| Title | : | Girl in Landscape |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0375703918 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780375703911 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 280 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1998 |
Pella's father, Clement, has just been swept out of elective office in New York and has set his sights on the next political frontier: joining the first human settlers on the Planet of the Archbuilders. Once the domain of a super-evolved alien species who used "viruses" to alter their ecosystem before abandoning it, the planet is now a hothouse landscape of ruined towers and refuse inhabited only by skittery, mouselike "household deer" and a few remaining Archbuilders.
Clement's mission, to forge a community that embraces the Archbuilders, puts him on a collision course with Ephram Nugent, a xenophobic homesteader.
Girl in Landscape Reviews
-
I have absolutely no interest in science fiction in any capacity. I also am deeply terrified of outer space and I once had a dream about my dad being abducted by aliens through my parents' kitchen window that left me unable to sleep without the bathroom light on for years.
I found Girl in Landscape on my bookshelf. I have no memory of purchasing it, and my boyfriend says he's never seen it before. I have a ton of books cluttering my shelves right now, so I picked this up with the intention of reading until I became mildly disinterested, at which point I would no longer feel guilty about chucking it.
Except, I was never disinterested, even for a moment. In fact, I was enthralled from the very first page.
In short it's about a family who leaves Earth and start a new life on the planet of the Archbuilders, which is what the inhabitants are referred to. The children are coping with the recent death of their mother, while attempting to find themselves in this new world - a place where miniature deer roam like mice, witnessing everything and keeping secrets.
It's not a perfect book, but at the same time I can't really point out where it definitely went wrong. I suppose I just wanted to know more, but I also appreciated the simplicity. I loved Pella. I loved the writing. I loved the Archbuilders and the household deer. I loved the atmosphere, and the feel. I loved that I could perfectly imagine becoming a household deer myself, running and tumbling across the dusty landscape.
In the end this book will remain on my bookshelf, and I will probably have to go out and find more written by Jonathan Lethem. Not the outcome I wanted, but I'm not disappointed. -
If every book were like Jonathan Lethem's Girl in Landscape I'd probably never talk to anyone ever again. That'd not be such a bad thing, really (I mean for everybody else. I can be a right pain in the ass). I could move to a new frontier and read all day. (Start my own planet!) Everything would be the great read that makes me feel fullfilled. Longing sigh.
'Landscape' I read in one sitting on a ass numbingly long flight. That I didn't notice anything else around me was amazing. That's what I want the most out of my reading, to be able to forget myself completely (more forgetting me than everybody else). Even my inner reading voice didn't sound like me. (I loved the episode of Seinfeld when George couldn't stand to read 'cause he hated his own inner voice. Then he got an audio book that had his same voice. Loved it.)
It's not the reaction I should have to reading a book like this one. It's really about going to the unknown and not turning your face away from its sun. How we can enslave ourselves by pretending all the time. I guess I just don't feel like I'm discovering anything unless it's a great book to take me there. Real life and real people can be so lonely. I don't really want to be just me. I don't doubt that people feel like the people in this book, only it's not like I get to know about it, you know? There's no cutting through the bullshit. I wanted to keep on reading about Pella not doing the stifling drugs and getting out of her body to be able to look into the secrets of others. It was my chance not to be shut out. Books are the best.
This is another book that is called a "coming of age" story a lot. I think anyone who doesn't swim like a shark without ever stopping shouldn't have any trouble relating to Pella, thirteen year old girl or no.
P.s. 'Landscape' also has my favorite bestiality love story. -
It appears necessary that I begin my review with a true story. I was enjoying reading in the pregnant sunshine, robins flirted in the leaves behind me, a gentle breeze stirred the budding trees. I was not, however, enjoying this novel, in fact, I was sighing as I sped along. Suddenly the novel in question was targeted by an Avian Airborne Excrement attack. Now i have experienced the white drops of British sketch comedy before. This was a blast, it nearly tore the book from stunned fingers. I decided it was a sign and stopped for the time being.
