meeja consumed

[lotesse]

Watched Roma with my family over the holiday. It was very beautiful, a very intense and high-detail sensory experience ... other parts, though, felt very inaccessible. I felt like I understood it better when I read that it was based on Cuaron's memories from his childhood, because it very much conveys the caring detachment of children toward their caregivers' griefs. The film loves Cleo, and cares about her, but it's a child and it does not understand; and Cleo, also, seems not to understand. I was somewhat frustrated, by the film's end, that clearer understanding did not come; but it was an obvious artistic choice not to give it, for sure.

I re-read the first half of Parable of the Sower, and then had to take the book back to the library -- and I'm not sure if I'm going to try again to make it through. This is my first return to Butler since I first read her as a college student. She's a figure that I have huge respect for, as a literary giant and a woman of genius. I didn't like PotS in college, because it was just so heavy. I went back to it now very deliberately, because for all that I didn't like it fannishly, as a work of predictive fiction it's continuing to be uncomfortably on point. If anything, my initial problems with the book are magnified -- it's so powerful and well-written and interesting and real, and it just drains away all my hope for human existence, and it gets hard to go on. I'm also not real into the religious angle, and that doesn't help. It makes me see life as so tissue-paper fragile, civilization as such a courtly lie -- and it's not wrong, not wrong at all, but a person can only bear so much looking directly into the sun. Maybe I need to try another starting point w Butler all together?

Comments

[stellar_dust]

I've been meaning to read Parable of the Sower (it's been on my shelf for a few years now). The only Butler I've read is Kindred - it drew me in very quickly and I finished it in a day, but it's also an emotionally difficult read with a lot of hard truths. But as it's shorter than PotS and not part of a series, maybe it's a better entry point to her works?

[lotesse]

I'm frustrated with myself, because some parts of PotS pull on me very fannishly, but I can't seem to plow through the more difficult parts of it to get at them. The protag character is a driven young woman with a somewhat mysterious "hyperempathy syndrome," meaning she experiences the pain of others if she becomes aware of it. This is super fascinating and catnippy to me -- but I want it in a much more playful and melodramatic world, and Butler is just so merciless about slamming one into harsh reality.

I had Kindred out from the library as well, but it was overdue before I thought to renew it, so I returned it yesterday. I'd love to hear a little more about what you liked about it -- I like to have some spoilers in mind when going into a book!

[stellar_dust]

Hmm, let's see how well I can articulate this! The main character is a black woman married to a white man in I think the 1970s, and while they're in the process of moving house she is repeatedly and mysteriously transported back in time to the antebellum South where she encounters her ancestor, a slave owner, at multiple different points through his life. It doesn't fit any standard time travel tropes: there's never any possibility that she will be able to use 20th century ideas to change the way anyone thinks in the past, and she isn't the sort of character who needs to be taught a lesson about attending to history - she's just there for no obvious reason, she has to either fit in or die, and she has trouble doing that in many ways. The story pulls no punches about violence and racism and slavery, I think it draws a more accurate picture of its historical setting than many such books, but it's not interested in moralizing or placing blame: the main thing that I think it has to say is: this happened, this is happening, and we (as individuals and collectively) need to do the hard work to look at it with clarity, acknowledge it, and deal with it productively.

I also think the main character is likable and relateable, and the historical aspect is fascinating (when she's in the present she does a lot of research to process and contextualize what's happening to her, and it raises hard questions about the relationship between ancestry and family that I wish it had spent more time with). And it's written in such a way that I always needed to know what was going to happen next, even when I was pretty sure it was going to be horrible.

I don't know, it's a hard book to talk about. I'm not sure whether I'll read it again, but I'm glad to have read it once.

[melannen]

...Apparently I have had "Kindred" and "Fledgling" mixed up in my head all this time. Ooops. I blame V:tM.

I read "Wild Seed" in college, and while it definitely continues the trend of dropping you into harsh reality, I found it a little more accessible than other Butler I've tried, although that may just be because it was more divorced from my own experience.

[stellar_dust]

Maybe I should pick up one of those instead of trying to tackle PotS. Did you read Wild Seed for a class?

[starshipfox]

I've read some of Butler, but never Parable of the Sower. I have a huge respect for her too but I find her hard to engage with because her work is so dark and lacking in hope. I feel a similar way about the work of N.K. Jemisin.