In this episode, we talk about two of our favorite topics: food and southern culture.
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This is my first review since August 2018.
Do I even know how to write a book review anymore? Did I ever?
I’m pretty sure my last review of a novel by Octavia E. Butler was mostly a love note anyway. It should be no surprise that this one will be the same.
Before we teleport into another timeline to discuss the dystopian, soul-shuddering, mind-fuck that is Lilith’s Brood, I want to start on the last page of the novel. There’s a small box about the author that inspired some intense feelings for me:
I’m in awe of the trail this woman has blazed, proud of her blackness and activism, sad that she is no longer physically on this earth, and determined to live and write in a way that’s at least as vaguely impactful as she has. If I remember my old book review format properly (I don’t), I’m supposed to save my rating for the end. The absolute reverence and adoration I feel for this author and this story outweighs my self-control: Five Stars.
It wouldn’t be a Writer Who Reads review without me ashamedly revealing the excessive amount of time I took to read this novel. But I have excuses! On top of my super demanding job and somewhat social life, Butler’s Lilith’s Brood is a compilation of three separate stories: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago. At 749 pages, it’s practically three books in one.
See, great with excuses.
The three volumes were published separately between 1987 – 1989 and ultimately collected in a now out-of-print volume called Xenogenesis. In 2000, the trilogy was similarly compiled into the Lilith’s Brood collection currently in print.
Reading these “weird” titles, you must’ve guessed that this is a science fiction novel. Of course! It’s what Butler does and does spectacularly well. The cover of my copy, tattered and beaten, reads: Multiple Award-Winning Author of Kindred and Fledgling.
Multiple Award-Winning.
Okay, I’ll stop flexing for Ms. Butler. You get it.
This novel was a journey. Like most dystopian novels, it’s uncomfortable. It’s tragedy and unimaginable circumstances happening to humans just like us. It’s a cautionary tale, an alert, a call out. This is what happens when humans fuck up. So stop fucking up.
Where Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian story rooted in realism, Butler’s Lilith’s Brood is dystopian in unthinkably distressing, supernatural ways.
I don’t mean supernatural as in magic powers or spirits. The most soul-shuddering thing about the supernaturality of Butler’s world is the plausibility. She truly injects the science in science fiction, conveys it so thoroughly and simply and logically that you’ll spend hours educating your friends about the anatomy of an alien species. Share it as fact.
Holy hell, Butler.
Once again I struggle to intrigue my audience with a thorough synopsis without including spoilers, but here we go. Broadly, the world ends due to war. We’ve heard this story before; we’ve almost lived it a few times. If it happens tomorrow we won’t be surprised.
Perhaps that’s why the story starts after the war—after our worst fears finally come to be. Butler allows her reader to fill in most of those blanks, which in itself is a lesson. See how easily you can imagine the end of the world? Stop it with the wars.
We start with Dawn and meet Lilith, my favorite character. She’s tall, black, beautiful. She’s guarded and responsible, cautious and open, independent but yielding. I want to call her mother or sister. She’s black femininity in all the ways I’d like to express it. If I knew her in real life, I’d be desperate for her approval.
So Lilith wakes, disoriented, on an alien spaceship. She remembers the war, her family, her losses, but not how she got to the ship. At first she doesn’t even know if she’s really on a ship. Eventually, slowly, the aliens reveal themselves, their wants, their nature and values.
That’s really all I can share without spoiling anything.
Adulthood Rites follows a character named Akin, whose background I will not reveal.
Imago follows Jodahs, a character I relate to in disturbingly specific ways. Queer ways.
Both Dawn and Adulthood Rites were written in third person; Imago in first person. I speculate that this was done intentionally. Perhaps Butler needed the freedom that the third person perspective allows in the first two stories to flesh out the new world being created. Perhaps our first-person character Jodahs’ transformation called for a more intimate perspective. Or maybe Butler was just tired of writing in the third-person.
While we’re talking about writing, let’s dive into a few of the things that made my mouth water while reading. Normally I mark up my books with tons of hearts to indicate exceptionally written lines. However I always seemed to be moving while reading this: on a subway in NYC, a plane to New Orleans, a rooftop pool in New Orleans where a woman screamed, “You’re reading Lilith’s Brood! I love you!” Or a plane to London, a cafe in London. Yes, it has been a journey. A journey without a pen.
I’m unable to identify one thing I love most about Butler’s writing, but I’ll focus on the graceful balance of it all. Butler never over-writes or rushes to cram everything in at once. The story unfolds, compounds, builds into a rich world that we fully understand because she’s not using big complex words or explanations. See this simplistic explanation of Lilith’s fear as she comes into contact with something otherworldly:
“She did not want to be any closer to him. She had not known what held her back before. Now she was certain it was his alienness, his difference, his literal unearthliness.”
Lilith’s Brood, p13
Other things Butler does well: juggles a ton of characters, building them through action and always keeping the story moving. Nothing is superfluous. No character is poorly thought out. Each has their own distinct voice. And the dialogue! I have to talk about the dialogue.
