For much of the time I was reading this book I thought of it as science fiction. Then it occurred to me that calling it science fiction would be a misFor much of the time I was reading this book I thought of it as science fiction. Then it occurred to me that calling it science fiction would be a misnomer. Everything outlined in the story is perfectly possible with current technology.
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Here is the set up: people are buying ‘kentukis - cute pet robots about the size of a small dog. They roll around your house on the floor like your robot vacuum cleaner. They return to their home base charger occasionally to power up.
Your robot has a video camera constantly recording as it rolls around your house, sometimes on its own, sometimes with instructions you give it, and sometimes and here’s the catch -- it can also be controlled by one other person who also has a kentuki. You don’t know who that other person is, where they are located or even what language they speak. When you buy one of these robot pets you get to party control some other person’s robot pet.
What could possibly go wrong? Well, you might make a pretty extensive list if you spent five minutes to think about it. We read stories of young girls showing their boobs to the robot and then getting blackmailed. Or a young boy who becomes so obsessed with his robot and the distant robot he controls that we are told he basically becomes a robot in a little boy’s body. Some people let the robot follow them around the house into the bathroom and the shower.
So I think I’ll call it dystopian fantasy since this combination of technologies doesn’t quite exist- yet.
It’s an interesting story with straightforward writing and a bit of dialog. I thought the sections following the robots around were overdone at the expense of the development of the human characters so it seemed to drag a bit and become dull to my liking, thus the ‘3’ I gave it.
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The book is translated from Spanish. The Argentina author (b. 1978) has written a couple of novels and three collections of short stories. She now lives in Berlin. I also read this author’s Fever Dream but it was a DNF for me.
Top photo from robostore.It The author from Wikimedia ...more
This is a strikingly good book by a young Spanish author. I’ll stick to the blurb so that I don’t reveal any more of the plot. The blurb tells us whatThis is a strikingly good book by a young Spanish author. I’ll stick to the blurb so that I don’t reveal any more of the plot. The blurb tells us what it’s about:
“No one knew where they came from: thirty-two feral kids, seemingly born of the jungle, speaking an unknown language. At first they scavenged, stealing food and money and absconding to the trees. But their transgressions escalated to violence, and then the city’s own children began defecting to join them. Facing complete collapse, municipal forces embark on a hunt to find the kids before the city falls into irreparable chaos.”
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The story is narrated by the social worker who led the hunt to find the kids. At first, he seemed to be fascinated by the children and their behaviors. But the political pressure to 'do something' about the kids became so great that eventually he led the hunt for them. Who were these kids and where did they come from?
It’s a hard novel to classify. Perhaps dystopian fits it best. Perhaps fable. It’s not science fiction or fantasy because we can see how this entire scenario might actually happen. (view spoiler)[ We learn fairly early in the book that all 32 kids died, but once we know that we wonder how that could possibly happen, and we don’t learn that until the very end of the book. (hide spoiler)]
As the social worker discusses the behavior of the children, two things stand out: their affinity for spontaneous play and inventing games, and their lack of leadership. They hang out in small shifting groups of 6 or 7 kids. Different kids assume leadership at one time or another – so its kind of an ‘answer’ to Lord of the Flies.
The story is set in a small city on the edge of the forest in Argentina. (The Spanish-born author lives in Argentina.) There has always been a community of indigenous Indian people whose kids form a group of what we might call ‘street urchins’ begging and selling flowers and trinkets on the streets. At first the new group of kids is not even noticed.
There is good writing and some ‘big thoughts’:
The mere meaning of the phrase “This is real” has changed more in the past two decades than in the past two centuries…”
“…everyone has their own witness. Someone that we secretly want to convince, someone all of our actions are directed toward, someone we can't stop secretly talking to....often someone trivial, secondary to the normal course of life.”
“If there's one thing that characterizes small cities, it's that they're as alike as tacks: it makes no difference which; they all use the same mechanisms to perpetuate power, the same circuits of legitimization and cronyism, the same dynamics.”
“People pay the same sort of attention when they're afraid as they do when they're in love.”
“The useless machinery of internal bureaucracy had fallen upon us like a net covered in glue…”
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The Spanish author (b. 1975) is becoming a prolific author with about 20 novels, five of which have been translated into English. I note that with almost 4,000 ratings on GR, this book’s score of 3.9 is quite good for a book by such a relatively unknown (in English) author.
Top photo of Salta in northwest Argentina from theculturetrip.com The author from theparisreview.org
A novella of a fantasy dystopian world where there are ‘clothed ones’ who rule and ‘naked ones’ who have two sexes. The naked ones are confined to a rA novella of a fantasy dystopian world where there are ‘clothed ones’ who rule and ‘naked ones’ who have two sexes. The naked ones are confined to a rambling old house where they live like rats, so crowded they are crammed into closets and fight over scraps of food. They don’t actively practice cannibalism, but if someone dies…
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Some hidden but some SPOILERS FOLLOW
The clothed ones visit the warren occasionally to hold parties and have sex with the naked ones. They feast and toss food to the naked ones to watch them fight over the scraps. Kapos, naked ones allowed to have knives are the cooks. They also keep order and rule the roost.
The clothed ones also enjoy torturing the naked ones. They believe that torturing naked ones is a healthy, reinvigorating activity. (view spoiler)[ Every day the kapos send out one of the naked ones to beg for food and supplies. But he/she may never return because they might be captured and tortured to death in the street. (hide spoiler)]
Our main character is a naked one who lives all day in the closet. He’s distinctive in appearance. (I say ‘he’ because naked ones choose to be primarily known as a he or a she.) (view spoiler)[ He’s tall and slender with red hair and there’s some particular depth or intelligence in his eyes that has attracted the attention of one of the female clothed ones. If you’re a naked one you don’t want to attract attention. He lives in terror of being sent outside. He’s letting his fingernails grow. (hide spoiler)]
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A sample of the author’s writing style:
“I open the door, and come out. I don’t come out, I emerge, I slide, I’m a long, rickety vapor; there’s a mist in my armpits, and my mouth is white, I’m a spatula of gelatin, I awaken to pain, sputter moans, I’m a roar, my foamy body fizzes with pins and needles, my eyes are stung red by the light, my eyes, desperate to make out the world, spin amid the hot fumes of the torches. On top of this, I have to wrestle my way through the multitude of naked yellow bodies that wander, compact and clammy, across the concrete courtyards and the torturous, brightly lit corridors. But I make an effort and manage to adapt quickly; otherwise this body - as if it were another wardrobe confining me, helpless to begin with – could end up shattered, crushed, disappeared.”
