meikuree

didn't read much, but here's what I've been up to!

books/novels:

Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry

long-listed for the Booker Prize. this was phenomenal and lyrical/dreamlike with its prose. some parts worked better for me than others, and it meanders a little too much in the middle even for me, a noted lover of indulgent and textured prose. but I like that it's understated. it's a story about grief that relies on telling more than showing imo at some small points, but I loved the extended scenery porn. by GOD I loved it and the entire wistfulness and sorrow of this book.

the bits about the main character (Tom) being sent on deployments (as part of the British Army) to Palestine and Malaya caught my eye, because of course -- I need to check the years/timeline in this book but it sounds like Tom was likely sent to Malaysia as part of the Malayan Emergency, a long conflict where the British tried to quash local communists. the narrative does acknowledge the 'crimes of empire' or something to that effect, and Tom's guilt for his role in killing Chinese rebels. but it also felt like it was thrown in as a device to nuance Tom as someone who's neither a straightforward victim or predator, someone caught in the thorny undertow of trauma, without contending with the positionality of what it means to be someone like Tom (who's Irish) who was sent to another British colony to carry out the dirty work of the British empire. Tom's other 'kinds' of trauma related to his wife's past history of being abused take up a lot more space and airtime.

those ambivalences aside, I liked this one.

Severance by Ling Ma

this book is technically accomplished and decidedly original, in the way it spurns usual tropes in immigration narratives, but on a personal reader response level I'd give it a... 3 or 3.5/5 at most? as more eloquent people than me have said, narratives about the existential ennui :( and entrapment :( of office workers can feel twee at best -- tone-deaf at worst -- when they fail to acknowledge the material advantages office workers have over workers in more precarious and blue-collar industries like cleaners, waiters, taxi drivers, and so forth. it's not a crime to write about how work sucks for a specific milieu -- god knows work sucks anywhere! -- but stories like that have such a trend of feeling self-absorbed or insular.

this is also my McPettiness coming through, but I did not like the sex scenes. I'm fine with sex scenes in any media. the ones here repulsed me. I'm a Het Sex Disliker in general though, so that's my caveat.

this book makes several gestures towards critical commentary but never really follows up on them -- the main character's encounter with a taxi driver, her meeting with a Shenzhen factory supplier manager, and so on. and it feels like it stews in a soup of the main character's own rootlessness and atmospheric nihilism which, fair, this is an apocalypse novel -- but I'm weary of the disaffected ironic voice that seems to be so prevalent among people coming out from the Iowa Writing Workshop or the usual MFA programmes, the one that says "I'm too cool for political overtures!"

also, nice that this book does push back against some annoying tendencies in chinese diaspora fiction vis a vis depictions of China or ~The Motherland~ -- there is some confrontation here with the materiality and irony of Bibles being manufactured in China, the fact that China is the factory of the world, and the main character, herself a Chinese immigrant, has become part of the first world commodity networks that profit off labour exploitation in China -- but again, it doesn't go anywhere by the end.

also my personal prejudice, but I wish diaspora fiction would move away from othering China and towards recognising China as a complicated place with its own politics and richness of life/history/power dynamics instead of... I guess... always being written from the view of middle-class, comparatively well-off immigrants who see it as That Place My Parents Came From.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

too sleepy to write a full review but this was exquisitely #fucked up, and the horror is a slow frog-boiling build-up. I mean that as a compliment. I learned about Shirley Jackson's terrible husband while reading this, and felt -- sympathetic appreciation? -- at knowing that Merricat and Constance were loosely inspired by her daughters and Charles (the main Macho Guy) was inspired by her husband.

articles and short stories: