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defrogAnd so, you know, the book reports, eh?
Planet of Exile by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This is Ursula K. Le Guin's second standalone novel of the Hainish Cycle (and also her second novel overall). This time, the setting is Weral, a double planet that takes 60 earth years to complete one orbit, which means its winter season lasts around 15 earth years. The Hainish colony of Landin has been on Werel for 600 earth years, and has effectively been marooned there, with no contact from the League of Worlds. Their numbers are dwindling, and they have an uneasy relationship with Tevar, a nomadic agrarian tribe that lives nearby and regards the “farborns” as witches because they have telepathic abilities.
That’s the backdrop for a tale in which the farborns and the Tevarians are forced to unite when the barbaric Gaal – who are migrating south as they typically do when winter starts to set in – make it apparent that this time they intend to raid both Tevar and Landin on the way. But the alliance unravels quickly when the de facto leader of the Landin, Jakob Agat, falls for Rolery, the daughter of Tevarian chief Wold.
I generally enjoy Le Guin’s work, but this one didn’t really come together for me. The world-building is interesting, but the romance between Agat and Rolery wasn’t convincing, and the climax was rather jumbled and confusing. I get the basic themes she was trying to get across here – cross-culture clashes, the challenges of the Hainish version of the Prime Directive and the consequences of foreigners being unable or unwilling to adapt to local culture, etc. But the narrative vehicle to deliver those ideas doesn’t quite work.
Silence by Shūsaku Endō
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is one of those instances where I saw the movie version before reading the book, which I admit I’d never head of until Martin Scorsese filmed it. The film was fascinating and moving enough that when I found a copy of the book, I was keen to read it.
The book is a fictionalized depiction of Japan’s persecution of Christians in the 17th century as experienced by two Portuguese Jesuit priests who travel there to discover the truth about the fate of their mentor, Father Ferreira, who reportedly apostatized under penalty of torture, which they cannot believe he would do. The story focuses on one of the priests, Father Rodrigues, who finds himself struggling with his own faith in the face of all the suffering he encounters and experiences and God’s silence throughout it all, as well as his own personal Judas, a local Christian named Kichijiro who betrays Rodrigues more than once.
The movie doesn’t stray far from the book, so there were no surprises here plotwise, but I have to say it’s still a moving story – perhaps more so in that it gets much deeper into Rodrigues’ internal struggles as he realizes the reality of Christian persecution is much different from the glorious martyrdoms he envisaged, and the impact this (and God’s apparent silence) has on his faith. I did find it odd that the narrative starts via Rodrigues’ correspondence to Lisbon about his journey, only for Endo to abandon this a third of the way through for a more conventional third-person narrative. But that’s a minor quibble. Overall I found this fascinating from a historical, literary and spiritual perspective.
The Obama Inheritance: Fifteen Stories of Conspiracy Noir by Gary Phillips
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
The pitch for this anthology sounded right up my street – 15 stories where the basic instruction for each writer was: “Pick any conservative conspiracy theory about President Barack Obama – no matter how loopy – and just run with it.”
The result – at least for me – is disappointing. For the most part, the stories here either aren’t very well written or don’t really follow the instructions – at least as far as I understood them. Maybe I misunderstood the overall premise, but it seems like at least half the stories here are less about exploring the fun fictional possibilities of Obama conspiracy theories and more wishful-thinking revenge tales where conservatives who badgered the Obamas for years finally get theirs – which is fine as far as it goes, but in my mind it isn't really in the spirit of the stated mandate. And what a Robert Silverberg story from 1982 is doing here is a mystery in itself.
To be sure, there are a quite a lot of good ideas here – Michelle Obama as covert operative, Barack Obama leading a secret resistance movement after Trump goes full fascist, the true secret of Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s longevity, Obama and Biden as Star Trek time travellers – but not many develop into decent stories. Notable exceptions include Walter Mosley’s “A Different Frame of Reference”, which riffs on that photo of Obama sneaking a smoke (or was he?), and Christopher Chambers’ “The Psalm of Bo”, which gets points for coming up with the idea of Obama’s dog leading an army of weaponized dogs against the last MAGA stronghold in post-apocalyptic America – written in semi-Biblical language, no less.
Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I was hipped to this book by Jon Ronson, who mentioned it in his book So You've Been Publicly Shamed. It’s an account of Anna Funder’s time in Berlin in the mid-90s in which she started interviewing people who had lived in (or worked for) the East German regime. She was inspired to do so in partly to get a sense of what it was like to live in a walled-off society where the Stasi (East Germany’s infamous secret police) ruled, and partly because up to then – six years after the Berlin Wall came down – no one had really bothered to chase down those stories, and many people seemed to want to forget the whole thing and move on.
The result is sort of a people’s history of East Germany and the Stasi, as told by various former Stasi officials, their informants, and of course their victims, including Miriam (whose husband died in a Stasi cell under mysterious circumstances), Julia (Funder’s landlady who was harassed by the Stasi because of her Italian boyfriend) and Frau Paul (whose sick infant son was in West Berlin when the wall went up). She also meets the man who painted the line where the wall was to be built, and goes drinking with Klaus Renft, East Germany’s biggest rock star.
The book is as much about Funder’s experiences during her investigation as it is about the stories she retells, which may put some people off, but I didn’t feel as though it got in the way of the overall story. This is a fascinating account of what it’s like to live in a fascist dictatorship so obsessed with control that it will micromanage people’s lives with intimidation, blackmail, lies, fear and twisted logic. And interestingly, it’s also a testament to the fact that it’s difficult for people who grew up in a strict panopticon Communist state for decades to find themselves living in a capitalist society overnight – not least those who were empowered by it.
