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Jun. 20th, 2021 09:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretThe Unraveling by Benjamin Rosenbaum
I've had this book on pre-order for about a year and a half, and I've been anticipating it for even longer. I have loved Benjamin Rosenbaum's storytelling since I first read "Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes', by Benjamin Rosenbaum"" over fifteen years ago, and I was so eager to read his first novel.
It is so, so good. It was a delight to read from end to end, and and utterly enthralling feat of storycraft, juggling so many things without ever overwhelming, and so many of those things are things I love: complicated, messy families, Talmudic discourse, post-human imaginings, interesting gender play, revolution forcing impossible moral choices.
Rosenbaum in interviews keeps namechecking LeGuin and Delany, and especially LeGuin is an obvious influence- both The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness loom heavy over this book. And like, if you like LeGuin I feel like this is worth reading on that basis alone, because it does a good job of taking the cool things LeGuin does and building on them.
But the first obvious influence I noticed is not one I've seen in any of the reviews I've read so far- the first chapter is a delightful take on the opening chapter of Joyce's A Portait of the Artist as a Young Man, this awkwardly tight, linguistically limited perspective on the young protagonist going through a world that ze does not understand. By using this perspective we get introduced to some of the novelties of the world (Most people have multiple bodies; there are two genders but they are not the same Male and Female as is common Earth, but Vail and Staid, which embody their own sets of cultural rules and stereotypes and taboos; this is a post-scarcity reputation and consensus based economy) in a clear way, because those novelties are just as alien to our protagonist. After the first chapter, time jumps and for most of the book, the protagonist Fift is sixteen years old, in a long-lived society where full adulthood does not typically come until one is over a hundred years old and into their "Century of Courtship".
The Staid/Vail dynamic is so interesting. It's based on the same kinds of stereotypes that animate our understandings of gender- you're a boy so you will like sports, but Rosenbaum's thrown them in a blender and imagined a different kind of division of cultural inheritance. Vails are emotional, Staids are emotionally epressed, which might accord with stereotypes with Vails = Women and Staids = Men. Vails do sports and fighting and promiscuous sex, Staids pine romantically and do indoor activities, which might accord with stereotypes with Vails = Men and Staids = Women. But perhaps most interesting to me, Staids are accorded access to the Long Conversation, and Vails are not.
The Long Conversation is a series of writings and debates about those writings, and meta-debates about the debates, about the history and political and philosophical thought underpinning the evolving society of the world. It's basically Space Talmud, in other words, and it is restricted to one gender in the same way that Talmud has historically been restricted to Jewish men. And how excited I am to read a story interrogating the problems of structuring the religious laws that bind everybody so only half the population is allowed to study them, I cannot tell you. But Rosenbaum's depiction of the Long Conversation is rich and deep in the way I hope that my own Daf Yomi posts have been, showing the balance of reliance on tradition and capacity for creativity and generative power in the sacred texts. In one of my favorite scenes, Fift sits in a private room with a Long Conversation prodigy (who will later become zir lover) and for the first time, gets to see the Long Conversation as a living, breathing institution with power to effect change, instead of as a rote recitation of historical doctrine. I've seen a lot of writers attempt scenes like this, from Miller in A Canticle for Liebowitz to Stephenson in Anathem, and it's always my jam, but nobody writing SF about the future of religion is as close to my heart as Rosenbaum.
But as much as the book teems with big, complicated ideas, it is equally good at the sentence level. From paragraph to paragraph the perspective shifts from one of Fift's bodies to another, and yet it was never a struggle to follow because of how carefully and deliberately context clues are planted. And so many passages convey an overwhelming feeling of emotion and alienation by brilliantly stacking noun piles.
I'm a sucker for noun-piles like this, but this is an unusually good one- each of the exotic categories on the list fit together to build a mood and a scene, but they also make sense in context in the world-building. This may be the first time reactants or serendipity coordinators are mentioned in the story, but as you read further you will gain a deeper understanding of what each group does and why they were part of this parade.
And there is a chaos and joy and humor (Rosenbaum keeps describing the novel as a comedy of manners, which is true and also somehow doesn't get anywhere near the truth of the matter) and beautiful language and love and romance and hard questions about technology and society and privacy and also an awful lot of cool musings on being a parent and being a child and the mutual obligations and their endpoints, and I loved it all.
But also there is a great passage toward the end that I could not stop chortling over where people start writing RPF fanfic and making RPF fanvids about the book's main characters and if I hadn't loved the book before, I would have loved it for that chapter alone. There's this great discussion, from the POV of a fourteen year old, about the challenging ethical dilemmas of shipping (Rosenbaum calls it 'mancing', short for romancing) real people in a context where the stories we tell about people have political consequences. So, so good.
