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language: English
country: USA
year: 2016
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 25.3.16-21.5.16, 14.7.23-4.8.23
I’ve read A Stranger in Olondria four? five? times now, but this was my first time rereading Sofia Samatar’s The Winged Histories since it came out in 2016. I remembered at the time thinking it might be even better than A Stranger in Olondria (this is a bold claim!), and on rereading I think I was right.
I’ve said previously that you could read the two books in either order — they’re companion novels rather than The Winged Histories strictly being a sequel — and I think that’s technically true, but I think reading The Winged Histories first would sacrifice a huge part of the experience of the book, which is the way it explodes your sense of Olondrian history, culture, and (most importantly) politics after A Stranger in Olondria. you see, now, just how narrow Jevick’s perspective was, how much he missed, like you’re on a mountaintop now and you can see the full range of the Kestenyi desert stretching out below you. I think you could read The Winged Histories first, but I think it wouldn’t work as it should without Jevick’s journey to ground it, and I think reading A Stranger in Olondria second would make it fall rather flat.
rereading this with more Delany behind me and more Le Guin behind me, I think The Winged Histories is strongly marked by both of them: Delany especially in its attention to its world, its sensitive handling of the relationship between power, politics, superstructure, and (inter)personal desire; Le Guin in that — like The Tombs of Atuan — it’s exploring, among other things, the ways gender and patriarchy structured A Stranger in Olondria. I’m reminded of “Snowbound in Hamadan” —
Winter in the rose land.
The roads all snow, but you
slipped free as a crow on white.
You were a poet.Revise.
The Winged Histories interweaves the stories of four women — and, to be fair, two men, and numerous other people whose lives intersect briefly with Tav’s, Tialon’s, Seren’s, and Siski’s lives — before, during, and after a war — variously a civil war with both religious and material causes (if you ask the Laths), a doomed struggle against cultural erasure (if you ask the Nains), and a war for national liberation (if you ask the Kestenyi). it’s about the ways their (our) lives are caught up in and shaped by historical processes beyond their (our) control, and about the ways their (our) lives become entangled in each other’s, and it’s about the lives and histories that have been excluded from History — women’s histories, lgbtq people’s histories, the histories of conquered peoples, more generally the Other’s histories (there’s a particular aspect of it that reminds me almost of The Stone Sky). it’s still interested in reading and writing, but it’s the logical follow-up to Jevick’s realization at the end of A Stranger in Olondria that the selection process matters as much as — if not more than — the specific books we read.
if you haven’t read A Stranger in Olondria, please do yourself a favor and read it, and then read The Winged Histories.
[...] and sky and sky and asky.
moods: emotional, hopeful, inspiring, reflective