A review by kxiong5
Begin the World Over by Kung Li Sun

adventurous challenging hopeful inspiring tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.25

So…I read the first quarter of this book in snatches on commutes, etc. and then the last three quarters of this book in one furious night after getting back from Niagara Falls and from St. Catherine’s in Canada, which either fits or reinforced my sense of the book’s pacing: very slow at the beginning as we accumulate characters and backstory, and then very very fast as the revolution begins. 

 

 

Like The Free People’s Village, James starts as an entry point to revolution (as the uninitiated and uncertain revolutionary-by-circumstance, aka he got blackout drunk after meeting a very charismatic Denmark Vesey and snuck onto Vesey’s ship). But (maybe because he’s not white and white guilt is not at all focal in this book, thank god), he doesn’t dither in ways that get annoying and self-serving the way Maddie’s narrative in The Free People’s Village often does: He has serious concerns about his enslaved family members being sold as punishment for his escape, he has real career aspirations for himself and wants to make a name for himself as a chef, he has actual leadership skills in his ability to command a kitchen and work as a convener around that food (e.g. when he’s wheedling information about revolution out of folks like Vesey and Romaine, at first for purely gay reasons (lol Denmark)), and ultimately he chooses the path of revolution without hesitating after he’s made his choice. In any case, once he’s done being the entry point to the narrative, like a readerly warmup to the tactics of revolution, it turns into a multivocal narrative with even more interesting characters (Romaine, Mary, Red Eagle in particular, but to a lesser extent Denmark Vesey as well) with complex backstories and internal conflicts that get revealed in somehow totally different ways. (The kinds of internal conflicts they face also feel like a way of saying, you can have very different orientations towards action and your world and work very well together, e.g. Mary’s single-minded will to action against Andrew Jackson in the wake of her sister’s sale vs. Red Eagle’s struggle to inherit a (slightly gendered) matriarchal mantle his mother needs him to take on vs. Romaine’s having led and witnessed the price of failed revolution—they debate things furiously but ultimately put their egos aside and think of the lives at stake and reach consensus fast enough to keep their army agile and still manage to bring everyone with them in a way I’m realizing is a foundational aspect of revolutionary writing: you need to bring everyone with you into the future. You don’t break ranks and you don’t leave anyone behind. 

 

In some ways, I think this is a more successful way of getting at the tactics and community of revolution, while The Free People’s Village is more about the ambivalence of trying to do good as an individual within a divided community and find a political education in the whirlpool of modern disruptions and violence, which operates at a scale that the revolutionaries in Begin the World Over cannot match (muskets and machine guns require very different tactics // cannot operate a battlefield in the same way in the slightest). The Free People’s Village gets more at why things are hard today—scale-wise, political environment-wise, and in terms of individual egos playing a significant role in how people act around each other and why—and Begin the World Over works more so in terms of what things could be possible, if chosen, if everyone is willing to face up to violence and work together and not be tied to what the world should look like after the revolution while fighting the revolution itself (I mean, other than the obvious: people cannot be property, land cannot be property, you cannot bargain with people who are beholden to those ideas, and you cannot abandon your political allies). 

 

I’d love to look more into this author’s process of researching this book & write about this in conjunction with The Free People’s Village and Everything for Everyone (this book just cemented my need to write about these together—and talk about what it means to write an alternate history of the past, present, and future, and what you can do about narratives as such), and of course will need to reread pieces of this in the process. Overall, though: this book was thoroughly cool, if a little slow at the start, and reads like a heist novel (like if I’d actually enjoyed Six of Crows / if Six of Crows actually had a sense of mission and purpose that wasn’t tied to a full-on other series, but also more narratively experimental and interesting as well). 

 

A few scattered notes I made while reading: 

 

• Mai’s discussion of an economic replacement for the slave trade
• food at the heart of revolution (the Denmark x James romance as the driver of these didactic discussions of revolutionary tactics and the ways in which you can disagree fundamentally about them is interesting) 
• Romaine’s experiences of faith…a willingness to read the signs from herons to people
• How to use language this way in the real world? what of a world where language is losing its trust (given machine learning and language models?) 
• The value of faith and recognizing when something is truly beginning to crumble…you need to write. Write like your mind’s on fire. This was the purpose of everything in your life.
• note moments of significance in the novel and what they signify to you—in each of these characters’ narratives (the refusal that Red Eagle learns) 
• Show and deception / subterfuge as a necessary part of revolution**
• But also speed and flexibility—the ability to move quickly and as one with surprise and nimbleness —> and a willingness to give up all of what you think you have to chase down something you don’t know will happen (in for a penny, in for a pound // if you have very little to carry with you, you’re less afraid of losing it)  
• And that Andrew Jackson’s downfall is his hesitance to attack what he sees as his own property!!! That hesitation in the need to protect property—this is what is powerful. This is what holds him back. 
• Read these novels quickly and study them after…!! As a reader you cannot hesitate and the writers need to keep it that way (**interesting: think about what pacing does to these novels conceptually) 
• The necessity of violence // and how violence operates on different scales (the easier more manageable violence of Begin the World Over vs that of The Free People’s Village)…how do you break through that if not via a world collapse? (NYC Commune?)
• could do a general read / synthesis of these pieces quickly and delve into key moments / themes in each as bulleted sections 
• Speed >> fast and slow work >> fast paced writing // writing with urgency vs. the slow sensorium of chemical time