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juushikaTitle: My Real Children
Author: Jo Walton
Published: New York: Tor, 2014
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 320
Total Page Count: 176,605
Text Number: 517
Read Because: fan of the author, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: In the grips of dementia, Patricia remembers the two parallel paths of her long life. This frame narration is interesting but too concise, particularly in the book's resolution. And there's something disappointing in the final message of female martyrdom, that women's (voluntary, no less) suffering is necessary to buy a better world. But the embedded narrative is fantastic. Each life is full of minute detail, but the alternating narrative maintains the pacing. Patricia's lifetimes, one in an abusive marriage, the other as a lesbian in a nuclear world, are issue-heavy and occasionally moralizing, but with the best intentions; together, they illustrate the way that sexuality and sexism and circumstance build a life. In no reality is Patricia confined to her social limitations; she remains, and makes herself, a complete and dynamic person. My Real Children is intimate, finely detailed, sympathetic, and personal; beautiful to read, for all its heartbreak. That it sometimes folds under close scrutiny makes the experience it offers no less effective.
This is not quite one of the books-about-books that compel me to write lists–but it’s by Jo Walton; of course it’s also about the narratives we consume to create ourselves. Thus:
Media mentioned in My Real Children
including name-dropped historical figures, not including locations; in approximate order of appearance; probably not exhaustive, but close
Charlotte Sometimes, Penelope Farmer
J.R.R. Tolkien (as a teacher), also: The Lord of the Rings
Beowulf
Margaret Drabble ("at Oxford [....] everyone had the excitement of thinking they might be going to be someone famous." I can't find the source of this reference.)
Elizabeth Gaskell, generally and: Cranford
"Ozymandias," Percy Bysshe Shelley ("The lone and level sands stretch far away")
"Sea Fever," John Masefield ("the lonely sea and the sky")
John Ball ("When Adam delved")
King Canute
A.E. Housman
John Milton
Metaphysical poets
The Bible; The Acts of the Apostles
Virginia Woolf, generally and: A Room of One's Own
Robert Herrick
Andrew Marvell
T.S. Eliot
1984, George Orwell (the two minute's hate)
The letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett
Sonnets from the Portuguese, Elizabeth Barret Browning
Thomas Hardy
William Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, also "Shakespeare's bawdy"
Romanticism, specifically: its view of nature
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Adventures of Roderick Random, Tobias Smollett
D.H. Lawrence
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (Malthusian belts)
Andrew Marvell
"To His Coy Mistress," Andrew Marvell ("A hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze; Two hundred to adore each breast..." "Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball" "And tear our pleasures with rough strife Through the iron gates of life" "Time's wingèd chariot")
Gustave Doré's etchings of Dante's Divine Comedy, specifically of Inferno
Inferno, Dante Alighieri, trans. Dorothy L Sayers
Gaudy Night and Busman's Honeymoon, Dorothy L. Sayers
Renaissance art
Madonna of the Magnificat, Primavera, and The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli
Raphael, specifically: portraits of popes
Ganymede, Perseus with the Head of Medusa, and autobiography, Benvenuto Cellini
Bust of Cellini, Raffaello Romanelli
Christ and St. Thomas, Andrea del Verrocchio
Oscar Wilde (in context of homosexuality)
Alan Turing (cameo)
Niccolò Machiavelli
Middlemarch, George Eliot (Causaubon's sterile Key to All Mythologies)
The frescoes of Pitti Palace: Lorenzo de' Medici welcoming the exiled muses to Florence, Lorenzo de' Medici pointing out the young Michelangelo
Marsilio Ficino's tomb (and as translator of:)
Plato
David, Michelangelo
The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
The Mikado, Gilbert and Sullivan
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer
Astounding Science-Fiction a.k.a. Analog Science Fiction and Fact
Miscellaneous paintings: of Saint Elizabeth, of anonymous Renaissance Italian women in crowds
John Donne, general and specific: ("Her marriage had never been her whole life. Donne was wrong about that as so much else." I can't find the source of this reference.)
