Sofia Samatar

Once, he said, on ancient Earth, there was a Horizon, and to gaze on it was to look neither up nor down. Look out...

This is an sf story about a generation ship and the people on it who have never known anything else. Those are a dime a dozen in science fiction, of course, but Samatar focuses on the class divide in the ship, and academia's role in both upending and upholding systems of oppression—it's a unique angle on an old sf staple, and of course totally played to my own interests. show more Great read. show less

Sofia Samatar's work is a revelation. Her prose has only become richer and more assured between her debut novel and this follow-up. The Winged Histories gives the stories of four women whose stories are linked by the events that shape them (and that they help to shape). The contexts of the complicated class and national histories the inform these women is described in such clear detail that I feel that I know them all, their histories and their inner realities. Amazing, incredible, lush, show more emotionally rich, politically fascinating, this is one of the most satisfying novels I have picked up in ages. It begs the reader in each moment to consider how histories are created, and the costs and inequalities behind how we all must fight to be a part of history, however it gets written show less

This is a hard book to review. On just the prose itself, it's a 4 or 5 stars. This book is gorgeous. The language is lovely and musical. Plot wise, it was again, high - there was a good premise. For actual execution, however, probably a 2. Gorgeous language, unfortunately, just does not make up for very slow and uneven pacing.

The first half of the book was Jevick learning about Olondria, the land of books and writing, and then actually going there himself after his father's death. He spends show more much of his time as a loafer and playboy, enjoying food, books, and women. This section was arguably the slowest portion of the book. Things pick up slightly with the appearance of Jissavet's ghost, though it isn't until Jevick falls in with the Priestess of Avalei that I started really getting into the story.

Another thing that kept bugging me was that I did not like either Jevick or Jissavet. Jevick, despite being the protagonist, did not exhibit much agency and was instead solely an agent of the plot. He largely allowed others to determine his fate and it wasn't until toward the end of the story that he made decisions for himself, which to the credit of the development of the character, were selfless. Jissavet was a brat, and I think she was fully aware of that. She acknowledges she had no respect or understanding for her mother and thought herself above her mother. Whether that was just an aspect of her personality or a manifestation of her kyitna was a bit unclear, but either way, I had very little sympathy for her in life or in death, where she essentially bullied Jevick to get her way.

At the end, I finally understood this was a book about the power of books and writing and learning.

A Stranger in Olondria is not written in an easy-to-read manner, deliberately, I think. It mimics some of the classics of previous generations, with rambling prose that is hard to follow for someone (read: me) accustomed the straight-forwardness of contemporary publishing. Which makes me realize it's been a very long time since I sat down with Lord Dunsany or Tolkien and gotten immersed in the prose, focusing on the language rather than the plot. The speculative fiction genre seems to have forgotten its roots, and Sofia Samatar appears to be trying to revitalize a love and appreciation for language in the genre. show less

A Stranger in Olondria is the most lyrical, engrossing novel I've read in quite a while.

Jevick inherits his father's pepper estate and, for the first time, makes the annual journey to the pepper market of cosmopolitan Olondria. Jevick has never left his rural island home, but he has grown up immersed in the literature of Olondria—his tutor is an exiled Olondrian scholar, and Jevick is the first of his people to become literate.

The story that follows is a picaresque adventure, a romance, a show more ghost story, a postcolonial novel, and a profound meditation on the transformative, ambivalent power of stories. Samatar excels stylistically—her dense, lush descriptions remind me both of Salman Rushdie and of lyrical modernist poets like H.D. It's her characters, however, that make this a really exceptional novel and kept me reading—they are the real thing, the "Mrs. Brown" of the Le Guin essay, and their voices stayed with me after I finished the book.

I'd love to discuss this book in a group setting—there are a lot of Big Ideas here, some of which blindsided me when they cropped up near the end. Samatar is dealing with the intersections between cultures and ways of life, a topic fantasy and science fiction is so good at addressing, and it's challenging material. (Sample book club questions: Do stories save us or merely haunt us? Can we ever truly know another culture or another person, or do we just tell stories to ourselves?)

Finally, I really, really like that this is a fantasy novel and not magical realism set in our world. If you have ever wished for some productive cross-pollination between postcolonial literature and speculative fiction (or wished you were smart enough to wish for such a thing), pick up this book. show less