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[oneminutereviews]

The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands, by Sarah Brooks

Between China and Russia lie the Wastelands. Within, flora and fauna, even the landscape, act strangely. The author of the titular guide lost his faith, then his mind, and then went missing. The only way to cross the expanse is the Trans-Siberian Express. Last journey, something went wrong. People died. Now, too soon for safety, the train embarks on another crossing.

This was an acceptable use of multi-POV. We follow three characters: a disgraced scientist hoping to rise again by investigating the Wastelands, a daughter trying to clear her scapegoated father’s name by finding the true cause of the last crossing’s failure, and a train employee who meets a stowaway. Stuck inside together, each character takes risks, each storyline affecting the others via the health of the train.

I won’t give away the plot, because the effect relies on a creeping "oh no" feeling of knowing that something will go wrong but not quite knowing what. And then it goes wrong, and more goes wrong, and everything is changing with no way to stop it, no matter how much the characters pretend that all is fine. As each person pursues their own goals, the threat of the train itself failing looms over their heads. You just know it will all come crashing down somehow.

A particular strength of the book, I thought, was information management. Everything was properly built up so that went something went wrong, all the author needed to do was drop a single line and I immediately knew that this was bad, very bad, oh no. When truths were revealed they slipped neatly into place—and increased the "oh no" factor.

Beyond that, this was a fantasy novel with a satisfying conclusion and no romance, which was more than enough for me.

Review submitted by bobble.

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A River of Golden Bones, by A. K. Mulford

I’m glad I stuck it out through A River of Golden Bones, but I still wish that beginning took less time. A. K. Mulford’s fantasy novel features two twin werewolves, Briar and Calla, who live in hiding from the sorceress who killed their parents. Briar’s betrothed is supposed to help her take back the twins’ land. But then the sorceress comes back, the prince's dad is a greedy jerk, and Calla has to adventure off to save Briar and the kingdom.

Once the adventure was in motion (over a 25% in) I had a great time. Calla has multiple intertwined arcs of self-definition, including coming out as nonbinary and rejecting a soulmate (before non-soulmate-based romantic interactions). The world felt lived-in and vibrant. I adored how the worldbuilding supported the plot without being overly complicated. As one example, fantasy racism and sexism did exist. However, the plot actively challenged unfair social structures, such as the view among werewolves that human lives had no inherent worth, a cause Calla takes up as she (and the readers) learn more of the historical complexities.

One more issue for me: there are a few too many sex scenes. I think only one was plot-relevant. There would’ve been more except that the main couple kept being interrupted before they could get busy. In all, however, I recommend this novel to other fantasy readers.

Review submitted by bobble.

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Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri

Interpreter of Maladies is the name of Jhumpa Lahiri's award-winning first collection of short stories, published in 1999, and also the name of one of the stories within it. Altogether there are nine short stories, mostly (but not entirely, see below) exploring the lives of Indian immigrants in the US. The stories are independent and can be read in any order, although I enjoyed reading "The Third and Final Continent" as the last one since it's the only way to end the collection on a really happy note.

I found it interesting to classify the stories, of which three are set in India and six primarily in the US. In "A Temporary Matter" and "When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine", the protagonists are second-generation immigrants, who came from Indian families but spent their whole lives in the US. In "Interpreter of Maladies", a couple of such second-generation immigrants (and their third-generation kids) are observed by a viewpoint character who's spent his entire life in India. "A Real Durwan" and "The Treatment of Bibi Haldar" are set entirely in India, with nothing about the US in those stories at all. "Sexy" and "Mrs Sen's" have purely American protagonists, with first-generation immigrants from India as important non-viewpoint characters. In "This Blessed House", the protagonists are implied to be respectively first-generation and second-generation Indian immigrants to the US, but this is not made completely clear as far as I can tell. "The Third and Final Continent" tells the story of first-generation newcomers from India to the US.

In my opinion, the stories can be ranked from most to least tragic as follows: "A Real Durwan" (a real tragedy), "A Temporary Matter" (a sad story with hope that's quickly dashed), "Sexy" (a miserable account of extra-marital affairs), "Mrs Sen's" (a saddening insight into the difficulty of integrating into a new society), "The Treatment of Bibi Haldar" (which would have been right down at the start of this list if not for its ending), "Interpreter of Maladies" (quite sad, but nobody truly permanently affected by the events), "This Blessed House" (a strange story whose point I didn't really get, more sad than happy but not by much), "When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine" (neither particularly sad nor happy, I'd say), "The Third and Final Continent" (starts off quite dismal, but the happiest ending of them all).