Sappho
"To Lucasta, going to the Wars," Arthur Quiller-Couch ("I could not love thee, Dear, so much, Loved I not Honour more")
Peter Gabriel (musician)
Italian pop and "Volga beat"
Antonio Vivaldi
Igor Stravinsky
Gaudete
Henry Moore
Neo-Impressionism
Author: Jo Walton
Published: New York: Tor, 2014
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 320
Total Page Count: 176,605
Text Number: 517
Read Because: fan of the author, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: In the grips of dementia, Patricia remembers the two parallel paths of her long life. This frame narration is interesting but too concise, particularly in the book's resolution. And there's something disappointing in the final message of female martyrdom, that women's (voluntary, no less) suffering is necessary to buy a better world. But the embedded narrative is fantastic. Each life is full of minute detail, but the alternating narrative maintains the pacing. Patricia's lifetimes, one in an abusive marriage, the other as a lesbian in a nuclear world, are issue-heavy and occasionally moralizing, but with the best intentions; together, they illustrate the way that sexuality and sexism and circumstance build a life. In no reality is Patricia confined to her social limitations; she remains, and makes herself, a complete and dynamic person. My Real Children is intimate, finely detailed, sympathetic, and personal; beautiful to read, for all its heartbreak. That it sometimes folds under close scrutiny makes the experience it offers no less effective.
This is not quite one of the books-about-books that compel me to write lists–but it’s by Jo Walton; of course it’s also about the narratives we consume to create ourselves. Thus:
Media mentioned in My Real Children
including name-dropped historical figures, not including locations; in approximate order of appearance; probably not exhaustive, but close
Charlotte Sometimes, Penelope Farmer
J.R.R. Tolkien (as a teacher), also: The Lord of the Rings
Beowulf
Margaret Drabble ("at Oxford [....] everyone had the excitement of thinking they might be going to be someone famous." I can't find the source of this reference.)
Elizabeth Gaskell, generally and: Cranford
"Ozymandias," Percy Bysshe Shelley ("The lone and level sands stretch far away")
"Sea Fever," John Masefield ("the lonely sea and the sky")
John Ball ("When Adam delved")
King Canute
A.E. Housman
John Milton
Metaphysical poets
The Bible; The Acts of the Apostles
Virginia Woolf, generally and: A Room of One's Own
Robert Herrick
Andrew Marvell
T.S. Eliot
1984, George Orwell (the two minute's hate)
The letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett
Sonnets from the Portuguese, Elizabeth Barret Browning
Thomas Hardy
William Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, also "Shakespeare's bawdy"
Romanticism, specifically: its view of nature
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Adventures of Roderick Random, Tobias Smollett
D.H. Lawrence
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (Malthusian belts)
Andrew Marvell
"To His Coy Mistress," Andrew Marvell ("A hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze; Two hundred to adore each breast..." "Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball" "And tear our pleasures with rough strife Through the iron gates of life" "Time's wingèd chariot")
Gustave Doré's etchings of Dante's Divine Comedy, specifically of Inferno
Inferno, Dante Alighieri, trans. Dorothy L Sayers
Gaudy Night and Busman's Honeymoon, Dorothy L. Sayers
Renaissance art
Madonna of the Magnificat, Primavera, and The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli
Raphael, specifically: portraits of popes
Ganymede, Perseus with the Head of Medusa, and autobiography, Benvenuto Cellini
Bust of Cellini, Raffaello Romanelli
Christ and St. Thomas, Andrea del Verrocchio
Oscar Wilde (in context of homosexuality)
Alan Turing (cameo)
Niccolò Machiavelli
Middlemarch, George Eliot (Causaubon's sterile Key to All Mythologies)
The frescoes of Pitti Palace: Lorenzo de' Medici welcoming the exiled muses to Florence, Lorenzo de' Medici pointing out the young Michelangelo
Marsilio Ficino's tomb (and as translator of:)
Plato
David, Michelangelo
The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
The Mikado, Gilbert and Sullivan
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer
Astounding Science-Fiction a.k.a. Analog Science Fiction and Fact
Miscellaneous paintings: of Saint Elizabeth, of anonymous Renaissance Italian women in crowds
John Donne, general and specific: ("Her marriage had never been her whole life. Donne was wrong about that as so much else." I can't find the source of this reference.)
Sappho
"To Lucasta, going to the Wars," Arthur Quiller-Couch ("I could not love thee, Dear, so much, Loved I not Honour more")
Peter Gabriel (musician)
Italian pop and "Volga beat"
Antonio Vivaldi
Igor Stravinsky
Gaudete
Henry Moore
Neo-Impressionism
