Review: Siren Queen by Nghi Vo

I love Nghi Vo's writing enough to have pre-ordered this one, even though I don't find studio-era Hollywood (or Hollywood in general) all that interesting. And while I was correct that the plot, the setting and the character's motivations inspired little excitement in me, I still delighted in reading this novel. 

I enjoy how Vo writes narratives about being a queer asian woman in unusual settings (for example, The Chosen And The Beautiful featured a queer asian woman as Daisy's best friend in a re-telling of The Great Gatsby). Her characters' experiences with their identities are sometimes at the forefront of the narrative, and sometimes they fade to be barely perceptible yet ever-present. In this novel, an aspiring actress and second generation chinese immigrant negotiates a studio contract that excludes roles for maids or with "funny accents." We see her struggles to make it in Hollywood with this narrow path forward, hiring directors completely at a loss for what to do with her. Eventually, she is cast as a monster. Her relationship with her race and others' assumptions about accents shapes her life, and colours her internal voice:

I steamrolled my native accent as flat as a sheet of gold leaf. I had told Oberlin Wolfe no funny accents, and I meant to hold up my end of the deal. That was where I lost the very last of my Cantonese, and it died with a soft aspirate, a consonant rhotic.

She also frequently remarks upon the accents of others ("Ukrainians who came to Hollywood to make their money on the silver screen before their accents excluded them from the talkies", "a restrained Mid-Atlantic accent called for me to come in", "an Indian girl with a Brooklyn accent"). 

We never learn the main character's name. We see several names that are given to her, each marking her as foreign in some way:

Of course I had a name. I still do. It's mine, and now I keep it in a carnelian box, hinged and clasped with gold, carved to look like a creamsicle egg. It's Chinese with an ugly American cognate. I take it out and look at it sometimes. It fits like something made for me, though the maker didn't quite know my measurements and guessed at the colors that might suit me.

Jacko called me the Chinese Kid, or CK when he was being whimsical. I thought it was affection or plain American disinterest, but a caterer explained it to me one hot June day.

"That man doesn't do anything by accident," he snorted. "He's making sure that you don't belong to the studio, not yet, not until he can get a good fee for bringing you in."

Like accents, names also become a recurring background beat. Names mark who you are by the accident of your birth, who Hollywood wants you to be, who people see you as. Names are marketing gimmicks, and they're personal, and they're how you become immortalized forever. 

I could go on and on about little motifs carried throughout the narrative. It really is so beautifully woven.

Review: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

The passage of time is both ever-present and inconsistent or non-linear. There are watches and clock towers and specific dates and times for many events. On the other hand, events far into the future ("many years later, as he faced the firing squad") or events from long ago are often woven into the narrative, characters live to be 150 years old, it rains for nearly five years straight (four years, eleven months and two days to be precise). The Buendia family, and their house, don't really seem to progress with time as much as their events fold back on top of themselves. Family members fall into the habit of taking things apart just to be able to put things back together. They repeat the patterns of their ancestors.

The story is incredibly beautifully told — I loved the repeated refrain of solitude — but found the characters rather unintrospective and not particularly interesting.

In the end, the final descendant decodes the old manuscripts written in Sanskrit by the traveling alchemist, and discovers it was a foretelling of the events of the family, ending with him. Is this why time felt fluid, because it was trying to conform to the foretelling? Is this why the characters fell into their ruts, repeated patterns? Is everything predetermined? Or is it a broader critique of how we are all products of our past and our traumas? A little bleak, not quite my style of theme.

Review: Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi

Peaces felt very much like a book for the thirty-something millennial. You’ve had time to form a few different close-knit friend groups, then watch knots loosen or unravel. I think it’s natural for friendships to come and go in your life, as you and your friends grow along different paths or move to different places. Peaces presented the opposite philosophy: that there is a dumpee (forgotten, pitiable) and a dumper (unmoved, oblivious to the feelings of their friend) in these waning friendships.

Have you ever had an almost offensively easy breakup? The kind where the person you’ve just broken ties with because of blah blah and blah gives you a slight shrug, a “Thanks for everything—especially your honesty,” then walks away whistling Hoagy Carmichael’s “I Get Along Without You Very Well”? Or has that been you—the low-key dumpee? I’ve never once taken it on the chin like that, never even thought of trying to.

The fascinating mystery at the heart of the labyrinth of this book is whether Premysl, the son of the a benefactor, exists. To most characters, he appears as a completely normal, if rather socially awkward, young man. To the heiress, Ava Kapoor, he is completely unobservable – the reader can’t help but wonder if her friends are gaslighting her? We wind through the memories of the eccentric cast of characters, seeing Premysl and Ava through all sorts of perspectives, and eventually discover that our narrator, Otto, has a few Premysl-like ghosts (ex-boyfriends and a chance acquaintance) in his own past. These ghosts, these unseen friends (or rather, un-seen friends), manifest in the form of the villain of our tale, who holds the passengers of The Lucky Day hostage and gives a lackluster monologue about being discarded.

“We’re trying to support each other,” Yuri said. “Trying to get back into the game. Together. So don’t ask me for my fucking surname. I’m here for Prem and Raúl and Tolay and the stories of their unseeing, which you will not be told now or ever. Because with people like you it goes in one ear and out the other until it actually happens to you. Then you’ll be googling for support groups and everything else. ”

(...)

“Well, really, you’ve kept each other here, with your eagerness to form a clique of people something out of the ordinary is happening to. Mundane jobs and Instagrammable honeymoons? Oh no, not for us. We’re the passengers of The Lucky Day”

As The Lucky Day pulls into the last train station, Ava Kapoor ceases to be able to see or hear all but one of the other passengers. The vanishing of her friends is of trivial concern. The vanished friends take it surprisingly on the chin, for the most part.

This metaphor for friendship feels alien to me. Reuniting with friends from former days feels more like putting on a song I used to love but haven’t heard in a decade, and less like putting on a song and hearing only silence. 

I went into this book hoping for a modern fairy tale version of Murder on the Orient Express meets Jane Eyre meets Piranesi. And it was exactly that, I suppose. It had a claustrophobic train setting begging to be explored. The cast of characters included wealthy benefactors and heiresses and people with unusual occupations, and people that might exist or might simply be figments of imagination. The narrator was unreliable. The mood was dark but whimsical. Packed with everything I wanted but strangely empty inside.