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.

MEDUSA OF THE ROSES, we have a literary heir to Jean Genet at last

MEDUSA OF THE ROSES
NAVID SINAKI
Grove Press
$27.00 hardcover, available tomorrow

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Sex, vengeance, and betrayal in modern day Tehran—Navid Sinaki’s bold and cinematic debut is a queer literary noir following Anjir, a morbid romantic and petty thief whose boyfriend disappears just as they’re planning to leave their hometown for good

Anjir and Zal are childhood best friends turned adults in love. The only problem is they live in Iran, where being openly gay is criminalized, and the government’s apparent acceptance of trans people requires them to surgically transition and pass as cis straight people. When Zal is brutally attacked after being seen with another man in public, despite the betrayal, Anjir becomes even more determined to carry out their longstanding plan for the future: Anjir, who’s always identified with the mythical gender-changing Tiresias, will become a woman, and they’ll move to a new town for a fresh start as husband and wife.

Then Zal vanishes, leaving a cryptic note behind that sets Anjir on a quest to find the other man, hoping he will lead to Zal. Stalking and stealing his way through the streets, clubs, library stacks, hotel rooms, and museum halls of Tehran—where he encounters his troubled mother, addict brother, and the dynamic Leyli, a new friend who is undergoing a transition of her own—Anjir soon realizes that someone is tailing him too. It quickly becomes clear that more violence may be the fastest route to freedom, as Anjir’s morals and gender identity are pushed to new places in the pursuit of love, peace, and self-determination.

Steeped in ancient Persian and Greek myths, and brimming with poetic vulnerability, subversive bite, and noirish grit, Medusa of the Roses is a page-turning wallop of a story from a bright new literary talent.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I think most of us love the honorable thief in fiction. Stories abound over the generations that feature a good person forced to steal by an unjust system, by a pressing external need, or just to redress the wild imbalance of power over one's person. Robin Hood, Locke Lamora, Aladdin, and their literary kin are enshrined in the cultural conversation. Mythology's trickster gods, those agents of chaos, are...witness Loki as embodied by Tom Hiddleston here and now...endlessly popular because no one doesn't love a funny, witty piss-take.

Then there's Jean Genet. DEFINITELY not a comfortably admirable character to most people, a petty thief and prostitute whose actions as a very incompetent thief (he kept getting caught!) earned him the 1940s French version of a three-strikes law conviction. No one ever tried to pretend he was in the Resistance. Who cared what language the jailers spoke? He stole and sold his body because he didn't like the other options...wholly self-motivated, probably a narcissist, but magnetically interesting and embodying anti-establishment Cool.

Now, after years of disuse, we have Anjir from that mold. He and his love Zal must be together. Funds for transitioning to female aren't coming from the government that demands he take this step...which, to be fair, isn't one he resists...so he steals.

Living in theocratic Iran is awful enough for AFAB women.Think how much more horrifying it would be to be an AMAB man-loving man who, deliberately and consistently, acts "like a woman"...has sex with and enters into romanitic partnerships with men. A complete affront to Male Privilege! An assault on God's Will! God put men on top! DON'T BOTTOM!! Or, if you really must, then transition to female.

I totally support trans rights. I am not in any way trans, have no desire to be female, dislike pretty intensely my culture's hideous fun-house mirror idea of "femininity" and would strongly prefer to be dead rather than forced to conform to what I see as a ghastly disfiguring joke of an identity. Yet, if gay men want to live and love their partnered lives, that is what their theocratic government tells them to do.

I live in fear of the US right-wingnuts figuring out their transphobia can be redeployed.

What I enjoyed about my ride through modern Iran was the sense I got of a society on the boil. Stuff is happening in this book, stuff that's out of most people's sight, but is building up pressure and will blow a hole in the status quo. The author has crafted an avatar of selfish anti-social action who represents, just by his existence, Resistance!

Told in beautiful sentences, this story of Love, Passion, and Honesty draws on millennia of models for its men's identities. It is a read I won't soon forget or easily allow to slip under the newer reads to come.