Review: Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes

Marketing did Natalie Haynes’ delightful Medusa retelling dirty. From the reviews, it appears readers went in expecting Madeline Miller’s magnificent Circe except with snakes for hair. I get it: the subtitle “Medusa’s Story” hints towards an intensely intimate perspective of a woman grappling with being the sole mortal among her gorgon sisters or working through the trauma of her violation in Athene’s temple. It’s not that book. It’s a different book. It’s good at what it sets out to do, and, unsurprisingly, fails at accomplishing what it doesn’t aim to do.

So what does it set out to do? Well, here my empathy for the misled readers ends because it is laid out fully from the very first page:

I see you. I see all those who men call monsters.

And I see the men who call them that. Call themselves heroes, of course.

I only see them for an instant. Then they’re gone.

But it’s enough. Enough to know that the hero isn’t the one who’s kind or brave or loyal. Sometimes – not always, but sometimes – he is monstrous.

And the monster? Who is she? She is what happens when someone cannot be saved.

This particular monster is assaulted, abused and vilified. And yet, as the story is always told, she is the one you should fear. She is the monster.

We’ll see about that.

Stone Tears is a story about what makes someone a monster. It is about Medusa, yes, but it is also about the “men who call [her] that” and who “call themselves heroes”. It is about “all those who men call monsters.” The second page takes us soaring above the world we are about to explore, a literal birds-eye view of a world structured around patriarchal dominance: gods over mortals, kings over subjects, men over women. Each of these power relations, we will see, creates monsters. The next chapter zooms into one such relationship: Zeus, king of the gods, hunts down and rapes the minor goddess Metis and then swallows her whole. It’s an intense chapter, the monstrosity of it is vivid. 

Readers waiting for “Medusa’s story” will have to wait until the 10% mark to hear through her eyes for the first time. Medusa is raised by her Gorgon sisters. It is a tiny isolated community: the three women live alone, lovingly tending a humble flock of sheep. The egalitarianism of it contrasts the scheming, power-hungry gods and monarchs of the surrounding chapters.

Medusa’s principle foil is, of course, Perseus, re-imagined as a Brock Turner or Brett Kavanaugh type: immensely privileged by birth, given help at every step of the way, whining as he fails upwards, and almost unbelievably cruel. Narratively, Perseus’s story is structured as a classic Hero's Journey—because of course it is in the classic retelling. Haynes deftly plays on our expectations with this trope, showing Perseus follow the expected steps of embarking on a quest and seeking wisdom and playing roguish tricks on a trio of three wise women, then taunting the reader for sympathizing with someone so carelessly cruel, so monstrous.

So perhaps when you’ve finished congratulating Perseus for his quick tricks, you might spare a moment to think about how the Graiai lived after he was gone. 

Blind and hungry.

With Medusa’s deadly head retrieved, Perseus wanders through the world killing indiscriminately and remorselessly, leaving the narrative for the last time laughing after turning his bride’s extended family to stone, musing how he will let others clean up his mess. 

But it is not just Perseus who is a monster. We see monstrous behavior in the gods’ egotistical violence: Zues’s rape and consumption of Metis, Poseidon’s rape of Medusa, his collective punishment of the Ethiopians for the vanity of their queen, Athene—powerless to take aim at her true target, Poseidon—cursing Medusa. We see other humans acting monstrously: a father who locked up his daughters out of fears of prophecies, a king forcing his brother’s life partner to marry him. Over and over, the true monster is patriarchy and its agents.

The horror of these figures of Greek mythology, varyingly beautiful or at least not portrayed as physically monstrous, is contrasted with the warm, caring sisterhood of the Gorgon sisters. Sthenno and Euryale’s loving reflections on the surprising delights and unsettling fears of motherhood are so human you forget they have tusks, wings and talons.

