(no subject)

[skygiants]

I think I first heard of Waubgeshig Rice's Moon of the Crusted Snow via rachelmanija's post, so it had been on my radar and my to-read list well before it got picked for our book group last month -- it's a quiet, intensely local apocalypse novel set over the course of one bad winter in a small and relatively isolated Anishinaabe community, where it takes a week to realize that the fact that the Power Continues To Be Off is not just the normal kind of shit that happens when you're up way north and your infrastructure is mediocre, but a sign that perhaps something quite bad has happened to the rest of the world.

Rice has a background as a reporter and IMO it shows in the relatively journalistic writing throughout the book, less interested in developing individual relationships than exploring the community as a whole. The book provides a really interesting, thematic examination of how a standard 'infrastructure is just gone now' apocalypse might hit a community that has only begun to rely on that infrastructure relatively recently and perhaps even more relevantly a community that within living memory has experienced losses just as apocalyptic for the world as they knew it. Not that it's not difficult, and not that people don't suffer -- of course it is, and of course they do, and in some ways it's worse knowing that at one point most people in town might not have needed a regular truck with food deliveries to get through a difficult winter, but now many of them do need it and they don't have it -- but it's a different sense of perspective.

Some of the standard apocalypse tropes do apply (there is ill-advised mid-apocalypse partying, a sinister doomsday prepper from outside the community with Too Many Guns, and the eventual looming specter of survival cannibalism) but for the most part the stakes are less about the immediate pressures of survival for any individual, and more about the ways in which the community both does and does not succeed in making it through this experience as a collective, and adapting once again to a catastrophically changed world.

(genarti and I had chorus practice right after the book club discussion where we talked about this book, and in the middle of it I suddenly experienced a revelation and frantically messaged her 'they didn't assign anyone to be in charge of MORALE BUILDING ACTIVITIES! someone needed to start a COMMUNITY CHOIR!' And I do think it would have helped tbh -- I am thinking still and always about Dmitri Shostakovich and the siege of Leningrad -- but on the other hand I don't know that I'm volunteering to be in charge of the community choir for the next apocalypse, either; being in charge of the community choir seems difficult enough in normal times.)

Comments

[chestnut_pod]

I enjoyed this review; thank you :)

[shati]

Heh, I remember thinking the actual prose read like journalism, like just on a sentence level. I read it in March 2020, and I had to remind myself just now that it was written before covid.

[caprices]

OH, my favorite apocalypse book!!
I incidentally read it shortly after reading Braiding Sweetgrass, which of course is not specifically about apocalypses but does touch on indigenous viewpoints related to ecosystems and the effects of westernization, and also has a little bit about, ahem, winter cannibalism, and taboos against. All of which happened to slot in so thematically well with The Moon of Crusted Snow that the story felt extremely solid in a way that a lot of end-of-world narratives just don't.

[suncani]

This does seem to be a fundamental failing of apocalypse themed fiction in general. Its why although there were other parts of the book I disagreed with I enjoyed Station Eleven for keeping art and culture a part of life after the virus. People who say that its unrealistic/that people wouldn't have time for things like that in an apocalyptic setting do seem to overlook the community building aspects as well as it being an intrinsic part of human nature.

*blushes and gets off soapbox

It's a great review and makes me very curious to check out the book now so thank you :)

[osprey_archer]

Yes, I loved the way that this book focused on forming a picture of the community as a whole and how all those moving parts shifted in response to the apocalypse. And it's a sobering look at just how fragile the modern world is in many ways: I remember the bit where the two boys who were away at college come back on their snow mobiles, and report that the cities are already breaking down because people are so totally dependent on the infrastructure that has just collapsed.

[sophia_sol]

Oh, I didn't know Rice had a background as a reporter, and I can definitely see how it shows in this book! I loved the community focus, and I"m glad you enjoyed the book too!

you are SO RIGHT though about both the importance of community choirs and the difficulty in being the person who does it!

[skygiants]

Thanks for saying so, I'm glad! :D

[skygiants]

Yeah that was definitely also true and I think the first thing that had me check Rice's background -- it was also a bit tricky for me to get used to at first, which then made me think about how little actual journalism I read on the regular ... thanks for reminding me you had read this so I could go back and read your post about it also!

[skygiants]

That sounds like an extremely fortuitous/thematic pairing, reading-wise!

[skygiants]

Yeah, Station Eleven is also one of the things I was thinking about with this -- also my own personal favorite wild apocalypse story, the manga Seven Seeds, in which one team of survivors is very grim and focused on Practical Survival Tasks and another nearly dies 300x by stupid accident but is great at setting up regular talent shows and team-building activities and, surprise, it turns out you need both! Anyway, I hope you enjoy this one if you read it. :D

[skygiants]

Yeah, the sequence with the college boys is especially grim because of how fast it happens, and how quickly the university just abandons the kids who have nowhere else to go -- I think the whole thing takes place over like five days? Which is almost inconceivably fast for kids to already be starving in their dorm rooms, but of course it takes an enormous infrastructure to take care of college kids who aren't expected to provide any food for themselves, and once that goes away there is no way to replace it.

[skygiants]

I did really like also that one of the threads in how things played out is that the leader of the community wasn't bad per se but also wasn't really prepared to pull things together -- you could see also how things might play out very differently if the person in charge had a larger personality, and instead they end in an interesting place that's neither quite a dramatic success nor a dramatic failure.

[obopolsk]

Ooh, I am very intrigued by the premise of this book! I am not allowed to put anything else on hold at the library until I make progress on the books I have out, so this is going on the pre-holds-list list.

[suncani]

Oh interesting! I'll have to take a look at Seven Seeds too. Also, I don't know if you saw this, but it also made me think of that as well - even Neanderthals weren't just about survival, taste and pleasure is important too :D

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/22/world/prehistoric-diets-plants-neanderthals-scn/index.html

[skygiants]

It's important to get through the rotation responsibly! (But I hope you dig it if/when you read it. :D)