tabacoychanel

Margot Lanagan, “Singing My Sister Down" (2006) It’s about family and female relationships and how social mores can be both repressive and life-affirming, and it hurt more than Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Lanagan’s way with words continues to be the unsurpassed eighth marvel of the world.

Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day (2019) sync-read here with hamsterwoman  and cafemassolit. Tl;dr first half rocked, second half let me down, capitalism sucks.

 Sandra Newman, The Heavens (2019) Ben loves Kate. Kate has dreams. The dreams might be realer than her waking world. In fact the dreams seem to affect her waking world. This book is absolutely brilliant. I mined the rec from Abigail Nussbaum, who seems to hate all the things I like, but the flip side of that is she has such niche taste she’s never reading the same books other people in the SF/F community are reading, and this one was a home run for me. On a prose level Newman’s word choice is unfailingly on-point, which is impressive because she’s switching between two vastly different registers—modern millennials in Manhattan and minor nobility in Elizabethan England—and she never once sacrifices legibility for verisimilitude. But even minor characters’ voices still sound distinct. On a plot/structural level I intuited each major twist just ahead of its reveal. On a thematic level it’s about how the worst feeling in the world is when the people you love disbelieve you and treat you like you belong in an insane asylum; Kate is hobbled in her “real” life by her supernatural gifts. People will try to sell you The Heavens as a time-travel romance in the vein of The Time Traveler’s Wife but DO NOT FALL FOR IT. The Heavens is the book I’ve been searching for since I finished Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, I just didn’t realize Claire North was not going to be the one to write it. It actually does the thing that I have criticized Song for a New Day for not doing properly, which is marry the author’s personal and political convictions, and give art and society each their due. It’s a little slow to start but please read at least up to the scene where Ben and Kate have a fight and Kate’s like “maybe I should get a cat instead of a job.”

Georgette Heyer, The Talisman Ring (1936) NGL THEY HAD US IN THE FIRST HALF.JPG Ok I was def raising my eyebrows at the heroine’s vapidity. She was a sweetheart but Heyer’s Regency heroines normally have a bit more bite to them—more Lizzy Bennet than Fanny Price. Turns out she was 1/2 of the B-couple and we don’t meet the actual heroine until later. The hero is your typical his-way-or-the-highway tyrannical Heyer hero, and all the shenanigans are fall-on-your-face funny. The structure isn’t as tight as something like Cotillion (my fave because it features the ANTI-HEYER-HERO) but the set-pieces had me in stitches. That feeling when you have to trust someone you don’t know that well to play along with your charade in order to fool a supremely odious third person, and the whole act of pulling the wool over a third person’s eyes is both Peak Teamwork and Peak Romance? Oof, nobody does it like Heyer.

asoiaf | Like winter we are cruel by lagardère (Jon/Sansa S7 AU, 101k) “This has got to stop. It’s a kiss and then it’s a war, and you know if you spoke long enough and low enough I’d do it.” “She could poison your wine and slit your throat, and still you would choose her.” Holy mother of god this woman can write. This is obviously not my ship butwitcherology recc’d it and she was right, it’s stunning and absolutely savage. I’m a little pained that Littlefinger was the antagonist as I love that twisty motherfucker.

Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres (1991) There’s a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay that goes “scratch my heart to find / The roots of last year’s roses in my breast” and that’s it that’s the book. It didn’t plant any new thoughts in my head but it did unzip me and give me access to feelings long submerged or untapped. I’m probably never going to reread King Lear when I can reread this even more brutal retelling instead.

King Lear is the story of a tyrant who divides his kingdom between his two viper-esque older daughters while disinheriting his actually deserving third daughter. It is not immediately obvious that he’s a tyrant, since his name is in the title of the play and all, but you will experience no such confusion with A Thousand Acres, which takes place in the American Midwest in the late seventies. When I say ”takes place” I mean it in the sense that The Departed (2006, dir. Martin Scoresese) takes place in Boston—it couldn’t have been set anywhere else. The fact that the movie it’s adapted from, Infernal Affairs (2002, dir. Andrew Lau and Alan Mak) didn’t really need to be set in Hong Kong doesn’t detract from that other film, it’s just a fact; and say what you will about the Dover Cliffs but I really don’t think King Lear needed to be set in Britain either. A Thousand Acres needs to be set when and where it is because it’s about land. Being a farmer is more than an outlook or a discipline or a vocation, it’s a theological imperative: There is no distinction between being a farmer and being a man, between work and leisure. That Smiley’s Lear is an awful man, a rapist and a pedophile, is inextricable from his being a wildly successful & respected farmer who owns the titular thousand acres. The whole way of life is rotten to its roots. You see the moral emptiness of Lear’s kingdom a lot sooner than you do in Shakespeare’s version, though, because A Thousand Acres is narrated by one of Lear’s unfilial daughters—Goneril, the one whom he canonically cursed with barrenness.

