Oh d'oh. Salt Fish Girl
Apr. 25th, 2009 10:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prusikIt just occurred to me that I never blogged about Salt Fish Girl by Larissa Lai. (I'm pretty sure I've blogged about all the other Clarion [West] 2009 instructor books I've read this year. I certainly intended to blog about Salt Fish Girl. D'oh.)
My first impression reading it was, "OMG, this book was written just for me!" OK, that obviously isn't literally true. Still, this book struck me in a way that few other books have. (The most recent one before this was Elizabeth Bear's Carnival.)
In the case of Salt Fish Girl, it's probably due to her pitch perfect depiction of ethnically Chinese characters. There aren't enough of those in genre fiction. (I'm doing the best I can. Shut up.) By the way, if you can come up with a comprehensive list of detailed, complex, true-to-life depictions of Chinese characters in genre fiction, there aren't enough of them yet. (This is to forestall any list of so-called counterexamples. Yes, Salt Fish Girl is not the only book in the world with realistic Chinese characters. This doesn't mean that with Salt Fish Girl genre is now officially "diverse.")
The book is crammed with lovely, evocative writing. The sheer strength of text carries me through the weird in bliss. Really, she could have made anything happen and I would have eaten it up. It's a little disappointing then that in its last section that the novel loses some of its power. She ties everything up and rationalizes everything impeccably. The writing is still wonderful. Everything makes perfect sense. However, while she had the novel balanced between skiffy and magic realism throughout the novel, it didn't work for me in the final section. I suppose if I knew why, I'd be a better writer.
Part of it is, I suspect, that some things I didn't want explained, even if the explanation makes perfect sense and ties all of the novel's disparate threads together. Or maybe it's that I got a skiffy explanation when I'd wanted something less scientific-rational. (Actually, that alternative explanation, puzzlingly, is still there too at the very end.) I'm being vague to avoid spoiler, which makes this very hard to write about.
Anyway, Salt Fish Girl is a big, imaginative, ambitious work. If it didn't succeed perfectly for me, it certainly succeeded well enough that I'm glad I read it. I definitely look forward to whatever she does next.
My first impression reading it was, "OMG, this book was written just for me!" OK, that obviously isn't literally true. Still, this book struck me in a way that few other books have. (The most recent one before this was Elizabeth Bear's Carnival.)
In the case of Salt Fish Girl, it's probably due to her pitch perfect depiction of ethnically Chinese characters. There aren't enough of those in genre fiction. (I'm doing the best I can. Shut up.) By the way, if you can come up with a comprehensive list of detailed, complex, true-to-life depictions of Chinese characters in genre fiction, there aren't enough of them yet. (This is to forestall any list of so-called counterexamples. Yes, Salt Fish Girl is not the only book in the world with realistic Chinese characters. This doesn't mean that with Salt Fish Girl genre is now officially "diverse.")
The book is crammed with lovely, evocative writing. The sheer strength of text carries me through the weird in bliss. Really, she could have made anything happen and I would have eaten it up. It's a little disappointing then that in its last section that the novel loses some of its power. She ties everything up and rationalizes everything impeccably. The writing is still wonderful. Everything makes perfect sense. However, while she had the novel balanced between skiffy and magic realism throughout the novel, it didn't work for me in the final section. I suppose if I knew why, I'd be a better writer.
Part of it is, I suspect, that some things I didn't want explained, even if the explanation makes perfect sense and ties all of the novel's disparate threads together. Or maybe it's that I got a skiffy explanation when I'd wanted something less scientific-rational. (Actually, that alternative explanation, puzzlingly, is still there too at the very end.) I'm being vague to avoid spoiler, which makes this very hard to write about.
Anyway, Salt Fish Girl is a big, imaginative, ambitious work. If it didn't succeed perfectly for me, it certainly succeeded well enough that I'm glad I read it. I definitely look forward to whatever she does next.
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no subject
Date: 2009-04-25 06:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-25 07:40 pm (UTC)I should point out that it's not marketed as a genre novel. it's marketed as a literary novel. (I'm not implying any sort of value judgment. This is just so you know where to find it in the bookstore.)
Also, I just realized that I didn't mention any of the particulars like plot. (Yes, there is one, quite a solid one, in fact, but I won't attempt to summarize) or setting (19th century China and mid-21st century Canadian Pacific Northwest). D'oh...
no subject
Date: 2009-04-27 07:01 am (UTC)