Sofia Samatar

A Stranger in Olondria is the most lyrical, engrossing novel I've read in quite a while.

Jevick inherits his father's pepper estate and, for the first time, makes the annual journey to the pepper market of cosmopolitan Olondria. Jevick has never left his rural island home, but he has grown up immersed in the literature of Olondria—his tutor is an exiled Olondrian scholar, and Jevick is the first of his people to become literate.

The story that follows is a picaresque adventure, a romance, a ghost story, a postcolonial novel, and a profound meditation on the transformative, ambivalent power of stories. Samatar excels stylistically—her dense, lush descriptions remind me both of Salman Rushdie and of lyrical modernist poets like H.D. It's her characters, however, that make this a really exceptional novel and kept me reading—they are the real thing, the "Mrs. Brown" of the Le Guin essay, and their voices stayed with me after I finished the book.

I'd love to discuss this book in a group setting—there are a lot of Big Ideas here, some of which blindsided me when they cropped up near the end. Samatar is dealing with the intersections between cultures and ways of life, a topic fantasy and science fiction is so good at addressing, and it's challenging material. (Sample book club questions: Do stories save us or merely haunt us? Can we ever truly know another culture or another person, or do we just tell stories to ourselves?)

Finally, I really, really like that this is a fantasy novel and not magical realism set in our world. If you have ever wished for some productive cross-pollination between postcolonial literature and speculative fiction (or wished you were smart enough to wish for such a thing), pick up this book.… (meer)

This is the sort of book that sits with you and forgets to leave, and at some point you turn around from whatever you're doing and realize you're still thinking about it.

It's a ruminative story, with a slowly building story. Big stuff happens, but it unspools rather than explodes, and the protagonist, Jevick, doesn't carry the day and save the kingdom: he is a heartbeat in a grander political and religious conflict. I'd say A Stranger in Olondria is demonstrative of the ongoing erosion between the barriers of genre (which I'm defining right now by pulp conventions, rapid plot, etc) and literary (which I'm defining as prose- and character-motivated) work. The heart of the story is the main character's personal transformation.

Also, there are ghosts and lyric poetry. Unlike the poetry in nearly any other novel I've read, it's beautiful and moves the story.
… (meer)