The Forum Book Club thread 2020. August: Tiempos recios

[MamaPata]

I finally started The Swallows last night. It looked like such a slim little book; I thought that it would be a quick read. But that prose was dense! And the subject matter intense - I think this is going to be slow going. The first chapter was absolutely horrifying. I don't want to trigger any spoilers, so I'll hold off more discussion until we're all further along.

I had the same experience. I had known from extralean’s post that there would be a lot of new vocabulary for me, but I definitely wasn’t prepared. I’ve mostly not been having a problem reading in French lately, but the first page of this was a struggle (though I do seem to now be improving).

[Serpent]

I can definitely understand why it is so popular in Russia. Millions use the vast amazing (it truly is) Moscow metro daily, and the fact that this story is built around the metro with a lot of cultural references partially driving the adventure is compelling. I was in Moscow in 2011, and I had fun reminiscing, and would look up what stations look like to remind myself of the stations and lines myself (I forgot a lot! but it came back as I was reading so that was a lot of fun).

That's true Also, like with all dystopian fiction (I guess), it can be very comforting to read about someone who definitely has it worse than you do. A boy for whom going to the next metro station is a huge adventure. And when actually using the metro, you feel so grateful just to be able to hop on a train so easily, to have working escalators with no missing steps, to have wifi on most trains (there was no wifi there back when the book was written)
As someone who's never been to New York or London, if I were to read dystopian fiction where they're still recognizable, I'd be jealous of the main characters I guess TBH this is my first dystopian book.

Also, as the author pointed out (in a very political interview - please discuss only the book here!):
"I believe Western European post-apocalypse stories mean zombie stories or just virus stories or whatever," Glukhovsky explains. "They have this cheerful tonality because they free Western society of the laws and obligations and turn the very known urban environment to no man’s land, where everything is possible and where you can dehumanise human beings and murder them. Wherever zombies are popular, they are popular because people are tired of rules. Zombies give you a fairy tale that allows you to legally smash the head of your neighbour because they’ve been dehumanised. ... The popularity of the zombie tales and the Western style post-apocalypse is the consequence of this."
Zombies allow Americans to dream of the past, to transport back to romanticised days of the Wild West. On the other side of the Bering Strait, the population doesn’t pine for a time when humans were wild – it dreams, wistfully, of another relic of the past: order.

"This incredibly nostalgic, bleak, regretful tonality of the Russian post-apocalypse stems from the fact that we had this feeling – just like people in the Dark Age and medieval times – that the Golden Age of civilisation was long gone and you were looking into the past with a great nostalgia thinking that the higher the paramount of culture and science and civilisation was already gone. You fear the future because you know for sure that every tomorrow is going to be worse than every today. You look back with awe and admiration and nostalgia and you miss all these days. You understand they are gone forever and you have no hope or future."

And this explains perfectly why I never cared for books with zombies. Oh and the interview mentioned S.t.a.l.k.e.r. computer games.

There's more but the link is so political that I won't share it here (there are also minor spoilers). PM me if you can't find it via google. I'll be happy to discuss the interview outside this forum.

For female characters, I don't necessarily need a gun-slinging female character that shatters gender roles for me to enjoy a novel, but I was more bothered by the fact that women seem almost non-existent! They should make up half the population, but I can't think of a single female character's name, which just makes it feel like an older military novel, or (literal) man against nature novel, but it's supposed to show a whole society in the metro so I don't understand what all the women are doing! lol.

Oh I agree, but the presence of a female fighter is very telling with regards to what the author thinks about women. So far all references to women involve motherhood and having babies Artem's friend has a little sister and they are harsh towards her.
(but for me the worst part are expressions like "sit like a woman and do nothing", "old women's tales", "blush like a girl"... sigh, and I'm not even done with the third chapter yet)

[MamaPata]

April’s book will be the Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. As I have said, it is very readable by my dated memory, but it is longer than the others so people may want to crack on with it. I won’t be able to start it til april so I will be a bit slow but am looking forward to discussing it.

(Please continue discussing the other books, this is just a general warning so everyone has time to get hold of it and start)

[Cèid Donn]

For female characters, I don't necessarily need a gun-slinging female character that shatters gender roles for me to enjoy a novel, but I was more bothered by the fact that women seem almost non-existent! They should make up half the population, but I can't think of a single female character's name, which just makes it feel like an older military novel, or (literal) man against nature novel, but it's supposed to show a whole society in the metro so I don't understand what all the women are doing! lol.

Oh I agree, but the presence of a female fighter is very telling with regards to what the author thinks about women. So far all references to women involve motherhood and having babies Artem's friend has a little sister and they are harsh towards her.
(but for me the worst part are expressions like "sit like a woman and do nothing", "old women's tales", "blush like a girl"... sigh, and I'm not even done with the third chapter yet)

What's even more telling is how easily the author can conceive and write male characters who have varying viewpoint, motivation, desires and values. He was able to attribute these elements to his male characters but couldn't bother with any female character to the same degree. This isn't even something that is about breaking gender norm--it's simply the reality of the human experience that women (and non-binary people) are every bit as much individuals, with our own viewpoints, motivation, desires and values, as men, and our experiences are just as worthy of being told in stories.

That's literally been the crux of the conversation we're been having as a society for the past, oh, 40 years or so about gender representation in literature, movies, TV and general storytelling: that what we cherish as "great works" is largely stories where men are shown as individuals with their own inner lives and where women--if women are shown at all--are shown as caricatures, plot devices and tropes that reinforce oppressive, limiting stereotypes about women, our abilities, contributions and actual roles in society. In the very least, this is very biased, incomplete representation of the human experience in our "art."

That said, a woman fighter/soldier is hardly gender-norm breaking in the modern world, regardless of cultural or individual attitudes, especially for Russian culture, where women's participation in the military, or in combat roles that supported the military, is just historical fact. It's rather pathetic that a Russian novel published in the 21st century can't do better then this.

[kanewai]

I finished Les hirondelles de Kaboul over lunch ... and I'll be impatiently waiting until the end of the month to discuss it. I've got some things to say about this book.

The short spoiler-free version: it was a fascinating look at life under the Taliban, and on the emotional and spiritual impacts this had on the main characters. I was impressed that a male author was able to imagine what impact fundamentalism had on women. And then I got to the last twenty pages - and the author blew any good will I had for him. Rage post to come April 1.

Note: I assume it's safe to discuss books after the month is up without worrying about spoilers, yeah? I'm not sure if we ever came up with a standard practice for those.

[Maiwenn]

I finished Les hirondelles de Kaboul over lunch ... and I'll be impatiently waiting until the end of the month to discuss it. I've got some things to say about this book.

The short spoiler-free version: it was a fascinating look at life under the Taliban, and on the emotional and spiritual impacts this had on the main characters. I was impressed that a male author was able to imagine what impact fundamentalism had on women. And then I got to the last twenty pages - and the author blew any good will I had for him. Rage post to come April 1.

Note: I assume it's safe to discuss books after the month is up without worrying about spoilers, yeah? I'm not sure if we ever came up with a standard practice for those.

Yesssss to all of this! I had a reaction of "wait... what?" the first time I read it. I look forward to reading your thoughts!

[Serpent]

I'm not planning to read this but I'm intrigued
wasn't the original plan that it's okay to post spoilers in the last few days of the month as long as you warn about them?

[MamaPata]

Yeah, personally I sort of expect people will end up sharing spoilers here, so if I haven't finished (as for example is the case now!), I just won't check until I'm done. If it's a major spoiler, it might be good to put a heading at the top of the post so people can skip if they're joining in later. But otherwise, I don't think we can avoid spoilers completely.

(Will finish the book asap so I can join you all!)

[MamaPata]

I have now finished it! I have to admit, it didn’t really work for me (from the beginning, but ah, also the end was an experience). I didn’t hate it but I just wasn’t particularly into it - if we hadn’t been going to discuss it here, I’m not sure I would have finished it. I’m not quite sure what didn’t work for me, so I’ll be interested to hear other people’s experiences.

[kanewai]

My reactions to the book were varied. Spoilers ahead for the non-readers.

The book opens with imagery of a city in ruins, followed by the public execution of a woman accused of prostitution. It all feels very post-apocalyptic. To me, it was relatively obvious that the execution was foreshadowing, and that the book would also end with an execution. I was sure that not all the characters would make it out alive.

The main part of the novel follows the intersecting lives of about five characters. The women are all prisoners in their home, the men are all broken. The relationships between everyone is broken too, as if the Taliban had poisoned people's very capacity to connect. I thought this part was vivid and frightening; it was hard to believe that this was taking place in the modern world. The sense of place as strong, but there wasn't much plot, or significant depth to the characters.

It was an amazing look into a world that is closed to most of us. I was also impressed that a Muslim writer would take such a critical look at political Islam, and that a male writer would offer such an empathic look at what the experience of women must be like under fundamentalism.

And then, in the last act, one of the men, a jailer, falls in obsessive love with a prisoner who's set to be executed in a few days. There's no reason for his obsession beyond that she's beautiful (she never talks to him), but it's also somewhat believable. Obsessions aren't always rational. It's what happens next that I found completely unbelievable: the man confesses his love of the prisoner to his wife. The wife is happy that the jailer is finally showing emotion - she thought his heart had been permanently closed to the outside world - and is so full of joy that she swaps places with the prisoner so that her husband can have a chance at happiness. And he accepts this!

And so I don't know what to make of the book. Had I read it wrong all along, and was the book really about one man's redemption and the women were just plot devices? Does the author really believe that a woman's calling is to sacrifice her life for her husband - and if so, should he really be using a women's pen name??? Or, if I'm feeling charitable, was this just a very poor attempt at introducing a plot twist at the end?

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As an aside: I thought this was an excellent choice for the book club. It's short, so most of us can finish in a month. It's international, so should appeal to a wider variety of readers than many authors who are more 'tied' to a language. And it's a book I want to talk about, even if I'm not sure I liked it.

I'm taking a pass in April. I've read Shadow of the Wind twice. The first time was in English, and I really enjoyed it. The second time was in Spanish, and I discovered that it is not one of those books that fully work the second time around. I'll hold off until May to discuss more.