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A review by charlotekerstenauthor
The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar
"Your body remembers war. This body I love. War has shaped the beloved body."
So What's It About?
Civil war has come to Olondria. In The Winged Histories we see what this war means to four women, drastically different yet alike in that their lives are shaken to the core by the chaos in their land. Tav dreams of being a swordmaiden, and she is one of the first to whisper of rebellion. Tialon reflects on a life wasted by the oppressive restrictions of her father's religion. Seren sings of her love for Tav and the cycles of life that she sees unfold all around her, and Siski learns to face what she left behind after a life of empty frivolity.
What I Thought- The F Word
If I hadn't been entirely convinced by the end of A Stranger in Olondria, I would now be entirely positive: Sofia Samatar has won my heart for life. In short, this is a beautiful, stunningly-written little marvel of a book, strange and sorrowful and full of heart-aching loveliness. I'm sure I can't say anything about Samatar's prose that hasn't been said more eloquently by someone else, but I've never read anyone who writes quite as deliberately yet fearlessly, in a way that is at once finely-tuned and effortlessly graceful.
This is a book about war and its nation-spanning consequences and ugliness. It speaks to the cycles of oppression and rebellion that are doomed to repeat again and again, belief and tradition and fear. At its heart I think it is more than anything a story of women's resistance, and the many diverse, complex forms that this female resistance may take.
Tav's resistance is expressed when she runs away to become a swordmaiden, and again when she helps incite the Kestenyan rebellion against Olondria. It is perhaps the most literal form of resistance, but Samatar would not be satisfied with her readers calling Tav a hero and moving along to the next story. We see the ugly, horrible repercussions of her actions - both for herself in the form of PTSD and slow healing from her suffering as a soldier and for the nation as a whole in the damage that is wrought by the conflict. It's a wonderfully nuanced undoing of the fighter girl trope, where strength is equated with a woman's ability to engage in traditionally masculine forms of violence.
"It was the beginning of the dance of the mountains."
Tialon's resistance comes in the tiniest and strangest forms as she lives a tiny and overwhelmingly restrictive life under the dark, repressive influence of her father's obsessive religion. The atmosphere of stillness, boredom and repression is absolutely stifling in this portion of the book, and we see the way that zealous devotion to religion stripped Tialon's father of all his joy in life, kindness and affection for others. Tialon was a character in A Stranger in Olondria, and her aid to Jevick is revealed as one of the only things she considers being meaningful in the entirety of her life.
"The priest’s daughter read about the life that was going on in the palace. She drew pictures under the beam of her single candle, pictures of ladies and gentlemen walking and dancing and sitting down to meals at elegant tables. She knew all the styles of dress, how bodices changed from year to year, the fashions of hairpins, and whether the gentlemen were wearing their hair short or long, and sometimes she drew herself in the midst of the dancers, in a light carmine frock with a necklace of tourmalines and Evmeni pearls. She read the geographers, Elathuid the Voyager, Firdred of Bain, and she drew herself aboard ships, in hotels, in tents, on the pinnacles of mountains, and then sometimes in cities, in little parlors, among cousins, in the garden of an aunt who passed her an ice decorated with pink dust. She had to imagine the colors, as she possessed only charcoal. She drew in a frenzy of self-loathing and a sick, irresistible craving. Sometimes she made herself eat the charcoal as a sort of penance and vomited ecstatically over the balcony. At dawn the sky was so clear and almost green. And she felt bright and light. She always burned the drawings before she left her room. "
Seren's resistance comes in the form of her insistence upon the necessity of "new songs." Living with her nomadic people and learning to spread ideas through song, she sees the way that her people are limited by their notions of gender and sexuality. One of the most interesting parts of the book was the treatment of lesbianism by Seren's people: they see it as something that is acceptable in little children, but any women who continues to love women into adulthood simply need to grow up. Ultimately, this belittlement and judgment leads Seren and Tav to strike off on their own into the wilderness, and leads to Seren's conclusion that there need to be new songs.
"The men are going to war and the women are spinning. The women are spinning and the men are going to war. The men are going to war for the women. The women are singing the men to war. The men’s hearts grow hot and sharp as blades from the singing of the women. The women are memory. They are the memory of men, of those who have died. The men sing of the fallen and the women keep their songs and memories alive. The women spin threads that never break. The women are spinning shrouds. All the men and women are singing themselves to death."
Siski's resistance comes in the form of her survival through the war and its aftermath, having lost all the trappings of her frivolous life as a socialite. There are so many fascinating components of Siski's story - from the misery of her and Tav's childhood home due to her father's rapidly-changing moods to the strange, horrible supernatural truth that she turns her back on when she is a teenager. Ultimately, her story is one of running and running from that horror and trying to lose herself in the pleasures of life, but ultimately being unable to keep running from her heart and what she owes to the man she loves.