It's a thought-provoking collection, leaving the reader mulling over issues like the difficulty of adapting between two very different cultures (especially "Mrs Sen's" and "The Third and Final Continent", to some extent "When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine", and in a intrasubcontinental way in "A Real Durwan") and what makes a relationship succeed or fail (this comes up in all the stories except "A Real Durwan" and "When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine").

Review submitted by Rand al'Thor.

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The Invisible Hour, by Alice Hoffman

I didn’t expect The Invisible Hour to be fanfiction, but that’s what it was. Specifically, it’s fanfic of Nathaniel Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter. The main character, Mia, grows up in a cult similar to the society in that Letter. Still, she rebelliously sneaks library books. Eventually Letter inspires her to run away.

What transpires after that is a chase around time and space. Yes, time. Mia’s abiding love for Hawthorn’s novel lets her time-travel back to when he was alive. She meets Nathaniel himself and starts to fall in love with him. Their liaisons change the future: the words in Mia’s copy of Letter start disappearing, Back to the Future style. So while in her present Mia is chased by the cult leader, in the past she tries to balance what she wants with what’s best for Nathaniel and the book that he must write to preserve this odd little time loop.

The book’s emotional throughline worked surprisingly well given how twisted the timeline got. Mia’s attempts to figure out her life, at first haltering and then slowly more confident, combined with her lingering baggage from growing up in the cult, wove together nicely into a well-rounded character. The finale closed off all the plotlines neatly and provided a satisfactory ending. I enjoyed reading The Invisible Hour despite it being far more “literary” than my normal fare.

Review submitted by bobble.

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Cinderella is Dead, by Kalynn Bayron

Cinderella is Dead has a good premise going for it: lesbian vs. patriarchal society which idolizes Cinderella’s story. Young women dress up for a ball where men select brides. Protagonist Sophia wants to elope with her girlfriend, who refuses. Sophia escapes the ball by herself and meets a descendant of Cinderella. They plot to overthrow the system.

That all sounds interesting, right? My issue was that there was barely anything but high concepts and obvious messaging. Baryon clearly has Big Ideas to share about misogyny. Unfortunately, the book is a paper-thin plot thread to lead Sophia to the next monologue. The standard Cinderella story is the official propaganda; the real (and very complicated) version is revealed in bits and pieces. The characters, including Sophia, are just there to get in a bunch of pointed lines on the misogyny theme or as mouthpieces for the true Cinderella backstory.

A simpler way of putting it is that the characters didn’t feel like people. They felt like puppets, no matter their alleged character depth. There’s way too much telling in general. As one example, Sophia repeatedly declares her love for her girlfriend, but not once does that girlfriend do anything but tell Sophia that they can’t be together. I’d care more about Sophia’s relationship if I saw why she cared for her girlfriend.

The general plot structure is fine. However, the story should’ve been simplification, especially of the over-complicated true Cinderella story. Then there might even be time for character development beyond theme-mouthpiece usage. As is, I can’t recommend this novel.

Review submitted by bobble.

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Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett

I hadn’t read much Discworld when someone recommended Going Postal as a light romp. It was indeed a delightful romp, and made me want to read more Discworld. The premise of a conman forced into public service led to all sorts of hilarious shenanigans. I loved watching the protagonist dig himself out of the latest hole with seemingly nothing but the conviction that he could, and liberal use of fast-talking.

The omniscient narrator voice was entertaining (again, Pratchett’s Discworld) and the plot was tight. The ending, especially the last plan pulled out of a back pocket, was immensely satisfying. Rebuilding a crumbled public institution and taking on an evil Big Business had, I admit, a certain amount of wish-fulfillment for me. All the worldbuilding around the important bits was memorable and novel. That was probably helped by the lovely narrator, but it was good all the same.

Despite being part of a quite large anthology series, this particular installment didn’t rely on prior knowledge at all. It’s a great entry point for people who haven’t read much Discworld. Going Postal has my strong recommendation for any fantasy readers.

Review submitted by bobble.

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Satire by Jane Ogden and Peter Buckroyd

Satire by Jane Ogden and Peter Buckroyd. Cambridge Contexts in Literature, series editor Adrian Barlow. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 128 pp.

