So I've been contemplating "retirement" lately...

And no, before you begin to think it'd be akin to this pathetic search for attention that I parodied nearly three years ago, it's not a "retirement" from blogging/reviewing all together.  Rather, I have been thinking for the past several weeks (I first heard the news on Twitter) on Nick Mamatas' decision to "retire" from writing SF/F/H.  In particular, this passage from his recent FAQ post regarding the retirement has resonated with me:

The Readercon sexual harassment debacle was one, as was overhearing disgusting pig commentary about the event at Worldcon later that same year. Naturally, last week's SFWA sexism controversy is proof to me that I should just stay away. In addition to sexist culture and patriarchy and all the politicized rhetoric used to explain such phenomena, it all rather hints to me that SF is basically full of people in a state of emotional arrest. You know, social simpletons. I don't want to write for these people.

 If I add the time that I was a moderator/Admin of wotmania's Other Fantasy section (October 2001 to the site's shutdown in 2009) to the nearly nine years since I started this blog, I have been inundated with "genre" matters for nearly a dozen of my adult years (or almost a third of my lifetime).  While I've seen some interesting movements arise (New Weird and Steampunk as "hot" topics; the growing profile of non-Anglophone writers), more and more I just see the seedy underbelly of the so-called "genre community" bared like a mangy dog rolling in its filth and expecting passing humans to rub its belly and pat it on the head.   Rarely does a month (week?) go by without some "controversy" raring its putrid head:  sexist old farts, racist twits, and so forth.  But what annoys me most is how jejune the arguments are on most sides.  Even those "progressivists" with whom I should share more sympathy too often come across as offering little more than a rebuke of dimwits who long ago should have been shunted aside in favor of new paradigms of storytelling.  I get the message that so many members/fans of X, Y, and Z are full of offensive crap.  I just want better reasons to read your writings.

And that's what I am not really seeing here.  Doubtless some of it is due to some "blind spots" of my own choosing and some of it due to a relative lack of visibility for alt-SF/F (I'm actually surprised that such terminology, to my meager knowledge, has not been applied to those recent stories that buck older "mainstream" SF/F/H).  All I know is that I can barely stomach the thought of reading any SF or fantasy right now (I've been hot/cold with horror for two decades now) and perhaps instead of enduring yet another iteration of old fart says dumb stuff and various "FAIL" .gifs are made in response, I should just delete the few remaining "genre" links in my blogroll, stop following 2/3 or more of the 500+ people I follow on Twitter, and just instead read something, anything other than SF/F for a year or more until this "burnout" I feel is gone.  I'm hesitant to do this and likely won't in full, but the past year or more has certainly sapped most of my enjoyment of speculative fictions.

Feel free to guess the number of hours/days/weeks/months before I change my mind :P

The things that draw more hits: May 30-June 13

Not that I'm all that surprised by this, but here are the stats for 7 out of the past 8 blog posts (not counting this one or the one I made almost 24 hours ago), according to Google.  The top-listed post is an almost desultory commentary on four other people's posts on epic fantasy, the other six being reviews that might actually be of some use to some people.  Let's see the numbers (should note that I linked to all of these on Twitter and that I did nothing further for any nor anything less for any as well), shall we?

Personal reactions to several recent attempts...  11 Comments  323 Views  Posted:  6/12/13

Haruki Murakami, 1Q84                                      0 Comments    51 Views  Posted:  6/9/13

Sjón, From the Mouth of the Whale                    0 Comments    79 Views  Posted:  6/3/13

Kevin Barry, City of Bohane                               0 Comments    42 Views  Posted:  6/2/13

Kjersti Skomsvold, The Faster I Walk...             0 Comments    59 Views  Posted:  6/1/13

Arthur Phillips, The Tragedy of Arthur              0 Comments   107 Views Posted:  5/30/13

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night              0 Comments     63 Views Posted:  5/27/13


It's a good thing that I'm not all that interested these days in hit counts (although to be honest, those review view numbers are not reflective of the hundreds of daily views of the home page, which would probably mean that 2-3 times those amounts at least are the likely read numbers), although it is amusing to see that posts that require less thought and effort get more views.

Tempted to post a picture of a fennec and/or squirrel to see if the hit count would be even greater....