A good story that makes us think about how we define ‘others.’ I read this because I recently read and enjoyed the author’s The Armies about the violence in Colombia. Both are worth are read.
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The author (b. 1958), also a journalist, has written a dozen novels. He lives in Bogotá and in 2006 won Colombia’s highest literary award, the Premio Nacional de Literatura. From GR it looks like four of his books have been translated into English.
Top image, 'The Rake' from wattpad.com Image from redbubble.net The author from eltiempo.com
Another surreal, science fiction/dystopian work from the master.
People in a small country are catching a disease that causes them to go blind. As theAnother surreal, science fiction/dystopian work from the master.
People in a small country are catching a disease that causes them to go blind. As the disease spreads, the government isolates them, like lepers, in decrepit abandoned dormitories. Soldiers surround them with orders to kill anyone who tries to leave. All the soldiers do is dump food in the parking lot and tell the inmates to figure it out.
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The attempted self-governance of the hundreds of people who end up within the walls becomes a kind of Lord of the Flies or Animal Farm parody. Their initial efforts at self-governance, building by building, goes along reasonably well until a man with gun assembles a group of thugs. (view spoiler)[ They terrorize the facility, stealing everyone’s valuables and forcing women into prostitution. (hide spoiler)]
The story follows the traumas and the exploits of a small group that sticks together: an ophthalmologist, a car thief, a prostitute, a young boy, an old man, etc. (view spoiler)[ One woman becomes the group’s leader. She is careful not to reveal that she can still see because she will feel obligated to be at everyone’s beck and call. (hide spoiler)]
In the second stage of developments, the whole city has gone blind. The soldiers are gone and the small group goes into the city where throngs of blind people crowd the streets desperately seeking food and shelter. There is a complete breakdown of civic services and there is no electric power or even water.
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With all this as background we ponder the various nuggets of wisdom from the author:
“He had even reached the point of thinking that the darkness in which the blind live was nothing other than the simple absence of light, that what we call blindness was something that simply covered the appearance of beings and things, leaving them intact behind their black veil.”
“…the [eye] doctor took him by the arm and installed him behind a scanner which anyone with imagination might see as a new version of the confessional, eyes replacing words, and the confessor looking directly into the sinner’s soul…”
“The skeptics, who are many and stubborn, claim that, when it comes to human nature, if it is true that the opportunity does not always make the thief, it is also true that it helps a lot.”
“An empty belly wakes up early.”
“Would you like to hear the latest news, that colonel we mentioned earlier has gone blind, It’ll be interesting to see what he thinks of that bright idea of his now, He already thought, he shot himself in the head, Now that’s what I call a consistent attitude, The army is always ready to set an example.”
“Be quiet the doctor’s wife said gently, let’s all keep quiet, there are times when words serve no purpose, if only I, too, could weep, say everything with tears, not have to speak in order to be understood.”
“Do you mean that we have more words than we need, I mean that we have too few feelings, Or that we have them but have ceased to use the words they express, And so we lose them…”
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This is the tenth book I have reviewed by this Nobel Prize-winning author. I see it as a science fiction work where an aberration of normal life lets us see how quickly some kind of dystopia develops. So it’s like two other works of his I have read: Death With Interruptions and The Stone Raft.
Great reading! 4.5 and I’ll round up to 5. [Edited 4/7/24]
Top photo from thehindu.com Photo from a dystopia animation by Saad Moosajee from thisiscolossal.com The author as a young man from nytimes.com...more
This is a book about the absurdity and meaninglessness of the modern workplace. There are only three main characters and th[Edited for typos 12/16/21]
This is a book about the absurdity and meaninglessness of the modern workplace. There are only three main characters and they all work in a giant factory that is a city unto itself – for example, it has 100 cafeterias for its workers. Many employees live in residences on the grounds, so it’s a company town. We never learn what the factory makes, but that’s ok because the three employees we follow don’t know either.
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All three main characters are young, two men and a woman, the oldest is 30-ish. All are unmarried and we don’t learn anything about their love lives. Two of them are part-time contract employees who really wanted a full-time job. The part-time woman shreds papers; the part-time man proofreads documents, marking them by hand without access to a computer.
The full-time male, a plant biologist who has worked there for several years, best illustrates the absurdity. He was hired to study moss on the property that stretches for miles. When he was hired there was talk of growing moss on the roofs of the buildings to ‘go green.’ But the company contracted with an outside firm to do that, without his knowledge or involvement as if they forgot he existed. The only thing he does is to lead an annual ‘moss hunt’ trip for school kids. He is extremely grateful for his job.
No one develops friendships with other employees. Some don’t even speak to each other. Maybe they nod good morning. When they eat together the conversation is inane. Work cubicles are designed to block their views of each other; some sleep at their desks.
The environmental impact of this giant construction is a theme too. Mainly that is shown by documents the proofreader inspects that talk about the strange surrealistic mutations that animals living on the property are developing: flightless birds and ‘washer lizards’ that live in the laundry building, feeding off lint.
Not Kafka, but a bit Borges-like I’d say. A quick read; a novella of 115 pages. I’d give it a 3.5 rounded up to 4.
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The author (b. 1983) is starting her writing career, having written three novels, two translated into English. She has already won several awards including the prestigious Akutagawa Prize. She was born in and lives in Hiroshima.
