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[emmersreads]

Five Plays in English Verse by Aeschylus (trans. Lewis Campbell) - Review, 2.5/5

Classics, especially old classics, are a great thing to look for in second hand bookstores because your chances of turning up a neat-looking copy are pretty high. But beware! Just because a copy looks neat doesn’t mean it is actually any good.

I’d been on the hunt for a copy of The Oresteia, a myth chronicling the fallout of the Trojan War and interpreted wholly or in part by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. In The Oresteia, Agamemnon returns home and is murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, in revenge for sacrificing their daughter to the gods in return for victory at Troy. Their two surviving children, Orestes and Electra, conspire to murder Clytemnestra, trapped between family loyalty and filial duty to avenge their father’s death. Finally, Orestes seeks absolution for the matricide from the gods in order to put the cycle of violence to rest. The story is a key element in The Odyssey, brought up several times. Part of the tension in Odysseus’ return to Ithaca is that while he could end up like Menelaus, perched with his hot wife atop a pile of riches, he could just as easily end up as Agamemnon, murdered in his own home, his family ruined by a dark legacy of spilled blood.

My hunt for a copy of the plays turned up this secundo hardcover from the late 40s. Good as it looks, it was already dated then — the translation is the Lewis Campbell one from 1890. I really should have got something more recent.

Unfortunately, I don’t particularly rate Campbell as either a translator or a poet. The meter is frustrating to follow, both out loud and read silently, and a lot of the rhymes are hopelessly slanted unless one pronounces them with a really obnoxious public school accent. This was very funny to realize but quickly became much less funny when it just kept happening. The meaning of the play feels like it is muscled out by the archaic verse. A few great lines do manage to muscle their way through, particularly Clytemnestra’s vicious exultation:

Prate not of dishonour! ‘Deserving’ were rather the word. Had he [Agamemnon] not prepared for his house an encumbrance of woe? Let him not loudly plead there below That in paying the price of her death whom a nation deplored, The branch I had reared from his loins, he is slain with iniquitous sword. Men shall reap what they sow!

What can I say. This is dope as hell. All those folks making a million cookie-cutter feminist retellings of Clytemnestra are valid actually.

But for the most part the text rarely rises to the poetic heights that so charmed ancient Athenian audiences, and that Campbell praises with the peculiar unctuous reverence held by the Victorians for the perceived creators of western civilization.

Personally, I don’t think Aeschylus’ plays have held up particularly well. The conventions of Ancient Greek theater feel very limiting to the modern audience. In particular, the convention that plays ought to take place in few or only one location, over the course of only one day makes them feel like short skits to the modern eye. Any violence or physical action occur off-stage, conveyed through monologue or suggestive sound effects, a startling omission for a tradition now so decisively shaped by Romeo and Juliet’s duels or Titus Andronicus’ dismembered hands. Between the mind-the-gap cultural context and the poor translation, it is difficult to access the original impact of these works.

I have to concur with Campbell that Aeschylus’ other plays don’t really compare to the Oresteia trilogy. They lack a certain depth of emotion evoked in Orestes’ despair as he flees the Erinyes or Clytemnestra’s righteous rage as she declares (I imagine her yelling, tossing the bloody weapon at the feet of the Argosian elders), “Men shall reap what they sow!” Aeschylus is also the old man of the three acclaimed Greek tragedians, and in comparison with his successors (particularly Euripides), his plays tend towards the stiff and archetypal. Thanks to his reliance on the chorus rather than the characters to explain the plot, the plays can come off as long strings of moral speeches.

While I know Greek plays typically didn’t contain all that much action, I found myself unable to envision the Danaids eternal keening and weeping in The Suppliants. The drama to be wrought from the Pelagusians swearing to defend these unknown maidens though it will mean certain war is distant from us. We can see the shadow of it, the warriors risking their own lives and the lives of their wives and children (Andromache begs Hector not to take the field in The Iliad not because his death would not be glorious but because it will mean the enslavement or execution of their newborn son), dancing upon the wall of the cave. But the true vision, seen by the light of the sun two millennia since set, is lost to us.

This isn’t so much a criticism of Aeschylus as a reflection on him. His world and its dramatic conventions are millennia distant from us; he wrote these plays a century before the first critical thought about tragedy was composed. He swum in a strange sea. The modern reader must keep in mind that the conventions, atmosphere, and purpose of the Ancient Greek theatre are foreign to us, less entertainment and more a public spectacle of worship of a strange and distant god. These plays can still be enjoyed and appreciated for their own merits, but the reader must be prepared to make the hike up mount Cithaeron themself, and to encounter the strange behaviour of the Maenads there.

This version of Aeschylus feels like something to be studied rather than something worth reading for its own merits.

[emmersreads]

Trust by Hernan Diaz - Review

3/5

This won a Pulitzer Prize in spite of its heartbreakingly dull cover design. Seriously; what about this futuristic bell jar rock building conveys ‘Rashomon-style exploration of perspective and narrative in the Gilded era New York financial aristocracy’? Don’t tell me the first thing is more enticing than the second either. You’re lying.

Because we all judge books by their cover, I didn’t really consider picking this one up until I found a nice second-hand copy for not very much money.

The Pros:

Interesting concept and setting. As we live in interesting times (it remains to be seen whether we’re in a second gilded age or whether it has already passed us by and we’re straight into depression), it feels like an appropriate era to look back on. And early economic incidents are often batshit insane.

I liked the take on an epistolic narrative. Trust is told through four diagetic sources, all written about the same period: the gossipy novel barely pretending not to be a fictionalization of the life of financial titan Andrew Bevel, Bevel’s own unfinished name-clearing autobiography, the decades-later memoir of Bevel’s ghost writer Ida Partenza, and finally the private journal of Bevel’s reclusive and mysterious wife. The sources penetrate deeper and deeper through the layers of obfuscation and narrative-building, attempting to uncover the true nature of the genius behind Bevel’s miraculous success. It’s a really effective way to explore the self-mythologization of finance.

The Cons:

I really wish Trust had done more with the setting. The Gilded age was a period with a very particular image and style. I would have enjoyed a little more grandiosity and excess, especially in the early section of the book where little of the comparison between accounts exists to hold our interest. Instead, it feels a little stripped down, like it could take place just about anywhere.

I found the eventual twist boring and predictable. I wish it had recontextualized the preceding book in a less clear cut and binary way. Ironically for a book critical of the self-mythologizing of the finance world, its mythology is its flaw here. It needs to establish a narrative of a single supernatural genius in order to take this image apart. But, to my mind, only ends up inverting it. Like if the wizard of Oz was revealed to be a fraud only for us to then find he was being puppeted muppet-style by a second even more secret wizard that was real this time.

It’s hard to review a book that is merely fine, especially one with as few rough edges as this. All I can say is that I wanted more. The setting and topic lend themselves to shock and awe — skyscrapers, over-sized statues, numbers with so many zeros on the end that your eyes kind of glaze over — but the actual story is almost clinical in its simplicity. This is a sad scenario where I have more to say about the paratext (I started this review with two paragraphs about the cover design, and in fairness ‘Trust’ is a a great title for this - you could get a more than decent college English essay out of it) than about the text itself.

Our current society is in many ways simply the remodeled detritus of the Gilded Era. Unfortunately, Trust has none of the same staying power.

[emmersreads]

Piglet by Lottie Hazell - Review

1.5/5

A blurb on Piglet’s Storygraph page describes it as an, “uncommonly clever novel.”

I ended up rereading this blurb a lot after various library hold shenanigans had me stopping and starting the book like a dissatisfied sprinter grinding out a good time. I returned to the page way more often than I normally do, the Storygraph entry typically being a largely superfluous addition to a cover image and date read. I found myself meditating upon this quotation, wondering what the uncommonly clever take would be, when it would reveal itself. Especially since I had put the book on my tbr for entirely superficial reasons: I liked the gorgeously vibrant impressionist painting of a burger on the cover and the narrator of the audiobook has an authentic northern accent, which really lends a degree of resonance to the protagonist’s regionalist shame.

It was fine, I guess.

There’s little I can point out that is concretely wrong about it. A lot of stuff that is frustrating to me in particular, but nothing I can say that is objectively bad. Nothing that I would describe as uncommonly, or frankly, commonly clever either.

I’m going to spoil the whole ass book here because I actually kinda don’t think it’s worth your time.

Protagonist Piglet finds out her perfect sophisticated fiancé has cheated on her only a few weeks out from her perfect sophisticated wedding, the event that will finally remove and purify her from her lower class northern origins. Piglet spirals as she is confronted with the decision to split and lose the aspirational life she has worked so hard to build, or stay and have it tainted with the same shame of imperfection as her childhood and family. She finds herself insatiably hungry as she kicks the choice down the road. Her obvious self-destructive spiral alienates everyone honestly interested in what is best for her. She seeks reassurance only from those who will tell her what she knows she doesn’t want. After a deeply humiliating wedding, Piglet finally hits bottom and breaks up with her fiancé. Only then does she feel satiated.

Was that it? Is that really so clever?

I think I may have even said that out loud as I stood alone in the double isolation of my noise-cancelling headphones and empty house. A novel in which a woman’s self-denied dissatisfaction with her ostensibly perfect life is embodied through a normatively disturbing lack of self-denial vis a vis food is the ‘it was a dark and stormy night’ of literary fiction. It was immediately cliched even if it had never been done before.

What does it really say about body politics for a fat woman, acutely aware of her size, preparing for her wedding, to enter a restaurant, order everything on the menu, and then eat all of it with her hands? This is not a facetious question. The thing that would have saved this book for me was if it had more to say about the politics of eating in public, of eating as a fat person, eating in unsanctioned ways, in a period of time when women are expected to diet. Instead it leans hard into the experience of self-sabotage (yes, I know no one does this on purpose and it indicates serious personal problems etc etc but I would simply enforce my boundaries, sorry to Piglet but I’m different) and into the mortifying ordeal of being the main character in someone else’s badly acted sixteen part tiktok skit.

The connection between Piglet’s binge eating and her spiraling mental health was acutely uncomfortable as a reader. Piglet often swings between elation and soul-crushing mortification as she eats, becoming extremely sensitive of the people who might be watching her and what they might think. I became inescapably aware that as a reader, I was doing essentially the same thing.

