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Reading Wednesday
Apr. 20th, 2022 11:52 amJust finished: The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa. This might be my 2022 Big Mood Book the way that Severance (the book not the movie) was my 2020 Big Mood Book. It's brilliant but I read a lot of brilliant books. What lives rent-free in my head is the way it not just captures free-floating nostalgia and longing but how well it depicts diverging realities.
This book has been described as dystopian and Kafkaesque, which it is to a point, but not in the way that much contemporary fiction aims to be dystopian and Kafkaesque. This is a book written in the midst of a reality that is dystopian and Kafkaesque for readers who are aware of this, who are casting about for a way to exist within it. A less talented author than Ogawa would have written a story where the Memory Police are directly and obviously responsible for the disappearances, and a protagonist who is one of the minority who retains her memory. The inevitable conclusion would be her rising up to fight them, and likely failing but giving the reader something to aspire to. Instead, it's never clear what causes the disappearances—this doesn't matter at all to the story she's telling—and the Memory Police are just part of the system that enforces them, and that makes them all the more terrifying. The protagonist isn't one of the select few who retains her memory—she only knows that she is missing something important. There is no moment of triumph, or even its possibility, within this narrative, just a diminishing of the world, and the characters struggling to make meaning within that shrinking space.
I don't need to tell you why I relate to this, do I? It's obvious why I relate to this.
Currently reading: Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin. Things I am not particularly into: splatterpunk horror, gendercide stories. I tend to find the former gross and the latter boring, having written one myself at the grand old age of 15 and feeling that everything that can be said with one has been said, and is not very interesting anyway. So why did I pick up a splatterpunk gendercide novel?
Ehhh I heard the author interviewed in a bunch of places and she sounds really cool, plus I heard she kills JKR in the book, so I wanted to read it.
Anyway, it is really good so far! The premise is that the gendercide is hormonally based—anyone with too much testosterone gets turned into a mindless monster, meaning that cis women, trans women if they stay on estrogen, trans men if they stay off of testosterone, enbys if they don't have testosterone, and pre-pubescent children are all spared. Society falls apart, though, so obtaining hormones is a struggle, even outside the murderous mobs of men. Our heroines are two trans women who hunt men because estrogen stored in the balls and kidneys can be used to keep them and post-menopausal women alive. They are, in turn, hunted by an army of TERFs that blames trans people for the apocalypse and wants to take over major cities.
This is the first gendercide book I've read to really grapple with what happens to trans people in the genderpocalypse, so already it has that going for it. Also Felker-Martin's writing is fantastic—vivid and visceral (sometimes quite literally). There are a few quirks that bother me, like overuse of epithets (unavoidable to a certain point when nearly all of the cast uses she/her pronouns, but it feels a little fanfic-y to me), and referring to women in their 20s and 30s as "girls," but overall the quality of prose in this is mindblowing and makes me jealous.
All of the trigger warnings, obviously. This is grimdark in all the ways. If you look at the cover and think, "maybe this book is not for me," trust me that it's not for you.
Shadows Cast By Stars by Catherine Knuttson. Now, this is a curious book. I picked it up because it seemed like the kind of thing that kids would like and the cover is extremely pretty. It's about a future dystopia (huh, there is a theme this week) ravaged by plague (stop me if you've heard this), and the only people immune from the plague are Indigenous people (hey wait a second). So they are hunted by settlers, and the protagonist and her family must flee to the Island, ruled over by a band of guerrilla warriors.
WOW does this ever sound like a ripoff of Marrow Thieves! I looked it up to see if other people have noticed that it's a ripoff of Marrow Thieves only to discover that it pre-dates it by 5 years, oops. In fairness "white people hunt Indigenous people to extract their, er, human resources" is not a particularly outlandish metaphor.
As for the book itself, it's decent YA. I am weary of Special Girls With Special Powers but it comes with the genre, and there's some interesting complexity around the Band being basically macho assholes. It's weird how much a book published in 2012 differs from one published now—the vagueness around identity, Tragic Mulatto tropes applied to Métis people, and terminology would be problematic now even though it's only a decade old. I wonder if Dimaline read it or the two books just emerged separately spontaneously.
