Reading Wednesday: On Wednesday!
Jul. 3rd, 2019 05:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhRaven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee. The sequel to Ninefox Gambit and the second in a trilogy of anti imperial, military, space-opera, science-fiction. Raven Stratagem picks up nearly immediately after the end of Ninefox Gambit but maintains the suspense by switching POVs from Cheris and Jedao (the two consciousnesses forced to share one body in the previous book), who now appear to be functioning as a single coherent unit and who are determined to destroy the Hexarchate, the oppressive, violent empire all the characters live under. Cheris/Jedao begins their reign of terror and/or justified revolution (which it is depends on who you ask) by commandeering an entire military fleet.
Which brings us to the new POVs of this book: General Khiruev, the (former) leader of said fleet, who is forced by training and drugs to obey anyone ranked above her, even when she loathes them wholeheartedly, as she does Jedao; Kel Brezan, an underling in the same fleet who is one of the extremely rare military people capable of disobeying a direct order, but if he does choose to contradict Jedao, he'll be outing himself as untrustworthy and almost certainly will be discharged for that very ability (Brezan is also a transman, but it's so unimportant in this world that it only comes up in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference); and, way on the other side of the galaxy, Shuos Mikodez, leader of the assassination/intelligence/propaganda arm of the Hexarchate. Mikodez knew Jedao before his current incarnation in Cheris's body, has his own reasons for possibly wanting to overthrow the Hexarchate, and provides a broader perspective on all the action and plotting.
One of the most exciting and suspenseful elements of Raven Stratagem is simply who is the central person? Did Jedao destroy Cheris's consciousness and take over her body? Is it Cheris, pretending to be Jedao for reasons of her own? Did the two of them melt into one personality? And, whoever it is, what is their real goal? Cheris/Jedao claim to be out to destroy the Hexarchate, but how and why? And what do they plan to replace it with? To put it simply: can they be trusted? This question is what Khiruev, Brezan, and Mikodez all spend an entire book trying to figure out.
Raven Stratagem is very much a novel about war and the atrocities committed therein; it's about despotic government and how it warps everyone within it as part of the price of individual survival; it's about what you choose to do when the world is terrible but fixing it might kill more people than leaving the structural oppression in place. And it's SO GOOD.
I do have to admit that I was slightly less emotionally engaged by Raven Stratagem than I was by Ninefox Gambit. I think it's because, while the new POVs are all great characters, I originally latched on hard to Cheris and especially to the mystery behind Jedao's motivations, and they are both kept somewhat at a distance in Raven Stratagem. It's the only way the mystery of "who is this?" could work, of course – an internal POV would have given away the solution on page 1 – but nonetheless I missed them both.
Despite that, Raven Stratagem is a wonderful book and part of a wonderful trilogy and you all should read it immediately! If you haven't already.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy. A novel set in modern India by the author of The God of Small Things. I have been waiting for Roy to return to writing fiction for nearly twenty years... though I don't like to complain when she's been spending her time on vitally important journalism that seeks to point out injustices and protect minorities. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is exactly the novel you might expect from a writer with that background.
Our main character – or so, at least, it appears at first – is Anjum, a hijra (more or less a transwoman, although there are some cultural differences that make it not quite the same identity as in the West) in Shahjahanabad, the old, mostly-Muslim neighborhood of Delhi. The first half of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is the small story of Anjum's life – her singing lessons as a child, her eventual joining of a group of other hijras, her recognition as a famous activist icon only to be undermined in later decades by younger and yet more progressive hijras, her adoption of an abandoned child, her near-death experience in the 2002 Gujarat riots, her emotional breakdown afterward that leads to her losing her adopted daughter to another mother, and her eventual decision to start living in a graveyard, unable to deal with life or the world. As the years and decades pass, though, Anjum slowly recovers, and starts to claim the land within the mostly-disused graveyard, eventually erecting a guesthouse that collects other outcasts: a blind imam, retired hijras, a Dalit (the group that was formerly called "untouchables") man who's pretending to be a Muslim (slightly less socially rejected) and has renamed himself Saddam Hussein, a newborn baby found on the sidewalk, and, eventually, Tilo, whose story forms the second half of the novel.
