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As mentioned on here before, I'm a huge fan of Katherine Arden's Winternight Trilogy, so I was really excited to read her newest book for adults (after she took a detour into children's spooky fiction). Warm Hand of Ghosts takes place during WWI and according to the jacket, involves a meeting with the Devil on the battlefields of Flanders....or is it in a haunted hotel on the outskirts....
In any case, I loved the way Winternight combined Russian history and folklore into a really atmospheric world people with unforgettable characters. So I delved with in great expectations. And. Well.
>! It was slow. And a lot of telling instead of showing. At first, I wondered if her sojourn in children's fiction had blunted her abilities (and I still wonder if that's part of it). The pacing was slow, the characters flat and obvious. Three chapters in a collapsed 'pillbox' where nothing really happens? And how is a German in the same pillbox with the Canadian? After 70 pages, I was no longer interested in finding out. I ended up skipping to the last 50...surely it got better? No, not as far as I could tell. No atmosphere or complexity whatsoever. Even the devil seemed boring! (and this woman studied Russian....did she not read Master and Margarita?) < Which made me wonder -- in this time when everything is subject to purity spirals and taking offense and things and a complete lack of humor -- has all of this sucked the life out of our artists and writers imaginations?
As I said, I loved the Winternight Trilogy, but then -- I'm an American (like Katherine Arden). I've seen that there's been criticism of her using Russian folktales while not being Russian, ie another 'appropriation' slam, another 'how dare someone who isn't (fill in the blank) write about (fill in the blank). And so instead of being inspired by stories and landscapes and letting her imagination run wild, it's as if she did all kinds of research to make sure she didn't get anything wrong, and then wrote a flat, slow, boring book that wouldn't offend anyone. Frankly, virtually every book I've tried to read in the last 2 years, other than by JKR, seems just as flat, virtuous and unimaginative as this one.
Has anyone else run into this?
I've seen rumblings of Celtic descended people angry at people 'appropriating' their culture too. But the thing about cultures -- and this goes for ALL of them -- is that they're alive and ever changing. Tomatoes are from South America, but it's hard to imagine Italian or northern Indian cooking without them. The only culture that doesn't change based on exposure to other cultures, other people, is a dead one.
Same with art (and I'm including fiction and poetry). People are inspired by what they see, what they encounter, where they go. And I realize it can be a fine line between 'inspiration' and copying another culture's art form as if it's your own creation, the way white people have done with Native American and African art. That is what I would call appropriation. But incorporating another culture into your own creation in a way that acknowledges your sources but goes beyond them into something that takes on a life of its own....well, that to me is what artists have always done. Now it feels as if everything is expected to be a faithful representation of 'reality' a la 'reality tv' -- which of course is fake as anything. And so the artificial -- gender ideology, virtual reality, cosmetic surgery -- is embraced as 'real' while imagination, creativity and fantasy are pushed out of art and fiction, which is their rightful place.
Yeah.
Copying stuff other people created is just what humans do, and it is true that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery - this, at least, holds true when the source is acknowledged .
(When it is not, then it is like that thing where a woman says something in a meeting, and is ignored, and a few minutes later a man says the same and is praised for it.)