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The Discreet Beast of Wildeeps review
Dec. 28th, 2015 07:13 pmHey,
Coming up on the year's end so I better get through some books and tell you about them.
First up, the ad-hoc book club selection The Discreet Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa. It was on a best-of booklist,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
beah and I both thought it looked interesting and then we got other folks to read it with us.
The book is set in Peru and follows the stories of two men in two different towns who are facing something of a crisis. Felícito Yanaqué owns a transport company and wakes up one morning to find an extortion note pinned to his door. Meanwhile, Don Rigoberto, a manager in an insurance company finds himself in the middle of a family feud when his boss asks him to mind the store while he spites his two sons who wish he were dead so they can get his money. The book does well switching back and forth between the stories and while it does tie them together, it does so kind of obliquely up until the last few pages.
It was an interesting book, but there's a lot of South American culture on display in that book that really struck me as an American reader. A lot of discussion around honor and blood relations and gender relations that feel more antebellum South than modern day Peru. This does make one or two of the plot points a bit unsatisfying for me. Still, the writing was pretty good and looking into his other works, I've found one or two others I'd be interested in reading. I also think there are some interesting conversations about the book in my future from other readers.
Switching gears, next up was The Crouching Beast by Frank Boccia. Mr. Boccia was an Army Lieutenant in Vietnam in 1969 and this is his account of the battle of Hamburger Hill -- so you know this is going to be some light reading.
Actually, about 2/3rds of the book describes his time as platoon commander in the months before the actual battle itself. You get to know the various men under his command and you get to watch him learn more about being an effective leader. The actual battle itself is a just a bit anti-climactic.
The main reason for this is that Mr. Boccia was one of the few officers on the ground to actually survive in his company. Pretty much every other Lieutenant and the Captain were killed or incapacitated (and sometimes their replacements were as well). Boccia's platoon lost about half its men but actually fared pretty well because they were running security between the command post and the site of the assaults. Since they weren't being sent in, they tended to survive. This isn't a knock on Boccia's leadership or ability -- he was prepared to make an assault before it was called off, and keeping the line between the top of the hill, the command post, and the landing zones secure was an important job (the NVA surrounded them and came close of overrunning them once or twice). Still, it feels like you never really see what's going on.
Of course, what's going on is that small platoons of men are being sent over rugged terrain that funneled the into a killing field they couldn't hope to escape from. Their enemies were very well dug in and well protected from artillery and air strikes (and those air strikes hit Boccia's company twice during the operation). It was a crappy situation where commanding officers tried the same thing over and over expecting different results.
Honestly, sort of an unsatisfying book, but then, that's pretty true to Vietnam as a whole.
Finally, I zipped through Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson. Again, another "best-of" booklist, but this one really hit the nail on the head. It's got a lot of good stuff going for it.
So the book is set in North America -- well, it's clearly set in the New World, but the map might be different because there was a bit of a cataclysm when the post-singularity humans became light-beam space gods and zipped off to the stars. Now you've got a pre-industrial technology level with weird stuff left over from "the gods". This includes a few people/beings who are gifted with talents beyond mortal ability.
Demane is one of those children of the gods. He tries to keep it subtle, but the other men in his group of caravan workers know he's somehow different and nickname him Sorcerer. Demane is doing this back-breaking labor because at the end of this trip, far south to the City of Olorum, he and his lover can finally be together.
The trip will take them through the Wildeeps, a sort of wound in the fabric of spacetime where multiple realities and times overlap. Luckily, there is a magic road that can be safely followed to get through the Wildeeps. Unfortunately, there is a monster stalking the road who isn't contained by it's magic. So Demane and the Captain (another child of the gods) must venture out and stop it.
There's a lot of great stuff going on here. I don't want to spoil it too much by talking about the neat little conceits in the book. I will say that while it doesn't begin to pass the Bechdel Test, pretty much every single character is a POC and there are a couple of well-done gay relationships. It very neatly subverts a lot of standard Sword and Sorcery tropes and is just a great deal of fun to read.
The only small knock I have on the book is that Wilson will just drop in a flashback with no warning so sometimes you have to back up a bit. It's not terrible (and clearly shows his love of Samuel Delaney's work), but it does irritate a bit. Still, in the grand scheme of things, this is something you should definitely check out.
later
Tom
Coming up on the year's end so I better get through some books and tell you about them.
