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silkyzacuto's reviews
12 reviews
BAKEMONOGATARI: Monster Tale, Part 1 by NISIOISIN
dark
funny
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
The Stars that Rise at Dawn by Ivana Skye
emotional
reflective
tense
medium-paced
4.5
This book has been an obsession of mine since I read it 2 years ago, and as a Jew with an intense relationship to the communities and experiences of mysticism, otherkin, guttertrash, and also psychosis and other madness, I have never discovered a book of any kind that combines so much that is appealing, recognizable, frankly rude, and challenging to my worldviews and culture into one single book. It's flawed but the material it does put out is such thought-provoking raw material I'm unsure how much the flaws matter.
The setting is a pair of motorcycle-filled Levantine fantasy cities with 1930s-ish technology and a casual, blithe attitude to the presence of angels, magical manifestations of people’s souls that are given businesslike and normalized legal protections, harsh and half-mad street merchants and authors scorched into disability by G-d-fire, or gnomish bucolic demons who run orphanages in the wilderness. And to the ability to telepathically tell G-d — who is an endlessly curious, mirthful, and flamingly harsh inhuman beautiful entity with no words or body, and characterization drawn not only from specifically Jewish G-d of the Torah and Talmud, but as the series title indicates, the jewish Shekhinah — whatever you think whenever you want.
Because in this series' world, "your lives will argue for you." It's one of the most thought-provoking theological ideas I've seen in fiction or nonfiction and very casually presented: that your life on earth demonstrates and argues through everything that makes up that which you call your life, is what G-d is receiving as comment and feedback for the olam ha ba — the world to come. G-d has no plan or deontology, because 6,000 years ago, They admitted that the strife and suffering and rebellion proved They had no idea how to form an afterlife that was satisfying to everyone, and made a covenant with the world asking for the world to argue it to Them, so that They *can* have any idea of *what* They even *should* give people. Because G-d in this series is not a shorthand to '''''goodness'''' or anything like that. They are the placental intensity of muchness They are the quantum foam of inviting existence and They are a...specific person who other people might like or not like. They are not goodness or a gesture at goodness or a sign of your goodness or a way to goodness or really anything with a meaningful relationship to goodness, positive or negative, at the soul level — G-d’s only relationship to goodness comes from a responsibility, that They undertook, as any person might find themselves obliged to undertake. In fact, the field of ethics and morality in general in this world is almost totally uninterested in G-d, while it's the most amoral or morally disinterested characters who are attracted to G-d.
Building from this, the entire book is, pleasingly to me, incredibly jewish in tone and philosophy. Many abrahamic/‘angels and demons’ fantasy is stuff I find miserably unpleasant, because from plot to world-building to basic ideas and characterization assumptions, it’s usually just an extrusion of either pure christianity or worse, many-steps-dissociated christian pop-cultural adaptations, with maybe a few jewish and muslim myth concepts thrown in for flavor, but no realization that other worldviews are even possible. This book, while in many ways a very original and aesthetically unique take on basic abrahamic mythology, definitely mirrors judaism by far the most out of the abrahamic traditions, especially in the world’s general ethos. But in *direction* and focus is very different, in a manner most reminiscent of a scifi-type alternate history set in a different type of world, from mainstream judaism as well -- the covenant and its general ambiguous relationship to ethics that I described before gives a good indication of this.
The book's plot against this backdrop is different, and much, much smaller — ostensibly. A group of three friends — ethics-obsessed, controlling, didactic Eliya, her best friend the amoral, reckless, adrenaline-fiend Tamar, and the shy, gentle, misunderstood third wheel Yenatru, seemed they would continue to share their lives and respectable college educations together after they graduated from high school, or at least keep up with each other, because during their early teens they made a promise to always tell each other about anything interesting they did or experienced. Instead, Tamar motorcycled off into the desert one day, and paid the price of her eyesight in order to demand G-d show Their soul’s true form to her so she could feast her eyes on it for an inexplicable reason, and then without a word of explanation, ghosted her friends and vanished to another city to become a blind street vendor. Years later, Eliya and Yenatru are reaping the so-called benefits of normal life as normal college students — crippling depression, disillusionment, loneliness, emptiness, frustration at a lack of growth, and what seems to me a lingering hauntedness about how anyone could care about anything in this world enough to do what Tamar did to pursue it.
