Book Review: The Last Cuentista
May. 2nd, 2022 07:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI didn’t particularly enjoy Donna Barba Higuera’s The Last Cuentista, although it must be admitted that after reading all those gulag books I have become a damn hard sell on dystopias, especially dystopias that draw on mid-century anti-Communist tropes about how totalitarian societies drain all the life and individuality out of their members so they march around in lockstep. (Think: Camazotz, the Borg.)
Although totalitarian societies have many problems, as it turns out that their members remain recognizable individuals with opinions and feelings, probably because it’s not actually possible to turn people into faceless drones. As such it seems ethically sketchy to portray a human society this way in fiction, not to mention (and this is really more aggravating in a work of fiction) really boring. Who wants to read a whole book about interchangeable characters you can’t tell apart? At least Madeleine L’Engle kept the Camazotz section short.
Anyway. When The Last Cuentista kicks off, a comet is about to strike earth. Petra and her family flee on a generation ship, where they are put in stasis. But when Petra wakes up 388 years in the future, she discovers that over those centuries, society on the ship has warped into a dystopia called the Collective, devoid of stories! emotion! individuality! and opaque skin! because in their quest for unity the denizens have altered their genetic code so they are all alarmingly see-through. I guess this is intended to…solve…racism?
Frankly not convinced it was a solid ethical choice to make the baddies visibly grotesque.
I kept waiting for the book to recognize that even bad guys have stories, emotions, and individuality, and it never really does. But it also never fully commits to the idea that the Collective genetically altered such things right out of their systems, either. There’s a young Collective member, Voxy, who loves Petra’s cuentos, but we never learn why he is unlike the other members of the Collective or, alternatively, that he is NOT unlike the other members of the Collective, and that Petra’s understandable horror at waking in a future without her parents or brother has blinded her to the fact that these weird-looking people are still, well, people, and as such have emotions etc.
The book also has the incredibly annoying habit of throwing in whole sentences in Spanish, unitalicized, which it only occasionally bothers to translate. I found this incredibly jarring, and I can read Spanish. I can’t imagine how aggravating this would be to a monolingual reader.
Also the book’s ending is straight out of The Giver. In fact, from a certain angle the book is a riff on The Giver (Protagonist Rebels Against Conformist Dystopia through the Power of Memory and Stories), only The Giver has the priceless advantage of portraying baddies who are recognizably human in a society that seems like it might actually function.
Although totalitarian societies have many problems, as it turns out that their members remain recognizable individuals with opinions and feelings, probably because it’s not actually possible to turn people into faceless drones. As such it seems ethically sketchy to portray a human society this way in fiction, not to mention (and this is really more aggravating in a work of fiction) really boring. Who wants to read a whole book about interchangeable characters you can’t tell apart? At least Madeleine L’Engle kept the Camazotz section short.
Anyway. When The Last Cuentista kicks off, a comet is about to strike earth. Petra and her family flee on a generation ship, where they are put in stasis. But when Petra wakes up 388 years in the future, she discovers that over those centuries, society on the ship has warped into a dystopia called the Collective, devoid of stories! emotion! individuality! and opaque skin! because in their quest for unity the denizens have altered their genetic code so they are all alarmingly see-through. I guess this is intended to…solve…racism?
Frankly not convinced it was a solid ethical choice to make the baddies visibly grotesque.
I kept waiting for the book to recognize that even bad guys have stories, emotions, and individuality, and it never really does. But it also never fully commits to the idea that the Collective genetically altered such things right out of their systems, either. There’s a young Collective member, Voxy, who loves Petra’s cuentos, but we never learn why he is unlike the other members of the Collective or, alternatively, that he is NOT unlike the other members of the Collective, and that Petra’s understandable horror at waking in a future without her parents or brother has blinded her to the fact that these weird-looking people are still, well, people, and as such have emotions etc.
The book also has the incredibly annoying habit of throwing in whole sentences in Spanish, unitalicized, which it only occasionally bothers to translate. I found this incredibly jarring, and I can read Spanish. I can’t imagine how aggravating this would be to a monolingual reader.
Also the book’s ending is straight out of The Giver. In fact, from a certain angle the book is a riff on The Giver (Protagonist Rebels Against Conformist Dystopia through the Power of Memory and Stories), only The Giver has the priceless advantage of portraying baddies who are recognizably human in a society that seems like it might actually function.
no subject
Date: 2022-05-02 12:13 pm (UTC)Nonitalicized whole sentences in a second language is a choice with an ideology behind it: it's intended to decenter the dominant monolingual, English-speaking audience and give them a taste of the struggle that people for whom English is a second language feel reading monolingual English books and also to establish the fact of other languages as equal to English and not requiring special orthographic (e.g., italics) treatment. Whether this is a good approach or an effective one is a whole other question, but that's the thinking (at least as I understand it) behind it.
no subject
Date: 2022-05-02 01:50 pm (UTC)The choice not to italicize seems like a wonderful example of someone coming up with an idea that sounds good in theory (no italicizing means that all languages feel equal! Yeah!) but works completely differently in practice. It's like reading one of those early twentieth century books where the author just tosses in a Greek epigraph, in the original Greek, without providing a translation (and it's probably thematically important so you do need to know what it means!), in the comfortable assurance that the entire audience has a classical education and if you don't then what are you even doing here?
no subject
Date: 2022-06-21 08:36 pm (UTC)I am still fairly confident that Camazotz is the conformist horror of the American suburbs, not of Communism.
no subject
Date: 2022-06-21 09:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-21 09:23 pm (UTC)Camazotz has non-conformity even in L'Engle. It's just that if you bounce your ball to your own rhythm, you are next seen being impersonally tortured until you learn better.
(I'm not saying this novel wasn't annoying, I just see the Camazotz/Communism analogy a lot and I think it would hold more water if the planet didn't look like a white-bread American suburb all over.)