First up, the ad-hoc book club selection The Discreet Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa. It was on a best-of booklist,
beah and I both thought it looked interesting and then we got other folks to read it with us.The book is set in Peru and follows the stories of two men in two different towns who are facing something of a crisis. Felícito Yanaqué owns a transport company and wakes up one morning to find an extortion note pinned to his door. Meanwhile, Don Rigoberto, a manager in an insurance company finds himself in the middle of a family feud when his boss asks him to mind the store while he spites his two sons who wish he were dead so they can get his money. The book does well switching back and forth between the stories and while it does tie them together, it does so kind of obliquely up until the last few pages.
It was an interesting book, but there's a lot of South American culture on display in that book that really struck me as an American reader. A lot of discussion around honor and blood relations and gender relations that feel more antebellum South than modern day Peru. This does make one or two of the plot points a bit unsatisfying for me. Still, the writing was pretty good and looking into his other works, I've found one or two others I'd be interested in reading. I also think there are some interesting conversations about the book in my future from other readers.
Switching gears, next up was The Crouching Beast by Frank Boccia. Mr. Boccia was an Army Lieutenant in Vietnam in 1969 and this is his account of the battle of Hamburger Hill -- so you know this is going to be some light reading.
Actually, about 2/3rds of the book describes his time as platoon commander in the months before the actual battle itself. You get to know the various men under his command and you get to watch him learn more about being an effective leader. The actual battle itself is a just a bit anti-climactic.
The main reason for this is that Mr. Boccia was one of the few officers on the ground to actually survive in his company. Pretty much every other Lieutenant and the Captain were killed or incapacitated (and sometimes their replacements were as well). Boccia's platoon lost about half its men but actually fared pretty well because they were running security between the command post and the site of the assaults. Since they weren't being sent in, they tended to survive. This isn't a knock on Boccia's leadership or ability -- he was prepared to make an assault before it was called off, and keeping the line between the top of the hill, the command post, and the landing zones secure was an important job (the NVA surrounded them and came close of overrunning them once or twice). Still, it feels like you never really see what's going on.
Of course, what's going on is that small platoons of men are being sent over rugged terrain that funneled the into a killing field they couldn't hope to escape from. Their enemies were very well dug in and well protected from artillery and air strikes (and those air strikes hit Boccia's company twice during the operation). It was a crappy situation where commanding officers tried the same thing over and over expecting different results.
Honestly, sort of an unsatisfying book, but then, that's pretty true to Vietnam as a whole.
Finally, I zipped through Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson. Again, another "best-of" booklist, but this one really hit the nail on the head. It's got a lot of good stuff going for it.
So the book is set in North America -- well, it's clearly set in the New World, but the map might be different because there was a bit of a cataclysm when the post-singularity humans became light-beam space gods and zipped off to the stars. Now you've got a pre-industrial technology level with weird stuff left over from "the gods". This includes a few people/beings who are gifted with talents beyond mortal ability.
Demane is one of those children of the gods. He tries to keep it subtle, but the other men in his group of caravan workers know he's somehow different and nickname him Sorcerer. Demane is doing this back-breaking labor because at the end of this trip, far south to the City of Olorum, he and his lover can finally be together.
The trip will take them through the Wildeeps, a sort of wound in the fabric of spacetime where multiple realities and times overlap. Luckily, there is a magic road that can be safely followed to get through the Wildeeps. Unfortunately, there is a monster stalking the road who isn't contained by it's magic. So Demane and the Captain (another child of the gods) must venture out and stop it.
There's a lot of great stuff going on here. I don't want to spoil it too much by talking about the neat little conceits in the book. I will say that while it doesn't begin to pass the Bechdel Test, pretty much every single character is a POC and there are a couple of well-done gay relationships. It very neatly subverts a lot of standard Sword and Sorcery tropes and is just a great deal of fun to read.
The only small knock I have on the book is that Wilson will just drop in a flashback with no warning so sometimes you have to back up a bit. It's not terrible (and clearly shows his love of Samuel Delaney's work), but it does irritate a bit. Still, in the grand scheme of things, this is something you should definitely check out.
later
Tom
