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Book Reviews: Crash, Ballard; The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin; The Wolf Wilder, Rundell
Title: Crash
Author: J.G. Ballard
Published: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001 (1973)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 205
Total Page Count: 284,220
Text Number: 920
Read Because: fan of the film, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review:
After being involved in a fatal car crash, a man finds his sexuality and inner landscape remapped by automotive accidents. It's an unexpectedly compelling, perversely logical connection: the violence of a car crash uniting human bodies with omnipresent metal and technology, and with each other; the way that desire wraps itself around trauma and injury. Being drawn into that logic, participating in that same interior remapping, made the film a remarkable experience for me when I first saw it. The book achieves the same work, and I'm glad it exists, but it's a lesser experience.
There's a plot here, but not a complex one, and the bulk of the length is instead profoundly, obnoxiously repetitive language. (Binnacle! "heavy" anatomy! mucus mucous mucosa mucilage! ~45 "chromium" alone!) The explicit sexual content made possible by text is innate to the themes, but likewise is deadened by the language and by the pervasive male gaze. Desensitization is one of the narrative's themes and, perhaps, goals, but it doesn't benefit the book; being familiar with the premise combines with the repetition to make the text a chore. My order of approach probably skews my opinions, but paring the book down in adaptation removes those flaws while maintaining the successful core concept; the original text wants badly for brevity.
Title: The Left Hand of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4)
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Narrator: George Guidall
Published: Recorded Books, 2016 (1969)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 295
Total Page Count: 284,515
Text Number: 921
Read Because: continuing the series, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: An ambassador comes to Winter, a cold planet inhabited by the only humans known to experience estrus, in the attempt to bring them in to the Ekumen union. This rivals The Dispossessed in depth but not in breadth—it has similar gradual but complicated character growth, but the worldbuilding is frontloaded and the plot less dense. It manages to be both reductionist and insightful in its examination of gender, overlooking gender nonconformity in both societies (nonconformity that absolutely existed in 1969) and so maintaining a gender essentialism which violates its own theses, but it's also rigorous in is examination of gender, of culture, of communication—Le Guin's knack for ground-up worldbuilding, where speculative premises impact entire cultures and entire lived experiences is in full force here. So it reads unevenly, not all of it has aged well—but the second half and in particular that long winter cross-country trek is phenomenal, a quiet interpersonal study with incredible language; and I found this well worth my time.
Title: The Wolf Wilder
Author: Katherine Rundell
Published: Simon Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2016 (2015)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 275
Total Page Count: 284,790
Text Number: 922
Read Because: personal enjoyment, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review:
A girl who returns semi-domesticated wolves to the wild is pulled into tumultuous events in wintery Russia. The use of language here is lovely—I expected flowery, but it's not that; it's powerful, empathetic—a great fit to middle grade. Combined with the premise, this has fantastic atmosphere and wish fulfillment, the punishing chill of Russian winter, of survival; an impetuous and sympathetic heroine who runs with wolves. (Never particularly realistic wolves, but they hug the line of idealized-but-wild, and that's all that really matters.) I don't love the plot as much, it can be too grim to sell the wish fulfillment, and has the predictable pacing expected from the genre. This isn't my favorite new MG novel, but it gave me what I wanted, and I'm glad I waited to read it until midwinter.
Author: J.G. Ballard
Published: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001 (1973)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 205
Total Page Count: 284,220
Text Number: 920
Read Because: fan of the film, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review:
Faced with this junction of the crashed car, the dismembered mannequins and Vaughan's exposed sexuality, I found myself moving through a terrain whose contours led inside my skull towards an ambiguous realm.
After being involved in a fatal car crash, a man finds his sexuality and inner landscape remapped by automotive accidents. It's an unexpectedly compelling, perversely logical connection: the violence of a car crash uniting human bodies with omnipresent metal and technology, and with each other; the way that desire wraps itself around trauma and injury. Being drawn into that logic, participating in that same interior remapping, made the film a remarkable experience for me when I first saw it. The book achieves the same work, and I'm glad it exists, but it's a lesser experience.
There's a plot here, but not a complex one, and the bulk of the length is instead profoundly, obnoxiously repetitive language. (Binnacle! "heavy" anatomy! mucus mucous mucosa mucilage! ~45 "chromium" alone!) The explicit sexual content made possible by text is innate to the themes, but likewise is deadened by the language and by the pervasive male gaze. Desensitization is one of the narrative's themes and, perhaps, goals, but it doesn't benefit the book; being familiar with the premise combines with the repetition to make the text a chore. My order of approach probably skews my opinions, but paring the book down in adaptation removes those flaws while maintaining the successful core concept; the original text wants badly for brevity.
Title: The Left Hand of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4)
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Narrator: George Guidall
Published: Recorded Books, 2016 (1969)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 295
Total Page Count: 284,515
Text Number: 921
Read Because: continuing the series, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: An ambassador comes to Winter, a cold planet inhabited by the only humans known to experience estrus, in the attempt to bring them in to the Ekumen union. This rivals The Dispossessed in depth but not in breadth—it has similar gradual but complicated character growth, but the worldbuilding is frontloaded and the plot less dense. It manages to be both reductionist and insightful in its examination of gender, overlooking gender nonconformity in both societies (nonconformity that absolutely existed in 1969) and so maintaining a gender essentialism which violates its own theses, but it's also rigorous in is examination of gender, of culture, of communication—Le Guin's knack for ground-up worldbuilding, where speculative premises impact entire cultures and entire lived experiences is in full force here. So it reads unevenly, not all of it has aged well—but the second half and in particular that long winter cross-country trek is phenomenal, a quiet interpersonal study with incredible language; and I found this well worth my time.
Title: The Wolf Wilder
Author: Katherine Rundell
Published: Simon Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2016 (2015)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 275
Total Page Count: 284,790
Text Number: 922
Read Because: personal enjoyment, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review:
Once upon a time, a hundred years ago, there was a dark and stormy girl.
The girl was Russian, and although her hair and eyes and fingernails were dark all the time, she was stormy only when she thought it absolutely necessary. Which was fairly often.
A girl who returns semi-domesticated wolves to the wild is pulled into tumultuous events in wintery Russia. The use of language here is lovely—I expected flowery, but it's not that; it's powerful, empathetic—a great fit to middle grade. Combined with the premise, this has fantastic atmosphere and wish fulfillment, the punishing chill of Russian winter, of survival; an impetuous and sympathetic heroine who runs with wolves. (Never particularly realistic wolves, but they hug the line of idealized-but-wild, and that's all that really matters.) I don't love the plot as much, it can be too grim to sell the wish fulfillment, and has the predictable pacing expected from the genre. This isn't my favorite new MG novel, but it gave me what I wanted, and I'm glad I waited to read it until midwinter.