John Crowley (1)Kirja-arvosteluja

The best "What if?" stories out there are the ones which take a certain action (or character) and change it a little bit - and then allow the story to unfold with that change in place. Sometimes, that allows weirder things to be added, sometimes it is just a story as it may have happened.

Crowley went for the first option - he started with a small change but wrapped it into a secret society and time travel. And yet, the novella works because its internal logic makes sense inside of its own framework.

Cecil Rhodes's real life reads as a story even without embellishments. His will established the Rhodes Scholarship - which is probably the first thing a modern reader think of when they hear his name. His story in Africa may be colorful and his name may be living in a lot of local names (past and current) but I'd admit that I knew very little about him before I met him in this novella (and then went to check how much of what was in the text was true - the answer ended up being "a lot").

It all started really innocently - a young man invented a time machine and went back in time to get a rare stamp. Things did not go exactly as expected and before long the reality he started from seemed to have changed - the British Empire never fell, a time traveling society had been meddling and ensuring that the Empire will stand forever and history as we know it had become a bit less stable. So where does Rhodes come into play you wonder? Well, he had the money and he had the right upbringing and mindset - setting up a scholarship while making sense before his death did not really match his thoughts earlier in his life. So what if he never managed to get to the later stage of his life and never got disillusioned with the Empire?

For most of the novella, the reader needs to pick up from sometimes very subtle clues what kind of reality the text is talking about - ours, the one where Rhodes dies even younger than in ours or something totally different. It could have been frustrating but it ends up fascinating - Crowley's handling of the real history works flawlessly in its merging of the story of a young man, Winterset, who is asked to go back in time and undo a change which brought what he thinks of the real history. There are some places where the text could have stalled but somehow it never happens - the necessary confusion for the story to work ends up being the strength of the novella. And by the end of it, by the time when the reader knows a lot more about that world than any of the characters, it all gets tied together - all the way back to where we started with that rare stamp.

This story is exactly what science fiction (and fantasy) is really good at - looking at real life issues with a different lens. In this case, it is colonialism and the British Colonial Service - the format allows the exploration not only of what had been but of what could have been (both good and bad). The ending may feel unresolved - the story is closed but there is enough of an opening for everyone, including the reader and Winterset, to realize that this may not be the end.

I am not surprised the novella won the World Fantasy Award (even if it is nominally a science fiction story, there are some elements to push it to the border between the two genres or even over into fantasy) - if anything, I am surprised it did not win more awards. I am glad to have finally found it.½

An Irish nobleman is torn between loyalty to England and his Ulster homeland, or so it appears. A magical flint which he carries on him represents old Ireland and its gods, and a small magical mirror reflects the image of Elizabeth I. With aching beauty and rich period detail, this novel of paranormal history demands to be slowly savored, and so I did.

I really liked this. It had some pretty cool ideas for post-apocalypse societies, but I'll admit, I liked the truthful speakers the best. I got a little bored and distracted at Dr. Boots' List, which is a shame, because it ties in really well with the main story. I hope I didn't miss anything because of it. I very much liked the idea of Path, and the Filing System, and I was intrigued by the League of women. Quite interesting!

It took me forever to get through this book. It has sleep dust embedded throughout its pages, and apparently they’ve invented a release mechanism that works even with e-books. Seriously, I don’t think there was a single session where I sat down to read this book during the day and didn’t fall asleep at some point before standing back up, and I rarely take mid-day naps. Likewise, when I read it before bed, I usually ended up going to sleep earlier than I normally would. So… I guess that’s the main thing I got out of this book. I’m now very well rested?

The story revolves around a large and very convoluted family, most of whom live in or around a large and very convoluted house in the middle of nowhere. There's some overlap with the fairy realm there, so that some family members are able to see them, although others can’t, and most lose the ability as they get older.

My Kindle edition had a family tree – at the very end of the book, with no reference to it in the table of contents that might have clued me in to its existence. By the time I saw it, it was too late to do me much good. The most critical people were pretty easy to keep track of though, and since I was reading on the Kindle I was able to search and find prior references if I forgot who someone was, so I did ok without the tree. In the earlier parts of the book, it jumps back and forth in the timeline quite a bit and introduces a large number of characters, but this wasn’t the part I disliked. It felt a little confusing at times, but I was able to follow it and the setting seemed really interesting, so I’d looked forward to learning where everything was going.

