Post-midnight postlets
Jul. 29th, 2019 12:02 amI have been meaning all month to write about Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire, so that I'll actually have recorded everything I read in June -- the task is getting smaller as I put it off, because my memory of what I wanted to say about it gets vaguer. I liked it a lot!* Space opera. Protagonist Mahit is an ambassador sent by a small independent space station confederacy into Teixcalaan, an immense interplanetary empire. Many inhabitants of Teixcalaan would find it entirely right and proper that when beginning that last sentence I thought I could elide the place names, didn't include the name of Mahit's home (Lsel Station) but found I couldn't really do without the name Teixcalaan -- a name which means 'the city' and 'the empire' and 'the world' and derives from the verb 'to act correctly.'
The core dynamic of the book, and what I find most compelling about it, comes across in the dedication: This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever fallen in love with a culture that was devouring their own. Mahit is deeply attached to her home, Lsel Station, but she also loves the poetry of Teixcalaanli high culture -- hence her suitability for ambassadorship -- and it is impossible to love Teixcalaanli poetry without on some level identifying with its pervading assumptions, one of which is that Lsel Stationers are barbarians who should be integrated into the empire at its convenience. The empire tells a story according to which there are no other good stories, and it has centuries' worth of superlative poets, as well as the special effects budget of as many planets as it needs, to back that up with. There's a moment in the book which very much connected with me in which Mahit realises, first, that she's being manipulated, and second, that the manipulation is working regardless.
I really like Mahit, out of her depth but a strong swimmer, navigating a factional politics on which she's been improperly briefed. I like her charming Teixcalaanli companions, about whom the question isn't so much 'Are they trustworthy?' as 'Are they merely as untrustworthy as the situation requires?' The politics passes through complicated and tricky on its way to untenable, and Mahit would very much like to get a night's sleep, but preferably after working out how to deal with the things that are likely to go horribly wrong before she wakes up again, so some icecream will have to do in the mean time...
I read this book because I was halfway through 1491 when![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants reviewed it and mentioned that it involved an Aztec-based culture in which human sacrifice wasn't singled out for being exotic and horrifying. And it isn't! That was nice! There isn't enough about the Aztecs specifically in 1491 for me to have much sense of what this book is doing with them, but my feeling is that Teixcalaan's more an empire than it's anything else -- there's a lot of Byzantium in there too, and not just because it's one of the template empires, it's Martine's field of study. The Aztec influence changes the details, the animals that get to be symbolic are hummingbirds, the empire is shaped like a sunburst which is also the shape of its temples... (although no, I think that detail is actually Incan -- unless it's both). But being in the middle of 1491 did change my reading experience more than by making me think, 'Something with Aztecs, nice' -- because as early as A Memory Called Empire's introduction, a character is speculating that there might be something new out there, something poking around the fringes of human space which could pose a meaningful threat to Teixcalaan, and my mind went immediately to, "Oh dear lord, the European-analogues are aliens," and that threat loomed much larger than it otherwise would have done, even as the start of the story pointed mostly in other directions -- a threat which might be a bluff, or might be lengthily deferred... or might land in any given chapter.
The last bit of s.f. involving Aztecs I read was the Flora Segunda series, which I love, and which has a heaped tablespoonful of human sacrifice being exotic and horrifying. I had really been wanting to read a book in which Aztec-analogues were terrible in all the ways empires tend to be terrible, while also getting to be other things. This is a good book for that.
---
In one of Chesterton's Father Brown stories, a man walking through city streets in the rain holding a mirror, tilting it about and spending long periods looking into it as he walked, would be noticed by the titular crime-solving priest. Father Brown would know from the manner of his whimsy that something was eerie, something was wrong; such a man ought to look merry, but that man looked careworn. Father Brown would start to follow him, talking with his friend on the way about the wonderful and terrible meaning of mirrors. The story of Perseus and Medusa would be raised -- monsters that need to be hunted without being looked at -- and then they would round a corner and come upon the mirror smashed, traces of blood on the glass, and a stone statue of the man who'd been carrying it, looking up with an expression of shock. But of course there would be no supernatural element in the mystery's solution: a vengeful sculptor, a plot accounting for the evidence perfectly, less convoluted than it seemed.
