Words for Worlds - LXII
Hello everyone, and welcome to another issue of the Words for Worlds newsletter.
What I’m Reading
I’ve begun the year with two deliciously weird books, which also overlap in interesting ways, despite coming from very distinct literary traditions.
Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter is our January pick of the month for our Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle. Our theme was time travel, and while this isn’t really a “time travel” book as you’d commonly understand it in the context of science fiction, it is drenched in themes around the individual and the collective past. The narrator, along with a character that seems half-real and half-invented by the narrator’s own imagination, open a clinic where each room is devoted to a faithful recreation of a certain period from the past. Here people come who want to “re-live” the past, as much as they can. The scale expands, and soon the entire European Union is conducting a referendum where every country is voting on which period of the past it wants to go back to; and by the end, past and present have become so intertwined that time seems to have lost its meaning.
Time Shelter feels like a kaleidoscopic novel, both in the sense that it is made up of many moving parts that change shape and form every once in a way, but also, it feels like an assemblage of a range of disparate literary influences. There is a strong Borgesian sense of whimsy, and more than once I was reminded of Pierre Menard; it also struck me that the narrator’s foil (who may or may not be real) is called “Gaustine”, a name that feels particularly weird until you remember that the protagonist of Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel is called “Faustine”, and you start seeing the tonal similarities between the works. And it’s also a deeply European novel, in the sense that the physical and mental topography of 20th-Century Europe is at the heart of the book (the section on the referendum is particularly steeped in European-ness).
At the end, I wasn’t left entirely convinced by Time Shelter - its various moving parts ended up giving the whole a somewhat disjointed feel - but the premise is memorable, and there are moments of incandescent prose. Worth a punt, if you’re in the mood for an experimental novel.
Jose Eduardo Agalusa is an Angolan novelist. I first read his book, A General Theory of Oblivion, a few years ago: set in Angola on the cusp of Independence, it was brief, but captivating, and very dark. The Living and the Rest is the second book that I read by him, and it’s quite different: more meta-fictional, and more wryly ironic than bleak. A group of writers, from different parts of the world, are gathered on an island off Mozambique, for a few days of literary panels and conversations. An unexplained event cuts off the the island from the rest of the mainland, leaving the writers stranded. Suddenly, they find themselves face-to-face with what appear to be their own characters, who’ve walked off the pages and are now interacting not just with their creators, but with the other writers as well. As the writers struggle to regain contact with the rest of the world, reality and their constructed worlds begin to blur entirely.
As I’ve written above, there are a lot of thematic similarities between Time Shelter and The Living and the Rest: the most striking is that of the narrator inhabiting the same world as their characters, and the breakdown of that line between reality and invention. The distinction is undercut repeatedly, because in both novels, it’s never entirely clear if these characters are inventions, or if they have a life of their own. Both novels, in that sense, leave the reader with very little firm ground to stand on, creating a general sense of disorientation. I think, though, that The Living and the Rest hung together a little more coherently, probably helped by the fact that it wasn’t tackling multiple storylines at the same time!
This is another one that isn’t, by any means, a breezy read, but rich and unique enough to justify some degree of effort.
The Indian Scene
In exciting news, we have the first Indian SF novel of 2024! Flame Tree Press has published Idolatry, by Aditya Sudarshan. Here is the blurb:
Idolatry , set in Mumbai in the near future, is about a novel technology, Shrine Tech, which enables everyone to worship a god of their own preference. The story follows a disaffected young actor, who is hired as a marketing rep by the company that owns the Tech. It is run by a man calling himself Mister Happy Maker. Soon, the young actor is plunged into the crucible of a society altering in strange and insane ways, in which ordinary individuals (a building society secretary, an indie film-maker, an aged priest, among others) are living their dreams, nightmarishly.
I’ve ordered my copy, and it should arrive next month. I’ve read Sudarshan’s previous work - A Nice Quiet Holiday, Show Me a Hero, and The Persecution of Madhav Tripathi: while he has ranged across genres, I’ve always felt that his style would make for a great political SF novel (indeed, Persecution is borderline weird fiction). So, I’m looking forward to this one, and it may be the first of a lot of SF from India this year.
There are also some exciting updates on the anthology scene. MIT Press is bringing out The Inhumans and Other Stories: A Selection of Bengali Science Fiction. It’s part of a very welcome recent trend to translate kalpavigyan and bring it to an English-speaking audience, both in India and abroad. This one’s edited by Boddhisattva Chattopadhyay, so you know you’re in safe hands. The pre-order links are now open.
What’s Happening at Strange Horizons
Check out “Hijacked Interiors,” a poem in our 8 Jan issue, by the Egyptian and Palestinian writer, leena aboutaleb. leena first wrote for us as part of our 2021 Palestine SF Special Issue: her brilliant poem, “Art Exhibition: West Bank Girl on Fire,” is also a must-read.
Recommendations Corner
I’m sure I’ve recommended The Invention of Morel before in this newsletter, but also, I think we’ve had enough issues to justify repeat recommendations now! I’m featuring Morel because both Time Shelter and The Living and the Rest reminded me so strongly of this 1940s masterpiece, which Borges called “the perfect novel.” Morel is one of my favourite books of all time, and a real showpiece of the imaginative possibilities of the genre. Here’s a plot summary from a very old review I wrote, back in 2013 (the review itself is full of spoilers, so fair warning), which will - hopefully - pique your interest:
The story is told from the point of view of a fugitive who, fleeing from the law, has arrived upon a remote and inaccessible island, where he determines to live out the rest of his life. This plan is thrown into serious jeopardy when, for no apparent reason, a group of people suddenly arrive upon the island, and the fugitive has to hide form them. Soon, however, he finds himself falling in love with the pensive and enigmatic Faustine, whom he sees every evening, watching the sunset from a rock (there are some truly brilliant observations about the psychology of love scattered throughout the novel – it’s worth reading for that alone). The fugitive’s attempts to attract her attention fail utterly; she refuses to acknowledge his existence – she even seems blindly oblivious to it. Subsequently, he sees a man named Morel come up to speak to her, at times in an intimate manner, and yet at other times distantly and formally – so that it is impossible to tell whether they are, or have been, lovers. The fugitive feels an intense jealousy – and yet Morel refuses to take any notice of him either, even when they nearly come face to face.
At this point, other strange things begin to happen. The fugitive notices that the conversations between Morel and Faustine are repeated, word for word, after the interval of a week. People complain of feeling cold even when the climate is excessively hot. They dance in a storm and swim in a pool that is full of rotten leaves and decaying fish. And one day, two suns and two moons appear simultaneously in the sky.