The further I got into the book, the less I liked it. The timeline got more linear and the character focus narrowed, but the story became more nebulous. It became more metaphorical and less logical, and there were long sequences where the author wrote about things happening to characters, except that apparently those things weren’t actually happening, or at least not in the way the characters thought they were, to the point that sometimes I was confused about what was “real” in the context of the book and what wasn’t. And then you have people becoming fish, birds, and trees? It probably didn’t help that, by this point, I was in a perpetually sleepy haze myself whenever I read the book. Reading this made me feel like what I imagine it would feel like to be on drugs, and I’ve never enjoyed books that give me that sensation.

The writing style is more literary I guess, with some odd ways of phrasing things that occasionally required me to re-read a sentence. I wouldn’t call this a funny book, but there were times it made me burst out in surprised laughter because something unexpectedly struck me funny, even toward the end when I wasn’t enjoying it anymore. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure if the things that made me laugh were supposed to be funny. It’s possible I might have been delirious. The ending was as unsatisfying as I expected it to be by the time I finally reached it. This book I think is more about style and atmosphere, but the story itself lacked enough substance for me to sink my teeth into.

I’m rating this at 2.5 stars and rounding down to 2 because I think I would have preferred less sleep.½

If this book had been broken down into a series of novellas, I would have loved almost half of them

There are some magnificently beautiful stories in this book, and I really wanted to love it. There are just as many that I found very boring and charmless. If I enjoy a book enough, a messy ending is generally forgiven. But here, 80 pages from the end my feelings toward this novel were still evenly split love/hate, and then things went downhill for the remainder.

Loose ends, plot-holes, purposeless characters taking up chapter after chapter in an already long tale, and suprisingly little magic for a book about fairies and enchantments.

Still, read it for the good bits.

Interesting and weird. The idea cannot support the novel.

The protagonist of Ka is the corvid Dar Oakley, and the narrator is a nameless man to whom the bird has told his stories, a string of recollected Crow lives over the entirety of human history. The first part is set in prehistoric Europe and the second in the Middle Ages. Part three has two major arcs: one among Native Americans prior to colonization, and another during and after the US Civil War. The final part of the novel returns to the context of the narrator in "the Ruins of Ymr," a near-future setting of social and ecological decay.

The pace throughout is slow and thoughtful, caught between the divergent perceptions and expressions of Person and Crow. There are multiple visionary episodes. As a whole, the book contemplates the incomprehension of memory and mortality, along with the value of story itself.

Una America futuristica y anarquica en que el protagonista es una nueva especie, parte leon, parte hombre. Norteamerica ha sido destruido por la guerra civil. Los animales han sido transformados biologicamente en criaturas hibridas. Violentas bandas de barbaros combaten contra los agentes de ingenieria social. Pero unos y otros odian por igual a los leos y a todas las ultimas criaturas depredadoras, que los hombres llaman Bestias.

Pompous, overwrought, overwritten, overdone. This self-congratulatory piece of drivel even starts with a humble-brag in the form of a pre-amble, where the author 'humbly' apologizes that the has used many references and content from other works. Ironically none of it helps to understand the goal and supposed nuances of the book. That is, assuming you can figure out what a specific set of paragraphs refers to. Most of the time you will spend decoding the content of this book. Either because it is not clear that the author jumped in time, or place, or person. Or you need to move over to Wikipedia to understand a certain reference. I could write a short paragraph describing what the narrative is about but that wouldn't help anyone. Just because an author uses peculiar grammar and impenetrable language, doesn't mean he actually has something interesting to say.

Mil años después de la Tormenta, que ha destruido la sociedad industrial, los sobrevivientes se han dividido en comunidades aisladas, con sus propias y minúsculas culturas. En Belaire Pequeña viven los del Habla con Verdad, que practican una ética de franqueza total, un misticismo alimentado por intoxicantes, y un estilo serpeante de vida y conversación. Vecinos próximos son las gentes más reservadas y puritanas de la Lista de la doctora Botas, aficionadas a los gatos, y descendientes de una organización feminista que llegó a anunciar el fin del mundo.