If I bought into the novel I became a voyeur on this fictional woman’s breakdown. There was a car crash effect to it. It was compelling in its horribleness (Piglet eats until she feels ill, throws up, envisions herself growing trotters and transforming into a pig; it is clear that her binges are not the healthy experience of enjoying food while fat but a binge motivated by visceral self-loathing), but I felt like the ethical thing for me to do was to look politely away. If I could not intervene then at least I could offer privacy. On the one hand, the novel is devastatingly effective in creating this experience, on the other, it felt like it was griping my collar begging me not to read it.

It feels like there ought to be something there. A book that hates to be read, where the ethical choice would be to put the thing down unfinished, the text equivalent of those video games that slowly back you into being a fascist through increasingly complex bureaucratic paperwork. But then the book ends with the healthy decision being made and everything becoming okay like we’ve flipped a switch to an HGTV cooking show. I was profoundly disappointed that Piglet shied away from a genuinely confronting depiction of eating while fat for the trite little resolution, “at least, Piglet was satisfied.”

As much as I appreciate an open ending, this is not a resolution. In breaking up with her perfect sophisticated fiancé, Piglet has only solved half her problems, and not even the most interesting ones. She has prioritized herself over the image of the perfect aspirational life she had previously been pursuing, but suddenly being able to simply stop eating when full does nothing to address the problems of fatness and food politics the book so carefully raised. Just don’t feel bad about it is not a conclusion, especially to a book that is so devastatingly effective in illustrating the mixture of shame and elation Piglet feels about eating in public.

I read this book over the course of three library borrows and like five months. I kept coming back because I wanted it to be better, but it never was.

(Addendum: food writing is worse that Butter by Asako Yuzuki, but better than You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Awaeke Emezi, solid 7 out of 10)

[emmersreads]

Good Material by Dolly Alderton - Review

4.5/5

This might be an unexpected take but Good Material is perhaps my favourite romance, like ever. Fans and haters alike might disagree, that this is a romance, that it’s good because it is a romance, but allow me a long winded defense.

I want to interpret Good Material as a romance novel because it is most centrally a character study though the lens of a romantic relationship. That this relationship has ended ought not really to matter (I find the RWA’s definition, which includes a requirement for a happy ending, to be overly prescriptive and limiting). Romance as an experience can be much more than getting into and being in a relationship. The idea that a person’s life is just the runway up to their One Perfect Soulmate, that an other relationships they may have must be unimportant and unsatisfying, and that once with this soulmate they must remain together in their best relationship forever, is regressive. I get that romance as a genre has very concrete conventions because it offers a fantasy that most readers do enjoy, but that does not mean there is no space here for experimental and alternative takes. The unexpected take on a relationship was exactly why I liked the book. It felt fresh in a way that extremely trope-y conventional romance does not (again, I get that this is precisely why most readers like it, but come on guys we can have both).

Rather than being about falling in love, Good Material is about moving on. Beyond the character study of a well-intentioned if imperfect and intensely needy man, the primary theme is the emotional experience of singlehood. I think reading this as a romance is the best way to appreciate what it has to offer. It is romance in that it is the absence of romance. Our protagonist suffers because he defines his life by romance and doesn’t know how to endure its absence. And, I do have to admit, as an eternally single person, I did enjoy a book about finding oneself through singleness more than I do about falling in love in the same manner as one gets hit by a freight train.

Good Material is a character study of a washed-up burnt-out failed comedian clinging to his recent break up to avoid confronting the fact that he’s still living like a college student in his mid-thirties, and it might even be his own fault. Something about the ostensibly well-intentioned but so deeply unself-aware that he ends up hurting people anyway protagonist has been really compelling to me recently, and Good Material’s Andy fits the bill perfectly.

Your mileage may vary depending on how much of Andy’s deeply unreliable narration you can take. Most of the negative reviews I perused mentioned having little patience for Andy’s self-pity, but at least for me that was the whole point. Andy is comically self-absorbed, so much so that he can’t even make jokes about it. There’s a lot of humour in his myopia, but also a lot of realness. We’ve all been that person who can’t seem to grasp that at least some of the reason things aren’t going well for them is themselves. The unself-aware male protagonist is so compelling for me perhaps because I see a lot of myself in them. The lonely romantic is ever compelled to wonder what they are doing that is so objectionable to prospects.

I think it is a pretty serious misread of the text to suggest that Andy is petty, out of control, and emotionally dense by accident. All of that stuff is the entire point. He literally would rather humiliate himself pretending to go to therapy than actually go to therapy. Needless to say, I found this all extremely funny. But, I do have to acknowledge that in order to do so, one needs to give Andy the benefit of the doubt. Personally, I’m not sure why you wouldn’t. He is only fictional, and helped along by that fact that his misadventures resemble in tone if not in specifics Alderton’s own hot mess era chronicled in her memoir Everything I Know about Love. Reading Andy as very much a man written by a woman definitely helped the medicine go down.

The thing that really tied it all together for me was the ending. After trekking through Andy’s nostalgic and occasionally nauseating return to every part of this relationship, seeing his ex coloured by every stage of grief, we finally meet her. We hear the breakup for her perspective. Jen’s sections reveal her as a fiercely indpendant person starkly different from Andy (a romantic who struggles to exist outside of a relationship). The break up blindsides Andy, and he spends the subsequent novel trying to understand Jen and tying himself in anxious and resentful knots over what others think of him. We reach Jen’s perspective to reveal that it’s true, Andy never really understood her at all. The reason Andy has been looking for, the thing he can do to make her come back to him, doesn’t exist. The break up was never about him.

The novel is about self-awareness. The breakup throws Andy’s self-perception as the great boyfriend, half of a whole, into disarray. Its fallout sees him begin to encounter the difference between how he sees himself and how he appears to other people. When we meet Jen, the truth, or at least another view of it, is revealed. She was never as invested in becoming part of a romantic unit, in being a girlfriend. The parts of Andy that drove her away were not, as he assumed, his crappy career prospects, but rather his smothering devotion to the idea of a relationship. It felt so fresh and rebellious to read something as small as a woman who chooses to break up for her own sake. For the reveal to be that for her it was never really about this man or any others, but about living her own life.

That’s why it is my favourite romance. I’m not particularly interested in the fantasy of being completed, protected, anticipated by a partner, but rather the fantasy of finding actualization in your own self. Now that’s romantic.

[emmersreads]

The Nest by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney - Review

2.5/5

Here’s a compliment I never expected to pay to The Nest: it coheres.

It comes together in the end, in spite of its messy front two-thirds. That doesn’t mean I’d recommend the book. The bad very much does outweigh the good in my opinion. But at least you’re not left miserable. It is able to summon a basically heart-warming attempt at character growth.

There’s the compliment part of my compliment sandwich done. It’s an open-faced sandwich.

The first two-thirds of this novel are exactly what people are talking about when they say they hate literary fiction or ‘book club books.’ Mediocre wordcraft about unhappy assholes bitchily navel-gazing about their unfulfilling relationships and the wasted potential of their literary careers. Trying to be a novel snarkily deriding the hollow posturing of self-obsessed literary hacks while being a writer’s seminar New York-pilled self-absorbed literary hack yourself is a special kind of sauce. Here’s my unsolicited advice: don’t attempt to spear fictional characters for being mediocre and shallow until you can ensure your own novel is not also mediocre and shallow.

It is immediately apparent that this book ought to be about self-awareness because all of the characters desperately need some. The Nest is like ‘Schitt’s Creek’ if ‘Schitt’s Creek’ thought it was ‘Succession.’ Our characters bemoan their waning access to a level of wealth that appears increasingly unethical and destructive as the economy crashes around us. Instead it becomes about, I don’t know, accepting the situation as it is? Not holding out false hope? This should be a book about money and about greed, but greed isn’t particularly flattering, so when characters need to grow the novel flushes its own set up down the New York toilet.

I’m being mean because The Nest is steeped in a genuinely detestable bourgeoisie obsession that it is never able to shake, particularly destructive for a book about money. By this I mean an obsession with being and remaining bourgeois, which sucks because, while I do like books about rich people, I really don’t have a lot of sympathy for a bunch of people who are merely quite wealthy rather than ultra-wealthy. The eponymous Nest is a trust fund inheritance that our four principle characters have been relying on to solidify their tenuous grasp on their wealthy lifestyles.

Again, I don’t mind a book about the bizarre follies of the rich (imo that’s what makes dark academia compelling as a genre) so long as I’m not expected to sympathize with them about how how vacuous and annoying other rich people are. In one scene, stay-at-home mom Melody is accosted by two other PTA moms. As they chirp about how totally unfair it is that financial aid isn’t offered to white kids in rich suburbs, Melody reflects on how horribly vapid they all are for not knowing what it’s like to be an only tenuously wealthy housewife. And I wanted to reach right into the page and shake her until she realized she was exactly the same, or at least until her $250 haircut was disastrously mussed. There was nothing uniquely deserving about suffering from being a rich kid who grows up to be a potentially less rich adult.

Every character is nauseatingly attached to material possessions, particularly houses. We get three separate passages about characters who bought at low prices in undervalued neighbourhoods or were gifted a cheap place only to smugly reflect on how great gentrification is if you’ve got a foot on the property ladder. Even the characters that aren’t anxiously grasping at external signifiers of wealth to fill the empty void inside them are characterized by their tastefully authentic scandi modern brownstones. Is this what being middle-aged is like? Only caring about how good your stuff looks in the golden light of a New York sunrise?

Speaking of New York, there is something about being a writer living and writing about New York that cooks your brain. I started a shelf on Goodreads called ‘What is Wrong with New Yorkers’ as a private joke after reading the bizarro worlds of Billion Dollar Loser by Reeves Wiedeman and The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy. I quickly learned that whatever is in the water there (I assume it’s also what makes the bagels taste like that) isn’t limited to non-fiction. I don’t know how to explain the specifics of this, but no one believes there is something uniquely special about New York more strongly than New Yorkers. It’s a type of Paris Syndrome that only affects locals. The most visible part of this is books set in New York’s enduing obsession with the same few New York landmarks. Hilariously, The Nest sets the uncomfortable and contentious family reunion in the same Grand Central seafood restaurant as Cleopatra and Frankenstein sets its uncomfortable and contentious family reunion. I get that it’s apparently an iconic spot, but it does give the impression that New York has a population of ~8 million but only one restaurant. The emphasis on the same half-dozen iconic sports makes entire novels feel like that one establishing shot of the Empire State Building in every tv show opening credits.

