As with the previous trade, this exceeds the previous volume as more is revealed regarding the liminal space of story and what the cabal is up to. This time, though, Tom is thrust into an actual story: Moby Dick, as he searches for answers. Ritchie and Lizzie have their own story in the “real” world, and we meet a new faction. It ties things up with the continuation of the even more surreal Pauly story as well. The artwork of which is truly superlative.

When you read these back to back as one continuous plot it is absolutely great. The pacing makes more sense and the annoying cliffhanger is completely different. You also get all of the flashbacks for the crew members, everyone has arcs. Apart they’re good. Together they’re near perfect examples of the genre.

A great sequel to the first, though I think I prefer the themes and time period focus of the first one more. This one focuses on missing women and gerrymandering, essentially, in a predominantly black neighbourhood around the mid 90s.

During an election season another girl goes missing, creating a pattern and a lot of pressure to solve the murders as fast as possible. With circumstantial evidences they finger the grandkid of one of the opponents, and Jay Porter, who has been trying his best to leave town and move on with his girls, is pulled into a criminal case. He hasn’t practiced in years and his life is in transition, creating multiple narrative tensions.

Like all legal thrillers, there is a methodical kind of pacing that doesn’t always work for me, but the counterbalance of numerous subplots and the tension there do a good job of pushing things along. Solid on all fronts, just like the first.

Fantastic bits of writing that are thematically interlinked, conflate or playfully, artfully distinguish between the person consuming the written word and the person who wrote it. Borges-esk at times in its fluidity in moving from story to story without typical framing to alter the readers perspective of the narrator, using their inbuilt assumptions.

Major themes are grounded in memory and the act of writing, but it ranges broadly on that theme and often in surprising ways. A character’s reliability can be called into question at any given time, and the character may be the author. And the author could be a woman calling the author, complaining about a “bad” piece of writing that was published. There is a frustration, it feels like, with the way people internalize stories and what that act then reflects in the author. And the inability of people to reckon with the notion of two completely separate selves performing the act of writing and reading. Mix that with the fragility and subjectivity of memory and a kind of awe in the verisimilitude and you get a pretty unique style of writing.

It’s always engaging and very artful. It very much feels like an artist displaying their craft. The prose, especially with first person does feel slightly formal—I’m wondering if that is due to translation or due to the time period, as it is a collection and she has been writing for quite some time. Anyway, the stories went in delightful directions and were moving.

“You were looking at the moon, weren’t you?”

Very fun stuff. A combination of historical fiction with fantasy extrapolated from spiritualism. The action sequences/choreography is probably the best I’ve read. It’s Wuxia, so melodramatic as heck. Not very plotty, more of a prologue, it feels like. I really enjoyed this and am glad I’ve got the sequel already. Doesn’t conform to western fantasy (obviously) and is therefore not formulaic and novel, which gave it a lot of latitude.

This is a tighter story than the first and starts out with a bang. It’s so refreshing reading something with tropes you have no idea about. Again, the action scenes, which are many were fantastic and felt completely different in characterization despite the frequency.

As I see it, one of the most pronounced differences is the difference in how embodiment is handled when coupled with martial prowess. The mind is generally divorced from physical contest; skill is repetition/training and talent. Their philosophy or ideas or morality are divorced, generally. Unless it’s a fable or parable, or something like that. Here people’s prowess and style of defence or offence could be derived from many things, and there is almost always a connection to their approach to life and lived experience. This makes most fights about notions on lived experience themselves embodied in people as a fight, which makes them far more interesting. Also, people aren’t typically out to specifically kill the opponent (though not always).

But because characters are mythologized, often actual historical figures, and they represent ideals they espouse, it becomes transparently a novel of ideas. There is melodrama and “good” versus “evil” you’d expect in classic fantasy, but it feels like a lot more holistic approach and less, say, puritanical. A lot of the time characters are expected to change, rather than be eliminated. Ideas butting heads, retreating, having to be introspective and change who they are and thus their approach to succeed against an opponent they were once defeated by. Then the mental approach is married to the body, where the body has to learn the new approach as well. Sometimes taking years to internalize the change and be able to outwardly manifest the reflection.

The one area that’s disappointing, and I think everyone can expect to see if they know when it was written is how women are characterized. They are numerous and eclectic, which is probably better than most 50s western fantasy. But also embody pretty sexist qualities that is in-line with western lit. They generally have to find ways of getting their way that are different to how men go about it and their lives centre men.

What was really neat about this one is there’s a Manuel that can make the person who studies it well, and internalizes the information well, a powerful, maybe unstoppable warrior. And I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that in a wuxia movie. Maybe Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon… or Hero? I can’t recall. But it’s neat reading this progenitor of the genre and seeing characters and different elements show up as recognizable to me despite only seeing the very popular films brought over for an English audience.

Continues to be really well paced and poetic, with good flow. Still amazed it’s able to make this amount of fights interesting. And the fights themselves very fun as well. Dynamic and tense. I’ll continue, for sure.