Smoky Barnable es un joven anodino que viaja a pie desde la ciudad hasta un lugar de nombre Edgewood, que no figura en ningún mapa, con la intención de casarse con Daily Alice Drinkwater, tal y como le han profetizado. Es una historia épica de cuatro generaciones de una peculiar familia que vive en una casa que es muchas casas.
Pero también es la historia de un amor fantástico, de una pérdida desgarradora, de cosas imposibles y destinos inamovibles, de la visión de un futuro distópico en el que Estados Unidos es gobernado por un déspota siniestro.

I honestly didn't know how this book would end. I didn't enjoy it as much as I had hoped, it seemed to drag on and some of the writing came across as awkward to me.

En una tormentosa noche de 1816, Mary Shelley y Lord Byron se desafi aron a escribir una historia de miedo. Como resultado, Mary Shelley creó a Frankenstein, mientras que Lord Byron abandonó el relato. Hoy, siglos más tarde, una joven historiadora encuentra documentos que demuestran que el mítico autor llegó a escribir la novela que fue cifrada en un misterioso código matemático por la hija de éste.

Crowley, John. Engine Summer. 1979. Gollancz, 2013.
Engine Summer is set in a deep post-apocalyptic future in which a young man, Rush that Speaks, from an idyllic sustainable community sets out on a quest to reunite with his lover, Once A Day. He finds that his world is a stranger place than he imagines. Will he one day become an Angel, a being remembered only for his story? The style of the novel is self-consciously poetic. You have to be in the mood for something uplifting. 4 stars, if you are in such a mood.

"Style over substance" is widely understood to be a criticism, yet some artists can chisel out a style so precisely that it becomes substance itself. Crowley approaches this in the best parts of Little, Big—here's someone who can write about a child yawning for the first time in a way that leaves me wide-eyed until it dawns on me what it is that's being described. However, I'm unable to comment on whether the zigzagging plot coalesces into anything coherent by the end. The style alone propelled me about 75% of the way through the whole book. But then I gave up and just felt annoyed I'd even gone that far. I found the relationship that the novel opened with charming and maturely written. I could deal with their story fading to the background as the generations proceed, but once the spotlight is on Auberon and Sylvie, I just couldn't stomach another paragraph about her panties or magical brown Puerto Rican skin. Then he hits us with Auberon letting her sleep with other guys "as long as, when you're with me, you're with me" and look, I could happily read a story about this kind of dynamic, but what's here is a single paragraph that serves no purpose except to say "look how progressive my story is." Now, not only am I being turned off by sections Crowley is writing like he has all the faith in the world are going to turn me on, I'm comparing Crowley to the kind of dude that would write a poem about how feminist he is so he can go wink at the girls at his reading of it. Too self-congratulatory without being natural enough to seem authentic. So, I go to Wikipedia to check out the other accolades Little, Big has received besides Harold Bloom's, and the next one I see is from this guy. His website background looks like this and the quoted review says: ""Victoria" follows Cosmo Cowperhwait the inventor of a human-amphibian hybrid that bares an uncanny resemblance to Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, as well as an insatiable sexual appetite..." This is one of those cases where I wouldn't even have cared about the flaws if its best moments hadn't held so much promise. So now I walk away thinking, here's someone who writes about sex less compellingly than they can write about a literal yawn.

I note that the only other person who has mentioned the word "sex" on this Librarything page said: "In high contrast to the incomprehensible nature of most of the "action" and relationships were the embarrassing and obvious tropes in the latter half: the oversexed Latina, POC described as food-colored, the manic pixie girl who teaches the young man to live by leaving him." In contrast to that reviewer, I loved the abstract quality of the rest of the work, and the vocabulary, but that stuff still completely put me off of it.½

This is a weird book for me to review. It seems like all the majority of the action happens out of frame, described after or before, with just a line or two, about the results or strategy. O'Neill is a flawed character, owing allegiances to both the English and the Irish, sitting a tight line between the kingdoms to make sure his people have the best chance of survival and the best chance of winning their freedom back from the English. its a brutal world, where children are put in dungeons as ransom, where whole villages are destroyed. While the novel is fantasy, it is based on reality. The public events of the book happened. I hadn't realized how the English took Ireland, the beginning of their colonialism.