Photo of Hiroshima skyline from shutterstock.com The author from ndbooks.net...more
A science fiction/fantasy story set in the Dominican Republic (DR) in the near future. There’s a lot going on in this short book (130 pages) and thereA science fiction/fantasy story set in the Dominican Republic (DR) in the near future. There’s a lot going on in this short book (130 pages) and there are many themes, so let me list some of them:
Environmental disasters and the preservation of reefs
LGBT especially transgender
The indigenous Taino people of the DR, Puerto Rico and Cuba
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Other ethnic groups in the DR especially Italians and Jews
Afro-Christian syncretic religion
Race – we are often told a character is ‘black as coal,’ white, light-skinned, has cinnamon skin, etc.
Dystopia: a 1984-ish, tightly monitored central city surrounded by slums where poor people live and anything goes
Music - We hear a lot about music and we know we are not too far off in the future because people still listen to Metallica and REM. The author is also a musician who has her own techno-rock band.
Some science fiction aspects: People have computer vision built into their eyes and cameras built into their hands. Illegal immigrants who cross the border from Haiti are hunted down in DR and killed by robots.
Again, there’s a lot going on in this book, so I don’t think I’m giving too much away if I tell you what’s going on in just the first 17 pages so you can get an idea of what you are signing up for if you read this. I’ll use spoilers:
(view spoiler)[ A young woman has just made a career change from street prostitute to maid for a wealthy important woman. The woman is a psychic card read for the President of the DR. The young woman is desperately accumulating money for a sex-change operation to become a male. (hide spoiler)]
We learn a lot of factual information about ethnicity and race in the DR including the Afro-Christian syncretic religion practiced by many. A major thread that runs through the novel is about the Taino people, a subgroup of the Arawak people who occupied many of the Caribbean Islands before European colonization. History books used to say they that all the Taino people had been killed by the Spanish but it turns out that Taino DNA survived through intermarriage. A lot of people in the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Puerto Rico today have some Taino ancestry.
There’s a lot about Italian immigrants. One character’s parents lost their farmland back in Italy after two years of continuous rain. And another true story we learn about is a settlement of Jews in the northern beach town of Sosua. That settlement dates back to the late 1930s when dictator Trujillo agreed to provide a home for Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.
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At times I found the story line confusing and it would have helped me to know all this ahead of time because I had trouble following it all, thus the rating of ‘3’ I gave it. Here’s the main science fiction/fantasy premise of the story: (view spoiler)[ A seagod comes back occasionally to help the Taino people survive. He/she develops from an anemone (the tentacle of the title). The anemone is kept in a jar by the psychic woman. When the seagod develops into human form he/she happens to be imprisoned but ‘controls’ three characters. One character is a young woman who wants to be a man. Another is a young male entrepreneur who wants to create a DR artist colony to raise money to marry a wealthy young woman who is obsessed with preserving the reef. The third character is a young crazy male artist. I say crazy in part because the computer re-playing videos in his head constantly takes him back to the escapades of a Taino man who belonged to a group of buccaneer cattle rustlers who are being hunted down by Spanish soldiers. (hide spoiler)] Quite a task to fit all this into 130 pages!
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There is some good writing:
“Katherine sounded like a woman beaten down by piles of dirty dishes and a construction worker husband who showed his affection by not spitting on the rug.”
“They were charming and straightforward, because people who have money don’t have to engage in the usual bullshit to rise above others.”
“Lies, thought Alcide, are like beans, they have to be well seasoned or no one will swallow them.”
Top photo: Boca Chica on the south coast of DR from wikipedia Modern people celebrating their Taino heritage from nationalgeographic.com The author from npr.org
[Revised 10/9/22 and 9/4/23 - spoilers hidden, shelves added]...more
This novel is set in a near-future dystopia that, for the folks in the story, is a lot like their existing dystopia.[Revised, spoilers hidden 7/27/22]
This novel is set in a near-future dystopia that, for the folks in the story, is a lot like their existing dystopia. Saeed and Nadia, a young unmarried couple, live in an unnamed war-ravaged country, let’s say, like Syria. They are basically confined to their neighborhood by the fighting, and mainly to their room. They have uncertain electric power and water, often relying on food lines for their next meal.
They flee the country as refugees, and make several subsequent trips to other countries, ending up in the same place: confined to a refugee camp, living mainly in their room, standing in food lines.
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It’s a love story, and it isn’t a love story. We can see from the beginning how their different outlooks on life pull them away from each other. A very telling example of this is that wherever they go, Saeed, the male, seeks out others of his religion and ethnic group to hang out with. Nadia, who has lost all her family, has left all that behind and wants nothing to do with her old religion and customs. (view spoiler)[ Saeed becomes more devout in his beliefs as time goes on, and Nadia feels his devoutness as a reproach even though he never says a word about religion to her. (hide spoiler)]
And the story is science fiction and it’s not. They hear that ‘guarded doors’ exist that are portals to ‘other worlds.’ And it’s true! You bypass the guards or bribe them and you enter this door and find yourself in a refugee camp in another country. (view spoiler)[ In an instant the couple goes first from their native country to Greece; then later to London (where an entire neighborhood of fancy homes has been taken over by squatters) and then to La Jolla, California. (hide spoiler)] I say it’s not really science fiction because that’s the full extent of the magical realism going on, and clearly it’s just a metaphor for how refugees move from one country to another.
The story is also about the evils of ultra-nationalism. While they are fleeing in-fighting in their home country, wherever they go the camps they live in are attacked by government troops trying to remove them, or at least keep them confined, or by right-wing neo-Nazi types trying to kill or chase out the foreigners.
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There is good writing. I’ll give some examples I liked starting with the opening lines:
“In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war…”
“…but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying.”
“…they had gone to his place that night, and she had shuffled off the weight of her virginity with some perplexity but not excessive fuss.”
[When Saeed first got a cell phone]: “Saeed partly resisted the pull of his phone. He found the antenna too powerful, the magic it summoned too mesmerizing, as though he were eating a banquet of limitless food, stuffing himself, stuffing himself, until he felt dazed and sick…”
“…their eyes followed Nadia as she moved around the apartment in her black robe, serving tea and biscuits and water, and not praying, though not ostentatiously not praying, more as if she were busy looking after people’s earthly needs and might do so later.”
“The island was pretty safe, they were told, except when it was not, which made it like most places.”
