This is a sweet, engaging memoir about growing up as a young Muslim girl/woman in middle America, wearing hijab and struggling through Islamophobia, pThis is a sweet, engaging memoir about growing up as a young Muslim girl/woman in middle America, wearing hijab and struggling through Islamophobia, parental expectations, and self-doubt. “Wearing hijab is not a personality, one character tells our young narrator at one point, and it’s that recognition that pushes the narrative deeper and into more interesting territory. Huda and her schoolgirl friends face racism in many forms, from the micro aggression of one teacher who can never remember or pronounce their names, to another who goes on racist diatribes and assigns F grades to anyone who questions her, to salespeople and passersby who assume that they’re oppressed, cloistered, or terrorists. And at the same time, Huda is struggling hard to develop her own identity, understand who she is and what she wants in life, and recover from making her own hurtful mistakes. The title is the theme. Worth a read. ...more
An incredible compilation of ordinary people’s voices from the Syrian revolution. It’s a staggering to read the accounts of what people have gone throAn incredible compilation of ordinary people’s voices from the Syrian revolution. It’s a staggering to read the accounts of what people have gone through, and heart-breaking to see what so many people have suffered. The world did not do right by these revolutionaries. ...more
This felt a bit slighter than Exit West, which I really liked. The story of Changez, a Pakistani finance student who works his way into an exclusive pThis felt a bit slighter than Exit West, which I really liked. The story of Changez, a Pakistani finance student who works his way into an exclusive position with an American financial valuation firm (“focus on the fundamentals” is their motto) and then, with 9/11, comes to resent and reject the USA’s economic colonialism and imperialism. I liked it but I felt like it didn’t really raise the stakes enough, which seems odd after that summary. It felt...mild? Maybe just a product of how wild and extreme global politics have since become, or maybe a failure of empathy on my part as a reader. There’s a subplot involving a tragic girlfriend that feels particularly dated at this point, too. ...more
An enjoyable memoir about growing up Filipina-Egyptian-American in the eighties and nineties, navigating fashion, food, culture, race, religion, and eAn enjoyable memoir about growing up Filipina-Egyptian-American in the eighties and nineties, navigating fashion, food, culture, race, religion, and everything else. ...more
A beautifully drawn memoir of two Somali boys growing up in a refugee camp in Kenya, suffering through hunger, interminable waiting, dangers, losses, A beautifully drawn memoir of two Somali boys growing up in a refugee camp in Kenya, suffering through hunger, interminable waiting, dangers, losses, hopes, and fears. Oman Mohammed and his brother Hassan are eventually resettled to the USA, but not until they’ve spent fifteen years in the camp, and gone through unimaginable difficulties. Still, their story is better than that of many girls in the same position, who are married to older men and bound forever to that life. The situation is horrible and agonizing, there are countless lives at stake, and it’s infuriating to read this and not know what to do or how to stop the cycles. The hope and fortitude of people like Omar and Hassan are amazing. ...more
A memoir of growing up queer, female, and brown in the Canadian Islamic (Pakistani) immigrant community. For an outsider like myself it was interestinA memoir of growing up queer, female, and brown in the Canadian Islamic (Pakistani) immigrant community. For an outsider like myself it was interesting to see what resonated and felt familiar—Montréal as a city of perpetual cool and initiation for young queers and cultural neophytes—and what was new—the nuances in the lived experience of arranged teenage marriage, the complexities of an immigrant family learning and adjusting to life in Canada. ...more
**spoiler alert** Ok, I read this over the course of a long flight and an unintended layover, on my phone, which made it both a little odd (I don’t us**spoiler alert** Ok, I read this over the course of a long flight and an unintended layover, on my phone, which made it both a little odd (I don’t usually read digitally) and quite intense. I pretty much devoured it, and it really moved me, even though there are ways in which I could see Hamid has room to grow as a writer.
Nadia and Saeed are a young couple in an unnamed country, probably in the Middle East, which is beginning to go to war with itself. Over the first third of the book, their city goes from a fairly safe and normal place where Nadia can live (guardedly, at some risk) as a single woman and Saeed’s family can live their lives underpaid but intellectually free from terrorization...to a place where that’s not possible. The process of increasing militarization and militancy is frightening to read, and seems too familiar from news stories about Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Iran...