I finished the novel later and it contains the germs of something interesting. Otherwise this is a tale of trans-planetary Western with native inhabitant Archbuilders being substituted for Native Americans. Archbuilders are the remainders of a great civilization who now profess an interest in English and flit about like Shakespeare's Fools, eating each scene with one-liners while the sexual antics of human children "threaten" to unravel the colony. Jesus. -
CRITIQUE:
What Makes a Man or Woman Wander?
This novel was designed as a work of post-apocalyptic science fiction, although it owes much to John Ford's Western film "The Searchers".
The girl's name is Pella Marsh. Shortly after the death of her mother (Caitlin), she, her father (Clement) and two younger brothers (Raymond and David) depart Earth (they had lived in Brooklyn) for a human settlement on a planet called "The Planet of the Archbuilders". Their goal was to escape an unidentified environmental crisis. At the time only about 200 humans live on this planet.
The Final Frontier
It's tempting to call this planet the (or a) "Final Frontier". It's very much a manscape, like the Wild West. The humans are there to maximise their own wealth, freedom and opportunity. There is little law and order. The Archbuilders are the remnants of an alien race, the precursors of which have already left the planet to explore other frontiers of their own. "They remade their planet, built a civilisation, and then they figured out a way to do the greatest thing anyone's ever done - explore the stars."
The survivors are relatively uncivilised (compared with their precursors) and scorned by many of the humans. Efram says, "The rabble around here are just the lazy, stupid ones that didn't want to go." They suffer from the same prejudice as the native Indians of North America. "Calling them idiots is too generous. They're sexual deviants, most of them. If they touch the children I'll kill them." Apparently, the Archbuilders don't differentiate between adults and children in the same way that humans do. They even relate to children more so than adult humans.
Their precursors developed a sophisticated society and built environment consisting of arches and towers, which has since collapsed into ruins. The visual landscape evokes Monument Valley in Arizona/Utah, where much of "The Searchers" was filmed.
The Influence of The Searchers
In an essay called
"Defending The Searchers", Lethem describes "Girl in Landscape" as "a novel I'd predetermined should be influenced by The Searchers." A friend (with whom he fell out) questioned his "near-hysterical reverence" for the film. Lethem subsequently realises that "The Searchers is too gristly to be digested in my novel, too willful to be bounded by my theories." He might even have "diminished" the film.
The novel is no mere homage to the film. The novel adverts to the film, but is its own construction.
The character Efram Nugent could be based on Ethan Edwards (the John Wayne character), while 13 year old Pella could be based on Debbie Edwards (the Natalie Wood character), who is abducted by the Indians and becomes part of their tribe. Even then, Lethem has created fully-developed characters of his own.
To the extent that the Archbuilders might represent the Indians, the domineering Efram empathises with their precursors, if not the survivors. The walls of his home are a reconstruction of the interior of an ancient Archbuilder tower that serves as a shrine containing relics of their culture, which he both adores and worships. The Archbuilders refer to his "love of ancestors."
On the other hand, Efram wants to segregate the Archbuilders from the human settlements. He believes that they carry viruses that can change the bodies of humans, especially pubescent girls whose bodies are deformed by their new breasts. Somebody, perhaps Efram, imagines: "The girl's body was pretentious with womanhood." Despite all of his righteousness, there is a constant suspicion that Efram is a greater threat to Pella than any of the Archbuilders or their viruses. Like John Wayne in "The Searchers", he says to Pella at one point, "We'd better get you home." In his eyes, she is threatened by her proximity to the Other.
Strangely, Pella has an unhealthy interest in Efram. She lacks a strong mother figure in her life, but is never abducted by the Archbuilders, or any of the white males with whom she comes into contact or conflict. Still, she is precociously supportive and protective of the Archbuilders. When an Archbuilder is wrongfully accused of raping or molesting a young girl, she helps to defend him from his accusers, the "sick minds" of humanity, at her own peril.