The language is beautiful. John Crowley has a way with words that can articulate a complete sense of a person, in a sentence or two. But, with only a sentence or two, the brutality of a person can easily by missed, for example, only a few sentences are devoted to Hugh's fiery temper, and quick to action. I'm glad a read it - its not a book I would have read if I knew that it was more historical fiction, rather than actual a book of "History and Magic".½

I rarely read fantasy, wait I never do. So I read this book anyway. Not altogether my cup of tea, yet it was not all bad either for me. A complex winding plot with many characters, some of which I struggled to piece in and remember their purpose in the plot.

No doubt Crowley is an excellent wordsmith with a fantastical mind, no no criticism there. For fans of the fantasy genre this certainly would entice them. For myself I am satisfied to say I read it and gained a bit from the experience, now back to non-fiction.

I really want to like this book and this tetrology, but I have to put it down. I read the first 400 pages or so in about a week, and then let the last 50 languish on my bedroom floor. Maybe reading the first two in succession was not the best idea, as the wandering structure and lack of definite idea (or one idea that does indeed bear repeating but not THAT MUCH, man, not that much) strain the integrity of the characters. The problem might be that I'm not ready to understand and appreciate the full idea of Crowley's ("there is more than one hisotry of the world"), and need to come back to it when I can wrap my mind around it.

However, his obvious joy as a wordsmith is a constant delight. Must be said.

John Crowley’s Flint and Mirror brims with fascinating, well-crafted history. Sadly, the accompanying magic feels less essential.

The story is primarily set in 16th-century Ireland following Queen Elizabeth’s assumption of the English throne. Her father, Henry VIII (the second monarch of the infamous Tudor dynasty), had already begun England’s shift to Protestantism and conquest of Ireland. Much of its people remained staunchly Catholic, however, and Elizabeth sought to finish bringing the isle to heel.

Crowley’s protagonist is Hugh O’Neill, heir to a line of Irish royalty. Flint and Mirror tells the tale of O’Neill’s long life in a short span of pages, chronicling his early days as an English ward—brought to London under the premise that “like an eyas falcon, a young Irish lord if taken early enough might later come more willingly to the English wrist”—his rise to power in Ireland, and his eventual rebellion against his former colonial benefactors.

There’s much to admire here. Crowley relates the brutality of the occupying English forces without casting O’Neill as a wholly innocent hero. Flint and Mirror also gives a sense of larger happenings in Europe, often from unexpected vantages. (My favorite example: when a minor character watches a storm wreck wayward ships of the Spanish Armada upon a rocky section of the Irish coast. O’Neill then takes in some of the survivors—allies in the fight against Protestant England—and shelters them until the time comes to wage “the last war against … the Queen’s armies.”)

And the prose is gorgeous. Some memorable lines:

- “The Earl looked down on himself, the red curls of his breast gone gray, the scars and welts where no hair grew. The land that was himself, in all its history.”

- "With a great yawn, a gulp of morning, he awoke entirely at last.”

- “As though she were some fabulous many-walled fort, mined and breached, through the slashings and partings of her outer dress another could be seen, and where that was opened there was another, and lace beneath that.”

Yet Crowley casts Flint and Mirror as a historical fantasy without making the fantasy consequential.

The two objects in the title are magical artifacts given to O’Neill during his youth. One is of Irish origin, the other English. But despite suggestions that they might allow him to summon mythical allies to his aid or spy on his enemies, we never see him wield these powers in meaningful fashion. We’re also told there’s a larger “war in heaven” underway, but this doesn’t play out on the page either. Mostly, the magic in Flint and Mirror serves the symbolic function of explaining O’Neill’s conflicting loyalties (and perhaps doubles as a larger metaphor for Ireland’s fraught relationship with England). For similar reasons, I wish the subplot featuring an Irish woman and a creature of legend had impacted the main storyline.

To repeat, though, Crowley’s writing is beautiful—more than good enough to keep me going through the sections where I wondered whether Flint and Mirror should have been straight historical fiction. Here’s another quote to whet your appetite (a description of the Spanish sailors O’Neill rescued): “Only when they were called to war at last, given arms and armor from the hidden stores of the earl of Ulster and the lord of Tyrconnell and ordered to the south for the last battle, did they inspire fear as they went: dressed in white, as they had when they were seamen, daghaidhe duvh, dark of face, they would seem as they moved over the land to be of that black tribe of the O’Donahues that cast no shadow. Yet they went in hope to join their old ships, that were sailing again for Ireland from Spain: to join the fight against the English on Ireland’s behalf, and on the side of those who had saved them.”

