A slow, patient journey following Ulysses Temper through four decades (with occasional interludes with Evelyn Skinner, art historian). In 1944 Florence, British soldier Ulysses makes unexpected connections with the people that follow him back to his home in London, and eventually draw him back to Italy. Though Ulysses is the main character, it is the ensemble cast around him, and their connections to one another, that provide the warm heart that centers the story. I love how each of them is allowed space to grow, learn, and change, and how they each do their best to support one another. The writing is just gorgeous and both London and Florence are beautifully and wistfully rendered.
Tag: genre-historical fiction
All the Murmuring Bones, by A.G. Slatter
Miren O’Malley was raised with stories of merpeople and magic, debts and revenge, knowing that each story could have some truth at its core: after all, her own family’s fortune came from a bargain with the sea. However, with her generation, the bargain has fallen into decline, and against the wishes of her family she digs into the reasons and history behind her family’s situation. I loved the interstitial stories, told by and to Miren; the writing was dark and atmospheric, but the characters felt alive.
Babel, by R.F. Kuang
This book is subtitled “or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution,” which clues the reader into the fact that there will be linguistics nerdity, class struggle, and obviously magic. When words are translated between languages, nuance is sometimes lost; in Kuang’s alternate history, this elided nuance becomes actual magic. What follows explores the British Empire’s domination and exploitation of other nations through the lens of language: how those in power try to make it just another tool of oppression, and how native speakers of those languages are forced into choosing between buying into the system and benefiting from the oppression, or rebelling against it, and losing everything. Robin, the narrator, is taken from China to England at a young age, so that the British magicians can train him to use his language to serve the empire. His gradual awakening to how he is being used, and how he can use what was given him to fight back, makes for a gripping and urgent read. This book made me want to flip madly through to follow the action, and at the same time want to linger over each page, savoring the insights and turns of phrase. A fantastic and beautiful read.
The Diamond Eye, by Kate Quinn
Historical fiction based on the life of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a real life Russian sniper credited with over 300 Nazi deaths, who later became a propaganda hero and friend to Eleanor Roosevelt. Quinn digs into the historical record and creates an amazing character out of an amazing real person; her Lyudmila is prickly and impatient, steely and dangerous, full of heart and spirit (and the other characters are amazing too). As usual with Kate Quinn books, both the grit of her heroines and the horrors of war came fully to life; for me the climactic final duel strained belief, but I loved reading it all the same.
When We Cease to Understand the World, by Benjamín Labatut
“This is a work of fiction based on real events,” says the author, and as such it’s weirdly disconcerting; you know the history, but you’re fuzzy on the details, and Labatut takes full advantage of that. The book kicks off with a mostly-factual account tracing the discovery of Prussian Blue to cyanide, poison, and its horrific use in the Holocaust; the author muses on the vibrant beauty of the color, and the stain that it left on history. The following stories go on to profile men of great brilliance, Schwarzschild and Heisenberg and Schrödinger among others, whose discoveries in math and science drive them to madness as they realize the destruction their ideas could wreak upon the world (or maybe, Labatut insinuates, they have to go mad to make these leaps of intuition at all). Their madness and visions are described with such lush prose that the feel of the text touches on gothic horror; fiction is woven so seamlessly into fact that you can’t draw a clear line between real and imaginary. The book swerves to end on a biographical, reflective tone, on which the narrator refuses to cut down a diseased tree; it is dying inside, but still tall and wide and of great sentimental value, and he does not wish to see the rot within. It functions as a kind of allegory: we can see and appreciate the outer structure of things, but if we dig too deeply, we may find ourselves revolted by what lies within, and the mere pursuit of that knowledge may bring it all crashing down around us.
A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles
I loved this book so much. A gentleman is sentenced to lifetime house arrest by a Bolshevik tribunal; his house arrest is to be in the grand Metropol hotel. The main character is everything you want in a storybook gentleman: urbane, sympathetic, and clever; the tone of the book is pleasant but also insightful. Every page was a delight to read, the characters were really well developed, the hotel is painted so beautifully that I really would love to visit someday, and you get a beautiful overview of the first few decades of the Soviet Union.
Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Take all the artfulness and creeping wrongness of DuMaurier’s Rebecca, but make the heroine an actual fierce and feisty 1950s debutante who can dress fabulously while also holding forth on philosophy and the chemical properties of paint… throw in references to racism, sexism, colonial plunder, and a great nod to The Yellow Wallpaper… and you have this amazing book. In response to a desperate appeal from her newlywed cousin, Noemí ventures into the in-laws’ mold-infested Gothic mansion, and meets a creepy old British patriarch and his weirdly subservient family. Reading this was extra creepy for me because I’d just read about the possibilities of fungal networks, which this book uses to good effect.