Oh! I "got" Years of Rice and Salt right at the end. About halfway through I thought, "Hmm, here is a person who has deeply read his Cao Xuequin. Doh!" And that made the story way more interesting to me. I had been seeing that I could respect the details to be right - as much as I can judge them so as a person who has read Ibn Batuta and the Mahabharata and plenty of chinese classics & poetry & whatever other Hindu and Buddhist texts I've come across. Also, I let go of my wish for a particular kind of story that would be like a little mystery to be solved or revealed.
But it was the end speechiness that made me realize it is all about "the attitude towards history" which is also about truth and individual stories, about culture and reading - what stance do we take towards history and the structure of culture, if we don't "just accept it" - The same thing that fascinates me about "life-eating" stories like Dune, The Hallowed Hunt, Book of the New Sun -- where life-eating, or the consumption of stories, or the extent to which you buy into history, is either a path to godhood or it means you're evil or sort of both. If we kick out the great man theory of history and the golden bookshelf and yet also don't want the Chinese Cultural Revolution then things get complicated. If we attribute full humanity and thinkiness and potential-to-create-culture and valid stories to everyone then we have to accept a little potential for boring processiness as well. This is also what I've noticed is good and bad about identity politics and the literary movement towards "spoken word memoir". And of course reincarnation is a good way to talk about self-criticism.
I enjoyed the snarky exoticising of the vanished primitive savagery of the Europeans - especially the bits about their music.
But the speechy bits at the end of the book were the beautiful key to having a moment of epiphany - of decoding many lives - which is why I read anyway. The story structure became okay for me at the end. & then the very end was very sweet.
Still feeling critical of the not-Paris Islamic lesbian scientists... a bit... and of the general flatness of character and sameness of voice that I always notice.
Hurray, you encourage me to actually finish. I stopped about halfway through (lost it while moving), but if there is an aha! moment at the end, I will soldier on.
Posted by: wired | July 17, 2006 at 01:47 PM