The hero/monster reversal is a very fun angle for a Greek mythology retelling. It’s satisfying terrain to explore here in the West as we reconsider Western myths from the colonization of the New World to which of the Allied forces was chiefly responsible for the defeat of the Nazis in World War II. Haynes is at times didactic in her calling out to readers the monstrosity of her characters—I don’t begrudge her for it, the monsters of history and popular books attract far too many fans. Haynes tells the story from a creative array of characters: Medusa, Perseus, Athene all get their say, but so too the individual snakes that make up Medusa’s hair, and Medusa’s decapitated head. Perspective influences your definition of a monster, after all. 

Those looking for a more serpentine Circe should look elsewhere. Those with some tolerance for somewhat Marvel-y dialogue interested in a feminist retelling of a half dozen interwoven episodes from Greek mythology will enjoy Stone Blind.

Review: Beowulf, translation by Maria Dahvana Headley

The rhythm of the translation was almost distractingly delightful to read over audiobook. The alliteration and assonance and word play were often very fun. However, I found many of the very-modern translations a little jarring: "hashtag blessed", "dude" (although I like "bro" and "swole"--they bridge modernity and antiquity better), and "no shit". I appreciate the author's avoidance of anachronistic archaic words like "betwixt" but it was too much for me. This passage perhaps best encapsulates the highs and lows of the translation:

They cornered it, clubbed it, tugged it onto the rocks,
stillbirthed it from its mere-mother, deemed it
damned, and made of it a miscarriage. They
examined its entrails, awed and aggrieved.

Meanwhile, Beowulf gave zero shits.

The translator set out to bring to life the women in the story, and I think she succeeded well at this. The most memorable passages were the battle with Grendel's mother and with the (female) dragon. Who, really, were the victims versus the monsters in the tale? These women wielded power in their own right, they had motivations of their own and justifications for their actions.

Old stories prompt reflection of changes in storytelling and morality. The pacing of the poem feels off for modern senses: the first battles happen very quickly, and don't follow the typical incite/failure/reflection/success pattern expected of a hero's journey. The battles are unexpectedly brief relative to the lavish scenes of gift giving or funeral rites that follow them. This difference in emphasis is a good peek into how important kin bonds and rewarding loyal armsmen was to the social structure of the time. The Odyssey is similar in this way, but Emily Wilson's modern, feminist translation is much better.

Review: Pandora's Jar by Natalie Haynes

Pandora’s Jar examines some of the women of Greek mythology – from Pandora to Penelope, highlighting the agency (or lack thereof) women have in the narrative, how they are objectified by the narrative voice, or how their failures or successes are rewarded or punished by the narrative compared to that of similar male characters. This kind of critique is the mainstay of feminist media critique, and Pandora’s Jar does it compellingly and with humour. 

This kind of critique of older media sometimes elicits angry retorts (always from men) about how it was a different time, and we cannot apply the standards of our present to the great works of masterful (male) writers from back then. Where I think Pandora’s Jar is particularly interesting is that the author points out over and over again how contemporary versions of these mythological women were often far more egalitarian in their depictions than some of the more modern versions we have come to know. As an example, ancient Greek depictions of Pandora emphasized not the “unleashing of evil/chaos” that we know her for now, but instead portray her role as the first woman, showered with gifts from the gods — an Eve without the apple scene. The play that underpins most of our conceptions of Oedipus, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, gives barely 150 lines to Jocasta and very little space to her emotional journey, despite being by all accounts an innocent victim in a tragic story. Just a few years after this play’s first performance, Euripides gives us The Phoenician Women, where Oedipus barely features while Jocasta flexes her political muscles brokering a peace between her warring sons and braves a battlefield. Euripedes is hardly an outlier; the poets Stesichorus and Statius also produced works that centered Jocasta more. 

Why is it that these more feminist angles didn’t survive the millennia to occupy the same role in our pop culture? Haynes offers a few suggestions, emphasizing mostly taste or cultural currents: “As we change, so these characters have also changed as if to match us.” For example, Greek plays were often performed at nightclubs, where men might bring their mistresses, and these same men might not have been too fond of versions of Clytemnestra’s story that paint her murdering her cheating (and filicidal) husband as anything too sympathetic. During the twentieth century, changes in religious attitudes may have been why Anouilh’s 1944 adaptation of Oedipus switched the birth order of two siblings: what was first “appropriate if excessive religious fervor in an older sibling” became the “behavior of a rebellious younger sibling.” Under-emphasized is the explanation highlighted by Parenti in The Assassination of Julius Caesar: classic history is mostly written and interpreted by wealthy white men. I would have liked to see Haynes engage with this lens more.

