Kyung-sook Shin, Please Look After Mom (2012 Man Asian Prize winner)

Mothers are, for most of us, the most important human beings we will ever know.  They give birth to us, nourish us, scold us when we stray from their teaching, sit down with us and make sure we learn our alphabets/characters and arithmetic so we can do better in class, and when we are adults, they strive to remind us of where we came from and what we can aim to achieve.  That is the Hallmark image of motherhood and although the realities of our lives reveal differences in this image of mother as supporter and enabler, it certainly is a vision that quite a few of us reading this have of our own mothers.

Yet mothers are also often taken for granted, as if they were a nice animated machine that dispensed food, hugs, and money, not necessarily in that order.  For many of us, as we’ve grown older, our mothers fade into the background, unless they call us up an evening or two (sometimes, in the process, annoying us) to see how we were doing and if we would be coming over to visit sometime soon.  Mama can become little more than an old person that gets in our way and we try to “make something” of our lives.  It’s not as though they are hated, usually it is far from that, but they are no longer important to us because they don’t provide for us and many of us just don’t have the time or desire to provide for them as they age.

This is a rather uncomfortable social truth that spans across six inhabited continents and divers cultures.  It lies at the heart of Korean writer Kyung-sook Shin’s Please Look After Mom, which recounts through the points-of-view of a particular mother’s husband and children their memories of her that were reactivated after she turned up missing after she missed connecting with her husband on a commuter train a month prior.  Shin builds through these reminiscences a complex mosaic portrayal of the mother, Park So-nyo, and of the complicated relationships her children and husband (who proved to be faithless to her during their marriage) had with her and with each other.  Below is a memory that the eldest daughter, Chi-hon, had:

A few years ago, your mom said, “We don’t have to celebrate my birthday separately.”  Father’s birthday is one month before Mom’s.  You and your siblings always went to your parents’ house in Chongup for birthdays and other celebrations.  All together, there were twenty-two people in the immediate family.  Mom liked it when all her children and grandchildren gathered and bustled about the house.  A few days before everyone came down, she would make fresh kimchi, go to the market to buy beef, and stock up on extra toothpaste and toothbrushes.  She pressed sesame oil and roasted and ground sesame and perilla seeds, so she could present her children with a jar of each as they left.  As she waited for the family to arrive, your mom would be visibly animated, her words and her gestures revealing her pride when she talked to neighbors or acquaintances.  In the shed, Mom kept glass bottles of every size filled with plum or wild-strawberry juice, which she made seasonally.  Mom’s jars were filled to the brim with tiny fermented croaker-like fish or anchovy paste or fermented clams that she was planning to send to the family in the city.  When she heard that onions were good for one’s health, she made onion juice, and before winter came, she made pumpkin juice infused with licorice.  Your mom’s house was like a factory; she prepared sauces and fermented bean paste and hulled rice, producing things for the family year-round.  At some point, the children’s trips to Chongup became less frequent, and Mom and Father started to come to Seoul more often.  And then you began to celebrate each of their birthdays by going out for dinner.  That was easier.  Then Mom even suggested, “Let’s celebrate my birthday on your father’s.”  She said it would be a burden to celebrate their birthdays separately, since both happen during the hot summer, when there are also two ancestral rites only two days apart.  At first the family refused to do that, even when Mom insisted on it, and if she balked at coming to the city, a few of you went home to celebrate with her.  Then you all started to give Mom her birthday gift on Father’s birthday.  Eventually, quietly, Mom’s actual birthday was bypassed.  Mom, who liked to buy socks for everyone in the family, had in her dresser a growing collection of socks that her children didn’t take.

This passage, which is only but one of several similar flashbacks, goes straight for the jugular.  In reading it, I could remember how my mother and maternal grandmother were in regards to sewing clothing for several in the family, the simple dismissal of attention, and the stoic facing of age while the family grew up and moved into different homes (and in my case, to a different state for two years).  I could easily see myself in a position similar to Chi-hon’s, possibly sitting at a desk or table twenty years from now and wondering about my mother and just how quickly and completely she had faded into the background, despite her being so vocal about my need to learn responsibility when I was younger.  That is the devastating beauty of Please Look After Mom.  Shin utilizes a mixture of first-, second-, and third-person points-of-views to place us right in the shoes of the missing mother’s family.  How easily it could be our own mother who has wandered away, suffering from medical ailments, yet not wanting to interrupt our self-absorbed lives.  If we find ourselves thinking and reacting along with the husband and three children, then Shin’s novel has us utterly in its grasp.  We cannot turn aside, but have to confront the memories that burble up from reading a story just like this.

It is easy to forget how much and how little we understand our own family members until stories such as Please Look After Mom come along to jar us into remembering what we had forgotten or at least had tried to forget.  For that and for how adroitly Shin mixes the four narrative threads together to reveal portraits of each family member and mom, Please Look After Mom may be the best character novel of this year’s Man Asian Prize finalists.  It is difficult to imagine a story that could be more effective that portraying multiple, and sometimes conflicting, images of a family matriarch.  It simply is a moving novel that may lead to a few tears welling up as you read it.

Originally posted in March 2012 on Gogol's Overcoat.

2012 Booker Prize Winner: Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

The forest stretched ahead for days.  Sometimes antique weapons are unearthed:  axes that, wielded with double fist, could cut down horse and rider.  Think of the great limbs of those dead men, stirring under the soil.  War was their nature, and war is always keen to come again.  It's not just the past you think of, as you ride these fields.  It's what's latent in the soil, what's breeding; it's the days to come, the wars unfought, the injuries and deaths that, like seeds, the soil of England is keeping warm.  You would think, to look at Henry laughing, to look at Henry praying, to look at him leading his men through the forest path, that he sits as secure on his throne as he does on his horse.  Looks can deceive.  By night, he lies awake; he stares at the carved roof beams; he numbers his days.  He says, 'Cromwell, Cromwell, what shall I do?'  Cromwell, save me from the Emperor.  Cromwell, save me from the Pope.  Then he calls in his Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, and demands to know, 'Is my soul damned?'

For nearly five centuries now, the passion play that is the life and times of Henry VIII's court and king has fascinated historians and laypeople alike.  With the exception of relatively minor antecedents such as Wycliffe and the Lollards, England in the 16th century did not seem to be as ripe for rebellion against papal authority/church traditions as were several of the German states; it was more of a top-down phenomenon there than in the Holy Roman Empire.  Yet what caused Henry VIII to first divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon, and then proceed through that infamous litany of "divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived?"  Who were the masterminds, if any such Faustian ministers could be said to be thus, that shepherded the king to divorce England from the Catholic faith?  For centuries, these questions have bedeviled contemporaries and their descendents alike and the literary works that have touched upon this, ranging from Shakespeare to Robert Bolt to hagiographies of St./Sir Thomas More and others such as Thomas Cranmer, have populated bookshops for centuries.

The latest entry into this realm of historical speculative fiction is a planned trilogy by Hilary Mantel that focuses (at first) on the life and career of Thomas Cromwell, who rose from the lower classes to become one of the chief architects of Henry VIII's annulment of his marriage to Catherine and the subsequent declaration of the King of England being head of the Catholic dioceses there.  These events Mantel covered deftly and with aplomb in her 2009 Booker Prize-winning opening volume, Wolf Hall.  While that novel was well-written and added excellent moments of narrative tension, it pales in comparison to the second volume, Bring Up the Bodies, which covers events from after the execution of More in 1534 to the execution of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife, in 1536.

Historical novels are very difficult to write convincingly.  Too often, novelists find themselves constricted by the known facts to create interesting characters out of historical people, especially when these characters are famous.  It is often easier to create a fictional character who manages to summarize the chaotic or exciting events of a time while s/he only intersects fittingly with the "real" people.  Or perhaps, as Alexandre Dumas was wont to do with his Musketeer novels, a minor historical person has their role expanded and fictionalized to an extent to create a narrative that is both "real" and exciting.  Mantel in both Wolf Hall and here in Bring Up the Bodies, has chosen a third, more difficult path, that of using major historical figures to reconstruct a tumultuous and sometimes mysterious epoch in English history.  Too easily the characters and situation could have devolved into a shallow mystery/thriller-type novel; one only has to look at Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time to see a historical reconstruction that takes on too many aspects of the murder-mystery for it to be viewed as anything beyond just that.

