Art of the last two days:
I went to see Flow with Runo and it was gorgeous. It's a Latvian animated movie set in a world without humans. A cat finds unexpected friendship with a capybara, a lemur, a dog, and a secretary bird after a flood inundates the world and they take refuge in an old boat travelling the new worldwide ocean as the waters continue to rise. It was gorgeous, magical in a strange and lonely and wondrous way. There's no dialogue. It's carried by the animal body language and music and it was majestic and lovely.
And on the airplane I finished reading the novella Sordidez by E. G. Conde. It's a climate fiction novella, compelling and powerful, a worthwhile read I'm still mulling over, but some parts became a little too obviously black-and-white. The writing was beautiful. The depiction of a climate-change-ravaged future, where both the careless greed of the global powers and the vindictive and deliberate use of environmental devastation against political dissidents, was lyrical and heartbreaking and way too resonant. The struggles and triumphs of community-building from the rubble, Native people once again tending to their Native lands after the colonizing powers rise and fall and rise and fall again, was deeply moving. The timeskips, the span of time this short novella covered, could sometimes feel jumpy, but I think that mostly worked. I loved seeing Doña Margarita's survivors' community in the rural Yucatan. I really liked the perpetual low level conflict between the UN, the People's Government, and the local rural people. I liked Vero and his struggle to figure out what he was meant to do and who he was meant to be. I was... unsure how to feel about La Loba Roja. The explicit parallel drawn between her and the military dictator was weird, because she was also portrayed as right. I also. Well. I wasn't as enthused about her unilaterally declaring herself a goddess-queen of the new Yucatan as it felt like the book was. And appointing Vero the returning king of Puerto Rico. That felt like nothing good could come of unilateral declarations like that. I feel like the results of her movement were not adequately covered, they were just timeskipped over. I also thought one of the late-book reveals about the UN kind of cheapened the politics of it somewhat--made it a little too... obvious, a little too trite. Which was unfortunate, because so much of it was so good and thoughtful!
Very different takes on climate fiction, and both really cool and kind of hard to describe my feelings on.
