(no subject)

[skygiants]

The Ukrainian fantasy novel Vita Nostra has been on my to-read list for a while ever since shati described it as 'kind of like the Wayside School books' in a conversation about dark academia, a description which I trusted implicitly because shati always describes things in helpful and universally accepted terms.

Anyway, so Vita Nostra is more or less a horror novel .... or at least it's about the thing which is scariest to me, existential transformation of the self without consent and without control.

At the start of the book, teenage Sasha is on a nice beach vacation with her mom when she finds herself being followed everywhere by a strange, ominous man. He has a dictate for her: every morning, she has to skinny-dip at 4 AM and swim out to a certain point in the ocean, then back, Or Else. Or Else? Well, the first time she oversleeps, her mom's vacation boyfriend has a mild heart attack and ends up in the ER. The next time ... well, who knows, the next time, so Sasha keeps on swimming. And then the vacation ends! And the horrible and inexplicable interval is, thankfully, over!

Except of course it isn't over; the ominous man returns, with more instructions, which eventually derail Sasha off of her planned normal pathway of high school --> university --> career. Instead, despite the confused protests of her mother, she glumly follows the instructions of her evil angel and treks off to the remote town of Torpa to attend the Institute of Special Technologies.

Nobody is at the Institute of Special Technologies by choice. Nobody is there to have a good time. Everyone has been coerced there by an ominous advisor; as entrance precondition, everyone has been given a set of miserable tasks to perform, Or Else. Also, it's hard not to notice that all the older students look strange and haunted and shamble disconcertingly through the dorms in a way that seems like a sort of existential dispute with the concept of space, though if you ask them about it they're just like 'lol you'll understand eventually,' which is not reassuring. And then there are the actual assignments -- the assignments that seem designed to train you to think in a way the human brain was not designed to think -- and which Sasha is actually really good at! the best in her class! fortunately or unfortunately .... but fortunately in at least this respect: everyone wants to pass, because if you fail at the midterm, if you fail at the finals, there's always the Or Else waiting.

AND ALSO all the roommates are assigned and it's hell.

Weird, fascinating book! I found it very tense and propulsive despite the fact that for chapters at a time all that happens is Sasha doing horrible homework exercises and turning her brain inside out. I feel like a lot of magic school books are, essentially, power fantasies. What if you learned magic? What if you were so good at it? Sasha is learning some kind of magic, and Sasha is so good at it, but the overwhelming emotion of this book is powerlessness, lack of agency, arbitrary tasks and incomprehensible experiences papered over with a parody of Normal College Life. On the one hand Sasha is desperate to hold onto her humanity and to remain a person that her mother will recognize when she comes home; on the other hand, the veneer of Normal College Life layered on top of the Institute's existential weirdness seems more and more pointless and frustrating the further on it goes and the stranger Sasha herself becomes. I think the moment it really clicked for me is midway through Sasha's second year, when Sasha's like 'I gotta pass Monstrous Annihilation of the Self class or probably my mom will die' so she spends months and a horrible timeloop monstrously annihilating the self, and then the profs are like 'great, so you get an automatic pass because as top student we need you to plan the winter social.' Which, for Sasha, at this point, is perhaps worse.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Wow, that's genuinely an impressive move, to take a scenario that ought to be a power fantasy and turn it into an exploration of powerlessness!

I have a question that probably the author wasn't at all interested in answering, but I'll ask anyway: is there any explanation for why dark angels who can cause heart attacks at will need to spend time and energy teaching young people to annihilate the self? Why *this* is the dark angels' means of accomplishing their dark purpose, as opposed to just heart-attacking their way there? On the one hand, I'm quite prepared for the answer to be no; on the other, I can imagine that there could be reasons ...

[skygiants]

The author is actually very interested in the question -- Sasha and her classmates are constantly demanding, externally and internally, why, why are you doing this, why can't we just go home? ('dark angels' isn't literal, to be clear, just in the sense that the advisors are like the worst version of a guardian angel that there is.) And the answer is always: well, we can't possibly explain it what you're here for because at this stage you couldn't possibly understand it. As someone quotes below, if you're trying to turn an ant into a human, how you could possibly explain it to the ant? (It's a very metaphysical book.) But by the end there is a kind of answer, and an interesting one, I think, although many elements of it are still ambiguous.

