Longer notes from current books
Solaris
A thoughtful, heartbreaking, and strange book about communication and its possibility/impossibilty, and how our lives, be they short, infinite, or repeated are alternated by moments of brief joy and dull sadness.
I saw the movie first, which Lem famously lampooned as documenting the “erotic problems of people in outer space”. But I always had the truism “the book is better” in my head and bought a rough paperback copy in a barn sale a few years back (though apparently there are criticisms of this translation.
The book starts in motion, with the main character, Kris Kelvin, launching in a shuttle from a ship to the planet from which the book takes its title. Upon arriving at the station that hovers over the planet, he finds that the crew are in hiding; one of them (who we later learn is his scientific mentor) is recently dead by his own hand. He gradually discovers that the two remaining crew are acting strangely, suffering from some unnamed psychosis or trauama. While wandering the station trying to figure out what’s going on, he sees strange shapes and figures in the cramped and trashed hallways. And, after spending the night, he wakes up to find his ex-wife, who killed herself a decade prior, sitting on the edge of the bed, with no memory of how she arrived there.
The interaction of these characters propels the plot of the novel. But the real character is the Solaris itself, which is home to a planet-wide life-form that appears as a whirling, roiling ocean of plasma and has, for decades, been entirely impenetrable to any human testing, experimentation, or communication. Much of the book recounts the history of the study of Solaris, which has given rise to an entire field of scholarship and research, as humans have tried, again and again, to interpret the planet’s strange characteristics, periodic transformations, and baffling and dangerous effects. Over the course of the book, this intellectual history, rigorously and richly written, brings us up to the crew on the station and their fruitless mission to understand the planet they are on. The primary theme of the book is the inability to communicate, certainly across extra-terrestrial lines and even between two humans, and the plot as well as the intellectual exposition foreground this ultimate tragedy. There’s also a subtle but real critique of the colonial notion of exploration as conquest. The more humans seem to try and understand/encapsulate Solaris, the more the planet creates new unintelligibility, escalating into danger.
The tone of the book is creepy and haunted; it’s almost a gothic romance in outer-space. The characters are elusive and unsettling. The remaining crew, Sartorious and Snow, are each damaged in their own way by their interactions with the planet, but it’s never exactly what has happened to them. Even Kelvin, the narrator, remains unreliable at times, questioning his own sanity, finding ways to provisionally prove what he’s experiencing only to have those later found to be unreliable. Even Rheya, the suddenly re-appeared wife, gradually realizes the conditional nature of her own self-hood, and takes drastic actions in response.
I get why the book is so lauded. It’s a brilliant and thoughtful novel about the tragedy and failure of communication, even as it locates the possibility of joy in the rare moments where communication recedes into genuine connection.
Babel
An anti-colonial romance, about language and its wonderful imperfections, and how all of that maps onto power, racism, and struggle.
The book takes place in an alternate 1830s Oxford (both the city and the University), and follows a young Anglo-Cantonese man named Robin Swift who is enrolled in the Royal Institute of Translation. The power of the British Empire is based upon harnessing the difference between words in English and their translations in other languages, called “silver work” because the translated pairs are inscribed into silver bars for use in powering machinery, weapons, buildings, and other significant pieces of infrastructure. All of this is facilitated by the aforementioned Institute, which both teaches this process and also manufactures and maintains the Empire’s silver. Robin becomes close with his cohort of fellow students, who are drawn to Oxford by the glamour and power of the Institute. But they gradually realize their own complicity in the violence and inequality of the U.K., both at home (silverwork functions as a form of mechanization) and abroad (the Empire needs more and more silver, and more and more bilingual students to inscribe it). They also discover a secret society, made up of former and current students, who are working to take down the British Empire. And Robin gradually learns that his own family history is intimately tied up with both the power of the Empire and the forces seeking to undo it.