The bias in these stories — and all stories we pass on — matters. The first versions we encounter become what is seen as “standard”, even when they’ve been toned down or distorted from some “authentic” version. Other versions we encounter become “re-tellings”, and their deviations from the expected script can take on a political, status quo-questioning quality.

But because we read them as children, we don’t always consider them critically: we tend to see them as a neutral, authoritative version from which other versions deviate. And – like all books – they reflect the values of their time. So while I don’t want to dissuade you from reading these stories to children, I would urge you to counterbalance the quiet prejudice which lurks within them.

Review: A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles – this they named empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

First contact stories typically consider two questions: 

1. What is the political response of humanity to a new intelligent species? 
2. How do we define humanity/consciousness? 

Some stories focus on the first question: Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem series is one such example. Humanity has 400 years to stave off extinction at the hands of the Trisolaris alien race, how do they respond? Other stories focus on the second question: in Ursula K Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness, ambassador Genly discovers the genderless Gethenians, and discovers what it means to be human without gender. However, the second strand is present in both stories. The Trisolaris aliens are unable to deceive, and this difference between humans and aliens forms an essential aspect of humanity’s political response. Genly is intentionally sent as a lone ambassador, a political decision made to encourage social integration between the ambassador and the aliens.

A Desolation Called Peace considers both questions in roughly equal parts but its answers felt rather shallow and disconnected. The political response of the sprawling Teixcalaan empire is to send a military force to face the aliens, who have been skirmishing with pilots and knocking out resource centers. At the hint of a threat, Emperor Nineteen Adze and her Minister of War send orders to nuke the alien planet. The emperor justifies her decision with rather frightening colonial language. 

“It is a terrible thing to do, and a terrible decision to make. But that’s what Emperors are for. (...) I’d rather have a pyrrhic victory—display just what Teixcalaan is capable of, smash a living beautiful planet full of people—and yes, they probably are people, but not the kind of people we can understand—smash it to dust and deathrain. I’d rather one act of horror than an endless war of attrition, losing our people and theirs, on and on and on. Like a suppurating wound at the edge of the Empire, forever. Sometimes it is better to cauterize.”

Through the plucky actions of the empire heir apparent Eight Antidote, the army general’s best friend, an ambassador and a bureaucrat, cooler heads prevail, the aliens are recognized as human, and the war ends. What becomes of those calling for genocide? Nineteen Adze shrugs and expresses eagerness to eventually hand over the heavy responsibilities of being an emperor to Eight Antidote. Nineteen Adze isn’t the hero of the narrative, her willingness to slaughter entire villages and sometimes entire planets for strategic outcomes isn’t presented as morally right, but neither is it fully presented as morally wrong. This same sort of calculus is made throughout the narrative: protagonist Nine Hibiscus slaughters rebels to maintain peace in the empire, euthanizes a soldier to prevent a painful death, and enables the assassination of a military commander to prevent the destruction of the alien planet. The message is clearly that sometimes a little devastation is required to prevent more devastation, but the story doesn’t take a clear position on when. Is the message that imperial leaders who call for genocide won’t be punished, but will continue their careers uninterrupted? Is it that whether cauterizing the wound is smart or cruel can only be determined retrospectively? Unsatisfying.

What of the second question posed by First Contact stories: what does it mean to be human? These aliens are revealed to share thoughts and memories between individuals. Accustomed to consciousness being a hivemind, they do not, at first, appreciate what the death of individuals means to humans. In the world of Teixcalaan, a few technologies have given humans the ability to form their own sorts of shared thoughts and memories. The surveillance state at the heart of the empire allows for law enforcement to behave and respond like a hive. The Stationers’ imago technology allows for inheritance of memory between individuals in the form of a brain implant. Teixclaani fighter spaceships – presciently called shards – come equipped with shared vision and proprioception. Heir apparent Eight Antidote sees similarities in how these three technologies enable communication and how the enemy behaves, sparking his realization that the aliens possess a hivemind. He leverages the hivemind of the fighter pilots to prevent the genocide of the aliens and end the war.