[asakiyume]

Okay, now I'm suddenly intensely interested! Onto the to-read list it goes. (... Is it long?)

[skygiants]

It's a bit of a chonker (400 pages ish?) but I found it went pretty fast!

[asakiyume]

I scanned the other replies and saw that you leavened it with other books, so maybe that's what I'll do.

[sushiflop]

I read this book and liked it and also didn't. It was an experience, that's for sure.

I remain curious about the sequel.

[skygiants]

IT IS FOR SURE AN EXPERIENCE.

I'm also curious about the sequel, but it also feels so much like a book that's complete as it is that I'm dubious about it as well ...

[landingtree]

I read this last year! It really stuck with me; also, such a bleak cycle of the same emotional beats over and over!

I thought the line about why the teachers are so cruel - "If you were trying to turn an ant into a human would it help to stop and explain to the ant first?" or whatever exactly it is - was really sold by the descriptions in the back half of the book about what it's like for the protagonist to start understanding the things she's learning.

I felt weird about how the story kept being about the special one, the one who justifies the system by being incredibly talented at being shaped into what the universe needs, in light of the authors' note about how the book draws on the experience of their daughter. I was left going, "Surely the authors know that this would be a bad education system... Right? Even though the system succeeds completely?" I feel differently about it if I think of the world-shaping power the protagonist ends up holding as a metaphor for being a virtuoso with the flute.

[skygiants]

Yeah, fully agreed! I think that kind of sense of the brain turning inside out, becoming other, becoming incomprehensible, is really hard to sell in normal human prose that we are reading with our normal human brains and the book somehow manages it -- extra impressive in translation tbh.

I wasn't sure that I felt that the system succeeded completely -- I mean I also tbh wasn't entirely sure I understood what was happening at the end at all, but it seemed to me that Sasha was rejecting the paradigm and future that the school was trying to give her, and choosing to become else instead. I think? Maybe? Or maybe I just expected so much for that to be what happened that I warped the text as I read it ...

[landingtree]

This makes me want to read it again! What’s stuck in my head reminds me of the movie Whiplash - in which a student defies his abusive teacher and by so doing becomes what the teacher hoped to create, a weird mix of proving the teacher wrong and proving him right. But this is now me comparing something I don’t remember that well to something I remember even less well, so I wouldn’t swear to it.

[octahedrite]

I loved this book and this post makes me want to reread it.

[skygiants]

I had to put it down in the middle to read one or two other books that had to be finished in a time sensitive fashion and I was desperate to get back to it the whole time!

[sovay]

Nobody is at the Institute of Special Technologies by choice. Nobody is there to have a good time. Everyone has been coerced there by an ominous advisor; as entrance precondition, everyone has been given a set of miserable tasks to perform, Or Else.

Is there ever an explanation for how students are chosen for this fate, or is it just part of the horror that it could happen randomly?

(I do not plan to read this book.)

[skygiants]

As in many magic school texts, there is some kind of potential or latent quality in them identified by the teachers -- a quality that becomes clearer and is eventually defined by the end of the book -- but this quality does seem to occur more or less randomly. Sasha's closest connection at the school is the estranged son of her terrifying advisor, but he's the only one who has any kind of pre-existing tie before the events of the story begin.

[vass]

Ooof, that's an excellent description of a way OCD can play out from the inside.

[skygiants]

yeah I would say that's DEFINITELY an element in the text

[rydra_wong]

Oh DAMN, that resonance had not occurred to me, but yeah.

[labingi]

Wow, this sounds like a book I'd like to read, even though magic school books are usually extremely annoying to me. I'll have to keep an eye out for this one. Thanks for the description.

[skygiants]

You're welcome, hope you enjoy it if you do!

[serriadh]

This sounds like it has some things in common with the bits of Emily Tesh I really liked - the “but what if I’m SO GOOD at becoming a super fighter space fascist I don’t actually realise that I’m… a space fascist who is trying to turn all her friends into better space fascists just by sheer Head Girl force of will” part.