This New Yorkism is the sense that the story could only take place in New York not because of any specific element tying the characters and their problems to the place but due to some ineffable magic that the rest of the world tragically lacks. Novels set in other cities, even other large and weird international cities, are not like this. In reality, The Nest could only be set in New York because the target audience of a book in which the only sympathetic character is a formerly promising literature girlie live there.

The experience of reading this book is the experience of browsing an Erewhon, or perhaps catching a glimpse of the inside of one of those fancy dressage barns, the kind with woodchip floors, or of making awkward eye contact with diners at a restaurant that you’ve just realized is out of your price range as you try to back inconspicuously out the door. It’s obvious who this is for, and it’s not you.

*

As a bonus, here’s a list of New York attractions that appear in every book about New York regardless of whether it makes sense, in order of frequency:

Central Park — I think you’re actually contractually obligated to include this one or they blackball you from the publishing industry.

New York Library — this ranks particularly high because it appeals to the self-importance of writers. See The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

Grand Central Station — self-evident, particularly common in books about the countryside retreats of New Yorkers like The Guest by Emma Cline

The MoMA/The Met — Even Donna Tartt is not immune from New Yorkism. These are used basically interchangeably. For whatever reason The Guggenheim is not nearly as popular a name drop.

The Brooklyn Bridge — this appears bizarrely frequently despite being a very awkward setting for most scenes. Honourable Mention: I eliminated Fifth Avenue since it contains over half the other landmarks and it felt like cheating to count them twice.

[emmersreads]

Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah - Review

4.5/5

Chain-Gang All-Stars was my favourite book of 2023 and it wasn’t even close. I’m now employed as a full-time shill for Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, so obviously his first book, Friday Black, was on my tbr. The continuity between these stories and CGAS is clear — biting and not particularly subtle satire, dehumanization of both the oppressor and the oppressed, normalization of ultraviolence — but I was also surprised by the ways they differed.

My favourite part of CGAS was the relationship between Loretta and Hamara. I loved it. I thought it was touching and emotional and I think butch women with hammers are cool as hell. Short stories aren’t really a great medium for developing a relationship, unless that’s literally the only thing that story is about. Still, I found myself missing the character dynamic of Thurwar and STAXX. I’m really glad Adjei-Brenyah decided to write a longer work and to explore that direction.

That’s not really what I want to focus on in this review though. A big part of the reason I made CGAS my book of the year was that I couldn’t stop thinking about it — not while I was reading and not after I finished it. I’ve had the same experience with Friday Black.

I initially had some trouble with the Overdrive ebook. I’d only finished the first story when my ebook was replaced with its Spanish translation, which I couldn’t read, and which I couldn’t dislodge for a full week. The entire time I couldn’t stop thinking about that first story, ‘The Finkelstein 5’, clearly inspired by the Central Park 5 but dialing up the violence of racist vigilantism.

The theme that stayed with me the most this time was the pervasive ultraviolence. It’s present in almost all the stories. Even the ones that don’t include literal interpersonal violence feature lurid blood and gore. In ‘The Finkelstein 5’, racist vigilantism is escalated from the shootings that fill our headlines to chainsaw beheadings right out of a slasher movie. In ‘Lark Street’ a teen encounters the spirits of the children he and his girlfriend decided to abort — in the form of anatomically correct foetuses, covered in blood and more fish than person. In ‘Friday Black’, customers are driven into a mindless frenzy by the desire for seasonal sales, which leads them to attack and kill each other and the unfortunate staff in pursuit of limited stock. I was acutely aware of this because my mother had dnf’ed CGAS on account of the violence. I’ve always thought that the ultraviolence was the point of that book and it’s only more clear in this one.

The key element here is the sense that that violence, even extreme violence, doesn’t matter the way it should. Characters move through a world in which violence is normal, mundane, with neither moral nor practical consequences. This is most clear in ‘The Flash’. Suburban residents are trapped in a timeloop punctuated by nuclear armageddon. Even when they become aware of the timeloop, it doesn’t end; they’re left with nothing but the knowledge that nothing will ever matter again. Protagonist Ama spends multiple loops becoming the murder-queen, killing and torturing everyone in various violent ways. Eventually she becomes tired of this and decides to turn over a new leaf and be a nice and inspiring person. Everyone remembers Ama the knife queen, but they all move on. Ama reenters the community. What else can they do — nothing will change.

The meaning of this commentary on the real world is obvious. Black people have a different relationship with violence than white people. For white people, violence perpetrated against them is a symptom of something so majorly wrong that regular life must be put on hold until it is resolved. Violence is something that necessitates redress, justice. On the contrary, violence perpetrated against Black people or by white people is at best a necessary evil to preserve the status quo, otherwise it’s not actually a problem. Don’t make a big deal of it.

The ultraviolence in these stories expresses the feeling of living in a world in which nine-year-olds are instructed on how to interact with the police so as not to be shot, in which a significant portion of physicians believe Black people feel less pain than whites, in which Black people are killed with impunity.

Adjei-Brenyah’s use of ultraviolence as a motif shows his ability to weave multiple levels of political commentary together in his work. Neither Friday Black nor CGAS are difficult to decode — CGAS even includes footnotes to ensure that the reader doesn’t miss the real events being referenced or mistake them for a flight of fancy — but that’s an intentional choice. We experience the political messaging both in what Adjei-Brenyah is explicitly telling us and in the feelings he evokes. The sense that violence doesn’t matter the way it should, that lives are disposable, is never something acknowledged directly in any way. Rather, it’s an overbearing atmosphere established by the interplay of the characters and of the short stories themselves. There is such a depth to these works. I love the combination of explicit discussion and literary evocation. It makes Adjei-Brenyah’s work compulsively readable and unforgettable. I can’t wait to see what he does next.

Black Lives Matter

[emmersreads]

The Odyssey by Homer (trans. Emily Wilson) - review

Boy, has this translation ruffled some jimmies over on the parts of the Internet that are genuinely interested in classical scholarship and the meaning of Ancient Greek epic poetry composed over three millennia distant to our current time. I’m sure it’s all mutually respectful and productive and discussion of the difficulties of making an ancient and complex poem accessible for a modern audience whilst still conveying an accurate sense of its content.

I’m obviously well behind the curve on the Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey discourse, but the short version is that Wilson’s translation received some promotional coverage for being the first translation of The Odyssey by a woman. This provoked the usual backlash, that this translation was in some ineffable way ‘woke’ and ruining the poem by adding ‘wokeness’ to it, somehow. It’s extremely clear that all the objections to Wilson’s translation were theatrical nonsense cooked up by bad faith idiots who care little about classics but a lot about twitter follower counts.

I’m focusing on the translation here because it’s The Odyssey. You already know the story. Even if you’ve never heard it quite like this, you already know the story. This poem is so influential on the history of European literature that evaluating whether I liked it is really besides the point. It is interesting primarily as the source of all that influence, peering back into a story at once familiar and deeply alien. I do think it’s worth returning to if your only exposure to Greek mythology recently has been though modern romantic adaptations. Personally I think it’s valuable to remind oneself of the ways in which those texts are strange and unfamiliar. TL;DR Odysseus is a lot more naked and angry than you remember him, and the poem is a lot more concerned with how he orchestrates his return to his long vacant seat as king of Ithaca than it is with his journey.

In discussions like these it’s important to establish at least some bona fides. While I am not a translator or a classicist, Wilson’s Odyssey is not the only translation of the poem I’ve read. I’ve also read the Robert Fitzgerald translation of The Odyssey and The Iliad (in their entirety). All this to say that I know what I’m talking about when I say that Wilson’s version is not meaningfully different from previous translations and anyone with even a modicum of curiosity about the original would know that.

The most striking change in Wilson’s translation is her choice of casual and accessible vocabulary to convey the context that the original, while poetic, would have been familiar to its Ancient Greek audience. It certainly feels different from the more ornate and poetic translations of earlier years (personally, I’ve never felt the poetry of iambic pentameter, sorry), but I have a hard time feeling particularly mad about it. It is important for us to understand that when The Odyssey was written, epic poetry as we now know it did not yet exist. Using ornate and old-fashioned vocabulary to evoke a feeling of ‘epicness’ is an anachronistic projection of our own archetypes onto the past. You can make a career out of debating what this would have been to the Ancient Greeks (though less so now considering cuts to higher education humanities funding), but we must consider Wilson’s choice to be a valid argument.

Of course, the vocabulary is not the center of the firestorm, which was over the translation’s ostensibly overly ‘woke’ treatment of women and slavery. I say ‘ostensibly’ because once you actually read the text you find just how comically short the offendingly ‘woke’ passages actually are. At issue is about ten pages of the translator’s note, in which Wilson explains her handling of slavery in The Odyssey and the poem’s female characters, most notably Penelope. The book as a whole is over five hundred pages long.

Wilson is not taking a revisionist view. Her interpretation of Penelope strains above all to capture the uncertainty of the character. Wilson’s Penelope is far less explicitly insightful and decisive then she is in other interpretations. Wilson preserves the Ancient Greek sense of the masculine Warrior-Hero; Odysseus pillages and rages his way broth through foreign lands and his own territory while Penelope weeps and sleeps. It is a pretty dramatic contrast to Wilson’s much wiser and more self-aware Helen in her translation of The Iliad.

I was struck instead by how much more macho Odysseus is in the original text. In more recent adaptations and popular imagination, Odysseus appears as the more cunning and intelligent counterpart to the physically gifted Achilles and overbearing Agamemnon. As a consequence he also inherits the comparatively modern idea of a more scholarly character naturally being less macho. For the Ancient Greeks this was not the case. Plato, for example, means ‘wide’, since the philosopher was also an Olympic wrestler. Physical prowess was an essential characteristic of an Ancient Greek hero, so Odysseus is an exceptional athlete eager to flex his skills at violently dominating other men (read into that what you may).