I bought this book mainly because it had been marked down to 50¢ at a used book sale. To my delight, it turned out to be a surprisingly good primer on literary analysis. The opening paragraph says:

The aim of this book is to help students become more aware of how understanding something of the contexts—literary, linguistic, social, historical or cultural—in which any text is produced can enhance their reading and help them to develop their own informed interpretations of what they read. (p. 8)

Right off the bat, then, the stated aim is not confined to satire: the techniques and approaches explained are meant to be applicable to any text. This more general focus makes this an excellent introductory textbook on reading not only satire, but literature in general. The authors have a helpful definition of what it means to read a text:

In the context of studying literature "reading" means more than just being able to decipher the symbols on a printed page. It means more than being able to take in the information on the page. Reading is about making sense of what is read, about seeing how texts have been put together, and why writers have done it in a particular way, and why they have chosen to use certain kinds of language to express their ideas and feelings. Reading literature is an active process for the reader. (p. 98)

This active process involves a close reading of the text within its contexts. The authors are careful to dispel the notion that context is merely "background information," being rather "a series of keys which can unlock the text in different ways" (p. 21). For example, Pope's The Rape of the Lock can be read within its specific literary context as a mock epic, or Twain's Huckleberry Finn within the historical and social context of slavery. Additionally, the reader might take any of various approaches to this contextual reading: Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, structuralist, new historicist, etc. By bringing together close reading, contextualization, and critical approach, a reader can arrive at an informed interpretation of the text. The authors point out that such interpretations are not absolute:

Studying a literary text is an interaction between the reader and the text, which is not going to result in final "right" answers. It is the reader's job to respond, to think, to engage with and to interpret what he or she reads—to make meanings from the text, based on evidence from within and around it. Because of differences between people in their experiences, education, gender, ethnicity and class, no-one interprets a text exactly the same way as anyone else. Thus, there can be alternative ways of reading the same texts by different people, or by the same reader revisiting the text at different times. (p. 99)

The writers therefore list "an awareness of alternative ways of interpreting a text" as a necessary skill for the reader.

These guidelines on how to read literary texts are formulated into exercises throughout, the focus naturally being on satiric texts. More than half of this brief textbook comprises extracts, each prefaced with contextual information as well as suggestions for ways to approach the text in question. I am not convinced that this is good strategy: what is the point of having students read three pages of Northanger Abbey, or three paragraphs from Swift's "A Modest Proposal"? Can students arrive at informed readings when the texts are served up as mere fragments? The decision to include a reproduction from Hogarth's Marriage à la Mode is particularly questionable: even granting Hogarth's masterful handling of satire, a student of literature is not well situated to interpret an oil painting. Given the care the authors take to explain the importance of literary and linguistic contexts in reading, the blithe disregard for painterly conventions as a necessary context for Hogarth is baffling.

The problem appears to be that this textbook's dual goal is hard to contain in such a short compass. Short of the excerpts from satiric works, the book has only about sixty page to introduce students to the craft of reading and to provide an overview of satire as genre and method. When the writers scant aspects of the former, an excuse is ready at hand. A textbook on critical approaches to literature could not get away with describing the psychoanalytic perspective in a single clause saying it "might consider aspects of sexuality, and uses of imagery" (p.100)—doesn't any close reading consider imagery? This infelicity could justified on the grounds that this is a textbook on satire, not on theory. It's harder to explain away the disparity between the thoughtful framework the authors provide for reading generally, and the absence of any substantial readings of satiric texts. The book is exemplary at signposting—at suggesting directions that students could follow. But one looks in vain for any example of those signposts being followed to a satisfying destination. Even just one reading that put into practice the prescribed blend of close reading, contextualization, and critical approach would have been helpful.

Some aspects of the work are decidedly old-fashioned. For example, male authors are referred to by their last names: Swift, Pope, etc. Austen, however, is nearly always Jane Austen. Is there some need to disambiguate her from, say, Mount Godwin Austen? And surprisingly for a book published in this century, there is nary a mention of postcolonial approaches to reading, nor of any satirical writers from Africa or Asia. Salman Rushdie would like a word.

These flaws aside, this is a very useful book. Its explanations of how literary analysis works generally are thoughtful and intelligent. Updated and supplemented with full-length literary works and practical examples of the sorts of readings that can result by using the strategies outlined in this book, this would be close to an ideal textbook for an introductory course in literature.

Review submitted by verbose.

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Spine of the Dragon by Kevin J. Anderson

Content warning: Sexual violence.

