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A review by libkatem
Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente
5.0
I have been waiting for this book for over a year, and when I finally got my hands on it, I dove right into it, unable to wait even a moment longer.
It’s a very visual book. The dialogue is important, I guess, but it’s like silent films. How you view the story depends on what the camera (or in this case, Valente), decides to show you. And even then you can’t trust it. Who edits a film or a story has immense control on how we interpret a film. There are many famous stories of directors telling actors not to act, that the editor will cut the film together and the audience will bring their own interpretation to the story.
The same is true in this book. In the prologue, the narrator (in the only instance we have a narrator), invites us into the story. The images that Valente calls up are literally projected onto the skin of the audience. In this way, we start to understand that these images would not exist without us. We have to be here to interpret what happens to Severin by the end.
Severin and her father Percival are in constant competition in how to tell stories to an audience. Percival is of the old school; Silent Films are still the standard, and he creates Gothic romances and stories with vampires and all sorts of supernatural things that Severin begins to reject from a very young age. These things do not exist, and she is interested in truth. And in sound, and in color. As an adult, she is famous for her documentaries, and her mysterious ending happens on the shoot of her newest project.
We think we know Severin. Severin belongs to the audience in a way that only someone born to Tinsel Town can feel like she belongs to us. We see images of her entire life, sometimes even reshot. But like any movie, we only know Severin because we can see ourselves in her. It’s something she learns early, from one of her first mothers. Mary Pellam has four laws of acting, the last one being that everything that is on film becomes a synecdoche- that your smile, words, expression, will stand in for everyone’s ideas of what emotions look like. Severin knows this better than most.
The unspoken competition between Percival and Severin plays out in how Severin’s last story is told. Percival spends years trying to chase down his daughter’s truths, and in the end, we realize that we can never really know what happened. Even if her entire life, from beginning to end, is reflected on film, the only truth we can get from it is the truth we bring to it. It’s fascinating and disjointed; it’s unsettling and beautiful. It aesthetically combines things that I love most in the world: the flicker of old films, the fire and ice and mystery of space, divers, pearls, the dark side of people, flowers and ice cream and fancy cocktails from the roaring twenties, with things that I fear most in my heart of hearts: that people can disappear without a trace and that we will never ever know that happened to them; Roanoke, the Bermuda Triangle, the Mary Celeste.
This book lives up to its title.
It’s a very visual book. The dialogue is important, I guess, but it’s like silent films. How you view the story depends on what the camera (or in this case, Valente), decides to show you. And even then you can’t trust it. Who edits a film or a story has immense control on how we interpret a film. There are many famous stories of directors telling actors not to act, that the editor will cut the film together and the audience will bring their own interpretation to the story.
The same is true in this book. In the prologue, the narrator (in the only instance we have a narrator), invites us into the story. The images that Valente calls up are literally projected onto the skin of the audience. In this way, we start to understand that these images would not exist without us. We have to be here to interpret what happens to Severin by the end.
Severin and her father Percival are in constant competition in how to tell stories to an audience. Percival is of the old school; Silent Films are still the standard, and he creates Gothic romances and stories with vampires and all sorts of supernatural things that Severin begins to reject from a very young age. These things do not exist, and she is interested in truth. And in sound, and in color. As an adult, she is famous for her documentaries, and her mysterious ending happens on the shoot of her newest project.
We think we know Severin. Severin belongs to the audience in a way that only someone born to Tinsel Town can feel like she belongs to us. We see images of her entire life, sometimes even reshot. But like any movie, we only know Severin because we can see ourselves in her. It’s something she learns early, from one of her first mothers. Mary Pellam has four laws of acting, the last one being that everything that is on film becomes a synecdoche- that your smile, words, expression, will stand in for everyone’s ideas of what emotions look like. Severin knows this better than most.
The unspoken competition between Percival and Severin plays out in how Severin’s last story is told. Percival spends years trying to chase down his daughter’s truths, and in the end, we realize that we can never really know what happened. Even if her entire life, from beginning to end, is reflected on film, the only truth we can get from it is the truth we bring to it. It’s fascinating and disjointed; it’s unsettling and beautiful. It aesthetically combines things that I love most in the world: the flicker of old films, the fire and ice and mystery of space, divers, pearls, the dark side of people, flowers and ice cream and fancy cocktails from the roaring twenties, with things that I fear most in my heart of hearts: that people can disappear without a trace and that we will never ever know that happened to them; Roanoke, the Bermuda Triangle, the Mary Celeste.
This book lives up to its title.