Hello, friends and readers! It’s been over thirty days since I spent time with a human who wasn’t my wife or (from a safe, two-metre distance) my mother. I expect I’ll be looking back another thirty days from now, and saying it’s been over sixty days. But it is what it is, and we all do needful and uncomfortable things to keep other people safe…
This time I have only two books to tell you about. Both of them are forthcoming (so they’re something to look forward to!), one of them is a novella. One of them I adored, while the other I enjoyed and appreciated while also wanting to have an argument with someone about the tendency to valourise certain historical periods and figures as special or in some way peerless… But more on this later.
Zen Cho’s The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water is a slender and gorgeous novella, deftly written and precisely paced. It has a strong wuxia aesthetic and a compelling set of characters, and it has action, personal intrigue, secret pasts and unexpected revelations—plenty of those.
There’s a limit to how much I feel I should discuss the details of The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, because so much of my enjoyment came from how things I expected unfolded in unexpected ways. I expected secrets of the past reprised in the present: I did not expect the precise ways that the history of a bandit second-in-command and the history of a former votary of a religious order would dovetail to bring them together, or how the narrative element of bandits with sacred objects would play out. It’s an elegant and fascinating gem of a novella, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.
Jo Walton’s Or What You Will is also forthcoming, due out this July. It’s a standalone novel, not set in the same universe as any of her previous books, but it is connected to some of them very strongly, nonetheless.
Since The Just City and its sequels, Walton’s fascination with Renaissance humanism—and Platonism viewed through the lens of Renaissance humanism—has been clearly displayed in her work. Lent made this fascination even plainer, set as it was in 15th-century Florence, and here in Or What You Will Walton returns to the same well. Yet again, Pico della Mirandola (or his shadow) and Marsilio Ficino appear as larger-than-life presences, and the world of Renaissance humanism is presented with an enthusiastic geekery that verges on evangelism. (Or What You Will is, at least in part, definitely a love-letter to Florence.)
I fear that this tone of evangelical revelation—the Renaissance! isn’t it SO COOL! — leaves me unfortunately cold, and contributes to a degree to my ambivalent level of outright enthusiasm for Or What You Will. (I fear I’ve always been rather jaded with the whole idea of the Renaissance: it’s a historian’s construct that’s extremely limited in both time and space as a tool for thinking with, and as a narrative construct it’s gotten rather out of hand and developed rather self-congratulatory Eurocentric legs.1) But that ambivalent enthusiasm is also influenced by how much, tonally and in certain thematic elements, this novel feels like Among Others. There’s a symbolic salvific role for science fiction and fantasy in both Among Others and Or What You Will, and in Or What You Will, that salvific role is reified and made manifest. The power of imaginative creation and a fictional world can in a very real way save one, or perhaps two, specific individuals from death and pave the way to life everlasting…
Yet this is a powerful novel, for all that it may at times feel self-indulgent. A novel deeply concerned with grief, with selfhood, with growth and change.
And a playful one. Walton interweaves the fictive and real (or real insofar as it applies to the novel) worlds with a kind of joyful abandon, playing with categorisation and creation, eliding the edges between worlds until it’s possible to step between one and the other. There are layers of fiction—of fictive creation—that slide into each other, and there’s an argument about the nature of fiction, reality, and immortality. A playful argument.
Walton is deft with characters and with prose: Or What You Will is very easy to read. And to keep reading. The conclusion doesn’t quite satisfy, but that may be a function of my relation to the novel’s thematic arguments, rather than actual execution.
It’s an interesting book. I liked it. I want to pick a fight with a lot about it. I’m not sure how to reconcile these two reactions, save perhaps to observe I’m growing more unreasonable as well as crankier in my middle age.
What are you guys reading right now?
Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, was published in 2017 by Aqueduct Press. It was a finalist for the 2018 Locus Awards and was nominated for a 2018 Hugo Award in Best Related Work. Find her at her blog, or find her at her Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council, the Transgender Equality Network Ireland, and the Abortion Rights Campaign.
[1]For one thing, the Graeco-Roman classics did not necessarily need to be (re)discovered: okay, some of the stuff - like Quintilian's rhetoric handbook - survived as just one last manuscript and as a classical historian sure, fine, it's great we still have the ancient equivalent of An Idiot's Guide To Speeches For Political Life or, for that matter, Lucretius's I Show Off With A Poem About Atoms And The Universe, This Poem Is A Scientific Treatise On The Nature Of Things And It's Really Long, but most humans can get along fine without knowing anything about that. And as for Aristotle a) fuck that guy anyway and b) Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina had access to plenty of Aristotle. And Galen! So many texts of Galen exist in the Arabic manuscript tradition and don't have good English editions or any English editions even still, no I'm not still bitter about that from my PhD, wait who'm I kidding, I am STILL BITTER. And almost every single discussion of the Renaissance in popular culture completely ignores the importance of the Arabic world and the weirdly fertile interchange spurred by the wars-and-truces of the crusades, and particularly the kingdom founded by Roger de Hauteville in 12th century Sicily. This is a long footnote. I have feelings about the Renaissance, okay. Most of them deeply ambivalent, and some of them Well, there's a bit of an intellectual line between the Renaissance and why neo-Nazis have a hard-on for the classics, isn't there.
excelent post
Having just finished Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson, I then for thematic continuity moved on to Rushdie’s Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights. After that comes a re-read of Foundryside so that I can read Shorefall. (After that, I anticipate Hugo voter packet reading will dominate for a while.)
