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The endless rain you thought of as your heart
For the sixth night of Hanukkah, my parents gave us a microwave. Considering its predecessor had gotten to the point of needing five or more minutes to warm a bowl of soup and we were becoming more than vaguely concerned about the noises it had taken to making in the process, the new addition is a major gift to our kitchen. We have also confirmed that our toaster oven is not broken: it works just fine when plugged in on its own recognizance, the extension cord required to connect it to the inconveniently located patch-job of a kitchen outlet has just given up the ghost. We should have a replacement by tomorrow before the winter storm moves in.
I was woken on three different occasions by spam calls this morning, including one which tried to persuade me that I needed to give personal information over the phone in order to sign for a package at an address at which I no longer live. I was half-asleep and suspicious and unintentionally but satisfyingly confused the scammer by asking things like "What kind of package?" and receiving the very convincing answer ". . . a small box?" Eventually he abruptly hung up. I have been trying to reestablish something at least resembling a functional sleep schedule ever since the five-day migraine at the end of November and I have no remorse about making things harder for someone who interferes with my sleep, especially when the chances are really good that he wanted my credit card number.
I loved Susanna Clarke's Piranesi (2020), which I read last night on the couch while under a cat. Its puzzle-plot makes it difficult to discuss for people who care about spoilers, but it is full of time and sea and memory and while it is very much its own numinous self, it can also be legitimately read as a remix of most of my favorite parts of C.S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew (1955)—potentially in continuity with it, depending on how seriously a parenthetical remark is meant to be taken—with influence I am confident identifying from Owen Barfield and would like a double-check on Charles Williams from someone who knows the Inklings better than I do. At one end of its spectrum of genres, it feels at least flavored with Mervyn Peake; at the other, a novel much more like Elizabeth Hand's Hard Light (2016) or M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart (1992) is just aslant to it. I suspect I would have loved it even if its central setting had not turned out to resemble places I have dreamed, a vast house of monumental stairs and sculptures whose lower levels are filled with ocean and whose upper levels are filled with sky, inhabited to the best of the narrator's knowledge by himself, by the thirteen skeletal dead for whom he cares tenderly, by his twice-weekly companion in the search for the world's lost knowledge, and by uncountable auguries of birds. Without reducing to autobiography or metaphor, it makes a great deal of sense to me as a book that a person would write whose life had been altered irrevocably and nonconsensually, as Clarke's was by chronic fatigue syndrome shortly after the publication of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004). I would not call it horror. I am glad to know that Clarke has more than the one mode of writing in her and I would be perfectly happy if this one won as many of all the things as her debut. I love its statues and tides.
I was woken on three different occasions by spam calls this morning, including one which tried to persuade me that I needed to give personal information over the phone in order to sign for a package at an address at which I no longer live. I was half-asleep and suspicious and unintentionally but satisfyingly confused the scammer by asking things like "What kind of package?" and receiving the very convincing answer ". . . a small box?" Eventually he abruptly hung up. I have been trying to reestablish something at least resembling a functional sleep schedule ever since the five-day migraine at the end of November and I have no remorse about making things harder for someone who interferes with my sleep, especially when the chances are really good that he wanted my credit card number.
I loved Susanna Clarke's Piranesi (2020), which I read last night on the couch while under a cat. Its puzzle-plot makes it difficult to discuss for people who care about spoilers, but it is full of time and sea and memory and while it is very much its own numinous self, it can also be legitimately read as a remix of most of my favorite parts of C.S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew (1955)—potentially in continuity with it, depending on how seriously a parenthetical remark is meant to be taken—with influence I am confident identifying from Owen Barfield and would like a double-check on Charles Williams from someone who knows the Inklings better than I do. At one end of its spectrum of genres, it feels at least flavored with Mervyn Peake; at the other, a novel much more like Elizabeth Hand's Hard Light (2016) or M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart (1992) is just aslant to it. I suspect I would have loved it even if its central setting had not turned out to resemble places I have dreamed, a vast house of monumental stairs and sculptures whose lower levels are filled with ocean and whose upper levels are filled with sky, inhabited to the best of the narrator's knowledge by himself, by the thirteen skeletal dead for whom he cares tenderly, by his twice-weekly companion in the search for the world's lost knowledge, and by uncountable auguries of birds. Without reducing to autobiography or metaphor, it makes a great deal of sense to me as a book that a person would write whose life had been altered irrevocably and nonconsensually, as Clarke's was by chronic fatigue syndrome shortly after the publication of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004). I would not call it horror. I am glad to know that Clarke has more than the one mode of writing in her and I would be perfectly happy if this one won as many of all the things as her debut. I love its statues and tides.
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I would agree with those vibes, too!
Would you recommend The Magician’s Nephew, then?
Yes. It's my favorite of the Chronicles of Narnia. It's the one with the strongest influence from another writer—E. Nesbit, whose characters get a scene-setting name-check on the first page—but it's also the strangest, a children's adventure that takes a hard right into a weird tale that turns into a creation myth. It's full of beautiful, numinous images and bracketed with metafiction. It's a chimera, but it's always felt to me like the one that gets least in its own way. There's a thread of it in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but I didn't realize until Piranesi how much of a taproot text it must be for Clarke. Chronologically it's the first the series, but it was not designed to be read without knowledge of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and really should not be; in other words, I continue to feel that the reordering by HarperCollins was a stupid, stupid idea.
I belatedly dabbled in the Narnia books for the first(ish?) time this year, and liked The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian well enough but bounced hard off of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Luckily, you don't need that one for The Magician's Nephew! If it's important to you to go on, I might recommend skipping to The Silver Chair just to see if you can get into it independently; it has a lot of plot coupons, but it also has one of the series' best characters and some nice existentialism. As for the rest of the books, I don't know what to tell you. My growing awareness of Orientalism somewhat cratered my ability to re-read The Horse and His Boy even though it has an interesting female co-protagonist; eventually I wound up writing fic to argue with Lewis' Calormen. I love the awful revelation of the god Tash and the gorgeous science fantasy of the apocalypse of Narnia in The Last Battle and otherwise it's unsubtly transposed Christian eschatology and literal character assassination and we're done. But I can re-read the others, even if I haven't in several years now. I will re-read The Magician's Nephew as soon as I'm in the same house as my childhood copies. I wasn't expecting to find so much of it unraveled and rewoven through Piranesi.