The further I got into Spine of the Dragon, the more I realized I should cut my losses and stop. This epic fantasy doorstopper (over 25 hours of audiobook) completely failed its blurb. Allegedly, two human kingdoms work together against a greater enemy. That never occurs.

But that’s not even the worst problem. There was way too much backstory, even for epic fantasy. It dragged the book down and stretched it out. Only handful of plot was sprinkled throughout the 25 hours of book. The rest was backstory: for each of the at least 18 viewpoint characters, for each major faction and sub-faction, between each major faction and sub-faction, and so forth. I forgot 95% of the proper nouns. After a certain point there were simply too many. The fact that a concerning amount of the backstory and worldbuilding involved rape, including child rape and incestuous rape, certainly didn’t help. Unnecessary rape, since I could easily think of alternatives with the same effect.

I can only assume that cooperation occurs later in the series, though the ending of the first book provides a bleaker outlook than the start. It takes 17 hours of audiobook for one side to even send an ambassador, and until the end for the leaders to meet. Needless to say no agreement is made, because this novel is allergic to satisfaction.

Anderson clearly put a lot of thought into this book’s world. However, the writing itself failed to give me any reason to go back. I strongly recommend you not read this novel.

Review submitted by bobble.

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El llano en llamas by Juan Rulfo

Juan Rulfo's El llano en llamas is a collection of short stories (fifteen of them, in the first-edition translation that I read) set in early twentieth-century Mexico. Each one is very short, most of them just a few pages and many of them covering a time period of less than a day if you don't count flashbacks. I think of them as a series of vignettes, each one giving us a glimpse into the life of a single family or person, which together give us an impression of a way of life, in a particular part of the world at a particular period of time. In that sense, it reminded me of Narayan's Malgudi Days - both collections somehow immerse the reader in a culture that they may not be familiar with.

So what impression does it give us of life in early twentieth-century Mexico? A pretty grim and brutal one. The landscape is harsh and hard to live in, and more than half of the stories have protagonists who are killers, in one way or another. Most of the characters are eking out their lives seemingly on the verge of death, with things like proper healthcare or having enough to eat being clearly far-fetched dreams in their world. The bleak and unforgiving landscape is easy to imagine from Rulfo's writing, and each story begins with a gripping opener that forces you to keep reading it to the end.

The story with the grimmest geographical description is surely "Luvina", followed by "Nos han dado la tierra", in both of which the major point of the story is to emphasise how harsh the physical environment is - honourable mention to "Es que somos muy pobres" for a grim description of living conditions, even if more related to weather than the place itself. The most awful people as main characters are probably found in "El hombre" and "Talpa", but this is a spoiler-free review.

Read these stories and they'll stay with you afterwards: a chilling insight into a tough way of life. I read only the English translations, as I don't speak Spanish, but I imagine the originals could be even more compelling.

Review submitted by Rand al'Thor.

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One Day All This Will Be Yours by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I went into One Day All This Will Be Yours with just a glance at the blurb: time-traveller trying to prevent time-travel war. It turned out great. The narrator is engaging and conversational. An incredible amount of novelty is squeezed out of time-travel by taking the “time-travel war” concept seriously. That’s me speaking as a lifelong speculative fiction fan. The use of time travel was still novel. On an emotional and plot level, One Day portrays the futility and waste of war in a moving and direct manner without resorting to gore. Did this paragraph intrigue you? Go get the novella now!

Still here? I’ll go into more detail. The “Causality War” was the first war fought with time machines. The collateral damage included causality itself. Time nukes created “time shards”, islands of broken time. Nearly all of time broke into shards. This obviously had devastating effects on all of time. Our protagonist, the sole survivor, settles in at the edge of time. His goal is to kill any and all other time travellers. If no one but him has a time machine, then no one will start another time war.

Tchaikovsky’s lovely, evocative description stuck with me. The sheer destructiveness of a war fought with time machines. The chilling feeling of fighting when "us" and "them" lose meaning because all the fighters are from different versions of history. The way that no one quite knows how the war started, but only that they must fight on. The lengths to which the protagonist goes to keep the future the way he wants it. The ending, one of the few downer endings which worked for me, because it tied in so well with the horror-of-war message.

I haven’t even gotten into the actual plot. All that time travel war stuff is backstory. I promise, there is a plot which befits the set-up. What is that plot? Well, I think you really should read the novella to find out.

Review submitted by bobble.

