DARKMOTHERLAND, an IMAX movie played on a 1080i screen

DARKMOTHERLAND
SAMRAT UPADHYAY
Soho Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An epic tale of love and political violence set in earthquake-ravaged Darkmotherland, a dystopian reimagining of Nepal, from the Whiting Award–winning author of Arresting God in Kathmandu

In Darkmotherland, Nepali writer Samrat Upadhyay has created a novel of infinite embrace—filled with lovers and widows, dictators and dissidents, paupers, fundamentalists, and a genderqueer power player with her eyes on the throne.

At its heart are two intertwining narratives: one of Kranti, a revolutionary’s daughter, who marries into a plutocratic dynasty and becomes ensnared in the family’s politics. And then there is the tale of Darkmotherland’s new dictator and his mistress, Rozy, who undergoes radical body changes and grows into a figure of immense power.

Darkmotherland is a romp through the vast space of a globalized universe where personal ambitions are inextricably tied to political fortunes, where individual identities are shaped by family pressures and social reins, and where the East connects to and collides with the West in brilliant and unsettling ways.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA DEDLWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: There is a lot to be said for ambition in storytelling. This book, for the first third, was destined for enshrinement in my hall of fame; the second third for my favorites list; and by the end for my "you should read it if you love, or need, a full-immersion wide-angle view of what chaos really does." You should know going in that women have significant challenges regarding consensual sex here. The centering of a transfem character's experiences made for sharp commentary on gender roles in a repressive, fascistic regime, yet also made my hackles rise. I have trans folk in my life whose potential feelings about this book's explicitness I constantly found obtruding in my reading.

It's not to say this is a pure negative. I'm all for people writing uncomfortable takes on the world as we find it today. The fact that Rozy is a person with agency, albeit in a very twisted system, felt both natural and unhappy. Her choices were severely limited, and yet also used to prove the point that pressure can cause a person to become more powerful the same way water under pressure can become a weapon.

The fictionalized country in the story was a background for me, a setting; the events played out on its stage. I was unable to get deeper than that, despite the story's evident desire for me to do so, by the sheer size if the cast we're following. It is always a risk to expand a cast beyond a handful of people. The great trick of numbing people to the reality of suffering is to follow Stalin's epigrammatic maxim: "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic." Like teaching history, telling a story in novel form only becomes less involving when you dilute your message (especially when it's essentially the same message repeated) beyond a certain point. I'm not clear if that was an intentional choice of metacommentary on the author's and publisher's part.

This story of the chaos and upheaval that attend a violent ending suffers from this dilution. It also tries its best to invest you in its very deeply felt observations on how cruelty ultimately undermines itself as it metastasizes. As ever, the issue of what is celebration and/or normalization arises as repetition of violent language and behaviors continues to assault one's readerly experience. This fine balance between intention and reception is always deeply personal. It crossed my internal line shortly after midpoint; I was too deeply interested in the results the author intended to bring to quit, as I ordinarily would have done. That's why I got as close as I did to a full four stars.

I'm not doing a good job, I fear, of expressing how deeply enfolding a tale is told here. I'm very much a fan of stories that require me to think and deeply consider the places and times and inhabitants of the storyscape before me. I think a read that makes demands on my deeper cognitive resources is a fun read. This story does that. I'm very interested in tales of messy endings that are inevitable and inherent in the setup of the world being built. This story could be the poster child for that. I was, then, very much on the side of the author and his project of elucidation.

But because of certain choices he made, it began to feel like it was just that: a project.

I wanted to end the read as much, or more in love with it as I started our being. I'm bummed that I couldn't.