This book does so many wonderful things well. For one thing, it’s a great book about the joys of learning and scholarship, while also revealing the ways in which pure knowledge can be a force that blinds people to suffering around them. It’s also thoughtful about language, and especially about translation, with discursions into linguistic theory that are rich but not confusing. It’s a great anti-colonial novel, with meaningful politics and a complex interrogation of political tactics, movitations, and goals in and how they cohere in radical movements. A central pre-occupation of the book is about whether violence is a necessary action in the work of undoing empire. Ultimately Kuang’s characters agree that it is, but Kuang also makes clear the real physical and emotional costs of going down the road of radical violence.
The characters are broad, complicated and interesting. Robin’s cohort includes Ramy, original from India but raised and tutored by a British colonial leader, Victoire, a Haitian woman whose family fled to France during the revolution there, and Letty, the daughter of a British admiral whose brilliance have led her to Oxford despite the sexism of the time. These are definitely not characters typical of academia-novels, let alone novels bout 19th century Oxford. The professors (including Robin’s patron, Professor Lovell, one of the villains of the novel) are all eccentric and interesting in their own ways, and with complex motivations illuminated by the eventual revolution that overtakes the Institute near the book’s conclusion.
The book makes liberal use of footnotes, which include both real-world and in-world facts, opinions, and translations. I have to say that I found it astonishingly difficult to see the asterixes in the hardcover version I read. Frequently I would get to the end of the page, find the footnote there, and then spend a good minute or two combing the page looking for the asterix that pointed to said footnote. I am not the only one!.
This is wonderful novel of radical romanticism, full of evocative and (regrettably) unusual characters, big ideas about freedom and violence, and a rich and engaging setting in Oxford. It deserves every accolade.
Knave of Graves
A dark and funny fantasy novel full of faith in humanity and strange, gritty magic.
Jeppo Karkiskjo is the gravedigger of the rural town of Vattivoja, on the edge of a great empire. He was once a promising student, sent to the capital city’s great magic school, but his failure at the school led to him returning home and taking up his father’s hereditary post as the town grave digger, as well as keeper of the remains of the legendary saint from whom the town takes its name. In his spare time, he makes protective charms which he sells in the town market, pines after local widows that he meets at funerals, chats with the beggar/fortune-teller who sits with him, and, at night, trades fresh bodies to a local night-hag in exchange for books and artifacts that allow him to keep hold of his magical interests in secret. Jeppo is introduced to a merchant from the capital who promises him a chance to reclaim his lost glory in exchange for the bones of the saint, which the merchant (secretly a necromantic sorcerer) will use for dark and nefarious purposes. The book culminates in a series of increasingly violent confrontations, and resolves itself with explorations of faith and human connection that felt satisfying and thoughtful.
That plot summary may make the book sound grisly and somber, but the tone of this book is breezy and funny. Jeppo is such a sad-sack and malcontent, and the whole town is full of lively rich characters who contrast with his dour self-pitying. It reminded me of the Coen Brothers, and especially Fargo, with its shaggy rural tragedy, humor, and charm overlaid with darkness and violence. There’s a particularly comical plotl-ine in which Jeppo’s attempt to magically ensorcel the widow of his childhood bully results in him being mobbed by a flock of lovestruck geese.
I particularly loved the oblique and deeply corporeal magic in this book, which recalls the descriptions of sympathetic magic in Frazier’s “The Golden Bough”. Jeppo’s charms, which he makes and sells in the market, require specific and seemingly incongruous materials put together in unusual shapes and forms, and with their protective affects reflecting out through a variety of unusual symbolic associations. Sometimes they don’t work in the way they’re supposed to. The glyphs he carves into the walls of the cemetary to protect it from “bogeys” are animate; they cry out in distress when their terms are violated. There’s a sense that all of this magic “works” but it’s not clean or mechanical. It’s more like the weather or animal behavior; mostly consistent but changing circumstances or forces can alter or obviate its manifestations in unforeseen ways.
I had heard of this book from Nick Mamatas' recommendation of it (he’s thanked in the acknowledgements), and I was not disappointed. I read it as quickly as time and a full work-family schedule would allow. Great, funny, strange, and deeply human stuff.
