Time and again kept the embers on fire

[dolorosa_12]

I said on Friday that I was looking forward to a weekend with no social obligations, and lots of cooking, and broadly speaking, that's been the case. It's been great!

I went for a little walk this morning, and was pleased to note slight hints of the change of the seasons towards autumn — hues of red and yellow in some of the trees around the cathedral, and the smell of woodsmoke emanating from several houses. I'm still hoping for a winter filled with foggy, frosty mornings. There's no sign of that yet, but I have at least been able to content myself with photos of such weather in other places — in Vilnius, Kyiv, and Ærø in Denmark. (As an aside, I highly recommend — if you use social media — following accounts that focus on photography of places around the world you love and have visited or want to visit in the future. It's like a way to travel, virtually, and expand the landscapes of your mental geography.)

As I hoped, there was a lot of cooking this weekend — slow, flavourful meals for dinner (oliahercules oven roasted stuffed capsicum yesterday, Burmese curry currently roasting in the oven today), plus a lot of preserving. I picked over two kilograms of green tomatoes that I don't think will ripen, and turned half into green tomato chutney, and started the other half to ferment. I've always aspired to be the kind of person who has a pantry full of pickles and preserves, and although I don't have the storage space to do this on a massive scale, I've liked my attempts this year, and will continue adding to my repertoire as I grow a greater variety of vegetables.

Other than cooking and wandering, and the usual weekend personal maintenance, I've spent a lot of time reading — a mixed bag, but on balance mostly good. The books are as follows:

Honey (Isobel Banta), a novel following several aspiring pop stars in the Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera etc mould in the 1990s and early 2000s. The book does a fantastic job of capturing how truly messed up that moment in time was — how it ate up young women with big voices and big dreams, and sucked them dry and spat out the bones like a piece of old rubbish. As someone who was a teenage girl during that time period, the depths of the abuse and cruelty — that toxic nexus of the last gasp of print tabloid media and the rise of internet gossip columns — just seemed like the fabric of the universe, but looking back, it was its own breed of horrifying. Banta conveys this with empathy and understanding, and although her characters and their music is entirely fictional, there are a lot of echoes of real-world stars and music industry figures, recognisable to anyone who paid passing attention to that pop cultural moment. The only false note to me was the pop music starlets' depth of awareness of all the toxic structures around them, which didn't ring true (I feel that in reality, the real-world equivalents of these characters maybe understood subconsciously how they were viewed and being treated by the industry, but not in a way that they would have been able to articulate).

All My Rage (Sabaa Tahir), Tahir's first foray into contemporary (non-fantasy) fiction. The novel interweaves the stories of Salahudin and Noor, the only two Pakistani-American teenagers in a remote Californian desert town, as well as flashbacks from Salahudin's mother's early married years back in Pakistan. It's a story haunted with grief and pain — the intergenerational trauma and racism experienced by the characters is dealt with in terrible, unhealthy ways. This is a book about people who are incapable of giving voice to their regrets or pain, instead sealing up everything inside, where no words will reach them. Tahir herself grew up in a similar environment — like Salahudin, her parents were Pakistani immigrants running a small-town desert motel — and she writes with experience of the sense of being trapped in a tiny, insular community where you do not fit in, and see no way out.

Lady Macbeth (Ava Reid), the book that sparked my Friday open thread prompt about satisfying and dissatisfying retellings. As is probably obvious, this is Reid's attempt at a retelling of Macbeth, focusing on Shakespeare's most acclaimed female character. Reid's usual thing (and what made her an insta-read for me to begin with) is to write a story about teenage girls and young women whose experiences of abuse and trauma render them monstrous in the eyes of the wider world, with a relentless emphasis on the fact that abuse survival is not soft or pretty. While this has served her well in earlier novels, you may be able to see why this approach is not a good one for the character of Lady Macbeth. Instead, Reid has done what I've often seen criticised in the glut of supposedly 'feminist' retellings of Greek myths: written a traumatised, abused, frightened young woman who is utterly blameless of any of the bad or even controversial actions perpetuated by the character in the source material. To top this off, the story is a historical, geographical, and linguistic mess (the constant, grating use of the word 'Scots' to describe what is presumably meant to be Gàidhlig is merely the most glaring) — and while Shakespeare was obviously no paragon of historical or geographical accuracy, Reid's defensive author's note on the fluidity of her treatment of language, history, and cultural and national identity only serves to emphasise the lack of care in this regard. (As an irate Goodreads reviewer commented, 'what has Scotland ever done to Ava Reid?') A female character-centric Shakespeare retelling, use of Breton lais and the folkloric trope of the three impossible tasks, in the hands of an author whose previous work I've enjoyed immensely? I've never been so disappointed.

