Godwin Shen Shen itibaren Zubovskiy, Tulskaya oblast', Rusya, 301732
This book grew and accustomed itself to my senses as an oblong piece of grit would first irritate, then slowly become smoothly subsumed by the oyster surrounding it. The final result was just as beautiful and deceptively complex as a perfectly round pearl would be, a piece of wonderful simplicity with a surprisingly sordid history of formation. Fortunately, the world at large did not feel the need to wrest this slowly wrought jewel from its protective nest, unlike its more physically cohesive counterpart. The writing grasped at beauty in form as often as some books grasp at plot or characters. This did not go so well at the beginning, and for the most part the imagery was a patronizing mess of shoddy similes. Constantly telling the reader how to picture something, think about something, rather than showing them. Yet another author that could have done better in cultivating their skill with metaphor. Needless to say, during the first half of the story my attention was not drawn into the story enough to pass by instances of misogyny and racism without feeling perturbed. However, as the book continued, so did the development of the writing. The beauty lessened its forceful display, and slipped more comfortably into subtly delighting my point of view. The truths that the author wanted to convey to the reader became less of a lesson, and more of a confession. The author even grew to gift their female characters with a complexity that consisted of more than a pretty face and relationships to men. This augmentation could have been better, but in this old world setting that had yet to be scarred by WWII, it would be a waste to depreciate the successes of the book with standards that at that time were not the norm. The past is a foreign country, after all. In addition to the moments of visual beauty, there are long passages of metaphysics to be found within these pages. While it is true that other authors have done it better, I had not yet run across one who have devoted as much of their mental capacities to the thought of old age, and come up with conclusions that are utterly heartbreaking in their beauty. I with my youth cannot claim to innately relate with all of these conclusions, but I do know something about the slow death that passion dies over the long passage of time, and I can say that the book captured that mental state, that whirling chaos of wasted dreams and futile existence, with a pain bordering on the exquisite. To reiterate, this book is a pearl. A single event filled with high emotion and murderous impulses, layered over with more than twoscore years of thought and solitude, enough for the fires of passion and youth to die and glaze over with the weight of accumulated smoothness wrought by time. There is a beauty here that cannot exist without implicit awareness of the closeness of death, as well as the unanswerable question of why this death has not yet come. The glowing gold of embers sinking into the dark of a once roaring fire, a last glimpse of the barest trace of light before the all encompassing night. They linger on, and that is all.
This is one of my favorites. Once again Piper confronts a complicated issue, how do you define sentience and what does it mean for society.