John Crowley (1) (1942–)

It took me forever to get through this book. It has sleep dust embedded throughout its pages, and apparently they’ve invented a release mechanism that works even with e-books. Seriously, I don’t think there was a single session where I sat down to read this book during the day and didn’t fall asleep at some point before standing back up, and I rarely take mid-day naps. Likewise, when I read it before bed, I usually ended up going to sleep earlier than I normally would. So… I guess that’s the main thing I got out of this book. I’m now very well rested?

The story revolves around a large and very convoluted family, most of whom live in or around a large and very convoluted house in the middle of nowhere. There's some overlap with the fairy realm there, so that some family members are able to see them, although others can’t, and most lose the ability as they get older.

My Kindle edition had a family tree – at the very end of the book, with no reference to it in the table of contents that might have clued me in to its existence. By the time I saw it, it was too late to do me much good. The most critical people were pretty easy to keep track of though, and since I was reading on the Kindle I was able to search and find prior references if I forgot who someone was, so I did ok without the tree. In the earlier parts of the book, it jumps back and forth in the timeline quite a bit and introduces a large number of characters, but this wasn’t the part I disliked. It felt a little confusing at times, but I was able to follow it and the setting seemed really interesting, so I’d looked forward to learning where everything was going.

The further I got into the book, the less I liked it. The timeline got more linear and the character focus narrowed, but the story became more nebulous. It became more metaphorical and less logical, and there were long sequences where the author wrote about things happening to characters, except that apparently those things weren’t actually happening, or at least not in the way the characters thought they were, to the point that sometimes I was confused about what was “real” in the context of the book and what wasn’t. And then you have people becoming fish, birds, and trees? It probably didn’t help that, by this point, I was in a perpetually sleepy haze myself whenever I read the book. Reading this made me feel like what I imagine it would feel like to be on drugs, and I’ve never enjoyed books that give me that sensation.

The writing style is more literary I guess, with some odd ways of phrasing things that occasionally required me to re-read a sentence. I wouldn’t call this a funny book, but there were times it made me burst out in surprised laughter because something unexpectedly struck me funny, even toward the end when I wasn’t enjoying it anymore. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure if the things that made me laugh were supposed to be funny. It’s possible I might have been delirious. The ending was as unsatisfying as I expected it to be by the time I finally reached it. This book I think is more about style and atmosphere, but the story itself lacked enough substance for me to sink my teeth into.

I’m rating this at 2.5 stars and rounding down to 2 because I think I would have preferred less sleep.… (mer)

If this book had been broken down into a series of novellas, I would have loved almost half of them

There are some magnificently beautiful stories in this book, and I really wanted to love it. There are just as many that I found very boring and charmless. If I enjoy a book enough, a messy ending is generally forgiven. But here, 80 pages from the end my feelings toward this novel were still evenly split love/hate, and then things went downhill for the remainder.

Loose ends, plot-holes, purposeless characters taking up chapter after chapter in an already long tale, and suprisingly little magic for a book about fairies and enchantments.

Still, read it for the good bits.… (mer)

The protagonist of Ka is the corvid Dar Oakley, and the narrator is a nameless man to whom the bird has told his stories, a string of recollected Crow lives over the entirety of human history. The first part is set in prehistoric Europe and the second in the Middle Ages. Part three has two major arcs: one among Native Americans prior to colonization, and another during and after the US Civil War. The final part of the novel returns to the context of the narrator in "the Ruins of Ymr," a near-future setting of social and ecological decay.

The pace throughout is slow and thoughtful, caught between the divergent perceptions and expressions of Person and Crow. There are multiple visionary episodes. As a whole, the book contemplates the incomprehension of memory and mortality, along with the value of story itself.… (mer)