A review by introverted_reads
Pluralities by Avi Silver

emotional hopeful reflective fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

5 stars

ARC provided by publisher on NetGalley for an honest review 

“I was a shapeshifter, worshipped for my pluralities…So many stories of self, huddled together to wander the void of my own uncertainty, fleeing and seeking in equal measure… Silence, silence. Perfect and terrible. The sympathetic resonance of the great dark universe, waiting to be heard.”

Avi Silver’s Pluralities is quite possibly one of my new favourite books. Pluralities is a piece of speculative fiction, which in the space of just over 100 pages, manages to trace two narratives; one exploring gender, the trans experience, and gender euphoria, and the other exploring connection, love, and what it means to be alive.

“It would be nice, to lie down. To disassemble. To let his atoms wander apart and return to the universe, perhaps to come back together as something better in another hundred million years. Perhaps it would be painful, but only for a moment. The pain of unbecoming would be nothing compared to the pain of trying to connect.”

Silver’s prose is something to be admired. Their voice carries a poetic quality, and the beauty of their prose, his constructions of language, could be placed on a level with the likes of Oscar Wilde. I found myself unable to tear my eyes from the text; Silver’s poetic voice carries beautifully into their prose, and results in a novella that feels like a piece of art to be taken apart, admired, respected, and cared for.

“There is a wound in Cornelius that Bo cannot see. There is something in his heart that it cannot find and repair, not in the way it wants to, and it fears what these messages will do if they take root. A bit of bad code can corrupt everything, and the ship does not want its friend to break.”

The narrative of Cornelius, an alien prince, and Bo, his best friend who happens to be a sentient spaceship, explores the beauty and depth of platonic love, as well as what it means to be alive, and the fragility of the organic body and experience. Bo and Cornelius are completely in harmony together, two lonely existences joined by an invisible, but infallible, cord within an infinite space of the universe. There is a deep, and profound relationship between these two beings, despite their differences, and this relationship is fundamental to their own realisation of self. Their relationship isn’t perfect, they have to learn to trust one another entirely, to trust the other’s judgment and decisions, and to respect that judgement, but the relationship is founded wholly on pure love.

“Because we’re no good without the other. Because even at your worst, you do not deserve the pain you house. Because I do not do enough to show just how much faith I have in you. Because I’ve run a thousand simulations through my core, imagining what our lives would be apart, and it just doesn’t work, Cornelius. It just doesn’t work.”

This narrative finds itself as an analogy within the exploration of gender, the body taking the role of the spaceship, the vessel, and the self becoming the passenger, allowing Silver to seamlessly weave two different stories into one novella.

“But here I was, a pale blue dot in a whole galaxy of possibilities. A nervous little spaceship, floating somewhere between the supposed binary. It was a nebulous place to be, but it was mine.”

Avi Silver’s depiction of the trans and nonbinary experience isn’t neat, it isn’t tidy, it isn’t the easy A to B of self-realisation - it felt so personal, so real, and I felt so seen within the pages. Being trans isn’t as simple as a journey from A to B, not every trans individual finds themselves neatly fitting on the binary of gender constructed by our society. Theseus says, “…my life experience [is] fundamentally different from cis guys… a way of choosing masculinity for myself, but masculinity that isn’t cis. Being a man on my own terms, I guess.”, verbalising the experience of recognising the vague idea of gender, yet feeling it is something wholly unique from the binary ideas of gender (“… a flickering light I didn’t have the words for… I understood, but I didn’t have the verbal language to describe just how much.”).

“The confession came in a burst of brilliant light, supernova of honesty long overdue, and then went dark. I grasped at my body with shaking hands, trying to keep myself from malfunctioning, falling from the sky into a million unfixable pieces.”

Silver articulates the peace found in “…the void that was left between identities…”, a reminder that there is no obligation to have to be able to verbalise your own experience of gender and self, whilst also recognising the wanting to be recognised by others: “Despite the fact that I barely understood myself, I wanted to be understood by others.”

“They looked at each other, the mysteries flowing between them like cosmic feminine ley lines, and I felt nothing… I didn’t know if it was more her pride or my shame that made me so determined to be a girl… Cult’s kind of a loaded word, but what I’m trying to say is even though I knew that I didn’t belong, leaving didn’t feel like an option.”

The relation of femininity and womanhood to a “cult” in the post-first, second and third wave feminism society, is a detail that I really appreciated in Pluralities. It’s something I also noticed in Felix Ever After, and the misguided accusation that being trans as an AFAB individual made you a “bad feminist” because you must hate womanhood and femininity. Seeing this self-doubt reflected on the page, the question of whether your experience is gender dysphoria, or whether it is internalised misogyny - “Was shying away from the divine feminine of my line an act of violence against my own? A projection of internalised misogyny?” - was a comfort. “Leaving” womanhood doesn’t make someone a bad feminist, or a victim of internalised misogyny, it’s just that it was never you to begin with: “…she had never been mine…”.

“The concept of gender euphoria was my lodestar, a promise that being trans wasn’t just about what felt wrong, but also what felt right.”

But Avi Silver also emphasises trans joy. At the heart of the narrative is the journey to gender euphoria. Pluralities is a story of hope, of joy, and peace within the notion of self. It’s a story on the value of trans voices - “Just because it took me more work to get here doesn’t mean that it’s less valuable…” - and the value of an expression and experience of gender beyond the binary.

“I couldn’t describe what it felt like to be myself, to be nonbinary, but I could read through the stories and decide whether or not they felt like mine.”

Quotes taken from e-ARC provided through NetGalley and may change in final published work 
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