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How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse by K. Eason

How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse never lived up to its title (there was a distinct lack of multiverse destruction) but was still a delightful read. I appreciated how it took fairy-tale tropes, twisted them ninety degrees, and dropped them into space politics. I emphasize: this book is space political intrigue with a dash of fantasy magic. It is, sadly, not about destroying the multiverse. I still strongly recommend it for an engaging plot, entertaining narrator, and satisfying conclusion.

I thoroughly enjoyed the strong narrative voice. Especially its sarcastic attacks on fairy-tale tropes and the like. I will admit that its asides often go on for about 10% longer than they should, as do Rory’s internal thoughts. Also, the narrator can’t resist explaining everything of interest in a scene. That includes the inner thoughts and emotions of non-point-of-view characters. In the narrator’s defense, there are in-universe reasons why this is possible, and I personally appreciated having subtext be text (I am bad at subtext), but not all readers will agree.

Anyways, the plot. As princess of a space kingdom, Rory receives fairy blessings upon birth, such as harp-playing and spotting lies. (That last one is technically a curse, but it's very useful.) When her father is killed, the kingdom is drawn into a war. She proposes marriage for peace. Upon arrival she finds deeper conspiracy, targeting both her and her groom-to-be. Rory has to plot to save herself, save the prince, and maybe fix the government she’s trying to marry into.

While “teenage princess has arranged marriage to end war” is a mishmash of YA tropes, the book’s final message is surprisingly anti-monarchist. Plus, the relationship arc with the prince is platonic instead of romantic, which I adored. Finally, the climax was resolved in a delightful way. Honestly the whole book felt novel, even though I’ve read tropes a thousand times.

Review submitted by bobble.

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Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin

Winning the Nobel Prize in Literature is generally regarded as a great honour. But the prize was never awarded to authors such as Leo Tolstoy, Henry James, Anton Chekhov, Mark Twain, Henrik Ibsen, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov. On the other hand, how many people still read the works of Sully Prudhomme (first Nobel Prize for Literature in 1901), Giosuè Carducci (1906), Verner von Heidenstam (1916), Frans Eemil Sillanpää (1939) or Johannes Vilhelm Jensen (1944)?

Gabriela Mistral was the first Latin American author to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, but when Literature Stack Exchange suggested a Gabriela Mistral reading challenge, I had to overcome my prejudice against what seemed one of those long forgotten Nobel laureates. It helped that Ursula K. Le Guin had published a large selection of Mistral’s poems with her own English translations in 2003. Even though Le Guin is best known for her science fiction and fantasy novels, she was also a poet. This volume, published by the University of New Mexico Press, is the largest selection of Mistral’s poems ever published in English and fills the gap left by earlier translations, by Langston Hughes (1957) and Doris Dana (1971), which have gone out of print.

Le Guin selected poems from five of Mistral’s published volumes: Desolación (1922), Ternura: canciones de niños (1924), Tala (1938), Lagar (1954) and the posthumously published Poema de Chile (1967). She also included four unpublished poems. The Spanish text and Le Guin’s translation are usually printed on facing pages, except when the lines are short enough to print both text side by side on the same page. Le Guin did not attempt to reproduce the metre and only reproduced the rhyme if it came without forcing. She also included some of the dark, difficult poems from Mistral’s last two books, but the admits that the choice was otherwise subjective.

Le Guin’s translations capture the spirit of Mistral’s poems very well. In order to achieve this, the translations can’t always be literal. Sometimes, it even seems as if Le Guin is taking liberties, for example when she translates estanque as millpond (in “El amor que calla”, pages 12–13) or al roce del cilicio as at the touch of the lash (in “Íntima”, pages 14–15) or “Habla con dejo” (literally: “[She] speaks with [an] accent”) as “She chatters” (in “La extranjera”, pages 192–193).

Mistral’s work is influenced by her Catholicism, which is reflected both in some of the poems’ themes and in metaphors, even in poems that are not religious. That does not mean you need to be religious to appreciate her poetry.

The book would have benefited from more careful editing and proofreading, especially the first part. Typographical errors include “I stretched our my arms” (page 29), “a mis casa” and “infinto” (both in the second stanza of “Desolación”, page 40) and “Roció” (the title of the poem “Rocío”, page 57).

Gabriela Mistral: Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral. Translated by Ursula K. Le Guin. Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series. University of New Mexico Press, 2003 (431 pages). ISBN 9780826328199.

Review submitted by Tsundoku.