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A good story and good writing, so a goodread. Exit West was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2017. The author is a native of Pakistan (b. 1971) but writes in English. He has written a half-dozen novels and a book of essays. I liked this book as much as I liked the first one by him that I read, Moth Smoke.
Top photo of war-ravaged Syria from news.cgtn.com Migrant camp on a Greek island from middleeasteye.net The author from france24.com...more
We’re in a small town on a Japanese island. It’s dominated by the brutal “memory police” who make things disappear. Well, they make p[Edited 1/30/202]
We’re in a small town on a Japanese island. It’s dominated by the brutal “memory police” who make things disappear. Well, they make people make them disappear by declaring that ribbons or emeralds or stamps have to disappear and the citizens reluctantly but dutifully gather and hold bonfires to burn the now-forbidden item of the month.
Some people keep forbidden items and if the MP’s hear of that they will kick your door in and confiscate the items and haul you off who knows where. It’s likely you won’t be heard from again.
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And not only do they forbid hoarding of items, they want the memory of those items to be destroyed. Most people forget what ribbon was, or what it was used for, and they forget the smell of now-banned perfume. But some people remember. The MPs want those people. The MPs know who they are and a few good souls try to hide them from the police in basements and in secret rooms at great peril to themselves
Our heroine is a young novelist. Her mother, a sculptor, was a hoarder of banned items. Her mother is no longer with us. The young woman only has two friends: her publisher and an old family friend who ran the ferry boat to the mainland before the ferry was “disappeared.” She doesn’t have the power of memory but she’s hiding someone in her house who does.
Increasingly important things begin to be banned: birds, fruit… and guess what else? It’s a novel about the trauma of loss.
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We get to read excerpts from our heroine's latest novel about a woman who permanently loses her voice, so we have a story within a story that’s a metaphor for the ongoing horrors. She develops a love interest in her real life along with the woman in her story, so that helps keep the plot moving along.
A good story, and I think the book has the potential over time to become a classic of dystopian totalitarian literature along with others such as Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 and 1984.
A classic quote used in the book: “Men who start by burning books end up burning other men.”
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I recently read and enjoyed another book by this Japanese author (b. 1962): The Housekeeper and the Professor. It too was about memory loss: an elderly professor who could retain recent memory only for an hour and a half.
Top photo on Honshu Island from thetimes.co.uk Illustration from mexikaresistance.files.wordpress.com The author from smh.com.au...more
This story is from the front-lines of the on-going terror and civil war in Syria. It’s almost a manual of what it is like to live in a dystopian socieThis story is from the front-lines of the on-going terror and civil war in Syria. It’s almost a manual of what it is like to live in a dystopian society that is disintegrating while we watch. The title tells us what we might expect from the continuing headlines we’ve seen for five years: such terror and chaos reigns in the country that many of those who cannot flee the country have given up hope of living. When a mother’s second son dies in the rebellion, her first reaction is “I’m not surprised.”
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The main character is a The young man whose father has just died. He has promised his father that he would bury him next to his sister back in his father’s hometown, a few hundred miles away. Although the son has had only cursory interaction with his older brother and sister over the last ten years, he convinces them to accompany him to take the body in a Volkswagen bus on what would be in normal times, a one-day-or-so trip to the burial site. He’s not a guy with a lot of self-esteem: “I’m just another worn out pair of shoes walking the street.”
The author uses the chaotic trip to illustrate conditions in Syria and to tell us the stories of the man, his father and his siblings. I’ll leave out those details as spoilers. Instead I’ll focus on what is revealed about the chaotic conditions people in that country are surviving on a daily basis. The trip turns into a hellish journey, an insane, Kafkaesque nightmare. And we are reminded of Kafka not only by the byzantine bureaucracy the three-some encounters at military checkpoints, but also by the body metamorphosing into worms. You’ll need a strong stomach to handle all the description of the bodily decay, not to mention the violence in this book.
We see through the eyes of the author and the main character how the brutality of the regime created its own revolution. Many rebels deserted the army with their weapons when they were disgusted by orders to shoot to kill demonstrators with no restrictions: women, children and elderly were fair game. They opened fire on funeral processions. There is no accountability for soldiers of the regime: they can shoot or torture anyone for any reason – no questions asked. So giving a soldier at a checkpoint a flippant answer can get you killed.
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Hospitals are prohibited from taking in rebel wounded. Doctors who privately treat such wounded are targeted for murder by the regime. One woman whose doctor son was killed that way asked his medical colleagues to piece together his body after it was released by the police. Nor can rebels be buried in traditional graveyards, so private ones spring up.
As the family travels back to the father’s hometown they cross numerous military checkpoints; first those of the regime; then, as they pass into rebel territory, those of the rebel resistance. There is the absurdity of the military wanting the body placed under arrest because he was a man wanted for joining the rebels. It takes hours and sometimes days to get through a checkpoint. One checkpoint is manned entirely by Chechen soldiers who hardly speak Arabic. One rebel-held checkpoint requires men to pass a test of religious knowledge to continue through.
There is constant gunfire, explosions, the roar of streaking jets, helicopters, troop and tank movements in the main character’s neighborhood as well as on the road. His father chose to live in a shell of his former home with walls missing. The streets are filled with amputees. There are snipers along the highways, and bodies can be seen along roads left for the wild dogs that feed off them. One night of the trip the family tries to sleep in the van in a field but dogs throw themselves at the van trying to get at the decaying body.
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Not a pleasant book to read but neither are the daily headlines. It reminds me of other books I’ve read that describe life in chaotic worn-torn countries. So many! Two recent ones are Hotel Silence by, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir (also set in the Mideast) and Made in Yugoslavia by Vladimir Jokanovic. The author (b. 1964) is a Syrian novelist, playwright, poet and screenwriter. Much of his work has been banned or suppressed in his country.
Top photo from aljazeera.com Middle photo from newyorktimes.com The author from timesofisrael.com
DNF even though it is short and I like Marguerite Duras’s work. I bought this at a library discard sale. But I just couldn’t get into it. I didn’t feeDNF even though it is short and I like Marguerite Duras’s work. I bought this at a library discard sale. But I just couldn’t get into it. I didn’t feel any tension developing or any real development of the characters even though I gave it about 40 pages. Since I did not finish it, I did not give it a rating.