No, what Mantel's representations of not just Cromwell, but also Boleyn, the ambassador from the court of Emperor Charles V, Cranmer, and the divorced Catherine show is a complex weaving of character and situation to create a narrative tension that slowly builds through the first half of the novel before it explodes in the novel's final chapters.  For centuries, the events leading up to Boleyn being charged with adultery and treason were shrouded with mystery.  The extant evidence is contradictory in places and there are hints that political machinations involving the family of Jane Seymour (Henry VIII's soon-to-be third wife, who later died giving birth to the sickly future King Edward VI) did lie, if not quite at the center of the charges against Boleyn, at least somewhat more than just a peripheral role in the matter.  Mantel judiciously notes this without overplaying this possible angle. 

If anything, what makes Bring Up the Bodies' second half so strong is that Mantel has created several plausible possibilities for the charges against Boleyn that the reader may find herself trying to anticipate which may be the strongest clue to the eventual denouement.  Yet the novel is more than the presentation of evidence regarding a historical political intrigue.  It also excels at being a great character-driven novel.  Whereas Wolf Hall centered around Cromwell to the near-exclusion of other PoVs, here in Bring Up the Bodies the perspectives of other characters adds to the building drama.  The fate of Boleyn feels as foreordained and morbidly fascinating as that of Santiago Nasar's murder as outlined in Gabriel García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold.  This creation of tension within a fictionalization of an event already well-known is impressive and Mantel's opulent descriptions contrasted with the shifts in perspective is nothing short of brilliant.

Bring Up the Bodies certainly is a deserving winner of the 2012 Booker Prize.  Its prose is excellent, the characterizations are top-notch, and the narrative construction not only is ambitious but it also manages to achieve its lofty goals.  In a year filled with excellent contenders, it stands out due to the difficulties (noted above) that it managed to overcome.  Mantel joins the rare company of those authors who have won the Booker Prize twice and she is the first writer to have a sequel win this prestigious award.  Simply put, it is the best out of a group of books that is much stronger than last year's weak shortlist. 

Ranking the 2012 Booker Prize finalists

Due to my slow recovery from an upper respiratory illness and this weekend being tied up with the Southern Festival of Books, I won't be able to write all six planned reviews in advance of Tuesday's announcing of the winner of the 2012 Booker Prize.  I have read all six books now and while most of these differ only a little amount in my estimation, I thought I'd provide a ranking of the books by personal preference for those who like such things without the thought I prefer being given to the individual books themselves.

1.  Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies.  Took me until the second half of the novel for it all to fall into place.  The inherent drama of the mysterious events leading up to Anne Boleyn's arrest and execution is done masterfully here.

2.  Will Self, Umbrella.  At first, I was hesitant about this work, as it consciously riffs on 20th century Modernist writing (in particular, Joyce, although there are traces of other writers such as Woolf present) to present a tale that spans into our own.  It was the most "experimental" of the six and for the most part Self manages to avoid the pitfalls that come with using a stream-of-consciousness style narrative.

3.  Deborah Levy, Swimming Home.  Levy's use of language to tell a short, sharp, poignant tale was near brilliant at times.  Along with the two above and the two below, I could be content with this being a winner.

4.  Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis.  Reviewed this earlier.

5.  Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists.  This story, which is set in both contemporary and World War II Malaysia during the time of the Japanese occupation, is beautiful in its prose, with characterizations that are very well-done.  The garden motif is used very well.

6.  Alison Moore, The Lighthouse.  This work did not appeal to me as much as the other five did.  While the prose is very good, the characterizations felt a bit too hollow to me for me to consider it on the same level as the others.


Compared to last year's shortlist, this one is worlds better.  Again, over the next week or two, I'll try to write fuller reviews, but these are my personal preferences at this time.

Mo Yan is the 2012 Nobel Literature Laureate

I have heard Chinese writer Mo Yan's name being bandied about for months in some quarters as being a favorite for the Nobel, so it was little surprise that he won.  A quick check of the iBookstore shows that he has already had some books translated into English (and I presume in several other European languages), so I went ahead and bought the e-book edition of The Republic of Wine, which I will read and possibly review late this month/November after I finish writing the Booker Prize reviews and maybe after the National Book Award fiction finalists as well.

Anyone familiar with his writings want to weigh in?

2012 National Book Awards shortlists announced

From the awards homepage:

Fiction:

Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her (Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group USA, Inc.)
Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King (McSweeney's Books)
Louise Erdrich, The Round House (Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)
Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)
Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds (Little, Brown and Company)

I've read (and loved) the Díaz and just purchased e-editions of the others (the Fountain was only $2.99 on iBooks, the others $11.99-12.99, for those that care about such things), so these will be reviewed later this month/early November in advance of the November 14 awards ceremony.

Non-Fiction:

Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956 (Doubleday)
Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House)
Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4 (Knopf)
Domingo Martinez, The Boy Kings of Texas (Lyons Press, an imprint of Globe Pequot Press)
Anthony Shadid, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Might not be able to purchase/read all five of these in advance of the winner being announced.  The Shadid might get more interest due to the author's death while covering the civil war in Syria earlier this year.

Poetry:

David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press)
Cynthia Huntington, Heavenly Bodies (Southern Illinois University Press)
Tim Seibles, Fast Animal (Etruscan Press)
Alan Shapiro, Night of the Republic (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Susan Wheeler, Meme (University of Iowa Press)

I love poetry, so at some point, each of these will be read.  Just don't know how many will be reviewed before November 14, however.

Young People's Literature

William Alexander, Goblin Secrets (Margaret K. McElderry Books, an imprint of
Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing)

Carrie Arcos, Out of Reach (Simon Pulse, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing)
Patricia McCormick, Never Fall Down (Balzer+Bray, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)
Eliot Schrefer, Endangered (Scholastic)
Steve Sheinkin, Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World's Most Dangerous Weapon
(Flash Point, an imprint of Roaring Brook Press)

Again, no promises all (or any) of these will be read/reviewed in advance of the winner being announced, but I will investigate these later.

Thoughts on the shortlists?

2012 Booker Prize finalist: Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

SHE'S RIGHT, Xavier said.  Only the rich can afford surprise and/or irony.  The rich crave meaning.  The first thing they ask when faced with eternity, and in the fact the last thing, is:  excuse me, what does this mean?  The poor don't ask questions, or they don't ask irrelevant questions.  They can't afford to.  All they can afford is laughter and ghosts.  Then there are the addicts, the hunger addicts and rage addicts and poverty addicts and power addicts, and the pure addicts who are addicted not to substances but to the oblivion and tenderness that substances engender.  An addict, if you don't mind me saying so, is like a saint.  What is a saint, but someone who has cut himself off, voluntarily, voluntarily, from the world's traffic and currency?  The saint talks to flowers, a daffodil, say, and he sees the yellow of it.  He receives its scent through his eyes.  Yes, he thinks, you are my muse, I take heart from your stubbornness, a drop of water, a dab of sunshine, and there you are with your gorgeous blooms.  He enjoys flowers but he worships trees.  He wants to be the banyan's slave.  He wants to think of time the way a tree does, a decade as nothing more than some slight addition to his girth.  He connives with birds, and gets his daily news from the sound the wind makes in the leaves.  When he's hungry he stands in the forest waiting for the fall of a mango.  His ambition is the opposite of ambition.  Most of all, like all addicts, he wants to obliterate time.  He wants to die, or, at the very least, to not live.

Dimple said, "I need a translator to understand you." (Ch. 3)

Cities are comprised of layers upon layers of people.  For many of us who are native to a particular city, it is all too easy to wander through its labyrinths and think we know it.  Yet there are those places that many of us know to avoid.  What resides there in the metaphorical bowels of the metropolis?  Is it danger?  Or is it something else that disturbs us so?  "The seedy underbelly" we often call such locales.  We presume to understand, usually without giving a voice to our thoughts, just what "it" is that resides there.  To question this would be foolhardy; how could we ever hope to understand?

Yet there is a vibrant life that exists within those layers of city life that so many of us dismiss without a second (or sometimes, a first) thought.  There, one can find perhaps that hooker with a heart of gold, or maybe it is better to say a soul who is in search of a life raft.  Or maybe one can encounter that most unnerving of souls, an addict.  In some regards, an addict is an "other" who exists beyond race, class, gender, or caste:  s/he is viewed frequently with a sort of horrified wonderment.  What makes someone an addict?  What tales can they tale beyond the clichéd story of redemption from the depths of despair?  Does one ever choose to be an addict, knowing what it entails?