Tilo's story is far more structurally experimental than Anjum's. It frequently skips around in time and place, switches narrators, diverts at one point into a long, nearly nonfictional satire of children's fiction, and takes a hundred pages or so just to explain what happened to Tilo. It's hard to even call it her story, since the second half of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is even less about her than the three men who were her college friends and who are all obsessively in love with her: Musa, who grows up to become a Kashmiri freedom fighter; Biplab Dasgupta, who becomes a government agent also in Kashmir, organizing the torture, murders, and propaganda Musa fights against; and Naga, who starts out as a human rights activist, transitions into being a leftist journalist, and is slowly corrupted by Dasgupta into being a government mouthpiece. Tilo herself is a bit of a manic pixie dream girl, left traumatized by what she's witnessed and seemingly passive to the will of whoever she's around. But even more than any of them, it's a novel about Kashmir and all of its people: toddlers shot at funerals, movie theaters remade into "interrogation" centers, the intellectually disabled mistaken for militant commanders and beaten to death, 4am awakenings, martyr graveyards, poisoned gifts.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is about a group of outcasts who find family and, well, utmost happiness by abandoning the real world and making their own. But because of that theme it is, ultimately, also a story about the world that cast them out in the first place. In other words, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a novel that is all about modern Indian politics, and it assumes that the reader is already familiar with the issues. I mentioned above the 2002 Gujarat riots and Kashmiri freedom movement, but The Ministry of Utmost Happiness also covers Anna Hazare's 2001 anti-corruption protests, Adivasis and the Naxalite insurgency, cow vigilante killings, the Bhopal chemical disaster, Narendra Modi's rise to power, and Hindutva. If you don't know what any of those are, Roy's not going to explain it to you. As an example of what I mean by that, Modi (India's current prime minister) is never actually referred to by name. It's obviously him, but Roy always calls him Gujarat ka Lalla, or Gujarat's Beloved. If you can't recognize him by description alone, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is not particularly interested in speaking to you. Which I don't mean as a criticism; plenty of writers have a specific audience and aren't interested in doing 101 for outsiders. But I think it does explain a lot of the negative reactions that I've seen to this book. It's pretty incomprehensible if you don't follow Indian politics. (And if you do, I have to admit that it's a little bit "Greatest Hits of Indian Leftists", as though Roy had to cram every single issue that she's ever been concerned with into one novel.)
I wish it leaned a little heavier on the characters and their personal emotions and a little lighter on the political lessons, but I enjoyed The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. It doesn't remotely compare to The God of Small Things in lyricism or tragic power, but that's okay. Not every book has to be world-changing. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness might be smaller and more likely to be forgotten, but it's a good story for here and now.
Which brings us to the new POVs of this book: General Khiruev, the (former) leader of said fleet, who is forced by training and drugs to obey anyone ranked above her, even when she loathes them wholeheartedly, as she does Jedao; Kel Brezan, an underling in the same fleet who is one of the extremely rare military people capable of disobeying a direct order, but if he does choose to contradict Jedao, he'll be outing himself as untrustworthy and almost certainly will be discharged for that very ability (Brezan is also a transman, but it's so unimportant in this world that it only comes up in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference); and, way on the other side of the galaxy, Shuos Mikodez, leader of the assassination/intelligence/propaganda arm of the Hexarchate. Mikodez knew Jedao before his current incarnation in Cheris's body, has his own reasons for possibly wanting to overthrow the Hexarchate, and provides a broader perspective on all the action and plotting.
One of the most exciting and suspenseful elements of Raven Stratagem is simply who is the central person? Did Jedao destroy Cheris's consciousness and take over her body? Is it Cheris, pretending to be Jedao for reasons of her own? Did the two of them melt into one personality? And, whoever it is, what is their real goal? Cheris/Jedao claim to be out to destroy the Hexarchate, but how and why? And what do they plan to replace it with? To put it simply: can they be trusted? This question is what Khiruev, Brezan, and Mikodez all spend an entire book trying to figure out.
Raven Stratagem is very much a novel about war and the atrocities committed therein; it's about despotic government and how it warps everyone within it as part of the price of individual survival; it's about what you choose to do when the world is terrible but fixing it might kill more people than leaving the structural oppression in place. And it's SO GOOD.
I do have to admit that I was slightly less emotionally engaged by Raven Stratagem than I was by Ninefox Gambit. I think it's because, while the new POVs are all great characters, I originally latched on hard to Cheris and especially to the mystery behind Jedao's motivations, and they are both kept somewhat at a distance in Raven Stratagem. It's the only way the mystery of "who is this?" could work, of course – an internal POV would have given away the solution on page 1 – but nonetheless I missed them both.
Despite that, Raven Stratagem is a wonderful book and part of a wonderful trilogy and you all should read it immediately! If you haven't already.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy. A novel set in modern India by the author of The God of Small Things. I have been waiting for Roy to return to writing fiction for nearly twenty years... though I don't like to complain when she's been spending her time on vitally important journalism that seeks to point out injustices and protect minorities. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is exactly the novel you might expect from a writer with that background.