As their lives become more desperate, Saeed and Nadia make a bargain with a man who can put them through one of the doors that has begun to open mysteriously, magically, in different parts of the city, each one leading somewhere else on the planet. It’s a risk but it becomes their only choice and they take it together. They land in Mykonos, in a refugee camp, which has its own problems. They jump again to London, where refugees swamp the city and English nativists attack them. Their last move is to Marin, which Hamid envisions growing into a new city in sight of San Francisco, and where Saeed and Nadia eventually realize that their love for each other has cooled and that they should separate.
I loved the conceit of the doors, and the ways Hamid uses them to probe the migrant and refugee experience worldwide. Some doors are guarded, some are monitored, some are free. Some passages bring freedom and love. Some bring loss and terror. It often depends on who you find on the other side, and how they feel about the people arriving on their doorstep.
I also loved that Saeed’s and Nadia’s stories don’t end with their migration, or with the terror of the war. We get to see them find some peace in a changing world. We also see how they change as people, and how their relationship changes as they grow up and through their experiences. Their final meeting, when they’re aged, back in the city of their youth, is lovely and sad.
Hamid has a habit of writing long, long sentences with a particular cadence, which sometimes kicked me out of the story as I tried to keep track of the point. He also sometimes gets a little bit high-toned, in places where I thought plain language would have had more impact. Overall, though, I wasn’t so much bothered by anything he did as by what he chose not to do. I think the idea of the doors is so brilliant that it could have stood a little more elaboration and exploration. I loved Nadia in particular, and thought Saeed felt a bit underdrawn by comparison.
All that said, though, this is a fierce and lovely book about people and migration, one of the major moral and logistical challenges of our time.
A collection of essays bundled together after publication in various other places, focusing on a few central themes such as art and politics. Some of A collection of essays bundled together after publication in various other places, focusing on a few central themes such as art and politics. Some of these felt fresh and insightful, while others felt more like book reviews that didn't need to be reproduced (except maybe for the Hamid completist.) I finished knowing more about Pakistan as a country and culture, and the fine distinctions between tribal, political, and cultural groups in South Asia, than I did when I started. I'm thinking Hamid's novels might appeal to me a bit more....more
Sattouf's memoir about his early years as the out-of-the-ordinary blond, big-eyed toddler son of a French mother and Syrian father in the late seventiSattouf's memoir about his early years as the out-of-the-ordinary blond, big-eyed toddler son of a French mother and Syrian father in the late seventies, shuttling between Libya, Syria, and France, is fascinating and a little freaky. It was another time and another place, to be sure--but Sattouf's memories are far from complimentary of his parents, of his father in particular, or of most of the people he encountered in rural Syria after his father misguidedly (?) moved them there in hopes of an academic career under the first al-Assad.
In Syria, Sattouf remembers sour-smelling peasants, backward rural sexism and macho culture, weird-looking uneducated kids, and widespread poverty and propaganda. In one scene his mother realizes that what she'd thought were dog turds all over the landscape are in fact the turds of children living in homes without plumbing. She's horrified--but Sattouf's father laughs it off as a meaningless detail of the glorious communist revolution. Through the course of the book it becomes increasingly, painfully clear that Sattouf's father is deceiving himself and his family about Syria's true nature, and that far from offering him a leg up toward an illustrious future, it's a dead end of demagoguery in which he has no real place.
The art feels very French-politico--black ink characters that feel very Charlie Hebdo, which makes sense since Sattouf has worked there. His rendering of himself as a boy is charming and self-effacing--he comes across more as a moony, big-eyed, oddball critter than a golden child among a dark-haired people. I hope there'll be a second volume to follow this up, because I'd like to know what happens when Sattouf-the-naif gets a little older and starts pushing back against his feckless father's misguided political agenda.
A short meta-theatrical (meta-fictional? meta-nonfictional?) play about an incident I'd never heard of--the online impersonation of a young gay SyrianA short meta-theatrical (meta-fictional? meta-nonfictional?) play about an incident I'd never heard of--the online impersonation of a young gay Syrian-American woman by a white American man. See "A Gay Girl in Damascus" for all the weird catfishy details.