The story is tense, of course. Butler expresses this tension, vulnerability, rage, sadness, conflict, recalibration, and more through her dialogue alone. Characters say things and we understand the weight and true meaning without being told. As seen in Adulthood Rites:
“Give him to me,” Galt said. “I’ll make him talk.”
“He’ll talk when he gets ready,” Iriarte said. “Hell, I had seven kids before the war. They’d talk all the time until you wanted them to.”
“Listen, I’m not talking about baby talk!”
“I know. I believe you. Why does it bother you so?”
Lilith’s Brood, p341
There are barely any dialogue tags or text outside of the dialogue here, but clear emotion, tension, and significant characterization.
Okay, I’ve been patient. Can we talk about sex now?
When I mentioned talking to my friends about alien anatomy, you had to know I meant sex. I meant that I needed to talk to someone—in this example, my podcast co-host, Trapper—about alien sex.
And, honestly, all I did was confuse him and myself. I look forward to confusing you as well, as I try to explain how and why I’m enraptured with the way Butler expresses something that is pleasurable, sexual in nature, but maybe not always sex?
I don’t know! I don’t know! I love it.
Avoiding spoilers, please read and appreciate this short and breathtaking interaction between nameless individuals:
Now their delight in one another ignited and burned. They moved together, sustaining an impossible intensity, both of them tireless, perfectly matched, ablaze in sensation, lost in one another. They seemed to rush upward. A long time later, they seemed to drift down slowly, gradually, savouring a few more moments wholly together.
Lilith’s Brood, p162
And this excerpt from Imago:
“… the rhythm of her heartbeat, the rush of her blood, the texture of her flesh, the easy, right, life-sustaining working of her organs, her cells, the smallest organelles within her cells—all this was a vast, infinitely absorbing complexity.”
Lilith’s Brood, p678
The intimacy Butler explains in numerous skillful ways is not sex as we understand it, but it is pleasure. She used that word a lot: pleasure. It is elegant and transcending, attentive. I love how she writes these scenes. I love it and I don’t understand it fully. I don’t think I want to. How tantalizing. How grossly romantic.
As this review comes to an end, I feel compelled to speculate on the overall theme. Butler built a whole species, an entire reality and potential future.
Why did she do it?
There’s something referred to as the Human Contradiction in the novel, which is the unspoken but thoroughly felt tension between impressive human intelligence and the innate deceit, jealousy, and deception that we cannot seem to shake.
If Butler simply wanted to point that out, she succeeded. Although I go back and forth on whether she’s making a helpless observation or calling on the human species to change, to improve.
In the end, I’m glad to say that I have a lot more Octavia E. Butler fiction to read. Butler seems to honor her connection with the story and the reader above any rules, natural or otherwise. It’s this attention to detail, this obvious passion, that has fully pleased me.
Again, Five Stars.
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In this episode, we explore the little-known yet masterfully crafted work of author Edward Prime-Stevenson—a man who faced persecution with bravado and used his talent to strip away social stigmas.
Please join us as we try to read a little more, write a little better, and explore the human condition—together.
Listen on ITunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Castbox, or right here on the blog. Comments and ratings are appreciated on all platforms!
Reading: Imre, a memorandum
Resources:
Left to Themselves: The Subversive Boys Books of Edward Prime-Stevenson
Homosexual Identity, Translation, and Prime-Stevenson’s Imre and The Intersexes
Biography Stevenson, Edward Irenaeus Prime
Manipulating a Genre, “Boy Book”
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We need to talk about The Handmaid’s Tale.
My professor in undergrad recommended this book to me. In my memory, she put down my 40-page manuscript, bleeding red with her notes, and sighed.
“Something very basic is off—your dialogue is wrong. Your tenses shift,” she said. Then she told me to read Margaret Atwood. I bought The Handmaid’s Tale and ate it in days, so quickly I didn’t absorb what I needed. The story was just too good; I needed to get to the end.
Five years passed.
The Netflix show came out.
I hadn’t finished my manuscript.
It became clear that if I were ever going to write my novel or watch The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu, I’d have to really read this book. And write a review.
All of the buzz I’ve heard surrounding the television show always involves the story-line. And why wouldn’t it? A shockingly well-formulated dystopian society that addresses troubling misogynistic realities within our own present-day society is enthralling to look into. To “what-if” until you convince yourself that it could happen tomorrow. To highlight, even further, the injustices we live with today. We like to watch train-wrecks, collapse and catastrophe—even more when they seem to be speeding towards us. Thanks, Margaret.
This is a great time to note that The Handmaid’s Tale was written in the 1980s.
But before we get into the plot, I have to touch on Atwood’s writing. I mentioned, briefly, in embarrassment, the comment my professor made on my tenses issue. It’s easy for me to slip in and out of tenses—a curse, actually. Lets call it a talent, which also happens to be a flaw. In this novel, Atwood manages to seamlessly slip between past and present—when society was normal and then when everything was changed.
How.
How does the story move so fluidly? One second our urgent need to know what exactly “The Ceremony” entails is undercut by a quick immersive flashback…then flows back to the present.
