What Are You Reading Wednesday
Feb. 13th, 2019 08:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricCurrently Reading:
Fiction: Yelena Moscovitch, Virtuoso, which is still engrossing, but I am foolishly trying to read it on my phone and it's not suited to that.
Lit Mag: Lifted Brow 'Blak Brow' edition, of which I read some more on the train to London last week
Academic: Contemporary Chaucers, still.
Other non-fiction: A. Revathi, The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story. Has been on my unread shelf since shortly after I read The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, because one way to fix the fact that I don't know enough about the Hijra community to know if Roy represents them well is to... actually read some Hijra writing.
Recently Finished:
The Good People by Hannah Kent
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a dark, slow novel, with a sense of inevitable doom that builds slowly throughout. It has many of the historical fiction strengths which Kent exhibited in Burial Rites (Burial Rites really set a standard for me in historical fiction - I call it 'the sausage test': the scene where the female characters make sausages in Burial Rites is intricately detailed, gory by modern standards but prosaic to their eyes, incredibly clear that women's work is *work*, and used for deep character development work. The Good People has a few such scenes - the traumatic stillbirth scene is one). The people of this nameless valley on the Flesk live hard, grim lives, but not lives devoid of joy or complexity.
The historical event fabric of this novel is more limited than that of Burial Rites: Kent had a few newspaper reports of relating to an infanticide trial, and has woven the fabric of this narrative - in which a recent widow, struggling with the care of her disabled grandson, becomes convinced he is a changeling - as a fiction out of deep historical and cultural research.
I am... not comfortable with the way this book handles disability, however. I took for granted going in it wasn't going to be a happy story. The infanticide is the fixed historical fact in this web, after all, and of course the deep 3 p POV means that where the POV characters aren't seeing the child as fully human, neither is the narration. I do think that's worth exploring: what dire circumstances drive a grandmother to infanticide? There is attention given here to circumstances beyond simply 'having a disabled child', don't get me wrong: the dismissal on the part of both doctor and priest of Nora's predicament, the recent bereavement, the harsh economic situation.
And yet. I keep coming back to the fact that this child character - who for all intents and purposes Kent made up from whole cloth, all the historical record says is that he was drowned - has no consistent symptom pattern to modern eyes. This is effective: I spent a lot of time desperately trying to *explain* what was happening, just as Nora herself did. But I also read an interview where Kent explained her choice as wanting to hold open the possibility that the child *was* a changeling, and... I just. I would endorse that approach for a lot of historical fiction situations (is this character a saint or experiencing psychosis, say), but it feels wrong this time. It feels a little bit like not affording him, the victim, the same weight of explanation and backstory as was granted to Nora, the widow, Nance, the herbalist, and Mary, the maid who participated in the attempted exorcism and alerted authorities to the death of the child. Kent fictionalised *all* of them from nothing but their names, but only the adult, abled women are fully developed characters.
I'm actually quite surprised that nothing and nowhere online has commented on this book from a disability perspective? I legit found more engagement with the fact that Kent made a culturally insensitive slip-up when visiting Ireland by referring to the fey as a belief of the past than with the portrayal of disability here.
Online fiction:
Up Next: No particular direction, yet. There are editions of both Meanjin and TLB I haven't read.
Music Notes: Enjoying Kaleo's A/B, still.
Fiction: Yelena Moscovitch, Virtuoso, which is still engrossing, but I am foolishly trying to read it on my phone and it's not suited to that.
Lit Mag: Lifted Brow 'Blak Brow' edition, of which I read some more on the train to London last week
Academic: Contemporary Chaucers, still.
Other non-fiction: A. Revathi, The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story. Has been on my unread shelf since shortly after I read The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, because one way to fix the fact that I don't know enough about the Hijra community to know if Roy represents them well is to... actually read some Hijra writing.
Recently Finished:
The Good People by Hannah KentMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a dark, slow novel, with a sense of inevitable doom that builds slowly throughout. It has many of the historical fiction strengths which Kent exhibited in Burial Rites (Burial Rites really set a standard for me in historical fiction - I call it 'the sausage test': the scene where the female characters make sausages in Burial Rites is intricately detailed, gory by modern standards but prosaic to their eyes, incredibly clear that women's work is *work*, and used for deep character development work. The Good People has a few such scenes - the traumatic stillbirth scene is one). The people of this nameless valley on the Flesk live hard, grim lives, but not lives devoid of joy or complexity.
The historical event fabric of this novel is more limited than that of Burial Rites: Kent had a few newspaper reports of relating to an infanticide trial, and has woven the fabric of this narrative - in which a recent widow, struggling with the care of her disabled grandson, becomes convinced he is a changeling - as a fiction out of deep historical and cultural research.
I am... not comfortable with the way this book handles disability, however. I took for granted going in it wasn't going to be a happy story. The infanticide is the fixed historical fact in this web, after all, and of course the deep 3 p POV means that where the POV characters aren't seeing the child as fully human, neither is the narration. I do think that's worth exploring: what dire circumstances drive a grandmother to infanticide? There is attention given here to circumstances beyond simply 'having a disabled child', don't get me wrong: the dismissal on the part of both doctor and priest of Nora's predicament, the recent bereavement, the harsh economic situation.
And yet. I keep coming back to the fact that this child character - who for all intents and purposes Kent made up from whole cloth, all the historical record says is that he was drowned - has no consistent symptom pattern to modern eyes. This is effective: I spent a lot of time desperately trying to *explain* what was happening, just as Nora herself did. But I also read an interview where Kent explained her choice as wanting to hold open the possibility that the child *was* a changeling, and... I just. I would endorse that approach for a lot of historical fiction situations (is this character a saint or experiencing psychosis, say), but it feels wrong this time. It feels a little bit like not affording him, the victim, the same weight of explanation and backstory as was granted to Nora, the widow, Nance, the herbalist, and Mary, the maid who participated in the attempted exorcism and alerted authorities to the death of the child. Kent fictionalised *all* of them from nothing but their names, but only the adult, abled women are fully developed characters.
I'm actually quite surprised that nothing and nowhere online has commented on this book from a disability perspective? I legit found more engagement with the fact that Kent made a culturally insensitive slip-up when visiting Ireland by referring to the fey as a belief of the past than with the portrayal of disability here.
Online fiction:
- Theodore McCombs (Lightspeed magazine), Talk To Your Children About Two Tongued Jeremy. I had to switch to reading this instead of listening to it as a podcast, it was too sinsister/upsetting. Good story, well done, but disturbing.
- Tony Ballantyne (Lightspeed magazine and podcast), Midway. You ever read a sci-fi and think 'space is wasted on straight men?' Yeah. There's a lot to commend about this but the underlying assumptions about a. what are the obvious things that happen in space among aliens and b. what the narrator expects the AUDIENCE to assume about him, all of that was... so straight man.
- Marissa Lingen (Beneath Ceaseless Skies magazine/podcast), The Deepest Notes of the Harp and Drum. I really liked this - an interesting take on Aarne-Thompson-Uther folklore motif 780.
Up Next: No particular direction, yet. There are editions of both Meanjin and TLB I haven't read.
Music Notes: Enjoying Kaleo's A/B, still.