The story is set in a future, apparently communist, dystopia in which Jews are still persecuted. A woman (Sabana) and a young man (David) arrive at the house of Jew, named Abahn, to guard him until a kind of “mob boss” named Gringo arrives to kill him. Gringo says all the local merchants want Abahn killed. Meanwhile another Jew, also named Abahn, arrives to wait with them.
The entire 110 pages are essentially dialog spoken in a few words or less. It reminds me of Waiting for Godot. I did not read far enough to understand what the significance might be of having both of the Jewish men have the same name. And there is some obvious symbolism I did not catch in that David, the man with the gun, is blind. If you read it, this is a typical section of what you will be reading: (I left out quotation marks in the following.)
They are silent. Again Abahn gestures toward the Jew: He’s unsure now. That’s what I think. David thinks. It’s completely normal for Gringo to kill him. Normal, says Abahn. David lowers his voice a little: He’s Gringo’s enemy. He’s a different kind of man says Abahn. He’s a communist who believes that communism is impossible. And Gringo thinks it is. David smiles as if at a joke. He hesitates. Yes, definitely, he says. Which? Abahn asks. David stops smiling. He looks toward Sabana. He wants her help. She is silent. You don’t know, says Abahn. We don’t know. They are silent. Again Abahn gestures towards the Jew: He doesn’t think it’s worth the trouble to kill Gringo. He thinks Gringo is dead, says Sabana. What? How? cries David. No one answers him. It’s completely normal that Gringo would kill him, says David again, his voice trembling. Yes. Gringo, says Sabana. David stares at Sabana in terror, seized by brutal shock. He waits. Sabana says no more. His terror grows. The life of the Jew is unseeable, invisible. Says Abahn. Like the life of David. His terror still grows. Silence falls.
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Duras wrote many novels. I really enjoyed her novels The Sea Wall and Emily L.
The main character, Ma Daode, is an older high-placed government official in charge of creating a ‘new dream of China’s rejuvenation’ intended to replThe main character, Ma Daode, is an older high-placed government official in charge of creating a ‘new dream of China’s rejuvenation’ intended to replace wasted personal dreams. His office develops poetry, slogans and websites. In a science fiction vein he envisions a computer chip that will do this. Meanwhile he struggles with, and at times is overwhelmed by, his own horrible memories of the violence and turmoil that accompanied Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward of the early 1960’s and the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976.
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As were many people, Director Ma was both a persecutor and a victim in those times. He reported on his own parents with tragic consequences for them, as well as eventually for him, as he revealed himself as a ‘son of reactionaries.’
One persistent theme in China is how opposing sides both use patriotism and, in the past, homage to Mao, to beat up and kill each other. The Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution split into factions that fought and killed each other, each claiming the other side was reactionary or ‘western’ and not revolutionary enough. It was the “Million Bold Warriors” vs. “The East is Red.” The carnage was incredible.
I was aware of the violence and that millions of professional people were sent to do manual labor on farms and get ‘re-educated,’ as the main character was when his faction lost out. I was aware that people were beaten up, but I did not realize that there were massacres where hundreds of thousands of people were killed in the violence. And this doesn’t count the perhaps 30 million who died as a result of the famine after the reorganization of land during the Great Leap Forward.
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A modern example occurs in the story when Director Ma is charged with pacifying villagers who refuse to abandon their homes and land so that the city can expand after obliterating their village. Both sides claim to revere President Xi Jinping. The officials are there to promote China’s growth in his name, but the peasants hang a huge picture of the President and paint the buildings and walls with his slogans about preserving rural values. The destruction of these signs will be filmed when the bulldozers roll.
The main character goes to a herbal healer for a potion to help him forget but it seems to make things worse. It seems that the more Director Ma tries to forget the more he remembers, and these things start creeping into his speeches with predictable repercussions for him -- they aren’t supposed to be mentioned. Unlike Stalin, who was politically erased in Russia, in China you are still supposed to honor Mao, but you have to pretend he never did anything wrong. The whole story is overlaid with black humor, as while he gives his speeches and has these dark thoughts, he is receiving, reading and responding to sexy texts from his mistresses. The story has fantasy, lots of violence, and explicit sex.
Another major theme is corruption. The main character receives boxes of chocolates with wads of money and little gold bars inside. The demolition of the village is occurring only after all the appropriate palms have been greased. It’s who you know, not what you know, so Director Ma has several mistresses because affiliating with a high official is a quick way for a woman to get ahead.
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Needless to say, the author (b. 1953) is exiled from China. He has lived in Hong Kong, Berlin and now London. He is a painter as well, and even his paintings were banned, and he was detained in China in 1983 during the ‘Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign.’ His books are banned and his name or his books can’t be mentioned. The book’s dedication is “To George Orwell, who foretold it all.” Is it correct to call a novel dystopian if most of the dystopia displayed actually exists?
Photo of Chinese village from featurepics.com Scene during the Cultural Revolution from The Cultural Revolution Through Photography at undsoc.org The author from api.time.com
An apocalyptic or dystopian novel that reminds me a lot of The Road by Cormac McCarthy and Sleepwalking Land by Mia Couto, the latter set in MozambiquAn apocalyptic or dystopian novel that reminds me a lot of The Road by Cormac McCarthy and Sleepwalking Land by Mia Couto, the latter set in Mozambique.
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SPOILERS FOLLOW
A young boy has fled his home. He is pursued by the local sheriff and has a bounty on his head. His father has sold “his services” to the sheriff. He flees through a drought-stricken region (we assume in Spain because the author is Spanish) where dead crops lie in abandoned fields. The landscape is so flat and treeless he often travels by night to hide. He meets an old goatherd, a man who shows him how to survive on goat milk and by eating roots and rats. The main problem is finding water in the super-parched landscape. They travel for days without seeing another soul.
