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May. 8th, 2020 10:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsThe Empress of Salt and Fortune, an extremely recent novella by Nghi Vo, is more or less specifically targeted to appeal to me in several ways, being as it is:
- the secret history of an unwanted royal wife's secret rebellion and rise to power
- as told through the perspective of her most trusted handmaiden
- to a historian/archivist who is taking an oral history of the handmaiden's memories around various Significant Artifacts as they catalog them in the empress' home of exile!
'wait,' you may say, at this juncture, 'that sounds like two frame stories? that's a lot of frame story for one relatively small novella?' And: okay, yes, perhaps, but also, if what you're interested in is history and historiography and memory and narratives of empire, in my personal opinion it is fine and OK to have a high frame story::actual story ratio (see also: specifically targeted to appeal to my personal interests and enjoyment. If I could change anything I would add even another frame story and have a layer of scholarly commentary and footnotes and that's probably why I'm not in charge of changing things.)
Anyway, I enjoyed it very much and would absolutely recommend; it's a big scope for a little book but at this time, when I don't actually have much attention span for long and meaty books, I would actually rank the fact that it's a mosaic of a story told in curated glimpses and vignettes as more of a pro than a con. Also, beautifully written!
- the secret history of an unwanted royal wife's secret rebellion and rise to power
- as told through the perspective of her most trusted handmaiden
- to a historian/archivist who is taking an oral history of the handmaiden's memories around various Significant Artifacts as they catalog them in the empress' home of exile!
'wait,' you may say, at this juncture, 'that sounds like two frame stories? that's a lot of frame story for one relatively small novella?' And: okay, yes, perhaps, but also, if what you're interested in is history and historiography and memory and narratives of empire, in my personal opinion it is fine and OK to have a high frame story::actual story ratio (see also: specifically targeted to appeal to my personal interests and enjoyment. If I could change anything I would add even another frame story and have a layer of scholarly commentary and footnotes and that's probably why I'm not in charge of changing things.)
Anyway, I enjoyed it very much and would absolutely recommend; it's a big scope for a little book but at this time, when I don't actually have much attention span for long and meaty books, I would actually rank the fact that it's a mosaic of a story told in curated glimpses and vignettes as more of a pro than a con. Also, beautifully written!