These are the existential questions that Indian writer Jeet Thayil explores in his debut novel, Narcopolis.  Set in late 20th century Bombay (before its name changed to Mumbai), Narcopolis revolves around the "dead city" of the denizens of Rashid's opium den.  Over the course of nearly 300 pages, Thayil explores the lives, dreams, and fears of several addicts in order to get closer to the heart of addiction itself.  Narcopolis is neither a tale of survival nor a Bildungsroman.  Its characters may strive to better their lives (one such example being the hijra Dimple), but the main focus is on narrating the possibilities of addiction itself.

It is too easy for a writer, whether or not s/he is writing from personal experience, to slip off the razor's edge into either a maudlin tale or a condemnatory fable.  Addicts are not simple constructions; they are a host of possibilities within a single human body.  Thayil's own past with heroin during his time living in New York and Bombay/Mumbai perhaps helps him avoid the potential pitfalls, but what really stands out is how he utilizes a rapid, almost breathless narrative that switches limited third-person PoVs frequently to create this sense of communal experience.  Whether it is the main narrator, the hijra Dimple, or a couple other of the opium den's regulars, Thayil's narrative feels vital, alive, and fully aware of the contradictions present within its characters.  He rarely strikes a wrong note, whether in character voice or in the prose itself, and much is packed into its 284 e-book pages.

Too easily a reader may find herself trying to focus on the "exotic" qualities of urban life different from what s/he has experienced.  Thayil manages to avoid this through acknowledging the existence of poverty-stricken slums, but without that sort of "poverty porn" that titillates at the expense of a larger human narrative.  Rashid and his customers are not window dressing for others to gawk at:  they are humans whose concerns, while perhaps somewhat foreign to those alien to contemporary Indian urban societies, are real and intriguing because they are valued much higher than the setting around which their lives unfold.  Narcopolis in many regards reminds me favorably of Cuban writer Pedro Juan Gutiérrez's excellent Dirty Havana Trilogy in its unflinching dedication to narrating the lives and experiences of those too often dismissed by their own fellow citizens. 

Thayil's prose is sharp and eloquent without feeling affected.  Perhaps due to his experiences as a poet, Thayil can sum up complexity of emotion in just a few well-placed paragraphs, such as this excerpt from a reflection from a Chinese ex-soldier, Lee, in regards to his mother:

She didn't believe in culture.  She didn't believe in books.  She didn't believe in knowledge that die not benefit society as a whole.  She believed that indiscriminate individual reading was detrimental to progress because it filled the populace with yearnings that were impossible to identify, much less satisfy.  Societies with the highest literacy rates also had the highest suicide rates, she said.  Some kinds of knowledge were not meant to be freely available, she said, because all men and women were not equipped to receive such knowledge in an equal and equally useful way.  She did not believe in art for art's sake; she did not believe in freedom of expression; she did not believe in her husband, whose stature as a novelist she regarded with suspicion mixed with shame.  Despite her lifelong aversion to culture she would go to university because she wanted to be a teacher.  Teaching was the noblest profession in the world, she said.  It was selfless, revolutionary, and critical to the nation's well-being.  It concerned itself not with money, which was irredeemably dirty, but with the future of the mind.  (Book Two, Ch. 2)

Yes, there is contradiction here between the love of learning and the dismissal of knowledge.  Yet we are full of such inconsistencies.  Thayil's characters, whether they are reminiscing under the haze of opium or are lucid dreaming, contain such conflicts within themselves.  We might find ourselves empathizing with them, feeling similar regrets and dreams.  It is here, in that sympathetic bond that the reader may form with these characters, that Thayil's narrative is its most effective.  Few readers may have experienced the pangs of chemical addiction, but most of us have known at some point that tug-of-war between emotional states and our desire to free ourselves from the restraints placed upon us by society.  Some times, it seems the freest people are those who realize this and choose to take a path that may liberate themselves at the expense of their own selves.  Narcopolis is a brilliantly-realized novel because it takes that unsettling concept and plays it out in front of the reader, allowing that reader to make his or her own conclusions about it.  Very few novelists could have written such a tale and to see a debut novelist accomplish this is all the more marvelous.  Certainly a very deserving candidate for this year's Booker Prize.

Review plans for October: More Malazan, Booker Prize finalists, Sapkowski

October seems to have arrived with a vengeance here, as the temperatures have been much colder (and rainier) than normal.  I've always associated this time of year with reading and I have been busy with a few projects in mind.  Since I have this week and next free for the most part of any other demands on my time (at least until the October 12-14 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville), I plan on (re)reading and reviewing the following (* denotes already read):

Malazan Re-Read Project:

* Reaper's Gale
* Return of the Crimson Guard 
* Blood Follows
Toll the Hounds (previous review exists)
Stonewielder
The Lees of Laughter's End
The Healthy Dead
Crack'd Pot Trail
Orb Sceptre Throne
Dust of Dreams (previous review exists)
The Crippled God (previous review exists)
* Forge of Darkness

2012 Booker Prize Shortlist

* Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
* Deborah Levy, Swimming Home
* Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis
Tan Twan Eng, Garden of Evening Mists
Alison Moore, The Lighthouse
Will Self, Umbrella

Andrzej Sapkowski Re-read Project:

Geralt Saga (only two books out of the seven (eight in Spanish translation) are available in English)

The Last Wish/El ultimo deseo (previous review exists)
La espada del destino (The Sword of Destiny) (previous review exists)
Blood of Elves/Sangre de los elfos (previous review exists)
Tiempo del odio (Time of Contempt) (previous review exists)
Bautismo de fuego (Baptism by Fire) (previous review exists)
La torre de la golondrina (The Swallow's Tower)
La dama del lago, pts. I & II (The Lady of the Lake) (will be reviewed together)

The Hussite Trilogy (incomplete in Spanish translation; not available in English to date)

Narrenturm
Los guerreros de dios (The Warriors of God)


Yes, most of the month will be devoted to reading these, although a few more doubtless will be slotted in, although most likely without a review this month.

Which of these works/projects appeal to you most and why?

2012 SF&F Translation Awards winners announced

Just received this from Cheryl Morgan.  The winners were announced earlier today at FinnCon:


Winners Of the 2012 SF&F Translation Awards

The Association for the Recognition of Excellence in SF & F Translation (ARESFFT) is delighted to announce the winners of the 2012 Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards (for works published in 2011). There are two categories: Long Form and Short Form. The jury has additionally elected to award two honorable mentions in each category.

Long Form Winner

Zero by Huang Fan, translated from the Chinese by John Balcom (Columbia University Press)

Long Form Honorable Mentions

Good Luck, Yukikaze by Chohei Kambayashi, translated from the Japanese by Neil Nadelman (Haikasoru)

Midnight Palace by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, translated from the Spanish by Lucia Graves (Little, Brown & Company)

Short Form Winner

"The Fish of Lijiang" by Chen Qiufan, translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu (Clarkesworld #59, August 2011)

Short Form Honorable Mentions

"The Boy Who Cast No Shadow" by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, translated from the Dutch by Laura Vroomen (PS Publishing)

"The Green Jacket" by Gudrun Östergaard, translated from the Danish by the author and Lea Thume (Sky City: New Science Fiction Stories by Danish Authors, Carl-Eddy Skovgaard ed., Science Fiction Cirklen)

The winners were announced today at Finncon 2012 < http://2012.finncon.org/>, held in Tampere, Finland. over the weekend May[July?] 19-20. The awards were announced by jury member Irma Hirsjärvi and ARESFFT Board member Cheryl Morgan.

The winning authors and their translators will each receive an inscribed plaque and a cash prize of $350. Authors and translators of the honorable mentions will receive certificates.

Jury chair Dale Knickerbocker said, "The jury would like to thank all who nominated works, and compliment both the authors and translators for the fine quality of this year’s submissions. While both the winner and honorable mentions in the long fiction category had their supporters, we ultimately chose Huang Fan's novella Zero (translated from the Chinese by John Balcom) as the winner. The author skillfully weaves elements from the masterpieces of dystopian fiction into his own very unique text, and the translator successfully communicates the work's stark, frightening nature. Zero's surprise denouement takes Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle a step further, wedding it with a touch of Asimov's The Gods Themselves."