Where the Dark Stands Still (A.B. Poranek), a gorgeous blend of Polish folklore, Howl's Moving Castle, and Beauty and the Beast. This, on the other hand, was an absolute delight. If you like Uprooted, you'll probably like this. Our heroine is a misfit teenage girl with magical abilities, there's a creepy, sentient forest, and an immortal supernatural boyfriend. Poranek isn't doing anything particularly original with these building blocks, but the heart (at least my heart) wants what it wants, and quite frequently, what it wants is this, done well — and Where the Dark Stands Still delivers.

Comments

[rmc28]

Friday morning there was frost on the ground when I cycled to the rink for coffee skate, and the field with the horses had a space where the sun broke through the trees and was making fog sublime off the frozen grass.

[dolorosa_12]

Ooh, lucky you! That sounds wonderful.

So far, all I've experienced is visible breath some mornings when I've been walking to the pool. Then again, Ely tends to be slightly warmer than Cambridge for reasons that remain unclear to me.

[evewithanapple]

Yeah, that's about what I expected when I saw that Ava Reid was writing a Macbeth retelling. The thing about Reid is, she's talented, but she's not especially innovative; you can see how much she's following the lead of other writers in her cohort. She's not Maya Deane, who's off doing her own thing. So I figured her LM book would follow the general Jennifer Saint/Natalie Haynes/Madeleine Miller playbook.

[dolorosa_12]

You're not wrong. She has a really lovely turn of phrase (if you don't mind a bit of purple in your prose, which I don't), and she's been very astute at jumping on trends at the right moment and using TikTok adroitly — but she's not good at going outside the limits of her own imagination and experiences, and has a kind of incuriousity which hampers her ability to say anything innovative with the stuff she's producing.

[evewithanapple]

Yes to the trend following! Dark academia, classic lit retelling, Slavic fantasy - she's got all the hits. I don't think it's a coincidence that her best book is Juniper and Thorn, because it's also the most original out of the bunch. (And of course the one that got the most pushback precisely because she put a toe out of acceptable genre conventions.

[dolorosa_12]

Yes, exactly!

[wearing_tearing]

I haven't read any of Reid's novels--I tried, but the writing style doesn't agree with me--but I've been seeing all of the conversations around Lady Macbeth. It does seem like it was a full on mess and didn't at all portray the figure of Lady Macbeth like she was in the original work. I really don't understand why she'd take such an incredible character and turn her into a teenage French(?) girl who is never to blame for anything.

[dolorosa_12]

Other than Goodreads reviews, I haven't seen much discussion of the issues with this book (other than Reid hinting on her Instagram that's she's being tagged in negative reviews, which I don't think is great behaviour on those reviewers' part).

I really don't understand why she'd take such an incredible character and turn her into a teenage French(?) girl who is never to blame for anything.


I know, right? I think there are two problems at work here. First, Reid basically has one story that she tells over and over again: teenage girl/young woman survives abuse and trauma, and behaves in a way that looks monstrous from the outside (but is justifiable due to what she's experienced). Second, I think a lot of authors are far too wary of paranoid readings of their work which mistake depiction for endorsement, leading to a refusal to include any nuance, and an insistence on being as blunt as possible in distinguishing which are the good, blameless characters, and which are the characters who are irredeemable. This does not lead to writing with any room for complexity.

[evewithanapple]

In total fairness to her, there was some pushback to Juniper and Thorn because Marlinchen's hypersexuality was seen as "gross" and "too much." So I at least see where the wariness comes from. She really needs to be less online.

[dolorosa_12]

I remember that at the time — and in fairness to her as well, her publishers basically gave her no marketing support for her first three books (in that publishing way of not expecting certain books to do well, and then setting up a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the books fail to make inroads), but her third book blew up on TikTok and she pushed it into being a massive bestselling hit through social media word-of-mouth and sheer determination. So there was a certain justification on her part for being really accessible via social media.

I agree with you that it would be good for her to enforce more boundaries online.

[evewithanapple]

It's the paradox of modern publishing: you have to be online and immersed in reader spaces all the time in order to sell your book, but also doing so basically means locking yourself in a shout box with all your worst critics, which impedes your ability to actually write the books.

[chestnut_pod]

If I had a nickel for every time a book I was looking forward to changed a complex literary-historical figure into a teenaged French girl who is right all the time, to profoundly counter-productive effect, I'd only have ten cents, but it's weird that it happened twice and at the hands of such different authors as Ava Reid and Lauren Groff.

[dolorosa_12]

I cackled out loud when reading your comment. So true!

[oracne]

The Poranek sounds fun!

[dolorosa_12]

It is! It's not doing anything particularly groundbreaking, but it's good at what it's trying to do.

Ava Reid

[tactilemuse]

I actually just picked up Juniper & Thorn this morning having just put down Strange Sight by Syd Moore Monday. I'm pretty excited to start this book having never read anything by the author. I'm adding Where The Dark Stands Still and All My Rage to my list too. I appreciate your suggestions and view points on books so much!

Re: Ava Reid

[dolorosa_12]

I hope you enjoyed Juniper and Thorn — definitely Ava Reid's strongest book — and I'm glad to hear you found some other things to add to your reading list.