Jean-Christophe Valtat

Valtat's slim little book is interesting and a bit dizzying. There's a Lolita vibe to it and a pretty unabashed expression of male longing heightened not only by his object's inability to speak (she's across the street) but her disability, whatever it is. So the female is voiceless and utterly defenceless, and the male voice appropriates literally everything. He's a teen too (there are some references but he could be older) and the effect on me was ooky and a little astonished at how tone-deaf the writer is to questions of having women and the disabled own their own voices. The writing is a brilliant and tone deaf tour de force of the male gaze and self-absorption, perhaps rightly so in a teen but still not my thing.… (plus d'informations)

Yes, this book took me a month to read. I finished it out of sheer cussedness - and so that, if I posted a less-than-glowing review, people wouldn't be able to convincingly tell me it got better.

In Aurorarama, we have two main point of view characters, plus periodic appearances of an intrusive omniscient narrator. I rather liked the omniscient narrator, as it fit with the emulated time period.

I hated Gabriel d'Allier. He's a terrible person and (worse) not in any sort of interesting way. When we meet him, he's in danger of losing his job as a professor due to an accusation he's behaved improperly towards a female student. He is righteously angry because he did no such thing - not with that student. Though when the student tearfully comes to him with concerns about the professor who made her voice these false accusations, he ... gives her a spanking.

Now maybe, dear reader, it would be more becoming in you to leave the room, and I would advise you not to look back on the scene if you can help it: were you to linger and witness, for instance, that Phoebe has now her grey dress and petticoats over her head, you would be, and not me, responsible for it, and you could not count on either yours truly or on Gabriel to confirm that this vision was not a child of your unbridled imagination.

Gabriel is a lech and a drug abuser, he doesn't care about anything involving effort and generally falls aimlessly through the plot: an observer necessary to let the readers know that plot is happening, rather than an actor himself.

I also didn't like Brentford Orsini much. Compared to Gabriel, I suppose he is all right, and he is set up as one of the few denizens of New Venice to recognize the humanity of - and validity of complaints by - the local Inuit. It is through Brentford that we learn that New Venice is a place where dream portents are true, though subject to interpretation. We meet through Brentford's dream the Ghost Lady, whom Brentford mistakes as Sandy Lake (a once-famous, long vanished pop singer), and from his search for meaning we briefly see Kujira Etsuko (a woman whose body once literally produced drugs, thus positioning her at the center of a famous New Venice love story).

Shortly after his introduction, we readers are led through a painfully lacking-in-introspection perspective on his upcoming marriage. Although Brentford is still in love with the dead Helen (a seeming paragon and savior of the city, and the person he'd been seeking in dreams), he is engaged to and living with Sybil - who is a pop singer and utterly vacant in Brentford's perspective. He doesn't even seem to like her music/band. I just can't understand intentionally tying oneself to someone you don't even like, so Brentford pretty much lost me there. But at least he acts (even if he often waits until the last moment to choose to do so).

There's a lot of ideas in this book, probably too many. There's the usual steampunk technology and digressions into exactly how this particular dirigible is constructed. There are mentions of the various quarters of the district, arising from different cultural bases. There are a number of descriptions of the music and music scene, none of which made me wish I could actually hear any of it. At some point in the past, time started running backwards (this may have something to do with Helen saving New Venice by magic - oh, yes, and there's magic), but since New Venice is still in contact with the wider world, I'm not sure what it means that time is running backwards. There are anarchists in the literary tradition of the turn of the previous century (i.e. people who like to blow things up). There are the Inuit, whom the chapter titles call Eskimos, and who are excellent plot points but barely painted in as characters. There are spirit animals, of a sort. And, like the cover copy promised me, there are Suffragettes (herein titled Sophragettes).

While I was talking about this book to a friend, I promised that this line would make it into my review. So here it is. About two thirds of the way through the novel, every significant female character vanishes from the story. Stella runs off on Gabriel with another man (possibly under hypnotic coercion). Sybil vanishes from Brentford's wedding bed (definitely under hypnotic coercion) and is replaced by a puppet. The other women who have played any sort of significant role at this point are the dead Helen and the ghost of a woman who arrived dead at the docks of New Venice in a sled drawn by dogs, holding a mirror with "Lancelot" written on it for anyone who missed the Lady of Shallot allusion. The ghost woman's appearances are tied to Phoebe - who vanished in the company of the bad man who has now taken Sybil. Lilian/Sandy is in hiding with the Scavengers. At this point, every woman has disappeared from the text. This sounds like a metaphor for everything I hate in bad fiction, only it literally happens!

