To Hold up the Sky – 3/5
I really like the Cixin Liu novels I’ve read, and have felt that the short story collections are a mixed bag. The issue tends to be a lack of closing confidence. There’s also some cool premises, and some interesting premises explored in strange ways.
The opening story “The Village Teacher” splits the narrative between a simple country teacher and an intergalactic war, and the way in which these get resolved is really interesting.
Another story takes a huge chunk of humanity and freezes them in time in a resource saving ploy, and as the humans move into the future, they check in from time to time on humanity’s progress. This is an old sci fi conceit, but it’s explored well.
Another story posits a technology that creates an atomic level mirror copy of the Earth and captures that new Earth for all time as an almost searchable planet of all human history. Which leads to some very frightening discussions about free will and surveillance. In a similar story, a mirror like lens floats near the Earth and the reflections allows for…well, some reflection.
“When it was born, the universe was smaller than an atom, and everything within it was intermixed as a single whole; the natural connection between the universe’s small parts and its great entirety was thus determined. Though the universe has expanded to whatever its current size, this connection still exists, and if we can’t see it now, that doesn’t mean we won’t be able to in the future.”
“Language was a bottleneck—he knew he didn’t have enough time. He fantasized that the knowledge he had spent his life accumulating—not much, but dear to him—was lodged in his brain like small pearls, and that as he spoke, a crystal ax chopped the pearls out of his brain onto the floor, where the children scrambled to gather them like sweets at New Year’s. It was a happy fantasy.”
“When you read or make science fiction, your sympathy automatically moves away from ideas of ethnicity and nation and toward a higher idea of humanity as a whole; from this vantage, humanity naturally becomes a collective unit, rather than an assembly of different parts divided by ethnicity and nation.”
The Guermantes Way – 5/5
This third volume of Proust’s long novel primarily takes place as our narrator has moved directly into the neighboring sphere of the Guermantes household (the local nobles) and has fallen in love (kind of?) with the Lady of the house, the Duchess Guermantes.
This, along with the background buzz about the recent Dreyfus Case, where a French (who is Jewish) military official is arrested and convicted of treason, and whose case, while also being expressly false brings up a huge swath of anti-Semitism along with it. In the novel, it comes to stand for the idle nobles taking on pet opinions and stances, not really representing factions or even opinions, so much as affectations toward one view of the case or the other.
The novel moves from there to our narrator’s affection for other women.
Like all the other volumes, it’s hard to review in brief the experience of the book. This is the longest of the volumes, but none of them ever feel that long, while also feeling terminable at times. A fair review, which this isn’t, would take on some of the long swimming passages and look closely at the interplay between the ideas and the language, and especially in the way that memory and time function. In the same way that I tend to think about how Shakespeare gave us the sense that human beings are individuals with individual consciousnesses, Proust gives us the feel of someone not just being a person in the world, but a person living a life in the world.
“We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say so we represent that hour to ourselves as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time, it never occurs to us that it can have any connexion with the day that has already dawned, or may signify that death — or its first assault and partial possession of us, after which it will never leave hold of us again — may occur this very afternoon, so far from uncertain, this afternoon every hour of which has already been allotted to some occupation. You make a point of taking your drive every day so that in a month’s time you will have had the full benefit of the fresh air; you have hesitated over which cloak you will take, which cabman to call, you are in the cab, the whole day lies before you, short because you have to be at home early, as a friend is coming to see you; you hope that it will be as fine again to-morrow; and you have no suspicion that death, which has been making its way towards you along another plane, shrouded in an impenetrable darkness, has chosen precisely this day of all days to make its appearance, in a few minutes’ time, more or less, at the moment when the carriage has reached the Champs-Elysées.”
“A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.”
Anything for Billy – 3/5
Sometimes Larry McMurtry just can’t help himself. In general I do find Larry McMurtry quite funny. Sometimes he’s less than funny. This book is a retelling of the Billy the Kid story from the perspective this time of a dime novelist who left his home in Boston to go out West and ends up palling around with Billy (Here: Billy Bone). The novel is chunked into several long sections with numerous short chapters, mimicking the style and structure of the dime novels that our narrator is known for writing. It has mixed results. For me, I find it difficult to read bit sized chapters, and end up immediately jumping to the next. I like short chapters, but not like this.