Ah, what the hell:

I'm stressed, possibly depressed, and my reading/reviewing has suffered

I am going to try to keep this short and relatively vague:  I haven't felt so much stress while working a job since I was taking prescribed medication that unfortunately caused one of those rare but severe adverse reactions of becoming extremely aggressive and hyper-alert.  I am currently working an extremely demanding job that I must keep during the summer break and it involves a lot of times where self-restraint has to be strong, lest I give in to the temptation of responding violently to being kicked, slapped, scratched, pinched, or spit upon by the residents for whom I provide services.  In comparison, reading fictions means less and less:  their struggles feel less vital, almost pointless to read.

So I've been reading less and less and enjoying even fewer activities.  Last weekend's trip to Vicksburg, Mississippi (which I chronicled here) was a very welcome break.  Knowing that I'm taking a couple of days off in mid-July and then might be able to leave the job at the beginning of August when the school year begins at times provides the only grips for my sanity after some spells.  So while I had planned on reviewing a lot of books this month in order to compensate for fewer posts during the spring due to working two jobs, it looks like I'll be writing only a few posts here and there when energy permits it.  But maybe I'll be stronger for this; I know I'm doing better than I did several years ago during the last spell of stress-and-medication-induced depression.

Now if only I could see more frolicking squirrels.  Those creatures make me think very happy thoughts.

Personal reactions to several recent attempts to create "essential epic fantasy" lists

As I've grown older, I've become somewhat more reluctant to join in anything that smacks of "genre community."  I have stayed out of recent discussions of recent snafus and dimwitted social commentaries regarding gender, race, class, etc. in large part because they are so repetitive in their genesis/retort/sniping that it seems to have become more an elaborate dance of several OCD people than anything substantially new or different.  Although I have not yet announced a "retirement" from anything "genre community" related (like Nick Mamatas did in regards to writing SF/F/H fiction), I typically feel relegated to the sidelines where those who (in)voluntarily are watching a vicious cockfight stare with a mixture of morbid fascination and acute revulsion.

So I should have been excited to see something positive emerge from online discussions (well, belated excitement, as I was on vacation this past weekend to Vicksburg and missed the initial discussions) regarding "essential epic fantasies."  It seems that there was a Twitter-initiated round of lists done by four people, three of whom I follow on Twitter and the fourth I have no ill feelings, along with an alt-list by another writer/blogger I follow on Twitter.  I note my personal feelings for the list makers here in order to make clear that this is nothing personal in regards to them, but frankly those lists were problematic at best.

The first problem I had with these lists were with the ways that the list makers chose to define "essential."  It may be the pedantic literature/history teacher in me, but any "essential" literary list should be, y'know, essential for a substantial body of readers.  Cherry-picking a few classics of (mostly) Western literature and then presenting them on a relatively equal footing with the likes of Brandon Sanderson, Jacqueline Carey, David Eddings, and others of their ilk is rather asinine, to be honest.  For these comparisons to work, especially for those who are not enamored with the idea of "epic fantasy" being an ancient literary mode, there has to be more connections than surface-level similarities.  It might seem easy to include a work such as The Epic of Gilgamesh due to its ancient roots and stories involving Sumerian myths, but the purpose of that narrative (namely that within the stories are embedded elements of Sumerian religious belief) differs wildly than a pedestrian work (OK, "pedestrian" may be considered mild by some) by David Eddings.  There just are not any real solid connections made between the selections, which in turn makes these lists feel less "essential" and more like "OK, I like some rather crappy works, but in order to give my list a patina of respectability and to prove that epic fantasy can be more than the wasteland of the lesser-talented writers, I'm going to include a few world's classics that influenced writers several chains up the "love and theft" line from the Sandersons and Brooks of the world, regardless of whether or not it makes sense to mention these two groups in a single pairing."  If these lists were more humbly entitled "epic fantasy favorites," it might be less attention-grabbing but also more appropriate.  The books on the lists for the most part are very underwhelming, with generally only a few works written in the past 130 years that arguably should be read by well-educated readers.

