Chapters & Choices

Last night I finished book #18 from the “Women in Translation” rec list, which was Pink Slime by Fernanda Trias, translated from Spanish by Heather Cleary. Pink Slime is a dreamy nightmare of a novel set in the aftershocks of an ecological disaster as one woman struggles to hold onto her life.

Nothing is as it once was: society has been upended by the “red wind” that kills anyone caught in it; the narrator is divorced from the husband she first met in childhood; and she has left her job in journalism to work as a caretaker for a disabled young boy.

This is a reflective book; there is very little plot. It drifts between the narrator’s present, her memories of the past, and in some cases, a future-tense look at the next few minutes. She observes the ways the government tries to cover for the damage the red wind continues to do, and the way society continues to fracture. She continues to visit her ex-husband in the hospital, although his condition never changes. She continues to fight with her mother.

In some ways, Pink Slime is a story about someone trying to hold onto a life that is already gone. The narrator clings to the past, for obvious reasons—it was better than her present. And yet, nothing new can be made until she releases that hold.

The thing that will stick with me most about this book is the birds. In the narrator’s world, the birds have gone. Where, no one knows. It is a topic of frequent discussion among the townsfolk. Will the birds come back? It reminds of a line from a Florence + The Machine Song: “What if one day there’s no such thing as snow?” Ecological disaster brings with it a poignant grief. How do you explain birds to a child who’s never seen them but in picture books? What is lost for each of us when an animal or plant or phenomenon is destroyed?

I enjoyed the morose, grief-stricken mood of the book, but it does feel directionless at times in a way that’s not wholly captivating. I can’t say what I take away from it on the whole. I would be curious to read more from this author.

Yesterday, with hours to go until my library hold expired, with another hold not on the horizon before 3 weeks, I finished A Drop of Corruption, the second book in the In the Shadow of the Leviathan series by Robert Jackson Bennett.

Ana and Din are back with another grody and baffling murder. I think the consistency between the first book and the second is very good; if you liked one, you’ll like the other. Bennett maintains the same quality mystery narrative here, dropping believable misleads while feeding out enough information that when Ana makes her breakthrough realizations you can look back and see the path she took.

Bennett’s fantasy world is coming into its own as well. We pick up many months after the end of the last book, so Ana and Din have developed a stronger rapport and working relationship. We are fed more information about the world itself—with some outside perspective, as this book takes place entirely in the nation of Yarrow, which is essentially a satellite state of Khanum, pending full annexation once negotiations with Yarrow’s king complete.

I enjoy how the women are written in these books. Ana and our new, local connection, Malo, are wholly unmoored from concerns about what others think of them. Ana is brash, loud, demanding, and arrogant—except that she’s almost always right. She has a masterful understanding of her own capabilities and weaknesses and she’s not afraid to openly discuss either. She’s also crass, gluttonous, and does not have great personal hygiene habits. And yet, everyone simple handles it, because she’s so good at what she does. I feel it’s rare to see a female character like this.

When it comes to the other women in service to the empire, like Thelenai and the female members of Uhad’s crew from the last book, there is little distinction between them and their male colleagues. A number of fantasy stories have posited that their worlds are gender-equal, but many fall utterly short of showing that beyond having women around. In Bennett’s world, in Khanum, I believe it, in part because the women lack the self-consciousness that comes of being raised in a sexist society.

However, this book is politically confused. It is obvious, even before the author’s note, that Bennett thinks very little of monarchy, and its destructive power is hammered over and over throughout the book. In that closing author’s note, Bennett is highly critical both of real-world leaders behaving like kings, and the glorification of monarchy in fantasy literature. However, the glaring hole in this, to me, is that no commentary is made on the empire. Ana and Din hail from what is nothing more than an elevated monarchy—one where their centuries-old emperor has chosen to extend his power well beyond his initial borders. Now, it makes perfect sense that Ana and Din believe in the good of Khanum. They serve it, they are members of its government. However, Khanum’s pending annexation of Yarrow is posited as almost universally a good thing for Yarrow—indeed, the only character we see strongly opposed to it is easily the most loathsome character in the book. There is criticism also of Yarrow’s practice of slavery, but when Din protests that a potential Khanum retreat from the annexation would leave the slaves of Yarrow to their fate, Ana warns him it is not Khanum’s place to legislate the morality of other places. And yet, over and over and over again for all of human history, empires have believed it was their place to do just that—and violently (Hello, White Man’s Burden).

Perhaps these inconsistencies would be less sharp if we understood more about Khanum and its role in the world. In A Drop of Corruption, we are told the empire no longer conquers with strength of arms—ergo the protracted negotiations with Yarrow. However, that means it did, and even in the last book we saw how the empire treats its cantons, with the utter destruction of Oypat accepted as a reasonable price to maintain the wealth of various noble families. Even if the emperor is only a figurehead, we know that Khanum is tightly bound by the whims and desires of its nobility. It was baffling to me why this is never raised in the political discussions of Yarrow and the annexation.

Moving on, we get new backstory on both Ana and Din here, which bulks their characters out (although Din’s apparent lifelong yearning to join the Legion feels a bit out of left field) and leaves us in a very interesting place for the third book. Ana continues to be a vicious delight and without spoilers, we are finally learning what makes her so unique.

I also had to appreciate the importance the narrative places on civil servants. One of Din’s gripes about life in the Iudex is, essentially, that it is unglamorous and frequently bureaucratic. Yet the narrative champions those who do the day-to-day drudgery of running a country, frequently for no thanks. It takes the garbage men and the post office workers and the teachers and the Social Security Administration clerks to run things, and A Drop of Corruption says these people are important, and the work they do is important, even if it is rarely recognized.

Bennett has hit his stride with this series and I’m curious to see where it goes next.

The other book I finished during my voyage through the southwest was How to Love Your Daughter by Hila Blum, translated from Hebrew by Daniella Zamir. This was book [checks notes] #17 from the “Women in Translation” rec list. It’s about an estranged mother and daughter; as the mother peers through the windows of her adult daughter’s house from across the street, she ponders what went wrong in their formerly loving relationship.

How to Love Your Daughter is a cerebral kind of novel that swims back and forth between Yoella’s present, desperately reaching after the daughter who’s walked out of her life, and Yoella’s recollections of raising Leah.

The twists and turns of their relationship are subtle, almost too subtle. Both characters come off slightly neurotic, fussing about every minor interaction and seeming, to me, to invent problems where none really existed. In the end, it’s not so much a long-deteriorating relationship, which is what I expected, as it is Yoella making one decision that forever alters Leah’s perception of her.

“No one warned me my love could destroy her,” Yoella says about Leah at one point and that’s the core of it. Yoella adores her daughter, almost beyond reason. And it’s that very willingness to put Leah above everyone and everything else that eventually pushes Leah away from her, which is such a perfect tragedy.

I saw another review that said this book was both too long and too short, and I think there’s some truth to that. There are drawn out middle sections which don’t necessarily add much, but the ultimate break and subsequent efforts at reconciliation by Yoella don’t get as much room to breathe as might have benefitted them.

However, the ending is an exquisite microcosm of the tension of the whole novel, leaving you wondering about unreliable narrators and perceptions. Some people felt that Yoella gets off too easy—I would recommend rereading the section where Leah talks to Yoella about her reality/fantasy of Dennis writing her a letter.

I don’t know that either Yoella or Leah comes off as really sympathetic here, but they do come off very human, full of flaws and self-justifications and irrational reactions. And maybe sometimes it’s just human nature to create a tragedy where there didn’t have to be one.