“There’s something *of* [Tamar], something important to her and probably incredible and so much, and [Yenatru] has no idea what it is. He might *never* know.
And though he understands exactly why—he knows what it means for something to be important, knows that if it beats your heart to think about and makes you cry to feel, it’s hard to say aloud—it still makes him sad to know that she is so very *something*, the nature of which he might never know.”
Then Yenatru, who, lonely and alienated by his fading friendship with Eliya and general lack of people who understand or have the patience to value him, takes up practicing Theurgy, the subtle and introspective art of understanding one’s own soul well enough to physically manifest it, like an angel does to create parts of the world. While practicing, he meets the fallen angel Lucifer, who is the one specifically christian element of this book, but is unlike any other characterization of Lucifer I’ve ever seen: deeply unpleasant to me personally, but also not in the cool, ambitious, and bad-boy way that has been done a hundred times in villain, hero, or antihero portrayals of Lucifer in a hundred other books. I have to caution that both the characterization of Lucifer specifically and the construction of fallen angels in general in this series is not likely to satisfy people who enjoy fallen angels in other media, because in many ways it trends towards the opposite of what any expectation, sympathetic or not, of a fallen angel would be -- the fallen angels are sympathetic, but along the axis associated with purity and humanity/normalcy, eschewing and shying away from overwhelming devilish inhuman ways of living (eg G-d), distressed unto dysphoria by the formation of their bodies to give them power and knowledge and mycelial tangling. And this Lucifer is soft (or tries to be), anxious, avoidant, brittle, full of revulsion and fear of extremity or abnormality (such as the G-d-burnt people like Tamar), spends time reading moralistic novels and probing for the attention of those they have deemed safe, and is desperate for human friendship and gentleness in their long and lonely immortal life, which has been dogged by fame since they became the first angel to fall and completely shook up G-d’s worldview and ideas about life.
The depiction of trauma in this book, through Lucifer and the effect they have on Yenatru, is another hit. Traumatized fallen angels are not an uncommon idea, but trauma as something that unequivocally makes someone both a worse and -- much more importantly in fiction -- a far more *boring* person than one could be, is rare. Here it is cloyingly, convincingly real, speaking to my experience and undoubtedly speaking from experience.
Once Eliya gets wind of this encounter, she asks Lucifer to find Tamar so that she can finally demand answers about the broken promise she's been obsessing about for years and meet up with her again, but Lucifer refuses — unless Eliya will agree to do Theurgy too. After this I was fascinated by chewing on the unfolding of relationship dynamics — between Eliya and Lucifer (a tooth-gritting get-along-shirt that draws out one another’s best qualities), and also Yenatru and Eliya (old friends who turn out to have never really known each other), Eliya and Tamar (the core relationship of the book, a knotty and acidic f/f homoerotic or anime-rival subversion and riddling among several other layers), Yenatru and Tamar (old friends who *do* understand each other quite well, but whose very lack of tension and friction in itself makes them less meaningful to each other), Lucifer and Yenatru (a classic meeting of very different lonely, affection-starved people who desperately want to be seen), and Lucifer and Tamar (a nightmarish dynamic where Lucifer, because they 'promised' Eliya to find Tamar, refuses to simply keep themselves and their trauma out of the situation and instead subjects Tamar to a barrage of ableist and antisemitism-esque contempt and bile out of triggeredness). I found them really unpredictable and unusual in a way I’m not used to, and in a good way, although unfortunately the ‘plot’ of the book is rather weak and bogged down in terms of dynamism, momentum, efficiency, or ‘showing not telling’ so to speak (especially compared to the third book in this series, The Lives That Argue For Us, where the author’s grasp of fiction-writing has clearly grown dramatically).