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Big Time by Ben H. Winters

Big Time disappointed me, but I don’t think it was a bad book. Mind you, it wasn’t a great book, but it was the sort of mediocrity with which one could pleasantly while away a weekend. My main issue is the mismatch between an interesting blurb and the novel’s actual contents.

What did I think I was getting? The blurb said that people could sell their time to others. That this was a “thriller that takes the adage ‘Time is money,’ and makes it literally, frighteningly so.” I was excited for a dystopia, adjacent to our world (the blurb also mentions the FDA), that dealt with the consequences of people selling time off their lives. The social implications would be fascinating. Unfortunately, the novel doesn’t grapple with those implications.

What did I actually get? An investigation into what happened to one of the main characters, Ally, who gets kidnapped. She escapes to a hospital, where she wakes up with amnesia and memories from the life of a woman named Ana. The other main character, Grace, who works for the FDA, is drawn into the case after being contacted by the hospital. Both women pursue what leads they have. They converge on the truth in the climax.

This actual plot was executed decently. Despite everyone being confused and all the major questions only getting final answers in the climax, the novel somehow maintains the necessary momentum to keep the reader engaged. The characters, especially the leads, are well detailed as people doing the best with what they have. Each felt like a full person with full lives. The biggest non-blurb-related issue I had was an abundance of point-of-view characters, especially the kidnapper, who gets many chapters and then spends them complaining about her pay. But I think many books have too many points of view, so that’s nothing special. If the true plot sounds interesting, you may enjoy reading Big Time.

I still wish I’d gotten that dystopia, though.

Review submitted by bobble.

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Darwin’s Cipher by M.A. Rothman

Fairly quickly into Darwin’s Cipher it became, if not a hate-read, then an amusingly frustrated read. I suspect that I was not the target audience. I’m studying graduate-level genetics. Mr. Rothman’s novel uses very, very incorrect genetics.

The main bad-pop-sci-genetics element is also the novel’s premise. One of the main characters, a geneticist named Juan, creates an algorithm which can predict millions of years of evolution. To be clear, evolution does not move “forward” over time. Evolution does not go in the same “direction” across all species. And that’s not the only such egregious element. Even Juan’s climatic solution is mind-bogglingly impossible. I freely admit that the terrible genetics probably biased me towards the rest of the novel.

So, what about the actual plot? Passable at best. The book jumps in between too many points of view, which take too long to intersect. The threat fails to be tense due to a lack of concrete stakes. I expect my thrillers to tell me what concrete badness the protagonists have to stop, or at least point to an obviously nefarious antagonist. Instead, the novel spends a while hinting that nonspecific bad things are happening. The blurb makes the novel seem way better than it actually is, by pulling interesting elements across, no joke, 7 hours of the audiobook.

Furthermore, the description and exposition is excessive for my taste. It’s often done via dialogue, even when the people involved would not naturally say description. And despite all that exposition, many people act in ways I found illogical, including the antagonists (e.g. desiring secrecy but still allowing someone to take medication out of a clinical trial site). There was a geopolitics blunder so unbelievable that it took me out of the story. No, I don’t think that a bunch of Argentineans would accept being whisked into a secret US government camp without so much as a fight. In short, the characters stumbled through painfully described scenes while I stayed thoroughly confused.

I only managed it through Darwin’s Cipher because it was like a trainwreck. I couldn’t look away, too curious for what genetics would be butchered next. I don’t recommend it to anyone.

Review submitted by bobble.

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Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich

After the reactor explosions in Chernobyl on 26 April 1986, Armand Pien, the most popular weatherman in the history of Belgian television, said in one of his weather forecasts that the cloud of radioactive dust that was spreading over much of Europe was not passing over Belgium. Many television viewers were sceptical and it later transpired that the Belgian government had told Armand Pien to make that claim in order to prevent a panic. Possibly, the government had forgotten to forbid him to talk about the rest of that cloud’s trajectory because Pien did not conceal that it was also travelling over the Netherlands and France …

Compared to what people in the Soviet Union had to endure, the above anecdote is entirely innocent, almost silly even. In Belarus, Ukraine’s northern neighbour, one in five persons, or 2.1 million people, live in the zone contaminated by the Chernobyl disaster. To put that into perspective, Alexievich tells us that one in four Belarusians was killed during the Second World War.