Adjectival Wave
Like the Archbuilders themselves ("They're so in love with English"), the novel is interested in linguistics. The Archbuilders have names that are a composite of an adjective and a noun: Hiding Kneel, Truth Renowned, Lonely Dumptruck, Gelatinous Stand, Rock Friend, Lonely Candybar. They made me think of bad indie band names. Hiding Kneel says of Pella Marsh, "Your name evokes."
Besides, every time, I saw a combination of two words, I wondered what it would sound like as a name: Disconcerting Pride, Fallen Bridge, Moist Crevice, Translucent Sac, Prefabricated Cabin, Misplaced Intensity, Pallid Euphemism, Rightful Place, Living Soul, Impatient Teacher, Implicit Alliance, Impossible Self, Withheld Explanation, Linguistic Dissension, Degenerate Buffoonery, Sunken Stone, Tiny Avalanche, Flimsy House, Kneaded Dough, Mourning Corner, Misshapen Venture, and Ragged Monolith.
This quest added another dimension to the appreciation of an otherwise rewarding novel.
SOUNDTRACK: -
’Paisaje con muchacha’ (Girl in Landscape, 1998), del escritor estadounidense Jonathan Lethem, es una novela de ciencia ficción con reminiscencias del western, pero desde una óptica realista. La familia Marsh, compuesta por los padres Clement y Caitlin, y por los hijos de ambos, Pella, Raymond y David, deciden abandonar una Tierra que no tiene nada que ofrecerles y donde el aire es cada vez más irrespirable, y probar suerte en el planeta de los Constructores de Arcos. Apenas colonizado, las pocas familias humanas conviven con los escasos Constructores descendientes de una raza superior que se fue del planeta. La protagonista de la historia es Pella Marsh, una niña de 13 años que ha de hacer frente a este mundo, a su situación personal como preadolescente y su dolorosa situación familiar. Pero aún deberá hacer frente a más problemas, cuando empiecen a notarse los efectos de no tomar las pastillas prescritas para todos los humanos, que impiden quedar contaminados por los virus nativos, así como la fascinación que ejerce sobre ella la figura del cacique local.
El magnífico escritor Jonathan Lethem, que ya se acercó al género en la curiosa 'Cuando Alice se subió a la mesa', decide centrarse en los personajes y en lo que les sucede, sin entrar en sutilizas sobre la descripción física del planeta y demás. La ciencia ficción es una mera excusa para narrarnos la historia de esta joven enfrentada a un nuevo mundo, similar al de los pioneros estadounidenses y los nativos americanos. ’Paisaje con muchacha’ es una buena e interesante novela, si se quiere de ciencia ficción, que funciona perfectamente en su brevedad y que hace recapacitar. -
Video review
Lethem takes on classic sci-fi in a tale of planetary discovery that mixes seamlessly personal and communal tragedy, the Girl and the Landscape. -
i found nothing unlikeable about this book.
the perspective from the preteen girl is, as far as i can tell, totally infallible. i buy it completely in the sense that i never feel like it's a guy writing how he THINKS she would feel.
on top of that we have classic western set in sci fi future.
and itsy bitsy alien deer.
the strength of his work is to write great characters and stories but set them in a sci fi setting. it's not about the setting or the world. it's about them. and that's how he transcends the genre. -
I like science fiction more as a setting than a genre. Too much of the writing that falls under that banner seems like the well-informed prattling of Asperger sufferers who used world-building as catharsis. Whether it's steam-punk Victorian era or a million years in the future, my deepest desire is for a story with strong character development an good pacing.
Lethem gets it mostly right with Girl in Landscape, creating something akin to a Steinbeck story set in a near-future on a mostly uninhabited alien planet now colonized by humans escaping a ruined homeworld. There's a lot to like about the story of Pella Marsh, a teenage girl trying to cope with the death of her mother and her useless father, but something in the way the slim volume is written kept me at arms length.
