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Jan. 13th, 2025 10:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsSeveral people on my book year-end round-up post have asked what I thought about Rakesfall, Vajra Chandrasekera's follow-up to Saint of Bright Doors. This is a great question and one that I am going to do an absolutely terrible job of answering. It has been like four months and I still have no idea what I thought about Rakesfall.
So instead I will try to answer a different question, which is, what is Rakesfall?
1. Rakesfall is -- sort of? -- a novel about the reincarnation of two individuals who are linked two each other, "tracing two souls through endless lifetimes," according to the cover copy. This is sort of true; it did also lead me to expect that I was indeed going to be able to consistently trace the aforementioned souls in the lifetimes in which they appeared, which is emphatically not always true, and also occasionally distracting, although I think that might be part of the point.
2. Rakesfall is -- sort of? -- a collection of short speculative fictions, linked together by the idea that the players are fundamentally the same throughout; that they are experiencing riffs and reprises on the same essential themes, and, moreover, that the players are constantly retelling the story of themselves to each other. Several of these stories, I know, were published individually before being pulled together into the form of this novel. I liked a lot of these stories very much in and of themselves! The one where the protagonist is helping her landlady file a legal case around her right to protect her home from her inconvenient zombie husband? Superb. Do I like this story the better for being part of something that could be called a novel? Is the whole, ultimately, greater than the sum of its parts? Unclear to me at this time.
3. Rakesfall is a book that, IMO, more or less demands to be studied. It makes a firm stand that it wishes to be read deeply and debated over. You could easily design a whole college course around this book, and I frankly think that course would be incredible. You'd read a lot of Sri Lankan history, including some really awful but interesting primary source texts from the period of Portuguese colonization, and a bit of weird 19th century mysticism, and ideally Vajra Chandrasekera would also provide a small packet of his favorite works from the AO3 for use in discussing the chapter that's framed as meta-TV fandom. I would love to take that class and I think I would learn a lot from it.
4. Relatedly, Rakesfall is definitely not a book that wants to be read in a single day. Unfortunately, for various reasons, that is what I did, which perhaps explains why I have still not sorted out my opinion about it.
So instead I will try to answer a different question, which is, what is Rakesfall?
1. Rakesfall is -- sort of? -- a novel about the reincarnation of two individuals who are linked two each other, "tracing two souls through endless lifetimes," according to the cover copy. This is sort of true; it did also lead me to expect that I was indeed going to be able to consistently trace the aforementioned souls in the lifetimes in which they appeared, which is emphatically not always true, and also occasionally distracting, although I think that might be part of the point.
2. Rakesfall is -- sort of? -- a collection of short speculative fictions, linked together by the idea that the players are fundamentally the same throughout; that they are experiencing riffs and reprises on the same essential themes, and, moreover, that the players are constantly retelling the story of themselves to each other. Several of these stories, I know, were published individually before being pulled together into the form of this novel. I liked a lot of these stories very much in and of themselves! The one where the protagonist is helping her landlady file a legal case around her right to protect her home from her inconvenient zombie husband? Superb. Do I like this story the better for being part of something that could be called a novel? Is the whole, ultimately, greater than the sum of its parts? Unclear to me at this time.
3. Rakesfall is a book that, IMO, more or less demands to be studied. It makes a firm stand that it wishes to be read deeply and debated over. You could easily design a whole college course around this book, and I frankly think that course would be incredible. You'd read a lot of Sri Lankan history, including some really awful but interesting primary source texts from the period of Portuguese colonization, and a bit of weird 19th century mysticism, and ideally Vajra Chandrasekera would also provide a small packet of his favorite works from the AO3 for use in discussing the chapter that's framed as meta-TV fandom. I would love to take that class and I think I would learn a lot from it.
4. Relatedly, Rakesfall is definitely not a book that wants to be read in a single day. Unfortunately, for various reasons, that is what I did, which perhaps explains why I have still not sorted out my opinion about it.
