Reviews and Comments

The music is a big deal in the book, and Spufford made a Spotify playlist to go with it. I don't want to use or direct people to Spotify, so I made a qobuz equivalent - mostly the same versions but I couldn't always find them, and added a couple of things in: open.qobuz.com/playlist/42331567

Edited: I learned that without an account one can only hear snippets of each song. There are free accounts available at least, but I hadn't meant to be as much of a qobuz shill as this is turning me into.

This book does so many things, and all outstandingly. It's a portrait of a Cahokia that in our timeline was never allowed to exist. It's a noir detective thriller. It's an intense character study of a deeply relatable protagonist. It's a love poem to 1920s jazz--the music and the cultural space it created.

I'm having difficulty actually talking about it coherently without massive spoilers. So just go on and read this book.

Full disclosure: this book was written by someone I know socially. I'm pretty sure I would have enjoyed it just as much if I'd found it by chance, but the sneaky thing about biases is how invisible they can be.

The description pretty much says as much as I can about the plot without spoilers. But what I can add is that Colin manages to be simultaneously terrible and very, very relatable - all the weaknesses that drive his series of bad decisions are ones everyone shares to a greater or lesser degree. And with that, I feel like the book manages to be a bit more than the knowingly silly light read it presents itself as, because the protagonist is a case study in how some less outlandish real world bad decisions happen. But this never comes at the expense of it being light entertainment.

Minor criticisms: even the other characters who get significant time don't feel fully fleshed out, probably because we only see them through Colin's eyes. And there are times, particularly towards the end, when the fantasy elements can get a bit USS Make Shit Up. Which would be very frustrating if the point of the book were Serious Fantasy Worldbuilding, but it's so not that.

There's an excellent book in here. An engaging story about individual and collective self-delusion and amnesia, with some very clear political messages and a grim humour to it. But at times, especially in the second quarter or so of the book, the author seems unclear whether he's writing a novel or a NY Review Of Books essay about individual dementia, collective amnesia, and the selective remembering of nostalgia. It's clear that he could write a fine essay and I'd enjoy reading that too, but the hybrid is clunky. From the POV of a novel reader the essay portions make the plot drag slowly enough that I started to lose interest. From the POV of a creative nonfiction reader, the actually fiction parts are jarring and confusing.

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Many signs are telling me that this has to be the year I finally read some Mann, and this book in particular. My German is far too rusty to read the original, but I found this apparently highly regarded translation at my local bookshop. The signs:

• Project 1933 using Mann's diaries as a source in most or all episodes so far.
• Time Shelter making a lot of explicit references to The Magic Mountain in its early sections.
• The Empusium which I'm hearing some raving about is apparently a modern take on the same story.

So... this won't be the next book I read because I need something lighter after Time Shelter (and have one in mind), but soon.

In the in-Bulgaria section of the book, it mentions a Czech film called "Lemonade Joe". I found the file online at easterneuropeanmovies.com/lemonade-joe/ (not free to watch, but a 24-hour membership is reasonably cheap). It's weird and delightful - in parts a loving satire of the Western genre (think Blazing Saddles or The Three Amigos but a decade or two earlier), in parts a slightly clunky but on-point critique of product placement / sponsorship culture, and in parts just fun slapstick comedy. Plot definitely drags in the middle, and there's a blackface scene (as unconvincing disguise, not minstrelry at least) that has aged very poorly, but worth a watch.

Everything I felt about outside.ofa.dog/book/168034/s/showa-19261939 applies here too. I learned a lot from this volume about how different WW2 looked from a Japanese perspective than from the Euro/USian ones I'm used to, and it makes a lot of things make more sense. Both why Japan wanted to expand the regional war it was already embroiled in, and how close it came to winning the battle for the Pacific.

I read this over the course of about 6 months as a group read. 5-10 of us would meet for an hour a week and take turns reading chapters. It's a very enjoyable experience that way, and at the same time I don't think I'd even have finished the book if I'd tried to read it alone.

Apart from being notoriously long, it's full of meandering digressions many of which would probably have lost me. And the tone of the writing is dominated by the pomposity of the narrator, which at times is used for great effect but at others just grates. It's also extremely wordily heavy. I realise that some of this is just the literary English of the time, but Melville was well capable of using that style to dramatic effect, like in Bartleby which I found a total page-turner, or some of my favourite individual chapters of Moby-Dick which would have been great stand-alone novellas. And while I suspect it was racially progressive for a novel written by a white USian back then, from any other perspective it's infuriatingly racist.

So why still a classic? Well, it does manage to conjure up a world, in which it tells a story that's simultaneously very small (one boat hunting one whale) and huge (an epic journey for that crew; a microcosm of whaling as a whole), with some very vividly rendered characters along the way, and much more comedy than I expected from the way people talk about this book.

The author is a geography professor at the University of Victoria, who I have got to know a bit through a shared interest in watersheds and water management. I knew she was also a published poet, but had filed that away in the back of my mind until seeing this volume at a bookstore and wondering why the poet's name sounded familiar.

I loved this book for several things:

• How real and solid the historical-London setting felt. I'm used to that sort of thing feeling very flimsy, but this is an author who clearly does deep research and lets it suffuse the writing without getting all 'splainy.
• The very palpable tension between the protagonist's precarious position and her need to have some freedom.
• The delightful-if-implausable retconning of Sir Christopher Wren's secret motive for shaping London the way he did.

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About halfway through and I have mixed feelings about this book. I find the plot such as there is one quite interesting and a very good vehicle for dissecting/mocking the 2010s-2020s turn to fascism. And I like the writing itself a lot. But Gospodinov seems perpetually unsure whether he's writing a novel or an essay.

The thing that's keeping me going is that he's a good enough writer and observer for it to be an enjoyable essay, but I am increasingly finding myself wanting the essayish digressions to get shorter so the plot can move more.

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