Most of the characters come off as damaged and emotionally removed. Lethem puts some quality work into showing the awkwardness inherent in people interacting with one another. Conversations aren't tidy, there's dead space, people do things that don't totally make sense. It creates an interesting, if sometimes offputting rhythm.
Ultimately what keeps the book from garnering a higher recommendation is Lethem's inability to really probe deeper into their lives. Many interesting concepts are suggested but never fleshed out, and it feels like the book ends just when a more ambitious book could have begun. Parellels between the way the aliens abandoned their homeworld and Pella's own life are pointed out in one instance, but never really exploited.
It was a quick engaging read, and though I finished it ultimately feeling a slight bit unsatisfied, it created a hunger and curiosity that will probably lead me to read more of his books. -
It's a terrific coming-of-age story, a terrific space Western, and a really smart reflection on human nature. But you can't quite hold it directly. There is something about it, like the sun out West, where it seems too bright to approach directly. The shattered sense of this future America sets it off on that foot; the scene at the beginning at Coney Island. We almost don't want to look but at the same time feel compelled and so those two impulses meet somewhere just off to the side of the thing itself. That's a masterful achievement if I do say so.
More TK at RB:
http://ragingbiblioholism.com/2014/11... -
This one is a strange mix even for genre-bending genius Jonathon Lethem. "Girl in Landscape" combines a young girl's coming of age and awakening sexuality with an alien landscape and the strange relationships between human and alien beings. At times charting the landscapes of children and adults and the odd spaces in between, at others chronicling failure, loss and the inherent possibility of settling a new world. This is my favorite of his novels. It is poignant and lovely, quirky and curious, yet also a plot-driven page-turner.
-
3 or 4, really. I can't find the reference now but I believe John Scalzi mentioned "household deer" somewhere which sent me chasing this down. I had recently finished Motherless Brooklyn so I thought I would continue with reading Lethem. It's weird. It's suspenseful and creepy almost all the way through. The author did wrap things up nicely and left everyone in a good place but I didn't have good feelings about it. The SF aspect is almost irrelevant. Well done though. I guess it's literature.
-
Ragazza con inquietudine
In un imprecisato futuro in cui il buco nell’ozono ha fatto il suo sporco lavoro, una famiglia colpita dalla sconfitta elettorale del padre e dalla morte della madre si trasferisce in una colonia terrestre su un altro pianeta.
Inizialmente sembra una storia di ambientazione familiare, con tutte le turbe tipiche di assestamento dovute al trasloco, ma sotto l’apparenza banale di un lento processo di assimilazione c’è una sottotrama che ha degli elementi assai inquietanti.
Intanto in questo nuovo pianeta ci sono i pochi indigeni rimasti che convivono a fianco dei coloni e da questi trattati non esattamente con uno spirito di convivenza pacifico.
Poi c’è la faccenda del virus archista, originario del pianeta in questione, contro cui bisogna prendere dei farmaci, ma che nessuno sa cosa porti. Inoltre c’è da tenere presente che fintanto che le famiglie terrestri sono tre o quattro, il tutto sembra procedere per gradi, ma quando sul pianeta appare un politico, la faccenda subisce una drastica accelerata ed un’altrettanto rapida ridefinizione.
Ecco quindi comparire le scuole, ma al fianco di queste anche una sorta di giustizieri che si autoeleggono paladini di una morale che finora nessuno aveva minacciato. Insomma non tutto quello che appare in superficie ha una precisa corrispondenza nel profondo. I personaggi mostrano livelli di ambiguità insospettati, lasciando il lettore a chiedersi se molte delle cose che Lethem attribuisce ai suoi protagonisti non siano in realtà aspetti della società che ci siamo costruiti lentamente negli anni.
La crisi del valori, primo fra tutti quello dell’unità familiare, sembra qui spiccare su tutto. Insieme con quella dei ruoli sociali codificati, che sembrano in questo caso subire un drastico rimescolamento, ecco quindi una figlia fare da madre al proprio padre, e via di conseguenza sgretolando se non certezze, almeno pretese tali.