Stirring stuff in any genre, and worth reading in full.

(For more reviews like this one, see www.nickwisseman.com)

Mögnuð fantasía sem John Crowley hefur skapað. Í henni segir frá fjórum kynslóðum íbúa sem búa í húsi sem ekki finnst á korti, er raunar mörg hús í einu og á mörkum mannheima og álfheima. Þetta er ástar og harmsaga íbúanna sem búin eru mikil forlög og alltumlykjandi er sambúðin við íbúa álfheima með kostum og göllum því þá verður að umgangast með varúð og virðingu. Stíllinn er lágstemmdur og draumkenndur auk þess sem töfrar og verur álfheima eru bakatil í sögunni en fjallað er fyrst og fremst um fjölskylduna.
Fallegur prósi og mikil dýpt. Crowley fékk World Fantasy Award 1982 fyrir söguna auk þess sem hún var tilnefnd til margra af helstu vísindaskáldsagna- og fantasíuverðlauna ársins. Vel þess virði að lesa.

I. LOVED. THIS. BOOK. I sat riveted, reading the last hundred-plus pages last night. Had to pee for the final hour, but couldn't be bothered. Had to know what happened next. That's how damn GOOD this book is! And I don't really want to write a standard kinda book review. I just want to tell everybody about what a terrific read this is. But okay. I'll try. The protagonist of John Crowley's THE TRANSLATOR is Christa 'Kit' Malone, and we meet her as a young girl, then as a high school and college student, and also as an adult, thirty-some years later, traveling to St Petersburg for a poetry conference. As a girl, she brought to mind Carson McCullers' Frankie, from MEMBER OF THE WEDDING, because of her close bond with her older brother, Ben. Kit was devastated when Ben left her to join the Army, and felt even more betrayed when he re-enlisted for Special Forces. In retaliation she has sex with an older boy she barely knows and becomes pregnant. It's the early sixties, and the Malones are devout Catholics, so Kit is sent away to a home for unwed mothers administered by nuns. Then we meet her at college, enrolling a semester late. There she meets the expat Russian poet, Innokenti I. Falin, enrolls in his class and, infatuated, falls deeply in love with him, though he is easily twice her age. A mysterious figure, we learn Falin's story in bits and pieces, and even those fragments are questionable. He confides to Kit how he was a homeless street child - a la Dickens - in the Stalin years, served in the army in the war, and spent time in prison. But he was also a recognized poet, and was supposedly deported to the U.S. as an undesirable. Is he a Soviet agent, a double agent for the U.S.? Falin's status remains murky, as the two spend a summer session collaborating on translating his poems, but their love affair seems genuine, particularly in that Falin is very reluctant to consummate it. And then, in the fall, their story suddenly collides with the tense times of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the narrative begins to accelerate towards an uncertain climax.

Oh yeah, and Kit was a poet too, something Falin encouraged, and she was also taking an intensive summer course in Russian at the university's Language Institute where her classmates were mostly young Air Force guys. This is where I figured out that the unnamed midwestern university must be Indiana, because in the 1970s I met a number of Air Force linguists who got their Russian training at Indiana in Bloomington.

But I digress, and I know this is all a poor excuse for a book review, but I guess I'm just trying to explain why I loved this book so much and how I could relate to so much if it. In fact I was just halfway through Army basic training when the Cuban Missile Crisis happened. So yeah, I was really caught up in this story. That and Kit. She was just such a heartbreakingly real character. (I was reminded of Natalie Wood as Deenie in SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS. That kind of vulnerability and innocence.)

Ah well. Enough. Loved this book Absolutely loved it. My hat is off to Mr Crowley. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the Cold War memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA

I was excited to start reading this...now I'm 20% through (page # meaningless on Kindle) and bored to hell. I dunno...maybe I'll keep going, but....I've got Little, Big now. I think I'll give that a shot.

I was excited to start reading this...now I'm 20% through (page # meaningless on Kindle) and bored to hell. I dunno...maybe I'll keep going, but....I've got Little, Big now. I think I'll give that a shot.

I wanted to like this book, but just could not get into it.

GOOD WILL
YOU MARK BELOW.
ALL ALL RIGHT WITH LOVE AFTERWARDS
WHY NOT SAY YES
[ ] YES