If you were a gay man of moderate athletic ability in Arthur’s Britan, and you heard about the Table, would you not be trying to get in there?), but they don’t use modern terminology to describe themselves, and their attitudes towards themselves and others feel appropriate for the setting.

Earlier this week, with 22 minutes left on my Libby check-out, I finished The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson. This is an SFF book about Caramenta, a young woman who travels to different parallel universes to gather information on their development for her employer, the tech company Eldridge.

In Cara’s world, and many like it, environmental disasters have wreaked havoc on Earth. The population is divided among people who live in domed, climate-controlled cities, and those left to the wasteland. The trick about world-hopping is that you can’t go to a parallel universe where “you” are still alive—so suddenly wastelanders like Cara, who have died over and over again by virtue of their terrible living circumstances, become valuable to Eldridge. Cara is particularly special, because in 325 parallel Earths which Eldridge has reached, she is dead in all but eight of them.

There is a lot of playing with what becomes of people if their circumstances are changed—Cara is especially interested in tracking one parallel version of herself who was adopted into a city family at a young age and how radically different her life is from the other Caras as a result.

The Space Between Worlds is pretty light on the SFF, actually. The world-hopping is really secondary to the issues of race and class that the book focuses on. I enjoyed Cara as a protagonist; she’s self-serving in a way that makes perfect sense given how hard she’s had to fight just to survive, but not cold-hearted. There are moments when you can see how much she wants to be different, softer, kinder, but she doesn’t trust the world not to punch her in the solar plexus if she tries.

She has a struggling romance with Dell, a female coworker born and raised in the city, and it’s tragic watching how the aforementioned race and class issues throw up roadblocks between them. I thought Johnson was occasionally a bit heavy-handed on the subject of Cara’s yearning for Dell, but on the whole this aspect was fun to watch play out.

The book was engaging all the way through and I always wanted to see how things turned out, but I’m not totally sold on the later third or so of the plot. I can’t decide if the ending was anticlimactic or just realistic. I did like the book, but something about the final big plot point just didn’t fully land for me.

Overall, a fun read.

I am definitely not going to finish my library system’s summer book bingo because I apparently never read anything I could even remotely stretch to fit the “soothing” square. Anyway, on Monday night I finished An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon.

This book takes place on a vast spaceship traveling for centuries, but the core of its story is an examination of racism and inequality. The dynamics between citizens of the upper decks of the ship and those from the lower decks is an allegory for the antebellum South, with the light-skinned upper deck citizens convinced of the moral necessity of their superiority over the dark-skinned lower deck citizens. Protagonist Aster and her friends and family aren’t slaves in name, but in practicality, they are.

Solomon excels in showing the myriad ways, large and small, that this dynamic breaks down Aster and those like her, particularly Aster’s companion Giselle. There’s scarcely a moment of Aster’s life where she’s allowed to forget “her place” and the constant stress of this wears on her. Aster is very intelligent, but none of that matters in a world where one look at her convinces people in power that she’s worthless.

I found Solomon’s writing engaging and her characters realistic. You may not like all of them, but they all feel like real people, and plausible products of the harsh lives they’ve been forced to live. When they behaved irrationally, it felt earned and real. When they were victorious, it felt like the story had provided enough support to back that.

Also at the core of the story is the passing down of information, stories, and traditions, which not only give Aster solace when times are difficult, but also guide her to the revelations she makes later in the book.

This is Solomon’s first book, and I do think it shows in some clumsy editing and dropped threads, but overall I think the book is a creative exploration of social dynamics with interesting characters and solid writing. If Solomon improves from here, I look forward to seeing what else they put out!

A+ Library is my bit where I review books with asexual and aromantic characters.

Once again managed to time things so that I finished both of my books on the same day…no idea how this keeps happening. Hours after wrapping up Sarah Gailey’s The Echo Wife, I also finished Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs, translated from Japanese by David Boyd and Sam Bett.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part, which is roughly a third of the novel, takes place over only three days. Natsuko Natsume is in her early thirties and lost for direction when her older sister arrives to spend a couple of nights with Natsuko, bringing along her twelve-year-old daughter Midoriko, who has refused to speak a word to her mother for the last six months.

The character: Natsuko Natsume, asexual
The verdict: Thumbs up
Previous entry: Someone You Can Build a Nest In

The Asexual Rep

I didn’t expect for this book to be a part of this segment, because I didn’t know it could be. Natsuko and the narrative never use the word “asexual” to describe her, but when she talks about her feelings on sex, I recognized so much of my own there it was impossible not to feel that she is.

Discussions of Natsuko’s sexuality don’t really arise until the second part of the book, and it’s never a huge focus, except as it ties into her goal of having a baby. Natsuko decides in her late thirties that she wants to be a mother, but she’s so repulsed by sex she isn’t sure how to go about it, because the usual method is completely off the table for her.

Natsuko’s only ever had one partner, a boyfriend she met in high school and dated through her early twenties. She seems to have been deeply in love with him, and they did have sex, but Natsuko describes her revulsion about having sex with him and how shocked she is when her friends appear to genuinely enjoy sex with their partners (“Even more than once a day!” she emphasizes). Natsuko’s dislike of sex is not because she doesn’t love her boyfriend or because there’s something wrong with him; it’s inherent to her experience. Eventually, Natsuko’s disinterest in sex leads to the end of this relationship, and she simply never pursues another.

