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Last Days of New Paris
Oct. 1st, 2016 08:50 pmOne of the things I love about Miéville is that the elevator-pitch summaries of his books can sound so out-of-nowhere and then I actually read them and it's like, yeah, okay, there's a short straight line between this and his other work, I see how this fits. The Last Days of New Paris is about Surrealist fighters in a Nazi-occupied post-magical-apocalype Paris, so it is of course about The City (everyone drink, in the Miéville-trope drinking game), and the exquisite corpses echo the Remade of Bas-Lag (drink) and we've got some demons and golems and doomed revolutionaries (drink drink drink)...
Despite that I felt for most of the book like I was not the audience for this book, that Miéville was playing a game of reference-the-Surrealist that would probably only delight fans of Surrealism. Which I am not - I mean, I agree it was important as a movement/as a response to its time, and there are occasional Surrealist works I've found memorable or powerful, but for the most part it's not the wing of the museum I'm going to head to first? And I just did not care, about this sort of guidebook-travelogue wander through carefully end-noted imagery ("and on your left, it's Dorothea Tanning's sunflower...").
And then Miéville did something I'm not sure he's ever done before, and ended a novel stronger than he started it. The very last final sequence blew me away with the clarity of its argument, and in 2014 I might have thought it was over the top, but here in 2016 it feels all too relevant, to the extent that I had to reconsider whether he had justified the previous 160 pages. Whether he needed all of that buildup to land that last hit; whether *my frustration with it* was actually one of the planned-for reactions, the better to make his case at the end. I don't know; me being me, I'm still inclined to wonder if he could have done it in a novelette. At that length I would have put it on my short-fiction recs list and probably nominated it; at this length I don't really feel like I can recommend it, because it really is an awful lot of I-turned-my-Surrealism-class-notes-into-this-giant-collage before you get to the end. But, man. That end. I'm going to copy some sentences under a cut, because I feel like I might want them for something later, although they won't make sense out of context. (Arguing about fascism, utopia, and the artist as utopian, probably. This was a fascinating book to read right after Too Like The Lightning.)
( Read more... )
Despite that I felt for most of the book like I was not the audience for this book, that Miéville was playing a game of reference-the-Surrealist that would probably only delight fans of Surrealism. Which I am not - I mean, I agree it was important as a movement/as a response to its time, and there are occasional Surrealist works I've found memorable or powerful, but for the most part it's not the wing of the museum I'm going to head to first? And I just did not care, about this sort of guidebook-travelogue wander through carefully end-noted imagery ("and on your left, it's Dorothea Tanning's sunflower...").
And then Miéville did something I'm not sure he's ever done before, and ended a novel stronger than he started it. The very last final sequence blew me away with the clarity of its argument, and in 2014 I might have thought it was over the top, but here in 2016 it feels all too relevant, to the extent that I had to reconsider whether he had justified the previous 160 pages. Whether he needed all of that buildup to land that last hit; whether *my frustration with it* was actually one of the planned-for reactions, the better to make his case at the end. I don't know; me being me, I'm still inclined to wonder if he could have done it in a novelette. At that length I would have put it on my short-fiction recs list and probably nominated it; at this length I don't really feel like I can recommend it, because it really is an awful lot of I-turned-my-Surrealism-class-notes-into-this-giant-collage before you get to the end. But, man. That end. I'm going to copy some sentences under a cut, because I feel like I might want them for something later, although they won't make sense out of context. (Arguing about fascism, utopia, and the artist as utopian, probably. This was a fascinating book to read right after Too Like The Lightning.)
( Read more... )