Beyond the need for a better, more sound rationale for having such an "essential" set of lists in the first place, these lists (as is often the case with list generators) demonstrate the deficiencies in the list creator's own reading.  This is not a pejorative in the sense that I am saying they are under-read (virtually everyone will have large reading gaps due to linguistic and cultural reasons), but a note regarding the futility of creating a comprehensive list by one's self.  In reading through the lists, I found myself thinking of works that contain elements of epic mode that were not discussed.  The below-listed are works that are culturally significant for large parts of the world's population:

Orlando Furioso
The Lusiads (Os Lusíadas)
Don Quixote
The Thousand and One Nights
The Epic of Sundiata
Romance of the Three Kingdoms
Nibelungenlied
The Kalavala
The Norse Eddas
Leaves of Grass
Gerusalemme Conquista (Jerusalem Conquered)
Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude)
Absalom, Absalom!
Tales of Genji
La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream)
The Ramayana
With Fire and Sword
Gargantua and Pantagruel
Ulysses

Even these are a tiny fraction of the memorable songs/dramas/poems/prose that are romances/use epic mode/phrases/imagery.  But most come from other traditions than Protestant-tinted Anglo-Saxon sources.  Some of the concerns differ from what Anglophones may be accustomed to, but each is much more "essential" when it comes to (inter)national literary traditions than any list of 1970s-2013 works will likely ever approach.

Considering that it is an almost Sisyphean task to devise a list of 10-50 "essentials" of the "epic fantasy" mode ("epic fantasy" being in scare quotes due to questions regarding its uniformity of form), what should be done beyond dropping "essential" from the title?  Perhaps there should be more reflection on the implied form of "epic fantasy" itself?  What value does that term possess today outside of its (pejorative) connotation of being the realm of barely pubescent youth, mostly Westerners in cultural traditions, who view it as the literary equivalent of the bombastic music of 1970s hard rock musicians such as Led Zeppelin (n.b.  I actually enjoy Zeppelin's music despite their shortcomings in the lyrics and treatment of women departments)?  That is the question that perhaps should be addressed more fully before setting out to write out lists that are questionable in their contents and in their cultural value, at least for those who did not grow up enamored with pulp fictions.

Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

Of course it's all just a hypothesis, Aomame told herself as she walked.  But it's the most compelling hypothesis I can produce at the moment.  I'll have to act according to this one, I suppose, until a more compelling hypothesis comes along.  Otherwise, I could end up being thrown to the ground somewhere.  If only for that reason, I'd better give an appropriate name to this new situation in which I find myself.  There's a need, too, for a special name in order to distinguish between this present world and the former world in which the police carried old-fashioned revolvers.  Even cats and dogs need names.  A newly changed world must need one, too.

1Q84 – that's what I'll call this new world, Aomame decided.

Q is for "question mark."  A world that bears a question.

Aomame nodded to herself as she walked along.

Like it or not, I'm here now, in the year 1Q84.  The 1984 that I knew no longer exists.  It's 1Q84 now.  The air has changed, the scene has changed.  I have to adapt to this world-with-a-question-mark as soon as I can.  Like an animal released into a new forest.  In order to protect myself and survive, I have to learn the rules of this place and adapt myself to them. (pp. 158-159 e-book edition, Ch. 9)

I first read Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 soon after its US release in late October 2011.  At the time, I found it difficult to summarize my thoughts on this sprawling book (it is nearly a thousand pages in hardcover and just over 1200 e-book pages on my iPad), as it covered so many things, some that I thought were done excellently, others that I thought were underdeveloped, and a few that just flat-out baffled me.  So I eschewed writing a formal review then, thinking that a re-read might provide a clearer picture of the story (stories?) being told.  Now that this novel is up for the 2013 IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize, it was a good time to re-read the book and see if my initial impressions had changed.

1Q84 is the most "speculative" of the shortlisted books.  It transpires in 1984 Japan and then in a place, pointedly noted as being non-parallel, of two moons, Little People, and a story that seems to travel through a semi-permeable membrane that separates the two worlds.  It is the story of a former child member of a religious cult-turned-assassin of abusive men, Aomame, and her search after twenty years for a man, Tengo, who once shared a mysterious moment with her when they were ten.  There are events such as a mysterious pregnancy, an Exxon Tiger billboard, and an unusual murder-mystery that make 1Q84 one of the most visible weird fictions to be released in the past five years.