[skygiants]

I love Some Desperate Glory, but so as not to mislead you, I don't know that I'd say the two books have all that much in common other than the sense of powerlessness within an educational system -- in a way it's actually sort of the opposite effect, now that I think about it. In Some Desperate Glory Kyr spends the first part of the book delighted by her trajectory, while the reader watching, who understands what's happening better than she does, is like NO WAIT STOP; in Vita Nostra, Sasha and the reader are both equally baffled by her transformation and what the point of it all could be, but boy do we sure both feel weird and bad about it!

[schneefink]

That sounds like very bleak terror indeed!

[skygiants]

I found it very effectively scary!

[kore]

....This sounds both v intriguing and like something I would never be able to read. But interesting!

[skygiants]

It was certainly a very compelling read!

[eglantiere]

dyachenkos are very impressively high concept writers (who also manage to write very broadly relatable characters), and it's a pity that their other books weren't translated, because i would dearly love to see what you make out of Pandem (would it make things better if we all had an omnipotent and omnipresent benevolent being communicating with us directly all the time? it depends!), or The Cave (what if during their sleep people all shared being animals in a sort of dreamworld cave, except that some of those animals were predators and some were prey, and sometimes Things Happened?) and so on. and a bunch of inventive and extremely depressing fantasy.

(apparently there are two sequels out to Vita Nostra now! i should check them out, and i have no doubt they'll be even bleaker than the first one.)

[rachelmanija]

Those other books sound amazing.

[skygiants]

ohhh I would also love to read these other books of theirs if they are ever translated!

(I'm so curious about the sequels to Vita Nostra and yet also can't help myself from being suspicious of them ... I'm still not 100% sure what happened in the ending but it certainly Felt like an Ending.)

[eglantiere]

having just finished school of shards... (i accidentally skipped over the middle book, but i got the gist, i think) i wouldn't say it's bad, but it definitely felt kinda unnecessary. it answers some questions about the first endings, adds some new ones, but i think it kinda overuses the concept and wears it thin.

(i THINK that what happened in the ending of vita nostra was that sasha did, indeed, become a Word as her teachers hoped, except she turned out to be Tetragrammaton. so to speak.)

[shati]

I enjoyed reading the sequels, but they force you to pay attention to the "why" and (a) I didn't get much out of that, (b) that kind of necessarily weakens the mood of incomprehensible terror, which is what I liked the best. But if you do decide to read them, I think you'll appreciate Lisa's role in the first sequel.

[skygiants]

I did always want more Lisa ...

[brownbetty]

I tried to read this book and failed out of it, *possibly* because I could tell it was going to keep being quite grim for quite a while!! But I'm glad you made it through to give me a sort of closure by proxy

[skygiants]

Yeah I would not say it ever becomes less grim! The ... tenor of grimness changes ... and gets weirder ..... but it is always BLEAK.

[marginaliana]

This sounds supremely fascinating and also probably something I should not read because it would not be good for the inside of my head. But wow. If you do end up reading the sequels I would love to hear your thoughts.

[skygiants]

I will for sure report in if I do!

[dhampyresa]

/adds to to-read list

[skygiants]

Curious about your thoughts, if you end up reading!

[hamsterwoman]

I feel like a lot of magic school books are, essentially, power fantasies. [...] but the overwhelming emotion of this book is powerlessness, lack of agency, arbitrary tasks and incomprehensible experiences papered over with a parody of Normal College Life.

Yes! I read this book a few years ago, in Russian (write-up here, if you're curious), and it really felt like a twisted mirror of what I love about magic school narratives normally, but extremely fitting to the Soviet/post-Soviet legacy of its setting.

[skygiants]

YES thank you for linking -- I remembered the things you'd said in your post but not where they came from, so I'd been going around thinking 'who did talk about this in context of the Soviet legacy, I know I read that somewhere!'

[hamsterwoman]

Yay, glad to provide the link :)

[nineveh_uk]

Another thank you for the link. I found the book both odd and compeling, and it's fascinating to see what you mention about the original text - the names and ty/vy switches feel like a loss in translation, even if the latter are inevitable to an extent.

In a way, what I most liked about it was tgat it wasn't so much datk academia as dark polytechnic. Sasha has been sent to study existential brain engineering, whether she likes it or not, and the institute life reflects that. Real-feeling student parties, grinding through the impenetrable course, not glam libraries, being where Sasha will discover the secrets of the universe.