But I still enjoyed it a lot especially upon re-reads — the very weakness of the plot allows for a sort of tumbling procession that I rarely see, namely that the plot and character arcs are very contingent. By which I mean, extremely contingent upon a specific sequence of events, that are not models for how any other situation or people would be likely to work. There’s an almost unplanned/serialized or webcomic-like quality to the way things play out, where these consequences came about from these things that occurred to these specific ppl in these specific circumstances. A reader can extract a lot of principles from this sequence of events but they aren’t really…..followable/able to be replicated or containing of a message about what kinds of actions have other meanings (for example, Lucifer’s quite condescending, tricking/forcing-you-into-this-for-your-own good, psychiatrist-like behavior towards Eliya, which does happen to help her specifically a great deal more than a better approach would have. Or in the opposite direction, Tamar’s rejection and careless cruelty towards her, which happens to help her even more). Because they’re wholly dependent on the very, very specific individuals in this story in ways that no other characters would react together in this way –- which is itself a major theme of the book and series. Individuals are infinitely unique and operate according to individual internal logic, like a chemistry accident, rather than an experiment. It was an interesting way the flaws of the book clearly still cleave to an underlying forceful self-truthfulness and insight on the part of the author.
I also enjoyed how it dealt with rsd-triggering uncomfortable and bitter experiences — there's a personal-feeling tone of relentless anti-romanticism of childhood friend groups that really *were* that shallow and flimsy. Throughout, in almost every scene and plot thread/interaction, there's a mostly subtle, again rather personal/unintentional-feeling presence of deconstructing or showing the negative and destructive possible outcomes of socially normative virtues of ethicality, kindness, loyalty, promise-keeping, helpfulness, and compassion. Most strongly in the interactions between Tamar and Eliya and Eliya and Lucifer. This was *fascinating.* It's something that works really well with the near-utopian setting of the world, where a lot of the more pressing ethical problems of the real world such as war and poverty are solved, thereby shutting down any opportunity for people/characters who really want to be 'good' (and would be 'good' in other stories) to enter a sort of symbiotic relationship with evil the way it does in worlds full of suffering. This is the (very underexplored) potential that utopian worlds have -- a lot of evil in the real world (or fictional worlds full of external problems) creates an endless supply of victims and misfortunes for do-gooders to prove their goodness by solving. In the absence of a lot of this evil, more thorny questions about how to be good/what this even means/how this impulse warps and becomes repellent emerge. In this vein, I really enjoyed the character arc of development for Eliya that really satisfyingly transforms her from one of the most annoying and insufferable people I have ever read about, into a poignant, wonderfully believable and very tenderly-written young person whose nature brings a lot to her friends and rivals.
The influence of Japanese light novels/anime/manga/JRPGS, and even more clearly, of Homestuck, are incredibly visible and enjoyable throughout the whole book. The defamiliarization, charmingly casual world building, and strong current of the author’s eccentric and eclectic personal ideas, preferences, and interests untempered by other structural or trope considerations is very refreshing — and is built upon much more in the next two books.
The concept of Theurgy is not only the best take on ‘soul magic’, or magic that comes from one’s soul, achieved through careful pondering and self-understanding of identity and interiority, it’s perhaps the only one that has ever satisfied me at all. Anyone who has strenuously pondered their own gender, sexuality, or neurotype would find it recognizable (but more expansive). However I personally found it most closely mirroring the experiences of otherkin, especially conceptkin — people who identify, on the level of the Self, as something specific, from an animal to something like a feature of the natural world, a void, fire, a river, the sea, a machine or satellite, etc, but in more careful specificity. The book’s definition of the ‘soul’ is ‘what makes you identifiable to yourself.’ For example, as Eliya ponders her process of Theurgy, she thinks:
“But flames, she’s still not satisfied. Is she really *just* the wind? And also, why?
Or maybe she’s at least an entire scene, an entire image, an entire place, not just the wind but also the open desert, and completely open sky, that too, she hasn’t factored in her tendency to look at the sky and horizon yet. And even then, is that incorporating every detail? She’s not sure, but she still seems to be onto something.”
Or take Yenatru, the much more natural theurgist with a very easy time of it:
“Because what he is, what he’s telling the world again and again and again that he is until it becomes true, is a soft breeze around his arms.
Because he’s the wind in the meadow too.
He’s crying; he wants this with all he is. He wants to be this wind, to be there when he touches. To be all that he is, so soft, so subtle, but there, there, there. And his says it over and over again in his heart until he makes it true: he already is this.
