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I just finished Arkady Martine's new book, A Memory Called Empire. I don't have a full review of it, but I wanted to jot down my thoughts on what I read.
Memory takes place on the capital world of a vast, interstellar empire whose aesthetics seem to borrow heavily from Aztecian and Chinese culture. The culture -- and by extension, the book -- is filled with sweeping grandeur in every facet of daily life. Formal poetry, wordplay, astonishing architecture, larger than life recollections of history... everything about the culture described by the story is meant to suggest allusion, metaphor and beauty around every corner. I found myself getting happily lost in every detail of the world, but never to the detriment of following the plot.
The characters in Memory are of a piece with their culture(s). Our viewpoint character comes from outside the empire, though she has loved this empire's culture since she was a young girl. This makes her ideal for helping us navigate through this complex world: like the reader, she's an outsider and thus has to piece together what would be natural for a native; but at the same time she's well steeped in the culture, so she doesn't have to constantly ask inane questions to get up to speed. Instead, she can draw conclusions from what she already knows and share those with the reader who inhabits her mind for the duration of the novel.
And putting the reader in the mind of the main character is a delicious bit of writing technique, because as the title of the book alludes, memory is an important part of the plot. In this case, the main character -- a diplomat to the empire -- carries within her the memories of her dead predecessor. This in turn leads to the book being very concerned with the subject of identity, personal autonomy and the melding of minds through both technological and cultural means. By inserting the reader into the main character's thoughts, Martine makes them complicit in this questioning and provides them with the perspective to understand it just a little bit more.
There is so much to go into in this book. It's a book about the fetishization of other cultures and the realities when meeting them head on. It's a story about flawed people, flawed memory, flawed history and flawed culture. It's an examining of the ego, the self, and what it means for 'I' to mean the same thing as 'we'. It's a tale about people fighting battles not with knives or guns, but with poetry and rhetoric and political maneuvering and hiding one's true face. It's a novel that loves all aspects of language and shares that love with those lucky enough to read it.
But perhaps most of all, A Memory Called Empire is about reality meeting polished metaphor. The art of the possible clashes constantly with the beautiful fictions of the world in Memory, and it's often heartbreaking to see just what happens when illusions get stripped away.
High recommend.
Memory takes place on the capital world of a vast, interstellar empire whose aesthetics seem to borrow heavily from Aztecian and Chinese culture. The culture -- and by extension, the book -- is filled with sweeping grandeur in every facet of daily life. Formal poetry, wordplay, astonishing architecture, larger than life recollections of history... everything about the culture described by the story is meant to suggest allusion, metaphor and beauty around every corner. I found myself getting happily lost in every detail of the world, but never to the detriment of following the plot.
The characters in Memory are of a piece with their culture(s). Our viewpoint character comes from outside the empire, though she has loved this empire's culture since she was a young girl. This makes her ideal for helping us navigate through this complex world: like the reader, she's an outsider and thus has to piece together what would be natural for a native; but at the same time she's well steeped in the culture, so she doesn't have to constantly ask inane questions to get up to speed. Instead, she can draw conclusions from what she already knows and share those with the reader who inhabits her mind for the duration of the novel.
And putting the reader in the mind of the main character is a delicious bit of writing technique, because as the title of the book alludes, memory is an important part of the plot. In this case, the main character -- a diplomat to the empire -- carries within her the memories of her dead predecessor. This in turn leads to the book being very concerned with the subject of identity, personal autonomy and the melding of minds through both technological and cultural means. By inserting the reader into the main character's thoughts, Martine makes them complicit in this questioning and provides them with the perspective to understand it just a little bit more.
There is so much to go into in this book. It's a book about the fetishization of other cultures and the realities when meeting them head on. It's a story about flawed people, flawed memory, flawed history and flawed culture. It's an examining of the ego, the self, and what it means for 'I' to mean the same thing as 'we'. It's a tale about people fighting battles not with knives or guns, but with poetry and rhetoric and political maneuvering and hiding one's true face. It's a novel that loves all aspects of language and shares that love with those lucky enough to read it.
But perhaps most of all, A Memory Called Empire is about reality meeting polished metaphor. The art of the possible clashes constantly with the beautiful fictions of the world in Memory, and it's often heartbreaking to see just what happens when illusions get stripped away.
High recommend.
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