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language: English
country: USA
year: 2022
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 30.1.23-8.2.23
I’d wanted to read Simon Jimenez’s The Spear Cuts Through Water since it came out last year, but the first time it came from the library I couldn’t quite make time for it; this time I did, and fuck am I glad I did, because it’s incredible.
the narration interweaves two (actually many more than two, but two overarching) stories. first, a young person, a member of the diaspora from the “Old Country” living in a country at war in an age of radio and trains, descends in dream to the Inverted Theater of the Moon and the Water, where they watch a dramatization of an episode in the history of the Old Country. second, we see the drama play out: two young men, one a prince who has turned his back on the violence and war crimes he once participated in in order to overthrow the brutally oppressive empire he served, the other a one-armed gate guard who finds himself traveling alongside the prince, set out on a journey to transport the divine Empress, who has finally escaped from her prison below the royal palace, to help the rebel forces gathering in the east.
the narration is kaleidoscopic. while much of it is told in third person, the underlying narration is second person, addressed to the audience member as they see visions of the past — both the Old Country’s and their own, tracing their relationships with their siblings, father, and grandmother, and their life in the diaspora as war looms larger over their new home. in addition, though, there are first person — both singular and plural — intrusions into the narration as the shades in the Inverted Theater, some of whom were participants in the main narrative, interject their memories of and perspectives on the events unfolding as Jun and Keema cross the country.
the book is many things. centrally, it’s a meditation on violence: the way violence becomes normal, the violence of the family (even when the family is loving, even when the violence is framed by love). it’s about the brutality of monarchy and feudal power, but also of capitalism — of arbitrary power in all its forms. it’s about the moral structure of the world: guilt andwhether we can make amends, whether or how we deserve to be punished, whether or how we deserve to be rewarded, what it means to make the “right” choice. it’s about the weight of history: the ways our actions and lives are shaped by the past, in ways we understand and in ways we don’t. it’s about revolution and the possibility of change, and the ways the forces of reaction will attempt to co-opt revolutionary change whenever they can. it’s about liberation, sort of. it’s about learning to live with oneself.
it is —”to its blade-dented bone” — a love story.
it’s marred by only two things. the first is mediocre copyediting: malapropisms, semicolon errors, wrong prepositions, tense errors (mainly with auxiliary verbs), uncoordinated phrases (Day Three was particularly bad — I suspect it may have been a later addition to the book). it’s a testament to how good the book is that I loved it so much in spite of how aware I was of this throughout.
the other was the decision to have the audience member be descended from a character in the main narrative, which I think was both a little weird thematically (did they need to be a literal inheritor of the story for it to be meaningful to them?) and a little exasperating ideologically in that it made them into a (fallen) hereditary aristocrat. class is weirdly absent from the audience member’s narration, or only addressed obliquely, and I wish there’d been a bit more attention to it. this is, though, ultimately a minor point, and I loved the book regardless.
moods: adventurous, dark, emotional, hopeful, inspiring, tense