I’d read a quarter of the book before I realized Ginny is actually the eldest—she’s a pushover who gives off some real middle-child vibes, and she’s always taken her cue from belligerent Rose. Rose and Ginny together raised the youngest, Caroline, after their mother’s death. Caroline wound up moving to the city to be a lawyer, while Ginny and Rose stayed on the farm to look after Daddy.

The event that sets the plot in motion is the return of the prodigal son: Their neighbor’s son who dodged the Vietnam draft and spent the past decade-plus smoking weed and learning organic farming techniques in Canada. The difference is, Edmund was the villain of King Lear but Jess Clark is not the villain of this piece, despite dodgy behavior like sleeping with the married Ginny and the married Rose at the same time and then ghosting both of them. Jess is an outsider, and his very presence makes everyone reexamine the assumptions they’ve internalized eg. Ginny says “I was fourteen when Daddy bought this farm” and Jess says, “Stole it from Harold, you mean.” One of the choices I really like about this adaptation is the choice to depict the relationship between Jess’s dad (Harold aka the Earl of Gloucester) and Ginny’s dad (Larry aka Lear) as a friendly rivalry rather than vassal-to-liege. If Harold buys an expensive piece of farm equipment then Larry must have one too. It’s a game of one-upmanship and it leads inexorably to Larry incorporating the farm and giving away shares to his daughters, which is not a legally or financially or personally sound decision but it’s like he feels like he has no choice?? This novel predictably culminates in one of those court scenes where the lawyers twist the testimonies of the witnesses to bend the truth into obscene shapes.

Being a farmer means in essence being a Calvinist: we get what we deserve. Six-year-old Caroline says “I don’t want to be a farmwife I want to be a farmer” because she has grasped that only one of these roles gives you agency. To be a farmer means you are supposed to be stoic, laconic, take every blow the world rains down on you on the chin. Change is on the horizon, however. Family farms fall like dominoes before the gale force of industrial agribusiness. You hear of farmers shooting themselves in the head after running up unpayable debts. Jess Clark is out here quoting communist Rosa Luxembourg lmao I fucking love his pretentious hipster ass; he got Rose to sleep with him by talking about how he was already sleeping with Ginny. I feel like Jess is one of those people, if this was a video game, would have charisma stats off the charts. But he only turns the charisma on when somebody’s watching; he’s such a cold fish it’s impossible to know what he’s really thinking or feeling. The thing about Jess is he fucks Ginny and Rose over, sure, but the way he fucks them is not with the active complicity of the system, and that’s the difference between him and Larry: Larry regularly rapes and abuses his daughters over a period of decades. When Larry loses his mind (and the scene of mad Lear cast out in the storm is showstoppingly executed) who does the town blame for his descent into madness? Ginny and Rose, obviously, for being unfilial daughters. Larry moves in with Caroline, who sues Ginny and Rose for the farm.

So Rose’s husband’s response to her confession “I’m having an affair with Jess” is “I’m going to kill your dad”??!! And that’s because Larry is the source and the ultimate cause of everything in their lives. There’s no escaping his influence. I feel like I’ve neglected to talk about Ginny’s character in-depth in favor of a high-level overview of what the book’s trying to do, but Ginny is not a sympathetic character. At one point she tries to poison Rose with pickled sauerkraut!!! Rose, her closest confidante and ally! Everybody in this book is terrible, do not read it if you can’t handle terrible people. I cried so much for Ginny ahhh I even cried for her poor clueless husband. I highlighted so many passages it took me like half an hour to type up these quotes beware that SPOILERS ABOUND:

“Acreage and financing were facts as basic as name and gender in Zebulon County.” “Compared to our sisterhood, every other relationship was marked by some sort of absence—before Caroline, after our mother, before our husbands, pregnancies, her children.” “However much these acres looked like a gift of nature, or of God, they were not. We went to church to pay our respects, not to give thanks.” “At the pig roast, Jess Clark and the new machinery were Harold’s twin exhibits.” “In my heart I knew those men were imposters, as farmers and as fathers, too. In my youthful estimation, Laurence Cook defined both categories.” “I saw that maybe Caroline had mistaken what we were talking about, and spoken as a lawyer when she should have spoken as a daughter.” “My father was easily offended but normally he was easily mollified, too, if you spoke you prescribed part with a proper appearance of respect.” “Deserving was an interesting concept, applied to my father. His own motto was, what you get is what you deserve.” “Are you going to stop him? No! You’ll just goad him on! He’ll cut you out! If you don’t calm down, it will be like you were never born. Doesn’t that scare you?” “An all-encompassing thrift that blossomed in the purchase of more land or the improvement of land already owned … to discipline the farm and ourselves to a life and order transcending many things, but especially mere whim.” “In Canada there’s no undercurrent of shame. You just drink.” I realized that maybe Alison and I wouldn’t have lasted together. I loved her, I really did, but what I loved most was being mad at her parents for her.” “If Rose had asked me, not what I had the most trouble with, but what my worst habit was, I would have said it was entertaining thoughts of disaster.” “Carter says, ‘What should I do? A president’s got to say ‘What do I want to do? what will make me feel good now that I’m feeling so bad?’ He’s like a farmer, you see only the big pieces of equipment he’s got access to are weapons, that’s the difference.” “He’s rigid like this because we’ve let him be.” “He wasn’t criticizing you. You don’t have to feel criticized.” “This is something I do often, this phrasing and rephrasing of sentences in my mind, scaling back assertions and direct questions so that they do no offend, so that they can slip sideways into someone’s consciousness without my having really asked them.” “My job remained what it had always been—to give him what he asked of me, and if he showed discontent, to try to find out what would please him.” “With Caroline, it was like she didn’t know there was something to be afraid of.” “The thing is, Harold can’t understand being in a state of flux. I mean, he understands uncertainty. Every farmer understands that, but it’s something that comes from outside, from the price of grain or the weather, not from within. If Harold’s ever been restless, I’d be amazed … The thing is, I can’t decide if being like Loren is a disease I’m too old to get now.” “To imagine ourselves living together somewhere else, on the West Coast, say, was to imagine that we were not ourselves.” “There he stood, the living source of it all, of us all.” “But you’re not really a woman, are you? I don’t know what you are, just a bitch, is all, just a dried-up whore bitch.” “There’s only one side here, and you’d better be on it.” “She humors him and sympathizes with him. He doesn’t overwhelm her the way he does us.” “We were just his, to do with as he pleased, like the pond or the houses or the hogs or the crops.” “A poor-looking farm diagrams the farmer’s personal failures.” “I understand him perfectly. You’re making it too complicated. It’s as simple as a child’s book. I want, I take, I do.” “Daddy things history starts fresh every day, every minute, that time itself begins with the feelings he’s having right now. That’s how he keeps betraying us, why he roars at us with such conviction.” “If I don’t find some way to get out from under what Daddy’s done to me before I die—“ “Here, I thought, were too people who agreed on so many things that their opinions automatically took on the appearance of reality.” “I felt the familiar sensation of storing up virtue for a later date. The days passed.” “As far as I knew then, my hands and my body had never met without an intermediary washcloth.” “But he did fuck us and he did beat us. He beat us more than he fucked us. He beat us routinely. And the thing is, he’s respected.” “I want what was Daddy’s. I want it. I feel like I’ve paid for it, don’t you? You think a breast weighs a pound? That’s my pound of flesh.” “And then our cautious lives had grown intolerable in retrospect, and every possibility of returning to them equally intolerable.” “’The winter was so bad after the trial—‘ ‘The hearing. Nobody was on trial.’ ‘I was.’” “I think people should keep private things private.” “That she was so apart from her body that I had to address the two halves of her separately.” “‘I was on the side of the farm, that was all.’ ‘What does that mean? You talked to her! She saw you as an ally!’” “How can we divide up the stuff without knowing what it means?” “I don’t know what makes them tick. It’s like they seek out bad things. They don’t see what’s there—they see beyond that to something terrible, and it’s like they’re finally happy when they see that!” “Lodged in my every cell, along with the DNA, are molecules of topsoil and atrazine and paraquat and anhydrous ammonia and diesel fuel and plant dust, and also molecules of memory.” “Rose left me a riddle I have’t solved, of how we judge those who have hurt us when they have shown no remorse or even understanding.”