The novel is divided into three chronological sections that span roughly the Spring through Autumn of 1984.  There are alternating chapters presented in limited third-person PoV that focus on Aomame and Tengo's experiences in both the "real" world and in the world of 1Q84.  Murakami makes copious use of literary and cultural symbols to make symbolic and (mostly) literal connections between the worlds.  One particular reference that may be more obscure to Anglo-American reasons is the "town of cats."  Seen from Tengo's perspective, the alternate world is not Aomame's "1Q84" but instead a place that reminds him strongly of pre-World War II writer Hagiwara Sakutarō's "Town of Cats" (readers wanting to read this story can find it in the anthology The Weird, which incidentally lists Murakami as being influenced by his work.  That note coincidentally was written some months before the US publication of 1Q84).  For Tengo, this "cat town" world was a strange, alienating place in which the "Little People," who are mentioned in the novel Air Chrysalis that he has ghostwritten for a 17 year-old girl, Fuka-Eri, lurk behind a series of mysteries.  

There is certainly an aura of menace in the novel's last third, as Aomame and Tengo come closer to identifying the mysteries that have invaded their lives.  Murakami ambitiously attempts to meld a weird, metatextual setting with elements taken from thrillers and for most of the time, this unusual pairing succeeds.  The slower, more contemplative pace of the first two parts gives way to a quicker-tempo, more action-packed final section.  Although not all of the mysteries are explained (if anything, explanation in a story such as 1Q84 would serve to dampen its appeal), there certainly is a nice tying-together of several symbolic objects within the course of Aomame and Tengo's eventual reunion.  Yet it is almost too little, too late, as there are some lengthy longeurs in the middle chapters that almost derail the novel.

1Q84 is one of those "too much" novels, at least for sections lasting sometimes longer than a hundred pages.  There are too many interesting and quirky characters for each individual one to have the impact that similar characters had in some of Murakami's earlier work.  There are a plethora of mysterious objects whose symbolic purpose in regards to the plot remain to be deciphered, perhaps too many for the narrative to handle adequately.  The pasts of both Aomame and Tengo are intriguing, but sometimes too much backstory had to be introduced for it to be as effective as it otherwise could have been.

Yet despite this sense that there is a surfeit of things that in moderation would made for great narrative elements, 1Q84 is a very good work.  Although at times it labors under the weight of its massive narrative, ultimately the reading experience belies that earlier sense that it is at times bloated and turgid.  Murakami manages to strike a precarious balance between exposition and leaving tantalizing mysteries for the readers to puzzle out at their leisure.  Although it is not quite at the level of his best-known works, 1Q84 is one of the better 2011 releases and its inclusion on the 2013 IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize shortlist does not stick out like a sore thumb.  If this is damning with faint praise, there are a whole host of fictions that could wish to be so damned.

Sjón, From the Mouth of the Whale

One interesting trend that I've noticed when (re)reading the ten finalists for the 2013 IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize is the large number of non-standard narratives.  In the books already reviewed, one can see a first-person plural point of view (Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic), a multi-level literary forgery/fictional family tale (Arthur Phillips' The Tragedy of Arthur), and a narrator who may or may not be suffering from dementia (Kjersti Skomsvold's The Faster I am the Smaller I Am).  Even the other work already reviewed, Kevin Barry's City of Bohane, utilizes character dialectic speech in a fashion not often seen in contemporary novels.  Therefore, it was little surprise to see that Icelandic novelist Sjón's novel, From the Mouth of the Whale, adds to the diversity of the shortlist's narrative styles with its mixture of the historical and the feverish, quasi-fantastical worldview of early 17th century Iceland.

From the Mouth of the Whale moves back and forth in time, from the exile of Jónas Pálmason to his recollections of his education, exorcism of a walking corpse, and the massacre of visiting Basque whalers.  Told in first-person point of view, From the Mouth of the Whale derives much of its narrative power from its deceptively unreliable narrator.  In using "unreliable" to describing Jónas, it is not to denote that he is being purposely deceptive, but rather that Sjón is exploring a worldview that would be remotely alien to us, as "science" and "magic" were not seen in the 1630s Iceland as being true/false opposing entities but rather as complementary disciplines between which Jónas maneuvers during his life.  Take for instance this scene about a quarter into the novel:

"That's the sort of nonsense that landed us here in the first place."