E tutte le scelte che i personaggi si trovano a fare, mostrano chiaramente il disorientamento che ha preso a serpeggiare di recente nella attuale situazione sociale americana. Insomma se in passato Lethem aveva raccontato storie seppur fantastiche, con una certa ironia, qui quello che sembra emergere è un quadro assai più frammentato e meno rassicurante, specchio di una società in una rapida evoluzione e non necessariamente positiva. -
I would call Lethem's work something like "allegorical science fiction" and maybe that is a real term. While it operates on the tropes of a scorched future earth and living on an alien planet in the ruins of a lost civilization, that is all just setting. The story is a fable of growing up while realizing that all adults around you are failing. Through the eyes (and that is really saying something in this book) of our fourteen year old protagonist, Pella Marsh, we see humanity stripped down to its bare essentials, exposed as raw and flailing. It isn't just the literally new and alien world that shows us this, but the new and alien world of puberty and impending womanhood that Pella is struggling through that allows us our reader's window into Lethem's dystopia.
The book is as much a sibling to old west, settlers stories (I was reminded of All the Pretty Horses and Shane) but requires the futuristic bent to allow for a young woman to have acceptable agency. To place modern, almost suburban social sentiments into constrast with an unforgiving frontier requires the sf motif, but this is a western at heart.
It is also a book that I believe would get the "YA" treatment these days. Some publisher would notice the age and gender of the protagonist and try to shoehorn it into the only genre that makes money any more. Luckily this was published when it was, otherwise I can just imagine some editor saying, "Great story, John, but what if one of the aliens was a sexy vampire..." Instead we are allowed an adult book that uses death and biological change to be the lens in which to observe the failure that is adulthood, and what that realization means for a maturing child. An adolescent who is just as culpable in the brutal corruption of adulthood as she brings about the death of the "villain" of the piece, who, for all his faults, actually does nothing wrong in the book, for all the menace he provides.
Lethem's cool, effortless prose drives this novel, full of tension without release, even at the end.
Great stuff. -
I want to mention, but skip over aspects of Girl in landscape likely to be covered by other reviewers. It certainly stands out because of its genre bending of Western and Science Fiction tale. It is clearly an homage of sorts to The Searchers. It is other aspects of the book that made it very moving to read.
It should not be overlooked that it is a wonderful coming-of-age story (or bildungsromane to quote the German literary term). Pella Marsh is a young woman forced to grow up far too quickly and reading her story is like being in her head feeling all those raw hormone-infused teenage emotions. Lethem does a wonderful job writing from a young girl’s perspective. Pella is believable if sometimes unpredictable. There is a wonderful trope of shifting and metamorphosis, becoming something a bit alien after moving to an alien planet. This fits in well as a metaphor of a child becoming an adult in the jarring manner Pella endures.
The Marsh children’s mother dies suddenly early in the book as a result of a fast metastasizing brain tumor. This could have easily tanked into V. C. Andrews level sentimentality if it not where for Lethem’s own life experiences. His own mother died in the same manner when he was about Pella’s age so this theme arises frequently in his fiction as it did in almost exactly the same manner in The Fortress of Solitude. His personal experience of this pain lends a certain weight of gravitas to Pella’s story.
What struck me most singularly however was Lethem’s near perfect treatment of the group psychology of children and adolescents. The young characters in this book behave so realistically, you may find yourself flashing back to long hot afternoons on the playground. I would recommend reading and discussion of this book to child psychology students, despite its Science Fiction trappings. -
A really peculiar novel. This is my first time reading Lethem, and I wasn't sure what to expect--though from what I can tell, his writing is very different from book to book. This books starts really strong with a family recovering from the death of their mother; there are some interesting science fiction elements, but the bigger picture had a kind vagueness that almost reminds me of a fable, contrasting with extremely interesting specific details from scene to scene. The prose is really sharp, and sometimes really funny. Around page fifty, the book starts feeling like a Wes Anderson film set on another planet, with landscapes and characters that occasionally feel like they came out of a western. This was an odd book, and I'm not sure what it was trying to do exactly; it drew from a lot of different directions without necessarily setting on one for itself, but there were a lot of great moments along the way. There was a kind of airiness to the prose/narrative I didn't always appreciate, and in the end a lot of elements felt underdeveloped, but what we got was still really interesting. I didn't love it, but I liked it enough to read most of the book in one sitting, and I could see myself reading Lethem again eventually.