What a fantastic bit of writing this is. It is so, so clever. Basically, there are five characters in this polyphonic novel. 3 of whom are the tomb guardians, which exist in the narrative as both past and present because there are two academics talking over the lecture of one, who is having a crisis with his thesis.

The guardians are paintings being actively contextualized in the story compiled by the lecturer. But they more so act as the voice of past and present for the pieces being analyzed, or so I think. They occupy the liminal space because history is not set on this, and as the story of the crisis of the thesis comes out, it wonderfully stands in for plot. Riveting in its twists and turns as he expands on each point they do and do not have regarding what is known about the art pieces, which in turn are in conversation with the historians and what is known about this particular event.

But the brilliant thing is that the conversation is on the page too, because the tomb guardians are having their own conversation about what happened. Sometimes their voice, which are merely italicized and indented, are dissenting, sometimes neutral—not adding much but still voiced—and sometimes, beautifully, they’re parallel grooves in harmony with the hypothesis.

It’s well written, completely novel to me, and doesn’t overstay the welcome. It manages to make a really interesting statement and taught me something about analyzing art. Can’t recommend it highly enough.

Update on reflection: I am bumping this down because my issue with the book I think is fundamental to what the story is about. And I still feel bitter about my experience with it, months later.

This is a sprawling book, both in its coverage of time and physical space, as well as perspective. There are quite a few characters, though some are more predominate than others. There’s the inclusion of an old tree that is predominately providing historical exposition.

Overall, I liked this, but I really am adverse to prescriptive storytelling. And this is that. The conclusions you’re supposed to come to, you can’t help but do so, since there is so much repetition of the themes and allegory and metaphor.

It is effective at showing the pain and growth from a literal transplant, both of the tree as well as the people who leave and live elsewhere. You consume the history in an easily digestible way, you see how grief and trauma and love are explored. That all worked for me.

Where it stumbled somewhat (beyond the sort of sophomoric overuse of simile, metaphor, allegory, etc.), is the anthropomorphism of the tree. Our relationship with nature, at a cultural and scientific level, makes it clear that we do not understand creatures all that well, as much as we have fables and folklore about these things. And so, when people endow nature—especially trees, though—with these qualities where it’s more-or-less a person, but of course with a veeeery long memory, it feels kind of weird and fetishistic and incomplete in its thinking of the natural compared to humanity. I am all for natural creatures being endowed with qualities that allow them to participate in stories. But I am not interested in them sort of aping humanity at all. I think it’s denigrating and solipsistic in its own way, and a pet peeve of mine.

This combined with the overuse of humanity directly learning from nature. Needing to rediscover our roots and entrench ourselves in the natural rather than the schizophrenic, cruel societies we have created, creates a kind of dissonance for me. I think it works at conveying the authors intent (many, many times over) but again, kind of reiterates this oversimplification of the natural world existing in a fetishistic quality to be made use of by people. We should pattern ourselves and society to form an equilibrium with nature, absolutely. But that doesn’t mean, in turn, that nature is understood by us. It feels like another sort of colonization of the natural world, basically. Unintentional though it may be.

So, as you maybe can tell, in a very human story, I kept finding myself in the weeds, so to speak. I would settle into the live story or whatever else spiralling out into this multiple perspective piece, and then encounter, invariably, my pet peeves again. I wanted to like this a lot more than I did and I think it’s solely down to the above problems that It didn’t resonate with me as much as it did others. So it goes.

edit: I also think the colonialism reflected in the tree's perspective and anthropomorphism that is antithetical to what the story is about--war, displacement, literally colonialism--in making the tree reflect humanity, rather than nature in most aspects, I think it creates a dissonance that makes it completely unsuccessful.

Did a video review of this: https://youtu.be/NIpRJSZ_eLQ

I am a sucker for narratives by children telling the story of their parents as they understand it, admitting that it was cobbled together and it’s the best they can make of it. In this case, because the mother mythologized herself with her well intentioned obfuscation when her two young girls would ask about things hard to express, especially because she was not well educated and was born with health issues that dogged her and altered her whole life.

Part 1 is the narrators childhood rumination on her mother and part 2 is the narrative of her mother, then it wraps up with present day. It is so compelling because it is rather matter-of-fact. Hardly a saint, and progressive in her own ways, especially in those times, there’s a juxtaposition as the narration catches up to the childrens misunderstanding or consternations of how and why she acts how she does. It is undeniably loving and non judgemental, which is a massive feat given the wide range of emotions and events the larger-than-life figure the mother cut.

At once the eye of an investigative reporter and a daughter and self insert in the story, the prose are excellent and pulled me right in without letting go. Narration was fantastic, mirroring the tone and voice that could easily have created a dissonance with such a personal work. It must have been a bit harrowing trusting it to a voice actor, but it’s completely to the pieces benefit.

Impossible to stop listening to, though undeniably filled with verisimilitude done right. This is the kind of memoir I love: ones which highlight how a “normal” person, every day in their interactions is extraordinary in their own ways. And most of all: interesting. So many people consider their lives to be not worth sharing or boring, but everyone’s story, when honed and drilled down, is a human experience worth sharing.