In a way the setting could be in the future, due to climate change, but it appears that it is in the past when motorized vehicles were new and the only one in town is a motorcycle owned by the sheriff. Others travel by donkey or horse. Because of the bounty on his head, the boy correctly learns that he can’t trust anyone who might befriend him. It’s a world of violence and terror.
I don’t know why this novel held my attention but it did. The young boy suffers as many afflictions as Job: the pursuit, sun that seriously burns his skin, impure water that debilitates him, debilitating thirst, near-starvation, physical bruises, smoke immolation, and others.
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Jesús Carrasco, the author, was born in Badajoz, Spain, and now lives in Edinburgh. Out in the Open, his debut novel, was a bestseller in Spain, published in more than twenty-one countries, and is the winner of many international awards, including the European Union Prize for Literature 2016 and an English PEN award.
Photo of the Meseta of central Spain from walkingthecaminotogether.files.wordpress.com The author from www.spainculture.us...more
A 1984-ish political allegory by a Syrian author. We’re in a dystopian society in the Middle East where The Leader, always capitalized, has created a A 1984-ish political allegory by a Syrian author. We’re in a dystopian society in the Middle East where The Leader, always capitalized, has created a society that not only worships him but exists to worship him. His picture and quotations from his speeches and poetry are everywhere. Government offices are literally wall-papered with his photos. “Any hint of individuality is a threat directed at the Leader’s supremacy.”
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Periodic parades with required participation by all males are constant. During these well-organized demonstrations the speeches by the Leader or those praising his brilliance are broadcast throughout the city full blast over speakers. Those not in attendance are required to view the speech on television with the volume turned up full blast. Because of the heat, everyone has their windows open so you can’t escape the ROAR of the title. The Leader and the ruling elite spend all their time watching re-runs of the parades and his speeches. No one can leave their house or enter any building without an ID card. Police goons are everywhere.
Our main character is a 31-year-old man who used to be a columnist and a writer of novels with a political bent poking fun at those in power. He can write no more because of the complete control of the society by the Leader. All his former works are banned. He lives off his wealthy mother’s money.
Yet the writer had been well known and the political leadership is not happy with his being silent. They want him now to write slogans and speeches for the establishment. His father has died but his mother is shortly to marry a high official in the government, a friend of the Leader. The author’s woman friend helps him see how this is all a set-up to force him to comply with their wishes. His mother is actually under threat of personal violence. What is he to do?
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I liked this story. It’s short and frightening. The constant tumult created by the regime comes across as well as the constant heat. No one appears to have air conditioning, just fans. He intervenes with the police beating someone up and gets his ID confiscated. He has to walk his way through a byzantine bureaucracy with goons and threats to try to get it back. His friend tells him don’t sass them back, just do what they say, but of course he can’t do that. Is this going to end well for anyone?
We also get a bit of hot sex with his woman friend. And some philosophy about leadership – how Alexander the Great expected worship in the East but was not silly enough to expect that in Greece – although worshiping emperors eventually came about in Rome. We read the thoughts of Hannah Arendt about how the masses need a leader, but vice-versa too.
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In addition to three novels the author (1950 -) has written scripts for TV series The Silk Market and about Kahil Gibran. This book was banned in Syria and the author eventually fled Syria to live in Berlin.
Photo of a street demonstration in Yemen from telegraph.co.uk Image from gstatic.com The author from en.qantara.de
This is a classic Russian science-fiction dystopian novel published in 1924 that influenced many subsequent books such as 1984 and Br[Edited 12/18/22]
This is a classic Russian science-fiction dystopian novel published in 1924 that influenced many subsequent books such as 1984 and Brave New World, and authors such as Kurt Vonnegut and Ayn Rand. According to Wiki “We is generally considered to be the grandfather of the satirical futuristic dystopia genre.”
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The book had to be published outside of the USSR because under Stalin the author ended up first imprisoned, and later exiled to France. In an Introduction, Foreword and Preface we are told that the book emphasizes the “insidious pressures for conformity” in the new Russia.
People of the United State are called ‘Numbers,’ which they all wear on the chests of their 'unifs' as they walk around four abreast. They all wake up at the same time and leave work at the same time. They have a ‘personal hour’ and sexual days. They live in high-rise glass cubicles, with curtains.
They attend compulsory meetings in auditoriums where they sing hymns to the state and hear from the ‘Well-Dooer’ on a big screen. They have to vote for him each year on the Day of Unanimity.
Everyone eats petroleum-based food. Rare resisters are punished by the offender being placed in a machine that dissolves him into water. A ‘Green Wall’ separates the urban area from the remaining wild world outside.
The main character is an engineer involved in building a spaceship to conquer other planets. He finds a lover who is involved with a small group of potential rebels. But ‘lover’ is a bad word because the system does not allow love or permanent pairings – just hookups.
A corrupt doctor gives the man and his alcohol and nicotine and they find a secret way of getting to the outside world beyond the wall. The main character starts thinking about his soul and about having a child. The rebellion may be spreading but at the same time, the state is introducing a new required lobotomy-type operation to nip this in the bud.
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Why a rating of 3? This book has been in my TBR for years but I’ll be honest and say I’m not a fan of sci-fi or dystopian novels. The author uses math terms in symbolic ways that don’t help the story along. The dialog seemed herky-jerky to me at times and some of the plot I thought was confusing. Still I’m glad I read it!
Top image: Le Corbusier’s 1924 plan for Paris envisaged razing the city from Montmartre to the Seine to build 18 giant skyscrapers. From thetimes.co.uk Sketch of the author from Wikipedia...more
Saramago sets this story in a dystopia but it is not far off in the future – we almost live in it now!
The Center is where the well-off live. It’s a mSaramago sets this story in a dystopia but it is not far off in the future – we almost live in it now!
The Center is where the well-off live. It’s a massive single 50-story building with apartments, galleria malls, museums and Disneyland areas. Every kind of experience imaginable is offered including all sports, such as skiing, and “environmental rooms” where you can experience sunny beaches, rain and blizzards. Around the Center are rings of slums, industrial factories and factory farms in greenhouses.
