It’s impossible to talk about this book without mentioning The One Trick at its centre. You might say it’s a spoiler, so consider yourself warned.
The story is narrated by a nameless woman who works as an actor in a stage play. She meets a young man, Xavier, who claims to be her long-lost son and is seeking a reunion. But she maintains that she never had a son, having had a miscarriage earlier in her life. The third point in the novel’s central triangle is her husband, Tomas, whom she believes is suspicious about her meeting with Xavier because of her past infidelities.
Here comes The One Trick: halfway through the novel, we get a “Part Two” title page, and suddenly, Xavier is indeed her and Tomas’s son. He asks to move back into their home, and they have to re-adapt to his presence. This puts a strain on the family, especially later, when his girlfriend starts to live there too.
The book really drew me in because of how it confused me. Even before the Trick, it makes you question what is reality for the narrator.
A short story collection that I picked up on my recent trip to Italy. The cool thing about it is, the stories are published as “parallel texts,” with the original Italian prose printed on the left (even-numbered) pages, and the English translation printed on the right (odd-numbered) pages. I don’t know Italian, beyond briefly dabbling in Duolingo, but I still tried to scan my eyes across the two pages to make connections between the vocabularies. I think it would be a great learning aid for someone picking up a new language.
It made me think about the process of translation as a whole. For this book, they seemed to have tried to maintain a strict alignment, i.e., the paragraphs start and end at the same vertical position on both sides of the page. I wonder if they were particularly rigorous because of the format of this book. If they didn’t need to present both texts side-by-side, would they take more liberties with sentence length and structure?
This was a vacation read, started on my recent trip to Italy, which involved long rides on a tour bus. It was not the best environment for intense attentive reading, and this novel fit the bill. The prose style is simple and sometimes a little bit quirky, which I appreciated for a light read.
The story follows a teenage girl named Frankie. Over the summer holiday, she meets a boy, a fellow outsider, and together they create a piece of art that they photocopy and post all over town. The poster features a poetical phrase1 that she composes:
The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are the fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.
The emotional core of Freedom, for me, was the love triangle between married couple Walter and Patty Berglund, and Walter’s rock star best friend, Richard. The three met in college, and for Patty, it was the classic choice: lust for the wild and dangerous musician, or the comfort of the responsible nice guy.
The book has an interesting structure, starting with a section told from the perspective of the Berglund’s suburban neighbours. It’s got a gossipy feel, like they see the cracks in the marriage, but can only speculate on the couple’s true nature from a distance.
Then, we get a chapter that’s taken from Patty’s therapeutic journal. She writes about her life story in the third person, but inserts running commentary as “the autobiographer,” often with self-deprecating or rueful reflections. I thought it was a really compelling way to dive into a character.
I’m glad to report that my journey with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is ending on a positive note. I wasn’t a fan of the previous entry, so I was a little worried about Foundation and Earth. Fortunately, I thought it was a huge improvement. It’s a direct continuation from Foundation’s Edge, so in hindsight, it’s almost as if the previous book was all a setup for the truly compelling part of the story.
I didn’t like the messy parallel plotlines in Foundation’s Edge, and so the main thing I appreciated about this one was its focus on a single group of characters, who are embarking on a single quest. We have Trevize, a member of the Foundation who’s got the weight of the galaxy on his shoulders, and his best bud, Pelorat, a scholar and all-round chill guy. Pelorat’s romantic partner, Bliss, is also part of the crew, and it’s in this three-sided dynamic that I got most of my enjoyment. It’s surprisingly sweet and relatable, how Trevize distrusts Bliss, simply because she’s Pelorat’s new girlfriend, and he doesn’t want his pal to get hurt. Add to that the conflict between Trevize’s and Bliss’s viewpoints about the fate of the galaxy, and you have some real satisfying character development.
The book is by no means perfect… I think it could have used some editing, because the debates between Trevize and Bliss, while thematically relevant, often feel repetitive, hitting the same beats over and over again. And any time a new female character was introduced, I cringed in anticipation of the inevitable tasteless description of her body.
Foundation’s Edge was published almost 30 years after the original Foundation trilogy, and you can feel that distance when you’re reading it. The sociological ideas that were at the forefront of the original books are kind of in the background now, replaced by a more conventional sci-fi adventure.
