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once the emotional infrastructure's in place
1. Gliff by Ali Smith: 7.5/10.
Ali Smith's been dubbed Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting, so I was curious, and picked this up; a compact and contained novel which I thought was deft, and didn't overstay its ideas, with sharp attention to its dystopian setting. emotionally I broadly liked this, even if intellectually I disagree with the author's likely views on art and humanity, which seeped through noticeably in the framing and treatment of the big bads, Technology and Corporations. one thing is that she verges (imo) on Luddism sometimes, and the idea that storytelling and art is what makes humans uniquely human and ethical and connected is, well -- it's commonplace, overdone, potentially twee, and frankly trite or worse politically naive when done clumsily.
still, Smith endeared herself to me early on, by including this Giorgio Agamben quote in the epigraph:
Which house is burning? The country where you live, or Europe, or the whole world? Perhaps the houses, the cities have already burned down – who knows how long ago? – in a single immense blaze that we pretended not to see. Some are reduced to just bits of frame, a frescoed wall, a roof beam, names, so many names, already eaten by the flames. And yet we cover them so carefully with white plaster and false words that they seem intact. We live in houses, in cities burned to the ground, as if they were still standing; the people pretend to live there and go out into the streets masked amid the ruins as if these were the familiar neighbourhoods of times past. And now the form and nature of the flame has changed; it has become digital, invisible and cold – but exactly for this reason closer still; it encircles and envelops us at every moment.
– Giorgio Agamben, trans. Kevin Attell
where Agamben, of course, is relevant to the novel for its allusions to the notions of homo sacer and legal states of exception.
one thing that isn’t apparent until later is that the protagonist -- Briar -- is nonbinary (or agender -- it's not specified). in fact, it doesn't come up at all until a usual So What Species or Gender Are You? dialogue. Briar is matter-of-fact about it all.
Nice of you to offer me a choice, she said, and are you a boy or a girl?
Yes I am, I [Briar] said.
Okay, she said, well, that’s either very brave of you or very stupid, given recent developments in history, so which is it?
You’re missing the point, I said.
She gave me a measuring look then she laughed and shook her head.
it’s just baked into the narrative without fanfare, though I can guess at the ~literary motivations~ for a non-binary character. and, well — in fiction I like gender expression-adjacent things without self-conscious gender introspection, gender exploration as a simple intrinsic tendency of real life and existence, so I’m not opposed to this. at first I chalked me not noticing Briar’s (lack of) gender up to my own blinkers. the book opens with sections where Briar has to hide in a safehouse with their younger sister Rose, and the bickering sibling dynamic is sketched out pretty believably that it reminded me of how two sisters would act if they ended up having to manage themselves and I just went on that assumption. but on reflection, there's also a moment where Briar’s sister gets threatened with misogynist violence and assault from a teen boy, and Briar responds as though it could have been directed at them too, as though they are at risk of and vulnerable to that violence all the time. and if you read the novel, they're validated in that stance.
this novel is also very, “what if horse girls were incredibly important?” the friendship that Briar & their sibling strikes up with a horse destined for a slaughterhouse was dear to me.
2. Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica: 5/10.
this was sold to me as a cannibal slaughterhouse novel, so I picked it up as a comfort read when I was having a miserable cold (I like disturbing fiction). but frankly it just annoyed me. 50% of that is due to Skill Issues on my part, 50% due to the novel’s construction. author did a good job sketching out details of who would be targeted in a HumanMeat CannibalWorld setting (immigrants, the poor) and drawing parallels between the barbarity of mass animal agriculture and those practices being turned onto humans - but the novel spoonfed the reader. a lot. a personal quibble: the cannibalism of minorities isn’t technically new; there were human zoos, slaves killed and consumed for flesh by white slave owners. the world and history here felt flat and unconvincing. I suppose my biggest complaint is: where’s the historical consciousness in all of this?
this novel also commits one of my most disliked fallacies in fiction commenting on the Anthropocene, which is treating “humanity” as a single universal entity responsible for the ills of ecological destruction — as equally culpable — when it’s more accurate to ascribe those to specific colonial or imperial entities with names and locations. and not everyone gets the equal mantle of personhood or humanity; there are racial groups still practically considered little better than animals. it's fine for the narrator to not care about any of that, unreliable witness that he is, but I mean an inattentiveness on the level of the author's framing and decisions in constructing the novel.
next time I’ll go for a Toni Morrison novel instead.
