octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

So I'm doing the Read around the World challenge, a book set in each county, and I could tell you all sorts of dishonest but high-minded reasons about why I chose this book for Iran, but the truth is I just adore greengage plums and always have done. They're the only plums that I like, and so when I saw this title I knew I had to read it. Well. Greengages have yet to steer me wrong and they didn't here either. This book is fantastic. I had no idea what it was about when I started reading, but it's Iranian magical realism, occurring as religious fundamentalists take over the country, and to give you an idea of how it gets: there are three children in a family. One is arrested and killed by said fundamentalists. One dies in a fire and narrates the book as a ghost that everyone (including the family) can touch and see, and the third turns into a fish. It is a very beautiful book - the language is just gorgeous - but it is a bit of a downer, especially at the end. That being said, it's so beautifully written that I'm going to have to get my own copy and gorge myself on greengages while reading, because this is something I will absolutely be coming back to in the future. 

It's one thing to be a fake fortune teller. It's quite another to practice your charlatanry on the stupidest, most gullible man alive, aka Lord Arthur Savile. Dumb as a post, dumber than roadkill, this inbred aristocrat, on being told he is fated to be a murderer, is so horrified that he loses the single brain cell he has and, instead of refusing to murder (like a sane person would), he tries to get the nasty business over with as quickly and painlessly as possible. There's a small twist at the end, and it is funny, but mostly it's funny because it's so hard to believe that Lord Arthur can walk and scheme at the same time. (He can't, of course, his schemes all go badly, but he does try.) 

I can't believe I haven't read this before, but it's one of those stories that everyone knows, isn't it? You don't need to read it if you already have that central image, Dorian Gray in front of his horrifying painted self. And in all fairness that image, and the basic idea behind it, are both creepy and compelling. The novel, I think, is less so. Don't get me wrong: I enjoyed it. And having looked the thing up on Wikipedia before I started, I learned that it was originally a novella, and Wilde bulked it up to novel length in order to have it published as a book, rather than in a magazine. I wonder if that initial novella would be an improvement, because this sags in places, particularly in the middle (that interminable chapter eleven!) and becomes unfocused in others. Wilde is witty, of course, but his wit wanders off-course in places, and makes the book version much more padded-out than it needs to be.

It doesn't help that nearly all the characters are unpleasant. Dorian Gray is a nasty, weak little man, and his mates aren't any better. I'm really only sorry that Lord Henry survived. He deserved the knife as well. 

I've read a small handful of true crime books lately, and this one seems different from the rest. It's not structured as a mystery might be, for one. This is basically because, until human remains were found to be blocking a drain, no one in the community (neither police nor civilians) was aware that a serial killer had murdered at least 15 men. No one had the faintest idea, and they wouldn't have any clue of the extent of the slaughter either, had Nilsen not openly confessed the minute he was taken in for questioning. He just seems an extremely odd individual, and it's clear that, even after all their interaction, Masters can't figure him out either. 

It's hard to read this and not come away with the conclusion that something was very wrong with Nilsen's brain, except that is something that might be said for all serial killers. I think the most interesting thing for me here was an early chapter on the history of mental illness in Nilsen's family... it's significant and well-recorded and seems to have lurked in the foreground for generations until Des Nilsen came along and started doing terribly violent and inexplicable things. I'm not sure how else you can describe necrophilia other than "inexplicable," to be honest, but frankly I am glad I don't understand it, and I'm not sure I want to spend anymore time trying. 

I have a much longer review of this coming out shortly in Strange Horizons, so this is basically just a short note for my own records. Breakpoint is an entertainingly curious mixture of poems, including poems on mythology and folklore, women in tech, historical events, and found code poetry (which is something I find fascinating, if not always entirely comprehensible). This initially seems a disparate mix, but the poems are tied together by culture and lived experience, and the most impressive thing to me was how small details in one piece would implicitly illuminate another, which is always a sign of careful construction, as well as a considered deliberation in deciding which poems go into a collection and which don't. I think my favourite was "Imagining Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace as Two Sides of a Quadratic Equation," and really, with a title like that, how could it not be? 

I really enjoyed this, though I did feel as if the historical framework of the thin child, and how she used Norse myth to cope with living through WW2 and the absence of her father to be, well, thin. Extraordinarily so. It doesn't give a great deal of weight to the rest of it, and I'm of two minds as to whether it needs to be there at all. The myth itself is well told, but what really stands out for me, and what's bumping this up to four stars rather than three, is the naturalist setting. The thin child wanders through the English countryside, and it's flowers and plants all the way. The world serpent slithers along the ocean bed and it's corals and otters and crown-of-thorns starfish... every other page, it seems, is a welter of organism and detail. This isn't using historical events to write about myth, this is using myth to write about nature, and that nature writing was what appealed the most. 