This was the stand-out scene of the novel for me. The reader is thrust into the perspective of the interconnected fighter pilots, who are terrified and psychologically tortured and dying. It’s a jarring contrast to the prior 400 pages of the novel, which depicted political negotiations between powerful individuals resulting in “difficult decisions” being made, all set in serene palace chambers with large windows overlooking gardens, or pristine spaceship command centers overlooking the quiet void of space. 

He died twice before he learned to talk. (...) Before he could find himself in the midst of the cacophony, he was spinning in a rictus of fear, engines cut, some other Shard-pilot’s blanked-out panic in his throat as her Shard was struck by the edge of a three-ringed, slick-grey spinning wheel of a ship and she saw the flat pockmarked side of the asteroid coming up fast and faster and faster and I love you I’ve always loved you remember me and nothing. An afterimage of fire.

Powerful writing, but I felt this thematic thread fizzled. The intervention of the pilot hivemind goes only so far as to prevent the delivery of the planet extermination order. The decision to assassinate Sixteen Moonrise to stop the extermination of the alien planet was made by Teixcalaan army general Nine Hibiscus. The assassination itself was carried out by the aliens. What if instead it was carried out by the fighter pilots – recognizing in the aliens a shared humanity, protecting this other conscious collective from an Empire that sings the songs of individual emperors but not of its pawns?

There was a poetic justice of this military technology developed by the Empire being used against the Empire’s military. I had expected this trick of using the Empire’s might against itself to come from Mahit, the ambassador to the Empire from the independent Stationer community. Early on, her imago machine tells her:

But what better way to draw a monstrous thing to its death than to use its functions against itself? Teixcalaan wants; its trust is rooted in wanting; it is in this way you and I will destroy it.

Despite this tease, it was the heir to the Empire who used the Empire’s technology to thwart the Empire, another riff on the theme of the Empire containing within itself the seeds of its own destruction. I would have liked to see this probed further – is it even possible for one lone but powerful voice within the Empire to change the trajectory of the Empire, or is it too much of a machine? However, the story ends with Eight Antidote looking a little more like prey than a cancer – kept safe within the sights of Nineteen Adze and “just dangerous enough to stay alive”.

That the alien hivemind was understood solely through fantastical technologies (imago machines, combat spacecraft) was a little disappointing. I think there was room for some fun exploration of collectivism versus individualism in this tale, and it would have been nice to see a more human element to interconnectivity. Community love, collective action, the excitement of being part of a throng – when do humans behave like a hive?

My diagnosis for the causes of the issues of this novel is the choice in point of view characters. Three Seagrass seems selected to get Mahit into the alien diplomacy mission; with that feat accomplished she spends most of the rest of the novel doing nothing but daydream about Mahit and muse about poetry. Her scenes feel a little like filler that dilute the other themes; her key moments could likely be given to Mahit. More time with Mahit could help tie together the two First Contact questions a little better, since Mahit, as ambassador and peace negotiator, shapes the political response to the alien presence, and also experiences proto-hivemind through her imago machine. 

Nine Hibiscus seems selected as a point of view character to provide a window into locations where plot happens, and to explore the theme of Difficult Decision-Making. However, her second in command, Twenty Cicada, was really the hero of the final conflict. He makes the self-sacrificing decision to consume the dead alien and through this communion become part of their shared consciousness, enabling peace negotiations.  His careful compartmentalization of his religious beliefs and personality from the tasks expected of him by the Empire provide an interesting foil to Mahit's complicated attraction to and repulsion from the Empire. Mechanically, he could have served the same role in observing events onboard the Weight for the Wheel while allowing for better exploration of the themes of collective consciousness and colonialism, at the expense of the already muddled and rather uninteresting exploration of Difficult Decision-Making.