What she says is true, though she should know better than to call it nonsense; it would be more correct to say that it was my intellectual gifts that marooned us here.  Or rather, exiled me here; it was her decision to make them row her over to share my fate.  Poor woman.  But it is probably the lesser of two evils to be the wife of Jónas and share a barren rock with him than to live among strangers.  Or so I gathered form the way people spoke to her on the mainland.  The saddest thing for me is that her loyalty is misplaced.  I have done this woman nothing but harm.  She was opposed to my heeding the summons of Wizard-Láfi Thórdarson, alias the specialist and poet Thórólfur, when he asked me to go out west with him and exorcise the troublesome ghost.  For that was the beginning of my misfortunes.  That is how we came to lose everything.  How did our paths cross?  It was during the eclipse of the sun, if I remember right.  I do not dare ask her; women think men ought to remember that sort of thing.  Last time she was scolding me for my madcap ideas, I asked her why she had come back to me if not to take up the thread where we left off when I had to crawl alone into hiding due to the persecution by the Nightwolf and Sheriff Ari of myself Jónas the Learned and my son Reverend Pálmi.  Indeed, why was she here if not to assist me in my investigations into the workings of the universe?  For that is how it used to be.  Now it is as if my enemies have given her the task of "bringing me to my senses," as more than one, indeed several, of my tormentors call it.  Yet that is not fair, for when I hinted as much the other day, she responded:

"If anyone knows there's no chance of bringing you to your senses by now, Jónas Pálmason, it's me." (pp. 76-77)

For most of the novel, Sjón adroitly mixes this combination of science and superstition to create a vividly-drawn 17th century Iceland that is fascinating.  Of particular interest are the stories of Jónas's exorcism (in which it is difficult to discern if he is lucid or experiencing a hallucination) and of the tragedy of the Basque whalers who suffered a horrific fate at the hands of the locals.  Sjón manages to narrate these stories with aplomb, as Jónas's recollections of each smoothly transition from the literary present back to these events and then forward again in time without there being a noticeable change in tone.  It is a narration of an extraordinary life combined with a cultural history of a true BFE backwater, with each informing the other, ultimately leading to a tale that insidiously grabs the unsuspecting reader's attention until she is quickly reading the pages.

Yet there are some flaws here.  Jónas's character, fascinating as it is for much of the novel, sometimes disappears too much into the narration, particularly later in the novel.  The carefully-maintained balance between the real and irreal breaks down toward the end as well, making for a more difficult discernment of the narrator's lucid thoughts compared to what appear to be flights of fancy.  Normally this would not be a major criticism, but it does destroy the tone established for the majority of the novel.  From the Mouth of the Whale is not a bad novel; for the most part I did enjoy reading it.  But it is a flawed novel and compared to the other nine finalists for the 2013 IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize, it, along with two others, are noticeably weaker in terms of structure and execution.  It is a novel worth reading, but it is not as good as the majority of the ones on this strong shortlist.

Kevin Barry, City of Bohane

It may sound trite, but language is the linchpin upon which all elements of a story depend for their structure.  Without appropriate language, even the most elegantly-plotted tales can end up as flat as a soda bottle left open for a week before anyone sips from it.  Language is intricately tied up in prose, yet it inhabits more media than just prose.  The musicality of the words, the lilt and tilt of phrases, these can make the reader think of music or poetry even when the words are printed and there is no discernible rhyme nor line pattern.  Great language makes even the most clichéd works enjoyable to read because there is something beautiful being told that entrances us.  Our oldest recorded stories depended heavily upon the spoken language and its tones and rhythms to aid the stories being told; many listeners knew the basics, but a skilled troubadour added nuances of voice and inflection to the tale that made all things new again.

The basic premise of Irish writer Kevin Barry's debut novel, City of Bohane, should be familiar to those who've read many (or any?) stories of love triangles and of the romances of gangsters.  The plot of a feared/respected gang leader and his quarter-century hold on the fictional western Irish city of Bohane seeming to slip due to the intrusion of a new rival gang, not to mention this "Fancy's" apprehensions regarding his beautiful wife, is a solidly-constructed tale but it is nothing special by itself.  These sorts of tales, whether you read (or watched) The Gangs of New York or other stories of its ilk, are commonplace in recent literature.

