#CONTEXT i have been struck with god awful pain for weeks now. i would love to write i have ideas but i cannot work on them.

[pyrriax]

curse of being a fanfic writer ig

[ravencromwell]

So Brown Girl In The Ring was one of those books it's difficult to talk about: I loved it with such ferocity that to try and articulate why only leads me into hyperbolic babble. It had such clear, elegantly simple writing but was somehow still so lush. It was a book I galloped through in less than a week, and post my depression meds that, gentlebeings, is an achievement, even for such a short novel. Hopkinson lets the narrative view and treat her characters with such compassion, even as the narrative examines the ways in which trauma begets trauma, the ways we break that cycle: redemption and regret and forging better paths for future generations. And those future generations taking those paths: grudgingly at first and then slowly coming into themselves: deciding that this world, this dystopian Toronto with all its beauty and solidarity alongside the ugliness, is worth fighting for and by God they're going to do it. With gentle, extended meditations on forgiveness and love: at its worst and best, and how we learn to distinguish the two. And it's all wrapped in Caribbean magic realism and I need y'all to go read it stat because I need a group of people to scream about this book with like I need to breathe.

But as I move on to The Association Of Small Bombs, by Karan Mahajan, I'm struck by the way these two masters of their craft use language in such divergent but skillful ways. * Hopkinson's style is simple: not spare by any stretch, but clear and economical. There's an excellent reason: much of the characters' dialogue is in marvelously unapologetic Caribbean dialect and unfamiliar English-only speakers are going to have to invest some time into picking up the linguistic ticks and rhythms. (Though OMG when you do, there's such a marvelous fucking return on investment, as particular characters adopt other characters' linguistic ticks to symbolize maturation in the most ingenious way--Nalo, just let me pick your brain for half an hour please; I'll become a thousandfold better writer--and the Caribbean dialect gives her this vast canvas of expression. There was such a power for me as someone insulated for so many years in the white English cultural bubble of being forced to not only absorb foreign concepts, but absorb them in their words, not tailored to my conception of the world.

The one drawback, if you can call it that, is that the way the coolest linguistic tricks Hopkinson uses require the full context of what came before in the novel to be fully appreciated makes it a profoundly difficult book to quote from out of context. Karan Mahajan, covering much more familiar subject matter, if from profoundly provocative angles, feels freer to use ornate language, equal parts gentle and so sharply incisive it feels like your skin is being flayed off. Lord help y'all, because I'm only three pages in, and I'm in love with the way they write and y'all's dash is like to be flooded with Mahajan quotes for the foreseeable future. Just look at some of these descriptions! On the way class effects even grief:

The two boys were the sum total of the Khuranas’ children, eleven and thirteen, eager to be sent out on errands; and on this particular day they had gone with a friend in an auto-rickshaw to pick up the Khuranas’ old Onida color TV, consigned to the electrician for perhaps the tenth time. But when Mr. Khurana was asked by friends what the children were doing there (the boy with them having escaped with a fracture), he said, “They’d gone to pick up my watch from the watch man.” His wife didn’t stop him, and in fact colluded in the lie. “All the watches were stopped,” she said. “The way they know the time the bomb went off is by taking the average of all the stopped watches in the watch man’s hut.” Why lie, why now? Well, because to admit to their high-flying friends that their children had not only died among the poor, but had been sent out on an errand that smacked of poverty—repairing an old TV that should have, by now, been replaced by one of those self-financing foreign brands—would have, in those tragic weeks that followed the bombing, undone the tightly laced nerves that held them together. But of course they were poor, at least compared to their friends, and no amount of suave English, the sort that issued uncontrollably from their mouths, could change that; no amount of sobbing in Victorian sentences or chest beating before the Oxonian anchors on The News Tonight, who interviewed them, who stoked their outrage, could drape them or their dead children in the glow of foregone success.

Just...look at that for a while. This marvelous meditation on class--and on the lingering, awful effects of British colonization--wound inextricably with such a wonderful, dreadful little anecdote about how you survive the unsurvivable.

There's another wonderful passage around the funeral of the boys:

At the cremation, which occurred on the stepped bank of a Yamuna River canal speckled with a thousand ripply eyes of oil, tendrils of overgrown hypochondriac plants thrust deep into the medicinal murk, Mr. Khurana noticed that outside the ring of burning flesh and wood, little snotty children ran naked playing with upright rubber tires. Behind them a cow was dreadlocked in ropes and eating ash and the wild village children kicked it in the gut. He shouldn’t have, but in the middle of the final prayers Mr. Khurana stepped out and shouted, shooing, the entire funeral party dropping back from the wavy black carpet of fire shadow. The children, not his, just looked at him and with beautiful synchronicity dove headfirst into the water, the rubber tires bobbing behind them, but the cow eyed him with muckraking glee and put its long wet tongue into the earth. The prayers continued but a tremor was evident: if the chanting had sounded before like the low buzzing of bees, the vocal swarm had now cleared and thinned as if to accommodate the linger of a gunshot. The exhilaration of Mr. Khurana’s grief gave way to the simple fact that he was a person, naked in his actions, and that as a person he was condemned to feel shame. He felt eyes rebuking him with sudden blinks between solemn verses. He stopped thinking of his two boys as they burned away before him in a flame that combed the air with its spikes of heat and sudden bone crack of bark. More ash for the cow.

That whole passage steals my breath every time: the insolence of the children, not so much cruel as bemused and grumpy. The way the weight of others expectations for how we're to deal with grief can be utterly crushing. All wrapped in a description of a part of the city as profoundly desolate as he is, as unable to get out of the cycle of desolation as he.

And one more, just cause it's my blog and I can damn it; probably my favorite so far:

Strange sights were reported. A blue fiberglass rooftop came uncorked from a shop and clattered down on a bus a few meters away; the bus braked, the rooftop slid forward, leaked a gorgeous stream of sand, and fell to the ground; the bus proceeded to crack it under its tires and keep going, its passengers dazed, even amused. (In a great city, what happens in one part never perplexes the other parts.)

He could, and probably is, as much talking about the way acts of terror are so often ignored in this vast, interconnected world of ours unless they target certain countries or people. But there's no condemnation there: it's just. a fact of life, and the rooftop incident is even used to levin the situation with a bit of gentle humor. Which makes it even more of a searing observation and indictment, makes you want to do better, pay witness and respect to more, just to live up to the gentleness about your failures in the past.

There's such kindness permeating both Hopkinson and Mahajan's tales. But Hopkinson expresses that kindness by letting complicated characters have their own povs to explain themselves and letting them have redemptive arcs and moments. Because she's being so careful with pros, her structure has to be her vehicle for reassuring us that yes, these characters attempts at betterment and redemption are being seen and will be rewarded. I don't know much about what Mahajan will do with their characters: I'm fascinated by so many questions about the victims and the bombers; there's so much grief the parents are expressing, but the why of grief, whether it's because they see their sons as whole people or extensions of themselves, is still murky. But I already adore that even the omniscient narrator exudes kindness and humor. They wrap you in these ornate sentences like blankets: yeah, the trip will be painful but see there'll be comfort along the way. It's just endlessly fascinating to watch such different stylists work their magic.

*Association is my first attempt to conquer the list of nonwestern litfic with badass voice and politics @tobermoriansass made for me. And damn, am I A. even more glad! she did and B. determined to devour it in its entirety this year after this introduction.