The best (5 stars):
Boy swallows universe was the highlight of the year. An amazing book. Rebecca was an unlikely find from a best-of list. James Islington came up with a great new fantasy series perfectly contained in three books.
Special mentions (4.5 stars):
YES! This is what I want. The west wing in space, but not just politics and government, give me an industry I know nothing about and do a deep-dive within a fictional framework.
Anyway, this novel delivers a political game-of-thrones power struggle for an alien planet whose culture is significantly defined by poetry. There's some interesting alien tech, called an imago, but it comes with significant problems that mean our protagonist has to get by without it for a large part of the novel.
Martine delivers a great political maneuvering thriller between different factions as viewed by an outsider who needs to negotiate a complex geo-political and personal landscape from a weak position. There's a good amount of action in the form of assassinations and uprisings to keep things interesting, although it felt a little under-described in some places.
Apparently the author leaned heavily on her knowledge of Byzantine history and politics to build the plot and power struggle, of which I know nothing, but it certainly felt very real and plausible. Considerable effort went into world building: linguistics, naming, poetry, political factions.
Some minor quibbles and slight spoilers:
Very deserving of the Hugo.
4.5 stars.
It starts out great. The incremental reveal of knowledge facilitated by amnesia was masterful, I was so thirsty to learn everything about this mysterious and dangerous world creating weird monsters and its mysterious powerful siblings warring with each other. But within a few pages our protagonist walks a deus ex machina pattern and now knows everything he forgot. There goes all of the anticipation and world building.
The strange part is that nothing is explained to the reader. He's just now trying to be the king of Amber for literally no defined reason. And apparently everyone else wants to be the king too, and are willing to kill their siblings for the privilege. Why? Power? Money? Do they not have enough of those already as princes? Who knows because literally none of the character motivations are revealed.
And where did it all lead? To the throne of Amber, of course. For that was sufficient justification for anything.
Is it? WHY?
Even now, Bleys and I could find Shadow Ambers where each of us ruled, and spend all of time and eternity ruling there. But this would not be the same, for us. For none would be the true Amber, the city into which we were born, the city from which all others take their shapes.
What, so now you're explicitly telling me this is all pointless. Why should I care about any of these idiots then?
But whatever, let's go pick up an army for this dumb war. Done. In like a page. Let's vaguely describe what they look like, and I'm now their god. Not telling why they think that or how I convinced them to die for my inexplicable power trip:
Then I reviewed the troops again and told them more of Amber. Strangely, they go along like brothers, the big red guys and the little hairy ones. It was sad and it was true. We were their gods, and that was that.
OK I think I need a navy, let me talk to my brother, OK cool got one. Let's go:
We talked for maybe an hour, after which time the northern seaways were open to the three phantom fleets of Bleys, which might enter expecting reinforcements.
Then most of the army and the navy died on the way into Amber, I won't describe it in any detail though, wouldn't want a pesky story to get in the way of just delivering death statistics:
It was three more hours before things let up, and many more later I learned that we had lost half of the fleet (and on my vessel—the flagship—we had lost forty of the crew of one hundred and twenty). It was a hard rain that fell.
Oh, and by the way, I know it's kinda mean to delude millions of people into thinking I'm a god and kill them in a pointless war for a throne I could just have in another identical world, but I feel a bit bad about it:
Then there was the card for Amber itself. I could take myself there with it and try an assassination, but I figured the odds were about a million to one against my living to effect it. I was willing to die fighting, but it was senseless for all these men to go down with me.
I mean I'm totally willing to die for this, but not if I might actually die, like, for real. Far better for millions of my red furry slaves to die instead for a war I'm pretty sure I won't actually win anyway.
If you're so keen on killing Eric, just go there and try yourself again, you came pretty close the first time.
1 star.
Having survived the cruelest of wars, how does one go on in a hostile or indifferent world?
When you have lost everything except memory, how can you count on the future or become attached to another person? Wiesel has written that God died in the camps for him, and it shows in the self-reflection here.
Once I asked my teacher, Kalman the cabalist, the following question: For what purpose did God create man? I understand that man needs God. But what need of man has God?
Suffering brings out the lowest, the most cowardly in man. There is a phase of suffering you reach beyond which you become a brute: beyond it you sell your soul—and worse, the souls of your friends—for a piece of bread, for some warmth, for a moment of oblivion, of sleep. Saints are those who die before the end of the story. The others, those who live out their destiny, no longer dare look at themselves in the mirror, afraid they may see their inner image: a monster laughing at unhappy women and at saints who are dead…
The problem is not: to be or not to be. But rather: to be and not to be. What it comes down to is that man lives while dying, that he represents death to the living, and that’s where tragedy begins.
Our stay there planted time bombs within us. From time to time one of them explodes. And then we are nothing but suffering, shame, and guilt. We feel ashamed and guilty to be alive, to eat as much bread as we want, to wear good, warm socks in the winter. One of these bombs, Kathleen, will undoubtedly bring about madness. It’s inevitable. Anyone who has been there has brought back some of humanity’s madness. One day or another, it will come to the surface.
3 stars
This one is a thought experiment from Wiesel about an alternative path his life could have taken after the war and the liberation of his concentration camp. In his own words:
Suppose the American army, instead of sending me to France, had handed me a visa to the Holy Land—would I have had the courage to join one of the movements that fought for the right of the Jewish people to form an independent state in their ancestral homeland? And if so, could I have gone all the way in my commitment and killed a man, a stranger?
and not just after the camps, but what would he have done if he'd spent two or four years in the camps instead of one? Would he have become a kapo and what would he have done if he was required to strike a friend?
The novel is deeply introspective:
A man hates his enemy because he hates his own hate. He says to himself: This fellow, my enemy, has made me capable of hate. I hate him not because he’s my enemy, not because he hates me, but because he arouses me to hate.
...Because my people have never known how to hate. Their tragedy, throughout the centuries, has stemmed from their inability to hate those who have humiliated and from time to time exterminated them. Now our only chance lies in hating you, in learning the necessity and the art of hate.
3 stars
