The Saint of Bright Doors

[psocoptera]

The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera, 2023 novel. I nominated Chandrasekera's 2020 short story "The Translator, at Low Tide" for the Hugo back in 2021, and have recced some of his other short fiction. This is his first novel, and it's really good, although I would say it is more on the "if you like that sort of thing" end of my recs than the broadly crowd-pleasing. Think Sofia Samatar, Strangers In Olondria, literary fantasy kind of thing. Really well-written, in the sense of well-crafted sentences, and sharp, unexpected turns or observations. Second-world fantasy (more or less) but sometimes with the sharpness of satire, and sometimes... deeper than second-world fantasy, if that makes sense? Like, with the genuine weirdness and lack of explanation that you sometimes get in something like Green Knight, where the fantastical details have a kind of weight or approach to the mystical. Magical realism, maybe. Definitely subversive in the sense of trope subversion and in the sense of being about power and resistance.

With spoilers: I don't have the cultural competence to talk about to what extent the world might be a fictionalized Sri Lanka and India, but it definitely might be. Chandrasekera is from Sri Lanka and there's a lot of stuff about an island/peninsula and its relation to a bigger continent and colonial powers. A lot of things in the world are a lot like our modern world - email and TV, trucks and planes, masks and distancing - and there was one fascinating reference to "United Nations blue" where I was like wait, maybe this isn't a second world at all, maybe this is in fact our world. And I loved that, that right to the end I wasn't sure what story was being told or where it might go.

Comments

[oracne]

Ooh. I loved A Stranger in Olondria.

[psocoptera]

This is definitely darker and weirder and more ambiguous but I do feel like it might have "if you liked that you might also like this" appeal.