Summerbook #14: Kalpa Imperial

By -
Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was, by Angelica Gorodischer, trans. by Ursula K. Le Guin

I'd really been looking forward to this, and it did not disappoint.  Angelica Gorodischer is an Argentinian writer, and has published quite a bit, but this is her first book to be published in English.  This book was originally published in two parts, in the early 1980s.  Each part is a collection of stories.

Most of the time, the stories are told by an old storyteller -- but not always.  Some are different.  All purport to tell small parts of the extremely long history of the Empire, which has existed in various forms for thousands of years.  There are dark ages, many dynasties, and waxings and wanings of power.

The first story actually tells of the complete destruction of the Empire in what you might call prehistoric times, since all knowledge was lost for quite some time.  People lived in a new stone age until one young man ventured further into the old ruins than anybody else had, and started people building again.

Other chapters chronicle the long life of a city, or how an ordinary woman with a lot of common sense ended up advising a hemophiliac Emperor.  There is the story of a little neglected prince who is taught to hate his traitorous (and dead) father, until some workmen just happen to tell him a different version of history than the one he's been taught.

A disgraced Northern nobleman wanders into the rainforesty South and accidentally becomes the leader of a revolution, and a doctor lives in an empty mansion and tells people who to be cured.

The last story was one of my favorites, and is also one of the strangest.  A caravan is crossing the desert, and an orphan coaxes the leader into telling ancient legends -- which, it takes a while to realize, are a mishmash of our own ancient legends, stories, and films.  I enjoyed trying to tease out just what this story meant (I have no idea).

A really interesting set of stories to read, strange and dreamlike and not quite like ordinary SF/F.  I've never read a whole lot of Le Guin, but I think her fans would enjoy this too.  Also, I really love the cover.

Comments

  1. Jenny @ Reading the EndAugust 11, 2019 at 6:59 AM

    Agh I need to read this!! Someone recced it to me, a book blogger, a long time ago and I added it to my list, and then for some reason when I went to the library to get it, I got a different book by the same author? I can't remember why. And that book was very meh for me, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to try again with this author. I think, though, that SFF stories would be better! Than more litfic-y stories!

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanAugust 12, 2019 at 10:30 AM

    Yeah, try it out! It's weird. And also was written in the early 80s, so remember that.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more