Spies like us,
This is dF
Planet of Exile by Ursula K. Le GuinMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
This is Ursula K. Le Guin's second standalone novel of the Hainish Cycle (and also her second novel overall). This time, the setting is Weral, a double planet that takes 60 earth years to complete one orbit, which means its winter season lasts around 15 earth years. The Hainish colony of Landin has been on Werel for 600 earth years, and has effectively been marooned there, with no contact from the League of Worlds. Their numbers are dwindling, and they have an uneasy relationship with Tevar, a nomadic agrarian tribe that lives nearby and regards the “farborns” as witches because they have telepathic abilities.
That’s the backdrop for a tale in which the farborns and the Tevarians are forced to unite when the barbaric Gaal – who are migrating south as they typically do when winter starts to set in – make it apparent that this time they intend to raid both Tevar and Landin on the way. But the alliance unravels quickly when the de facto leader of the Landin, Jakob Agat, falls for Rolery, the daughter of Tevarian chief Wold.
I generally enjoy Le Guin’s work, but this one didn’t really come together for me. The world-building is interesting, but the romance between Agat and Rolery wasn’t convincing, and the climax was rather jumbled and confusing. I get the basic themes she was trying to get across here – cross-culture clashes, the challenges of the Hainish version of the Prime Directive and the consequences of foreigners being unable or unwilling to adapt to local culture, etc. But the narrative vehicle to deliver those ideas doesn’t quite work.
Silence by Shūsaku EndōMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is one of those instances where I saw the movie version before reading the book, which I admit I’d never head of until Martin Scorsese filmed it. The film was fascinating and moving enough that when I found a copy of the book, I was keen to read it.
The book is a fictionalized depiction of Japan’s persecution of Christians in the 17th century as experienced by two Portuguese Jesuit priests who travel there to discover the truth about the fate of their mentor, Father Ferreira, who reportedly apostatized under penalty of torture, which they cannot believe he would do. The story focuses on one of the priests, Father Rodrigues, who finds himself struggling with his own faith in the face of all the suffering he encounters and experiences and God’s silence throughout it all, as well as his own personal Judas, a local Christian named Kichijiro who betrays Rodrigues more than once.
The movie doesn’t stray far from the book, so there were no surprises here plotwise, but I have to say it’s still a moving story – perhaps more so in that it gets much deeper into Rodrigues’ internal struggles as he realizes the reality of Christian persecution is much different from the glorious martyrdoms he envisaged, and the impact this (and God’s apparent silence) has on his faith. I did find it odd that the narrative starts via Rodrigues’ correspondence to Lisbon about his journey, only for Endo to abandon this a third of the way through for a more conventional third-person narrative. But that’s a minor quibble. Overall I found this fascinating from a historical, literary and spiritual perspective.
The Obama Inheritance: Fifteen Stories of Conspiracy Noir by Gary PhillipsMy rating: 1 of 5 stars
The pitch for this anthology sounded right up my street – 15 stories where the basic instruction for each writer was: “Pick any conservative conspiracy theory about President Barack Obama – no matter how loopy – and just run with it.”
The result – at least for me – is disappointing. For the most part, the stories here either aren’t very well written or don’t really follow the instructions – at least as far as I understood them. Maybe I misunderstood the overall premise, but it seems like at least half the stories here are less about exploring the fun fictional possibilities of Obama conspiracy theories and more wishful-thinking revenge tales where conservatives who badgered the Obamas for years finally get theirs – which is fine as far as it goes, but in my mind it isn't really in the spirit of the stated mandate. And what a Robert Silverberg story from 1982 is doing here is a mystery in itself.
To be sure, there are a quite a lot of good ideas here – Michelle Obama as covert operative, Barack Obama leading a secret resistance movement after Trump goes full fascist, the true secret of Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s longevity, Obama and Biden as Star Trek time travellers – but not many develop into decent stories. Notable exceptions include Walter Mosley’s “A Different Frame of Reference”, which riffs on that photo of Obama sneaking a smoke (or was he?), and Christopher Chambers’ “The Psalm of Bo”, which gets points for coming up with the idea of Obama’s dog leading an army of weaponized dogs against the last MAGA stronghold in post-apocalyptic America – written in semi-Biblical language, no less.
Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna FunderMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I was hipped to this book by Jon Ronson, who mentioned it in his book So You've Been Publicly Shamed. It’s an account of Anna Funder’s time in Berlin in the mid-90s in which she started interviewing people who had lived in (or worked for) the East German regime. She was inspired to do so in partly to get a sense of what it was like to live in a walled-off society where the Stasi (East Germany’s infamous secret police) ruled, and partly because up to then – six years after the Berlin Wall came down – no one had really bothered to chase down those stories, and many people seemed to want to forget the whole thing and move on.
The result is sort of a people’s history of East Germany and the Stasi, as told by various former Stasi officials, their informants, and of course their victims, including Miriam (whose husband died in a Stasi cell under mysterious circumstances), Julia (Funder’s landlady who was harassed by the Stasi because of her Italian boyfriend) and Frau Paul (whose sick infant son was in West Berlin when the wall went up). She also meets the man who painted the line where the wall was to be built, and goes drinking with Klaus Renft, East Germany’s biggest rock star.
The book is as much about Funder’s experiences during her investigation as it is about the stories she retells, which may put some people off, but I didn’t feel as though it got in the way of the overall story. This is a fascinating account of what it’s like to live in a fascist dictatorship so obsessed with control that it will micromanage people’s lives with intimidation, blackmail, lies, fear and twisted logic. And interestingly, it’s also a testament to the fact that it’s difficult for people who grew up in a strict panopticon Communist state for decades to find themselves living in a capitalist society overnight – not least those who were empowered by it.
Spies like us,
This is dF
