WHOOMP! HERE I AM.
In an attempt to not spend months between posts, here’s some reviews of books I finished in the past couple of days. They’re both a bit … well, me-ish … but perhaps you’ll get a buzz out of them also?
The Adventures of Christian Rosy Cross by David Foster.
My rating: three stars
The first David Foster I’ve read turns out to be right in my wheelhouse but also a bit of a ’70s let it all hang out holdover. This last part isn’t a particularly bad thing, but it does mean that when things get a bit hectic, the author has the ejector-seat trip of “hey man, it is what it is or was or whatever” that he can cling to.
Ahem.
OK, so this is a fictionalised version of the life of 13th century bloke-about-the-Holy-Land Christian Rosenkreuz. It’s probably a good thing that it’s fictionalised because there’s debate as to whether the guy ever existed at all. As you’d expect from a Dan Brown-level appreciation of Rosicrucianism (which I assume, probably incorrectly as everyone is not a stupid nerd-ass like me), that means this story is about esoterica: about alchemy, and transformation and chemical weddings and so on. Informed by the writings of Michael Maier (another spooky-action-at-a-distance dude, admittedly closer to us, having hung out in the 1600s), that’s what it is – replete with chunks of untranslated Latin, good reader – but also it’s about getting ball-tearingly fucked on hashish.
And satyriasis. (No, really, in “tape that two-footer to your leg you freak” terms. I told you the ’70s vibe was on here.)
The book follows the rough outline of Christian’s life as we know it, or believe it to have occurred: monastery time, then wandering throughout Biblical territories, before returning home. It plays pretty fast and loose with the truth (I’m not sure that the word “grouse” was used to describe anything in harems outside Australia at any point) and takes on the elements of farce and slapstick pretty readily.
(I suppose there’s a touch of Monty Python’s Life of Brian to be found throughout, as Christian’s followers appear to spring up despite his best intentions.)
Overall, the book doesn’t entirely work: the ending feels as if Foster got a bit jack of the whole stone-seeking mysticism and phoned in a “and then everything was better the end” kind of finale, but for people with a collection of grimoires, it’s a pleasingly diverting read with a couple of great I understood that reference! moments.
Yellowface by R. F. Kuang.
My rating: three stars
This was the first choice of the yet-to-meet book club at my work. I wasn’t particularly relishing reading this, as I’d heard that Babel, another Kuang novel, had some points of irritation that seemed to fit with my own Things That Piss Me Off list, so I was imagining that I’d just breeze through it in order to get it done.
I did breeze through it, but it turns out that that was because it was a great deal of fun, and I wanted to see what would happen. (That’s a good result.)
Yellowface is a novel that’s partially a thriller (or potentially a spook story?) and mostly about the ins and outs of writing, editing, and publishing. It spends a lot of time discussing the idea of race in writing: who can write particular stories? How does the presentation of the author inform public response? What happens when someone pretends to be something they’re not?
That last bit is important, because the novel is about one character (a white woman) taking a manuscript from another character (an Asian woman) and, after editing, passing it off as her own. (This is not a spoiler – it’s the driving incident of the book, and there’s more to it than I’m letting out here.)
What results is a type of inner-narrative from the perspective of a white woman presenting a voice on Asian topics – but also of a self-doubting writer. The machinations of publishing – those wheels grind slow – are skewered, and many aspects of the process (advances, sensitivity readers, wanting to murder the rung above you on the underpaid ladder to success) are examined with the sort of veracity only first-hand experience can have.
Awards don’t matter—at least, I am told this constantly by the people who regularly win them.
Of course, Kuang has that experience. She is an Asian woman writing mostly in the fantasy sphere – which is still a pretty white dude-dominant place. She’s also successful, so the writing about processes for writers with some level of achievement (as opposed to literally everyone else with a copy of Scrivener – hello there!) ring true. There’s the sort of bitchiness in here that only familiarity can bring, and I fucking relished it because I am a) an editor at heart and b) a petty, bitter old man.
Yellowface is a quick read and I enjoyed it immensely. My misgivings were misguided, and I felt a sort of sick glee watching the narrator’s stomach knot. Worthwhile for all you bookish dorks out there!
Yeah nah. 