It's a good thing the library allows me to renew books, because it took me a while to get through this. In my defense, this is a book about research methods in the social sciences, and I am not a social scientist or anywhere near one, so a lot of the earlier, more theoretical chapters were pretty heavy going. As the book went on, however, it began to engage more with the ways in which Indigenous peoples could navigate the practice of research. This was sometimes illustrated by examples, which made things a lot clearer - I could have done with quite a few more examples, to be honest, as nothing lights up theory for me like application.

It should be said that, as well as not being a social scientist, I am also not Indigenous, so much of this book wasn't directed at me. It's a book for Indigenous peoples who are engaging in research of Indigenous peoples (frequently of their own communities). I think what most struck me was the tension between being a researcher and being a member of the researched community, and the challenges and responsibilities that come with those dual roles. It was something that I had never considered before... which is why I read books like this, which are not directed at me, because it's important to be aware of issues like this. And while I admit that I am still not entirely sure what "positivist" means, I would like to think that I'm a little more conscious of research ethics now than I was, and that's a valuable thing. 

This book has clearly been researched to within an inch of its life, and it's paid off. Not only is it informative, it's also readable, which is something that not all investigative, historical nonfiction is. I'm forced to say that it's a little slow, and often seems more interested in the family life of Wonder Woman's creator than the comic itself - I would have liked to see more analysis of the early comic texts - but I wonder if that's a fair criticism. In my defense, the title of the book led me to expect a narrower focus, but in Lepore's defense the historical context of any creation is crucial to that creation, and by fully situating Wonder Woman in the culture and scholarship of its creator it becomes far easier to understand the development of the comic itself.

That creator, William Moulton Marston, is a fascinating character who comes across as something of a charlatan. It's clear that he's bright and well-educated, but he seems to be a bit dodgy in his scholarship, and a little too ready to take credit for the work of others... including the two women he has formed a polyamorous relationship with. One can give credit for his monomania regarding his own academic work without actually being convinced by that work, but admittedly that particular subjectivity had clearly left him with enormous blind spots regarding his pet theories of emotions and lie detection. His primary romantic partners - his wife Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and their live-in lover Olive Byrne - are equally interesting, even if I'm sometimes left wondering what they see in him, as in many ways they are both plainly more competent. Perhaps it's charisma? Anyway, their secret relationship, which is primarily the "secret history" of the title, plays out against a backdrop of feminist activism in the first half of the twentieth century, and it's all tied together convincingly. The tracing of bondage in early feminist imagery, to its famous place in the comic, was particularly well done I thought, and certainly enlightening. 

You know, most of the classifications I see of this novel are things like literary fiction, or classics, but to me it reads as straight-up horror. Literary horror, verging on the surrealist, but still. An entomologist goes to the beach for a long weekend, searching for beetles. The tiny local village he stops at for the night kidnaps him, and he's left in a house at the bottom of a hole in the sand, with no companion but a local woman as essentially nameless as himself. The sand dunes around them are enormous, and they - like half the households in the village - can only survive at the bottom of these holes by constant shoveling. The sand looms over them, it gets in everything, it's part of food and flesh and sex, and initially the man rebels and tries to escape, but the sand sucks him in, and by the end he's trapped himself, broken down and obsessive, the sand his entire life. The whole thing's a meditation on hopelessness, on the waste of a life spent on mindless, repetitive labour and small inanities, and it's weird and depressing and terrifying.

It is also no surprise to me that the author, apparently, is a fan of Kafka. Believe me, it shows. 

The prose here is so easy to read that I felt as if it were a shorter book than it was - I ended up reading it in a single day. It's also constructed very well, as three families that are falling apart, for very different reasons, find themselves connected together as secrets come to light... but I also feel that it's connected too well, if you get my drift. Everything is so neatly balanced that, as affecting as a lot of what happens is, it also strikes me as rather artificial in places. That's an impression that's reinforced, I think, by a number of really melodramatic twists. I don't want to say that it's not effective, because it is, and the emotional impact is rock solid. It's a very likeable book, with a determined, muted hopefulness, but the mechanism of all that heart-tugging is on clear display.