-
Anyway, a little while back I read this book having heard good things about Jonathan Lethem. It is a post-apocalyptic novel in which largely ineffectual characters settle on a foreign planet with the primary character being 14-year-old Pella Marsh. If none of that sounded good, it is because it wasn't.
Now the back of the book sold Girl in Landscape as a "genre-bending, mind-expanding tale of sexual perversity on a new frontier." Look elsewhere, brave reader, because there is little in the way of what that promises. The prose is tedious, the narrative is surprisingly unimaginative and entirely dull, and the characters lack any qualities that would give cause to care.
I would commit more words to this, but what is the point?
Originally reviewed at
http://inconsiderateprick.blogspot.co... -
The first third is terrific, and then the next 100 pages slow down into one of those "sexual awakening through fantasy genre trope" things, but once I adjusted to it not continuing with its initial inventiveness, I really liked this. Good ending, too.
-
The blurb describes this book as The Searchers meets Lolita. Hmm. Nearly.
-
Like a b-movie made too late. Like what's the point & where's the prose. Like don't sexualise teenage girls to pander to your male writer fantasies. Like SF? Like. Nah mate.
-
Less about settling into another planet than it is about human connections and intentions, especially when faced with the alien and unknown.
Lethem's prose made me want to go to the Planet of the Archbuilders. See the Archbuilders, or what's left of them at least. See the ruins. The first third of the book, describing ozoneless Earth, was enjoyable as well.
I guess the only criticism I have is how the ending didn't feel all that satisfying. I don't know how it could have been though. -
I might bump this up to four stars after mulling it over some. Hard to get a handle on this book.
-
Here is the thing: despite this novel being set in a future in which the earth is falling apart and a family travels over a light-year away to live on an alien planet with inscrutable aliens in a very young and empty alien colony, it isn't really sci-fi. It is really just a story about a thirteen year old girl, and growing up--it is about the secrets of the body, some yours, some known to all, it is about the secrets of childhood and of adulthood, of the secrets that foster in that liminal space, it is about the secrets that are the things we don't know are happening, or that we pretend not to know about. It is, in all, a very personal story, and all of the sci-fi trappings are just weird, oblong metaphors that have no easy parallel because, well, there is no easy parallel. What is it like to be a child and to see adults discussing sex? Well, it's a little like falling asleep and observing the conversation through the eyes of a nearly invisible miniature giraffe, that's what.
This book is at times infuriating because some of the conversations are very realistic--they are the kinds of obtuse misunderstandings and distastes that make up life, and while they are frustrating, they are understandable. At other times, however, people act in behave in a bizarre manner that better fits this novel as somehow allegorical, as speaking of something else, of being not an action, but a metaphor for something else. Sometimes this confusion between what is literal and what is not is just marvelous, though sometimes it is just a bit too confusing. What it all comes back to, however (and this is what makes me love this novel so much), is that, really, we are seeing the world through the eyes of a young girl, we are seeing parents rise and fall in her esteem, we are seeing inappropriate adults and overly sensitive ones, we are seeing new places and new friends and a new life that is so alien that it can only speak cryptically, and it is up to this young girl to figure out not only what is REALLY happening in the world, but what her place will be in it.
