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Wednesday reading
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!
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!
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As usual, your reading makes me want to read more.
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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.)
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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.
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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)
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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.
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Oh! and this morning!
Which is the sort of thing I figured you'd enjoy hearing ;-)
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Re: Oh! and this morning!
Re: Oh! and this morning!
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