Oct. 1st, 2010

dancingsinging: (Default)
Here are my off-the-cuff jabberings I wanted to get down while this book is fresh in my mind. This book isn't constructed in such a way as to be spoilable--no plot as such--but I'm planning to start with conclusions I drew at the end, so maybe it will be thematically spoiled by my comments?

- There's a line about the protag basically running through a maze of orchestrated events and Profound Lessons, but he's just an ordinary shlub and gets very little of it all. That's how I feel as a reader of the book, having been led past a procession of Important and Deeply Meaningful scenes where Profound Archetypes are invoked, but I just gawked at it. I'm pretty sure that this was an intentional effect. Ahh, the beautiful meta.

- There's all this symbology about vivisecting things and the fallacy that you can understand the essence of things by cutting them up. So, if I continue with the meta thing, actually analyzing this novel would be a mistake. Then again, the symbolically evoked opposite of vivisecting (sort of "getting" it, like, from the heart) is painted as providing a false sense of understanding. In any case, I do plan to reread and analyze it with the tools I picked up from my lit classes. Maybe I'll be slicing at a cadaver rather than grokking the essence of it, but, whatever.

- Of course, there's a line about nothing being between the covers but words.

- I have to do more slicing in the morgue to explain this in detail, but I swear this book should be in the running for a Tiptree, with the way it so brilliantly and viscerally portrays the problems with the dominant gender narratives, and how clearly it demonstrates how women pay and pay and pay because of them.

- This book is like only a few I have read (the Marq'ssan books, or The King's Last Song, frex) that leaves me with a feeling of breathless wonder, that such a thing could have been constructed by a mortal person. So complex, so intricately interlinked, saying so much.

I'm still at the OMG OMG I'm Gibbering stage, but I hope to have something a little more cogent to say in a bit. For now: READ THE BOOK, PEOPLE!



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