Our main character – or so, at least, it appears at first – is Anjum, a hijra (more or less a transwoman, although there are some cultural differences that make it not quite the same identity as in the West) in Shahjahanabad, the old, mostly-Muslim neighborhood of Delhi. The first half of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is the small story of Anjum's life – her singing lessons as a child, her eventual joining of a group of other hijras, her recognition as a famous activist icon only to be undermined in later decades by younger and yet more progressive hijras, her adoption of an abandoned child, her near-death experience in the 2002 Gujarat riots, her emotional breakdown afterward that leads to her losing her adopted daughter to another mother, and her eventual decision to start living in a graveyard, unable to deal with life or the world. As the years and decades pass, though, Anjum slowly recovers, and starts to claim the land within the mostly-disused graveyard, eventually erecting a guesthouse that collects other outcasts: a blind imam, retired hijras, a Dalit (the group that was formerly called "untouchables") man who's pretending to be a Muslim (slightly less socially rejected) and has renamed himself Saddam Hussein, a newborn baby found on the sidewalk, and, eventually, Tilo, whose story forms the second half of the novel.
Tilo's story is far more structurally experimental than Anjum's. It frequently skips around in time and place, switches narrators, diverts at one point into a long, nearly nonfictional satire of children's fiction, and takes a hundred pages or so just to explain what happened to Tilo. It's hard to even call it her story, since the second half of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is even less about her than the three men who were her college friends and who are all obsessively in love with her: Musa, who grows up to become a Kashmiri freedom fighter; Biplab Dasgupta, who becomes a government agent also in Kashmir, organizing the torture, murders, and propaganda Musa fights against; and Naga, who starts out as a human rights activist, transitions into being a leftist journalist, and is slowly corrupted by Dasgupta into being a government mouthpiece. Tilo herself is a bit of a manic pixie dream girl, left traumatized by what she's witnessed and seemingly passive to the will of whoever she's around. But even more than any of them, it's a novel about Kashmir and all of its people: toddlers shot at funerals, movie theaters remade into "interrogation" centers, the intellectually disabled mistaken for militant commanders and beaten to death, 4am awakenings, martyr graveyards, poisoned gifts.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is about a group of outcasts who find family and, well, utmost happiness by abandoning the real world and making their own. But because of that theme it is, ultimately, also a story about the world that cast them out in the first place. In other words, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a novel that is all about modern Indian politics, and it assumes that the reader is already familiar with the issues. I mentioned above the 2002 Gujarat riots and Kashmiri freedom movement, but The Ministry of Utmost Happiness also covers Anna Hazare's 2001 anti-corruption protests, Adivasis and the Naxalite insurgency, cow vigilante killings, the Bhopal chemical disaster, Narendra Modi's rise to power, and Hindutva. If you don't know what any of those are, Roy's not going to explain it to you. As an example of what I mean by that, Modi (India's current prime minister) is never actually referred to by name. It's obviously him, but Roy always calls him Gujarat ka Lalla, or Gujarat's Beloved. If you can't recognize him by description alone, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is not particularly interested in speaking to you. Which I don't mean as a criticism; plenty of writers have a specific audience and aren't interested in doing 101 for outsiders. But I think it does explain a lot of the negative reactions that I've seen to this book. It's pretty incomprehensible if you don't follow Indian politics. (And if you do, I have to admit that it's a little bit "Greatest Hits of Indian Leftists", as though Roy had to cram every single issue that she's ever been concerned with into one novel.)
I wish it leaned a little heavier on the characters and their personal emotions and a little lighter on the political lessons, but I enjoyed The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. It doesn't remotely compare to The God of Small Things in lyricism or tragic power, but that's okay. Not every book has to be world-changing. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness might be smaller and more likely to be forgotten, but it's a good story for here and now.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-04 02:17 am (UTC)I am incredibly fond of Brezan, whose life would have been much improved as a cranky paper-pusher in a space opera universe with less genocide and more comedy of manners (which he would probably also object to, but at least it would involve less constant stress-testing of his moral event horizons).
no subject
Date: 2019-07-20 11:51 pm (UTC)This is such a perfect description of him! And I think I would kind of love a comedy of manners space opera. Does that exist? Some of the Vorkosigan Saga might count, but other than that, I can't think of any examples.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-21 01:56 am (UTC)I think it must, but I also can't think of any examples that aren't Bujold. I hope the wider internet has got this covered, because I would also like to read it.