It’s a big brother dystopia. Security guards and video cameras are everywhere, and any unusual behavior gets you noticed and perhaps “written up” by the guards. When you drive outside the Center you are stopped by guards “checking your documents.” Because supply trucks have to bring goods and food in from the rings outside the Center, they have to pass through the slums. Occasionally they are waylaid by bandits but because this is a Portuguese dystopia, the police kind of let it happen without much ado.
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The story, which we are told in the blurbs, is simple. An old man, a widower and a potter, lives in the far outskirts, a traditional rural village beyond the Center and its rings. He lives with his only daughter and her husband. Her husband is a guard in the Center but lives in a dormitory and commutes home for a few days off every ten days or so. His dream is to become a “resident guard” – that is, get a promotion and with it an apartment to live full-time in the magical Center and bring his wife and father-in-law with him.
The old potter struggles to make a living. He sells plates and pots to the Center but recently people have stopped buying them, so he is experimenting with making decorative ceramic dolls. His daughter helps him.
The business collapses; the son gets his job and they all move into dreamland. You can imagine what the old man thinks of this – his life was his work and his identity. Now retired, he wanders aimlessly around Disneyland all day. The only other significant character in the story is a widow in the village. The old man and the widow are sweet on each other but he won’t think about marriage because he cannot support her without his pottery business, now defunct.
And maybe we can count the dog as a character too: “Everyone tells us that animals stopped talking a long long time ago, however, no one has yet been able to prove that they have not continued to make secret use of thought.”
Now the title. A short time after they have all moved to an apartment in the Center, new construction uncovers an archaeological site in a cave. The area is blocked off and guarded; guards are forbidden to talk about what is in the cave. But the son-in-law lets the old man in to view it. It is so horrific and shocking that the son-in-law quits his job and they all decide to leave the Center and start over somewhere else. [It is horrifying and I’m not even putting it in a spoiler!]
The book is written in a stream of consciousness style with long sentences, mostly using commas, but it is divided into fairly short chapters (8-12 pages).
The author has won the Nobel Prize, so we expect and we get great writing and deep thoughts:
“It is true what people say, the young have the ability, but lack the wisdom, and the old have the wisdom, but lack the ability.
Daughter: “Don’t talk about dying, Pa.” Father: “The only time we can talk about death is while we’re alive, not afterward.”
“…the game of give and take which is what married life almost always comes down to”
“Life is like that, full of words that are not worth saying or that were worth saying once but not any more, each word that we utter will take up the space of another more deserving word, not deserving in its own right, but because of the possible consequences of saying it.”
“Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don’t understand that the words are merely stepping stones paced across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they’re there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it’s the other side that matters”
“He had suddenly seen what the world was like, how there are many lies and no truths, well, there must be some out there, but they are continually changing, and not only does a possible truth give us insufficient time to consider its merits, we also have to check first that this possible truth is not, in fact, a probable lie.”
“but nowadays, it is only from eighty years onward that old age, authentic and unambiguous and from which there can be no return, nor even any pretense of a return, begins, de facto and unapologetically, to deserve the name by which we designate our last days.”
“arguments are more or less random groups of words waiting to be placed in a syntactical order that will give them a sense they themselves are not entirely sure that they have.”
“At that moment he realized that his memory of the dream was about to flee, that he would only manage to hold on to bits of it, and he did not know whether he should rejoice over the little that remained or regret the much that was lost, this is something else that often happens after we have dreamed.”
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In a witty and humorous passage the author dissects old ‘nuggets of wisdom’ which he calls a “malignant plague.” It is funny how you can savage things like “know thyself,” “where there’s a will there’s a way,” and “begin at the beginning.”
A great read. I’ve read five or six of Saramago’s books and this is now my favorite.
Photo of Lisbon from independent.co.uk Photo of the author from therumpus.net ...more
I had this book on my TBR shelf for years without realizing that it was essentially dystopian science fiction.
The main character is a woman in her earI had this book on my TBR shelf for years without realizing that it was essentially dystopian science fiction.
The main character is a woman in her early thirties reflecting back on her life as a child at a private school in England. Kids in the school grew up in an isolated but almost idyllic setting; not knowing their parents but realizing somehow they were “special.” After finishing school they live together in small groups in cottages before heading out into the world on their own. The story is set in the late 1990s.
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From the very first page we learn something is not right just from the language. We read that they have become “carers” and “donors;” their teachers are called “guardians” and they know there are people out there called their “possible.” We also learn they can have sex but are incapable of having children and that after their third of fourth “donation” they have “completed.” So we catch on pretty quickly what life has in store for these kids.
There are some genuine mysteries though. Why does the school seem obsessed with encouraging them to do creative work, giving them awards and collecting the best work to go to a gallery that they never see? Where does it go and who sees it and why?
Much of the plot is built around a three-way love story between a boy and two girls at school. One of the girls is the main character. All three are good friends but the boy and one of the girls are a couple. (view spoiler)[ The girl in the couple is controlling and domineering and prevents the relationship between her boyfriend and the other girl from developing. Later in life a romantic relationship develops between the other girl (the young woman who is our main character) and the now-young man. In fact she becomes his “carer.” Is the love they develop better than it would have been years ago? Or is it too late and stale? (hide spoiler)]
This quote tells us about the title: “Because maybe, in a way, we didn’t leave it [the school] behind nearly as much as we might once have thought. Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and – no matter how much we despised ourselves for it – unable quite to let each other go.”
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I thought it was a good story; it kept my attention all the way through, although not quite as good as the author’s best-known work, Remains of the Day.
Top photo from englishcottagevacation.com The author from newyorker.com
A story, translated from Russian, that is part magical realism and part science fiction – a blend of old Russia and[Revised, edited for typos 10/8/22]
A story, translated from Russian, that is part magical realism and part science fiction – a blend of old Russia and a post-apocalyptic futuristic Russia. Almost all of the action takes place in a Dr. Zhivago type sleigh ride during a week-long blinding blizzard across the frozen Russian landscape.
Minor spoilers follow.
