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psocopteraSo Lucky, Nicola Griffith, being marketed as a novel but it's about the same length as Lucky Peach and I suspect it of secretly being a novella. Although maybe "novella" is only a significant category in SFF anyways, and this mostly isn't. Or, well, I think genre is mostly a matter of what people do, so if people are interacting with this as SFF, then I suppose it is. I mostly know Griffith from Hild, a historical novel, or maybe historical fantasy, if there's such a thing as historical fantasy with no magic that's distinct from historical novels. (More genre trouble.) I've also had Ammonite on my to-read list for years, or at least I thought I had, only it wasn't actually there when I went to see how many years. It is now.
Anyways. So Lucky. A woman gets diagnosed with MS, which upends her life. Later some thriller and magical-realism elements come in. Griffith herself has MS, which invites the question of whether some of this might be semiautobiographical (presumably not so much the thriller or magical-realism parts), although I don't want to assume that people with disabilities aren't perfectly capable of writing entirely unrelated stories about people who happen to share that one trait. (But even then her experience must stand in some kind of relationship to the main character's experience, right? Like the character is having the experiences Griffith was afraid she would have, or wishes she could have had, or someone else had and she's trying to explore what that would have been like for her instead?) Some very sharp moments navigating the endless bullshit of the ableist world and the personal frustration of unwanted change. This felt a little bit like Tess of the Road in being a well-done thing whose primary audience is Not So Much Me, Really but that I'm very glad to see exist for the people for whom it will really hit home, and that I'm happy to have read along the way.
Content note for the offpage torture-murder of people with disabilities and some imagining onpage of the details thereof, and also for large amounts of regular daily-life ableism and medical-establishment ableism.
Anyways. So Lucky. A woman gets diagnosed with MS, which upends her life. Later some thriller and magical-realism elements come in. Griffith herself has MS, which invites the question of whether some of this might be semiautobiographical (presumably not so much the thriller or magical-realism parts), although I don't want to assume that people with disabilities aren't perfectly capable of writing entirely unrelated stories about people who happen to share that one trait. (But even then her experience must stand in some kind of relationship to the main character's experience, right? Like the character is having the experiences Griffith was afraid she would have, or wishes she could have had, or someone else had and she's trying to explore what that would have been like for her instead?) Some very sharp moments navigating the endless bullshit of the ableist world and the personal frustration of unwanted change. This felt a little bit like Tess of the Road in being a well-done thing whose primary audience is Not So Much Me, Really but that I'm very glad to see exist for the people for whom it will really hit home, and that I'm happy to have read along the way.
Content note for the offpage torture-murder of people with disabilities and some imagining onpage of the details thereof, and also for large amounts of regular daily-life ableism and medical-establishment ableism.
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Date: 2018-10-26 11:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-10-26 01:49 pm (UTC)