So then I had to finish reading, even though I was seriously done with this book, because I knew - knew - that someone would pop up to tell me I was wrong and should have kept reading. But no. Sure, the Sophragettes turn up deus ex machina style to save the day - but can any reader tell what they were fighting for or against before they get swept up into Brentford's goals? A small piece of the tale is from Lillian Lenton nee Sandy Lake's point of view, but that section is not about what Lillian wants or does - it's about one of our dead ladies' desires (and entirely wrapped up in the needs one of the gentlemen).

Brentford, from the epilogue, sums it up himself. He suddenly missed Lilian. He meant Sybil. He meant Helen. No. He meant Lilian. When the female characters are essentially interchangeable in what they mean to the main male character, there is a problem that no number of Sophragettes is going to cure.… (plus d'informations)

Oh, my God. This book. The next book in the series after Aurororama, it is a little bit less bewildering than the first, but maybe only because now it starts to feel familiar?

Basically, Brentford & Gabriel have been out-maneuvered in their attempt to reform New Venice. They, and a team of "supporting experts" have been sent on a diplomatic mission to Paris in an extremely disreputable transport known as a psychomotive that seems likely to have been intended to kill them. But instead sends them back in time to witness and perhaps participate in the birth of the idea of the city that will be New Venice.

Oh, there is a lot of mystery and snake oil! Occult figures, "medical" devices that affect the mind with magnets and electricity. Wax museums, poetry readings, and "therapeutic" drinking of animal blood. Wise-cracking child prostitutes and a severed head kept alive by complicated machinery.

As usual, I feel like I'm missing every other reference, especially to turn of the century French poets and philosophers. Female characters have more autonomy here, but they still sometimes feel like what a man's "sexy" idea of what a strong woman should be. But some neat ideas on do you really die if a version of you is still alive in another timeline? Is it better to remember or be wiped clean? And the one-step forward, one-step back nature of revolutions.

Another book coming, I think? Still definitely on board until the end.… (plus d'informations)

About fifty-five pages into this book I set it down with a harumph. I'd been waiting, waiting for the first introduction of a female character, and shortly after it happened that character may or may not have been turned over the knee of her professor and spanked.

Seriously?

I turned the book over and examined the back cover for a blurb by a woman. Opened to the first page of promotional blurbs, still looking. All men or publication names (so... 80% likely to be men.) Then there's a quote. From my sister. A rave, of course.

Fine.

I acknowledge that I am a little oversensitive to issues of representation just now (I blame the pinkification of Wonder Woman at Target, which, just, seriously? FEMINIST-HULK SMASH!) I decided to give the book a second chance and see where it went from there.

I am very glad that I did. Pretty much my only regret with this novel is that I read it in the summer. I read great chunks of it while walking to and from work on the river trail and could only imagine how much more perfect it would have been walking through a landscape heavy with snow.

I still haven't said much about the novel. It's been described as steampunk speculative fiction (the author prefers the term "Teslapop.") There are so many influences here it seems foolish to try to list them for all that would be missed. It's set in the early 20th century, in a city in the extreme North of North America -- New Venice. The city is a utopia-turning-dystopia with secret societies, shadowy police, a cornucopia of drugs, experimental music, magic, strained relations with local natives, powerful legends, and a mysterious airship floating above the city.

The book is crazy-thick with allusions and sly references and twists in on itself with a density that is sometimes oppressive. But it is also sometimes breath-takingly imaginative and visionary. And while the fantastical elements were sometimes excessive for me (I prefer my sf on the hard-science side of the spectrum), the Tesla-esque gadgets were fun to think about, and Valtat seemed always to suggest that surely there is some entirely plausible scientific explanation for all (well, maybe most) of this.

Did I mention there were zombies? And a polar kangaroo leading a white man on a shamanistic vision quest?

But whatever. I was hooked. Am hooked. I want to read this again in the winter, and am stalking the publisher's website for the sequel (whose publication date seems to have been pushed back multiple times).

A thoroughly diverting romp. Despite having a little bit of a girl problem.… (plus d'informations)