It's weird and it's confusing, but damn if it isn't fantastic. -
Upping my review to five stars. I loved this and also feel like it was pretty flawed but then I'm also not sure if the flaws were flaws or just unmet expectations I had? For example, had no real idea what the aliens looked like. Actually, that's not true at all-- they looked like Big Bird to me, so I guess I DID have an idea, but also, I don't know? That's more or less how I felt about most of this book. "What about X...wait, does X matter, isn't Y more important? BUT THEN Z..." So: loved the concept, was wildly engaged in the story even as I felt like: the Archbuilders could've been more fleshed out, particularly the ones who weren't there; what the hell was really happening with this planet; Clement just like disappears?; why didn't the boys become deer or did they?; I don't even know, I loved all of it in its total imperfection.
-
Es tan extraño que no sé si es realmente bueno o solo estoy impresionada. Es un drama con suspenso y aliens, y muestra tantas facetas humanas.
Definitivamente no es para todos los gustos, sé que al mencionar aliens puede sonar ridículo pero la verdad que el aspecto de la ciencia ficción es solo un marco para la historia. Tiene temas fuertes pero abordados de manera ligera y personajes muy imperfectos.
Aun no sé si me gustó pero estuvo interesante leerlo. -
It was a very interesting read and I think it paints humanity perfectly. We all judge and fear what we don’t know as dangerous and are blinded to the harm we cause ourselves.
-
5/5 stars easily.
-
I loved this story! Pella was so entrancing as a coming-of-age heroine in a very strange land, an alien planet complete with aliens who were both likeable and mysterious. I loved the dual lives they lived, the constant shuffling of viewpoint. And then to witness how humans carried Earth with them into this curious planet, it was bittersweet and hypnotic all rolled into one fantastic read! I wished I was living there, it sounded like my kind of town. Weird. Will be looking for more sci-fi from Jonathan Lethem.
-
Sometimes you make plans... sometimes they don't work out...
This was deeply dystopian. A cyclopean science-fiction romance. Most of the human characters, including Pella, the protagonist, appear lost and hopelessly disconnected, confused, bringing over the worst of their fears and failings from Earth. Only Efram stands apart from the crowd, but he comes off pretty quickly as a false prophet, a king who "rules by abdication." Even the aliens, The Archbuilders, who should be maintaining the planet act like leftovers, the idiots abandoned on their homeworld by a super-intelligent species, now letting their old civilization crumble away. It all creates this atmosphere of abject ruin and desolation, which Lethem renders beautifully. The setting itself feels like a vast, cracked kaleidoscope, and the story deals with grief and displacement working in concert, a precocious girl passing into womanhood right after losing her mother and her home. Did I mention there are nearly invisible giraffe-like 'household deer' and weird varieties of potatoes everywhere?
At first I wanted to describe this as something
Ursula K. Le Guin or
Ray Bradbury might write, but then I remembered how absorbing
Chronic City was. Lethem just writes like himself. He's an original, safe to say, able to make the unfamiliar seem real, and the familiar seem strange. -
Absolutely loved Motherless Brooklyn and really liked the totally different Amnesia Mooon, but was frankly disappointed by this one. An interesting premise that started strong but then petered out to kind of nothing. Lethem is always an excellent writer, and so the book held my interest right to the end, as I was hoping for a big reveal that justified all the lead up, but the ultimate "surprise" was really anti-climatic considering the post-apocalyptic, alien planet build-up.
The most interesting character in the whole book dies in the first twenty pages, and then after that there's really no one to root for. Pella's just too confused about herself and everyone else to be very sympathetic, and everyone else is just unlikable - except the aliens who aren't fleshed out enough to either like or dislike. I kept waiting for the Archbuilders to reveal some hidden depth or secret knowledge, but that never came - they were really just standard Western "reservation Indians;" sad shadows of a formerly great race.
This was a sci-fi book in setting only - Lethem kept the science and alien elements to a bare minimum. He mentions only two alien species on the whole planet, and provides just one real physical description of the Archbuilders. Obviously, we was using the sci-fi format to tell a separate story - but I could just never figure out what that story was. From the looks of it, there are a number of other Lethem books out there with apparently intriguing premises - but it will be a while before I try another one, unless it comes with a strong personal recommendation from a reader I trust.