"This year's winner in the short fiction category, Chen Qiufan's "The Fish of Lijiang" (translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu) was described by our judges as "brilliant," "original," and "a lovely and devastating story, beautifully written and translated." It presents an interesting take on mental illness and wellness, work, and future technologies. In the tradition of the best SF, it offers a convincing extrapolation of the economic and consequent social changes that China has undergone in the past 30 years."

ARESFFT President Professor Gary K. Wolfe added: "I'm delighted that the hard work of our distinguished jurors has resulted in such an impressive list of winners and nominees, and--equally important--that the international science fiction and fantasy community has taken this award to heart in terms of supplying nominees and suggestions for nominees. Congratulations not only to the winning authors and translators, but to everyone who has helped make these awards a viable and invaluable project."

The money for the prize fund was obtained primarily through a 2011 fund-raising event for which prizes were kindly donated by George R.R. Martin, China Miéville, Cory Doctorow, Lauren Beukes, Ken MacLeod, Paul Cornell, Adam Roberts, Elizabeth Bear, Hal Duncan, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Peter F. Hamilton, Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, Nalo Hopkinson, Juliet E. McKenna, Aliette de Bodard, Nicola Griffith, Kelley Eskridge, Twelfth Planet Press, Deborah Kalin, Baen Books, Small Beer Press, Lethe Press, Aeon Press, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Kari Sperring, Helen Lowe, Rob Latham and Cheryl Morgan.

The jury for the awards was Dale Knickerbocker (Chair); Kari Maund, Abhijit Gupta, Hiroko Chiba, Stefan Ekman, Ekaterina Sedia, Felice Beneduce & Irma Hirsjärvi.

ARESFFT is a California Non-Profit Corporation funded entirely by donations.

***

Some interesting choices, most of which I have yet to read.  Might need to rectify that shortly.

2012 Clarke Award winner: Jane Rogers, The Testament of Jessie Lamb

I used to be as aimless as a feather in the wind.  I thought stuff on the news and in the papers was for grownups.  It was part of their stupid miserable complicated world.

This year's Arthur C. Clarke Award generated quite a bit of discussion, much of it about the perceived deficiencies in the shortlist.  Without repeating all of the rhetoric that has been proclaimed regarding the list, it should suffice to note that the one novel that received the least amount of criticism, the one that some perhaps view as the "default" option for the award, the one that actually won the award, was Jane Rogers' The Testament of Jessie Lamb (which also appeared on the longlist for last year's Man Booker Prize).  After reading five of the six shortlisted titles (minus the Stross entry), it is easy to see what the judges saw in Rogers' novel that was mostly lacking in the others:  a story that is not incoherent, a tale that does not contradict itself at the narrative level, a narrative that does not plod nor threaten to disintegrate due to its haphazard construction.

Yet this is ultimately defining The Testament of Jessie Lamb in negative terms.  Because it does not offend reader sensibilities in regard to structure as did Sherri Tepper's The Waters Rising or contain narrative conceits that buckle under the weight of its pretensions, as did China Miéville's Embassytown, there is the sense that The Testament of Jessie Lamb is more the least-flawed novel on the shortlist rather than a particularly outstanding work of fiction published in the UK last year.  That impression only deepened as I read the novel last week.  The Testament of Jessie Lamb is not a "bad" novel; it does not contain multiple forehead-smacking moments that make the reader want to throttle the writer, yet it also contains little that makes this reader at least want to commend the author for her vision and execution. 

The novel begins with a biological disaster, one whose root causes are in question throughout the novel.  A sort of mash-up analogue of HPV, HIV, and Mad Cow Disease has been released into the population.  This disease, Maternal Death Syndrome (MDS), targets women who get pregnant.  Their brains begin an irreversible march toward a vegetative state and then ultimately death once the embryo begins to develop.  There is no cure, despite the frantic efforts of scientists.  There is only the sense of two ticking time bombs, one for women who might potentially become pregnant, the other for humanity as a whole.

The basic premise has the potential to be thought provoking, yet Rogers manages to make a dog's supper out of it.  The mechanisms for this disease are ill-conceived and harken back too much to 1950s and early 1960s SF, where radiation/gamma rays/atomic warfare served as the trigger for similar threats to humanity's survival (One such example of this, albeit a well-conceived one, is Brian Aldiss' Greybeard).  Even taking into account the probability that Rogers purposely left this trigger event nebulous in order to explore divers reactions to this development, the execution is sloppy.  It is very difficult to take seriously any truly pandemic, sudden development that causes 100% infection (and one that continues to show apparent effects into the second and perhaps even third generations) rates.  Questioning the validity of the premise so early into the novel does place a damper on later narrative events.

The titular character, the sixteen year-old Jessie Lamb, almost manages to make this questionable premise work.  Daughter of one of the prominent scientists working on a potential cure, she is bright, inquisitive, and not ready to settle for whatever explanation or premise is presented to her.  She is our lens into this world in which problematic gender relations have crystallized around the matter of MDS.  Why does this disease directly affect only women?  Why were men only carriers?  If this was a carefully-crafted disease, then what does this say about how women were viewed?

These are important questions, yet Rogers' treatment of them feels facile, as if she decided to go down the rabbit hole only so far.  Female agency lies at the heart of Jessie Lamb's story, or rather the seeming denial of it.  Yet Rogers risks diluting this by presenting a rather strange argument when Jessie attends a FLAME (Feminist Link Against MEn) meeting.  The initial depiction of this organization is rather telling:

There were about 20 women there.  Everyone was older than me and some looked older than Mum.  They were all a bit hippy-ish, with layers of old clothes and shrunken cardigans or ponchos on top.  I wished I'd had another layer, it was freezing.

Compared to YOFI, it felt serious.  There was something almost deadly about it.  The woman running the meeting was called Gina, she was quick and fierce and she never smiled once.  She talked about the war against women.  She said the introduction of MDS is the logical outcome of thousands of years of men's oppression and abuse of women.  Women's sexuality disgusts men and they're jealous of a mother's ownership of an unborn child.  That's why they want to marry virgins and keep women subservient, because they can never be certain that a child is their own.

This is, as far as I can remember, the only feminist organization that Jessie Lamb encounters.  It reads like a propaganda account of Indigo Girl-listening, layered clothes-wearing, men haters.  There is no subtlety to this, nothing to hint that this portrayal is ironic.  It serves only to present a radical view as a normative one.  Jessie does not react against the more strident, less logical claims (such as the one quoted below) but instead compares them to her own recent experiences.  This only serves to throw the narrative off-track, especially with this bit:

I glanced at Sal but she was intent on every word.  Another woman talked about sex, and how men prefer to have sex with other men but they were obliged to have sex with women in order to make children.  She said that was at the root of religious laws against homosexuality,  because it was in the interests of religion to create as many new babies as possible, to boost membership.  But now sexual reproduction was over, all those old commandments against homosexuality were melting away and millions more men were coming out.

***

I sat there with these awful things swirling round in my head like leaves in a storm.  I couldn't quiet it.  What they said about men preferring to be gay reminded me of college.

The thing is, there was a change.  Back before MDS, if you said a boy was gay, it was an insult.  Everyone knew there were gay people, and that it was legal and everything, there were loads of gay celebrities on TV.  If they met a gay couple in real life of course they'd be fine and act normally, but still in school it was an insult.  If they called a boy gay it meant he was pathetic.  And the boys and girls who really were gay kept it hidden.  In fact, you wouldn't have known that anybody was.  But in the months after MDS, that changed.  It happened so gradually you almost didn't notice.

Boys started to cluster together with boys, and girls with girls.  Some girls became frightened of boys – even though we were all on Implanon it was still a terrible thought, especially for those girls who knew a woman who'd died.  Sex didn't seem worth the risk.  And the boys – well, I didn't really know what they were thinking, but the atmosphere changed.  They got more involved in their own conversations, and less interested in trying to make us laugh.  In a way they were more shy with us.  It wasn't everybody; there were people who behaved exactly opposite.  Like the gangs, where you often saw boys and girls together – or even, like Sal and Damien had been at the beginning.  People bounced from one extreme to another, as if we couldn't find out the proper way to behave.

