An investigation into desire and all the concessions we make for it. Does desire come from lack or an overflowing? Can you have multiple soul mates? What does it mean to be right and wrong for a person simultaneously?
It is better to betray the other than ourselves is the obvious conclusion derived from the stories of the multiple characters in this book. And surrender to our wants, our desires, whatever those may be.
My new favourite subgenre of romance is the one where one partner loses the other and spends decades trying to reconstruct them and return them to life. I cannot imagine the level of devotion and drive that would take. Now if I could find a book where that happens and the lover comes back and hates their partner for it, I would have found my new favorite fixation.
The metamorphosis of prime intellect- Roger Williams
Prime intellect, an advanced AI, is given life and three rules to follow, one of which is to protect human life at all costs. The day it leaves its birthing place it encounters an ageing old woman called Carol, whom it heals of her illnesses, and her ageing. This decision ultimately informs it that the best way to fulfill its first rule is to preserve all of life in a digital landscape where everyone gets everything they want everytime they want it (provided it does not result in permanent death).
It follows then that death, or the illusion of death, becomes entertainment for the populace. During death games, people can be temporarily kill or be killed in any number of ways after which PI resurrects them.
For Carol, it is not the death, so much as the pain that she craves. It is the only thing she still has claim to in her body and her world, the only real thing, and she takes it seriously. Carol is special in that she is the only person that has almost died since PI took over, and is the person who first engaged a death game contract with PI.
The book takes place 600 years after PI took over. In the timeline of things, the utopia PI provides is still a novelty and only a few people rebel against it. Some sects of the population even worship it. We are presented with a powerful but young god, who despite his imperative to protect humans, fails in accounting for the role of struggle and suffering into the human condition.
I'm not sure what i wanted from the book. I liked it but felt it gave very little that was new in terms of what humans would do once they got bored. Because much of the story is told through Carol, events outside her life were only briefly mentioned. This made my understanding the psychology of people outside the death game cult vague which felt like a disservice to the larger story that I think would have provided more insight into the metamorphosis of PI.
I am also not sure that I agree with Carol's idea to not expose her new family to technology.
Julie and Cora(we first know of her name from a memory of her meeting Julie) are two ex-girlfriends embarking on a trip across Brazil. This trip was one they had planned long ago while they were in a relationship but one that never materialized. Cora is the voice that takes us through the histories, culture and economics of the little towns they pass as well as the terrain of their relationship and their lives.
The narration itself felt like being on a journey with the anecdotes from their lives and relationships being the interesting things you see from the car window. The writing was beautiful, funny, incredibly intimate and frank.
The way Cora describes their relationship, she was always the one more in love. She spends time in the trip trying to understand Julia who she claims to have never understood. Cora defers constantly to Julia's decisions. When Julia wants to deescalate their relationship, Cora goes along with it. When Julia doesn't want to introduce Cora to her family, Cora doesn't push. When Julia calls Cora in France for a road trip they had once planned, Cora changes her mind about going back to Brazil. This aspect of their relationship does not change much as the journey goes on, but Cora does ask the difficult questions he had never posed before and this leads to Julia showing Cora parts of her life that she had previously kept separate.
Cora gets validated that Julia likes her_their sex life is different, more grounded now that Cora doesn't have to guess at Julia's desire for her and in the daylight, both physically and metaphorically.
We also see Julia overcome slowly by slowly her fears of letting the world in on her relationship with Cora. With Cora, the only point of growth I can pinpoint are her engaging with Julia's brother while before she would have stayed out of the conversation because those are not the type of people she would be bothered to engage with. And even that felt a little condescending in the way she engaged with Julia's family.
The whole trip ends on a reconciliatory tone between them as by the end the two have gotten back together. At the end of the book, the author drops the title of the book in the narration in a paragraph where Cora describes the first night that she invited Julia to her home because Julia had been left behind by her friends and couldn't go back to her dormitory. The paragraph is a foreshadowing of their whole relationship: Julia watching the cowboys on tv on mute, Cora watching Julia. Julia sprawled out on the bed leaving little space for Cora, Cora trying to get comfortable anyway to watch the rest of the film. ' A duel, A romance, A desert. We all loved cowboys.'
This was a book whose writing style I really liked. It has a slow steady narrative beat. Most of the conflict between Julia and Cora was internal rather than external(they went through things on their own then reconciled without making it a whole affair), which I found very interesting but frustrating. Interesting because it was a view of how a lot of relationships with other people pass inside our own heads and frustrating because it felt like they would forever be misstepping around each other.
