ergative's reviews
1041 reviews

An excellent indictment of a trend in publishign that hasn't really changed that much since 2001 or so, when the book first came out: minority 'own voices' writers seem to struggle to gain recognition to write about anything except 'own voices' fiction. If a black guy wants to write novels that are structural commentaries on post-modernist blah blah Derrida, no one is interested. But if he writes, as a complete joke, the most stereotyped, offensive, racist depiction of Black youth doing crimes in the inner city, he is lauded for his 'realness' and 'rawness' and 'truth-speaking' and so on. It's Poe's Law before Poe wrote the law. 

I found this very funny, and effective at making its point--not least because it was equally willing to skewer the  hyper-intellectual literary theory crowd.  I'm not sure we really needed all those pages of the satire novel (which was incredibly disagreeable to wade through), but otherwise it was great.

How odd and imaginative and moody! It has a lot of the same feel as Gormenghast and Mordew -- strange, grotesque place, people by strange, grotesque characters -- but, crucially, without any of the disagreeableness. It's weird in a good way.

I went through a huge David Liss phase back in . . . 2008 or so? 2010? Anyway, he's written more since then, so I thought to give him another look, starting with a reread of this book, the first Benjamin Weaver story. And . . . he's fine. This is a perfectly fine historical thriller about stock market shenanigans, which is perhaps slightly more ambitious in its aims than its execution.

The ambitious aims revolve around changes in thought that characterized the early 18th century, specifically the rise in deductive reasoning, courtesy of the Scottish Enlightenment; and the shift in economics to see bank notes as equally valuable as gold and silver, even though they represented (at the time, pre-fiat currency) nothing more than an institution's promise to pay gold and silver later. Wealth changes from a piece of metal to people's beliefs and trust in a piece of paper. These ideas combine in the rise of the stock market: paper can be incredibly valuable, if it represents the promise of a company to pay dividends to shareholders, but only if the value of the paper rises (which it will only do if people believe it to be valuable); so decisions in stock-market purchases are themselves a game in probabilities. And his decision to have our narrator be a lapsed Jew offers an additional side of the narrative: he is an observer, but not quite a participant, in both Jewish and Christian London of the era, at a time when Jews have a very particular relation to finance. (Liss really likes Jewish narrators.)

But somehow, although it all sounds very erudite and thoughtful when I describe it, Liss's engagement with these ideas feels... clumsy? A little obvious? There's a Scottish doctor who name-drops Enlightenment names and explains didactically what it means to reason from probabilities, and why people are so uneasy at the economic shift from hard currency to promises and paper currency. Wikipedia tells me that this was actually his first book, so possiblly it's just first-novel syndrome. I think I'll continue to read his Benjamin Weaver books and see if they get better.

Perfectly fine fluffy queer historical fantasy, but the thing about chucking dead bodies at your plot to make it go is that they have to actually make the plot go. If a dead body does nothing but keep the soggy center of the book idling in neutral, it seems awfully disrespectful to the characters who thought they were giving their fictional lives in service of moving things along.

That . .. was a Booker Prize winning novel, all right. Yes, yes, each sentence was a work of art. But cripes, what a slog. Nothing HAPPENED. If this book had been the supplemental meidations on planets and interiority and humanity and navel-gazing that enriched a book about aliens and astronauts and politics and rockets and, y'know, PLOT, then it would have been exquisite. But Harvey forgot the plot, and just focused on winning the Booker. And, I guess, like, it worked? 

This was fun. New setting, Paris exposition.

I saw a post on mastodon by an author, a little while ago, who was perplexed that someone would read every book in a long series of hers, and give each of them 2.5 or 3 stars on Goodreads. But that is this series to me. The books are fine. I like them. They're reliable, they're pleasant, and they're copious. There are pretty gowns and tea parties and murder. I need something to listen to when I chop onions or scrub the bathroom or wake up at 3am and can't get back to sleep. These books fill that gap in my life.

Very clever, entertainingly constructed, with the meaning of the title revealing itself to be ingenious and playful in a pleasing way. But, to be honest, I figured out most of it well before it was revealed (except possibly the bit about Piers Capon, which as far as I can tell was not tied up), so I never really had that moment of being outfoxed by the writer. I saw the structure as it went up, which interfered a bit with my ability to admire the completed edifice when the scaffolding came down.

I quite like Slatter's Sourdough universe novels, but what I like best about them is how they all fit comfortably as standalone books in a shared universe. This one ffelt like it was making an uncomfortable effort to connect with the others, as if it didn't feel capable of telling a tale that stood on its own. Every character from the previous books shows up, and some -- like Asher Todd -- in a way that would have felt like an unconnected thread if I didn't know where she originally came from. Unless you'd already read the other books, it hurt the coherence of this one; and if, like me, you had read the other books, then the strands of connections felt forced and box-ticky. 

This was an odd combination of the disagreeable and the numinous, with a very un-funny plot line in which a creepy rapey murderous stalker seems to be getting played for laughs, backed by lots of haha so humorous daydreams about domestic violence. Very 1990s in its ethos. Was it supposed to be edgy? But ASIDE from that (Mrs Lincoln, how did you like the play?) the character work was good, the dialogue crisp, and the selkie stuff worked extremely well.