skygiants

The City in Glass is I think my favorite of Nghi Vo's full-length novels so far, for the reason that it seems to feel the least need to actually force itself to take the shape of a novel. The description calls it "a brilliantly constructed history and an epic love story;" I don't quite think it's either of those things, though the first more than the second.

In the first chapter of The City in Glass, the seaside city of Azril, which the demon Vitrine loves, is destroyed, very thoroughly, by angels. Why? That's not what Vitrine cares to talk about or to remember. What she wants to remember is the city in its heyday, the place and the people, and that's what she spends the first half of the book doing: wandering through the ruins, accumulating bits and pieces of memory, grieving and gradually building a determination to see the city become itself again, somehow.

One of the angels is stuck there too, because she cursed him. She is not happy to see him and does not want him there. Though she is glad that this means that he's suffering horribly! Fringe benefit! Nonetheless. This of course is the dynamic that the description calls "an epic love story" which I think does not really accurately convey ... the vibe .......... the thing that is going on here certainly does contain elements of both 'enemies' and 'lovers' but is definitely messier than I think the standard image that this phrase conjures.

Anyway. In the second half of the book, people do come back to Azril, and it becomes a city again. Vitrine, frankly, has mixed feelings about this: no city can ever be the same city twice, and she's still yearning for Azril-as-it-was, which is neither possible to have nor reasonable to want. Nonetheless. The new city of Azril is shaped by both Vitrine and the angel, and reshapes them in turn, as they reshape each other, in various painful ways. And, in the end, Vitrine finds something to love forever!

Weird book. Vivid, evocative, odd. Not really shaped like a novel, and, I think, better for it. I read it in a single night, and had some feelings about the various shapes of its grief.

Nghi Vo's The Chosen and the Beautiful is a slightly magical The Great Gatsby AU from the POV of Vietnamese adoptee Jordan Baker, and as I started to read it, I did very much spend the first several chapters thinking "maybe I should stop and reread The Great Gatsby first before coming back?"

...and part of me does regret a little that I did not do that, because I do think there are moments in the book that would have worked better for me, or had more layers to them, if I could remember the original well enough to determine exactly which choices and divergences Vo was making. On the other hand, the real question is, does the book work as a book itself or just as a fun exercise in intertextuality? And by like three-quarters of the way in I was invested enough in Vo's particular Jordan Baker and her own unique internal life and uneasy placement within the society through which she moves that I no longer felt a constant burning desire to go find the closest copy of The Great Gatsby for cross-reference, so I would say ... probably yes? Eventually, mostly?

Like, the parts of the book that are unique to this book -- especially the parts that lean into Jordan's paper-craft magic, flat figures and doppelgangers -- are really good; I read this book back in July or so and there are a couple scenes that are still haunting me. And I understand why this story interwoven around the Gatsby story, it's relevant and thematic; I do think possibly the balance was a little off? Like, this book sort of feels like ivy growing around the tree that's the Fitzgerald original ... the ivy is beautiful and changes the aspect dramatically but the tree is generally still the central structural thing and I think there's enough here that it didn't have to be, this could have been a ... new tree? The metaphor is possibly getting away from me a little.

Anyway, I did enjoy it very much and as always Vo's prose is gorgeous, her characters interestingly edged and her way with a central image simply superb. I admit -- coming back to Gatsby -- the thing that surprised me the most was the relatively central and sympathetic positioning of Nick and the Nick/Jordan romance, because tbh my vague memory from reading The Great Gatsby was that both Nick and Jordan were too afflicted with cynical observer syndrome to be particularly invested in each other at all as anything other than a brunch-date-of-convenience ... this was probably the biggest thing I wanted to cross-reference against the original just because I cannot at all tell if this is a true memory of The Great Gatsby (which I last read in the year 2002 or thereabouts) or simply many years of fandom osmosis.

That said, I did really love the way that particular thread concluded -- an incredible feat of full-book recontextualization that more or less justified the project of The Chosen and the Beautiful for me in and of itself.

The 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!