The response of the Party apparatus was to call up young men to serve as clean-up workers in the power plant and the contaminated land. On the roof of reactor No. 4, radiation was so intense that each worker’s exposure should not have been longer than forty to fifty seconds, but the work required at least several minutes. Radio-controlled equipment broke down within hours due to the radiation, so only humans could do the clean-up work near the reactor. However, the workers did not understand the risks; their military commanders, trained in indoctrination but not in physics, were ignorant about them. One of the clean-up workers says, “I believed in my lucky star. Ha ha! Now I’m second category disabled.”

In the zone around the nuclear power plant, where much radioactive debris and dust had fallen, clean-up workers were instructed to remove the top soil and bury it in pits. They also buried entire villages. According to one interviewee, around 340,000 troops were brought in for the clean-up work. Several former clean-up workers talk about the readiness to sacrifice oneself. Not all of them were conscripts, some were volunteers. When a former first secretary of a district party committee says that “there was such a thing as Soviet character”, that even sounds plausible.

However, indoctrination and heroism don’t protect against radiation and its consequences. When soldiers were given dosimeters at all, the readings were kept secret by the KGB. Clean-up workers weren’t given any information they would be able to pass on to their doctors. While the clean-up work was going on and villages were being evacuated, people were also brought into to plough the fields, sow and later harvest from them, because the Plan had not been altered and quota needed to be fulfilled. Radio-active wood, meat, milk, grain, potatoes and vegetables were sold as if nothing had happened. Those who suspected that something was wrong were unable to outwit the system. For example, some started buying more expensive sausages, hoping that those would contain uncontaminated meat: “We soon found out, though, that they were deliberately adding contaminated meat to expensive sausage. Their logic was that, as it was expensive, people would buy only a little of it and eat less.”

Before the disaster, nuclear physicists were the elite among academics and people had an idyllic view of nuclear energy. The atom was “a peaceful labourer” and accidents simply could not happen. After Chernobyl—people don’t even bother to say “the Chernobyl disaster” since the name of the power plant is now synonymous with the catastrophe—this all changed. The scientists were now fallen angels. In addition, several interviewees think that the disaster contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union.

One of the most damning testimonies is that by Vassili Nesterenko, who was director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy in Belarus at the time. As soon as he heard about the reactor explosion, he tried to get urgent information through to Mikalay Slyonkow, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Byelorussian SSR. Slyonkow’s response was that the accident was nothing more than a fire that had been put out and that there was nothing to worry about. That was probably what he had been told by Moscow. Nesterenko went to the Zone to measure the radiation and contacted Party officials who might be able to take action. However, instead of taking measures to protect the population, the Party confiscated all of the Institute’s equipment for monitoring radiation and brought criminal charges against Nesterenko. Slyonkow, by contrast, was promoted to Moscow.

Chernobyl Prayer is not a factbook about the disaster and its consequences. Alexievich’s book is a collection of testimonies, introduced as “monologues”, by people affected by the Chernobyl disaster. The order of these testimonies is not random: they are grouped in three long sections, each of which ends with a “choir”. A “choir” is a grouping of shorter testimonies that are not attributed individually to any specific person. Both before the first section and after the last section, there is a chapter titled “A lone human voice”. In each of these, we hear the account of a widow: the first the widow of one of the first firemen who were called up to extinguish the fire in the reactor, and the second the widow of a fitter who was sent to the Zone in October 1986. Both saw their husbands slowly die after returning from Chernobyl. In view of the number of clean-up workers that were sent to Chernobyl, there must be thousands of similar stories related to the Chernobyl disaster and how it was handled by the Party. There is also a generation of children from the contaminated zone who think they will never grow old and who may never have healthy babies. One girl, who was in tenth grade, told her mother, “Mum, if I give birth to a freak, I’ll love it anyway.”

By way of an epilogue, Alexievich cites a newspaper article about a travel agency in Kiev that started offering tourist trips to Chernobyl in 2005. “You will certainly going to have something to tell your friends about when you get home.” Chernobyl, or the banality of death.

Svetlana Alexievich: Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future. Translated by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait. Penguin, 2016 (294 pages). ISBN 978-0-241-27053-0.

Review submitted by Tsundoku.

[oneminutereviews]

The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid

“One morning, Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.” This opening sentence of Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Last White Man reminded me of the first sentence of Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis, which ended rather badly for its protagonist. Anders is not only a very common Swedish name but also an adverb meaning “different” in German and Dutch. The change in Anders is less extreme than Gregor Samsa’s, and we later find out he is not the only one who has changed, but nobody in the novel has the sense of humour to say that the change is only skin deep or that “dark-skinned is the new black”. In fact, nobody in the novel has any sense of humour and the change is not merely superficial. It does not only affect skin colour; it is more like being in a different person’s body. After hiding at home for a week, Anders, who works at a gym, observes, “the way people act around you, it changes what you are, who you are”.