Ultimately, I would read something else form this author, but I still don't know how to feel about Cora and Julia.
Momo is a 30 year old woman surrounded by membranes- both physical and emotional. She lives under the sea, which she describes as living underneath the waxy membrane of an apple, and works as a dermal technician, where she rejuvenates rich people's skin for a living using a special membrane. She has not had a relationship with her mother since she was 10, and dislikes personal intimacy and relationships with other people, preferring to experience it instead through the data she collects from the membranes she collects from her clientèle during their treatments.
The membranes in Momo's world serve as protective barriers. Running parallel to this fact is the idea of the canary, a gilded sparrow as Momo describes it. Young Momo wishes to leave the protective ocean membrane to see the land and wants to feel the burn of the sun on her arm despite the backlash she would receive for it. Older Momo names her salon, salon canary, and the salon both protects and traps her. She acknowledges that Andy is a canary trapped inside her unable to fly or sing, but without whom she would not be alive. At the same time, she is also the canary trapped inside the gilded cage that is Andy's body.
Only Andy turns out to be a military cyborg, and the salon canary is the room where Momo works repairing military grade cyborgs that need the fine delicate touch that only a human brain can offer in payment of a 20 year lease of the body she is using.
Momo's brain is fed reality through her mother's discs, and what the conglomerate IMS deems safe to feed her. This level of control strips her of authentic experience which leaves her working tirelessly and vulnerable in strange territory as the only person who would act as a checkpoint, her mother, is given very little access to her. This conglomerate also saves her life in a very real way, and allows her to experience 20 years that she would not have otherwise lived.
I kept thinking of the company's extractive and exploitative contract with Momo, given to Momo's mother at a point of desperation. The parallels with the labour and work environment currently, especially with Momo being detached from the work she actually does and how it ties in with the bigger picture of things, as well as her stolen labour and time. The theme of control perpetuated on her brain by the company is not subtle, and it aligns with algorithms on social media as we see them today. Even the general detached attitude and isolation of the people living in T city mirrors our own escapist use of the internet and the subsequent isolation from each other and from reality.
All in all, this is a book I would read again because of how much is packed into it. The gender, identity and sexuality aspects of it are also very interesting and a breath of fresh air because queer is the norm.
Took way too long to read for a book as short as this is. Lise was an interesting character, eccentric and weird and brash and not at all attached to the reality of what was going around her.
I had to recontextualize the book with the time it was written for me to understand the choices she made and what the author was trying to say about choice and autonomy through her. If I had known these going in, the book would have been a more fulfilling read.
Perhaps even the distracted narration was more of a Lise choice than an author's style? The tone of the book was unbearable at times, but her interactions with mrs.filkes were at least entertaining for how discordant they were.
The ending though, was a shocker. I left knowing nothing about why Lise would make that trip and make that decision, but I suppose props to her for having the guts to go through with it.
How the narrator talks about falling in love with the husband, that she thought about him so much that she convinced herself to loving him really stuck with me.
The book is a testament to the fact that moulding yourself to the perfect partner won't make your partner a better partner for you
Through reading Onyii and Ify's stories and trajectories, I kept thinking of how much war is a self repeating cycle. You hurt my people so I hurt your people and then I hurt yours then you hurt mine and so on and on it goes. Though even with that, the fact that the title of the demon of Biafra, goes to Onyii and Daren gets only accolades is very telling of the attitude of the victims getting twice as much flack for defending themselves against a stronger oppressor whom they are expected to be civil towards.
Ify going to get revenge for her parents was particularly heartbreaking because as Onyii said, she was a child too, before she became the demon of Biafra. Daren using Ify was not unexpected, but it was disappointing. But even through all that darkness, there were people caring for each other, Onyii trying to preserve Ify's innocence, the abds creating a humanity within themselves and love, platonic, romantic, familial.
could have been better if it were longer. It had so much potential for a story and for more depth, and exploration of the dynamic between Marion, Lisvet and the other bloodmaids, maybe even the whole system of blood maids in the north, but the length limited it. I ended up feeling like I was reading a powerpoint of 'signs your partner is an abuser.' I was told the characters loved each other, but I didn't feel it. Sure the scenes were there, but there was very little buildup for this depth of love they claimed to have for each other, Marion for Lisvet especially.
snowghoul
theartofmadeline
