Reviews and Comments

A parable of racism and colonialism, in which the different “races” are humans and several different alien civilisations, including the peaceful Athsheans, who are obviously meant to resemble an idealised, primitive-yet-wise indigenous people. Unfortunately, the effect of this is to suggest that there are essential, innate differences between “races”, and that these differences underpin racism.

The Athsheans resist human colonisation and in the process learn to kill (humans, as well as each other). Le Guin implies that they really had no history or narrative before this point, as if contact with humans represents the start of their history. It’s weird and Eurocentric and quite un-self-aware. The narrative switches perspective between an evil coloniser, a good scientist and a good Athshean, and Le Guin’s depiction of the evil coloniser’s perspective is scarily accurate, though also rather easy for the reader to condemn (because he’s so bad). The actual prose is great and very vivid, which makes the novella’s weaknesses all the more disappointing.

I read this on a train journey, and it’s a great novel for that situation: short, unsettling, and focusing on a character who is unmoored. It is set in The Hague and succeeds in building up an uneasy atmosphere in which violence is always just outside the frame. The protagonist/narrator is a court interpreter and I found the descriptions of her work (and her ambivalence about it) very compelling.

However, the narrator is also trying to work out whether she’s in love with a married man who can’t decide whether to leave his wife. This strand could have intertwined well with the themes of language and underlying violence in the novel, if the married guy weren’t so boring! I didn’t have a sense of what real “intimacy” with him might mean. Maybe it was intentional that he seemed so ungraspable - altogether, the writing is so measured and controlled that everything in the novel has an intentional feel to it - but the other central figures all have far more charisma, and each has a threatening edge.

A sad story about growing up in Soviet Ukraine and post-socialist East Germany.

The early chapters describe the childhood and teenage years of Lena in pre-1989 Ukraine - we get to know her gentle father and her tough mother, and see how much tenderness she has for her mother, despite/because of her strictness. This part of the novel is beautiful, as is the description of her intense encounter with an eccentric girl she meets at summer camp. (Probably the most vividly described character, and definitely my favourite. It's also where the tomato plants come in. For me this was the queerest part of the book. There are also other queer strands, though I still wanted more!)

I wish the novel had continued with that single strand, rather than opting for "four women -- multiple generations -- how will they communicate with each other?" which has become a bit of a formula, particularly in novels in German about recent history.

I found this book relentlessly sad. The whole novel is about loss; all the characters lose each other and/or lose their sense of home. I'm not anti-sadness, but I wished for some tonal shifts, because I gradually became a bit numb and some of the book's painful moments would be more effective if there were more lightness in between. Sometimes I also struggled with Lena's emotional detachment as an adult - e.g. there is a long period in which she never travels to visit her parents, but we don't really learn why that is; her detachment is treated as obvious, but I wanted to know how it came about.

I think this is likely to be translated into English (Salzmann's debut was translated) and I do recommend it to anyone who is on a quest for "queer Eastern Europe".

Queer thieves, intellectual sex workers, true love, and academic footnotes: this book appeals to many of my interests and lived up to most of my expectations.

What I love about it (apart from all the queer bodice-ripping and 18th century slang) is that it explains how everything and everyone (hormones, fenlands, footnotes, body parts) can be treated as property within capitalism - and suggests how we can rebel against that.

It is an extremely self-conscious novel which makes no attempt to be or sound "natural" or "realistic"; for some readers that might be a problem, but it's integral to the concept (which basically argues that authenticity is elusive or non-existent and not even that desirable anyway).

Why not 5 stars? Firstly, because the "common people" are idealized too much (e.g. when a thief is going to be executed, it seems like the entire proletariat are protesting while the bourgeoisie are all in favour, which seems like a simplification). And secondly, because the 18th century language is sometimes careless/anachronistic in a distracting way (e.g. we are suddenly told that someone "did the math") - the author finds a cunning way to explain/justify this late in the novel, but I felt like that was a slight cop-out.

Still, I loved this. And the footnotes are full of references to real books about colonialism, queerness, etc.