In a Borges story I wouldn't dare speculate about what a man walking through city streets in the rain holding a mirror would mean. More than it seemed to, in some way that would keep unfolding throughout the story until the familiar stable world was lost in it.
I was reading Borges earlier in the month, and he led me back to Chesterton. But though I had the both of them in mind, I was only taking the mirror to the second hand shop, because it had been leaning against a wall gathering dust ever since I started sharing a room with the built-in mirror in Charlotte's wardrobe. I've never walked with a mirror before. Unusual angles on trees.
(But now I want to write the Father Brown story, which was not meant to happen).
---
And I am writing this so late at night because there was a nine o'clock screening of Peter Strickland's In Fabric, and Peter Strickland has a sensibility which promotes fizzing energy. Film festival time is one of the happy times of year! The other two things I've seen so far are Apollo 11 (which, stitched together from footage shot at the time, is the strongest statement I've seen of 'We went to the moon! The frickin moon! Humans! We went there!') and Varda by Agnes, a wander through the career of Agnes Varda narrated by herself, which increasingly charmed me as it went along. Agnes Varda was the kind of person who, while shooting a documentary about her life, would meet an interesting couple who collected model trains and make a documentary about them on the side, only not on the side after all, because she'd decide they were far more interesting than her early life; whose eye for people and ways of life was as strong as her visual imagination, so that noticing people picking up discarded fruit and vegetables while a street market was being packed up caused her to make one friend and one three-panel video installation about the sprouting and decay of heart-shaped potatoes. I came out of that and In Fabric feeling more alert to the visual possibilities of the world, looking up at the incoherent architecture of Te Papa museum, and out at the dark harbour, and up at a church and a commercial building... Only, since those last two were after In Fabric, I had more of a sense that I might at any moment be stylishly murdered. Happily, as of the moment of posting, this has not happened.
*with quibbles. I feel pedantic when I say, 'I found some of its description and exposition repetitive'; it's the kind of thing I often want to say, and it's important to the feeling I have while reading a book, but it isn't what the book leaves me with. As a counterexample, I read Ellen Kushner's Thomas the Rhymer this month. That's a book about which I have no quibbles, not a single thing snagged me as I read. It was a good, energetic version of its source ballad, did everything it needed to to make a ballad into a novel, putting in the mortal world the Fairy Queen takes Thomas from, and plot for those years he spends in Elfland, and elves who don't value things as humans do nor think like humans. I don't love it. It doesn't stick with me the way A Memory Called Empire does, though for any randomly-selected minute of reading I was very likely having more fun.
The core dynamic of the book, and what I find most compelling about it, comes across in the dedication: This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever fallen in love with a culture that was devouring their own. Mahit is deeply attached to her home, Lsel Station, but she also loves the poetry of Teixcalaanli high culture -- hence her suitability for ambassadorship -- and it is impossible to love Teixcalaanli poetry without on some level identifying with its pervading assumptions, one of which is that Lsel Stationers are barbarians who should be integrated into the empire at its convenience. The empire tells a story according to which there are no other good stories, and it has centuries' worth of superlative poets, as well as the special effects budget of as many planets as it needs, to back that up with. There's a moment in the book which very much connected with me in which Mahit realises, first, that she's being manipulated, and second, that the manipulation is working regardless.
I really like Mahit, out of her depth but a strong swimmer, navigating a factional politics on which she's been improperly briefed. I like her charming Teixcalaanli companions, about whom the question isn't so much 'Are they trustworthy?' as 'Are they merely as untrustworthy as the situation requires?' The politics passes through complicated and tricky on its way to untenable, and Mahit would very much like to get a night's sleep, but preferably after working out how to deal with the things that are likely to go horribly wrong before she wakes up again, so some icecream will have to do in the mean time...
