ergative's reviews
925 reviews

 Ah, wonderful! Magic and mystery and manners and lots of interior design. Quite spicy. It was, hmm, not marketed as being that spicy. Not complaining. 

Huh. I'm left mostly perplexed by this. It feels like it was either a hot mess of vaguely connected ideas, or else the connections were deep and subtle and relied entirely on cultural associations that , not being Korean, I couldn't access.

Possibly part of it was the translation. You've got to look a bit suspiciously at a translator when a book written in Korean has a Korean character say to other Korean characters, 'You know that Korean saying You can live with a fox, but you can't live with a bear?' And then he proceeds to explain what it means, to his Korean interlocutors. 

Anyway, whatever this book was trying to do, I didn't get it.

 Bledsoe is really superb at constructing a sense of place and community. The characters feel fully realised; the blend between small town Appalachian hick and otherworldly faerie Tufa is incredibly difficult to describe, and incredibly effective: I both believe that these people are the long-lived semi-immortal descendents of exiled fairies AND that they embody some of the oft-evoked stereotypes characteristics of deep rural Tennessee, which are portrayed unflinchingly, without disgust, sentimentality, or apology. I really respect this world that Bledsoe has created. 

(I also respect the body count. One advantage of such a well-constructed world and community is that you've got a lot of characters to bump off whose deaths are meaningful and important, and who also don't overly shrink the cast because there are so many other people in play. I can't emphasize enough how the social world-building is really really well done!)

And yet, somehow, this particular book didn't really work for me, because overlaid on top of everything was a rather tedious reliance on sex as characterization. The bad woman comes to town, and she is sexually voracious--which is, to be sure, balanced by one of the people standing against her, who is also sexually voracious. So it's not shaming exactly--Bledsoe never shames anyone for anything in his books, even some of the pretty terrible things they do--but I did get rather annoyed at all the male gaze and all of the use of sex as power. And it's not even as simple as 'powerful women always employ sex as power', which would be a tedious stereotype, because one of the most powerful people is a twelve-year-old girl who has nothing to do with sex. Bledsoe scorns easy stereotypes. But still, the sex seemed unnecessary.

Also, gotta say that Nigel's storyline would have perhaps been less distressing if he were not the sole black guy in the book. I see what Bledsoe was doing, and in a way it's not any different from what he's doing with everyone else. He is not kind to his characters, and he's not cruel. He just is. And so Nigel's story is what Nigel's story was. But still. The only black guy. Not a great look. 

 Perfectly fine. Difficult to give an ensemble cast such distinct characterization in the wordcount, but they felt distinct. Quite a richly developed world for such a short book. But the plot felt a bit rushed, and there was a bit too much explaining-things-to-the-newbie to get over the difficult bits. I would have preferred to meet this world in a longer book so I could learn all the nuances more organically. But Shahin was hot; that worked. 

 Um, wut? 

No--I must have faith. It will make sense when I read it again. These books make  no fucking sense at the end until you read them a second time. Be strong. Trust the author. It will come clear. 

The thing about the premise of this book is that, on the surface, it looks rather simple: A very grumpy old man is grumpy and sad, until despite himself his neighbours (and cat) give him a new lease on life. But Backman has set himself a wildly difficult task, because Ove, the titular grump, is not just grumpy, but desperately sad and suicidal following the death of his beloved wife of 40 years. Every bit of grumpiness that Ove expresses is simultaneously hilarious because of the grumpiness (Ove trying to buy a computer; Ove getting into an altercation with a clown; Ove borrowing some sheet metal from a neighbour), and also underpinned by this crippling bereavement. Nowhere is this done better than in the treatment of Ove's brand loyalty to Saab, which has structured his whole life in ways that go back to childhood. One particularly brilliant chapter presents the history of his estrangement from a neighbour who was, briefly, a friend, through the lens of car purchases. Ove always bought a Saab, and his neighbour always bought a Volvo, until one day he bought a Mercedes--which is a ridiculous reason to have a falling out, except that the model choices they made in their car purchases reflect their respective griefs and disappointments as their lives unfold differently from how they'd hoped. It's not about the cars, but the cars are the tangible manifestation of the real thing, and Ove is a tangible kind of guy, so for him it is about the cars, because the cars are the thing. 