I didn’t get a good idea of Jo Walton’s new book from this review, but after I followed the link and saw it described there, all I can say is, sounds brilliant and I’m really looking forward to it! Sounds a bit like Jostein Gaarder’s books, where fiction and the real world unite – cool!
I feel embarrassed for not reading “good” or “important” books — I must admit I’ve been having a Mercedes Lackey binge. (Also Agatha Christie. And a lot ot fanfic.) But it’s comfort reading I want right now, not something I can’t trust not to hurt me in unexpected places.
I got an ARC of “Or What You Will” and really loved it. It is a fantastic blending of the current with reflections on the recent past of the novel setting that are also reflections of our own world and a different Renaissance setting via a different Shakespeare. There is a lot of meta here and it does imbue some conversation with Among Others within the reader but remains completely different. The link, as @CARLA says, has a bit more detail if you are interested.
I found the ending very satisfying and don’t want to give out any details as the journey is equally satisfying.
Any reading recommendations for that footnote and the “Renaissance as a historian’s construct”?
Studied pre-World War European and World History for just one year in high school here in India, and some introductory texts would be much appreciated. Thank you,
Reading Terry Pratchett here, Moving Pictures. I intend to identify and read all the Discworld novels I had somehow missed in the past. Terry Pratchett is great for the current times. His comedic view on all things comes through the other side of cynicism to become uplifting and humane. A true humanist, really, who believes in people’s potential for improving themselves and do good, often despite themselves. Like the great Renaissance thinkers (hehe), who dared believe in the progress of humanity and its emancipation from dogma and tribalism. Pico della Mirandola expressed this program quite beautifully.
No, seriously, I love the Renaissance. Italian literature classes (Italian is my mother tongue) where we studied the Renaissance period are among my best memories of high school.
Dumma: re introductory works on the idea of the Renaissance as a historian’s construct, you might try Jerry Brotton’s The Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2006) or Peter Burke’s older The Renaissance (MacMillan, 1987) which has a good short chapter on ‘The Myth of the Renaissance.’ Guido Ruggiero’s A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance (Blackwell, 2002) has some interesting chapters as well. I will admit that in my view, the more the Renaissance is “extremely limited in both time and space” the better; it is more useful as a concept in Italian history than in European, and in European rather than World History. But then I have very little sympathy for interpretations that see it as the beginning of everything modern, in Europe or (even less) in the world.
OK, that’s an … odd … footnote.
Some of it actually comes across as weirdly anti-intellectual (“Yeah, old books are pretty stupid and useless, not something decent ordinary people would be interested in.”), and some of it seems to be arguing against some weird, straw-man version of the Renaissance.
For one thing, the Graeco-Roman classics did not necessarily need to be (re)discovered:
The Renaissance is (partly) about the recovery of Greco-Roman classics in the Latin West. (I mean, “the Italian Renaissance” tells you we’re talking about Italy, no?) Since much of this involved translation of Greek manuscripts from Byzantium, it self-evidently doesn’t imply the classics were lost to everyone in the world.
“And Galen!” — Sorry, are you critiquing the Renaissance for the absence of translations into English?
I’m not sure why you bring up Aristotle (or, for that matter, why the “fuck that guy”, other than the anti-intellectualism theme), since most of his works had become available to the Latin West in the 12th and 13th Centuries via translations from Arabic; the Renaissance was marked in part by reactions against Aristotle (e.g., the humanist opposition to traditional, Aristotelian-based scholasticism).
There was also some art and architecture and literature (Latin and vernacular) and philosophy — and the introduction of printing — but hey, maybe that’s not important.
(Why you’re trying to suggest the Renaissance gave rise to Nazis is, I’ll admit, a bit beyond me.)
This really whet’s my appetite for both, but especially Walton’s novel. The title refers to Twelfth Night (happy birthday, W. Shakespeare!), does the book involve it, as Lent involved Richard III?
In breaks from reading a grim tome about white women’s involvement in slavery (They Were Her Property), I’ve been rereading for the nth time The Goblin Emperor.
@Msb:Yes, Twelfth Night is involved.
Thank you Fritzef, will try to get hold of those books.
Amusingly, I just finished Walton’s short story and poetry collection Starlings. And right before that, Walton fave Donna Leon’s The Temptation of Forgiveness