Rogers perhaps intended this passage to serve as a commentary on the swift, dramatic changes caused by the spread of MDS, but it comes out wrong, as if sexuality were more of a sociological rather than a biological orientation.  There are no nuances to this, nothing to indicate a variety of responses.  Instead, Rogers chooses the quick and easy route of presenting in passing a revolutionary behavioral change without ever really exploring the ramifications of it.

That perhaps is the main charge that can be presented against The Testament of Jessie Lamb.  Throughout the novel, Rogers takes the shorter path, neglecting to develop the overarching premise and the ways in which the characters react to them.  Jessie Lamb feels like a cipher, like that symbolic lamb being led to the slaughter, yet it appears she (and perhaps Rogers) view it as making a dramatic statement regarding female agency and the right to choose what to do with one's own body, even if it means certain and inevitable death.  These little creeping moments of dramatic decisions, culminating in Jessie's decision to be a surrogate mother for an uninfected fetus, are lessened because Rogers has not followed through with the development of these situations, leaving instead a novel that is defined by its gestures and not by the import of its actions.  The Testament of Jessie Lamb had the potential to be a great, award-worthy novel.  It instead compromised itself at critical narrative junctures, settling instead to be a flawed work that was perhaps merely the least-flawed in a subpar award finalist cohort.

Ranking the awards for 2011 releases: Preliminary placements

I have been following nearly twenty literary/genre awards given for books released in 2011, starting with last year's Man Booker Prize and continuing through the recently-announced Shirley Jackson Awards.  Although I have read some novellas and other shorter fiction, I'm going to limit this just to fiction/novel categories for better comparison points.  Mind you, there are still a few award nominees I have to read and some awards that haven't been announced yet, so this is just a prelim to something that I might expand upon in November, after the final awards for 2011 releases, the World Fantasy Awards, announces their winners.  Below are rough chronological listing of the awards:

2011 Man Booker Prize 

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending 
Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers
Carol Birch, Jamrach's Menagerie
Esi Edugyan, Half Blood Blues
Stephen Kelman, Pigeon English
A.D. Miller, Snowdrops

This was a weak shortlist, as few of the stories ever accomplished anything other than being competent at telling stories within long-established literary genres.  The Barnes short novel was well-written, but utterly forgettable in terms of an actual story or characterization.  The deWitt was my favorite from this group, but even it broke no new imaginative or prose ground.

2011 National Book Award


Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones 
Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife
Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision (collection)
Andrew Krivak, The Sojourn
Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic

This was a much, much stronger shortlist than the Man Booker shortlist.  Ward's story, although not my favorite, was strong, emotional, and lyrical.  Obreht's debut novel won the Orange Prize in 2011.  Pearlman won the National Book Critics Circle Award this year for her excellent collection.  Otsuka won the PEN/Faulkner Prize, and Krivak's book is up there with the others in quality, despite not making any other shortlists/winning any major awards.

2012 National Book Critics Circle Award

Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision 
Teju Cole, Open City 
Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger's Child
Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia

This too was a strong shortlist, although the Hollinghurst and, ultimately, the Eugenides left me feeling distant from the texts.  Cole's debut novel was my favorite of the five, followed by Pearlman and Spiotta.

2012 PEN/Faulkner Award

Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic 
Don DeLillo,  The Angel Esmeralda (collection)
Anita Desai, The Artist of Disappearance
Steven Millhauser, We Others (collection)
Russell Banks, Lost Memory of Skin

Interesting mix of short fiction and novels, newer voices and established names.  Of these, I liked the Otsuka the best, but DeLillo and Millhauser had strong collections.  Banks' premise was purposefully unsettling and the Desai was good but not as excellent as the others.

2012 Man Asian Prize


Kyung sook-Shin, Please Look After Mom 
Yan Lianke, Dream of Ding Village
Rahul Bhattacharya, The Sly Company of People Who Care
Jahnavi Barua, Rebirth
Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke
Banana Yoshimoto, The Lake
Jamil Ahmad, The Wandering Falcon

Toss-up for me between this and the National Book Award (and one other) for having the strongest shortlist.  I loved each and every one of these seven fictions, but there were few similarities in theme or approach between them.  Several of these are up for upcoming awards, including Lianke for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.


2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 

 No Winner

Finalists:

Karen Russell, Swamplandia!
David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
Denis Johnson, Train of Dreams

This was not a great list of finalists.  I liked all three, but each were flawed in some form or fashion (the Wallace was tragically left unfinished).  None of them deserved to win the award.

2012 British Science Fiction Award


Christopher Priest, The Islanders 
China Miéville, Embassytown
Adam Roberts, By Light Alone
Lavie Tidhar, Osama
Kim Lakin-Smith, Cyber Circus

This is one of the two SF/F fantasy shortlists announced so far that have not annoyed me.  Priest was a deserving winner.  Tidhar's book was very, very good as well and while I had problems with both the Miéville and the Lakin-Smith (I have yet to read Roberts' book; maybe when I have more money to import books again), it is a stronger list than the following two genre awards.

2012 Nebula Award for Best Novel

China Miéville, Embassytown
Jack McDevitt, Firebird
Jo Walton, Among Others
Genevieve Valentine, Mechanique:  A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti
N.K. Jemisin, The Kingdom of Gods
Kameron Hurley, God's War

This is a solid albeit unspectacular SF/F shortlist.  The Hurley and Walton are the two stories that I enjoyed most.  Refuse to read the McDevitt due to past experiences with his writing.  The others were okay, but not award-worthy to me.


2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award 

Jane Rogers, The Testament of Jesse Lamb
Charles Stross, Rule 34
Sherri Tepper, The Waters Rising
China Miéville, Embassytown
Drew Magary, The Postmortal/The End Specialist
Greg Bear, Hull Zero Three

Blech.  I have read four of the six shortlisted (the Rogers won't arrive until after the May 2nd ceremony; the Stross I refuse to read due to past experiences) and none of them strike me as worthy of any award shortlists, much less winning one of the few genre awards that awards a cash prize.  Easily the weakest shortlist out of the 2011 releases cycle that I have followed.

2012 Orange Prize

Esi Edugyan, Half Blood Blues
Anne Enright, The Forgotten Waltz
Cynthia Ozick, Foreign Bodies
Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles
Ann Patchett, State of Wonder
Georgina Harding, Painter of Silence

I have not finished all of these (read the Edugyan, Enright, Ozick, and Miller) and some of these are 2012 releases in the US, but it is a good, solid, but not spectacular shortlist this year.  The Enright took me until its final pages to hit me with the full force of its narrative.  The Miller was good, but there were a few longeurs.  The Ozick was unmemorable for me.  The Edugyan was OK, but I thought it was not deserving of the Booker Prize consideration that it received last year.

2012 Hugo Award for Best Novel

China Miéville, Embassytown
George R.R. Martin, A Dance With Dragons
Jo Walton, Among Others
Mira Grant, Deadline
James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

Ugh.  The Walton was my favorite, followed by Miéville and Martin, each of which was decent but not the authors' best works.  The Grant I will not be reading due to lack of interest in following a series and the Corey was dreadful.

2012 LA Times Book Prize

Alex Shakar, Luminarium 
Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision
Joseph O'Connor, Ghost Light
Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic
Michael Ondaatje, The Cat's Table

This was a strong shortlist.  The Shakar took me a bit to warm up to, but the premise and conclusion were excellent.  Already gave my encomiums to the Pearlman and Otsuka books, but the Ondaatje was also excellent.  The O'Connor was merely very good.

2012 Independent Foreign Fiction Award

Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery
Sjón, From the Mouth of the Whale
Diego Marani, New Finnish Grammar
Judith Hermann, Alice   
Yan Lianke, Dream of Ding Village
Aharon Appelfeld, Blooms of Darkness

Outstanding shortlist (I've read all but the Appelfeld, which will be read in the next few days).  The Marani book blew my mind and the others read are up there.  This could be the best shortlist of them all for me.

