Quick reviews

We Moved!

Back in March we moved to a new home in West Seattle. We’re really pleased to be here. I have a list of home projects as long as my arm. Additionally, I’ve started looking for work again. In short, too many tasks and not enough time to write. So a few short thoughts will have to suffice.

Books

Klara and The Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro - This is my second time reading one of Ishiguro’s works. I find I can only talk about this book in the abstract, though I did like it. Previously, I slogged through The Buried Giant, and found Ishiguro’s writing downright puzzling. Obscurity, it seems, is part of the design in Ishiguro’s works: he’s intent on challenging conventional structure. Reading Klara and The Sun after The Buried Giant, I began to see I needed to adjust my expectations coming to an Ishiguro work.

In Klara he expertly, and patiently, seduces you into caring for average-in-just-about-every-way protagonists. His prose is so easy to read – what some call a “singular, lightly formal diction” – that you quickly forget that you are reading something fabricated. His craft is so good that we become intimate with robot characters (though this is because they don’t act like robots in any typical way we think about robots, but are more human). He slowly but surely builds on his consistent themes of memory and obsolescence. And yes, there is an Ishiguro-special: a narrative twist. This is apparently another of his favorite devices, a kind of shock that subverts cultural norms. This twist is intimated though rarely openly discussed. I won’t spoil it.

My challenge coming to Klara was that I expected the narrative to come to a conventional kind of climax, if not a clear resolution. While the book has a kind of traditional narrative unity – its not an avant-garde, or surrealist sort of work – it nevertheless opts out of a clear emotional resolution to the story. Other readers may revel in the freedom of Klara’s ending, but I find it frustratingly vague on the “message” of the work, if Ishiguro believes in such a thing. So perhaps it has a post-modern bent in that respect.

Ishiguro creates a really subtle but realistic sense of foreboding as well. The metaphysical world plays no small part in this emotional theme, with ritual and religious scenes providing fascinating insights into Klara’s inner life. He adopts the anthropological maxim of making ‘the familiar’ of religious life strange through robot worship. To an anthropologist, these references feel more like gestures to the spiritual significance of ritual and religion, rather than fully fledged explorations of the social technology of ritural. This is perhaps because Ishiguro wants to make a narrower point, one regarding the nature of contemporary technological advance and society’s relationship to sacrifice (sacrifice that was once expressed through religious ritual).

I thought his exploration stumbles though by leaving out the ethnographic detail, since the references to ritual are generic; it is difficult to guage their import since we are seeing the world through a robot’s child-like perception of reality. What’s more, Ishiguro introduces a kind of textual Cubism to many of the metaphysical episodes, making them more abstract than socioculturally grounded. Klara’s unencumbered perspective might offer us an innocent view of love and sacrifice, but there also the problem that for Klara’s innocence she risks an impoverished perspective. Through Klara we see that she’s compelled by the sun, a god-like entity, and one that desires she intervene in the relationships of the teenagers. While the familial relationships involved were complex, Klara’s intutition of, and actions based on, her encounters with the Sun seemed incongruously one-dimensional, both from the point of view of the conclusions Klara drew from metaphysical, and from Ishiguro’s literary elaboration of the scenes. I felt that all the intimacy Ishiguro had created between the reader and Klara took a blow. But then, perhaps such subversion was his intent.

We Run the Tides by Vendela Vida - Just a quick plug for this one as I read it months ago and its already fading in my momory: this was my first book by Vida and wow, it was great. After reading a few poorly written novels just prior, it was so refreshing to come into Vida’s distinct writing style. She’s got a real talent and I’d love to read some of her other works. This is also a great example of a book that creates atmosphere: of a world that once existed in the form of the Bay Area in the late 80s/early 90s. While it’s a “coming of age” story, it is really focused on how teenage girls must navigate complex structures of power and misogeny where they face most of the downside risks. I admit, reading about their sex lives was uncomfortable, but I never for a moment thought Vida created an innacurate world. When Eulabee finds herself in situtations where older males can press their advantages, the stakes were all too uncomfortably real. The sex scenes are brief though they remain significant for the remaining plot, and yet Vida delivers them without a tone of outrage. Instead, they come across from the unexeperienced view of teenagers, such that the unattuned reader may not feel Vida’s nudge about the injustice of what they are witnessing.

My discussion here makes the novel seem very centered on the cultural politics of teenage sexuality, and while the book is undeniably about that, it really is a pleasure to walk in the world Vida creates and watch Eulabee grow even if it is among the hidden dangers of the pre-tech San Francisco upper crust. The ending has a really satisfying exploration of the meanings of the relationships involved for Eulabee as well.