The setup of the novel doubles down on the mind-control conceit introduced in the previous books: Trevize, a councilman of the Foundation, suspects that the Second Foundation is secretly pulling the strings of human history using their “mentalic” powers. At the same time, Gendibal, one of the leaders of the Second Foundation, also suspects that there’s yet another more powerful force out there, mentally controlling them.
For me, this made the mind-control plot device feel tired: if there’s always the possibility that some unseen force is actually calling the shots, then as a reader, I lose track of the characters’ motivations. I also found the two protagonists too similar: they’re both young and arrogant iconoclasts who don’t toe the party line, hunting for a hidden adversary, and to me, the two parallel storylines started to blend together.
By coincidence, I experienced a funny bit of synergy by reading this book and watching the show Bad Sisters at the same time. They’re both murder mysteries set in Ireland, and bled together slightly in my mind. I started to imagine the detective character in the book with the same appearance as the actor in the series. And because my ear had been hearing the spoken dialogue, I was able to mentally approximate the sound of the Irish accent while reading.
The novel is told from the perspective of Toby, and before the main mystery even kicks in, he gets assaulted by burglers breaking into his home, leaving him with a head injury. As he’s recovering at his fancy family home, his cousin’s kids accidentally discover a skeleton inside a tree in the yard. It shouldn’t be too much of a spoiler to say that the body belongs to someone from Toby’s high school days1, and various members of his family—his uncle and his cousins—all become suspects. Including Toby himself.
Here we are, at the end of the original Foundation trilogy. Over the course of reading the three books, I could sense that Isaac Asimov was gaining in confidence and skill. The style of the first novel was somewhat staid and dry, but by this third book, his writing had gained some flourishes, making it more fun to read.
By introducing the Mule and his powers in Foundation and Empire, the series added a new layer to the plotting. Both the Mule and the Second Foundation—a secretive parallel counterpart to the First Foundation that we’ve been following so far—possess mental abilities, which allows them to brainwash and control the actions of ordinary people.
Much of this novel feels like a spy thriller. Characters form alliances, but nobody can be fully trusted, because anyone can be a secret agent under the control of the other side. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the conclusion involves a series of scenes where an answer is revealed, only to be turned around with a twist, and the real answer being revealed… but then there’s another twist, etc. It’s almost comical how many times it undercuts itself, but I had a blast with it.
I much preferred this to the previous book, especially the second half, called “The Mule.” In the original Foundation novel, there’s a feeling of inevitability, which is kind of the point. The fledgling Foundation faces crises, i.e. threats from other planetary civilations, but it always turns out that Hari Seldon predicted what was going to happen. When the crises are resolved, always in the Foundation’s favour, it’s revealed that it was the only way that events could have unfolded.
Foundation and Empire turns the idea on its head by introducing a character called “The Mule,” who conquers planets at an alarming rate, and threatens to take over the Foundation. Without spoiling too much, I’ll just say that the Mule is unique, and since Seldon’s predictions only work on broad social events, the Mule throws the preordained plan into chaos.
In contrast to the “everything always works out” ethos of the previous novel, the Mule creates real tension and suspense. We experience the story through characters who don’t know what’s going to happen next… which is basically like most stories we read, but feels refreshing in this world of predestination.
This novel came to my attention during the Booker Prize shortlist period. On paper, it’s right up my alley—a literary novel with a space travel/sci-fi theme—and so, when it won the award, I became quite eager to get my hands on it.
The novel puts us on board the International Space Station, along with its crew of six astronauts, as they orbit the Earth. It covers a 24-hour period, during which they go around the world 16 times. There’s no plot really, other than a growing typhoon over Asia, and the fact that another crew is launching a mission to the moon on that same day.
The prose is well-written, with many poetic turns of phrase and lyrical passages. It does a good job of evoking the hardships that the astronauts go through: their sense of time is all out of whack because they experience 16 sunrises and sunsets every “day,” and they’re fighting to keep their bodies healthy in an envirnoment that humans are not built for.
After six months in space they will, in technical terms, have aged 0.007 seconds less than someone on earth. But in other respects they’ll have aged five or ten years more, and this is only in the ways they currently understand. They know that the vision can weaken and the bones deteriorate. Even with so much exercise still the muscles will atrophy. The blood will clot and the brain shift in its fluid. The spine lengthens, the T cells struggle to reproduce, kidney stones form. While they’re here food tastes of little. Their sinuses are murder.
But ultimately, I was disappointed with my reading experience. I found it frustrating because there was little narrative drive for me.
