jayeless's reviews
337 reviews

This is a fantastic book, and should be much better-known than it is. Set in a township near Pretoria in the tumultuous 1980s, it tells the story of Tihelo, a young teenage girl living with her mum and older sister. At first she's no fan of the protests and disruption, only wanting to go to school so she can become a journalist and escape the township. However, the brutality of the apartheid regime is inescapable, and her need to defend and get justice for her loved ones pushes her into the resistance. It's a powerful story which goes to some dark places, and I think it gives a good insight into what South Africa was like at the time (at least, speaking as someone whose own knowledge of that time is cobbled together from year 11 Geography classes, conversations with my partner's South African family, and what I learned from the Hector Pieterson museum in Soweto). It's notable as a South African novel actually written by a Black person, which is bizarrely difficult to find considering the demographics of the country. And I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to get into reading novels about South Africa, as indeed it's been (BY FAR) the most engaging of all the ones I've read. Enjoyable, significant, and deserves to not be so obscure.

This is the kind of book that'll be to some people's taste but not others, and sadly it wasn't to mine. Neither the characters nor the setting were very well-developed, and it was hard to feel invested in anything when it was all depicted in such a shallow way. The people who love this book seem to love it because of the flowery, poetic language, but for me that just made it even harder to get into because it's so over-the-top. If it does actually get made into a TV show, that might be a lot better for it because I assume they'll be forced to come up with an actual plot and an internally coherent vision of what the characters look like.

I found Amberlough hard to get into at first; there are a ton of names – of people, places and political groups – and while I picked them up before too long, it took a lot of furrowed concentration at the start. The good news is that so long as you're willing to do that, you'll be rewarded with a fantastic spec fic thriller, set in an analogue for Weimar-era Germany as it succumbs to Nazi rule.

The main characters are split between spies and burlesque theatre folk, most of them gay, and the rest dead broke (my god how refreshing it is to read a book where not everyone is rich!!). The characters are all far from perfect people, but especially Cyril, whose flaws are so glaring and decision-making skills so horrible that his chapters made me squirm to read at times. That said, despite their flaws I found them all compelling to read about, the way their stories crossed paths and had them sometimes allied and sometimes working against each other. That was neat.

There is a palpable sense of dread over the course of the book that gets sharper and heavier the closer you get to the end. The real theme of it is the way that the impending seizure of power by the Ospies (Nazi equivalents) forces people into some nasty dilemmas where every option sucks, but it still matters what option they choose anyway. I'm looking forward to seeing how that develops over the rest of the trilogy.

As an aside, I also appreciated the depiction of Amberlough itself – the many districts, from genteel to bawdy and everything in between; the public transport routes; the sights and smells of the city parks; the sounds of the different accents of its residents… it was just clearly a book from someone who loves urban life and can put into words all the things that make cities great. It made for an immersive environment as all the politics and scheming were underway. If this book sounds like anything you might be interested in I encourage you to give it a try, because it really gripped me.

Considering it was only 46 pages long, this novelette did a truly astounding job introducing a setting (fantasy Cairo c. 1920s), interesting characters, different types of mythical creatures and a compelling mystery that takes exactly as long to wrap up as feels appropriate. Really enjoyed this.

I'm not sure who the translator was for the edition I read, but I feel like they weren't one of the better ones… the prose in this was just stilted and maintained some level of distance from me; it wasn't the kind of engaging prose I'm used to reading. So a large part of my low rating is really because of the poor translation.

This is obviously considered one of the big books of Russian literature, and I certainly appreciated some of the snark and the sending-up of Soviet society. But the story itself was kind of incoherent, like a 500-page dream sequence where you can't expect any kind of continuity to last too long and there's a lot of seemingly unrelated things happening. (The closer you get to the end, the more related they turn out to be, but I endured a lot of confusion first.) It's also not really a book for character development… it's more like the kind of traditional tale where the characters represent things, rather than be people. Which is fine, there's still value in those kinds of stories, I just don't find them the most enjoyable. As for rewarding, I think this book could have been that, if I'd taken it slower (like one chapter a day) and had a reading guide or something to explain all the references. So, if you're not a habitual reader of old classics, that's the approach I'd recommend with this one… it's just not accessible enough to read straight through and expect to enjoy.