Jayaprakash Satyamurthy
Knivesout no more
Yep. That's what I said. I realised that a lot of my favourite fantastic fiction, speaking broadly, is not even part of the fantasy/sf genre, either in the eyes of the publishers or the fans. I'd like to introduce you to a few of these, and ask you about your own favourite non-genre fantastic fiction, as a step towards maybe broadening our reading as well as our understanding of the fantastic in literature.
OK, so here goes -
Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Cosmicomics
Calvino was one of the foremost literary figures of post-war Italy. His best-known work may be 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveller', a novel which consists basically of describing the reader's experience of reading the novel (you are now reading thisbook which is about...). He's associated with metafiction and magical realism, but my contention is that he is fantasy.
I mean, look at the themes and contents of the three books I've listed: Invisible Cities shows Marco Polo telling Kublai Khan the stories of dozens of imagined cities, down to architecture, customs, and so on, each city more fantastic than the previous one. In the end he realises that every city was really his longed-for Venice, that perhaps all cities are one.
The Castle of Crossed Destinies starts with a group of travellers gathered on a stormy night in what may either be a tavern or a castle. Inside, they find they are struck dumb, and are forced to use a handy tarot deck to tell their traveller's tales to each other. Calvino describes the cards each traveller lays out and the story being created. In the course of the book, many key European legends are re-created, and in the end shown to be part of a larger matrix of cards, of stories.
Cosmicomics is more sf - the loosely linked short stories are narrated by the ancient entitiy Qwfwq, who starts each tale with a scientific fact, and then proceeds to tell a fantastic, almost absurd story that picks up from that fact.
Martin Amis: Time's Arrow. It's the story of man's like told in reverse. The sequence of events is reversed - the story begins with his death and ends with his birth, and every detail is in reverse, like a film played backward. This in itself would qualify as a clever idea, maybe the hook for a short story. But the man whos life is being narrated was a German who was a member of the Army of in the Second World War and participated in the Holocaust. In a startling reversal, the protagonist is shown to be re-creating Jews from ashes and charred remains. It's not just shock value - Amis is confronting one of the single most shocking periods of the previous century and by reversing it, he is telling us various things - perhaps holding out a hope for healing and atonement? Certainly, forcing us to look at the event anew by showing it in a new perspective, which is a good thing. It's a technical achievement, a harrowing read, and one that certainly is very thought-provoking.
I'll weigh in with more later. Over to you.
OK, so here goes -
Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Cosmicomics
Calvino was one of the foremost literary figures of post-war Italy. His best-known work may be 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveller', a novel which consists basically of describing the reader's experience of reading the novel (you are now reading thisbook which is about...). He's associated with metafiction and magical realism, but my contention is that he is fantasy.
I mean, look at the themes and contents of the three books I've listed: Invisible Cities shows Marco Polo telling Kublai Khan the stories of dozens of imagined cities, down to architecture, customs, and so on, each city more fantastic than the previous one. In the end he realises that every city was really his longed-for Venice, that perhaps all cities are one.
The Castle of Crossed Destinies starts with a group of travellers gathered on a stormy night in what may either be a tavern or a castle. Inside, they find they are struck dumb, and are forced to use a handy tarot deck to tell their traveller's tales to each other. Calvino describes the cards each traveller lays out and the story being created. In the course of the book, many key European legends are re-created, and in the end shown to be part of a larger matrix of cards, of stories.
Cosmicomics is more sf - the loosely linked short stories are narrated by the ancient entitiy Qwfwq, who starts each tale with a scientific fact, and then proceeds to tell a fantastic, almost absurd story that picks up from that fact.
Martin Amis: Time's Arrow. It's the story of man's like told in reverse. The sequence of events is reversed - the story begins with his death and ends with his birth, and every detail is in reverse, like a film played backward. This in itself would qualify as a clever idea, maybe the hook for a short story. But the man whos life is being narrated was a German who was a member of the Army of in the Second World War and participated in the Holocaust. In a startling reversal, the protagonist is shown to be re-creating Jews from ashes and charred remains. It's not just shock value - Amis is confronting one of the single most shocking periods of the previous century and by reversing it, he is telling us various things - perhaps holding out a hope for healing and atonement? Certainly, forcing us to look at the event anew by showing it in a new perspective, which is a good thing. It's a technical achievement, a harrowing read, and one that certainly is very thought-provoking.
I'll weigh in with more later. Over to you.
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