Akiva Reads

by Vajra Chandrasekera

5 stars because I’m blown away by the complexity and what Chandrasekera has achieved. As exciting and original as Ancillary Justice when I first read it.

• I did not find this slow paced, as others have said, but it may have been because I was reading it so fast. I was deeply immersed and found it very hard to put down.

• I was willing to give the worldbuilding some grace and not question its roiling mix of magic, mythology, technology, and 21st century terms and concepts because I was so interested in the plot. That paid off in a big way!!

• This goes hard on Buddhism, in a way that feels daring and dangerous if the world of this book mirrors the religious politics of Sri Lanka in any serious way. My intro-level reading on Buddhism last year was invaluable even though it was clear I was missing a lot. Some concepts and stories I was able to pick out: Vido=Ananda, pure land and buddha fields (probably, I still don’t really grok these), the Mahayana/Theravada split in its outlines.

• Queer and trans, anticolonial, antiracist and anti-casteist, and overall quite anarchist, but not in a way that's idealistic about any of those things. Doesn't put any identities (or people) on a pedestal. Not idealistic about human nature nor the way humans relate to each other at all, but somehow still believes in trying and hope and revolution, even without believing that we’ll ever eliminate violence.

• Being in my mid-late 30s and really resonating with the scene where Fetter is thinking about the difference between him and Caduv, in their 20s and still forming their own identities and selfhoods, and the contrast with Koel's full fledged adulthood, which is aiming to form the world.

• I really really really fuck with the incredible surreal Kafkaesque journey through death and out the other side depicted as a refugee/internment camp.

• The end of the story was sudden and frustrating in some ways but it also worked really well: if a chosen one is the person a story is told about, then the true end of their chosenness is the end of them being seen/surveilled by the story being told about them. It’s also landed as a much happier ending than I feared: Fetter finally gets to be free and himself and alive, shaped by his family and his history, like we all are, but no longer controlled by them. Like his family, the reader is forced to realize that we can no longer completely understand Fetter and his life.

• I was so sure after the pyre that Fetter was the Man in the Fire - I think I like even more that he doesn't seem to be, though!

Original review: Extremely hard to put down, now I can finally do household chores.