Sofia SamatarReseñas

At times poetic and others philosophical, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain was an interesting story set in the future about one boys rise from slave to student and the struggles he faced.
There was much I didn't fully understand about the story but it was beautifully written and left much up to your imagination to figure out where this story would go next.

A Stranger in Olondria is the most lyrical, engrossing novel I've read in quite a while.

Jevick inherits his father's pepper estate and, for the first time, makes the annual journey to the pepper market of cosmopolitan Olondria. Jevick has never left his rural island home, but he has grown up immersed in the literature of Olondria—his tutor is an exiled Olondrian scholar, and Jevick is the first of his people to become literate.

The story that follows is a picaresque adventure, a romance, a ghost story, a postcolonial novel, and a profound meditation on the transformative, ambivalent power of stories. Samatar excels stylistically—her dense, lush descriptions remind me both of Salman Rushdie and of lyrical modernist poets like H.D. It's her characters, however, that make this a really exceptional novel and kept me reading—they are the real thing, the "Mrs. Brown" of the Le Guin essay, and their voices stayed with me after I finished the book.

I'd love to discuss this book in a group setting—there are a lot of Big Ideas here, some of which blindsided me when they cropped up near the end. Samatar is dealing with the intersections between cultures and ways of life, a topic fantasy and science fiction is so good at addressing, and it's challenging material. (Sample book club questions: Do stories save us or merely haunt us? Can we ever truly know another culture or another person, or do we just tell stories to ourselves?)

Finally, I really, really like that this is a fantasy novel and not magical realism set in our world. If you have ever wished for some productive cross-pollination between postcolonial literature and speculative fiction (or wished you were smart enough to wish for such a thing), pick up this book.

This is the sort of book that sits with you and forgets to leave, and at some point you turn around from whatever you're doing and realize you're still thinking about it.

It's a ruminative story, with a slowly building story. Big stuff happens, but it unspools rather than explodes, and the protagonist, Jevick, doesn't carry the day and save the kingdom: he is a heartbeat in a grander political and religious conflict. I'd say A Stranger in Olondria is demonstrative of the ongoing erosion between the barriers of genre (which I'm defining right now by pulp conventions, rapid plot, etc) and literary (which I'm defining as prose- and character-motivated) work. The heart of the story is the main character's personal transformation.

Also, there are ghosts and lyric poetry. Unlike the poetry in nearly any other novel I've read, it's beautiful and moves the story.

recenzie pe larg https://bloguldesefe.ro/2021/05/15/prins-intre-credinta-si-ratiune-un-strain-in-...

Part travelogue, part history of a colony of Russian Mennonites who settled in what in now Uzbekistan in the 1880s, part personal meditation, The White Mosque is an engrossing read. The author Sofia Samatar is of mixed heritage—her father was a Somali Muslim, her mother a white American of Swiss-German heritage—and she uses that as a lens through which to explore issues of identity and belonging. Samatar's prose is vivid, though perhaps at times a little too consciously so; equally, the digressive quality of her writing sometimes helps to reinforce her overall thematic points and sometimes seems to stray too far afield. Overall, though, I found this fascinating and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in memoirs which explore such themes.

This is an unusual book. The author's father was a Muslim from Somalia and her mother a Mennonite. In the late 19th century, a group of German Mennonites traveled to Central Asia (Uzbekistan/Turkmenistan) to do missionary work. They established a Christian village in the midst of Islamic population; their church was called the White Mosque.

This story is about a current trip the author took along with other Mennonites to retravel the road taken by their ancestors in the 19th century. There is much Mennonite history and the author writes a lot about her experiences as a biracial woman and the conflicts and the similarities between Christianity and Islam often with the theme of how much these faiths are alike.

I should have liked this better but honestly at times just couldn't get into her writing style.

This is a hard book to review. On just the prose itself, it's a 4 or 5 stars. This book is gorgeous. The language is lovely and musical. Plot wise, it was again, high - there was a good premise. For actual execution, however, probably a 2. Gorgeous language, unfortunately, just does not make up for very slow and uneven pacing.

The first half of the book was Jevick learning about Olondria, the land of books and writing, and then actually going there himself after his father's death. He spends much of his time as a loafer and playboy, enjoying food, books, and women. This section was arguably the slowest portion of the book. Things pick up slightly with the appearance of Jissavet's ghost, though it isn't until Jevick falls in with the Priestess of Avalei that I started really getting into the story.

Another thing that kept bugging me was that I did not like either Jevick or Jissavet. Jevick, despite being the protagonist, did not exhibit much agency and was instead solely an agent of the plot. He largely allowed others to determine his fate and it wasn't until toward the end of the story that he made decisions for himself, which to the credit of the development of the character, were selfless. Jissavet was a brat, and I think she was fully aware of that. She acknowledges she had no respect or understanding for her mother and thought herself above her mother. Whether that was just an aspect of her personality or a manifestation of her kyitna was a bit unclear, but either way, I had very little sympathy for her in life or in death, where she essentially bullied Jevick to get her way.

