A high two stars for this one. The pace finally picks up the way I had been hoping for about 75% of the way through, and then I had to finish the rest in one sitting. And that was pretty good! But it's a *slog* to get there, with tons of interesting ideas poetically over-described for (what felt like) hundreds of pages. I get the impression everything was the author's darling she couldn't bear to cut, and you have to read a book like that to realize why writers have to cut so much of the good stuff.

There are dozens of characters who I frequently couldn't keep straight, and they all have mythologically significant names. A good sprinkling of bi and gay characters.

I cared more about Severin before we got to the final few chapters; the ending felt a little cheap. When it still looked like she had died horribly and tragically young, instead of turning into a disembodied omniscient being. And how did Percy learn all that stuff about callowhales anyway---just further scientific advancements, since it's like 40 years after the main action? And no, Severin's fate isn't particularly ambiguous---the author is clearly putting her finger on the scale for one reading, while also technically leaving it "open to interpretation." Whatever, man.

Probably would make a neat film, with the advantage that you wouldn't have to read all the damn descriptions. I would also read the book Valente has set up for 6 generations down the line, with genetic and social changes and when the averted colonial-powers conflict finally hits, but I don't think I trust Valente with story-via-documents anymore. ( )

Catherynne M. Valente's cinema-themed space opera fantasy Radiance is decidedly non-linear, jumping around an alternate continuity that runs from the middle of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth. Fragmentary shooting scripts, press clippings, recording transcripts, promotional materials, business records, and other documents are assembled to gradually immerse the reader in a solar system where humans live on all the planets, and Earth's moon is the center of an interplanetary movie industry.

The book's jacket copy characterizes it as "decopunk," a feasible nanogenre, and not inapt. But in fact it progresses through a set of different genre moments--like movements of a musical work--established through the framing device of a movie in pre-production, going through major revisions. What starts out as film noir (The Deep Blue Devil) gets re-tooled as gothic horror (The Man in the Malachite Mask), then a fairy tale (Doctor Callow's Dream), then a musical revue (And If She's Not Gone, She Lives There Still), with a vein of mystery throughout that is more spited than satisfied by the brief final cut (Radiance).

I did find it a little slow going at first, but I did eventually take to it. It's definitely its own thing, both in the story it tells and how it tells it. The cinematic dimension is integral, thus setting it apart. But the composition around the vanished girl Severin Unck seems to place it in or near the catena of elegiac mysticism that runs from the Middle English Pearl through Schwob's decadent Monelle. In contrast to the authorial motives understood for those books though, Valente confesses herself to identify (at whatever remove) with Severin herself, since the germ of the book was her own experience as the daughter of a filmmaker father.

The book is wonderfully weird throughout, with its recurring refrain of "X which is not really an X" to describe all manner of otherworldly creatures that have been pseudo-terrestrialized through language. The descriptions of what X "really is" become crazier and crazier. (Patsy replies, "It's only a model.") For all that Radiance is a book about making and viewing movies, it is intensely literary, and it certainly lacks the rhetorical ductus of popular Hollywood. It's an art film of a science fantasy, full of classical allusions, narrative ruptures, and character enigmas. Yum.

This book is beautiful and weird and thick with purple prose and even when it answers the questions you have you're still left wondering. The mashup of different genres plays wonderfully with the "found footage" motif leaving you wanting more but needing to process the last section before moving on to the next.

Savour it and relish in the moments. And when it's done, read it again because you're going to want to revisit the beginning, knowing some of the possible ends. ( )

Flókin saga, stórfengleg en um leið er erfitt að tengjast sögupersónunum að nokkru ráði. Kvikmyndirnar eru enn þöglar vegna gríðarlegra einkaleyfa sem Edison fjölskyldan hefur tryggt sér. Allar pláneturnar hafa lífverur og mannkynið getur auðveldlega flogið á milli þeirra í eldflaugum. Sagna er sögð með bréfum, kvikmyndum, samtölum og öðrum álíka fléttuðum bútum sem gerir lesandanum oft erfitt með að tengjast söguþræði en í heildina séð er sagan flott skáldverk. ( )

What do people think about you? What holes do you leave in other people's lives? That's the question this book wants to answer. Severin Unck disappeared while filming a documentary on the planet Venus. This book explores who she was through the eyes of her friends and family. Always she is viewed through a veil.

It's a really fascinating book. The writing is captivating, switching between styles over and over again. ( )