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language: Welsh
country: UK
year: 2017
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 17.3.22-19.9.22
Catrin Dafydd’s Gwales is a fascinating, troubling, heavy, slow book. it took me six months to get through it, although it wasn’t six months of reading every day — rather, like two months of regular reading, then a month break, then a little more, then a three month break, then I finished it in one fell(-ish) swoop.
it took me a long time and a lot of energy for two main reasons. first: it is one of the most depressing books I’ve read in a long time. it’s deeply dystopian, and in a way that really hits home because everything about it is just how things already are here and now, but slightly more so and placed undeniably in front of you. it’s the unpleasant mirror behind the bar in Felski’s meditation on “recognition” in Uses of Literature. of particular note — and this is the biggest thing that troubles me — is the use of China in the novel (as the enemy in the “Digital War” of 2022-2025, which lays the backdrop for the main plot in 2057, and then within the main plot), which is, I think, meant as a critique of the PRC’s cynical use of “communism” in the service of state capitalism but I think at times was vague enough to risk edging towards sinophobia. in the end, however, I think it mostly succeeds in avoiding the latter, not least by virtue of its devastating consideration of race and racism within Wales in the context of a war between China and “the West”. I had to put the book down at one point during one of Judith’s letters — “Isie bod yn wyn” landed like a gut punch.
second: it’s an epistolary novel in the form of emails, text messages, online chat exchanges, diary entries, meeting transcripts, and the like. this wouldn’t be an issue in and of itself, but the enormous variety of language use across these different forms — from the formal (but not literary) Welsh of Huw’s letters to Brynach’s careful but colloquial diary entries to Shan’s extremely informal emails to her dead mother to Edith’s pointedly unmutated and highly anglicized speech, it’s a dizzying array of registers, dialects, and other linguistic practices — Dafydd displays a truly impressive mastery of language throughout the novel.
unfortunately, as a learner who’s quite attached to literary Welsh and the formal registers of colloquial Welsh that you find in twentieth-century writing, this was at times challenging, both because I was having to convert colloquialisms into the “standard” forms I’ve learned and because I found some of the colloquialisms grating (Edith’s hanging prepositions and lack of mutations in particular were like nails on a chalkboard). the move to write as one speaks that seems to be common in contemporary Welsh literature is frankly my least favorite thing about it.
but I digress from the novel proper. the novel interweaves a large number of characters, but its central figure is Brynach Yang, a Chinese-Welsh man who finds himself, over the course of the novel, drawn, in spite of himself, back into organized struggle against capitalism (and for Welsh independence). the book is an extended meditation on race, language, politics, revolution, and interpersonal relationships. what would we be willing to sacrifice to get free? what compromises are we willing to make in order to achieve our goals? the novel is a tragedy, and a particularly brutal one — there’s no two ways about it. the ultimate question it poses is: is the struggle worth it even if we lose?
Dafydd’s answer, I think, is yes, but with some substantial qualifications.
moods: challenging, dark, emotional, reflective, tense