A meandering, but moving, look at queer identity.
A college student’s romantic obsession with another woman threatens to derail her happiness.
Taipei in the late 1980s. Lazi is 18, newly enrolled in college, and describes herself as “an innately beautiful peacock” who is “pure carrion inside.” Depressed and self-harming over her attraction to women, Lazi enters into a toxic relationship with Shui Ling, a fellow student. During the course of their on-again, off-again unconsummated relationship, Lazi turns to a group of friends whose love lives are as complicated as her own. Qiu (Last Words from Montmartre, 2014), who died in 1995 at the age of 26, structures her essentially plotless novel as a series of eight notebooks that take us through Lazi’s college years. These notebooks can be unabashedly adolescent—sentences like “The glow on her face was like rays of sunshine along a golden beach” abound. Also true to the college experience are the long pages of abstract conversation Lazi and her friends engage in, usually late at night. But in many ways, Qiu’s willingness to show youth at its most self-absorbed and earnest is part of the book’s appeal. Most readers—perhaps especially those who identify as LGBTQ—will see themselves somewhere in Lazi’s agonized social circle. But Qiu also reminds her readers at every turn how truly isolating otherness can be: interspersed with Lazi’s musings, Qiu tells a kind of surreal, contemporary fable of a crocodile, the subject of equal parts bigotry and misplaced reverence. The crocodile’s plight, as it “got home from work [and] removed the sweat-soaked human suit clinging to its body,” serves as an odd, but perfect, metaphor for Lazi, whose true heartbreak is feeling so alien as to scarcely feel human.
A meandering, but moving, look at queer identity.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68137-076-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
For those who like their science fiction dense, monumental, and a bit overwrought.
Brown is back with Book 4 of his Red Rising series (Morning Star, 2016, etc.) and explores familiar themes of rebellion, revenge, and political instability.
This novel examines the ramifications and pitfalls of trying to build a new world out of the ashes of the old. The events here take place 10 years after the conclusion of Morning Star, which ended on a seemingly positive note. Darrow, aka Reaper, and his lover, Virginia au Augustus, aka Mustang, had vanquished the Golds, the elite ruling class, so hope was held out that a new order would arise. But in the new book it becomes clear that the concept of political order is tenuous at best, for Darrow’s first thoughts are on the forces of violence and chaos he has unleashed: “famines and genocide...piracy...terrorism, radiation sickness and disease...and the one hundred million lives lost in my [nuclear] war.” Readers familiar with the previous trilogy—and you'll have to be if you want to understand the current novel—will welcome a familiar cast of characters, including Mustang, Sevro (Darrow’s friend and fellow warrior), and Lysander (grandson of the Sovereign). Readers will also find familiarity in Brown’s idiosyncratic naming system (Cassius au Bellona, Octavia au Lune) and even in his vocabulary for cursing (“Goryhell,” “Bloodydamn,” “Slag that”). Brown introduces a number of new characters, including 18-year-old Lyria, a survivor of the initial Rising who gives a fresh perspective on the violence of the new war—and violence is indeed never far away from the world Brown creates. (He includes one particularly gruesome gladiatorial combat between Cassius and a host of enemies.) Brown imparts an epic quality to the events in part by his use of names. It’s impossible to ignore the weighty connotations of characters when they sport names like Bellerephon, Diomedes, Dido, and Apollonius.
For those who like their science fiction dense, monumental, and a bit overwrought.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-425-28591-6
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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