Wilson’s interpretation of slavery in the poem is limited to using the word ‘slave’ rather than ‘servant’ or ‘maid,’ and the note pointing out that the loyalty of the slaves Eumaeus and Eurycleia is perhaps more a fantasy of the slave owner than an accurate account of the perspective of the slave. That’s it. This isn’t a romantasy cozy novel. Acknowledging that the characters in service are in fact slaves is just an objective assessment of the poem. Enslavement too, the power to steal, own, and compel loyalty was a key attribute of an Ancient Greek hero. And Odysseus’ attempt to sort the loyal from the disloyal is the key conflict of the poem, far moreso than any sense of journeying. If I allow myself one shallow dunk, I thought these were supposed to be the ‘facts don’t care about your feelings, respect the inequalities of the past’ dudes. You guys should want there to be more slavery here because within the context of the poem that is evidence of Odysseus’ masculine heroism.

Ultimately, this review is more for my benefit. The critics of Wilson’s translation don’t care about classics or translation and they don’t care about The Odyssey. It is immediately obvious that most of them haven’t read this or any other translation. This is only over the optics of a woman occupying a prominent intellectual position. The ‘woke’ Odyssey isn’t real, and if it is, it only exists as insufferable tumblr posts written by people with no meaningful contact with actual community.

They don’t care about the debate around how to translate the poetry and vocabulary of this poem and they don’t care about anachronism or accuracy. All they care about is whether it fulfills their inaccurate preconceived notion of what a classic is, with all its implications for Western Tradition.

[emmersreads]

Matrix by Lauren Groff - review

Maybe I just don’t get Lauren Groff. While I was reading Matrix (almost entirely in one go during a frustrating eight hour plane delay), I thought mostly of The Vaster Wilds, the other Groff book I’d read. The two works felt very similar, even though their subject matter is different, to the point that I’m confident this is Groff’s style and the thing that her fans like. It’s not for me. I don’t particularly understand why anyone else likes it either.

Both books are conveyed with a certain amount of emotional distance. It feels like one encounters the characters as though through glass, even in their most intimate and emotional moments. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but it leaves me grasping for some kind of point. I felt I understood what the novel was grasping at better in The Vaster Wilds, a story that deals primarily with alienation. The emotional distance underscores the alienation of our protagonist from the settler village where she is enslaved, from the local indigenous population to whom she is a potentially dangerous stranger, and from the land itself, which is massive and unfamiliar to her.

If I had to describe Matrix’s theme in one word, I’d go with awe. Not the transcendent awe of the romantic era but the religious awe we associate with the medieval period. Matrix shows us not just awe in divine inspiration and devotion, but the awe of human (and specifically women’s) achievement. While Marie is a very calculating protagonist, she is also captured by rapturous divine visions which inspire her with a supernatural conviction. It was hard to feel the power that the book (with its starburst cover) so clearly wants to evoke. In a genre where emotion is frequently a key throughline, I found the coldness disorienting.

Partly as a result of this I remained (perhaps) unaccountably suspicious of Marie for the whole novel. I’m a good little fourth generation atheist and without any particular groundwork to sell me the religious engagement, I find it hard not to remember the inadequacies and abuses of church organizations. Yes, I know the point is not that the inherent misogyny of medieval catholicism in particular is a systemic issue that cannot be solved by simply self-exiling from male church authorities. I know it is about the liberating power of re-framing this world of women as something unique and special and precious, as de facto revolutionary. I just can’t stop the first thing long enough to dig into the second.

Storygraph | Goodreads

[emmersreads]

“The Unwanted Guest” short story from the Nona the Ninth paperback is now live on Tor’s website!

[emmersreads]

[summer reading]

officially dedicating my summer to the secret history…i love it sm 🥹🫶🏻✨

[emmersreads]

PLEASE for the love of the universe read anti-colonial science fiction and fantasy written from marginalized perspectives. Y’all (you know who you are) are killing me. To see people praise books about empire written exclusively by white women and then turn around and say you don’t know who Octavia Butler is or that you haven’t read any NK Jemisin or that Babel was too heavy-handed just kills me! I’m not saying you HAVE to enjoy specific books but there is such an obvious pattern here

Some of y’all love marginalized stories but you don’t give a fuck about marginalized creators and characters, and it shows. Like damn

[emmersreads]

Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors - 2/5

I glimpsed, for a moment, a reality in which I loved this book.

I picked up this book not because I had any particular reason to expect to like it, but because in terms of publicity, it has everything going for it. Cleopatra and Frankenstein is all over Instagram thanks to its memorable title and compelling cover design. Its author looks like the secret fifth member of ABBA with a name like an early 00s tabloid star. Seriously, I spent a long time googling her trying to uncover a previous career as a less evil Perez Hilton that I was certain I half remembered from 2004.

Anyway. What a disappointment.

Cleopatra and Frankenstein is fine, but that’s about it. A big influence I felt while reading this book was A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (which, controversially, I liked). This is a much more optimistic take on the same high-flying New Yorkers with artistic careers and mental health disorders. The appeal is both the human drama of unhappy people with the kind of eccentricities that you really only seem to get in New York (can you imagine some of this stuff happening to a person from Ohio? I can’t), and the voyeuristic literary tourism of the New York setting. Unfortunately, Coco Mellors is no Hanya Yanagihara. Yanagihara was a travel writer before becoming a novelist and you can absolutely tell. Her New York is illustrated with lush descriptions of expensive meals, humid parties, champagne-scented art shows. The book’s deep tragedy is juxtaposed with the greatest delights of a world class city. It’s something Mellors can’t match.

I felt this most acutely in the scene in which Frank and Cleo meet Cleo’s parents at a seafood restaurant in Grand Central Station (also, what’s the deal with this restaurant? The characters visit the same one for a tense family reunion in The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney. Surely y’all have more than one restaurant). The food arrives, interrupting the mortifyingly awkward conversation with this flaccid description:

The ruby-red lobsters sat at the center, their shells cracked open to reveal the plump flesh within. Nestled around them were freshly shucked oysters, chubby pink prawns, green-lipped mussels, and clams the size of a human palm. Flimsy white paper cups of tartar sauce and thick slices of lemon finished the impressive display.

It’s clearly meant to evoke the glittering decadence of New York’s overpriced tourist traps, but the paragraph falls flat. Perhaps it’s the clichés of the ‘ruby-red lobsters’, ‘plump flesh’, and ‘chubby pink prawns’, or the tell-don’t-show of the ‘impressive display.’ I was underwhelmed before I’d even finished the paragraph. I still remember Yanagihara’s “JB snored juicily” because that adjective surprised me. The seafood is a microcosm of the whole book, which just isn’t written well enough to support its loose plot construction. When the subject matter is otherwise so mundane and naturalistic, I expect the writing to provide something more of interest.

The actual plot was fine. Whatever. It didn’t exactly blow my skirt right off. I preferred the young artist looking for direction in Sirens & Muses by Antonia Angress. If we want to look at the young artiste involved with an older man who isn’t good for her, I liked it better in My Dark Vanessa, My Last Innocent Year, and Green Dot. I don’t really feel like Cleopatra and Frankenstein’s more neutral and ambivalent take on the relationship dynamic is really adding anything super significant. Sometimes people can just be bad for each other and being twice as old as your girlfriend isn’t actually that predatory — okay? I guess? I can watch a forty plus year old guy being an ill-suited date to a twenty-something in any romcom. I didn’t find Frank particularly charming and it felt like his flaws were mostly raised just to remind the reader that he isn’t necessarily malicious. Cleo’s problems didn’t hit any more effectively. After reading The Guest by Emma Cline, My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, and three quarters the of books by Taylor Jenkins Reid, I was starting to get exhausted by books about women who are dazzlingly attractive but also sad. There’s a limit to how much an ugly bitch such as myself can empathized with the experience of being suffocated by men throwing themselves at the hollow projection they’ve made of a beautiful woman. Believe it or not some of us go through our lives without men every throwing themselves at us in any way. This exhaustion was underlined by Cleopatra and Frankenstein’s one blindingly great scene.

I glimpsed, for a moment, a reality in which I loved this book.

Like A Little Life and Sirens & Muses, Cleopatra and Frankenstein bounces between narrators within Cleo and Frank’s social circle. One of these is Eleanor, a former screenwriter, who at thirty-seven, finds herself living back in her mother’s house, with a job she hates, no friends, no romantic prospects, and a father slowly dying of Parkinson’s. Unlike other narrators, Eleanor’s sections are told through extremely short vignettes, dramatically limiting Mellors’ usual ruminations, forcing her into dialogue and action. In one scene Eleanor and her mother go shopping on Black Friday, where, surrounded by pajama-ed customers, Eleanor breaks down.

“All men leave you!” I scream. “I still have a chance!” “What exactly are you saying to me?” yells my mother. “YOU CANNOT BE THE LOVE OF MY LIFE!” A man wheeling an overflowing shopping cart appears at the end of the aisle, gives me a terrified look, and heads the opposite way. I hold on to the display towel rack and bow my head. “I want more, Ma,” I say. “Wouldn’t you?”

After this tiff, her mother ignores her until they are both coerced into a massage chair demonstration by an enthusiastic salesperson

“Eleanor!” she calls over the vibrations of the chair. “Ma!” “I never wanted you to have less!” she says.

This scene reached down my throat and into my lungs to grab my heart. I cried reading it. I’m tearing up now just from copying it down.

It was like a keyhole into a book exploring the crushing existential weight of disappointment, of the relationship between two people, neither of whom understand why their life just somehow didn’t work out. I’m way deeper in my feels about this theoretical story of wasted potential than I am about yet another book about a girl who is so beautiful she can have whatever she wants if she could only want things that are good for her. Disappointment and underachievement aren’t easy to explore in fiction because they defy narrative and are inherently unsatisfying. Narratively it is more satisfying for Eleanor to eventually get together with Frank and live happily ever after, fulfilling her need for partnership and demonstrating his emotional maturity. But existentially it is disappointing that Eleanor’s answer is to just keep waiting, fulfillment will come along, eventually. Just keep waiting.