He focuses and feels, and feels, and feels, knowing how soft this wind can be and will be and already is, because he is it, he is it, he is it. He feels what it is to be air moving across his skin, because he is that, he is that, he is that. And he feels it, is it, ”
My biggest interest though, is in the characters of Tamar and G-d, the first ones introduced in the prologue, which bewitched and riveted me instantly. She has a vastly different self-conception:
“Then again,” Tamar says, shrugging. “Back then, I didn’t have myself, not really. There wasn’t much opportunity as a secondary school student to do anything with myself, carve out something that was myself. But now I have. And maybe that’s different. Look at me. My whole life, with what I’ve done to it. What I’ve done to myself. I’m blind…”
I am fascinated by her. She means more to me than any fictional character ever has. I am fascinated also by the concept of the Holies (the people who have been burnt into disability by G-d’s fire, which also then continues to stick to their bodies and minds (or souls) after the encounter like radioactivity or memory. It’s loaded with applicable comparisons and partial metaphors, though it clearly isn’t actually a direct metaphor for anything in real life), and the accumulative, Clarice Lispector-like becoming-through-time conception of their selves. Tamar, not unlike her namesake from Bereshit (Genesis), is, in a book that already combines and condenses and strings many ideas and themes into a single knot of a concept, is a character filled with recognizable-to-me jewishnesses of rude bluntness, passion, relishing of wrestling with challenges including but not limited to the endlessly confusing alien ideas of G-d, keen awareness of her own particularism and difference from the vast majority of the people around her and a callous sort of respect for others’ dignity. But by the same token, with a strain of also recognizable jewish-feeling subversion against many traditional jewish virtues that were impressed upon me as normative and prescriptive all my life. She is selfish, ethically dubious, greedy, vain, undutiful, a promise-breaker, and has what many would call an inflated ego in her demanding greed and irreverence for G-d and for the world at large. Through her, throughout the book, subtly and implicitly but tauntingly, the riddle is asked — in this world which is a near-utopia with very little poverty, bigotry, or war, thereby ridding the problem of immediate survival needs, what does it look like when a person knows themself, knows what it feels like to be smitten with a desire and what it is worth to be truthful about it, who have begun to make something of their life as their own life; as opposed to those who are held back from doing so by pearl-clutching, fear of regret, prescriptivism, lack of exposure, or most of all, especially in Lucifer’s case, trauma.
The setting is a pair of motorcycle-filled Levantine fantasy cities with 1930s-ish technology and a casual, blithe attitude to the presence of angels, magical manifestations of people’s souls that are given businesslike and normalized legal protections, harsh and half-mad street merchants and authors scorched into disability by G-d-fire, or gnomish bucolic demons who run orphanages in the wilderness. And to the ability to telepathically tell G-d — who is an endlessly curious, mirthful, and flamingly harsh inhuman beautiful entity with no words or body, and characterization drawn not only from specifically Jewish G-d of the Torah and Talmud, but as the series title indicates, the jewish Shekhinah — whatever you think whenever you want.
Because in this series' world, "your lives will argue for you." It's one of the most thought-provoking theological ideas I've seen in fiction or nonfiction and very casually presented: that your life on earth demonstrates and argues through everything that makes up that which you call your life, is what G-d is receiving as comment and feedback for the olam ha ba — the world to come. G-d has no plan or deontology, because 6,000 years ago, They admitted that the strife and suffering and rebellion proved They had no idea how to form an afterlife that was satisfying to everyone, and made a covenant with the world asking for the world to argue it to Them, so that They *can* have any idea of *what* They even *should* give people. Because G-d in this series is not a shorthand to '''''goodness'''' or anything like that. They are the placental intensity of muchness They are the quantum foam of inviting existence and They are a...specific person who other people might like or not like. They are not goodness or a gesture at goodness or a sign of your goodness or a way to goodness or really anything with a meaningful relationship to goodness, positive or negative, at the soul level — G-d’s only relationship to goodness comes from a responsibility, that They undertook, as any person might find themselves obliged to undertake. In fact, the field of ethics and morality in general in this world is almost totally uninterested in G-d, while it's the most amoral or morally disinterested characters who are attracted to G-d.