The play is interesting and would be challenging to see in person--the playwrite specifies that specific lines be delivered in Arabic, and others in any language that's not English, and that no subtitles or translation be offered. El-Khairy seems interested in exploring the chaotic multiplicity of voices on the Internet and in media--he offers specific stage directions for lines that should be spoken overlapping, in addition to the multiple language instructions. He also calls for a Chorus, which is at times played by the same actors who play the main roles, seemingly without clear differentiation as they step from one character to another.
He's also interested in the ways that Tom MacMaster, who punked the world by creating Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari's blog and political writings (and who created a human rights uproar when he tried to dispose of her by having her "kidnapped" off the street by shady agents), did something skeezy and gross. There are some hard-to-read passages in which MacMaster sexually exploits Amina, explicitly using her for his own gratification. She's not a real person, after all. At one point he even forces her into a clinch with a third party character named "Paula," which if you read the back story implies a veritable Möbius strip of gross, fake, contorted, entitled, rapacious hetero-male bullsh*t. (As well as some hard humor, if you're into that sort of thing.)
I read this in an effort to get a better glimpse into the lives of ordinary middle-class or upper-class Damascans. It's not exactly what I was hoping for, but it was an interesting tangent. I'm still on the hunt for more books about Syria that aren't lengthy Ottoman political histories or stories of peasantry or refugees. Those are all great books, they're just not what I'm seeking right now. Anyone have any suggestions?...more
Just about the most heartbreaking book you can read. Samia Yusuf Omar was a Somalian runner who competed in the 2008 Olympics at the age of 17, with aJust about the most heartbreaking book you can read. Samia Yusuf Omar was a Somalian runner who competed in the 2008 Olympics at the age of 17, with almost no professional training. She came in last in her heat and went home without a medal.
But Omar was determined to make it back to the 2012 Olympics and compete again, and this time to become a professional runner who could sponsor her family into a better life. She trained as rigorously as Somalia would let her, running on potholed tracks when she could escape the notice of local Muslim militants.
Finally she attempted to escape Somalia, to get to Italy where she could train properly. Instead she drowned in the Mediterranean Sea, like thousands of other refugees from Africa and the Middle East struggling to make it to Europe.
Kleist's art is simple but engaging, all black and white line work. His faces are distinctive and expressive, and he does a good job of conveying the loneliness, fear, and struggle in Omar's story. I was unprepared for the ending, and it really shook me.
"We know that we are different from the other athletes. But we don’t want to show it. We try our best to look like the rest. We understand we are not anywhere near the level of the other competitors here. We understand that very, very well. But more than anything else, we would like to show the dignity of ourselves and our country."- Samia Yusuf Omar, 2008
This is a dreamy, thoughtful novel about an unnamed girl who seems to strongly resemble author Yasmine El Rashidi, growing up in the years 1984-2014 iThis is a dreamy, thoughtful novel about an unnamed girl who seems to strongly resemble author Yasmine El Rashidi, growing up in the years 1984-2014 in Cairo, Egypt. It's divided into three sections with each section drifting through a summer in 1984, 1998, and 2014 respectively. Throughout, the narrator observes the world changing around her.
Her family, a formerly wealthy and prominent one, has come down in the world just as Egypt has fallen to political instability, corruption, and uncertainty. Her father has disappeared--it's not explained how or why until the end of the book, when she's an adult. As a child she only knows he's gone, and her mother is tense and withdrawn, sleeping most of the day. Her older cousin and uncle encourage her to think politically, but by the time she's a teenager it's clear that she doesn't want to be an activist, but an artist.
She wants to makes movies about the people around her, and specifically what makes them tick. Are they angry? Does it make them angry to live in a corrupt, embattled city--a place where the police can make anyone disappear, where the laws are unjustly and unfairly enforced, where secret police infiltrate everyday life, where gay and lesbian people are persecuted, where women are increasingly, insidiously forced to wear the veil, where the call to prayer echoes all day, every day? Or are they just weary? What do people expect, and what are they willing to do to make change happen? Are they even happy, in some ways? Do they just want to stand in a record shop and listen to music and discuss for hours whether the song they're hearing is an original or a bootleg, because the beloved singer's voice would never have cracked like that, at her most famous performance?