2012 Best Translated Book Award for Fiction

Jean Echenoz, Lightning
Moacyr Scliar, Kafka's Leopards
Jacques Jouet, Upstaged
Diego Marani, New Finnish Grammar  
Juan José Saer, Scars
Wiesław Myśliwski, Stone Upon Stone
Dezső Kosztolányi, Kornél Esti
Dany Laferrière, I am a Japanese Writer
Magdalena Tulli, In Red
Enrique Vila-Matas, Never Any End to Paris

I have read only five of these ten finalists, but those five (Echenoz, Scliar, Marani, Myśliwski, and Tulli) ranged from very good to outstanding in the case of Marani.  I certainly will be reading the rest of these shortlisted titles to judge their quality.

2012 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel

Michael Cisco, The Great Lover
Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf
Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All the Time
Sheri Holman, Witches on the Road Tonight
S.P. Miskowski, Knock Knock
Reggie Oliver, The Dracula Papers

Having read all but the Oliver, I think I can safely say that this year's Shirley Jackson novel finalists are the strongest SF/F genre shortlist that I've read.  The breadth and depth of these finalists is refreshing after the conservatism I detected in the Clarke and Hugo nominees.


In addition, I have read all or am in the process of reading the winning novels for these awards:

2012 James Tiptree, Jr. Award

Andrea Hairston, Redwood and Wildfire - excellent novel.  Should have been on some of the other SF/F shortlists.

2012 Bram Stoker Award

Joe McKinney, Flesh Eaters - decent but not great zombie apocalypse-type horror novel.

2012 Edgar Award

Mo Hayder, Gone - I'm currently 2/3 into this crime/thriller novel.  Better than expected, but not excellent so far.  But it is better than the other finalists I've read:

Keigo Higashino, The Devotion of Suspect X
Philip Kerr, Field Gray


I'll update my rankings later in the year, after other awards are released, but if I had to rank the top three, it would go:

1.  Independent Foreign Fiction Award
2.  National Book Award
3.  National Book Critics Circle Award
4.  Man Asian Prize
5.  PEN/Faulkner

There is very little space between these five.  For the bottom three, I would go:

1.  Arthur C. Clarke Award
2.  Hugo Award
3.  Man Booker Prize

The rest is closer to the first group of five than to the bottom three.  If you've read some or all of these shortlists, what are your thoughts on them individually?

2012 Clarke Award finalist: Sherri S. Tepper, The Waters Rising

"Neigh, neigh," offered the horse, "ti-i-idewise."

Out of the six finalists for this year's Arthur C. Clarke Award for SF published in the UK, Sherri S. Tepper's The Waters Rising perhaps has drawn the most flak.  Beginning with Christopher Priest's succinct dismissal of the novel's qualification to be considered a SF novel, "For fuck’s sake, it is a quest saga and it has a talking horse. There are puns on the word ‘neigh.'", most of the discussion revolving around The Waters Rising have dealt with that issue of what precisely is a "SF" novel in relation to what constitutes a quest or epic fantasy.  The novel certainly supports interpretations of both, although the far future, nanotechnology-based underpinning of a post-apocalyptic, quasi-medieval society is largely subsumed by the traditional characteristics of a quest story, replete with what some might pejoratively label as "travel porn," as well as cartoonishly-evil antagonists.  It is only near the end of the novel that the quest narrative fades into a slightly more plausible SF plot, with a strong emphasis on "slightly." 

The Waters Rising is a sequel to Tepper's 1993 novel, A Plague of Angels, which I have not read.  Apparently all the two novels share in common is a single human character, Abasio, and his talking horse, Big Blue.  Why Big Blue is a talking horse, I have no clue, except maybe he exists to make horrid puns such as the one quoted at the beginning of this review.  If Big Blue were the only talking animal in this novel, perhaps I could dismiss it as an anomaly, but the later addition of a talking chipmunk (even if the reason for its talking is explained within a quasi-mystical origin) makes it difficult to not parse this novel as a straight-up quest fantasy.

The story's plot is relatively straightforward.  There are a group of people, including Abasio and a seemingly young "soul bearer" named Xulai, are charged with returning to Xulai's eastern homeland of Tingawa (apparently a vague amalgamation of China and Japan), ostensibly to bear the soul of a dead Tingawan princess to her resting place.  Yet along the way, after numerous pages devoted to the niceties of travel and legendary quasi-histories, the troupe struggles against the wicked Duchess Alicia, who unleashes remnants of long-lost machines to try and end their quest.  All of this is standard-issue Quest 101 plot, with very little in the way of narrative innovation to keep this from devolving into a turgid, plodding affair.

The characterizations are very shallow, as most of the characters remain relatively static, with very little development in terms of motivation or reaction to plot developments.  Tepper has divided her characters into nice, neat "good" and "evil" sections, with virtually no hint as to why either should remain so.  Although there certainly can be well-constructed fictions that possess such stark contrasts between "good' and "evil" personages, The Waters Rising lacks any sense of real depth.  Perhaps part of the problem lies in how characters such as Xulai are portrayed:

Xulai set her feet on the path, noticing with some surprise that she was not trembling.  Her feet moved solidly and steadily.  Indeed, she felt...what?  not quite cheerfulness.  But the stone had been approving!  Approval was good.  Even better was being reminded of Precious Wind!  No one in the whole world was more calm and poised and well mannered than Precious Wind.  And, thinking about it, as the wagon man had bid her, if the stone knew Precious Wind, then the stone knew about Princess Xu-i-lok, who had advised her to make the obeisance but had forgotten to say anything about stones that talked, though, again, if Xulai had thought about it at the time, she would have noticed that she was to ask permission.  Well, if one asked permission, presumably permission would have to be granted, and if not in speech, then how?  So it was clear, if one thought about it, that the Woman Upstairs had implied that the stones would speak.

Faulknerian prose this passage most certainly is not.  In most novels, there are passages that when taken out of context can mislead readers into thinking that the entire work is clunky.  In this case, however, that is a representative passage.  Leaving aside the "precious" nomenclature for a moment, the internal monologue feels stilted, artificial; I suspect very few people think in such a fashion.  In her attempt to flesh out the characters' thoughts, Tepper has only succeeding to reducing them to mere vehicles of expression, devoid of anything that feels "human."  Tepper's tendency to force issues can be seen in another passage, where Abasio is conversing with Xulai:

"Will I be homesick?"  he had repeated in a thoughtful voice.  Well, would he?  "Home was a farm I had been eager to leave from the time I was old enough to walk.  Home was a city so filthy, so violent, and so torture ridden that I sometimes shudder when I remember it.  Home was a few good friends or, rather, good fellows who could be depended upon if one were under attack, though – for the most part – if they had shared one thoughtful new idea among them, it would have surprised me greatly.  Home was a long journey into new lands to the south while people died all around me, cut down like a harvest of grain.  Home was one woman, one woman I loved, love, gone now, leaving only her speaking, thinking spirit behind.  Home held another woman I had been with but never met, but who, I was assured, would raise my son to heroic stature by sheer force of will.  Home was that son, not yet born when I left, a son I unintentionally fathered though I was unconscious before, during, and for some time after the act.  Home was a war in which too many good men and creatures died, irreplaceable men, irreplaceable creatures, irreplaceable love."

Although admittedly, such sentiments are often expressed in such a fashion in many speculative fictions, it is a laborious effort that attempts to provide a backstory for readers who have not read the earlier novel in lieu of actually writing dialogue that sounds "natural."  The entire middle portions of the novel contain dialogue that is similarly stilted, making it difficult to do a close reading, since the entire affair bogs down into a series of narrations of past and current threatening events, such as the one that gives rise to the true conflict of the novel, that of humanity versus nature:

Abasio shrugged, "The Edgers told me the waters will keep coming.  They said that when the earth was formed, the aggregation included several huge ice comets.  They were mixed and surrounded by a lot of stone, so there were reservoirs of water deep inside the planet that nobody knew were there.  Recently, they've found a way out.  There's a country called Artemisia, south of the mountains.  The Big River used to run through there and the land went on south a long way before it came to a part of the ocean they called the Gulf.  Now over half that land is gone.  Of course, it was lowland to begin with.  I haven't been to the East End of this continent, but I've heard about it.  All the cities that used to be along the eastern shore are underwater now, or with their tops sticking out.  There's people living in the tops of the old buildings.  They go back and forth in boats.  Down below, in the parts below water, they farm oysters and mussels."