Cleopatra and Frankenstein wants quite badly to be a grounded book about emotionally ambivalent characters. A key theme is characters that are unhappy and unfulfilled even when they feel like they should be. Apparently good things — a rich patron, a beautiful younger wife — have unexpected consequences. Frank and Anders, the emotional immaturity brothers, have both been acting like nothing is wrong unless they acknowledge it for so long that they’ve become entirely incapable of self-reflection. Oops! All Manic Pixie Dream Girls. The various happy endings feel therefore trite and vaguely embarrassing. The only one that hits right for me is Cleo’s, which is by far the most ambiguous. If a few more of the characters had been invited to reflect on why the want the things they want, rather than just getting them, it might even have turned the story around for me. What doesn’t hit right is that the book’s only queer character, self-identified Gay Best Friend (yikes) Quentin, is the only character to get a truly bad ending. His narrative is set up for him to battle shame, embrace a more feminine presentation, and become less codependent on shitty boyfriends and expensive drugs. Instead, Cleo loses contact with him when he becomes addicted to meth. It’s by far the darkest fate in the book and feels particularly out of place since everyone else gets a happily ever after. Even serial philanderer Anders gets a long-term girlfriend and a dog. The optics of Quentin’s fate are deeply unflattering in a book that otherwise seems to take the criticism that Friends has too many white people in it as a personal challenge.

Considering all the hype it has received, I was hoping that Cleopatra and Frankenstein would be really good, but it isn’t really anything at all. There are some good ideas, but frankly I just don’t get why the novel went in the direction it did. Why invest so heavily in the ambivalent emotional crises of a bunch of characters just to pair them off with their one true love at the end? Why invoke so many iconic sights and sounds of New York if you have little to offer but clichés? Why carefully construct a diverse social group if you’re going to end with your only gay character dropping out to drug addiction? If all you see in this novel is an easy way to fill up an Instagram graphic then, genuinely, I get it, but beyond that this book barely holds up to the most cursory read.

[emmersreads]

These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong | 2.5/5

The best stories feel effortless, and overburdened narratives are the opposite of that. They make you keenly aware of just how much they’re not pulling it off.

It would be wrong to say that These Violent Delights is patient zero for this phenomenon, because its not like overburdened stories were invented in 2020, but it is a definitive case study. There is a good book in here somewhere, maybe even more than one, but they’re crushed in with so many bad ones that it makes the whole thing worse.

I’m going to pull out a bunch of specific details from this book and you may think that some (or even many) of them kinda slap, but don’t get it twisted, These Violent Delights is far less than the sum of its parts.

These Violent Delights is a very thinly veiled adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, starring the scions of two opposing gangs in 1920s Shanghai whose past romance draws them together even as the blood feud between their gangs pull them apart. In addition to the plot of Romeo and Juliet, there is a second main plot in which protagonists Roma and Juliette must put their allegiances aside and work together to avert a supernatural plague of madness ravaging the city of Shanghai. That’s already one plotline too many but the book has one more, growing off of the original play’s plot like some kind of horrible fungus. This one is a meta-mystery about why Roma and Juliette were broken up the first time and the events that led to the current tensions between their two gangs. It’s a meta-mystery because there is really no reason for the third person limited narration to hide it from us — the characters should realistically be thinking about it literally every time they interact — and it ends up as a super underwhelming reveal. That’s a lot of plots, and we haven’t even got to the side characters, who also have two side arcs that have nothing to do with the overall throughline. Each of these is enough for their own book, but as more and more get introduced they crowd each other out. The narrative is pulled in more and more directions.

There are two consequences to overburdened plots: first, basically none of them get the time they need, so at best they’re not as good as they could be and at worst they feel like demeaning token inclusions; second, while all of these plots are basically fine on their own, they don’t all play well together and end up robbing each other of thematic weight. As a result the book is a mismatched jumble of plots and characters that constantly undercuts its own continuity stakes, and thematic resonance.

Lets deal with the artificially crushed pacing first. The biggest victims of this are the side characters. There are way too many and they don’t have enough to do. Part of the premise of Romeo and Juliet as a play is that its really only about those two characters. They're not the most socially significant characters in their world, or the most self aware, but their relative insignificance in the grand scheme of things serves to highlight the meaninglessness of the violent grudge that leads to their deaths. The supporting cast is mostly there to flesh out that feud. They fight and die and that's about it.

In the grand tradition of YA fanfiction everywhere These Violent Delights desperately wants to expand these roles to give them their own hopes and fears and stories, and, in the grand tradition of YA zeitgeist, add some diversity to one of the English language’s most famous heterosexual romances. This book’s version of Benvolio and Mercutio, Benedict and Marshall (and we’ll get to the fucking names), are two bros in a bromoerotic friendship. It also adds Kathleen, a Capulet faction member, Rosalind’s sister, and a trans woman.

This will be an unpopular opinion — I’ve seen fans praise Gong’s novels for the diversity and confess disappointment in its absence in more recent novels — but I kinda hated it. Both of these are good ideas — representation is a noble goal, especially of a trans woman — but I can’t overemphasize just how little time these subplots get and just how irrelevant they are to the overall plot. Benedict and Marshall get a couple of cutaways that the audience can interpolate with their prior knowledge of m/m fanfiction. Kathleen gets a little meta-mystery around her backstory reveal conveyed over about two chapters. This backstory is interesting enough to be its own novel. A Shanghainese woman transes her gender while being educated in Paris and must impersonate her tragically dead sister in order to return home, in the 1920s? Don’t mind if I do! Why is it playing fourth or fifth fiddle to the heterosexual activities of literally Romeo and Juliet. None of this has anything to do with the actual plots, which are about teen melodrama and colonialism monsters. This means that even though they’re great ideas in isolation, they end up feeling like distractions. I was tempted to skip these chapters because they just weren’t important. Put uncharitably, representation in the form of side characters who exist to be diverse rather than to influence the plot in any way isn’t good representation at all. These Violent Delights would be a better story if these side plots were cut entirely, and these characters deserve a better book.

The side characters are the most egregious victims of the limited narrative space, but far from the only ones. Juliette and Roma get one internal character problem each — after four years in New York, Juliette feels like a foreigner in her own city, and Roma’s relationship to his violent father is on the precipice of total breakdown — which look like the beginning of a character arc, but vanish from the second half of the story. They are replaced by the feud meta-mystery stuff, which is much more predictable and much less interesting than the threads it replaced. The succession drama within the gangs is supposed to be important, but has so little relation to the actual plot that it only succeeds in establishing that Tyler (our Tybalt) sure is a character. Each gang has a loose affiliation with China’s two major political factions, the communists and the RoC nationalists, but this too is dismissed because there is not enough room for this book to be about both internal Chinese politics, the western foreigners slowly taking over the city, the animosity between the gangs, and a teen love story. Roma also has a sister! I guess!

The biggest space hogs are the Romeo and Juliet interpretation and the colonialism mystery, which are uneasy bedfellows. Romeo and Juliet is a play about the tragic deaths of two teens as a result of their uncompromisingly feuding families; part of the whole tragedy is how little external pressure is on the two groups. There’s no reason for them to hold this grudge and there’s no resources that they’re competing over. The fact that neither Capulet nor Montague really understand why they’re making such bad decisions is a major part of what makes the story so hopeless and tragic. There is no room in there for ‘also they unite to solve a supernatural mystery.’ Similarly, ‘a Shanghainese returnee discovers that the supernatural plague destroying her city is a hostile takeover by an English merchant’ is its own plot. ‘She also has this on-again off-again thing with a historical gang rival’ feels like a distraction. The high stakes of the supernatural plague and the systematic wrong of colonialism makes the comparatively lower stakes of teen melodrama seem meaningless and absurd. The two plots meet catastrophically in the climax. In one scene Juliette confronts Paul, the Englishman responsible for the disease and Roma is also there, standing awkwardly in the background. Paul sometimes makes a half-hearted cutting remark at Roma, but he might as well not be there, because Paul is Juliette’s antagonist, not Roma’s. Roma’s antagonist is his father, and that plotline never gets resolved. The two plots have so little to do with each other that at best all they do is take time away from each other. At worst, they deeply undermine each other, which brings us to the second problem with all these plots: they ruin each other’s thematic impact.

To put it succinctly: teenage romance and the violence of colonialism cannot be the same importance at the same time.

Romeo and Juliet is a very personal tragedy that is essentially a melodrama. It’s about the purity of young love. It’s about the overwhelming emotion of young love. It is fundamentally unimportant in the face of a systemic violence like colonialism.[[ It has become super trendy these days, especially in YA, to juxtapose a systemic injustice with an intimate emotional story, often but not always romantic. It is easy to see the motivation behind this: any particular experience of oppression is also extremely personal, and on the other hand an intimate emotional plot line may be used to add levity or hope to a situation that the protagonist is otherwise individually incapable of changing. However, a reasonable motivation doesn’t make this technique effective. At the end of the day systemic problems are structural by nature and are a fundamentally different scale from individual level conflicts.]] It is ludicrously naive to imagine colonialism defeated by the power of young love and in the face of the higher stakes of the slow takeover of Shanghai by westeners rich enough to buy it out from under the locals, the woes of two nineteen-year-olds who can’t be together are a distraction. The idea that there would be anything more important than either this relationship of the fuel ruins the context of the original play; the whole point of Romeo and Juliet is that there is no greater crisis going on and that the families have backed themselves into this corner. In These Violent Delights the plot is precipitated by events outside of the gangs’ control and with only one exception (Tyler’s attempt to kill Roma’s sister Alisa post-climax) all the major plot events happen because of someone outside of the gangs. I found myself often wondering, ‘why the heck is this a Romeo and Juliet adaptation at all?’

Unfortunately, the alternative isn’t necessarily better. The book’s version of Paris is Paul, son of an English merchant trying to set up drug deals with Juliette’s gang. As the story progresses, we discover that the plague of madness was brought to Shanghai in order to bend the city to his will. He has been intentionally it to his enemies and to the native Shanghainese this whole time. Also, the plague is spread via the vector of a shapeshifting fish-man who shoots infectious bugs out of his back as he swims through the river. It’s fine for the bad guy to have been colonialism the whole time, but saying that colonialism is a supernatural fish monster is, dare I say it, losing the thread of the metaphor a bit. Actually, I do dare say it. The subgenre of YA that deals with social justice plots like this one is at its best when it is at its most serious. These Violent Delights sucks because it is so fucking goofy. It is so reductive for colonialism to be a fish monster that I used it as a joke earlier in this paragraph. These two things are fine on their own but when they are thrown together they absolutely suck the soul out of each other.