Sex simply never really enters Natsuko’s calculus. She occasionally wonders if something is wrong with her, but ultimately refuses to put herself through something she doesn’t want to do to test it.

I found Natsuko’s feelings very relatable and her experience resonated a lot with me, even though she never labels herself (and since the book starts in 2008, that’s not unusual).

The Rest

The opening part really impressed me. Kawakami does a fabulous job keeping this simmering tension throughout, which at times fades into the background until it’s almost gone, and other times verges on boiling over. It’s obvious all three of these characters are deeply unhappy and the reasons for this and the way these things interact with each other is so fascinating. It’s a very realistic portrait of people who are trying their best, but mostly seem to be treading water in life, and not even managing that particularly well.

Although it spans only a short period of time, this section never feels drawn-out; it moves along at an engaging pace and provides the right level of detail and introspection to give you a full picture of the trio’s dynamic.

Kawakami kicks off with a theme of generational poverty and its impacts, which carries on through the rest of the book as well. Natsuko and her sister Makiko were raised in significant poverty and are still struggling with the impacts of that. Kawakami succeeds in showing the strain that such poverty puts on both individuals and relationships, how hard it is for anyone to be their best self when every day feels like a fight for survival. And yet, they are trying, and the love between the trio here is unmistakable.

The second part of the novel, which is much longer, is mostly just about Natsuko. Leading with the fact that I also enjoyed this section, it’s not as tight as the first third. Its focus is wider and it follows a lot more of Natsuko’s wandering journey towards a future she finds satisfying. Kawakami continues to excel in portraying the quiet messiness of people and their relationships and their daily struggles.

The book is filled with a sense of quiet desperation, which may have worn on me a little and resulted in the second part of the book feeling harder to get through. There’s a lot of cynicism among the characters, but it is deserved based on their experiences. Nevertheless, I think it does ultimately come around to a very hopeful place about seizing the future that you want and the necessity of taking risks to attain your dreams.

On the whole I was impressed with Kawakami’s writing and I would definitely look at more from her in the future.

Esen never could grasp why Ouyang might choose to keep himself apart, and why he lived with an austerity that bordered on monasticism. Most men who had risen so dramatically in station delighted in luxury, and Ouyang knew Esen would have gladly given him anything he wanted. But what did a eunuch soldier need other than weapons and armor? Ouyang thought of the abbot's scorn, Altan's curses. Creature. Thing. A tool that needed nothing, had no desires of its own.

-- She Who Became the Sun, chapter 5

Zhu saw Ma examining her from under her eyelashes as she drank the milk. It was a vexed look, as if she were convinced there was something else happening under Zhu's monkly naïveté, but she couldn't tell what it was. Still, she was the first person in the Red Turbans who had seen that much.

--  Chapter 9

Contrary to his father's assertions, Esen did remember. It was only that in his memory it had happened to someone else. Ouyang was so much a fixture in his life that he seemed devoid of any past other than the one he shared with Esen. It was only now that he was forced to see that memory truly, and acknowledge that Ouyang and that child were one and the same.

-- Chapter 8

[Ma] remembered the strange jolt she'd felt when she'd seen him [Zhu] kneeling before Little Guo on his first day in Anfeng. How, just for an instant, he'd seemed like someone who knew exactly what he was gambling, and why.

-- Chapter 9

Esen never meant to hurt, and Ouyang had always taken care to pretend matter-of-fact acceptance about his exclusion from family life. Why should he blame Esen for not reading his mind to see the anger and pain there? But the truth was: he did blame Esen. Blamed him even more than he would a stranger, because it hurt more that someone so beloved should not see the truth of him.

-- Chapter 10

And riding on his bad-tempered Mongol horse at the head of the procession was Monk Zhu himself. An unprepossessing little figure in robes instead of armor. From Ma's elevated perspective his circular straw hat made him look like a lopped stump. It was hard to believe someone like that had done the impossible. But even as she thought it, Ma remembered him saying I. It hadn't been the speech of a monk detached from earthly concerns, but that of someone keenly aware of his own interests. Someone with ambition.

-- Chapter 11

"Let me make an offering on your behalf."

"You're confusing your own opinion of me for your father's. I don't think his spirit particularly wants to hear from me."

"He thought highly of you," Esen said stubbornly. "My father didn't suffer fools. Would he have allowed you as my choice of general if he didn't believe in your capabilities? The reputation of the armies of Henan would be nothing if not for you. Of course he wants your respect."
...
The corner of Ouyang's mouth moved, more brittle than a smile. The shadow across his face was too transparent to mask pain. Esen thought: He mourns too.

-- Chapter 15

"You recognized it because you want something too. No one else knows, do they?"