The problem, though, is that in order for the humour of the grumpiness to come through and leaven the grief, Ove has to be a curmudgeonly old fart. And it's very hard to write a curmudgeonly old fart without invoking some truly disagreeable worldviews, because there are only a limited number of ways to be a grump. So, to make Ove a fully rounded grump, Backman writes him a little light misogyny (women can't drive); some very heavy fat-shaming (and not just in Ove--the character himself is always asking for food, so it can't be put down to seeing the world through Ove's eyes); and a truly appalling treatment of the poor shop clerks who are just trying to do their damn jobs. It got a little bit hard to take. 

So I laughed, and I cried, and I enjoyed the book enormously. I recognize what a delicate line Backman had to walk, and I think, on the whole, he was very successful. This is a fine book. I just think it could have been a tiny bit better than it was.

(There was also a wee flavour of strawman-has-a-point in the primary conflict surrounding a neighbour with dementia who the city council wants to put in a care home. See, the reason the city council wants to put him in a care home is because his wife asked for some more home help taking care of him. She already had some regular assistance, but she needed more, because she was getting overwhelmed looking after him by herself, with her own aging body and failing health. And the council spent a few years doing visits and investigating, and in the end concluded that she was not capable of looking after him, and that providing a higher level of in-home help would not be enough to meet his care needs. This is presented as the council being a monster trying to rip people away from their homes and families, but it sure feels to me as if there is a robust social welfare system that provides free assistance to keep people in their homes as long as is possible and provides residential care when it is no longer possible for them to live at home. The council eventually backs down when the neighbors threaten to blackmail one of the officials and agree to band together to help provide the home assistance that the neighbour's wife needs to look after her husband. But it strikes me that, if neighbourly support were truly sufficient to prevent the need to remove the neighbour from his home, then why were all these neighbours not chipping in during the two years that the council was investigating?)

 This was quite a fat book, and I read it in a day, so it was definitely engaging. But it was clearly more interested in making a Discourse about the state of England-America relationships, and specifically transatlantic marriages between impoverished English aristocrats and wealthy American heiresses, than it was in telling a story with sophisticated plot or characterisation. Yet, in a way, perhaps because it was so interested in doing the Discourse, it also avoided certain plot elemens that might otherwise have been much too predictable and tiresome. For example, one component of the book involves a romance between (who else?) an impoverished Englihs aristogract and a wealthy American heiress. 

 This book is the perfect instantiation of the genre I call People With Jobs. Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford are a writing team who wrote dozens of books alone and jointly, under quite a variety of pen names, including Joan Blair, who had, it seems, quite a productive career writing for Mills and Boon (iykyk). This book is the first of their collaboration, published in 1933, and it is a charming, delightful, sunny, happy, fluffy epistolary novel about a young woman who, for Reasons, decides to spend the year between her engagement and marriage working in London. We learn about her job hunt (she is very canny about sniffing out scam jobs for someone as inexperienced as she seems to be), office politics, her family and friends, various living arrangements, and quite a bit about her fiance--which is rather impressive, given that we never get his letters to her, only her responses to him. Nothing terribly dramatic happens, and indeed nothing terribly surprising happens (let's just say that I fully predicted all the various romantic developments), but everything is so light and charming and easy that it was a spot of frolicking sunshine to brighten our darkening Scottish autumn skies. Oh, and the heroine is Scottish too. Nothing there not to like. 

 This started out so brilliantly that I had to remind myself how brilliantly it started out when thinking about star ratings after finishing it, because in many ways the second half was a real disappointment. It's about Ingrid Yang, an eighth-year PhD student struggling to finish a dissertation on the poetry of Xiao-wen Chou, who is the Thomas Kinkade of Chinese-American poetry: wildly popular, cringily twee. She never really wanted to write her dissertation on Chou, but was steered in that direction by various (white) professors who have lots of ideas about career paths and academic interests that are appropriate for someone of her 'unique background'. Naturally, things don't go well, and as Ingrid starts poking into Chou's background, they go even worse, in ways that are delightful and surprising-yet-inevitable, and which I will not spoil in this review.