This premise is hard to buy, especially if anyone knows much about the Earth's geology.  With global warming, yes, some lowlands can be flooded, but to have this concept of having a vast subterranean waterworks main bursting and sending sea waters high enough to overtop lands thousands of feet above current sea level?  It is preposterous.  Leaving aside the unnecessary repetition ("down below, in the parts below water"), the amount of info-dumping would perhaps give even WoT fans pause.

Tepper certainly is not subtle in discussing gender issues.  Although her Sleeping Beauty tale, Beauty, had detractors noting its stark depiction of gender inequalities, it is much more subtle in comparison to The Waters Rising, where, for some unknown reason, post-disaster Earth has somehow reverted back to a near-exact analogue of the European Middle Ages, including even the issue of dowries:

"On Wold's side:  dowry.  On Tingawa's side:  wife-price.  That's another of our differences.  In Norland, women are so little valued, a man must be paid to take a wife; in Tingawa, women are so greatly treasured, a man must pay dearly to get one, as I have good reason to know!"  Bear still owed a large part of the bride-price for his own betrothed, and getting it by wagering had proven unprofitable.

As a discussion of gender issues, this scene felt shoehorned in, as Tepper is not as much deconstructing the very real and problematic issue of gender portrayals in epic fantasies as she is bolting this onto a narrative without integrating it in a suitable fashion into the narrative world.  The overall effect is diversion from narrative development rather than deepening it, as perhaps could have been the case. 

After hundreds of pages wasted in following a travelogue/quest, The Waters Rising finally reaches the end game, when the troupe reaches the cephalopod Sea King.  Tepper arrives at a magico-mystical solution to the inexplicable water increase by having the terrestrial species, humans included, be genetically altered so they could be hybrid cephalopod/human, etc. species that would live underwater.  Of course, permission would need to be sought from the various animals, some of which seem to have been altered to permit human-style speech.  This concluding section felt so hippy-drippy that I thought I was experiencing one of those old environmentalist commercials where a mute Native American was looking forlornly at forest/environmental damage and pollution.  When this is contrasted with a fuller explanation as to what caused a long-ago disaster (hint:  "Oog" equals the Abrahamic faiths), Tepper could not telegraph her eco-religious beliefs in a more bald fashion.

Tepper's refusal to be subtle or at least nuanced in presenting these elements makes it difficult to take anything away from her thematic treatments other than "she makes a strong case for the opposing side to her views."  When viewed as a whole, the constituent elements, especially concerning the environmental factors, are risible.  The humans feel like constructs, the talking animals seem like stereotypical stand-ins for "pure," "more primitive" human societies, and when this is introduced to a setting that has a questionable cause of crisis in the first place, it makes the resulting novel a dull, dreary mess.  While I could (eventually) see how The Waters Rising could be considered "science fiction," I still am baffled how this very weak and disjointed novel was chosen by a panel of judges to be the "best" SF published in the UK in 2011.  It easily is the worst of the four Clarke Award nominees that I have read to date.

Quick (but not fast) analysis of the 2012 Hugo Award nominees for Best Novel

One of the perks of being an online reviewer and critic who covers various literary genres is the ability to sit back, virtually puff a stogie (even if in real life I'm extremely sensitive to tobacco smoke), and airily note what the awards committees/fans got right and wrong.  The WorldCon-derived Hugo Awards especially generate conversation from SF/F aficionados, many of whom decry the perceived recent trend toward "middle of the road" conservatism in selecting finalists, especially in a few fields (the categories where there have been "fresher faces" incidentally seem to be the ones that are ignored due to a relative lack of awareness) such as Best Novel, Short Form Dramatic Presentation, and for a few reviewers amongst us, Best Fan Writer.  There is of course some legitimacy to these complaints, as there do seem to be an abnormal amount of "veteran" work that is being pushed despite a relative lack of critical praise from those who do read widely (if not always deeply) in various sectors of SF/F.


Best Novel

James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes
Mira Grant, Deadline
George R.R. Martin, A Dance With Dragons
China Miéville, Embassytown
Jo Walton, Among Others

My first reaction, upon seeing this shortlist, was "well, at least there's no damn talking horses," although I suppose the alien civilization in Miéville's novel comes somewhat close to that description.  That reaction was followed by a "meh" sound, a feeling that hours later still lingers.  I have read all but the Grant on this list (it is the sequel to last year's Hugo-nominated Feed, whose zombie storyline did not interest me when I received a review copy).  I reviewed the Martin and Miéville books last year and will be reviewing the Walton within the next month.

These novels, for the most part, are "safe" choices.  They are works for the most part by well-established authors, with two being middle volumes in multi-volume works (Grant and Martin) and another being the initial volume of a space opera series (Corey).  Miéville and Walton published standalone novels after each previously had written several other novels.  Corey (or rather Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) is perhaps the least well-known, relatively speaking, of the shortlisted novelists.

Yet veteran writers can still occasionally surprise readers with imaginative works that veer in unexpected directions.  However, this is not the case here with these books.  Among Others is a reflective piece, set at the beginning of the 1980s, is a nostalgia-driven piece.  Although I believe it is the most accomplished of the finalists I've read in regards to its construction and execution of thematic elements, there is nothing innovative about Walton's story.  It is a well-told reiteration of other reflective novels that contain traces of fantastical elements.  There is nothing really original about it, but it was a revisitation that also had very few narrative flaws.

Miéville's Embassytown I found to be an uneven work that is the latest in a line of Miéville's works to frustrate me.  Miéville has the ability to be one of those transcendent writers who can meld vivid imagery and memorable characterization into a work that would seethe with imaginative life.  Yet he never quite connects the pieces; his narratives are sloppy.  A main narrative theme here in Embassytown, that language can be shown to be a tool of imperialist hegemony, is weakened by the implausibility of the natives' "pristine" linguistic state (where Saussere's signifiers and signifieds are melded into one and no true semantic metaphor can exist) and the haphazard way in which this state is altered by the appearance of a fractious Ambassador duo.  The reader's main point of view portal, Avice, likewise is not a fully-realized character.  While some may find her character to be a realistic portrayal of a mostly passive observer, I noticed that there were times in which her actions did not suit this plausible character role, making for an inconsistent narrative/action sequencing, particularly for the second third of the novel.  It is very tricky to craft a smooth, well-fitting characterization and narrative structure around the thematic issues of language and imperialism.  Miéville's novel has too many exposed joins and leaking caulk for it to be a nearly-perfectly realized work.  It is not a "bad" novel, per se, but instead it is a sloppy narrative, which to some is about as damning.

Martin's A Dance of Dragons is the fifth volume in a best-selling epic fantasy series.  When I reviewed it last year, I found that I liked this prose, particularly in the scene with Tyrion and others sailing down a haunted river, really captured that elusive, horrific quality that heightens reader senses as they read a well-written passage.  The problem with this novel is that it has to do so much over its 1000 hardcover pages.  Series fans have complained about the "pace," by which I presume they mean how quickly they can get to "the good stuff" with their favorite characters, but for me the larger issue revolves around the fact that there is so much to cover that there are no true resolutions here.  Martin seemed to be trapped in a corner, having already had to divide the narrative in two with his previous 2005 novel, A Feast of Crows, with the consequence that both novels lack a cohesiveness that the first three volumes contained.  The plot has moved to the point of massive events poised to occur, but nothing really does here, at least in the sense of a true or even false climax such as those contained in a beheading, a battle, and a betrayal in the first three volumes.  This weakens the effectiveness of the scenes that appear here, as they come across as being (mostly necessary) set pieces that will not truly be at play for one or even two novels hence.

Grant's Deadline I cannot say anything on, as it is highly unlikely I will read the first volume, Feed, much less this second volume in her zombie series.  Not knocking the author, only noting that I am disinterested in reading this series.

I have a love/hate relationship with space operas, trending more toward the hate side in recent years.  Too often am I left feeling there is a false grandiosity to these tales.  Galactic or, if set "earlier," solar system civilizations that focus on macro-level issues with rather bland, utilitarian characters who seem to exist only to further some narrative point are another sticking point with me.  Leviathan Wakes reminded me of those elements that I despise in space operas.  I found the writing to have pretensions of saying something profound and eloquent, without the technical mastery to make either happen.  The characters were bland and seemed to be oriented more toward fitting in with role expectations associated with prior space operas than with anything that really felt "alive."  The plot was a retread and the execution was competent but nothing worthy of "best of year" status to me.  It took me months to finish reading this on my iPad after I received an e-galley as a bonus to my purchase of Abraham's The Dragon's Path (which was a superior novel to Leviathan Wakes, despite my reservations about the "lightness" of the setting and themes) because it was hard not to feel that I had read such reprocessed writing elsewhere.