A doctor carrying vaccine has hired a sled driver to get him to a remote village where people have been struck by a plague. The harder the doctor tries to reach the village, the more obstacles he encounters. It's like one of those “running nightmares” where you can never reach your destination. And, oh yes, I forgot to mention that the village people are suffering from the 'Bolivian plague' that turns them into zombies. Not good.
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There’s a shortage of gasoline. Fortunately, genetic bioengineering has done its magic and the sleigh’s motor (think snowmobile) is powered by 50 miniature horses propelling a drive belt under the hood. Genetic manipulation has also bred giant and miniature humans. The giant people, 6 meters tall, are hired to do things like clear forests by ripping trees out by hand. A tavern owner they encounter on their journey is a miniature man, about as tall as a wine bottle, married to a normal-sized woman. We have digital clocks but no phones or internet.
In the travels of the doctor and his driver, they come across a tent city populated by Kazakh people, aka 'Vitaminders.' The Kazakhs erect their tents in a few minutes by using a substance squeezed out of a tube of toothpaste that they water and then in a few minutes it grows into a felt-like substance.
The Vitaminders make their living selling an LSD-type drug. The doctor takes advantage of the drug just as he did the tavern owner’s wife. In his hallucinogenic drugged state the doctor has nightmarish dreams where he reflects on all the bad things he did in his life and tries to justify himself to a village tribunal that has condemned him to a gruesome death.
I’m not a science fiction fan but the book kept my attention with its inventiveness and my wondering exactly what is going on and what was coming next. On the other hand I didn’t quite get the point of it all.
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Sorokin (b. 1955) is a post-modern Russian writer. He has been writing since the 1980s and his early work had been banned under the old Soviet regime. But now he is banging out a book a year and has published about 15 novels since then.
Top photo from blog.eurekatent.com The author from britannica.com ...more
A translation from the German of a work from 1947. This was right after the war, and right after the atomic bombinRevised and pictures added 5/25/2020
A translation from the German of a work from 1947. This was right after the war, and right after the atomic bombing of Japan. But it’s not directly about the horrors that occurred in Germany; instead it seems to be about a future nuclear Armageddon. We read of a blazing new star and that technology allows us to preserve life or to destroy it.
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Perhaps the story also refers to the Allied firebombing of the author’s hometown of Hamburg. Wikipedia says one of the author’s most famous works is The End: Hamburg 1943, written 3 months after the bombing of Hamburg by the Allies during the Second World War.
This a short book (124 pages) without chapter breaks. In a dream-like, sleep-walking state, the narrator wanders through a city watching people in their ordinary lives. He has no interaction with them. Perhaps he is a ghost and they are real or perhaps he is the last person alive and they are ghosts.
As he wanders he reflects back on his upbringing and his relations with his father, mother, brother and other important people such as a favorite teacher. Even when he appears to be awake, he has amnesia for who people are.
There is much reflection on clocks, time, images in mirrors, names and mass hallucination. And of course, reflections on war and the trauma it inflicts on people (which we would now call post-traumatic stress).
Even for a fantasy it is a bit confusing and I thought it didn’t really contribute new insights compared to other such works. I note it’s very low-rated on GR (3.4).
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The author (1901-1977) knows first-hand of what he writes about. He would have been 13 years old at the start of WW I and in his forties during WW II. And, as I mentioned above, it was his hometown, Hamburg, that was destroyed.
Top photo from dystopiainstudy.weebly.com Sketch of the author from nimbusbooks.ch ...more
This book's subtitle tells us right upfront what to expect: "On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers.
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The wife of an elderly German psThis book's subtitle tells us right upfront what to expect: "On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers.
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The wife of an elderly German psychoanalyst is killed at a religious shrine in North Africa. With no progress being made by the official investigation, and unable to travel himself, the husband hires a female documentary producer to travel there and investigate.
Her trip turns into a surreal, nightmarish journey. Everyone is being watched or followed by someone else. And perhaps the wife's disappearance is related to her own husband's intense psychological observation of her. Her last journal entry was "I am being watched." The camera crew is itself followed and filmed by local news crew. So our theme is like a picture within a picture within a picture; nested dolls of levels of observation.
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The author was prescient to write this back in 1986, a bit before the ubiquitous computer cameras and surveillance video technology we are surrounded by today. The book, translated from the German, consists of 24 short chapters each of which is a single run-on sentence. Different, but it works, and it is fast-paced enough to keep your attention.
A few gems: "...an eccentric and sharp-witted man of whom no one could tell whether he was unfit for life or merely pretended to be helpless..."
"...she experienced with certainty that freedom was the trap into which she was expected to flee..."
"...real education consisted of knowing how to get ahead in the world by using the world one wants to get ahead in..."
The plot is resolved in a surreal military testing ground where satellites are watching planes watching tanks watching... We get an essay on the video-game nature of modern warfare where the person pushing the button on the bomb or the drone is disconnected from the impact of his actions.
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While the book is reasonably fast-paced, it's not necessarily a fun read; a bit more like something you have to read for a graduate course in sociology.
photos from top: thecoli.com habitatmag.com greencloudhosting.co.uk...more
A strange but haunting novel; almost a fantasy, with a lot of Big Brother thrown in. We are in a vaguely dystopian futuristic world in a vaguely west A strange but haunting novel; almost a fantasy, with a lot of Big Brother thrown in. We are in a vaguely dystopian futuristic world in a vaguely west coast American setting, even though the book is translated from French.
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But people are people and we have a lot of lovelorn, lonely and corrupt political and business types. They are all duplicitous and prone to suicide and murder. In fact, most of the main characters get knocked off along the way for reasons that aren’t always clear to the reader.
There is also a lot of strange sex going on, as if the author had read too much Michel Houellebecq. No one ever laughs in this book. I guess that in the future, humor has disappeared. It’s a short read, 125 pages broken into 25 untitled mini-chapters.
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The French author (b. 1948) has written eight novels, most translated into English. Some of her worked has been compared to Annie Ernaux. She’s best known for Hotel Splendid but based on GR ratings her work is not well-known among English readers.
[Revised, pictures, shelves added 1/20/23]
Top image from animationmagazine.net The author from prabook.com...more
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