I read this book because I was halfway through 1491 when
skygiants reviewed it and mentioned that it involved an Aztec-based culture in which human sacrifice wasn't singled out for being exotic and horrifying. And it isn't! That was nice! There isn't enough about the Aztecs specifically in 1491 for me to have much sense of what this book is doing with them, but my feeling is that Teixcalaan's more an empire than it's anything else -- there's a lot of Byzantium in there too, and not just because it's one of the template empires, it's Martine's field of study. The Aztec influence changes the details, the animals that get to be symbolic are hummingbirds, the empire is shaped like a sunburst which is also the shape of its temples... (although no, I think that detail is actually Incan -- unless it's both). But being in the middle of 1491 did change my reading experience more than by making me think, 'Something with Aztecs, nice' -- because as early as A Memory Called Empire's introduction, a character is speculating that there might be something new out there, something poking around the fringes of human space which could pose a meaningful threat to Teixcalaan, and my mind went immediately to, "Oh dear lord, the European-analogues are aliens," and that threat loomed much larger than it otherwise would have done, even as the start of the story pointed mostly in other directions -- a threat which might be a bluff, or might be lengthily deferred... or might land in any given chapter. The last bit of s.f. involving Aztecs I read was the Flora Segunda series, which I love, and which has a heaped tablespoonful of human sacrifice being exotic and horrifying. I had really been wanting to read a book in which Aztec-analogues were terrible in all the ways empires tend to be terrible, while also getting to be other things. This is a good book for that.
---
In one of Chesterton's Father Brown stories, a man walking through city streets in the rain holding a mirror, tilting it about and spending long periods looking into it as he walked, would be noticed by the titular crime-solving priest. Father Brown would know from the manner of his whimsy that something was eerie, something was wrong; such a man ought to look merry, but that man looked careworn. Father Brown would start to follow him, talking with his friend on the way about the wonderful and terrible meaning of mirrors. The story of Perseus and Medusa would be raised -- monsters that need to be hunted without being looked at -- and then they would round a corner and come upon the mirror smashed, traces of blood on the glass, and a stone statue of the man who'd been carrying it, looking up with an expression of shock. But of course there would be no supernatural element in the mystery's solution: a vengeful sculptor, a plot accounting for the evidence perfectly, less convoluted than it seemed.
In a Borges story I wouldn't dare speculate about what a man walking through city streets in the rain holding a mirror would mean. More than it seemed to, in some way that would keep unfolding throughout the story until the familiar stable world was lost in it.
I was reading Borges earlier in the month, and he led me back to Chesterton. But though I had the both of them in mind, I was only taking the mirror to the second hand shop, because it had been leaning against a wall gathering dust ever since I started sharing a room with the built-in mirror in Charlotte's wardrobe. I've never walked with a mirror before. Unusual angles on trees.
(But now I want to write the Father Brown story, which was not meant to happen).
---
And I am writing this so late at night because there was a nine o'clock screening of Peter Strickland's In Fabric, and Peter Strickland has a sensibility which promotes fizzing energy. Film festival time is one of the happy times of year! The other two things I've seen so far are Apollo 11 (which, stitched together from footage shot at the time, is the strongest statement I've seen of 'We went to the moon! The frickin moon! Humans! We went there!') and Varda by Agnes, a wander through the career of Agnes Varda narrated by herself, which increasingly charmed me as it went along. Agnes Varda was the kind of person who, while shooting a documentary about her life, would meet an interesting couple who collected model trains and make a documentary about them on the side, only not on the side after all, because she'd decide they were far more interesting than her early life; whose eye for people and ways of life was as strong as her visual imagination, so that noticing people picking up discarded fruit and vegetables while a street market was being packed up caused her to make one friend and one three-panel video installation about the sprouting and decay of heart-shaped potatoes. I came out of that and In Fabric feeling more alert to the visual possibilities of the world, looking up at the incoherent architecture of Te Papa museum, and out at the dark harbour, and up at a church and a commercial building... Only, since those last two were after In Fabric, I had more of a sense that I might at any moment be stylishly murdered. Happily, as of the moment of posting, this has not happened.
*with quibbles. I feel pedantic when I say, 'I found some of its description and exposition repetitive'; it's the kind of thing I often want to say, and it's important to the feeling I have while reading a book, but it isn't what the book leaves me with. As a counterexample, I read Ellen Kushner's Thomas the Rhymer this month. That's a book about which I have no quibbles, not a single thing snagged me as I read. It was a good, energetic version of its source ballad, did everything it needed to to make a ballad into a novel, putting in the mortal world the Fairy Queen takes Thomas from, and plot for those years he spends in Elfland, and elves who don't value things as humans do nor think like humans. I don't love it. It doesn't stick with me the way A Memory Called Empire does, though for any randomly-selected minute of reading I was very likely having more fun.