The novel follows the details of Romeo and Juliet very closely despite having dropped the overall thematic message in favour of the colonialism thing, so there are a bunch of characters that have no reason to be there other than the fact that they appear in the play. Why is Rosalind here? Why would a 1920s Shanghai gang have an experimental physician on the payroll? Well, friar Lawrence needs to be here somehow and for whatever reason he can’t just be cooking drugs. It is too much like Romeo and Juliet to not be a straight up retelling and it is not a retelling.

As you may have noticed, all the characters have been named the kidzbop version of their names from the play. I can’t even begin to guess why. A lot of hay is made out of how many different places all the characters are from and how that affects their sense of belonging. Roma is Russian, technically a foreigner, but he has lived in Shanghai his whole life, unlike Juliette, whose western education makes her an outsider — but they’re all named like a Say Yes to the Dress wedding party. Marshall is unusual in that he’s the only central character who is both poor and Shanghainese. If any character ought to represent the people Roma and Juliette are ostensibly trying to protect, its this one, but you’d never know it because his name is fucking Marshall. Juliette directly addresses that she is ambivalent about using an English version of her name and feels like an outsider compared to her cousin, so why does he also have an English name? Names are a hugely meaningful place to express personal identity and narrative worldbuilding. As an example, in Babel protagonist Robin chooses that name when he is required by his English patron to choose a name befitting of his new country; we never learn his original Chinese name. Babel uses this to represent the colonization of the individual mind via language. It is a familiar topic for These Violent Delights, where the characters are the globe-trotting new generation of the 1920s, but that detail is fundamentally superfluous because the simplest opportunity to show rather than tell is dismissed in favour of naming them more like Romeo and Juliet.

There’s a lot more stuff in here that simply needs removing. Either a cause or a symptom of the overburdened narrative is that the book feels poorly edited. It badly needed a second pass. The turning point of the ending is that Juliette diffuses an encounter between White Flowers and Scarlets by pretending to betray Roma and faking Marshall’s death by shooting him with an empty handgun. It does not take a firearms expert to know that an empty gun clicks. It is extremely obvious that it is empty. It’s a whole trope! The foreboding click as the protagonist hasn’t counted their shots. Or perhaps the moment of tension diffuses as the villain realizes they’ve run out of firepower. Blanks are rounds that include gunpowder but no bullet, but that combustion is where the noise comes from. I’m complaining this much because this is a pivotal scene. The way the gun works is crucial to the relationship between all the major characters and the social premise of the sequel. This is not a small detail you can fudge for everyone except the true obsessives. It needed to be corrected. (Also, by the way, even a blank round can seriously injure a person at close range as the still combusting gunpowder exits the barrel). There’s a bunch more of these. A friend of mine who knows more (read: anything) about Chinese history pointed out that it is ahistorical for the qipaos to be described as ‘tight-fitting’ especially as tighter-fitting than a western flapper dress. In reality, both garments were much looser than our preconceived notions suggest. Why is Juliette the heir of the Scarlet gang when her male cousin really ought to be due to male-precedence primogeniture. It wouldn’t even change anything material about the plot for Juliette to be trying to seize the heir role from Tyler rather than to be defending it from him.

These Violent Delights is a poor love story, and a worse thriller, and a deeply unoriginal comment on colonialism. It is trying to do too many things to do any of them well. The most depressing part of this is that the book is so messy and its use of the play so diluted by all the other crap going on, that the use of Romeo and Juliet comes across as little more than a cynical feature of a popular play to get classics girlie dollars. A vicious end indeed.

[emmersreads]

Emma by Jane Austen | 2.5/5

I have been sitting on this negative review of Emma for over a year so pls pretend I am charmingly tortured by my mixed feelings for this beloved classic rather than just a little hater.

I decided to read Emma because the Austen girlies are unstoppable. Every day I wake up for my twelve hour shift in the content mines of tumblr.fuck (for the purpose of this sentence we are both grizzled elderly men sitting on a porch just go with it) and find another post about how Jane Austen is the best thing since before sliced bread. Eat your heart out Shakespeare; if only you’d done all your plays about falling in love. These posts are a bit of a mindfuck for me because as much as I love a costume drama, Austen’s actual novels have always been underwhelming. One of my best friends is an Austen girlie. She loves the things. I dunno man, these books do not spark joy. But maybe I was just young dumb and a hater. Emma (2020) is my favourite Austen movie, so when I decided to reinvestigate the author I thought I’d start there.

The movie is better than the book. Shocked gasps; questions asked at parliament.

Emma (2020) is a great adaptation in part because it’s well positioned to keep the best parts of the book. My favourite part of the novel was the dialogue, which the film is able to lift often ad verbatim (“Mother, you simply must sample the tart!”). The patter of conversation is excellent and Austen’s sense of humor comes across just as effectively on the page as it does when spoken aloud. To this the visual medium can add the incredible set design, including the beautiful Regency wallpapers, Emma’s many jackets and little hats, Anya Taylor Joy’s eyes that look like they’re exes trying awkwardly to avoid each other in the grocery store, Johnny Flynn as Mr. Knightley having a romantic tantrum so intense he has to take his pants off and lie on the floor. Relatable. These elements couldn’t be in the book even if Ms. Austen had wanted to describe Mr. Knightley’s buttock-baring emotion.

Unfortunately that paragraph has been my way of damning with faint praise. The inverse proposition of an adaptation that adds a lot of things I liked is the source material without much to like about it. This is a bit of a misrepresentation. I found most of the book to be funny and enjoyable in much the same vein of the movie: a gorgeously decorated vanilla sponge cake. I just hated the ending so much it retroactively ruined all 500 previous pages.

I don’t begrudge Ms. Austen’s choice to hew to the Georgian standards of propriety (hence no ass shots), but this is a safe space for us to admit that those standards have not all aged particularly well, or particularly sexily. I feel like I’ve been infected with terminal bookstagram brainworms. I also don’t want to be here arguing that a book published two hundred years ago is too old-fashioned for me. But at the same time so much of the narrative about Austen is a revisionist history of how all her work was secretly not only meaningful (this is true, Austen’s work is about capturing the atmosphere and concerns of a particular social milieu, which she does effectively; it’s not less worthy of capture because it’s a space exclusive to women), but progressive.

People love Austen. They love romance and they love period drama. They don’t love when that genre is criticized for being dated or regressive. I understand that people do not read these books for the 21st century social commentary or the politics. And I understand that a 21st century moral critique is ahistorical and in poor faith. Trust me, I feel the ‘just let people have fun’ brigade hanging over my head like the sword of fucking Damocles.

But here’s the thing folks, my largely pretty enjoyable read of Emma was soured by just that: important parts of it are dated and regressive and it ruined my day.

The premise of Emma is that the titular protagonist is a rich and witty young woman intent on meddling in the romantic lives of others, at their expense. At the conclusion of the film, Emma realizes she has behaved badly to her lower class friend Harriet by leading Harriet to overlook the farmer Robert Martin (Harriet’s social equal) in order to pursue the richer Mr. Erlton (her social superior). Emma apologizes to Harriet and tells her to reconsider her feelings for Robert Martin, which turn out to be genuine. Finally, when Harriet discovers that her father is a lower class merchant rather than a secret aristocrat, Emma says she will welcome Harriet into Hartfield anyway. It indicates that Emma has outgrown her judgemental nature and preoccupation with appropriate matches to see Harriet as a friend in spite of her being Emma’s social inferior. And they all live happily ever after.

In the novel, this resolution takes much much longer. Emma’s flaw is not that she toyed with her friend’s emotions to arrange a match that amused her, but that she encouraged Harriet to have uppity opinions and to seek to rise above her station. The story resolves with Emma and Harriet returning to their proper social classes, Emma with Mr. Knightley and Harriet with Robert Martin. Emma and Mr. Knightley commiserate over how foolish Emma was to befriend Harriet and how unpleasant Harriet has become now that she is a social climber, and Harriet is revealed to have been naturally ungrateful and grasping and unworthy of a young lady such as Emma’s friendship.

I’m not going to waste my time on whether this sort of thing was just as bad then as it is now or whether it was simple a different time. Austen’s writing is a reflection of genuinely (though not universally) held societal beliefs and she’s not going to rise from the grave to change it now. It is, however, a deeply unpleasant ending. Emma’s problem isn’t that she toys with the people around her for entertainment, but that she doesn’t participate appropriately in the class system. Technically both of these are about becoming more self-reflective and more thoughtful of others, but the devil is in the details. It’s hard to enjoy that as the conclusion to a romantic comedy. I don’t come to Austen for a window into the uncomfortable realities of the past, or really any particular connection to the past. I’m here for the fluffy romance.

Part of the reason talking about not enjoying Austen because of these novels’ dated elements is so frustrating is that the common narrative about Austen is super revisionist. Austen has endured a lot of lumps and I do think it’s stupid to claim that she was a poor writer and was incapable of writing incisive social commentary just because she was a woman writing about the recency woman’s interests and concerns. I also think it’s reductive to claim that the social dynamics of Austen’s world often get misinterpreted due to the modern reflex to see every society preceding our own as nasty, brutish, and short. But this isn’t a critique of Austen, this is a critique of reading Austen in 2023. It’s not just about hating to see a grilboss winning.

On the other hand, why do I feel like I’m trying to placate the ‘just let people enjoy things’ brigade again?

One of the most frustrating things about being generally a romance disliker is the climate of toxic positivity that surrounds any genre that is more about having fun than any ostensibly higher purposes. There is a sense that since the audience of these genres is primarily women and they are often targeted by bad faith misogynistic criticisms, that any criticism of them is inherently misogynistic. I’ve been tying myself up in knots because my observation is that a book from 1815 has some nineteenth century ass ideas about class. This should be self-evident. ‘Just enjoying things’ in not actually my goal when reading, and ‘just letting people enjoy things’ isn’t my goal as a critic either.

