The Closest Thing To Animals
September 7, 2015 5:02 PM   Subscribe

The Closest Thing To Animals, A short story by Sofia Samatar.

"I have a habit of meeting people right before they get famous and don’t need me anymore. I met Rock Morris two weeks before his book came out. I met Cindy Vea when she worked at the bakery. Her hair straggled out of her ponytail and neither of us would have guessed you could even be a full-time blogger. Six months later, I emailed Cindy to remind her about the panel we were putting together for the Conference on Negative Realism. She never wrote back. I met Nadia Barsoum the year before she started growing peppers. She kept saying her knee hurt. We thought it was the fog."
posted by moonlight on vermont (5 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is an excellent story, I think the best short story of Samatar's I've read. It's exciting - I have felt in the past that she struggled with short stories; some of them were a little pat, some of them didn't seem to me to gel. A Stranger in Olondria, her novel, is amazing, one of the best fantasy novels I've ever read. If you like the Earthsea books or Lud-In-The-Mist or Kingdoms of Elfin - well, it's that kind of book in that it is very different from everything else, its own jewel.


I like her poetry, too, but I am no judge of poetry and don't know if it's good or not. I like The Death of Araweillo.

I don't think I precisely understand the story, but I like how it pulls together the jealousy and stuff about being Somali and the environmental collapse and the arts. I like how it's sort of the fiction of rolling apocalypse, because I think that's what is happening; the world is ending all around us but we're still shopping and having fundraisers.

I guess in a way it reminds me of Pat Cadigan's Home By The Sea, although perhaps since we're closer to the end of the world than we were in 1992, we understand it differently.
posted by Frowner at 5:44 PM on September 7, 2015 [3 favorites]


Seconding A Stranger in Olondria. You must read it.
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:25 PM on September 7, 2015


I'm not familiar with Samatar, but this was excellent. Is A Stranger in Olondria at all like this?
posted by shakespeherian at 9:37 PM on September 7, 2015


A Stranger in Olondria, her novel, is amazing, one of the best fantasy novels I've ever read.

Yes. If you like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel or the better sort of Ruritarian fantasies (Swordspoint frex) this is a book you need to read.
posted by MartinWisse at 10:32 PM on September 7, 2015


A Stranger In Olondria isn't exactly like this - it's not set in any version of "our world" and doesn't have dystopian themes. The language is much more like the last paragraph in this short story than like the rest of it.

It does have protagonist/narrators who aren't exactly likable, a mysterious illness central to the plot and quite a lot of....well, it's not a novel set in our world, so there's nothing about literally being Somali, or Somali-American, but there's a lot that chimes with those experiences. (And although I cannot prove it, I believe that the novel mirrors some of the parts of one of the first novels in written Somali, Ignorance is the Enemy of Love. I also feel like Samatar is creating a world of poets and writers which chimes with the actual importance of poetry and literature in Somalia.)

Stranger in Olondria is....well, honestly, it's a little over-written in places, a little bit too purple. Some people aren't into that. But I felt like the effects achieved in most of the book were well worth the spots where it tipped over into being too-lyrical. And the world of the novel is wonderfully described. I'd say that Jevick and Jissavet, the two primary narrators, are far more complexly realized than is usual even in good, character driven literary fantasy. I felt absolutely submerged in the book as I was reading it.

Also, the invented words are really good - they sound distinct enough to contribute to the world-building and they are lyrical but they are not contrived, and there are enough that they are effective but not so many that they distract you when you're reading.

Where it exceeds the Earthsea books and Lud-in-the-Mist is in how the plot deals with language and nation. The Tea Islands, where Jevick lives, are trading islands seaward of the great empire of Olondria. Despite their sophisticated trading culture, the Tea Islands have no written language, only burnt marks on wood. Olondria's national myth is of itself as a nation of readers, poets and books. Jevick is the son of a wealthy, violent, family-proud merchant; the merchant determines that his son will grow up speaking and reading Olondrian so as to trade more effectively. Jevick is a Tea Islander whose primary education comes from an imported Olondrian tutor. After his father's death, he is able to travel to Olondria. On the way, he meets Jissavet, an outcast peasant girl whose family is breaking with tradition by taking her to Olondria in the hopes that her illness, the terminal disease kideti, can be treated there. And then there's a whole plot about books, language, nation, power, who gets to speak, how a national literature is made.

It's just such a smart book, truly dazzling.
posted by Frowner at 7:07 AM on September 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


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