A Desolation Called Peace is a little special among the first contact stories I’ve read in that it dwells quite a bit on the actual contact part of the story. Second to the scene of Eight Antidote becoming one with the fighter pilots, the scenes of Mahit decoding alien linguistics were my favourite. I think this is something Arkady Martine does particularly well – I loved how A Memory Of Empire examined how language and literature influence connection between people, self identity and politics. But where that novel cohesively explored that theme, and tied together these threads beautifully, A Desolation Called Peace asked too many questions across too many characters and I didn’t think they tied together quite right.

Review: The Power by Naomi Alderman

It's the mid 2010s, and suddenly, women everywhere discover they can produce and control electricity. This power has a seismic effect on societies across the globe (the parallels with COVID-19 are stark and in some ways prophetic) as people react to the balance of power between men and women is thrown topsy-turvy. The inversion of gender stereotypes is intentionally overt. If the idea of exploring this thought experiment holds no charm for you, it will be a charmless read. 

The story telling is allegorical, both textually and meta-textually. The framing story is one of a (male) writer 5000 years into the future, presenting his well-researched but unorthodox theory for how his contemporary matriarchal society may have arisen. He notes to his (female) colleague that the characters are just instruments he uses to describe what he thinks could have happened. But of course, the characters also play the same role for Alderman in her exploration of gender and power structures.

Being allegorical, the message of the story is more important than the nuances of the character arcs or the world-building. One possible interpretation of its message is that if women were more powerful than men, it would be a matter of just years before the world was on the brink of nuclear annihilation. It wouldn't be a technically incorrect interpretation of the plot of the novel, just an obtuse one.

Another interpretation of the message is that there is no possibility of overcoming ingrained sexual or class disparities except through a Pyrrhic victory - only a cataclysmic event in which society must redevelop from the stone age could bring women to the same place of power as men.

The women will die just as much as the men will if we bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age.

And then we'll be in the the Stone Age.

Er. Yeah.

And then there will be five thousand years of rebuilding, five thousand years where the only thing that matters is: can you hurt more, can you do more damage, can you instill fear?

Yeah?

And then the women will win.

But I do think Alderman is a little more optimistic than that. Change without a cataclysm seems possible for her heretical historian:

The world is the way it is now because of five thousand years of ingrained structures of power based on darker times when things were much more violent... But we don't have to act that way now. We can think and imagine ourselves differently once we understand what we've based our ideas on.

Through Mother Eve's voice, this change requires collective action:

It follows that there are two ways for the nature and use of human power to change. One is that an order might issue from the palace, a command unto the people saying “It is thus.” But the other, the more certain, the more inevitable, is that those thousand thousand points of light should each send a new message. When the people change, the palace cannot hold. 

 

And this change requires recognizing that men and women are equally prone to violence and vengeance and other destructive tendencies, that it is the centuries or millennia of systemic power differences that produces the behaviours we see now.

I particularly loved the framing story. The little microaggressions from the female reviewer to the male author (including the final line of the book: "Neil, I know this might be very distasteful to you, but have you considered publishing this book under a woman's name?") were amusing, as were her arguments against his theory:

Have you thought about the evolutionary psychology of it? Men have evolved to be strong worker homestead-keepers, while women - with babies to protect from harm - have had to become aggressive and violent. The few partial patriarchies that have ever existed in human society have been very peaceful places.

I think it did a fantastic job at showing how our current cultural lens shapes our understanding of history.

This is the trouble with history. You can't see what's not there. You can look at an empty space and see that something's missing, but there's no way to know what it was.

However, I think I enjoy this book more in the rear view mirror. While reading it, I felt like it was overly long, with a rather long, odd and unnecessary "beware of fascism" detour. It could have been a fantastic novella, but it was an okay novel.

Review: We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson

 Rating: 5/5

Many of my favourite novels have fantastic opening sentences (Alice Through The Looking Glass and Pride And Prejudice come to mind). I picked up We Have Always Lived In The Castle exactly because of its opening lines.

