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Apr. 7th, 2009 12:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsBrian Francis Slattery's Spaceman Blues was another rec from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rahkan and from the title I was expecting something slightly comic and hard sci-fi-y. This . . . . was absolutely not that.
First of all - and maybe most importantly - the prose is gorgeous. Totally lyrical, with the same kind of long and exuberant sentences packing dark otherworld wonder that you get in China Mieville. (Trufax: I was trying to think what to compare this to, and was thinking of Mieville and Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, and then I turned the book over and the first quote I saw on the back was someone comparing it to Mieville and Doctorow. Go me? Of course, there are also quotes comparing to Tom Robbins, Isabel Allende, Dashiel Hammett, and like twenty others, so maybe I don't get so many points.) The difference is that there's not much overtly science-fictional or fantastical here until the end, and the wild unseen world is all a just-slightly-exaggerated New York, though not Midtown and the Financial District - instead, Red Hook, Spanish Harlem, Astoria, all the immigrant neighborhoods.
This world that is not the standard literary New York is very cool, and the characters who live there are pretty awesome also - for the most part they feel very real and individual, although a few things made me wince. It would also have been a lot cooler for me if our protagonist who gets drawn into this world and becomes An Archetypal Hero wasn't the single whitebread Middle America boy of the book. Fortunately the narrative style means we're hardly ever stuck in his head; many of the characters and storylines in the book have hardely anything to do with the nominal protagonist, and the way the plot works out makes it much less White Guy Comes In, Saves Everyone than it could have otherwise been. But it still bugged me.
The central question of the plot is why Manuel Rodrigo de Guzmán González suddenly disappears and leaves his apartment building to be destroyed by an explosion. Um, which is in general a good question to ask! His lover Wendell Apogee is searching to understand why he left and where he went (hilariously, in the front copy, they completely elide over the 'boyfriends' aspect, heavily implying that Wendell's just motivated by good old noir paranoid curiosity, that's all!); detectives Salmon and Trout are trying to unearth a potential conspiracy; Manuel's enemy wants to know what happened to the wife that Manuel ran off with, his friends try to go on with their lives despite the sense of impending catastrophe, scary men in raincoats are running around causing yet more explosions, and eventually there are aliens.
. . . yeah, the plot is not really the important part of the book. Anyway, if you like Mieville, or vibrant and beautiful and slightly surrealist prose (and characters), or views of New York that are not your standard 'shiny city with tall buildings', or paranoia and cults and aliens, this is probably a good book for you! But maybe not if only the last bit sounds appealing, because despite having 'Spaceman' in the title it's not really what the book is.
rahkan and from the title I was expecting something slightly comic and hard sci-fi-y. This . . . . was absolutely not that.First of all - and maybe most importantly - the prose is gorgeous. Totally lyrical, with the same kind of long and exuberant sentences packing dark otherworld wonder that you get in China Mieville. (Trufax: I was trying to think what to compare this to, and was thinking of Mieville and Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, and then I turned the book over and the first quote I saw on the back was someone comparing it to Mieville and Doctorow. Go me? Of course, there are also quotes comparing to Tom Robbins, Isabel Allende, Dashiel Hammett, and like twenty others, so maybe I don't get so many points.) The difference is that there's not much overtly science-fictional or fantastical here until the end, and the wild unseen world is all a just-slightly-exaggerated New York, though not Midtown and the Financial District - instead, Red Hook, Spanish Harlem, Astoria, all the immigrant neighborhoods.
This world that is not the standard literary New York is very cool, and the characters who live there are pretty awesome also - for the most part they feel very real and individual, although a few things made me wince. It would also have been a lot cooler for me if our protagonist who gets drawn into this world and becomes An Archetypal Hero wasn't the single whitebread Middle America boy of the book. Fortunately the narrative style means we're hardly ever stuck in his head; many of the characters and storylines in the book have hardely anything to do with the nominal protagonist, and the way the plot works out makes it much less White Guy Comes In, Saves Everyone than it could have otherwise been. But it still bugged me.
The central question of the plot is why Manuel Rodrigo de Guzmán González suddenly disappears and leaves his apartment building to be destroyed by an explosion. Um, which is in general a good question to ask! His lover Wendell Apogee is searching to understand why he left and where he went (hilariously, in the front copy, they completely elide over the 'boyfriends' aspect, heavily implying that Wendell's just motivated by good old noir paranoid curiosity, that's all!); detectives Salmon and Trout are trying to unearth a potential conspiracy; Manuel's enemy wants to know what happened to the wife that Manuel ran off with, his friends try to go on with their lives despite the sense of impending catastrophe, scary men in raincoats are running around causing yet more explosions, and eventually there are aliens.
. . . yeah, the plot is not really the important part of the book. Anyway, if you like Mieville, or vibrant and beautiful and slightly surrealist prose (and characters), or views of New York that are not your standard 'shiny city with tall buildings', or paranoia and cults and aliens, this is probably a good book for you! But maybe not if only the last bit sounds appealing, because despite having 'Spaceman' in the title it's not really what the book is.
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Date: 2009-04-07 05:42 pm (UTC)Isn't that just the thing about those crazy book jackets? (And movie trailers and tv show/movie descriptions on Netflix and Amazon) They never want to tell you what the book's really about so they can sell more copies, yet it's those very descriptions that turn me off to the book! I know they might want to keep somethings a surprise, but I think they should get a fan of the book to write the summaries. (If it wasn't for the internet allowing me to ask people about the book to see if it's worth while, I might never read! XD)
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Date: 2009-04-07 05:57 pm (UTC)Man, I wish someone would hire me to write book jacket summaries. It would be my ideal job! And every summary would be like "So there's a depressed dude, and he decides to go to a party at his greatest enemy's house for the lulz only he gets a giant mutual crush on the daughter of the house and his friends are all 'man, wtf has gotten into you!' GUESS WHAT HAPPENS NEXT." It would be . . . . a genius marketing scheme . . . . . um.
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Date: 2009-04-07 06:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-07 06:44 pm (UTC)(It's Harry Potter, except instead of being depressed allcapsily at wizard school, he's depressed allcapsily at the Danish court! VOLDEMORT DIDN'T KILL HIS DAD, BUT GUESS WHO DID.)
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Date: 2009-04-07 06:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-07 06:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-07 06:15 pm (UTC)I find it fascinating how DWJ seems to like playing with time and identity, she does it so well.
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Date: 2009-04-07 06:42 pm (UTC)And oh, I love Time of the Ghost - it's one of the most strange and creepy of her novels (and the most autobiographical, too - apparently she and her sisters did grow up in a very similar situation) and the whole concept of not knowing who you are and having to observe candidates from the outside - and get to judge them - is, like you said, fascinating! You're definitely right that time and identity (other worlds, other selves, getting to replay things until you get them right) are among the main themes she likes to poke at, especially in her less comic, more 'adult' books.
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Date: 2009-04-07 06:59 pm (UTC)Hee and yes one of the used bookstores had Charmed Life and The Many Lives of Christopher Chant so I just had to make sure that he got them.
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Date: 2009-04-07 07:34 pm (UTC)And yeah, there's a whole autobiographical essay on her website, and it's really interesting. (Or at least it is to me, ridiculously obsessive fan that I am.)
TREMENDOUS THUMBS UP FOR THIS. :D :D :DE
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Date: 2009-04-08 12:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-08 01:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-09 06:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-09 06:40 pm (UTC)Yeah, I read a little about it because I was curious after reading this about the other things he had done - that is the one about the epic financial collapse of the US, right? Which: aheh.