"By all the gods, had you turned into a dragon in front of me, I would have perished in fire before I ran away."
So What's It About?
Civil war has come to Olondria. In The Winged Histories we see what this war means to four women, drastically different yet alike in that their lives are shaken to the core by the chaos in their land. Tav dreams of being a swordmaiden, and she is one of the first to whisper of rebellion. Tialon reflects on a life wasted by the oppressive restrictions of her father's religion. Seren sings of her love for Tav and the cycles of life that she sees unfold all around her, and Siski learns to face what she left behind after a life of empty frivolity.
What I Thought- The F Word
If I hadn't been entirely convinced by the end of A Stranger in Olondria, I would now be entirely positive: Sofia Samatar has won my heart for life. In short, this is a beautiful, stunningly-written little marvel of a book, strange and sorrowful and full of heart-aching loveliness. I'm sure I can't say anything about Samatar's prose that hasn't been said more eloquently by someone else, but I've never read anyone who writes quite as deliberately yet fearlessly, in a way that is at once finely-tuned and effortlessly graceful.
This is a book about war and its nation-spanning consequences and ugliness. It speaks to the cycles of oppression and rebellion that are doomed to repeat again and again, belief and tradition and fear. At its heart I think it is more than anything a story of women's resistance, and the many diverse, complex forms that this female resistance may take.
Tav's resistance is expressed when she runs away to become a swordmaiden, and again when she helps incite the Kestenyan rebellion against Olondria. It is perhaps the most literal form of resistance, but Samatar would not be satisfied with her readers calling Tav a hero and moving along to the next story. We see the ugly, horrible repercussions of her actions - both for herself in the form of PTSD and slow healing from her suffering as a soldier and for the nation as a whole in the damage that is wrought by the conflict. It's a wonderfully nuanced undoing of the fighter girl trope, where strength is equated with a woman's ability to engage in traditionally masculine forms of violence.
"It was the beginning of the dance of the mountains."
Tialon's resistance comes in the tiniest and strangest forms as she lives a tiny and overwhelmingly restrictive life under the dark, repressive influence of her father's obsessive religion. The atmosphere of stillness, boredom and repression is absolutely stifling in this portion of the book, and we see the way that zealous devotion to religion stripped Tialon's father of all his joy in life, kindness and affection for others. Tialon was a character in A Stranger in Olondria, and her aid to Jevick is revealed as one of the only things she considers being meaningful in the entirety of her life.
"The priest’s daughter read about the life that was going on in the palace. She drew pictures under the beam of her single candle, pictures of ladies and gentlemen walking and dancing and sitting down to meals at elegant tables. She knew all the styles of dress, how bodices changed from year to year, the fashions of hairpins, and whether the gentlemen were wearing their hair short or long, and sometimes she drew herself in the midst of the dancers, in a light carmine frock with a necklace of tourmalines and Evmeni pearls. She read the geographers, Elathuid the Voyager, Firdred of Bain, and she drew herself aboard ships, in hotels, in tents, on the pinnacles of mountains, and then sometimes in cities, in little parlors, among cousins, in the garden of an aunt who passed her an ice decorated with pink dust. She had to imagine the colors, as she possessed only charcoal. She drew in a frenzy of self-loathing and a sick, irresistible craving. Sometimes she made herself eat the charcoal as a sort of penance and vomited ecstatically over the balcony. At dawn the sky was so clear and almost green. And she felt bright and light. She always burned the drawings before she left her room. "
Seren's resistance comes in the form of her insistence upon the necessity of "new songs." Living with her nomadic people and learning to spread ideas through song, she sees the way that her people are limited by their notions of gender and sexuality. One of the most interesting parts of the book was the treatment of lesbianism by Seren's people: they see it as something that is acceptable in little children, but any women who continues to love women into adulthood simply need to grow up. Ultimately, this belittlement and judgment leads Seren and Tav to strike off on their own into the wilderness, and leads to Seren's conclusion that there need to be new songs.
"The men are going to war and the women are spinning. The women are spinning and the men are going to war. The men are going to war for the women. The women are singing the men to war. The men’s hearts grow hot and sharp as blades from the singing of the women. The women are memory. They are the memory of men, of those who have died. The men sing of the fallen and the women keep their songs and memories alive. The women spin threads that never break. The women are spinning shrouds. All the men and women are singing themselves to death."
Siski's resistance comes in the form of her survival through the war and its aftermath, having lost all the trappings of her frivolous life as a socialite. There are so many fascinating components of Siski's story - from the misery of her and Tav's childhood home due to her father's rapidly-changing moods to the strange, horrible supernatural truth that she turns her back on when she is a teenager. Ultimately, her story is one of running and running from that horror and trying to lose herself in the pleasures of life, but ultimately being unable to keep running from her heart and what she owes to the man she loves.
"By all the gods, had you turned into a dragon in front of me, I would have perished in fire before I ran away."