![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
What I Finished Reading This Week
The Last White Man – Moshid Hamid
I first heard of this book in a newspaper’s 50 books to read this summer feature a few months ago and started reading it on Monday. It has a great premise: what if a blue collar racist woke up and found himself transformed into a person of color? The book itself, unfortunately, is disappointing. This is to do with both style and execution.
This is literary fiction. The prose is so heavy on stylistic affectation that the story is all but lost. Only one of the book’s 180 pages has more than two periods on it. Most of its pages have, at most, one complete sentence on them. Here’s a random example:
I can’t help but wonder if Hamid chose this style in part to disguise the book’s lack of substance, because there really isn’t much. Hamid posits an incredibly challenging premise—What if a white person woke up to find they suddenly had dark skin? What if that then started happening to a bunch of white people?—but doesn’t want to bother thinking through the answers. When Anders wakes up and sees that he’s dark-skinned, he is filled with "murderous rage" and wants to kill himself. Why? Because he is dark-skinned. He’s afraid to go outside. Then there are riots and some people are killed. And then society comes to terms with everything, and the next generation of children don't care about skin color at all. The book explores this with about as much depth as I have given it here.
It’s incredibly frustrating, because it doesn’t add to anything to the issue of race, or increase readers’ understanding of it, or challenge them to think about it in new ways. Racist violence already exists; you don't need Hamid’s premise for society to reach that point, and his plot just replicates it in cookie cutter fashion without generating any new insight into who commits it and why. Nor does the book acknowledge, let alone try to work through, that people react to bodily change with shock. It would have been fascinating had Hamid's characters struggled to untangle what part of their shock was driven by the existence of change—any change—and what was driven by racial prejudice. That is a huge, uncomfortable question people across the ideological spectrum would have to grapple with in such a scenario. But Hamid just ignores it. I think you’d also see new forms of racial stratification; undoubtedly some of those formerly white people would try to find a way to set themselves apart from—and above—people who were born with darker skin; how do people deal with that on an individual and societal level? But the book ignores this too. Nor does it include the perspectives of any characters who weren't born with white skin, which given the premise…
Hamid does do some things well. The names of the only two characters in the book who have them—Anders and Oona—made me place it it Scandinavia, but Hamid carefully avoids setting it anywhere discrete at all, and so it could happen anywhere at all. This is an excellent choice. Hamid is sympathetic to how poverty and its related ills—drug use, social alienation, mental health issues, toxic masculinity, nativism—wear away at people who might otherwise have had a chance at being decent human beings. There’s also a surprisingly affecting death scene (all dozen or so words of it). And despite the shortchanged plot (“There are some riots and deaths, and then everyone is okay with race”), I do appreciate the ending's optimism, although again, I think it's going to be a much longer trek to get there.
TL;DR – Overly affected prose coupled with a premise that raises multiple interesting and difficult questions that the author only engages in on a superficial level.
What I Am Currently Reading
Dark Rise – C.S. Pacat
I’ve had this one for awhile; figured I might as well start reading it.
Dracula – Bram Stoker
Still in the midst of the ship flashbacks. Unlike the Dracula Daily editor, I actually prefer reading them as flashbacks.
What I’m Reading Next
This week I picked up Her Majesty's Royal Coven by Juno Dawson, The Last White Man by Moshin Hamid, and Run vol.1 by John Lewis et al. I also took possession of Natasha Pulley’s The Half Life of Valery K, which was delivered to my home this afternoon. I did not order it, and the GC did not order it for me, so while I am elated to now own it I am also left wondering, Who the fuck sent this book to me?
これで以上です。
The Last White Man – Moshid Hamid
I first heard of this book in a newspaper’s 50 books to read this summer feature a few months ago and started reading it on Monday. It has a great premise: what if a blue collar racist woke up and found himself transformed into a person of color? The book itself, unfortunately, is disappointing. This is to do with both style and execution.
This is literary fiction. The prose is so heavy on stylistic affectation that the story is all but lost. Only one of the book’s 180 pages has more than two periods on it. Most of its pages have, at most, one complete sentence on them. Here’s a random example:
The back of the gym, the changing rooms and lockers and showers, stayed open a little longer, and one night as Anders was ready to leave, two men got into an argument, and they took it outside, and they were older guys, but big, bulky and strong and surprisingly quick despite their bellies, and they started to shove each other in the parking lot, and a few people gathered round, but those who gathered did not say anything, that was what struck Anders, they did not tell the two to stop, nor cheer them on, they were silent, they just watched, and soon the two men were punching, and it was ferocious, and out of the grunts and the shuffles came the sound of a fist hitting the side of a face, the solid crack of it, the thud, softly liquid and bone breaking at the same time, such a visceral, disturbing sound that it made Anders turn away, and he walked off, walked off without seeing what happened next, whether the dark one had the better of it or the pale one, Anders did not want to see, and though he did not see, the sound lingered, and it kept coming to him even as he lay on his bed that night, causing a wince, or a grimace, a physical response, Anders twitching there by himself, in echo.One-hundred-eighty pages of that. And that was one of the shorter sentences.