I've had this book on pre-order for about a year and a half, and I've been anticipating it for even longer. I have loved Benjamin Rosenbaum's storytelling since I first read "Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes', by Benjamin Rosenbaum"" over fifteen years ago, and I was so eager to read his first novel.
It is so, so good. It was a delight to read from end to end, and and utterly enthralling feat of storycraft, juggling so many things without ever overwhelming, and so many of those things are things I love: complicated, messy families, Talmudic discourse, post-human imaginings, interesting gender play, revolution forcing impossible moral choices.
Rosenbaum in interviews keeps namechecking LeGuin and Delany, and especially LeGuin is an obvious influence- both The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness loom heavy over this book. And like, if you like LeGuin I feel like this is worth reading on that basis alone, because it does a good job of taking the cool things LeGuin does and building on them.
But the first obvious influence I noticed is not one I've seen in any of the reviews I've read so far- the first chapter is a delightful take on the opening chapter of Joyce's A Portait of the Artist as a Young Man, this awkwardly tight, linguistically limited perspective on the young protagonist going through a world that ze does not understand. By using this perspective we get introduced to some of the novelties of the world (Most people have multiple bodies; there are two genders but they are not the same Male and Female as is common Earth, but Vail and Staid, which embody their own sets of cultural rules and stereotypes and taboos; this is a post-scarcity reputation and consensus based economy) in a clear way, because those novelties are just as alien to our protagonist. After the first chapter, time jumps and for most of the book, the protagonist Fift is sixteen years old, in a long-lived society where full adulthood does not typically come until one is over a hundred years old and into their "Century of Courtship".
The Staid/Vail dynamic is so interesting. It's based on the same kinds of stereotypes that animate our understandings of gender- you're a boy so you will like sports, but Rosenbaum's thrown them in a blender and imagined a different kind of division of cultural inheritance. Vails are emotional, Staids are emotionally epressed, which might accord with stereotypes with Vails = Women and Staids = Men. Vails do sports and fighting and promiscuous sex, Staids pine romantically and do indoor activities, which might accord with stereotypes with Vails = Men and Staids = Women. But perhaps most interesting to me, Staids are accorded access to the Long Conversation, and Vails are not.
The Long Conversation is a series of writings and debates about those writings, and meta-debates about the debates, about the history and political and philosophical thought underpinning the evolving society of the world. It's basically Space Talmud, in other words, and it is restricted to one gender in the same way that Talmud has historically been restricted to Jewish men. And how excited I am to read a story interrogating the problems of structuring the religious laws that bind everybody so only half the population is allowed to study them, I cannot tell you. But Rosenbaum's depiction of the Long Conversation is rich and deep in the way I hope that my own Daf Yomi posts have been, showing the balance of reliance on tradition and capacity for creativity and generative power in the sacred texts. In one of my favorite scenes, Fift sits in a private room with a Long Conversation prodigy (who will later become zir lover) and for the first time, gets to see the Long Conversation as a living, breathing institution with power to effect change, instead of as a rote recitation of historical doctrine. I've seen a lot of writers attempt scenes like this, from Miller in A Canticle for Liebowitz to Stephenson in Anathem, and it's always my jam, but nobody writing SF about the future of religion is as close to my heart as Rosenbaum.
But as much as the book teems with big, complicated ideas, it is equally good at the sentence level. From paragraph to paragraph the perspective shifts from one of Fift's bodies to another, and yet it was never a struggle to follow because of how carefully and deliberately context clues are planted. And so many passages convey an overwhelming feeling of emotion and alienation by brilliantly stacking noun piles.
The cavernous carrion birds passed them, then the hovering swarms of light, the bestial rompers, the stilt-tall fire dancers, the revelers, the hangers-on, the wannabes, and the vendors; followed by the bookies barkers, freelance serendipity coordinators, matchmakers, balloon-sellers, portraitists, commemorative body-garden architects, rowdies, reactants, and school outings with their teachers in tow; and th blue and red and black rent-a-bodies holding hands, the ones with mouths eating sourspun fluffity from a vendor's cart.
I'm a sucker for noun-piles like this, but this is an unusually good one- each of the exotic categories on the list fit together to build a mood and a scene, but they also make sense in context in the world-building. This may be the first time reactants or serendipity coordinators are mentioned in the story, but as you read further you will gain a deeper understanding of what each group does and why they were part of this parade.
