This Week's Carriers
Dear Reader,
The sky is gray and the streets are wet and my little basil plant is happily putting out baby leaves as I write this letter to you. I’ve had a pretty productive week—bookwise. I read three books, two of which I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed, the other one, well, it was good enough. I’ve been going through a bit of a reading slump as I was mostly reading online magazines, textbook chapters, reviews, and articles. But nothing can compete with reading full stories so I’m happy to be back. I had to sit down and carve out reading blocks in my daily planner, which I’m happy to say has paid off.
As April comes to an end, I have to admit that it’s quite unlikely that I will meet my reading goal in 2024, and to be honest it does make me anxious. But to be even more honest, some of the books I read are quite dense, and long. Plus I do need to put time aside to read book reviews from New Yorker, Literary Hub and The London Review of Books, so the reduction in the number of actual books I can read is inevitable. Anyway. Let’s talk about these stories.
The stories that carried me through this week:
1- Annihilation novel by Jeff Vandermeer, and Annihilation (2018) movie directed by Alex Garland
Though my classes do not start until May I’ve started peaking at the course pack. Annihilation caught my eye since I knew a horror movie was later made based on it and it has such a Lovecraftian cover design. I mean look how pretty!
The story is about a group of scientists/military women who enter an unknown site called Area X. This area has been isolated for so many years from the rest of the world because there has been wide and uncanny stuff happening in it. A government agency, Southern Reach, controls expedition missions to understand what caused this anomaly and why these weird things happen there. We’re following the 12th expedition mission through the accounts of the Biologist. Oh, and the characters don’t have names— they merely call each other by the purpose they serve in the mission: The biologist, the psychologist, the surveyor, the anthropologist.
As you can probably guess, the mission goes all kinds of wrong. But through that, as is always the case with sci-fi and horror, we get a deeper glimpse of what these people are really made of. The crises that happen one after the other, strip the layers that people cocoon around themselves, to the degree that I kept asking myself whether the Southern Reach is researching Area X or the people who enter it. But I guess there could never be research on our surroundings without us being part of it.
Many themes are explored in the book. Identity. Environmental change. Isolation and communication. But one that has thoroughly struck me is the almost pathological desire to know the unknown, to keep exploring no matter the cost. I suppose the theme was also the most interesting to Alex Garland, who wrote and directed the movie based on the book.
The movie is very different from the book and is deliberately ambiguous. I did enjoy it but some parts didn’t work for me. I will not review the movie here, since it is its own beast and needs a load of time which I don’t have, but I leave you with this quote that I loved so very much:
Then, as a psychologist, I’d say you’re confusing suicide with self-destruction. Almost none of us commit suicide, and almost all of us self-destruct. In some way. In some part of our lives. We drink, or we smoke. We destabilize the good job — or the happy marriage… But these aren’t decisions. They’re impulses. In fact, you’re probably better equipped to explain this than I am. You’re a biologist. Isn’t self-destruction coded into us? Programmed into each cell?
Dr. Ventress
2- The Character of Rain by Amélie Nothomb
This slim book is an interesting read, to be sure, exploring childhood and the existential anxieties coming with it, but I think I wan not mentally ready to delve into this kind of story now. Reading this juxtaposed with two brilliant sci-fi novels puts it at an unjust disadvantage.
Anyway, the story, which the writer claims to be autobiographical, follows baby Amélie, in six months of her life, from the age of two and a half, when she gains awareness, to the age of three. During this period, she discovers pleasure by eating chocolate, acquires two languages, and understands death and decay in the form of passing seasons. The book kind of reminded me of Hellen Keller’s The Story of My Life and her experiences with Anne Sullivan, specifically the scene where Anne puts Hellen’s hand under running water and then writes the word in the palm of her hand. That sort of raw experience of life is at the heart of Nothomb’s story. The equivalent of that part of Hellen’s life is when Amelie’s grandmother gives her chocolate and soothes her turmoiling rage.
The book has bits of comedy which I enjoyed. Sometimes it becomes boring but the short length of the book works to its advantage. One thing that confused me here was the theme of water which is omnipresent throughout the book. I don’t quite get what it represents, but I will have to reread this book when my classes start, and I think I’ll have more to say about it then.
3- Death’s End by Liu Cixin
No banquet was eternal. Everything had an end. Everything.
I finally finished the Three-Body trilogy, and let me tell you, it was no easy task. The final book is about 600 pages and is quite dense. A LOT happens in the book and I won’t even think of summarizing it but I liked the ending to the series. It was quite apt, and as always, foreshadowed in the first chapter which serves as a prologue. The book was a finalist to the 2017 Hugo Awards for Best Novel but lost the competition to The Obelisk Gate, the second book in the Broken Earth series from N. K. Jemisin—an author from whom I can’t believe I haven’t picked up a book yet.
Let me get one thing out of the way. Death’s End is brilliant. The story has so many fucking great ideas that I just can’t believe how one single writer could produce so many jaw-dropping concepts. If you look online, everywhere you look you can read praises of the series, and justly so. So I won’t add to that sea of praises with more adjectives. Instead, I’ll do something more interesting for me, which is to talk about the frustrating parts, because complaining is more satisfying. So, with that in mind, let me just ask: What the hell is going on with Liu Cixin’s female characters?! And could he BE any more on the nose with praising masculinity and treating femininity with infantilization and relating it to weakness?!
This is what came to my mind while reading the parts about the Deterrence Era with all the woman-looking men:
Reading the third book of the trilogy began much more smoothly than the other two books, with the promise of more interesting characters that can shoulder the weight of such a grand scoping story. However, this turned out to be a misplaced hope. The main character of the story is so frustratingly annoying that I could not wait to be rid of her, but unfortunately, she’s everywhere. Literally from the first page to the last page. Oh how I crave to dissect the characters of this book from cover to cover, but the slow snail that I am, it needs another two weeks of my time. It’s not a priority yet. But someday. Someday.
Anyway. That’s it from me.
A la prochaine,
Fatemeh