This book has been described as dystopian and Kafkaesque, which it is to a point, but not in the way that much contemporary fiction aims to be dystopian and Kafkaesque. This is a book written in the midst of a reality that is dystopian and Kafkaesque for readers who are aware of this, who are casting about for a way to exist within it. A less talented author than Ogawa would have written a story where the Memory Police are directly and obviously responsible for the disappearances, and a protagonist who is one of the minority who retains her memory. The inevitable conclusion would be her rising up to fight them, and likely failing but giving the reader something to aspire to. Instead, it's never clear what causes the disappearances—this doesn't matter at all to the story she's telling—and the Memory Police are just part of the system that enforces them, and that makes them all the more terrifying. The protagonist isn't one of the select few who retains her memory—she only knows that she is missing something important. There is no moment of triumph, or even its possibility, within this narrative, just a diminishing of the world, and the characters struggling to make meaning within that shrinking space.
I don't need to tell you why I relate to this, do I? It's obvious why I relate to this.
Currently reading: Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin. Things I am not particularly into: splatterpunk horror, gendercide stories. I tend to find the former gross and the latter boring, having written one myself at the grand old age of 15 and feeling that everything that can be said with one has been said, and is not very interesting anyway. So why did I pick up a splatterpunk gendercide novel?
Ehhh I heard the author interviewed in a bunch of places and she sounds really cool, plus I heard she kills JKR in the book, so I wanted to read it.
Anyway, it is really good so far! The premise is that the gendercide is hormonally based—anyone with too much testosterone gets turned into a mindless monster, meaning that cis women, trans women if they stay on estrogen, trans men if they stay off of testosterone, enbys if they don't have testosterone, and pre-pubescent children are all spared. Society falls apart, though, so obtaining hormones is a struggle, even outside the murderous mobs of men. Our heroines are two trans women who hunt men because estrogen stored in the balls and kidneys can be used to keep them and post-menopausal women alive. They are, in turn, hunted by an army of TERFs that blames trans people for the apocalypse and wants to take over major cities.
This is the first gendercide book I've read to really grapple with what happens to trans people in the genderpocalypse, so already it has that going for it. Also Felker-Martin's writing is fantastic—vivid and visceral (sometimes quite literally). There are a few quirks that bother me, like overuse of epithets (unavoidable to a certain point when nearly all of the cast uses she/her pronouns, but it feels a little fanfic-y to me), and referring to women in their 20s and 30s as "girls," but overall the quality of prose in this is mindblowing and makes me jealous.
All of the trigger warnings, obviously. This is grimdark in all the ways. If you look at the cover and think, "maybe this book is not for me," trust me that it's not for you.
Shadows Cast By Stars by Catherine Knuttson. Now, this is a curious book. I picked it up because it seemed like the kind of thing that kids would like and the cover is extremely pretty. It's about a future dystopia (huh, there is a theme this week) ravaged by plague (stop me if you've heard this), and the only people immune from the plague are Indigenous people (hey wait a second). So they are hunted by settlers, and the protagonist and her family must flee to the Island, ruled over by a band of guerrilla warriors.
WOW does this ever sound like a ripoff of Marrow Thieves! I looked it up to see if other people have noticed that it's a ripoff of Marrow Thieves only to discover that it pre-dates it by 5 years, oops. In fairness "white people hunt Indigenous people to extract their, er, human resources" is not a particularly outlandish metaphor.
As for the book itself, it's decent YA. I am weary of Special Girls With Special Powers but it comes with the genre, and there's some interesting complexity around the Band being basically macho assholes. It's weird how much a book published in 2012 differs from one published now—the vagueness around identity, Tragic Mulatto tropes applied to Métis people, and terminology would be problematic now even though it's only a decade old. I wonder if Dimaline read it or the two books just emerged separately spontaneously.