Here’s the rub: Emma is a fun and sweet romantic comedy with some of the English language’s best dialogue until the conclusion reminds us that there hasn’t ever been a romantic utopia with the sexy historical codes of practise but not the bad ones. Romance in Austen’s time was a function of the class system, not separate from it. And I don’t know, maybe I’m the patron saint of it really being that deep, but I had a hard time seeing the lighthearted romance in that.

[emmersreads]

The List - Yomi Adegoke 3/5

Before we begin the review, the author’s copyright company is called ‘God’s Favourite Ltd’ and that’s the funniest shit that I’ve ever seen.

I originally picked up The List because I’d become lowkey obsessed with — not anti-#MeToo but — post-#MeToo books after reading I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai. While these books aren’t critical of the principle of of standing up publicly against sexualized violence, they are critical of the form that standing up takes — twitter mobs. They feature a broadly feminist woman who unexpectedly finds herself the main character of twitter due to a romantic relationship with a man accused of sexual harassment which leads her to question the validity of Internet mobs as a social response.

I was entranced; however, primarily by The List’s disproportionately low Goodreads score. The various dynamics of review scores mean that scores tend to be inflated, with mediocre books easily hitting 3.6-3.8 stars. The List has obtained a measly 3.11 (which actually dropped from 3.15 in the time I’ve had it shelved). This indicates one of two things: either it’s an uncomfortably nuanced look at a morally complex issue that fails to provide a sufficiently clear resolution or it’s racist in ways that even the Goodreads readership can’t forgive. The score isn’t about quality, it’s about how easy the optics of the book are to defend. And the optics of The List are not easy to defend.

I’ll admit though, I was surprised to see the scores concentrated around three stars, with the reviews citing good ideas that failed to really come together. There’s hope for Goodreads yet. There were, of course, also a bunch of one and two star reviews calling it ‘apologist trash’ so I can continue to smugly make my original point, something I’d been thinking about since before I even finished the book.

I don’t think The List is apologist trash. It is trying so very hard not to be. Michael believes himself to be falsely accused of abuse, but the book makes sure we know that he knows most of the other men on the list are guilty. Michael has no real problem with the principle behind the list. We’re shown that he knows he has treated the women in his life badly and has been a shitty boyfriend. The final twist is even ‘women don’t make false accusations of abuse, men do.’ This book is desperate to let us know that it is about online toxicity, not about callouts being an inherently bad thing.

I don’t think that’s a bad point to make. Social ostracization resulting from bad faith accusations are demonstrably a problem in progressive spaces. In the six days it took me to read this book, my online town square (the eternally disreputable tumblr.com) saw two different callouts falsely accusing two different trans women of pedophilia. Callouts are a manifestation of social power and as such they work best on those with the least systemic power and poorly on those with the most. Give me half an hour on twitter and I could turn up dozens of small creatives, overwhelmingly queer, trans, and racialized, chased off the platform, but Harvey Weinstein is kind of the only super high profile man to receive actually permanent consequences, and only due to a pattern of unambiguously predatory behaviour stretching back decades.

As effective as callouts feel, they overwhelmingly target low profile vulnerable people and are ineffective at dealing with high profile, popular predators that actually make industries unsafe for women and marginalized people. I don’t think The List is wrong for wanting to explore that.

I also don’t think The List is effective at exploring that.

It was never going to succeed at what it wants to do because a culture of sexualized violence is a systemic problem and callouts and whisper networks are systemic level solutions. A fiction novel is about individuals — characters and their problems — and that lens is mutually exclusive with the systemic one.

The cold hard truth is that it doesn’t really matter if innocent guys get their shit ruined by something like the list so long as it generally increases the hostility of the industry to sexual predators. We can debate the effectiveness of that last part, but the fact that there will be exceptions isn’t important. Just like the fact that some women will navigate hostile industries without ever experiencing impropriety does not mean that those industries are safe for all women.

An individual lens can be interesting and valuable but it’s never going to be able to address systemic problems and systemic solutions.

An informative comparison here is Know My Name by Chanel Miller. Miller was sexually assaulted while unconscious by Stanford student Brock Turner, who, although he was convicted of the assault, was sentenced to six months in county jail (of which he served only three). Know My Name covers Miller’s experience both of the assault and of the convoluted and disappointing judicial procedure that followed. Miller is a great evocative writer and her memoir shines not just in how she illustrates her own experience and recovery, but also in how it explores the ways in which the systemic response to sexualized violence — hospitals, schools, the justice system — failed Miller and women like her. She clearly and effectively shows how these things are interlinked — good luck feeling in control of your like when your case is continuously rescheduled with no notice for over a year, good luck feeling empowered in your experience and emotions when the length and breadth of your testimony is controlled by a hostile defence attorney. Know My Name is as much and as effectively about the justice system as it is about Miller as an individual. It works because it understands the relationship between a systemic problem and an individual experience.

The List was never going to be able to achieve something like this, and I think it speaks to Miller’s talent as a writer that she is able to combine the two lenses so effectively. By contrast, The List feels shallow in the way that it prioritizes individual experience, especially the experience of men. Its development of Ola as a journalist who reported on sexual violence doesn’t feel developed enough to balance that out. I think if it had been less determined to engage primarily with the idea of the list (in the vein of Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams) it would have been received a lot better. That’s not to say that it couldn’t have succeeded in being political in any way (Queenie engages directly with sexism, racism, and sexual politics), but rather that such a firm focus required a more deft touch.

The List shines on the individual level. I think the characters are great. Uncharacteristically, since I’m a heartless bitch who hates romance, I was actually persuaded by the chemistry between Michael and Ola; I was cheering for them right until the end of the book. It’s clear why they like each other in spite of their bad behaviour and poor communication. I liked Michael’s crew. Again, it’s easy to see how charismatic and likeable guys like Amani remain popular in spite of their pattern of mistreating women. Team Kwabz all day though we love a respectful king. I also liked Ola’s friends, especially Ruth. I have criticism for how the characters fit into the narrative, but I like them so much as illustrations of Michael and Ola’s lives that I don’t even care. The novel’s true stroke of comedic genius is Frankie, whose multitudes contain both the inept ignorance of certain white feminists and the crocodile-like drive to succeed that kept an online publication independent well into 2018.

I do think The List is missing a trick. The accusations of it being ‘apologist trash’ come from the book’s often myopic focus on Michael’s emotions. Personally, I don’t think that undermines The List’s point, but it will be unwelcome for a lot of readers. The repercussions of the list on Michael’s career and emotional state are much more immediate to the story than the realization of how many women have been hurt (despite The List’s attempt to address this through Celie). This could be averted by more of a critical focus on those emotions.

Being accused of being an abuser is viscerally upsetting to Michael and the other men. Knowing that people think badly of you sucks, especially when they’re objectively wrong about it. But, not to get too real, I was bullied as a kid, so the fact that people will hate you for no particular reason and you just kinda have to deal with that was something I learned when I was like eight. The fact that people would think that Micheal is an abuser is so disturbing to him that it drives him to attempt suicide. It reminded me of an argument I hard in a video essay (by F.D. Signifier?) that the reason white people tend to see being accused of racism as worse than being racist is because an accusation of racism is something that a white person has no access too. It is acutely threatening to white supremacy because it is controlled exclusively by people of colour. I think an accusation of sexualized violence works analogously.

The fact that Michael can’t conclusively disprove the allegations is disturbing to him in part because it attacks patriarchal privilege in a way that privilege cannot respond to. I wish The List had dug a little deeper into this kind of problem. I think it would have felt a lot less accommodating to men’s feelings if it had done a little more to critically address why a man might feel this way. Even emotions like hurt and sadness are affected by societal inequality. Instead, it feels like the author’s obvious affection for her characters has kept her from pressing them too hard.

As I read The List, I kept coming back to the idea that it needed to do more somehow. The post-#MeToo genre has always been kind of unsatisfying to me because while it offers a reasonable critique of the movement (twitter mobs are not restorative justice), it feels like it constantly misses the mark on actually addressing the issues it raises. A hand-wringing Do Better PSA, no matter how well-delivered, is never going to make people be nicer on twitter. Hate mobs are a dynamic of the space, just like sexual assault is a dynamic of patriarchal society. And just like sexual assault, this isn’t going to be solved by enough people going ‘it’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me.’ The failing of the post-#MeToo novel is that even though it feels like a lot has changed, I don’t think much really has. A lot of the abusers targeted by the campaign have returned to their careers, or discovered the lucrative industry of pandering to reactionaries. We haven’t really seen much in the way of legislative change and I think last year’s trial of Amber Heard shows that changes in public opinion were more ephemeral than one might hope. Post-#MeToo books are unsatisfying because they feel like a criticism of a strawman. It would suck if a nationally famous closeted footballer committed suicide after his reputation was ruined by a twitter mob but like… would that actually happen in real life? Aren’t we just making up a guy to get mad at? Twitter is shit, but now that Elon Musk has flushed the website down the toilet of irrelevancy it’s becoming obvious that our problems are grounded in corporate control of media outlets. You know, structural things. Hand-wringing over people being mean online feels increasingly shallow.

Contrarian as I am, I’m loath to agree with the Goodreads commentariat, but I find myself falling into a pretty similar place. The List has a lot of good ideas but ultimately fails to come together because it is attempting to discuss systemic interventions through an individual lens. The disconnect comes across as poorly thought out and under developed. My recommendation: read Know My Name, or Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo unless you’re specifically interested in post-#MeToo literature.

[emmersreads]

We Ride Upon Sticks - Quan Barry

4/5

I enjoyed 92% of We Ride Upon Sticks and that’s mostly because I approached it with the right attitude: it ain’t that deep.

This novel is best appreciated as a lighthearted and goofy romp down memory lane. The marketing blurb compares it to Stranger Things and that’s an absolutely delusional comparison; both works trade in 80s nostalgia, but that’s where the similarity ends. It’s better to think of We Ride Upon Sticks as a teen comedy with a faintly supernatural flavour, like Ouran High School Host Club, Derry Girls, or in my mind especially, British comedy St. Trinian’s. Everything, from the supernatural to the interpersonal, is to be jeered and mocked with 2 kool 4 skool teen swagger. And that’s a lot of fun.