And there is a chaos and joy and humor (Rosenbaum keeps describing the novel as a comedy of manners, which is true and also somehow doesn't get anywhere near the truth of the matter) and beautiful language and love and romance and hard questions about technology and society and privacy and also an awful lot of cool musings on being a parent and being a child and the mutual obligations and their endpoints, and I loved it all.
But also there is a great passage toward the end that I could not stop chortling over where people start writing RPF fanfic and making RPF fanvids about the book's main characters and if I hadn't loved the book before, I would have loved it for that chapter alone. There's this great discussion, from the POV of a fourteen year old, about the challenging ethical dilemmas of shipping (Rosenbaum calls it 'mancing', short for romancing) real people in a context where the stories we tell about people have political consequences. So, so good.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-20 02:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-20 09:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-22 03:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-22 12:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-02-20 01:38 am (UTC)And THEN I got to the RPF fanfic part in the book and I was like !!!! SO HILARIOUS, "mancing" and SHIP WARS and tumblresque vocab and everything, OMG, I was laughing so hard and was like "I have to talk to
(no subject)
Date: 2022-02-20 03:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-02-21 11:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-02-20 06:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-02-21 11:46 pm (UTC)I did really enjoy the Long Conversation and would have loved to see more of it. I really liked Fift suddenly realizing there's a different interpretation that they've been getting wrong, and I adored the bit where Fift and Dobroc start talking in allusions to the Long Conversation and it's so neat for them. And it's not so different; members of my church are also always doing that, referring to our shared scripture in ways that someone not in our church wouldn't get (I guess my Lutheran in-laws do it too with Biblical text, but probably not to the same extent). I think the gender-segregation and the resulting secrecy makes it really different for me, though.
But what I kept thinking again and again while reading it is how human it all was, with all the alienness of the multiple bodies and different approaches to gender and what have you -- Fift's adolescent feelings of sort of confused inadequacy and not really realizing what zir strengths are, and the duties of parents and children and how those can succeed or fail -- and I think maybe there's a fair bit of intersection in those areas with my different restrictive religious upbringing. I feel like both Asian-American families and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints families have these pressures on parent and children relationships that have enough similarity to Jewish families that mean that those parts resonated with me in a way that maybe they wouldn't as much with another person. Interesting!
(no subject)
Date: 2022-02-22 07:51 pm (UTC)the bit where Fift and Dobroc start talking in allusions to the Long Conversation
I want to make a subtle point here, which is that Fift talks to other Staids in allusions to the Long Conversation all the time, that's just the result of zir rote schoolwork. It's a way of talking about the past, not a way of thinking about the future. The scene with ze and Dobroc is significant because it's the first time the allusions aren't just empty words, where they're using this shared language in order to imagine a new future. And as a Jew who spends a lot of time looking at Talmud and trying to find what is meaningful and relevant to today in it, I loved how the scene described that very specific emotional feeling of taking this ancient text and suddenly, unexpectedly, finding new meaning in it. The Talmudists' word is 'chiddush', this is a scene about finding a 'chiddush'.
I feel like both Asian-American families and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints families have these pressures on parent and children relationships that have enough similarity to Jewish families that mean that those parts resonated with me in a way that maybe they wouldn't as much with another person. Interesting!
One of the things I really loved is how clearly Rosenbaum envisions the mutuality of these parent child relationships, how both have obligations to each other and either can fail to meet those obligations. Which is definitely a thing that has Torah origins for Jews, that's a lot of how we conceptualize Honor Thy Father and Mother and similar commandments. But I think it's definitely an idea that's big in Asian-American families, too, in different ways, right?
I think a lot of the point of the book is that sometimes it's clear that one side has failed to meet its obligations, but most of the time it's not clear, and both sides think that the other has failed.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-02-24 06:20 am (UTC)Ah, I see, right. And yes, there was a specific emotional feeling there that really worked for me, because it's one I'm familiar with (and yeah, I also spend some time doing things like that).
One of the things I really loved is how clearly Rosenbaum envisions the mutuality of these parent child relationships, how both have obligations to each other and either can fail to meet those obligations. Which is definitely a thing that has Torah origins for Jews, that's a lot of how we conceptualize Honor Thy Father and Mother and similar commandments. But I think it's definitely an idea that's big in Asian-American families, too, in different ways, right?
YEP.
I think a lot of the point of the book is that sometimes it's clear that one side has failed to meet its obligations, but most of the time it's not clear, and both sides think that the other has failed.
Yes! I felt during the big scene of Fift's renunciation that... wow, they both have a point there, and yet they were both in the wrong too. Really well done.