Yet City of Bohane mostly transcends these generic elements.  This is one of the most evocative, "beautiful" novels that have been published in recent years.  Barry has such an ear for dialogue that his reproduction of working-class Hibernian English feels alive, full of vitality and teeming with imminent violence.  Take for instance this passage from the beginning chapter:

Whatever's wrong with us is coming in off that river.  No argument:  the taint of badness on the city's air is a taint off that river.  This is the Bohane river we're talking about.  A blackwater surge, malevolent, it roars in off the Big Nothin' wastes and the city was spawned by it and was named for it:  city of Bohane.

He walked the docks and breathed in the sweet badness of the river.  It was past midnight on the Bohane front.  There was an evenness to his footfall, a slow calm rhythm of leather on stone, and the dockside lamps burned in the night-time a green haze, the light of a sad dream.  The water's roar for Harnett was as the rushing of his own blood and as he passed the merchant yards the guard dogs strung out a sequence of howls all along the front.  See the dogs:  their hackles heaped, their yellow eyes livid.  We could tell he coming by the howling of the dogs. (p. 9 e-book edition)

Barry does an excellent job establishing the decrepitude of Bohane.  Despite it being mentioned on a few occasions that the action transpires in the year 2053, there is no sense of the "future" in this setting:  no phones, no social media, nothing that would made the reader think of 21st century bourgeois society.  Instead, there is a focus on intimate human relations, from how people dress to conform to certain social types (at times, the gangs of Bohane come perilously close to being a bunch of dandies on the prowl, although this certainly is not a defect of the story) to how people walk and talk.  This last element in particular showcases Barry's talents as a writer, as his dialogues are simultaneously hilarious, threatening, and possess a verisimilitude that very few fiction writers ever manage to achieve.  Below is a sample taken from near the end of Ch. 6, as to secondary characters, Fucker and Wolfie, are gabbing in a pub:

Fucker sat on his hands and bit his bottom lip. Wolfie, more the diplomat of the pair, changed tack.

'You'd be a fella who'd take a turn 'round Smoketown the odd time, sir?'

'Now,' said the spud-ater, 'we are talkin' decen' cuts o' turkey.'

'An' what'd have an interest for you cross the footbridge, sir?'

The old-timer's eyes sparkled.

'I'd lick a dream off the belly of a skinny hoor as quick as you'd look at me.'

Wolfie nodded soberly, as though appreciative of the spud-ater's delicate tastes.

'Draw a bead and you'll have your pick o' the skinnies,' he said.  'Could have a season o' picks.'

'A season?'

'Cozy aul' winter for ya,' said Fucker.  'Buried to the maker's name in skinnies and far gone off the suck of a dream-pipe, y'check me?'

The old tout sighed as temptation hovered.

'Oh man an' boy I been a martyr to the poppy dream...'

'An' soon as you done with the dream-pipe,' Fucker teased some more, 'there'd be as much herb as you can lung an ' ale to folly.' (p. 46 e-book edition)

 The tone is that of two friends, or at least two friendly pub acquaintances, shooting the bull.  This feels very naturalistic, but this frequently is not an easy thing to accomplish in fiction.  Yet here and throughout the narrative the characters' voices are distinct yet they contribute greatly toward creating a vivid landscape upon which the action unfolds.  This quality cannot be overstated here as there are times where the plot is relatively weak and it is mostly due to the strongly-drawn characters and their distinctive points-of-views that the action is as memorable as it can be.

Unfortunately, the beautiful, lush language and the well-drawn characters can only carry a story so far.  While the concluding part of City of Bohane is not "weak" per se, it is not as strongly-developed as the other sections of the novel and the conclusion feels as though the narrative engine ran out of gas making the last turn, as it sputters and wheezes its way to a denouement that is merely adequate.  Perhaps this is the flipside to Barry's accomplishments with narrative and characters:  the reader may find herself wishing at the end that its power could have been sustained for just a couple scenes longer.  As it stands, City of Bohane is a very good novel with memorable prose that finds those elements ultimately betrayed by a plot that just cannot sustain the energy of its first three-quarters.