[hamsterwoman]

omg, yes! It is definitely dark polytechnic rather than dark academia -- that's the perfect way of putting it! -- and that is also what I like very much about it, and I think a large part of what felt Uncanny Valley-relatable about it (as opposed to the dark academia books I've tried and promptly bounced off of) -- I may not have gone through Soviet/post-Soviet higher education myself, but I know a lot of people who did, and I did get a degree in a technical thing at a state school (with "public Ivy" pretensions but really not much glam), and Sasha's experiences felt much more real.

[antisoppist]

I was lent this book and had to give it back because usually I like people in terrible situations trying to work out what is going on but I couldn't cope with the vomiting coins and I got to the school where everything is awful and people are being maimed on a daily basis and decided it was too horror for me. I did like that it felt more like what a magic school would actually be like but at this time, the loss of control of your own body was too much for me.

[skygiants]

It's definitely extremely horror IMO!

[ghost_lingering]

This post just inspired me to read the whole trilogy over the course of the last two days, which was certainly ... a choice.

FWIW, IMO: The trilogy as a whole does keep doing interesting things & the third book in particular is a great foil to the first. (Though the second book did have some "middle book of a trilogy" issues, I thought.) But after reading I have so many massive question marks around the school's pedagogy, definitely throughout, but especially in the third book.

I also spent a lot of time going, "is this about communism? is this about the Eastern Orthodox Church?" but I don't know how much that was me actually picking up on things vs me just ... grasping at straws through the weirdness.

[skygiants]

asjd;flkdj I liked this book and read it pretty fast but I do feel like if I read all three in two days it would do something to my brain much like what Sasha experiences with the first run of exercises so I am deeply impressed by your Experience.

That's good to know about the second and third book and definitely does make me more intrigued .... I also kept thinking 'IS this about communism' and sometimes I thought yes! and other times I thought, no, whatever is happening is so much weirder than that!

[gogollescent]

I really relate to the desire for other people to read the sequels to these so I can rubberneck without, per se, having an immediate desire to read the sequels.

Like others in the comments I'm always kind of fascinated by the author's note re: this being inspired by and for their daughter--on the one hand, I get it and it gives me a bit more, idk, respect? charity? for qualities of the book I as not-the-intended-audience was ambivalent about, whether that's the shonen intensity and constant repetitive escalation, or Sasha's just-because specialness, or her yo-yo between defensive cruelty and empathy for Lisa... in the sense that I understand wanting to write realistically about the experience of being young and coming from a place of relative privilege, a.k.a., a still deeply troubled and alienated place! but meeting people your age who have had it far worse and finding it genuinely difficult not to other them for both self-protective and selfish reasons. (That said I did still think this ended with Lisa under the non-protagonist bus in a way that is all the more notable for her being one of the only other characters to rise to the level of fully 'round' human being.) On the other hand, I want to create some kind of chart or moodboard juxtaposing this with Naomi Novik saying the same about Uprooted. The many different messages it is possible to impart to the next generation.

[skygiants]

I spent the whole book simultaneously deeply frustrated by and grudgingly respectful of the amount of time Sasha didn't spend thinking about Lisa ... I wanted to think about Lisa! but it did feel true that Sasha just did not want to think about her as much as she possibly could avoid it, and her very deliberately drawn blinkered self-centeredness did work somewhat to balance out the just-because specialness.

I accidentally skipped the author's note while reading so the by/for their daughter thing has come as Wild News To Me from the comments. It does make me feel a way about the thread between Sasha and her mother.

[gogollescent]

This is the thing, right, as far as Sasha on the one hand remaining defiantly walled off to this to the bitter end (and being our only narrative camera throughout), but on the other hand this therefore also not being depicted as "protagonist deigns to confer meaning on [side character's tragic backstory] via a special episode." And agreed about her mother--for a book written by parents for a teenaged or recently teenaged child I feel like it's refreshingly unsparing about the disappointments/betrayals of that relationship, even as it also doesn't make this a tidy thing she can just emotionally disinvest from at will: quite the opposite.