Wednesday reading

[asakiyume]

I finished Embassytown, and I have to say, it did a thing I'm not sure any other book has done for me, which is alienate me for a good 45 percent of the book (from about the 45 percent mark until about the 90 percent mark)--such that I was writing frustrated, seething notes on Goodreads--and then, WOW, pull meaning and heart out of that mess in a way that really, really moved and impressed me. For those of you who've read the book, the thing that I loved more than anything else was Spanish Dancer's speech at the end. (So much. SO MUCH.) For everyone else, I wish I could share it, but it would spoil the book, and also it probably wouldn't mean much without the whole preceding story for context.

Some things (plot developments, character actions) that frustrated me during the story ceased to in retrospect--instead they seemed important and necessary. That's a weird feeling: as if the sensemaking reached back and made my irritation less not only in the present but also in the past. Mental time travel.

But some things still just straight out didn't work for me. For one thing, the narrator, Avice. I didn't like her very much. She would do things while dissing them--a characteristic I dislike--and she was weirdly aimless.

"It was in circles such as this," she tells us, "Embassytown society, that I met CalVin and became their lover." Okay, but why did you become CalVin's lover? What did you feel about them?

When Avice does share her feelings, I had trouble believing in them: "I had so much sadness in me. I cried, only when I was alone. I was so sorry for Hasser, silly secret zealot; and for Valdik"--but see how she calls Hasser silly? She holds herself so apart from everyone, is so cool ... I guess I would have preferred her to evince more interest in stuff, to be more warm and less detached. But that's just personal taste; other readers won't necessarily feel that way. She's portrayed consistently, and her actions and reactions feel genuine, so in that sense she's a satisfying character.

What I really loved the book for was its exploration of what it means to come up against something really, truly alien. Something truly alien might require you to change how you think, just in order to understand what it is you're dealing with. You might not even be able to articulate the change you need to make. That's how it is for the aliens in this story. (Yeah: the aliens get to do this growing, not the humans--maybe because it's pretty much impossible to show that for humans--you can fake-show it, but to really **do** it, you yourself would have to have expanded beyond our current thought limitations, and then you'd have to be able to share that in a comprehensible way--not easily done.) The aliens' learning curve is pretty harrowing (for far too long; I could have done with considerably less of the harrowing part), but--well, I liked how it ended up.

Good job, Miéville!

Comments

[sartorias]

The book doesn't sound at all like my thing but I really find your take interesting. Thanks for sharing it.

[asakiyume]

Thank you for reading!

Yeah, thinking of you as a writer, and from what I know of you as a reader, I think you'd be put off by the *distance* in this story, and the lack of a kind of thickness of human feeling. But that may be just me putting my own reaction onto you (you know, like if we were two kids going for ice cream and I said, "Sherwood doesn't want raspberry--she doesn't like all the seeds in it" when really *I'm* the one who doesn't like the seeds.) (Note: actually I don't mind seeds.)

[sartorias]

Trying to figure out what others would like can sometimes be a mug''s game. It's very like matchmaking.

[amaebi]

Sounds interesting!

As usual, your reading makes me want to read more.

[asakiyume]

You read a lot! You read tons more than I do. You're always reading articles and books and all kinds of things.

[amaebi]

I read a lot of mostly ephemeral non-fiction online, but don't make much time for more solid reading offline, which I also don't want to do as much as I want to make more time for writing, and then there's the guilty responsibility to do more gardening the I'm doing.

[asakiyume]

I hear you so loud and clear on this. I do it too: "I really want to do X.... but-but, I want to do Y even more .... but then there's Z, which I really *ought* to be doing."

[asakiyume]

(And it was very interesting... except for parts of the middle that I had to just page through--but on the whole, very interesting indeed)

[mount_oregano]

You're right, Avice is the kind of person who if I met her, we'd be ... cordial, but I don't mind reading books about (by, in a sense) characters who I don't like, as long as they're doing interesting things.

Overall, I loved the book and recommend it to my friends, with one caveat: China Miéville can be a difficult read, but it's really worth your time.

[asakiyume]

but I don't mind reading books about (by, in a sense) characters who I don't like, as long as they're doing interesting things.

I was thinking about this for myself: do I only like stories told by people (or focused on people) whom I could like? And I don't think that's the case--Time of Daughters, for instance, had a main character who was quite unpleasant, but I was interested in his psyche. But there does have to be *something* I can latch onto. With Avice, she was in such interesting places, doing such interesting things, and she was so worldweary and jaded all the time! I wanted to shake her.

A thing I really, really appreciated about the book was that Miéville straight-up addressed the thing that would be most difficult in dealing with a truly alien alien: communication. The Ambassadors and the Ariekei thought they were communicating--sort of--but they really weren't until the Ariekei could make the linguistic breakthroughs, and to do that, they had to change their whole way of thinking. It's just staggering.

I thought of Semiosis at several points--you did a great job with a very alien alien (and you included humor, which I really appreciated)

[amaebi]

As a matter of curiosity, did you read Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, and if so what did you think about its central character, and Atwood's choice to make him so?

[asakiyume]

Sadly, I did not! It's interesting to think about where one (in this case I) draw lines. For instance, I was reading Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning, whose main narrator was interesting--and then when key and surprising information came to light, it was almost too much. But not quite. I continued reading, and the story continued interesting--I liked it. But I didn't trust that there wasn't going to be more of that **tenor** of stuff in subsequent books, and though I enjoyed the first, I haven't been back for the others.

The thing I keep on coming back to with Avice is her--as it reads to me--apparent lack of engagement with life. Apparently she *is* involved--enough to feel sad, the way she describes--and yet for me, most of the events leading up to that sadness, she described with detachment and with mild interest at best. She's suffered a big trauma in her childhood--something deliberately inflicted on her--and it's affected her .... but we only hear about its effect really once. It's as if to show how painful it was and how avoidant she is, Miéville decided never ever to address it.. which isn't a great way to explore that. And that's the only reason I can think of for Avice's lack of emotional involvement. She has (at various points) a husband, lovers, friends, and alien encounters, but you might as well say she has two pairs of shoes, a refrigerator, and a long commute for the amount of impact those things seem to have on her.

[mount_oregano]

Yes, the language part interested me a lot, since I'm a wannabe linguist. In fact, that's why I picked up that book, and I agree, it did staggering things with the idea.

Oh! and this morning!

[asakiyume]

I was talking about science fiction with my daughter, and she was saying that a friend of hers had been talking about this novel where humans had settled another planet and had diverged significantly from back-on-Earth humans, and then back-on-Earth humans arrive, and I said, "Wow, that sounds like Semiosis--only Semiosis doesn't have the back-on-Earth humans arrive, and she said, "That's it! Not Semiosis but its sequel, Interference! (which reminded me I need to read that sequel). ... Anyway, her friend apparently loves it and said to my daughter, "I can't put this book down."

Which is the sort of thing I figured you'd enjoy hearing ;-)

Re: Oh! and this morning!

[mount_oregano]

Wow! Thank you! And if I may, ask your daughter to say hello and thank you from me to her friend.

Re: Oh! and this morning!

[asakiyume]

I'll do that ^_^

[skygiants]

Yes! The thing I loved about this book, really and truly, was the sense of hope pulled out of apocalyptic disaster -- there are all these points where things could have taken a turn for the absolutely worst and then, amazingly, they don't. (and I always do expect the worst from China Mieville, so this was perhaps even more surprising and delightful to me than it merited.)

[asakiyume]

I feel really lucky in the China Miéville novels I've read--or maybe I should say, I've been guided by people and chosen carefully--because I've been able to get the more hopeful ones!