The final section of the book is set a few years after the Arab Spring in Egypt--it was 2011 when millions gathered to oust President Mubarak in Tahrir Square. The narrator is a woman now, writing a book and pondering the same questions as she navigate the post-revolutionary world. In some ways it looks a lot like the pre-revolutionary one (except now the taxi have meters in them.) Her father has returned from prison, and her uncle has died. Her cousin is becoming increasingly radical and disillusioned--his fate seems uncertain. Her mother, on the other hand, has woken up from her decades of sleep and has become an energetic, leafleting activist. Are they angry? Happy? It's impossible to say.
There's a line early in the book about the narrator, as a girl, choosing a mustard color for her bedroom walls, which dried darker than it started out. That comes up toward the end as well--things get darker over time. We start out flexible, then get more rigid as we age, then mellow again, if we're lucky. Sometimes we forgive. Sometimes we don't get the chance. The world keeps turning....more
Such a great reinvention of the superhero sandbox. The art is great--faces are distinctive and appealing, gestures are evocative and meaningful, backgSuch a great reinvention of the superhero sandbox. The art is great--faces are distinctive and appealing, gestures are evocative and meaningful, backgrounds are full of detail. Wilson gets a lot done plot-wise in these first five issues, and also manages to convey substantial character development as Kamala Khan struggles with her new powers and identity. It's both refreshing to see the superhero tropes handed over to a brown-skinned woman (!), and thought-provoking to see how a Muslim protagonist fits into our current obsessions about security, safety, rescue, and violence. ...more
Hoo boy. This is a heck of a ride through occupied Baghdad, following the fortunes of black-marketers Dagr and Kinza. Every description I've read saysHoo boy. This is a heck of a ride through occupied Baghdad, following the fortunes of black-marketers Dagr and Kinza. Every description I've read says this book is about their acquisition of a known torturer for Saddam, Captain Hamid--but actually the story turns very quickly to other matters and Hamid simply becomes a grudging third member of their party. Hamid promises them access to hidden treasure, but that search only takes them through a few pages before they're diverted into the pursuit of a serial killer known as the Lion of of Akkad. When they cross paths with a secretive, millennia-old religious sect known as the Druze, things get even stranger.
I loved many things about this book. The writing is great--darkly comic, engaging, gripping, fast-paced, and literate. Hossain convinced me that he understands the complex and confusing history and culture of Baghdad, Iraq, and the Middle East--not to mention the web of American interests now overlaid there. The characters were distinctive and memorable, and the story was satisfying and surprising. I loved the elements of the supernatural, as well as the Dan Brown-esque nods to secret societies, hidden devices, and ancient conspiracies.
Unnamed Press is a small indie that seems to be doing great things. I wish they'd copyedited just a little more closely--there was a section of the book that was laid out incorrectly on the page--but overall this is a great title and I'm grateful to them for bringing it out. Hossain left room for a sequel, and I'd definitely read it (to see poor Dagr get a little happiness, among other things.) ...more
This is more of a 3.5 stars for me (come on with the half-stars, Goodreads, sheesh) but I'm not inclined to round up because the writing didn't wrap mThis is more of a 3.5 stars for me (come on with the half-stars, Goodreads, sheesh) but I'm not inclined to round up because the writing didn't wrap me up and transport me the way some true four-star reads have done. I loved the idea of this--a history of the exploration and colonization of sixteenth-century native lands (what would become Florida, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas) told from the point of view of a Moroccan man enslaved by Spaniards. I loved that Lalami wrote it after reading a one-line reference to the man in question in a historical account of Moorish Spain. I loved/hated soaking in the horrors of the colonial period. It's important stuff to read and remember and know, and we white folks in North America aren't sufficiently required or inclined to face up to that history very often. In short, I'm very glad that this book exists and that I read it, and I would recommend it to others.
But while I was impressed with Lalami's research and historical knowledge, the style didn't seduce me. Perhaps because she was constrained by the actual story of where these men traveled and what they did, or perhaps because she was writing in English rather than Arabic or French, or maybe for other reasons entirely, this book felt sort of flat to me. I can see why it was nominated for the Pulitzer--it's an important book, a substantial book, a book on an under-recognized topic. But I also feel okay that it didn't win, because I didn't feel a true emotional connection to the characters, and I ended the book feeling like the theme of "a story is the strongest weapon" was thin and under-earned.