After news reports from around the country about people changing, people—we never learn whether it’s only white people—start hoarding and there are flare-ups of violence. Later on there are riots, reports of killings and “pale-skinned militants” start people clearing out. But the changing continues.

Hamid never uses the term “black”, neither for those who were born dark-skinned, nor for those who change. He also avoids the term “race”. Consequently, non-white people are never identified with any specific ethnicity, including the cleaning guy at Anders’s workplace, who had been the only dark-skinned person at the gym. The novel can thus focus on how white people respond to the change, and the responses run the gamut from suicide to acceptance. Responses to seeing a dark man kiss a white woman cause discomfort in one person and strong disgust in another. One of the characters, who feels threatened by the changes around her, complains that “one of her favorite radio personalities had changed color, and changed brains it felt like too”.

Those who have changed don’t simply lose the memory of being white and the biases they had earlier. For example, someone may “sound white” on the phone but turn out to be dark-skinned. Years later, people talk about whiteness to their children who were born after the change.

Many reviewers read the book as an allegory on racism, but in the real world racism is intertwined with history and geography: colonialism, racial hierarchies, “The White Man’s Burden”, the slave trade etcetera. This kind of history is absent from the novel. Even the idea of white supremacy is almost entirely absent from the novel, except for a few references to distaste or disgust, so the story is mostly a matter of “us” versus “them“. In other words, even in the absence of the real-world history of racism, differences in skin colour give rise to hostility, which only disappears when those differences have entirely vanished. From this point of view, the note of hope that some reviewers perceive in the end of the novel sounds more like a shrill dissonant.

Mohsin Hamid: The Last White Man. Penguin, 2022 (180 pages). ISBN 978-0-241-99556-6.

Review submitted by Tsundoku.

[oneminutereviews]

The Katurran Odyssey by Terryl Whitlatch and David Michael Wieger

I bought The Katurran Odyssey on a whim many years ago because of its gorgeous illustrations. The story takes place in a fictional world named Katurrah, which is populated only by animals, many of which can speak. The main character is a ring-tailed lemur named Katook, whose home village is suffering under an extremely long winter. Katook is banned from the village after seeing the secret rites of the priests, and this is the start of a journey on which he tries to find others like him. He soon meets a proud and vain quagga named Quigga, who has lost his herd, and they agree to travel together.

On their search for Quigga’s herd and for monkeys like Katook, the two encounter various animal communities. Some of these are intellectuals and artists, some are peaceful jungle dwellers and some are slave keepers. The species that Katook encounters include aye-ayes, indris, a moa, a leatherback sea turtle, black-and-white colobuses, sable antelopes, giant spotted hyenas called bone-crushers, glyptodonts, phorusrhacidae (also known as terror birds but called phorcus in the book), river dolphins, proboscis monkeys, a mouse-deer, blue morpho butterflies and a fossa.

Terryl Whitlatch, who illustrated the book, studied zoology before she transitioned to arts, so she knows how to create convincing images of animals, including animals in motion. The illustrations also show ruins and buildings reminiscent of the architecture of Mesopotamia, Sudano-Sahelian architecture (see the Sankoré Mosque and the Great Mosque of Djenné in Mali), Angkor Wat in Cambodia and the Potala Palace in Tibet. Whitlatch often uses two facing pages as a canvas for the illustrations, which gives her a lot of space for various types of nature backgrounds and, when relevant to the story, interiors of libraries and palaces.

The story was written by screenwriter David Michael Wieger. It is a coming-of-age story in which Katook’s, and to a lesser extent Quigga’s, encounters with other species teach the characters a number of lessons that turn out to be helpful at the end of the story. The ending, in which Katook is somehow transported home and ends the long winter, is a bit quick and easy, but it avoids the type of double or multiple ending that people criticised in the film version of Lord of the Rings. The illustrations are the book’s strongest point. The Katurran Odyssey is the only illustrated book I have ever bought, but it was worth it.

Terryl Whitlatch and David Michael Wieger: The Katurran Odyssey: Book One – Finding Home. Simon & Schuster, 2004. Reprint: Design Studio Press, 2019 (188 pages). ISBN 978-1-624650-43-7.

Review submitted by Tsundoku.