3. Metal from Heaven by August Clarke: 6.5/10
people said this reads like Disco Elysium meets The Locked Tomb. respectfully: I don’t necessarily see the Disco Elysium part. I was also told the writing in this was lyrical, even excessive and ornate, and again: I don’t think so?! in fact my complaint was that the writing could’ve been pushed further and been more maximalist, it still read utilitarian and too-digestible at points.
people on the internet: we have lyrical writing at home!
the lyrical writing at home: actually normal straightforward spec sci-fi/fantasy writing
me: I’m never trusting any of you again
this read like a partial recycling of Gideon/Harrow elements at its worst; but at its best it was strong, enjoyable, and if there’d been more space to let the political intrigue and characters breathe it would be even better.
that said: it felt fairly obvious to me which parts were intended to allude to anarchist writings about prefigurative politics, and the problems of temporality and means/ends alignments. could be good, could be bad. there’s a qualitative difference imo between writing which is ideologically explicit but manages to say something new with it, and ideologically explicit writing which remains within the parameters of current political consciousness. I think this is good for a novel occupied with labour rights and workers’ revolutions; but I get the sense the author might have wanted to sharpen it and go further, and I hope he does it in future.
of course, it can be difficult to imagine the exact world that’ll come after revolutions (even if practically not much may be different at all). it would be a little like stepping into the great nothingness of the new (cr. Sophie Lewis).
- missed opportunities in this novel to bring in primitive accumulation or accumulation by dispossession (and deconstructions of the former), imo -- the author cites marxist theory and anarchist writings as inspirations for this, but a certain euro-western strain of it. where are you, Cedric Robinson?
- a plus of this book: there's lots of filthy, violent f/f porn. A+
4. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body by Susan Bordo
one line that struck me in this: in other contexts hunger and starvation is recognised as a tool of social protest, but anorexic people are denied that political agency.
this book also has a chapter or two commenting on the poststructuralism vs materialism debate in feminist theory. I'm no shill for poststructuralism myself, but I get the sense that the author misinterprets some contributions of poststructuralist theory and just attacks vulgar poststructuralism, though I would need to have read more Derrida than I currently have to weigh in.
I thought vaguely about the counterargument that eating disorders are really about trying to escape coercive gendering and de-gendering a womanly body — and obviously you can’t generalise but I’m reminded of a not uncommon experience among anorexic people who are happier as they grow more androgynous bodies, are elated when they’ve stopped having periods. it's very much about the cultural imprints foisted upon bodies.
this book also tackles race and class -- which is good, because one thing I've wrestled with is how eating disorders are pathologised so differently among economic classes -- starvation is abnormal largely among the beautiful, white middle-class. when you're working-class, going hungry's your lot.
short stories:
- When We Were Nearly Young by Mavis Gallant (a commentary here)
no subject
YOU'RE SO REAL. I got myself an ebook of this a few months back and, to its credit, it is better written (on a sentence level, I never got past chapter two) than 99% of SFF that gets buzz. Unfortunately that is not a very high bar to clear. (But hey, violent filthy f/f porn, u say? 👀 I should give it a second chance.)
HAH.
no subject
re: MFH, it has a slow start and gets better. then more middling. then a little better again. THEN it has an NGE esque ending. so very much a YMMV book. but Seth Dickinson said it impressed them and was politically incisive, so I was a little let down on that front.