Read this along with Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, which is a picaresque story of the slave trade told by a charismatic, rogueish free black narrator. They're good complements, I think--very different books, but both wonderful examples of historical narratives from under-heard voices (both author and protagonists). Come to think of it, that's probably a genre I should add to my GR shelves. Are there other titles in that vein that you would recommend? ...more
**spoiler alert** **Content advisory for discussion of multiple rapes.**
My enjoyment of this book followed a kind of reverse bell curve, with a really**spoiler alert** **Content advisory for discussion of multiple rapes.**
My enjoyment of this book followed a kind of reverse bell curve, with a really weak back end. :( I started out really digging it--a magic realist family fable about a Dewi Ayu, a Dutch-Indo woman who comes back to life twenty-one years after she died (and after she gave birth to her fourth daughter, a monstrously ugly girl she named Beauty.) The prose felt solid and the voice was coming from an interesting, unusual place--the story had the feel of folklore.
I hung with it for a couple hundred pages, following Dewi Ayu through the early years of her life and the chaos of war, in which she and other Indonesian women were forced into prostitution (aka, systematic rape under the guise of "comfort women") by occupying Japanese soldiers. Rough stuff, and hard to read, but the narrative voice seemed to understand that these were war crimes, and that the women suffered--and the story still felt like it was following a through-line. Indonesian history, between the Dutch and the Japanese, isn't always pretty.
Then things got weirder. The story skipped around, visiting different characters related by blood or marriage to Dewi Ayu and her daughters, and while there was still some historical context (the rise of Communism, the massacre of Communists, power struggles through the 1960s and 1970s), the voice seemed to get repeatedly distracted by minor household stuff. There were some entertaining myths and some stories that seemed like retellings of myths, and they mostly wound back around again, sooner or later, to the Dewi Ayu clan--although I couldn't always tell why we'd taken that particular tangent.
About three-quarters of the way through the book, the story seems to fall apart. We drop into the lives of a handful of different men who marry Dewi Ayu's daughters or otherwise get involved in her family life--and Dewi Ayu herself disappears almost completely from the picture. Instead, we spent pages and pages dwelling on these men's obsessive lust-relationships with young girls, complete with meticulous, extended sex-fantasy descriptions of the girls' bodies.
And then we get tons and tons of rape. Men are tempted by women, obsessed by women, driven wild by their lust for women. (And livestock. One guy goes nuts and repeatedly rapes chickens to death, as well as countless dogs and kine.) They drug, kidnap, and rape girls and women, rape their wives...it goes on and on. Women get pregnant from rape, are forced to marry their rapists, die of pain and regret and rape. And the rapes are often described in bizarrely explicit, extended, almost blissfully pornographic passages that in any other context would be meant for titillation. Phrases like "make love" and "have sex" are used interchangeably with rape, albeit mainly through the perspectives of the rapists themselves. But honestly, it felt to me like the narrative voice also conflated these things at some points, or at the very least was playing fast and loose with the ideas.
I almost didn't finish the book, because...what the #$!*? The latter third of the book (or thereabouts) reads like a bizarre masturbatory rape-dream written by someone with serious sexual issues. I understand that colonization--the occupation and forcible exploitation of a region by a foreign power--is a kind of rape, although I take issue with the old-hat analogy of colonial occupation to actual rape of the female body. I understand the title of the book equates beauty with pain and injury. But given the execution, I don't understand what I was supposed to feel or learn from most of this book.
I was left feeling like the author had taken a promising setup and driven it down a gross, personal back alley for his own purposes--or maybe to be more charitable, had lost control of what he was doing and gone way off the rails (and no one, including his editor at New Directions or his female translator, had told him.) I didn't feel like the book ended with anything like a justification for the bizarre saturnalia it indulged in for so long, or like it ever adequately reassured me that it understood the distinctions between colonization and actual rape, or the problems of using graphic, extended, repeated depictions of rape to make a literary or political point.
This book started out feeling exciting and interesting and new. Somewhere in the middle it folded in on itself like a crappy cake, and by the end what I had was something I mostly wanted to spit out....more
I grabbed this at random off a library shelf, thinking the premise--basically a hard-boiled noir mystery/thriOh, I have bones to pick with this book.
I grabbed this at random off a library shelf, thinking the premise--basically a hard-boiled noir mystery/thriller cloaked in elements of futuristic sci fi--sounded interesting. I was also interested in the Muslim backdrop, in part because I've read a couple of Kameron Hurley's novels set in an alternative Islamic world where women and bug tech dominate, and Effinger seemed like he might be an interesting precedent. I was a little troubled by the formula--everyday gumshoe pursues maniacal serial killer--but every story needs an engine. Also, George R.R. Martin blurbed the book, and various folks love on it for being one of the best cyberpunk novels around.