I can’t help but wonder if Hamid chose this style in part to disguise the book’s lack of substance, because there really isn’t much. Hamid posits an incredibly challenging premise—What if a white person woke up to find they suddenly had dark skin? What if that then started happening to a bunch of white people?—but doesn’t want to bother thinking through the answers. When Anders wakes up and sees that he’s dark-skinned, he is filled with "murderous rage" and wants to kill himself. Why? Because he is dark-skinned. He’s afraid to go outside. Then there are riots and some people are killed. And then society comes to terms with everything, and the next generation of children don't care about skin color at all. The book explores this with about as much depth as I have given it here.
It’s incredibly frustrating, because it doesn’t add to anything to the issue of race, or increase readers’ understanding of it, or challenge them to think about it in new ways. Racist violence already exists; you don't need Hamid’s premise for society to reach that point, and his plot just replicates it in cookie cutter fashion without generating any new insight into who commits it and why. Nor does the book acknowledge, let alone try to work through, that people react to bodily change with shock. It would have been fascinating had Hamid's characters struggled to untangle what part of their shock was driven by the existence of change—any change—and what was driven by racial prejudice. That is a huge, uncomfortable question people across the ideological spectrum would have to grapple with in such a scenario. But Hamid just ignores it. I think you’d also see new forms of racial stratification; undoubtedly some of those formerly white people would try to find a way to set themselves apart from—and above—people who were born with darker skin; how do people deal with that on an individual and societal level? But the book ignores this too. Nor does it include the perspectives of any characters who weren't born with white skin, which given the premise…
Hamid does do some things well. The names of the only two characters in the book who have them—Anders and Oona—made me place it it Scandinavia, but Hamid carefully avoids setting it anywhere discrete at all, and so it could happen anywhere at all. This is an excellent choice. Hamid is sympathetic to how poverty and its related ills—drug use, social alienation, mental health issues, toxic masculinity, nativism—wear away at people who might otherwise have had a chance at being decent human beings. There’s also a surprisingly affecting death scene (all dozen or so words of it). And despite the shortchanged plot (“There are some riots and deaths, and then everyone is okay with race”), I do appreciate the ending's optimism, although again, I think it's going to be a much longer trek to get there.
TL;DR – Overly affected prose coupled with a premise that raises multiple interesting and difficult questions that the author only engages in on a superficial level.
What I Am Currently Reading
Dark Rise – C.S. Pacat
I’ve had this one for awhile; figured I might as well start reading it.
Dracula – Bram Stoker
Still in the midst of the ship flashbacks. Unlike the Dracula Daily editor, I actually prefer reading them as flashbacks.
What I’m Reading Next
This week I picked up Her Majesty's Royal Coven by Juno Dawson, The Last White Man by Moshin Hamid, and Run vol.1 by John Lewis et al. I also took possession of Natasha Pulley’s The Half Life of Valery K, which was delivered to my home this afternoon. I did not order it, and the GC did not order it for me, so while I am elated to now own it I am also left wondering, Who the fuck sent this book to me?
これで以上です。
Tags:
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
I did not order it, and the GC did not order it for me, so while I am elated to now own it I am also left wondering, Who the fuck sent this book to me?
A good problem to have! You have a literary fairy godparent!
From:
no subject
I know! It's almost worse than going into something expecting it to be bad.
And oh my goodness, a literary fairy godparent indeed--in that respect, at least, I am inhabiting the right fairy tale right now. :)
From:
no subject
Have you ever heard of the book Black Like Me? It's the non-fiction version of this. I read it ages ago, and while I don't remember any specifics, I do recall it being an excellent read.
"...some of those formerly white people would try to find a way to set themselves apart from—and above—people who were born with darker skin" - This would be like the colorism that already exists. I feel like we'll always find a way to be horrible to each other. :(
And: I WANT A BOOK FAIRY! You're so lucky! <3
From:
no subject
I know! And right now I'm hoping it's Harry Sylvester Bird, which I've got on my TBR list. And thank you for recommending Black Like Me; it does sound excellent and I've added it as well.
I feel like we'll always find a way to be horrible to each other. :(
Yes, it's like whack-a-mole in a way. For every person trying to improve the way people treat each other, there are so many others who love to trample over others for arbitrary, bullshit reasons.
And man, I don't know what I did to earn a visit from the book fairy, but if I figure it out I will let you know too. :D