A review by thereadingrambler
Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera

5.0

I have no way to summarize or describe this book in terms of character or plot. On the surface, this book is about two people who are continuously re-incarnated in, alongside, between, and with each other through millions of years as Earth disintegrates. The better way to explain this book is through its themes, because this book takes absolutely no prisoners and gives you nothing to hold on to except for a sense of what the book is trying to do.

The book is divided into ten parts, each of which is basically entirely distinct from the other ten parts. The reader has to do all of the work to connect the characters, timelines, and plots to each other. But that’s not really the point of the book; there are many points to the book, but the main one I kept returning to was death. I love a reincarnation story, and this one thinks more deeply about the cycles of death and rebirth not of our “main characters” at all but the very notion of return as it is woven through the sites of great death, such a colonialism, slavery, genocide, and climate change. The lack of cohesion plot-wise between the parts emphasizes the greater cohesion of theme and purpose—to delve into the meaning and experience of death and the truth that no matter what we cling to everything will eventually die, perhaps entirely purposeless or from preventable causes, but death itself is not preventable, even for characters who count their years in the millions. Death, in many ways, is the ultimate goal of the book, a final death, not in the sense of a “release” but because that is the inevitable end and becomes something to be desired through its lack in this book. You find yourself wanting these limping, broken, diseased entities to finally die because being alive seems cruel, almost like they are siloed away from some vital (fatal?) experience.

But every story about death is also a story about love, and we do have two characters (their names are constantly changing and honestly I couldn’t keep up with all their incarnations) who are bound to each other through every dimension and incarnation and body. They die for each other and live for each other over and over again. The sense I had through my reading experience of wanting these two to finally, fully, and totally die could only be met when they were finally, fully, and totally reunited. The book was as beautiful as it was brutal, as painful as it was soothing and as intense as it was placid. I don’t know how to recommend it because it is also a hallucinatory dream which will definitely not be for everyone. But if you think you’re the kind of person who would enjoy a story that pushes the boundaries of what a novel can even do, then I would definitely pick this one up; it will be a reading experience like no other.