Plot in a nutshell: We're in an alternate future in which the US and the Soviet Union (Effinger wrote this in 1986) have both disintegrated into disorganized, warring constituent states. Marîd Audran is a petty criminal and jack-of-many-trades living in the Budayeen, a dangerous neighborhood in an unnamed Middle Eastern city. In this world, some people have cranial implants in which they can insert "daddies" (add-ons) and "moddies" (modules). Daddies temporarily upgrade your skills, while moddies modify your entire personality and make you into someone else as long as you wear them.
Audran gets dragged into a complex, Sam-Spade-type mystery involving the brutal killings of a whole busload of people. He's seconded by the local crimelord to find and stop the murderer(s), while skirting corrupt officials and avoiding suspicion, himself. Things escalate until we learn that the killings are motivated by international political intrigue--in other words, this thing goes all the way to the top, kid. Audran finds and stops the killers, but only succeeds in becoming further embroiled in the kingpin's web.
So.
The premise is interesting and solid, in all kinds of ways. Hooray for a book that doesn't assume Western European / Christian foundations for its imaginative culture! The idea of moddies and daddies is maybe a little played by now, but in the 1980s it was fresh, and Effinger does a good job of making the slightly icky moddy/daddy subculture convincing. He takes this notion to another logical conclusion, too--just as people are comfortable changing their knowledge and personality with add-ons, they're equally okay changing sex.
Most of the women in Audran's world are actually men who've transitioned sex. Some of his language around this is maybe questionable--he calls MTF women "changes"--but he refers to them all as "she" and I think overall does a good job of handling gender/sex reassignment as an unremarkable, everyday thing. Audran's main squeeze, Yasmin, was born male, and he almost never thinks of her as anything but a woman. And likewise, Audran's world includes many gay characters, none of whom behave in stereotyped "butch" or "effeminate" ways. His card buddies are an obstreperous gay man and an FTM transsexual--along with a "strictly heterosexual" Christian who's clearly considered the laughable one because of his intolerance and general miffiness. At least within the bounds of the Budayeen, Audran's world is tolerant of all kinds of difference, as well as of many kinds of vice.
So it's sad that this book has so much gender trouble. In following the path of the hard-boiled detective novel, Effinger chooses to go along with the old tropes of fridging women for the purposes of plot and character development. Many of his book's victims are women, many of them killed in particularly torturous, sexualized, and brutal ways. At least one man goes the same way--but that's small comfort. It would be so much more interesting to see a book depart from this tired path. Effinger gives us a few colorful female characters--the Black Widow Sisters are larger-than-life horrors, with poison fangs, supersized breast implants, and a penchant for violence--but none of them is developed and many of them (including the Sisters) die horribly. It seems as though we're just now starting to poke a little more at the idea that a "strong female character" is one who takes some drastic, often violent, action and is then shoved off a cliff (often onto a waiting rapist.) While Effinger does, to his credit, build a world in which women are visible in at least a few different types of jobs, he's not interested in writing women in full story roles. Of his surviving women, the most satisfying roles are those of Yasmin--who exists for sex and occasional clarifying dialogue--and Chiriga, the bartender who pours his drinks and listens to his tales of woe ("Play it again, Sam.") There's even an alleyway scene where Audran roughs Yasmin up and insults her, just to fit the old girlfriend-slapping trope.
So, I'd hoped for better on the gender front. And overall, I wanted the book to be more original in re-interpreting the hard-boiled genre. By the time I was three-quarters of the way through the book, I was getting so tired of watching the story hit its beats (now we are entering the second act, now the protagonist must be forced to make a decision forcing him to abjure his firmly-held beliefs, now the protagonist must be placed in dire peril and his hand forced, now a new source of information must be introduced...) that I almost put the book down. I don't mind a book hitting genre beats if it does it with a sense of playfulness and spirit, but this felt rote to me.