"Knows what?" His [Zhu's] face flickered, and for one irrational moment she [Ma] felt afraid.  She said, less certain, "You didn't accidentally stumble into Anfeng. You came here on purpose."
...
Out loud, it sounded preposterous. Monks weren't supposed to want things. They weren't supposed to have ambition. And yet--

After a moment, Zhu said, "You know what else no one knows?"

"What?"

He smiled at her. Ordinary eyes in an unhandsome face; it was strange how they captured her. "That you're smarter than all of them put together. You're right. I did come."

-- Chapter 11

Esen groaned. "Ah, how much easier life must be without family. Clean. None of these worries, concerns, encumbrances." Intoxicated, Esen was over-enunciating. Ouyang, staring at him in pain, saw anew the reminder of what he had always known: that Esen had forgotten that Ouyang had come from a family; that he had once been a son, a brother, too. "Better I should be like you, loving only my sword, none of this--this--" 

-- Chapter 15 

"It is," he [Zhu] said. "But you know what's worse than suffering? Not suffering, because you're not even alive to feel it." An incoming draft stirred the air, blurring the thin lines of incense smoke. His eyes flicked to her [Ma], and she startled. He sees me, she thought, and the peculiar intensity of it made her feel like she was being seen for the very first time.

-- Chapter 12

But Ouyang hadn't done his best. He hadn't even tried...Esen's sympathy cut Ouyang's pride to the quick. He knew Ouyang better than anyone. How could he really believe that had been his best effort? All it showed was that Esen had forgotten the most important thing about him: that he was a Nanren.

-- Chapter 18

All at once the performance slipped off his [Zhu's] face. He was a short man, so that they were looking eye-to-eye; it gave the moment a shocking intimacy, as though something of his inner self was touching something of hers. He said gravely, "You're working so hard to help Little Guo. Does he even know?"

How was it he saw her as someone who acted of her own volition, when to everyone else she was just an object performing its function?

-- Chapter 13

Esen's voice took on a note Ouyang had never heard before, low and roughened with potential, as he said, "You really are as beautiful as a woman."
...
He had betrayed Esen, but now Esen betrayed him. It was incomprehensible how despite everything they had been through together, Esen could still think Ouyang might be flattered by that comparison. How could he be so completely ignorant of the shame that was the core of Ouyang's being? Burning with an emotion that seemed to contain the agonies of both love and hate, Ouyang thought furiously: He chooses not to know. 

-- Chapter 15

[Zhu] set aside his book and rose, and started to untie his shirt. It was so bizarre that Ma found herself watching...She heard his clothes fall.

Then his cool fingers were on her face, turning it back. He said, "Look."
...
Zhu watched her look. Her face had a flayed vulnerability, something so raw and terrible that Ma flinched to see it. It made her think of someone baring a mortal wound they dared not look at themselves, for fear of reality undoing them in an instant.  

Zhu spoke calmly, but beneath the surface Ma sensed a shivering horror. "Ma Xiuying. Do you see something you want?"

-- Chapter 14

Ouyang, watching Esen with an ache in his heart, realized afresh that Esen had never been able to understand the values that made other people's worlds different from his own. He looked but he couldn't see.

-- Chapter 22

Zhu smiled at her. "I don't even know who I am. General Ouyang killed Zhu Chongba, but I'm not the person I was born as either. How can you know who you're cherishing?"
...
"I might not know your name," Ma said, taking Zhu's hand. "But I know who you are."

-- Chapter 19

Esen stopped dead. Cold terror crushed his chest. "What have you done."
...
Baoxiang coughed, his face reddening, but he maintained his composure. "Oh, you think--? No, brother. This isn't my plot against you."
...
"No," said Ouyang. "It's mine."

-- Chapter 22

The depth of Ma's grief and anger surprised her...The witnesses gone, Ma's tears overflowed. "You killed him."

Zhu was silent. Ma, reading her face, exclaimed, "You don't even deny it!...The only thing you needed him for was to hand you power...But you don't need him for that [the Mandate], do you?" She said bitterly. "Because you have the Mandate too."

-- Chapter 23

There was a long silence. Eventually Esen said, his voice cracking, "Why are you doing this?"
...
"Why? Do you want me to tell you why? I was nearly twenty years by your side, Esen, and for all that time did you think I'd forgotten how your father slaughtered my family, and his men cut me like an animal and made me your slave? Do you think for a moment I forgot?"

-- Chapter 22

Zhu heard the unflinching demand in Ma's voice: for Zhu's own loyalty, and honesty, and difference. As Zhu stood looking down at her, she saw suddenly how their journey would go...for Ma, every moment of that ascent would be compromise and heartache and the gradual erosion of her belief that there was always a kinder way. That was the price Ma would pay--not just for Zhu's desire, but for her own. Because she loved Zhu, and wanted to see her rule the world.

Zhu's heart ached. I'll make it worth it. For both of us.
...
"My future Empress," she called, and the words left her throbbing with the sweet potential of what was to come.

-- Chapter 23

I found it very interesting how Ma and Zhu's relationship is premised so heavily on their really seeing each other in a way no one else ever does (which is part of how it survives the murder of the Prince of Radiance), while the true fatality in Esen and Ouyang's relationship is Esen's inability or unwillingness to truly see or understand Ouyang.