I enjoyed the book on its own terms — it’s a genuinely heartwarming picture of teenage friendship and rebellion, and I did indeed laugh at the jokes — but I also liked it on a meta-level. It’s nice to have an unapologetically queer and feminist high school comedy without it being bogged down by mawkish emotional problems. I know I was once a teen constantly beleaguered by mawkish emotional problems (twas the era of Fall Out Boy and 21 Pilots), but as an adult that isn’t the part I look back on fondly. In other words, the art style of Heartstopper is very cute, but manzo do they have problems. We Ride Upon Sticks nails how irony-poisoned and allergic to sincerity we were as teens, and for some reason that meant a lot more to me than teenagers working through their emotions using healthy coping mechanisms and clear communication.

The only thing that really bugged me in the majority of the novel was the unceasing reoccurring jokes. Quan Barry loves a running gag. They come back so constantly and with such absurd regularity that it came back around to being funny for me (through I think a less easily entertained reader might find it simply unendurable instead). But that’s the majority of the book, and I want to move on to the 8% of We Ride Upon Sticks that I didn’t enjoy: the ending.

An unavoidably huge part of this novel is that it is socially conscious. It wants to do right by the feminist, queer, and BIPOC struggles of 80s teens and it wants you to know in the clearest most thoroughly explained language possible. Some readers might find this sanctimonious, but I thought it was fine. One weakness of this approach, however, is that it is always very obvious when the author fumbles the bag.

In this case the bag is the character Corey Young, formerly ‘boy’ Corey.

Spoilers for the ending of We Ride Upon Sticks.

The novel ends with a flash forward to our characters reuniting as middle-aged women so we can see what happened to the Danvers Falcons in adult life. I liked the idea and I liked the fact that for more of the characters their formative years continued well after high school graduation. The one I didn’t like was boy Corey. In the intervening years she has come out and fully transitioned. Now, I know a lot of trans people in real life and also I understand obvious foreshadowing, so I saw this coming a mile away. It was not a Reveal. Problem is the book so desperately wanted to treat it as one. We get this super long fake out scene before the book reveals that Corey is a woman now! Surprise! Were you expecting a man! I found that kinda tasteless.

What bothered me more is that while we hear a lot about the team’s anxiety about reuniting with Corey — will they say the wrong thing? Did they made transition harder for her? — we never hear anything from Corey herself. I’d put this down to a lack of authorial confidence. It feels like Barry is a lot more familiar with how it feels to be friends with a trans woman than how it feels to be a trans woman. That’s not a problem in and of itself, but I felt we needed to hear Corey’s side of things too. Is she excited to reunite with all her friends as her authentic gender? Is she apprehensive about spending time with people who only knew her pre-transition? This book is all about centring marginalized perspectives, that’s why it spends so much time explicitly calling out the ways the characters themselves fails at this — that it was disappointing for it to end by cantering a bunch of cis women’s anxiety about being accepting enough over a trans woman’s thoughts. Since this is what the book is All About, the comparatively small detail has an out-sized impact.

I already didn’t like the specifics of the reveal, and its general effect didn’t work either. It is one of a whole bunch of fake outs and twists in the flash forward section. There are so many that it fucks up the pacing, since the story is now being told essentially in reverse to accommodate the dramatic reveals. It ends on the note that the Danvers Falcons’ success was never the work of the devil, the idea of supernatural intervention just gave a bunch of teenagers the excuse they needed to work hard and band together. I thought that was really sweet, but it takes so long to get there that I was just ready for it to be over.

On balance, this is a recommend from me. I like that it’s fun and lighthearted, but it is also a queer novel that isn’t afraid to be ironic and crass. I enjoyed the absurd 80s references and the overplayed jokes. I liked that sports fiction can be for girls sometimes!

Let the hairspray wash over you and don’t worry about what the long term effects of all those CFCs will end up being.

[emmersreads]

Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations by Simon Schama 3.5/5 stars

bear with me lads, this is an Extremely special interest book review

Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations is a generally good book marred by a few incidents of absolutely deranged framing. I liked a lot about it, but it lacks focus. While it is an in depth look at an interesting subject for a popular audience, it doesn’t always hold up on an academic level. Ultimately, for me it worked better as a companion read to Seth Dickinson’s The Masquerade, which also deals with colonial medicine and hygiene, but in a fictional setting. Foreign Bodies covers a lot but it doesn’t stand up on its own.

The elephant in the room was, for me, that Simon Schama is an art historian, not a historian of science or medicine, and you can tell.

Or, well, I could tell, because I am a historian of science; I have two very expensive degrees about it. That’s why I have so much to say about the minor things that are wrong with this book.

First, the good. Foreign Bodies is a fun and eclectic look at the unfortunately not widely popularized niche of medical history: colonial medicine. I would actually highly recommend it as an anti-colonial read to flesh out one’s understanding of British occupation of India and China. The exploration of the racialized and colonial politics of hygiene and cleanliness — and how the principles of sanitation formed a cornerstone of the ideology of empire — is perhaps this book’s best contribution. As I mentioned above, I read this book directly after The Masquerade series. The series uses a fictional setting to explore the ethics of resistance to colonization. The most complete resistance to colonization includes refusing to adopt colonial practises of sanitation and medicine which do save lives. Is this a necessary sacrifice? Medicine is the poisoned fruit of empire; access to it is used to as both carrot and stick to ensure colonial obedience. The Masquerade is very thoroughly researched and incorporates a dizzying array of historical influences, and Foreign Bodies serves as an exploration of many of them. It contextualizes the fictional constructions in our real history.

I also, personally, loved the verbose literary style. This book is way way more complicated than it needs to be, but I found it fun and funny. My favourite example was the use of ‘conurbation;, rather than ‘city’ or even ‘metropolis’. What the fuck. If you prefer clarity and directness, you might not enjoy wading through this book’s extremely languorous prose, but for me it had a certain academia-camp charm. And I can appreciate the compulsion to explain and clarify that leads to long-windedness like this. I feel #seen.

What I appreciated less were the weird quirks of framing. Foreign Bodies is pretty aggressively anti-colonial. I’ve read a lot of books where the author is reluctant to explicitly ascribe responsibility for the cruel and unusual behaviours of colonial regimes — all of which were ultimately perpetrated by individual human beings — and this is not one of them. But it exclusively uses the 19th century European terms to refer to Asian locations. That was the detail that tipped me off that this was Schama’s first foray into the field. Unless the context is extremely specific to the 19th century geography or regime, I’m used to seeing Myanmar, not Burma. The 19th century names are technically not incorrect, it’s just not the sort of thing I’d expect to see in an academic work.

The other thing I wouldn’t expect to see, and to my mind the far more egregious error, is the continuous framing of inoculation as new and scientific while previous regimes of sanitization were superstitious and religious. Actual historians of science simply do not think like this.

I think it’s absolutely accurate to say that the Europeans, and especially the British, approached protocols of carbolic sanitization with a fanatical zeal, but to suggest that this was the religion of carbolic to the science of inoculation is misguided and ultimately distracts from the book’s more interesting questions. First, let’s quickly dispense with the idea that science and religion are two opposite poles of knowledge, as diametrically opposed as black and white. It’s especially out of place in a book that is otherwise attempting empathy towards non-western traditions of medicine, culture, and belief. Science is just another belief system grounded on very specific verification procedures (as opposed to faith, or criticism of certain texts, etc). The sooner we understand that science is a system of belief rather than a privileged access to The Truth, the better we will be at handling the times that science is wrong.

Because science is wrong all the time. Our understanding of our reality is is constantly changing as we refine pre-existing theories and discover new ones. Carbolic was exactly such a case. Fifty years previous, sanitization was the scientific doctrine bravely fighting the superstition of doctor’s honour and the religion of laudable pus.

I found it especially deranged that Schama frames inoculation as part of the vanguard science of bacteriology in opposition to sterilization. Sterilization is grounded in bacteriology just as much as inoculation, if not more (the evidence for the effectiveness of inoculation was exclusively statistical in this period, not microbial). Disease is caused by germs. To treat the disease, use carbolic to kill the germs. The germ are invisible and everywhere, so carbolic your shrivelled British heart out. This is mixed, of course, with the colonizers’ fundamental lack of respect for the personhood of the colonized, and you get the so-called religion of carbolic. It’s just out-dated science strained through a conservative and slow to adapt colonial bureaucracy.

This framing of inoculation and sanitization as two opposite poles of scientificness obfuscates the fact that inoculation was was just as much a part of western science, the western culture and technologies that were steam-rolling their way over Ayurvedic and Chinese medical systems. Does it make it better than this fruit of empire fulfils its promise? Schama isn’t interested in asking, and treats inoculation as unambiguously good, free from the colonial baggage of the rest of medicine. I get that the exploration of this question would be limited by the extreme paucity of non-European sources, but the execution here was still disappointing.

Ultimately, while Foreign Bodies is informative and interesting, it works best as a companion read because it doesn’t really come together by itself. It addresses the obvious, but fails to move any deeper. I have a distinct memory of being struck by the realization, a third of the way through the book, that I didn’t know what it was actually about. Schama draws a connection between viruses and bacteria as foreign bodies causing disease (this is the detail that separates germ theory from humoural theory), to suspicion of inoculation being grounded in fear of injection with foreign bodies, to key figures in the history of inoculation as foreign bodies both within the Asian countries where they worked and within the Western European empires that employed them. It’s a tantalizing idea, but Schama never explains what this connection is (beyond a literary image) or what it might mean. There is meat on that bone. What is the meaning of native and foreign in medicine? How does it interact with our ideas of sanitariness and cleanliness? How can we use this information to decolonize medicine and hygiene in the future? Foreign Bodies pivots so hard from wrapping up its many historical tangents to bemoaning COVID vaccine denialism that it never has time to address them. (This is putting it charitably; put uncharitably, one might suspect that this sort of thing never occurred to Schama at all).

I think the book is an admirable effort for a non-historian of science. It hits the mark way more than it misses. I just did find myself wishing that it had a little more of an understanding of the history and philosophy of science as a field. We’ve been over this sort of thing, but if that work never gets picked up but outsiders, we’ll keep spinning in circles.