At the end, I finally understood this was a book about the power of books and writing and learning.

A Stranger in Olondria is not written in an easy-to-read manner, deliberately, I think. It mimics some of the classics of previous generations, with rambling prose that is hard to follow for someone (read: me) accustomed the straight-forwardness of contemporary publishing. Which makes me realize it's been a very long time since I sat down with Lord Dunsany or Tolkien and gotten immersed in the prose, focusing on the language rather than the plot. The speculative fiction genre seems to have forgotten its roots, and Sofia Samatar appears to be trying to revitalize a love and appreciation for language in the genre.

DNF at 29%

This seemed interesting at first, but I couldn't get attached to the main character, which is the only one with a bit of a personality, and the long descriptions and excerpts of books the main character was reading made me really really bored.
It might work for someone that is looking for an atmospheric book centered on a main character with a love for a specific city and poems, but it didn't work for me.

Hard to describe this book. It is dense but not because it is in love with its own prose. It is full of setting but not in a self-conscious or self-indulgent way. It has a fully realized new world, but it's not precious--it feels real, with how characters react to and act in the landscape and the history and politics and culture. The plot does not go in a predictable direction but feels inevitable. There are action-filled scenes but is is also a story of inner life. It carries its own spell.

This is a beautiful collection. Samatar navigates her own imagination with distinctive voices and structures that make each of the twenty stories a fresh revelation. Her style is mythic: she tells the story she wants without making concessions for the demanding tendencies of the reader. This results in a crystalline sense of timing, as revelations often delayed or incomplete deepen her characters rather than merely pushing the plot along. Her prose varies from conversational to poetic, well-fitted to the different modes of her stories. I adore these stories, and would recommend them to anyone. Samatar does not transcend genre; she makes it unnecessary.

Started well, with vivid descriptions of dreamlike, exotic places (I quickly gave up on trying to map these places to possible real world counterparts). But then it meanders beyond belief. We get the narrator backstory but never his motivation. Draws you in and then leaves you waiting for a worthwhile story to begin.½

Intensely inhabited imaginary landscapes. Melancholy journeys internal and external. A sweet/sad human creation myth. These are good things in this book. I felt impatient with its melancholy and the foot dragging of the narrator by halfway through. I think I need a bouncier book.

Neither the protagonist, characters, plot nor world are interesting. There is a lot of pretty description, but it doesn't gel into a believable world. The main character is will-less and drifts around, curiously passive. The most interesting character in the book is dead for most of it. The most interesting place in the world is not 'Olondria' which is a blandscape, but the 'Tea Islands' which in this fantasy world are the source of all 'exotic' foods: coffee, tea, guava, coconut, cassava, millet. There are elephants there. The map in the front of the book is unused and we never find out about most of the locations on it. There are many 'boooks within books' mentioned in this story, but they are as boring and un-illuminating as their parent. I struggled to finish this book.

beautifully written but I got pretty bored with it about half way through.

2.5

This book is a slow start but the momentum builds quickly to a startling and wrenching finish. Sofia Samatar is an AMAZING writer. Like, her prose is gorgeous and will wreck you and create an image that you will be haunted by long after you've put the book down. I think her choice of four female narrators throughout civil unrest was a smart choice, as it demonstrates the effects of war on women civilians. The narrative polyphony is broken up into four books, so you don't have to try and identify which woman is speaking. That said, this novel reminds me a lot of Virginia Woolf's The Waves, which is all about mourning the loss of something or someone.

Many thanks to my sister, who gave this a rave review. I think this is a contender for best book I've read this year.

This is a book with profoundly beautiful writing and a sometimes dense and confusing plot, since much of it occurs within the protagonist's interior frame or as writing. It's twisted and frustrating, but it ultimately evokes the power of reading, much like Cordelia Funke's Inkheart books. This is definitely a book you read to enjoy the turns of phrase and the process of writing, rather than the story. Worth a read. I'm interested to see how the companion novel stacks up. 3.5 stars.

A pleasure to come back to Olondria, and good to see more of the cracks in a world that has a dangerously twee surface. This book really felt more like four novellas to me than a single novel, even though they are all about the same events. The use of four distinct storytellers was interesting, but somehow it didn't quite drag me all the way into its world in the way that the one extended fever dream of A Stranger In Olondria did.

Yep still the best

A beautiful, lyrical, intensely moving book. I can't lavish enough praise on this. Has already joined my "frequent re-read" shelf.

Chicago Nerds discussion notes: http://positronchicago.blogspot.com/2016/09/chicago-nerds-winged-histories.html

Read 2016, favourite.

Read 2015, favourite.

This is a good book, but that doesn't change the fact that I didn't enjoy reading it.

De verhalen vond ik niet allemaal even sterk, maar ze waren allemaal érg mooi geschreven, dus ik vind het sneu dat ik het gemiddelde omlaag haal. De novelle Fallow vond ik erg goed.