Building from this, the entire book is, pleasingly to me, incredibly jewish in tone and philosophy. Many abrahamic/‘angels and demons’ fantasy is stuff I find miserably unpleasant, because from plot to world-building to basic ideas and characterization assumptions, it’s usually just an extrusion of either pure christianity or worse, many-steps-dissociated christian pop-cultural adaptations, with maybe a few jewish and muslim myth concepts thrown in for flavor, but no realization that other worldviews are even possible. This book, while in many ways a very original and aesthetically unique take on basic abrahamic mythology, definitely mirrors judaism by far the most out of the abrahamic traditions, especially in the world’s general ethos. But in *direction* and focus is very different, in a manner most reminiscent of a scifi-type alternate history set in a different type of world, from mainstream judaism as well -- the covenant and its general ambiguous relationship to ethics that I described before gives a good indication of this.
The book's plot against this backdrop is different, and much, much smaller — ostensibly. A group of three friends — ethics-obsessed, controlling, didactic Eliya, her best friend the amoral, reckless, adrenaline-fiend Tamar, and the shy, gentle, misunderstood third wheel Yenatru, seemed they would continue to share their lives and respectable college educations together after they graduated from high school, or at least keep up with each other, because during their early teens they made a promise to always tell each other about anything interesting they did or experienced. Instead, Tamar motorcycled off into the desert one day, and paid the price of her eyesight in order to demand G-d show Their soul’s true form to her so she could feast her eyes on it for an inexplicable reason, and then without a word of explanation, ghosted her friends and vanished to another city to become a blind street vendor. Years later, Eliya and Yenatru are reaping the so-called benefits of normal life as normal college students — crippling depression, disillusionment, loneliness, emptiness, frustration at a lack of growth, and what seems to me a lingering hauntedness about how anyone could care about anything in this world enough to do what Tamar did to pursue it.
“There’s something *of* [Tamar], something important to her and probably incredible and so much, and [Yenatru] has no idea what it is. He might *never* know.
And though he understands exactly why—he knows what it means for something to be important, knows that if it beats your heart to think about and makes you cry to feel, it’s hard to say aloud—it still makes him sad to know that she is so very *something*, the nature of which he might never know.”
Then Yenatru, who, lonely and alienated by his fading friendship with Eliya and general lack of people who understand or have the patience to value him, takes up practicing Theurgy, the subtle and introspective art of understanding one’s own soul well enough to physically manifest it, like an angel does to create parts of the world. While practicing, he meets the fallen angel Lucifer, who is the one specifically christian element of this book, but is unlike any other characterization of Lucifer I’ve ever seen: deeply unpleasant to me personally, but also not in the cool, ambitious, and bad-boy way that has been done a hundred times in villain, hero, or antihero portrayals of Lucifer in a hundred other books. I have to caution that both the characterization of Lucifer specifically and the construction of fallen angels in general in this series is not likely to satisfy people who enjoy fallen angels in other media, because in many ways it trends towards the opposite of what any expectation, sympathetic or not, of a fallen angel would be -- the fallen angels are sympathetic, but along the axis associated with purity and humanity/normalcy, eschewing and shying away from overwhelming devilish inhuman ways of living (eg G-d), distressed unto dysphoria by the formation of their bodies to give them power and knowledge and mycelial tangling. And this Lucifer is soft (or tries to be), anxious, avoidant, brittle, full of revulsion and fear of extremity or abnormality (such as the G-d-burnt people like Tamar), spends time reading moralistic novels and probing for the attention of those they have deemed safe, and is desperate for human friendship and gentleness in their long and lonely immortal life, which has been dogged by fame since they became the first angel to fall and completely shook up G-d’s worldview and ideas about life.
The depiction of trauma in this book, through Lucifer and the effect they have on Yenatru, is another hit. Traumatized fallen angels are not an uncommon idea, but trauma as something that unequivocally makes someone both a worse and -- much more importantly in fiction -- a far more *boring* person than one could be, is rare. Here it is cloyingly, convincingly real, speaking to my experience and undoubtedly speaking from experience.