Formatting helps. And the novel reads vaguely stream-of-consciousness. Stay with me now, I’ll explain:
Offred, our protagonist, bounces around her story, sometimes shying away from especially painful flashbacks. Other times, she has no choice but to face them when something in the dystopian present reminds her of the past. It explains the flow and makes her human. It reaffirms that we, as readers, exist in her sometimes delicate, often distracted human mind.
But this isn’t a present tense with blind corners. She’s retrospective in a way that’s impossible in a true progressive present tense. It would be a journal, I think, but she’s not allowed to read and write. So it’s her own way of recounting her experiences as they happened.
Another note on Margaret Atwood’s writing: It’s Poetic. I found this in every line I underlined and, occasionally, in interesting formatting that read more like poetry than prose.
This is true of Atwood’s writing style, in general. I’m no Atwood expert or well-read fan (yet). But I did listen to A. M. Homes read Atwood’s darkly poetic (and oddly funny) short story Stone Mattress on The New Yorker’s podcast. And, stumbling through Foyles Bookstore today in London (Did I mention I’m in London? I’m in London.) I came across a collection of Atwood’s poetry. I didn’t know she wrote poetry. It all makes sense now.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood’s writing is poetic as she…
Plays with words [P.212]:
“Soothing to the eye, the eyes, the Eyes, for that’s who this show is for.”
Questions motives [P.155]:
“As a request it was opaque.”
Makes the intangible, tangible [P.126]:
“Envy radiates from them, I can smell it, faint wisps of acid, mingled with their perfume.”
Poetic.
One final note on Atwood’s writing deals with dialogue. In the past tense, the dialogue isn’t punctuated. I like this. I envy this skill of writers—to write clear dialogue without huge punctuation screaming, “someone is talking now” is a talent. Not overly difficult to do, but pleasant and easy to appreciate.
Lets proceed to the plot.
Take a momentary reading break to imagine me staring at a wall for five minutes asking myself how I can sum this up.
The Handmaid’s Tale is something all women carry in the back of our heads when we think of the past, the present, and the future. It’s a cautionary tale backed by indirect historical elements. It’s the story of what happens when everything goes wrong for women all at once.
Basic freedoms, body autonomy, and individuality are replaced with a hideously patriarchal society where tyrannical laws, backed by scripture, create an unrealistically conservative society. The story takes place a few years after the government takeover, so the old freedoms are still fresh in everyone’s minds. Rebels are still fighting the new government—spies and violence and paranoia abound.
It makes sense that Margaret Atwood wrote this in and around West Germany in the early 80s.
Things aren’t great for all of the men, but they aren’t as bad as they are for women. Sounds familiar to me, a black woman. Hi.
I don’t have much else to say about the plot. It’s dystopian and original, relevant and personal. I want to write stories like this, where the category/genre list looks hectic: Fiction, Political, Feminist, Fantasy. Where believable, factually dense worlds are created with scraps of ours. I want to suck in readers, take them far away, and spit them out… only to realize that they’d barely gone anywhere.
These are some of the things Margaret Atwood does well.
Five Stars.
In this episode, we survey the subtle and unflinching craftsmanship of writer Wu Zao—a woman whose boldly spun poetic narratives reflect the unconventionality with which she lived her life.
We analyze a segment of her work as part of our “Poetry Appreciation” theme, while simultaneously dissecting intricate topics like sexual self-identification, romantic fixation, and gender in an historical/intercontinental context.
Please join us as we try to read a little more, write a little better, and explore the human condition—together.
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In this episode, we pour over the sinuous work and idealistic perspective of poet Agustina Andrade—a woman whose lyrical sensibilities and quixotic writing style came to define Argentine poetry at the end of the nineteenth-century.
We analyze two of her poems as part of our “Poetry Appreciation” theme, and dissect thought-provoking topics like the cultural ramifications of art, Victorian sexuality and the power of self-expression.
Please join us as we try to read a little more, write a little better, and explore the human condition—together.
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In this episode, we peer into the unconventional life and prose of author Fredrika Bremer—a woman whose writing ignited a global shift towards the recognition of women’s rights.
We analyze an excerpt of her work as part of our “Femininity” theme and discuss moving themes like feminism, independence, and personal conviction.
Please join us as we try to read a little more, write a little better, and explore the human condition—together.
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In this episode, we look into the compelling world view and craftmanship of playwright Mamie Burrill—a woman who used the art of drama to incite powerful social and moral debates during the early twentieth-century.
We analyze one of her plays as part of our “Femininity” theme and discuss timely topics like reproductive rights, cultural expectations of womanhood and classism.
Please join us as we try to read a little more, write a little better, and explore the human condition—together.
Listen on ITunes, Stitcher, Castbox, or right here. Comments and ratings are appreciated on all platforms!
Reading: They That Sit In Darkness
Resources:
A Representative Tragedy of African American Women, B.N. Wakchaure
Aphrodite’s Daughters, Maureen Honey
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In this episode, we take a quick break from literary exploration and lay our analytical routine temporarily to the wayside. To celebrate the 10th installment of The Writer Who Reads podcast, we laugh our way through a candid conversation about our friendship and rummage through a heap of mutual memories.
Please join us as we try to read a little more, write a little better, and explore the human condition—together.
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