The pitch-perfect skewering of academia and race relations was perfection. The professors, students, friends, and lovers all serve really well-considered roles in highlighting different components of grad student life: the supportive (smothering?) partner; the academic nemesis; the best friend; the romantic jealousies; the demanding supervisor; the student activist groups; the horrifyingly bad campus plays; the protests; the DRAMA. The turning point plot reveal was a superbly constructed development that fits in perfectly with the set-up of the book, and allows Ingrid all sorts of opportunities to reveal how her book-learning in no way corresponds to any actual smarts. I was howling with laughter at many, many points.

But then things started falling apart. The sly, pointed commentary became broad and overblown. Ingrid started doing a lot of navel-gazing, which was much less successful at shedding light on Chao's points than the more objectively narrated events which revealed those same points much more subtly. For example, at one point Ingrid gets concerned that her boyfriend has an Asian fetish, and is only interested in her because she's Asian, rather than for herself. This concern is treated in a number of ways: Ingrid talks explicitly to her best friend and her best friend's brother about it (a great conversation, very succinctly capturing a variety of viewpoints on the issue); she starts seeing Asian women around town as romantic rivals in ways that she had never seen them before; she has a big fight with her partner about it--all of these are fine. Actually, maybe just two of these would be fine. We don't need all three of them PLUS a very long sequence in which Ingrid mopes in bed and wrestles with Doubts and Feelings. All the snappy, tight brilliance of the first half of the book collapses into flabbiness. 

The climax of the book, at Ingrid's dissertation defense, is the most disappointing. It feels cinematic--in a bad way. It feels like the writer was trying to imagine a movie climax, in which the main character needs to make a broad dramatic gesture, and that moment of indecision is signaled to the audience by pausing after a few sentences of dialogue, physically hesitating, stumbling, stopping to made the Big Decision. The moment depends on that pause, the silence, the concerned reaction shots, before the moment of decision in which the music swells and the scene proceeds. This works in movies, because movies operate according to certain constraints: long monologues and lectures don't work, so you can only have a few sentences before the big decisive moment arrives, and the big decisive moment need to be signaled by clear physical indicators, because the audience can't be inside the character's head. But in a book none of these constraints are actually present. You can be in someone's head at the same time they're delivering a speech or a lecture or making a decision. You can intersperse the lecture proceeding smoothly with the internal turmoil of the upcoming decision point. You don't need to show the entire lecture, either--you can summarize the lecture, and highlight the key points and transitions that underlie the coming revelation without quoting it directly in massive blocks of text. But since Chao didn't take advantage of these possibilities, the actual written scene, relying as it does on cinematic rather than written techniques, fails to convey drama, and instead feels clumsy and overblown.


There's also the problem of academic verisimilitude. I don't know if Chao has completed a PhD. It's not in her author bio. I certainly believe that she has been a grad student--those details are spot on--but the perpetual countdown of '50 pages left; 27 pages to go' as Ingrid works on finishing is just not how a PhD is written. It's not the case that you're trying to make a page count, and once you've made the page count you're done. It's also not the case that you finish your dissertation a week or two before the scheduled defense. Your committee needs time to read the damn thing! (I also find myself thinking that if she were more broadly embedded in academia, she would recognize that the massive revelation that drives the second half of the book would probably not have exactly the consequences for careers built on studying Xiao-wen Chou's poetry scholarship that she thinks it would, but I can't discuss that in more depth without spoiling the reveal.) But then, maybe these comments are unfair. There are many ways in which Barnes University, in this book, is a dysfunctional cesspit, so perhaps the ways in which it departs from actual academic practice is not any fault of Chao, but is instead another signal of the toxicity of Barnes University. Maybe at Barnes, committees don't read dissertations before defenses, and maybe at Barnes the only thing that matters is the page count.

So: the first half of the book was brilliant, and the book as a whole offers a very thoughtful consideration of white-Asian race relations in academia, with some hilarious skewering of academia and ineffective liberalism. But it gets too broad and overblown in the second half, and drags. If a kinder editor had chopped off about 20% of the second half of the book,  it would have been much improved.