Patrick Süskind: “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” (trans. John E. Woods)
A short but engaging read. The book claims to be a story of a murderer from 1700s France, and it is, but the murders are merely garnish: the first occurs a third of the way through the book, taking up a sole paragraph, and the other spree killings take up a few pages in the final third. All murders are described from a detached perspective; as the central character does not care about his victims beyond how they smell, neither does the narrative focus on anything but their smells.
This translation was a pleasure to read, the prose simple yet effective. It creates a visceral, vivid olfactory image of its setting and its protagonist. The perspective often branches out to secondary characters in the protagonist’s story, with each character possessing a strong narrative voice.
Recommended.
George R. R. Martin: “A Game of Thrones”
A re-read from me, prompted by the release of House of the Dragon, and one I enjoyed very much. The prose is basic but evocative, the dialogue is engaging, the character-work is layered and believable, and the depth of the world-building is just as fascinating as ever. I enjoy GRRM’s use of unreliable narrators in particular; he manages to describe the viewpoint characters’ perspectives in an understated way which makes them feel authoritative while still not presenting them as absolute truth.
It does, however, fall into some grimdark traps that I find distasteful, and I dislike how GRRM depicts certain nuanced topics – Daenerys’s sexualisation, for one, and the overcompetence of 13~15 year old characters. There are also an abundance of prosaic and genre tropes, such as how GRRM describes the messiness of the characters’ eating, and some ahistorical assumptions derived from how popular culture “believes” history to be.
Still, I do believe it’s worth reading, and I absolutely consider it a fantasy classic.
Recommended.
C.L. Clark: “The Unbroken”
This had some interesting ideas in the dynamics between the characters, and I was curious to see where the story would go with the thinly veiled fantasy setting of 1800s Algeria; I’m always keen to see more variety in fantasy that branch out from the boring, trite setting of “generic 800s~1200s western Europe”. The writing style, as well, was efficient without feeling droll.
Unfortunately, nothing ended up being done with any of it. The first third was good set-up and maintained a good level of building intruige, but the final half was plagued by everyone committing as many idiotic decisions as possible that didn’t feel appropriately contextualised by what was included of their backstories.
I also often felt like specific characters were being used as mouthpieces by the author in a transparent way. I enjoy political conflicts being explored in fiction, and it makes sense that the characters would be political themselves, but I don’t enjoy a metatextual lecture being delivered to me by the author’s use of the narration.
The world-building was light, and, where it existed, it was plagued with silly things such as the use of “skyfalling” as an obscenity – and not for any discernable lore reason, as characters would also exclaim the more recognisable “fuck”. I also found the deluge of proper nouns for places that’re fairly obviously just fictionalised versions of real-world countries alienating.
Not recommended.