Reading Thursday
Nov. 22nd, 2018 05:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhSabrina by Nick Drnaso. The first graphic novel nominated for the Booker Award, Sabrina is a story about fake news, conspiracy theories, internet Men's Rights Activists, and general societal disintegration and ennui. The titular Sabrina only actually appears for the first few pages, vanishing from both the book and the lives of those around her by simply not coming home one night. A few months later the story picks up with her boyfriend Teddy and her sister struggling with her disappearance; Teddy goes as far as to leave town to stay in the spare room of an estranged high-school buddy who is now a computer scientist in the military. Teddy is in a deep depression that leaves him incapable of maintaining a conversation or leaving the house, and which only gets worse when the police confirm that Sabrina was murdered, and that a videotape exists of her last moments – which, of course, ends up widely available on the internet.
Sabrina is an extreme example of what Hemingway called the iceberg style of writing: only a small percentage shows above water (or on the page), while most of the significance is left for the reader to subconsciously intuit, hidden below. Many pages in this book are entirely empty of dialogue or, in fact, any text at all; instead we see the characters silently walk down monotonous hallways, ride a bus, shop for the groceries, brush their teeth, and do all the other meaningless activities of daily life. Even when there is dialogue, it's often equally empty: half-hearted attempts at conversation punctuated by frequent awkward silences or misunderstandings, routine small talk with officemates, the droning of talk radio. This drab muteness is echoed in the art. Beige and olive-green predominate, and all the colors are grayed out. The characters are rendered in a flat, cartoonish style that makes it all but impossible to read emotions from their faces. When Teddy becomes enthralled by an Alex Jones-esque radio show which contends that Sabrina's murder was faked to give the government greater power (complete with on the page comparisons to real-life conspiracy theories regarding the Sandy Hook shooting), it's hard to understand why. Is he angry? Shocked? Convinced? DIsbelieving? I couldn't tell.
Nonetheless, it's a tense, fascinating book. I read the whole thing in a single sitting, unable to put it down without seeing what happened next, despite the characters' disconnection and lack of overt emotion. Sabrina didn't win the Booker prize, but it's still well worth checking out.
Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin. A science-fiction novel set on an isolated planet with three populations. First we meet the "hilfs", a sort of stone-age nomadic people native to the planet, embodied in the character Rolery, a young woman slightly unusual in her own society. Next there are the "farborns", the remnants of a colony settled by a galaxy-spanning society. Unfortunately it's been many, many generations since then with no contact – the colony was left with neither a ship of their own nor a communication device – and they don't know if they've been forgotten or if the empire itself has ceased to exist. We're introduced to the farborns through Agat Alterra, a young man also a bit misunderstood by his own people. Rolery and Agat, as you probably have already guessed, meet and fall in love, a relationship forbidden by both their people, since any such marriage is infallibly infertile and frequently leads to the wife's death by traumatic miscarriage.
Rolery's potential early death is not actually the main conflict of the story, though. The third group of people, the gaals, are normally small bands of raiders. But in an unprecedented move they have banded together into a massive warparty hundreds of thousands strong, and are looking to do away with both the hilfs and the farborns right before the years-long, devastating winter season hits. Not just Rolery and Agat, but all of the hilfs and the farborns will have to band together to survive, which leads to a revelation about how the farborns's preserence on the planet has changed them all.
This isn't one of Le Guin's masterpieces, but it's a lovely little novella. The writing is poetic, the worldbuilding deep and complex, and there are several action scenes that are incredibly vivid and exciting. I'm glad I read it.
Sabrina is an extreme example of what Hemingway called the iceberg style of writing: only a small percentage shows above water (or on the page), while most of the significance is left for the reader to subconsciously intuit, hidden below. Many pages in this book are entirely empty of dialogue or, in fact, any text at all; instead we see the characters silently walk down monotonous hallways, ride a bus, shop for the groceries, brush their teeth, and do all the other meaningless activities of daily life. Even when there is dialogue, it's often equally empty: half-hearted attempts at conversation punctuated by frequent awkward silences or misunderstandings, routine small talk with officemates, the droning of talk radio. This drab muteness is echoed in the art. Beige and olive-green predominate, and all the colors are grayed out. The characters are rendered in a flat, cartoonish style that makes it all but impossible to read emotions from their faces. When Teddy becomes enthralled by an Alex Jones-esque radio show which contends that Sabrina's murder was faked to give the government greater power (complete with on the page comparisons to real-life conspiracy theories regarding the Sandy Hook shooting), it's hard to understand why. Is he angry? Shocked? Convinced? DIsbelieving? I couldn't tell.
Nonetheless, it's a tense, fascinating book. I read the whole thing in a single sitting, unable to put it down without seeing what happened next, despite the characters' disconnection and lack of overt emotion. Sabrina didn't win the Booker prize, but it's still well worth checking out.
Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin. A science-fiction novel set on an isolated planet with three populations. First we meet the "hilfs", a sort of stone-age nomadic people native to the planet, embodied in the character Rolery, a young woman slightly unusual in her own society. Next there are the "farborns", the remnants of a colony settled by a galaxy-spanning society. Unfortunately it's been many, many generations since then with no contact – the colony was left with neither a ship of their own nor a communication device – and they don't know if they've been forgotten or if the empire itself has ceased to exist. We're introduced to the farborns through Agat Alterra, a young man also a bit misunderstood by his own people. Rolery and Agat, as you probably have already guessed, meet and fall in love, a relationship forbidden by both their people, since any such marriage is infallibly infertile and frequently leads to the wife's death by traumatic miscarriage.
Rolery's potential early death is not actually the main conflict of the story, though. The third group of people, the gaals, are normally small bands of raiders. But in an unprecedented move they have banded together into a massive warparty hundreds of thousands strong, and are looking to do away with both the hilfs and the farborns right before the years-long, devastating winter season hits. Not just Rolery and Agat, but all of the hilfs and the farborns will have to band together to survive, which leads to a revelation about how the farborns's preserence on the planet has changed them all.
This isn't one of Le Guin's masterpieces, but it's a lovely little novella. The writing is poetic, the worldbuilding deep and complex, and there are several action scenes that are incredibly vivid and exciting. I'm glad I read it.