I wanted more from the daddies/moddies premise. Effinger attempts to build a sense of crisis by having Audran deeply afraid of having the implants done--but once the work is finished he functions so easily with them that it's hard to remember he had any ethical or psychic trouble with them at all. There doesn't seem to be any real reason why he opposed having implants, and he easily forgets his opposition once he has them. There's really interesting meta-fictional potential to the moddies, especially since a moddy can give you the personality of anyone, including a fictional character. So Audran, for instance, takes on the personality of Nero Wolfe to try to track down the killer. It's a nice shout-out to the genre, but it begs the question: why Wolfe? Of all the investigators, detectives, and generally smart people in fiction, why pick the armchair-bound aesthete? Apart from wanting to shout out the original work, that is. It's equally bizarre that the killer chooses James Bond as a skin for his work. Bond isn't associated in my mind with cold-blooded assassins, although I guess he could get the job done. He seems more likely to get tripped up dallying with a blonde at the bar, especially in his Sean Connery days.
Worst of all, the rich premise of the moddies--and the potential craft problems that they present for the writer--is pretty much shrugged off, since Audran only uses Wolfe a couple of times, and essentially does nothing with him. The Audran-as-Wolfe sections are confusing and don't seem to accomplish much. Even the big bad daddy, the one that plugs into the "punishment center" in his brain (I'm pretty sure a neurologist would take issue with this book) to make him a raging killer equal to the murderer, disappoints. In one situation it allows Audran to tear a man to shreds--in another, it reduces him to a cringing pile on the crimelord's carpet. The ground rules for this piece of the cyberpunk setup never seem clear. In another book, the moddies could have taken center stage as both a plot and narrative device, with Audran's consciousness and awareness changing in and out according to need. Instead, they come across as a gimmick without much payoff.
Finally, the plot of the novel feels contrived and thin. Effinger's attention is clearly mostly on developing the mood and tone of his Budayeen world--and he does a good job of that. But it challenged my disbelief that the kingpin would spend so lavishly on having Audran augmented to hunt down the killer...surely there are more qualified people available? The motives for the killings turn out to be tissue-thin, and their revelations are either clunky or baffling, or both. By the end of the book I wasn't sure what I was meant to take from the final scene, in which an elderly sex worker reveals to Audran a piece of information that we already know. I think it's the classic let-down of the hardboiled genre--too little, too late. But I honestly don't know. I may have missed something, but I'm not going back to check.
So, all that said...this was not a book that thrilled me. I was excited by its premise and I enjoyed visiting Effinger's underworld, at least for a while. But overall it made me even more glad that Kameron Hurley's Islamic-based sci fi exists--while her world is brutal, it doesn't leave the same sour taste in my mouth. Her characters are violent and imperfect, but they've taken a step forward from our 1980s-era assumptions about sex, gender, and women in particular. Effinger took a few steps in that direction, but as far as my voluntary reading hours are concerned, he just didn't get far enough....more
This was a fun read, and appealing from several angles. I haven't read much Islamic-based fantasy (Kameron Hurley's trilogy is maybe the closest I've This was a fun read, and appealing from several angles. I haven't read much Islamic-based fantasy (Kameron Hurley's trilogy is maybe the closest I've come?) and I'm generally pretty ill-informed on matters Middle Eastern. So even though this book is a fantasy set in an unnamed country, I was pretty happy to soak up whatever background I could get about the complicated religious, ethnic, and social strata of this Arabic/Islamic/Indian/Hindu/colonialist/desi/you name it world. Plus, there are djinn.
Wilson's world seems to follow in the footsteps (at least a little) of Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson--which is a pretty good lineage to be in, I think. Her protagonist, Alif, is a gray-hat cyber criminal, who runs encryption and hosting services for whichever dissident group can afford to pay him. He get into trouble when the sinister government-run Hand comes gunning for him--and only later realizes that the Hand is not really after him, but a book he's come to possess. The book is a variation on One Thousand and One Nights, Volume 01--a series of tales that Alif realizes are also the building blocks of a vast computer code. There's slippage between many worlds here: the world of the book, the world of coding, the so-called "real" world," and the unseen world of the djinn.
All of these are great elements, and Wilson's prose is capable and well-paced. The plot feels a little rushed and attenuated by the end, as if it could have used one final round of compression edits, but that's no deal-breaker. Add in some strong, multi-faceted female characters (some of whom wear the veil, and some of whom don't--and that decision says nothing about their worth as people, hooray) and this is a great read for grown-ups who like smart fantasy....more
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