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psocopteraRakesfall, Vajra Chandrasekera, 2024 novel. I was excited to read this given how good Saint of Bright Doors was, but as it turns out this is a very different book, and while I'm sure it will have its audience, that audience is only somewhat me. :/ Where I described Bright Doors as being on the literary-fantasy end of my recs, Rakesfall is way, way into literary territory. Sometimes in a way that reminded me of New Wave SF, sometimes more like postmodern. Lots of wordplay, "dictionary words", register-jumping between formal and casual language. Sometimes I really like all of those things, but I kept finding myself rolling my eyes at the wordplay, and *not* finding myself having those moments of "wow, that was a good sentence" like I'd had with Bright Doors. Structurally this book is kind of a "blind men describe an elephant" situation, like, we are presented with a series of very different pieces and have to figure out the elephant for ourselves, with some parts being easier to connect than others. Apparently several of the chapters were previously published as standalone stories as far back as 2016 (I must have read the one that was in Clarkesworld in 2018, but I don't remember doing so), which... maybe doesn't help? Like, I don't know whether Chandrasekera had the whole shape of this work in mind in 2016, or only came to imagine later how these pieces might connect and fit into something larger, but for me, it only sort of came together into anything interesting. People who are better than me at this sort of connection-making might get more out of it? Or, like, people with the right cultural literacy? I'm pretty happy to read outside my cultural competence but I think there were a lot of mythological and other references here that I was completely missing (or, well, catching just enough of to be like "oh yeah I bet that's a bit of familiar imagery" or "I bet this is a retelling of something I would immediately recognize if I knew South Asian mythology the way I know Greek mythology").
Chandrasekera says something at one point that I think might be a mission statement, or part of one - "that enormity cannot truly, fully be spoken of without recourse to fable. There is a dread scale at which only myth works; only nightmare has the technology." He goes on to further debate that - "maybe fabulism strips histories of whatever dignity realism might have to offer - or maybe it's the other way around, maybe it's mimesis that takes away history's dreams and fantasies, makes it small and lonely and vulnerable in a haunted world" - but this is in general a topic I find interesting and a thesis I find pretty compelling? Like, a similar thing to what The Boy and the Heron was saying, that sometimes trauma can only be approached (or can best be approached) by way of the fantastic, symbolic, or surreal. There are places in this book where the Sri Lanka civil war is closer to the surface; I suspect that there are places where it's deeper, where there are things with profound resonance for Chandrasekera or Sri Lankans in general or some subset (people a certain age, people from a certain area), and I wouldn't even see those places. Which is fine - Chandrasekera should write for himself first, or for whatever audience he'd like to write for - but then, what am I doing here. Why am I trying to assemble something out of all of these inconclusive, unresolved fragments if the real emotional weight can only be felt in a frame of reference I'm not ever going to share. Saint of Bright Doors felt meaningful and sometimes approaching numinous even when I was sure I wasn't getting everything; this one not so much. But maybe this is the exact challenge you want, or you're happy just to hang out with Chandrasekera while he's playing with and working through some stuff he's come up with; that is totally fair and I hope all such readers will find the book.
Chandrasekera says something at one point that I think might be a mission statement, or part of one - "that enormity cannot truly, fully be spoken of without recourse to fable. There is a dread scale at which only myth works; only nightmare has the technology." He goes on to further debate that - "maybe fabulism strips histories of whatever dignity realism might have to offer - or maybe it's the other way around, maybe it's mimesis that takes away history's dreams and fantasies, makes it small and lonely and vulnerable in a haunted world" - but this is in general a topic I find interesting and a thesis I find pretty compelling? Like, a similar thing to what The Boy and the Heron was saying, that sometimes trauma can only be approached (or can best be approached) by way of the fantastic, symbolic, or surreal. There are places in this book where the Sri Lanka civil war is closer to the surface; I suspect that there are places where it's deeper, where there are things with profound resonance for Chandrasekera or Sri Lankans in general or some subset (people a certain age, people from a certain area), and I wouldn't even see those places. Which is fine - Chandrasekera should write for himself first, or for whatever audience he'd like to write for - but then, what am I doing here. Why am I trying to assemble something out of all of these inconclusive, unresolved fragments if the real emotional weight can only be felt in a frame of reference I'm not ever going to share. Saint of Bright Doors felt meaningful and sometimes approaching numinous even when I was sure I wasn't getting everything; this one not so much. But maybe this is the exact challenge you want, or you're happy just to hang out with Chandrasekera while he's playing with and working through some stuff he's come up with; that is totally fair and I hope all such readers will find the book.