Despite my mixed to negative comments on these shortlisted novels, I cannot say that I am surprised that they are on here.  I knew the Martin and Miéville books were very popular with many people and despite my criticisms, I can understand why many would love them enough to vote for them.  Cannot comment on Grant/McGuire's writing, as I have not read much past the cover blurbs, but she seems to have a passionate fanbase as well.  I know Abraham has his supporters (and I did like his previous fantasy series, which is what led me to even read this collaborative space opera) and Walton generally receives critical praises.  Yet this lack of true surprises I find to be disappointing.  Obviously, one cannot "fire" membership voting (even if it would be a folly to do this even with panel-selected works with which you disagree vehemently over a period of years), but one certainly can question if what is produced from these "fan" votes is as much an acknowledgement of something brilliantly written than a symbol of common denominators that will produce shortlists that hew closely to a certain "formula."  As long as there isn't an active critical base within these genre fandoms that make readers question what they are reading more and seeking out more than just reiterations of familiar, beloved works/genres, "safe" shortlists like this will continue to be produced.  Only caveat that I would add is that erstwhile critics better be aware of the social climes, or else they risk being just as "out of touch" as those voters with which they may tar with that brush.

Reading (and hopefully reviewing) the major lit/genre awards

One of the fun things about taking the time in late December to craft a "Best of 2011" essay is seeing which books (with the exception of the National Book Awards, awarded in mid-November to books published in that calendar year) that I've chosen will be shortlisted for various 2012 awards as well as investigating those works listed on other shortlists that I missed out on reading for some reason or another.

Already this year over at Gogol's Overcoat I have covered the National Book Critics Circle Award, Man Asian Prize, and PEN/Faulkner Award winners (and some of the shortlisted titles for each award).  In the near future, I will be reviewing the Tiptree Award-winning Redwood and Wildfire by Andrea Hairston (and possibly a couple of the Honor Roll stories; at least the ones by L. Timmel Duchamp and Gwyneth Jones will be read, as they are on my iBooks library), the Stoker-winning novel Flesh Eaters by Joe McKinney, and at least the winner (and maybe 2-3 of the shortlist, as I just bought three of the e-books for later reading when I'm on the exercise bike) of the Edgar Award for Best Novel here on this blog.  I will also be reviewing most of the shortlisted titles for the Nebula and Clarke Awards here and the 2012 Premio Alfaguara-winning Una misma noche by Argentine writer Leopoldo Brizuela, the Orange Prize winner, and the LA Times Book Prize winner in Fiction on Gogol's Overcoat.  Then, depending on how out of whack I find the nominees, I'll try to cover at least the winning (if not shortlisted) novels for the Hugos, Shirley Jackson, and World Fantasy Award here.  And if I receive word in time for non-Anglophone awards in languages that I can read, I will attempt to read and possibly review those as well.

By that time, I should have read several of the more well-known literary and genre awards awarded for 2011 fiction (and have started the 2012 lists for the Man Booker and National Book Awards).  It will be interesting to see how I would alter (if at all) my list of 25 notable 2011 releases.  Maybe then I can bitch about the quality (or lack there of) of certain award shortlists and some will see that I would be speaking from experience and not just because the works in question may suck.  Anyone else doing something similar with at least one of the shortlists this year?

I was considering reviewing all of the shortlisted Nebula Award for Best Novel, but...

I forgot to post this list for the Nebula Awards for Best Novel (I had considered briefly covering the other shortlisted titles, then realized that with my current reviewing schedule, I wouldn't have time), but seeing that the winner will be announced around May 19-20, I thought I might as well start acquiring the books that I haven't yet read (bold for the ones I've already read):

    Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)

    Embassytown, China Miéville (Macmillan UK; Del Rey; Subterranean Press)

    Firebird, Jack McDevitt (Ace Books)

    God’s War, Kameron Hurley (Night Shade Books)

    Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, Genevieve Valentine (Prime Books)

    The Kingdom of Gods, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

Based on the authors that I've read, it's not a bad list...with one notable exception.  I see that yet once again, a Jack McDevitt novel appears on the shortlist.  For the past decade, one could hardly go a year without something by him appearing on a Nebula shortlist.  Sure, it's SF and it seems he has a devoted fanbase, but I become quite skeptical about this, ever since I sampled one of his novels (I believe it was Chindi) several years ago and found it to be competent but far from very good.

Now I have heard rumors that McDevitt was one of several SFWA authors who would solicit votes much more vigorous than just a simple "hey, something of mine is eligible" post somewhere and while I do not know how valid those rumors are (after all, I likely will never be a SFWA member), there is that contrarian streak in me that does not want to promote with a review a work that may have been placed on a shortlist more due to personal ties than to quality of work.  True, the possibility of others appearing here due to "popularity" issues rather than story quality is at least plausible, but my experiences with their works has been better than my fleeting encounter with an older McDevitt work.

So I plan on reading the Walton and Jemisin (even though it means I have to read her second novel, The Broken Kingdoms, as well) in addition to re-reading the Hurley and Valentine for review purposes (I gave a mixed review to Miéville's book last year).   I just will not be reading or reviewing one of the finalists for reasons stated above.  It may seem a bit petty, but it is one way to protest the suspected state of affairs, even if many may believe this to be a mistaken policy.

2012 National Book Critics Circle Award winners announced (plus links to several reviews I've done to date)

The 2012 National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced on March 8, 2012.  I read all of the entries for Fiction, Criticism, and Poetry and to date have written eight reviews of those works (will finish the one remaining fiction and poetry finalists in the next day and may review only the winners in the other categories, now that I own e-book editions for the winners in Nonfiction, Biography, and Autobiography).  I will put an asterisk by the winners and at the end of each finalist in the three categories I read in full (I also read and reviewed two of the Autobiography finalists last year) I will put a number indicating which I thought was the best in the category and on down the line. 

Maybe others reading this who've read some of these finalists will want to weigh in with their thoughts on the winners and the shortlists. 

Fiction

Teju Cole, Open City (Random House) (1)
Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)(4)
Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child (Knopf)(5)
* Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision (Lookout Books)(3)
Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia (Scribner)(2)

Nonfiction

Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War (Random)
James Gleick, The Information (Pantheon)
Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
* Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War (Knopf)
John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead: Essays (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)

Autobiography

Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, A Marriage, and the Language of Healing (W.W. Norton)
* Mira Bartók, The Memory Palace (Free Press)
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America (Little, Brown)
Luis J. Rodríguez, It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing (Touchstone)
Deb Olin Unferth, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War (Henry Holt)

Biography

Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution (Little, Brown)
* John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (Penguin Press)
Paul Hendrickson, Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961 (Knopf)
Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Viking)
Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Belknap Press: Harvard University Press)

Criticism

David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything (Faber & Faber)(1)
* Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews (Graywolf)(4)
Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence (Doubleday)(5)
Dubravka Ugresic, Karaoke Culture (Open Letter)(2)
Ellen Willis, Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music (University of Minnesota Press)(3)

Poetry

Forrest Gander, Core Samples from the World (New Directions)(1)
Aracelis Girmay, Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions)(5)
* Laura Kasischke, Space, in Chains (Copper Canyon Press)(2)
Yusef Komunyakaa, The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)(4)
Bruce Smith, Devotions (University of Chicago Press)(3)

2012 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction nominees

Since I'm seemingly bent on reading and possibly reviewing every one of the major spring literary award shortlists in fiction (and a few other fields), here's the 2012 PEN/Faulkner Award shortlist that was announced a week ago, with the winner to be announced March 26:

• Russell Banks for Lost Memory of Skin
• Don DeLillo for The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories 
• Anita Desai for The Artist of Disappearance
• Steven Millhauser for We Others:  New and Selected Stories 
• Julie Otsuka for The Buddha in the Attic

I've already read three of the finalists here and I should finish the others in the next week or so.  If I get the chance to review them before the winner is announced, I'll either post them on Gogol's Overcoat or here, maybe as a delayed mirror of the post there.

Very solid list from what I've read so far, especially Otsuka's book, which I reviewed very positively when it was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award in Fiction.