The novel is not written exactly in the style of the dime novels, which is a relief, but not entirely as an anti-dime novel either. This isn’t so much about upending the mythos of the West (although kind of) so much as questioning that mythos and investigating the truth as we know it versus the story as it’s been told.
I guess the issue isn’t so much that the novel isn’t as funny as it thinks it is, so much as the novel can’t quite figure out how to place itself. I will also say that I find Larry McMurtry’s novels with real-life character to easily be his worst over all.
Dance to the Music of Time: Vol 3 – 4/5
The Valley of Bones -This 7th (!!) book in the series begins with our narrator and main character Nick successfully joining the Army (as he was trying to do at the end of the first book). Nick was too young for WWI and probably is too old now, something he’s basically directly told near the end of this first book when he gets transferred away from a fighting unit. In the meantime, it’s early in the war, and the early time was in general a disaster for the Allies, who had older, smaller, standing armies, but were slow to train and update their forces. In addition, the stakes, the parameters, and other information was still unknown for the most part, so there’s a lot of muddling about.
Nick has lots of time on his hands, and he mostly spends it talking with other officers. Nick is also trying to find his philosophical place in the war too, and he envisions himself among the history of England’s wars, and finds the 20th century lacking in romance. We of course know it’s not lacking in horror.
The Soldier’s Art – This 8th book continues Nick in his role in the military, now more on the admin side, and more so now on his way out of things. He’s moved into the command of Widmerpool, the former mediocre student whose ambition outweighs his ability. Nick begins to realize that the military tends to function like a lot of other bureaucratic offices, where the ticking off of a list matters more than the completion of a task with excellence. He also realizes that even in administrative roles, he still must deal with dangerous situations.
The Military Philosophers – The 9th book continues on with the military events, and follows a lot of the same path as the previous. I want to focus on one specific set of moments, Nick’s going to France. There’s a lot of funny little references to Nick’s French abilities, specifically how does he handle reading in French, and especially French literature. He says, yes, but not with the technical materials. Later in France he starts talking about Proust, which is especially funny since this book (set of books) is clearly modeled on Proust in a lot of way, but also in a very straight set of books.
“There could be no doubt, so I was finally forced to decide, that the longer one dealt with them, the more one developed the habit of treating generals like members of the opposite sex; specifically, like ladies no longer young, who therefore deserve extra courtesy and attention; indeed, whose every whim must be given thought.”
“Jeavon’s thick dark hair, with its ridges of corkscrew curls, had now turned quite white, the Charlie Chaplin moustache remaining black. This combination of tones for some reason gave him an oddly Italian appearance, enhanced by blue overalls, obscurely suggesting a railway porter at a station in Italy.”
“That was a good straightforward point of view, no pretence that games were anything but an outlet for power and aggression; no stuff about their being enjoyable as such. You played a game to demonstrate that you did it better than someone else. If it came to that, I thought how few people do anything for its own sake, from making love to practising the arts.”
“His woolly grey hair, short thick body, air of perpetual busyness, suggested an industrious gnome conscripted into the service of the army; a gnome who also liked to practise considerable malice against the race of men with whom he mingled, by making as complicated as possible every transaction they had to execute through himself.”
Blue Mars – 4/5
The final and longest, and sometimes grueling volume of the Mars Trilogy, this novel completes the cycle of Mars colonization. The first book focused on the actual mission to Mars and early colonization. The second book focused on the next generation of colonists and the beginnings of culture and how the Mars colony would interact with Earth, leading to a revolution. This third book focuses on the development of a government, trying to create the necessary coalition to keep the different factions together. Several of our original colonists are still here, because of gerontological treatments, and they’re seeing the ways in which Mars has developed and moved forward, and have mixed feelings about that, and having a hard time letting go. In addition, generations of the Martian humans have been born and are finding that the living a different planet begins to play with how human bodies react.
The book is still very expansive at times, and very claustrophobic at other times, and this mix of closeup and faraway narration can be jarring.
“Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before.”
“That is what capitalism is—a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings. But the hierarchy remains. And so we still hand over our lives’ labor, under duress, to feed rulers who do no real work.”
