The Years of Rice and Salt
Feb. 24th, 2011 12:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
What a lovely, upbeat, delightful little book. A beautiful gem. Very sweetly written, with an engaging cast of characters you really don't mind seeing over and over again as they are reincarned over and over in a world where the European population was wiped out by the Black Death. Very philosophical, very humanist, and very positive. It doesn't claim to be a utopia, and things range from the rather nice (due to a combination of circumstances, the native tribes of America successfully consolidate and form their own country) to the very nice (India becomes a bastion of Enlightenment and knowledge) to the distinctly horrible (WW1 and 2 blend into one massive war which lasts more than sixty years and costs over a billion lives and one mountain). And every time the characters die and come around again, their next life builds on the last adding to the sense of progress and moving from bad to good.
Only two quibbles, the feminist statements come across as a bit forced in the first examples, although they become more nuanced and very clever later on. I particularly liked the theory that the Muslim states lost the Long War because unlike the Chinese and Indians they did not have their women join the war effort until the very end. My second quibble is that the rate of progress and order of progress mirrors ours a little too closely, although it was a blast to see a hot-air baloon and realise where we were in technological terms.
So, really lovely, really sweet, I love it to bits and it ties the whole of the massive story, arching over more than a thousand years, into a neat little red bow which leaves you smiling and happy. Thoroughly reccomended.
It was also nice to read a book where Nazis were a complete impossibility.
Only two quibbles, the feminist statements come across as a bit forced in the first examples, although they become more nuanced and very clever later on. I particularly liked the theory that the Muslim states lost the Long War because unlike the Chinese and Indians they did not have their women join the war effort until the very end. My second quibble is that the rate of progress and order of progress mirrors ours a little too closely, although it was a blast to see a hot-air baloon and realise where we were in technological terms.
So, really lovely, really sweet, I love it to bits and it ties the whole of the massive story, arching over more than a thousand years, into a neat little red bow which leaves you smiling and happy. Thoroughly reccomended.
It was also nice to read a book where Nazis were a complete impossibility.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-24 12:24 am (UTC)Also, here's the details of that Lovecraft Cabaret I mentioned!
http://www.selfmadehero.com/news/2011/02/news-flash-2011-belongs-to-cthulu/
(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-24 12:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-24 02:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-01 02:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-24 08:28 am (UTC)Still so many theories about the Black Death though!
(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-24 02:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-24 02:57 pm (UTC)Add Hilary Mantel's: 'Wolf Hall' to your list if you haven't already read it. It's another fairly chunky tome- it's now out in paperback. I don't often read historical novels, being a historian and all with a tendency to cringe at anachronisms, but this is a really fine piece of writing. :o)