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise, I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cap mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead...

 If the playful morbidness of that doesn't draw you in, it probably isn't the book for you.

I loved Merricat as a narrator. The way she views the world around her was so unique and interesting. The central mystery - the sugar pot, the blackberries, the murder - was revealed well, and the story was well-paced and tidily wrapped up. A perfect modern gothic fairytale.

Review: Lady Susan by Jane Austen

 Rating: 3/5 stars

I have a fondness for a good female villain. Yzma in particular holds a special place in my heart. But The Little Mermaid's Ursula, A Song of Ice And Fire's Melisandre and Cersei, Mean Girl's Regina George, Morgan Le Fey from the Arthurian legend, all rank as some of my favourite characters. Many of these women operate at the boundary (or just outside of it) of social acceptability, and their flaunting of roles ascribed to women, or their ability to play with these norms to meet their own needs, is often thrilling and satisfying. 

Lady Susan fits perfectly in this category of wicked women. She is charismatic, confident in her power and willing to reach out and take what she wants.

I have made him sensible of my power, and can now enjoy the pleasure of triumphing over a mind prepared to dislike me, and prejudiced against all my past actions.

It was delicious to see this sort of character portrayed by Austen, whose main characters have otherwise ranged from the churchmouse-like Fanny (Mansfield Park) to the spirited but still sensible and moral Elizabeth Bennet. 

Lady Susan aside, the plot was fairly simple and short. I had hoped that Fredrica would turn out to indeed be a wicked woman. Lady Susan holds Fredrica in so little regard, and Catherine Vernon considers her to be so poorly misjudged by Lady Susan. I think it would have been a great use of the epistolary format of the novel, and played in well with the theme of trusting someone's word versus their reputation. Fredrica turning out to indeed be a perfectly normal woman that was ill-treated by her mother was a little disappointing and boring.

The ending breaks from the epistolary format to general prose as the narrator accounts for what happens to all the characters. I found the tone shift a little jarring at first. Still, Jane Austen's prose is very enjoyable. I get the sense that, with this book, written somewhat later in her life, Austen perhaps had something to say about the idea of women's beauty or desirability fading with age.

 Miss Mainwaring; who, coming to town, and putting herself to an expense in clothes which impoverished her for two years, on purpose to secure him, was defrauded of her due by a woman ten years older than herself

DIY Yzma Halloween Costume

"Ah, how shall I do it? Oh, I know. I'll turn him into a flea, a harmless little flea, and then I'll put that flea in a box, and then I'll put that box inside of another box, and then I'll mail that box to myself, and when it arrives...I'll smash it with a hammer! "

- Yzma, The Emperor's New Groove

Yzma is a Halloween costume I had wanted to try for a while. "The Emperor's New Groove" is a nostalgic Disney favorite for many people my age, and the movie is endlessly quotable ("Why do we even have that lever?!"), making this a fun costume to spend a Halloween party in. Yzma's style is dramatic, glamorous and unique - all attributes that make for an awesome costume, visually.

With my PhD thesis due far too soon, I didn't have endless hours to devote into sewing. I was pleasantly surprised by how fast this came together - probably a little under 3 hours of crafting time, half of which was gluing the feathers.

Because I was able to recycle a few things I already owned into this costume, it was also fairly inexpensive (also, see above, PhD students need budget costumes)! The base of the headdress is made from a cloche hat I had collecting dust on a shelf somewhere. I cut off the brim, planning to discard it before realizing the stiffness and shape of the brim made it a perfect base for the feather collar. Wire hangers and the black dress were similarly pilfered from my closet. The biggest "spend" item was the fake eyelashes - an optional, but effective final touch. All told, this costume can be made for under $50.

The headdress stayed put the entire night and I generally felt quite comfortable. Most people recognized the costume and I felt suitably glamorous and villainous. For 3 hours of crafting and $50, this was an effective, easy and frugal DIY Halloween costume.

[Check out my Daenerys Game of Thrones Costume from last year!]

Materials & Tools

Crafting Supplies: