Reading Wednesday 7/08
Aug. 7th, 2019 02:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livRecently read: Spinning silver by Naomi Novik. (c) Temeraire LLC 2018; Pub Pan Books 2019; ISBN 978-1-5098-9903-6
Pretty much all the Hugo reviews have been enthusiastic about this, and two of my partners both told me that I absolutely must read it because it's a fairy tale retelling with Lithuanian Jews. I ended up borrowingjack's Kindle, and reading it fairly fast during a road trip while jack was driving, so that I could return the device to him before he got too deprived of the books he was in the middle of. This is a very inconvenient arrangement and I really ought to figure out Calibre enough to be able to borrow Amazon ebooks.
I was not disappointed, I found Spinning Silver enjoyable and original and atmospheric, if a little superficial in some ways.
I almost liked the set-up in the first third better than the main plot. The three young women trying to make their way in a world that's largely stacked against women. Wanda, the Lithuanian peasant living a subsistence existence with an abusive father. Miryem, the Jewish daughter of a struggling middle-class moneylender, and Irina, the daughter of a minor noble who wants to use her marriage to advance his position. All three are so well characterized, and I liked the exploration of the ways they (are forced to) use manipulation to achieve their goals when they are denied any direct channels of agency. I particularly liked the handling of relative deprivation; Irina and her father are poor compared to royalty, and that matters, but they also own servants (who are real characters, not just robots to make the important characters' lives easier), and they're unimaginably rich compared to Miryem's family, who struggle and do without but are unimaginably rich compared to Wanda's family who spend all their waking hours failing to acquire enough food.
The main plot involves Miryem made the unwilling consort of the fairy king, and Irina being married to the Tsar who is actually possessed by a demon. The Staryk are really interestingly portrayed fairies, who follow their own morality in ways that are often casually but not necessarily maliciously destructive to their human neighbours. There's some cool worldbuilding of a society that works by typical "fairy promise" rules, and of the relationship of the Staryk with Winter. And I like Miryem's desperate attempts to outwit the fairy bargains she has non-consensually made, and her gradually building up some kind of rapport with the alien fairy servants. I was only a little bit wishing to return to the scenes of everyday life in fantasy Lithuania.
I was pretty excited by the denouement where Miryem's desperate plot dovetails with Irina's equally desperate quest to avoid being devoured by her husband's demon. I enjoyed the roles Wanda and her brothers play in finding that almost impossible compromise to save the humans from the Staryk and their eternal winter, the Staryk kingdom from disastrous warming, and everybody from the demon of destruction.
But I felt the ending didn't make sense; it was just compulsory heterosexuality, with both Miryem and Irina falling in love with their imposed husbands, who by the end barely meet the baseline of being somewhat less abusive than they first appeared. You don't see any of their positive qualities other than being rich and handsome. I understand that it's genre-typical happily-ever-after for relatively low status girls to end up married to the princes, but when you've used as much realism as Novik does in portraying the awfulness of a relationship with someone who has absolute power over you, it felt a bit hollow.
As for the Jewish bits, well. I definitely enjoyed having a range of Jewish characters, not just one token exotic type. I like that Novik avoids the romanticism you sometimes see towards pre-19th century Eastern European Jewish history, but also doesn't only focus on the grimness of belonging to a despised ethnic group. You could complain that Miryem in some ways matches the anti-semitic stereotype of using financial nous to exploit less numerate neighbours. But for me, Miryem's character works because you see the desperation behind her potentially selfish scheming, and because the book also shows two non-Jewish women doing their best in bad situations, and other Jewish characters some of whom are more and some less likeable.
The thing that threw me out of the story though was Miryem reciting the blessing for trees in blossom. Novik made the unfortunate choice to spell out the transliteration of the blessing, and we find that Miryem speaks Hebrew with a modern Israeli accent. I didn't like the blessing scene anyway; it feels like the blessing is being used as a spell to make a magic tree miraculously flourish when it's needed for story reasons, rather than thanking God for the natural phenomenon of trees in blossom. But having the blessing written out rather than just mentioned made me realize that basically, all the Jewish characters in SS are, well, pretty much contemporary American Jews transplanted into a vaguely "olden-days" setting. (There's little specificity of place, it could be anywhere in generic Eastern Europe, and it definitely doesn't take place during a defined historical era other than presumably before the Russian Revolution.) At weddings they do chair dancing and break a glass and even dance the hora (described with that term), and I'm not saying fairy-tale era Lithuanians definitely wouldn't have done those things, but they're all suspiciously identical to the most generic type of modern Ashkenazi culture.
And I mean, it *is* quite nice to have people-like-me as protagonists of a fairy story, but they're almost too like me, and I could no longer suspend disbelief about the characters arising in their particular context. Miryem's ostensibly Jewish marriage to someone who isn't even human, let alone Jewish, is accepted without a quibble because modern readers generally think marriage is about two individuals who are in love. And once I started questioning the setting, I started finding it odd that fairies and demons and magic exist in this world, but Christianity and Judaism are apparently true; I mean, it's not uncommon in fairy stories that Christian rituals work as a sort of counter-magic, but in SS Christianity (and the Divine right of kings, apparently) seems to be real and Judaism also does, which doesn't entirely make sense.
Still, definitely worth reading in spite of my quibbles.
Currently reading: The Storm Keeper's island by Catherine Doyle. I'm really enjoying this so far, the narrative voice which is tight third for an 11yo boy is absolutely gorgeous, just a bit sarcastic, and hilarious in a way that feels age-appropriate. Also lots of evocative descriptions of a magical landscape and of children being children.
Up next: Not sure, maybe Declare by Tim Powers, which has been on my to-read pile for ages and I feel I have energy for something complicated.
Pretty much all the Hugo reviews have been enthusiastic about this, and two of my partners both told me that I absolutely must read it because it's a fairy tale retelling with Lithuanian Jews. I ended up borrowing
jack's Kindle, and reading it fairly fast during a road trip while jack was driving, so that I could return the device to him before he got too deprived of the books he was in the middle of. This is a very inconvenient arrangement and I really ought to figure out Calibre enough to be able to borrow Amazon ebooks.I was not disappointed, I found Spinning Silver enjoyable and original and atmospheric, if a little superficial in some ways.
I almost liked the set-up in the first third better than the main plot. The three young women trying to make their way in a world that's largely stacked against women. Wanda, the Lithuanian peasant living a subsistence existence with an abusive father. Miryem, the Jewish daughter of a struggling middle-class moneylender, and Irina, the daughter of a minor noble who wants to use her marriage to advance his position. All three are so well characterized, and I liked the exploration of the ways they (are forced to) use manipulation to achieve their goals when they are denied any direct channels of agency. I particularly liked the handling of relative deprivation; Irina and her father are poor compared to royalty, and that matters, but they also own servants (who are real characters, not just robots to make the important characters' lives easier), and they're unimaginably rich compared to Miryem's family, who struggle and do without but are unimaginably rich compared to Wanda's family who spend all their waking hours failing to acquire enough food.
The main plot involves Miryem made the unwilling consort of the fairy king, and Irina being married to the Tsar who is actually possessed by a demon. The Staryk are really interestingly portrayed fairies, who follow their own morality in ways that are often casually but not necessarily maliciously destructive to their human neighbours. There's some cool worldbuilding of a society that works by typical "fairy promise" rules, and of the relationship of the Staryk with Winter. And I like Miryem's desperate attempts to outwit the fairy bargains she has non-consensually made, and her gradually building up some kind of rapport with the alien fairy servants. I was only a little bit wishing to return to the scenes of everyday life in fantasy Lithuania.
I was pretty excited by the denouement where Miryem's desperate plot dovetails with Irina's equally desperate quest to avoid being devoured by her husband's demon. I enjoyed the roles Wanda and her brothers play in finding that almost impossible compromise to save the humans from the Staryk and their eternal winter, the Staryk kingdom from disastrous warming, and everybody from the demon of destruction.
But I felt the ending didn't make sense; it was just compulsory heterosexuality, with both Miryem and Irina falling in love with their imposed husbands, who by the end barely meet the baseline of being somewhat less abusive than they first appeared. You don't see any of their positive qualities other than being rich and handsome. I understand that it's genre-typical happily-ever-after for relatively low status girls to end up married to the princes, but when you've used as much realism as Novik does in portraying the awfulness of a relationship with someone who has absolute power over you, it felt a bit hollow.
As for the Jewish bits, well. I definitely enjoyed having a range of Jewish characters, not just one token exotic type. I like that Novik avoids the romanticism you sometimes see towards pre-19th century Eastern European Jewish history, but also doesn't only focus on the grimness of belonging to a despised ethnic group. You could complain that Miryem in some ways matches the anti-semitic stereotype of using financial nous to exploit less numerate neighbours. But for me, Miryem's character works because you see the desperation behind her potentially selfish scheming, and because the book also shows two non-Jewish women doing their best in bad situations, and other Jewish characters some of whom are more and some less likeable.
The thing that threw me out of the story though was Miryem reciting the blessing for trees in blossom. Novik made the unfortunate choice to spell out the transliteration of the blessing, and we find that Miryem speaks Hebrew with a modern Israeli accent. I didn't like the blessing scene anyway; it feels like the blessing is being used as a spell to make a magic tree miraculously flourish when it's needed for story reasons, rather than thanking God for the natural phenomenon of trees in blossom. But having the blessing written out rather than just mentioned made me realize that basically, all the Jewish characters in SS are, well, pretty much contemporary American Jews transplanted into a vaguely "olden-days" setting. (There's little specificity of place, it could be anywhere in generic Eastern Europe, and it definitely doesn't take place during a defined historical era other than presumably before the Russian Revolution.) At weddings they do chair dancing and break a glass and even dance the hora (described with that term), and I'm not saying fairy-tale era Lithuanians definitely wouldn't have done those things, but they're all suspiciously identical to the most generic type of modern Ashkenazi culture.
And I mean, it *is* quite nice to have people-like-me as protagonists of a fairy story, but they're almost too like me, and I could no longer suspend disbelief about the characters arising in their particular context. Miryem's ostensibly Jewish marriage to someone who isn't even human, let alone Jewish, is accepted without a quibble because modern readers generally think marriage is about two individuals who are in love. And once I started questioning the setting, I started finding it odd that fairies and demons and magic exist in this world, but Christianity and Judaism are apparently true; I mean, it's not uncommon in fairy stories that Christian rituals work as a sort of counter-magic, but in SS Christianity (and the Divine right of kings, apparently) seems to be real and Judaism also does, which doesn't entirely make sense.
Still, definitely worth reading in spite of my quibbles.
Currently reading: The Storm Keeper's island by Catherine Doyle. I'm really enjoying this so far, the narrative voice which is tight third for an 11yo boy is absolutely gorgeous, just a bit sarcastic, and hilarious in a way that feels age-appropriate. Also lots of evocative descriptions of a magical landscape and of children being children.
Up next: Not sure, maybe Declare by Tim Powers, which has been on my to-read pile for ages and I feel I have energy for something complicated.