Once Eliya gets wind of this encounter, she asks Lucifer to find Tamar so that she can finally demand answers about the broken promise she's been obsessing about for years and meet up with her again, but Lucifer refuses — unless Eliya will agree to do Theurgy too. After this I was fascinated by chewing on the unfolding of relationship dynamics — between Eliya and Lucifer (a tooth-gritting get-along-shirt that draws out one another’s best qualities), and also Yenatru and Eliya (old friends who turn out to have never really known each other), Eliya and Tamar (the core relationship of the book, a knotty and acidic f/f homoerotic or anime-rival subversion and riddling among several other layers), Yenatru and Tamar (old friends who *do* understand each other quite well, but whose very lack of tension and friction in itself makes them less meaningful to each other), Lucifer and Yenatru (a classic meeting of very different lonely, affection-starved people who desperately want to be seen), and Lucifer and Tamar (a nightmarish dynamic where Lucifer, because they 'promised' Eliya to find Tamar, refuses to simply keep themselves and their trauma out of the situation and instead subjects Tamar to a barrage of ableist and antisemitism-esque contempt and bile out of triggeredness). I found them really unpredictable and unusual in a way I’m not used to, and in a good way, although unfortunately the ‘plot’ of the book is rather weak and bogged down in terms of dynamism, momentum, efficiency, or ‘showing not telling’ so to speak (especially compared to the third book in this series, The Lives That Argue For Us, where the author’s grasp of fiction-writing has clearly grown dramatically).
But I still enjoyed it a lot especially upon re-reads — the very weakness of the plot allows for a sort of tumbling procession that I rarely see, namely that the plot and character arcs are very contingent. By which I mean, extremely contingent upon a specific sequence of events, that are not models for how any other situation or people would be likely to work. There’s an almost unplanned/serialized or webcomic-like quality to the way things play out, where these consequences came about from these things that occurred to these specific ppl in these specific circumstances. A reader can extract a lot of principles from this sequence of events but they aren’t really…..followable/able to be replicated or containing of a message about what kinds of actions have other meanings (for example, Lucifer’s quite condescending, tricking/forcing-you-into-this-for-your-own good, psychiatrist-like behavior towards Eliya, which does happen to help her specifically a great deal more than a better approach would have. Or in the opposite direction, Tamar’s rejection and careless cruelty towards her, which happens to help her even more). Because they’re wholly dependent on the very, very specific individuals in this story in ways that no other characters would react together in this way –- which is itself a major theme of the book and series. Individuals are infinitely unique and operate according to individual internal logic, like a chemistry accident, rather than an experiment. It was an interesting way the flaws of the book clearly still cleave to an underlying forceful self-truthfulness and insight on the part of the author.
I also enjoyed how it dealt with rsd-triggering uncomfortable and bitter experiences — there's a personal-feeling tone of relentless anti-romanticism of childhood friend groups that really *were* that shallow and flimsy. Throughout, in almost every scene and plot thread/interaction, there's a mostly subtle, again rather personal/unintentional-feeling presence of deconstructing or showing the negative and destructive possible outcomes of socially normative virtues of ethicality, kindness, loyalty, promise-keeping, helpfulness, and compassion. Most strongly in the interactions between Tamar and Eliya and Eliya and Lucifer. This was *fascinating.* It's something that works really well with the near-utopian setting of the world, where a lot of the more pressing ethical problems of the real world such as war and poverty are solved, thereby shutting down any opportunity for people/characters who really want to be 'good' (and would be 'good' in other stories) to enter a sort of symbiotic relationship with evil the way it does in worlds full of suffering. This is the (very underexplored) potential that utopian worlds have -- a lot of evil in the real world (or fictional worlds full of external problems) creates an endless supply of victims and misfortunes for do-gooders to prove their goodness by solving. In the absence of a lot of this evil, more thorny questions about how to be good/what this even means/how this impulse warps and becomes repellent emerge. In this vein, I really enjoyed the character arc of development for Eliya that really satisfyingly transforms her from one of the most annoying and insufferable people I have ever read about, into a poignant, wonderfully believable and very tenderly-written young person whose nature brings a lot to her friends and rivals.
The influence of Japanese light novels/anime/manga/JRPGS, and even more clearly, of Homestuck, are incredibly visible and enjoyable throughout the whole book. The defamiliarization, charmingly casual world building, and strong current of the author’s eccentric and eclectic personal ideas, preferences, and interests untempered by other structural or trope considerations is very refreshing — and is built upon much more in the next two books.
The concept of Theurgy is not only the best take on ‘soul magic’, or magic that comes from one’s soul, achieved through careful pondering and self-understanding of identity and interiority, it’s perhaps the only one that has ever satisfied me at all. Anyone who has strenuously pondered their own gender, sexuality, or neurotype would find it recognizable (but more expansive). However I personally found it most closely mirroring the experiences of otherkin, especially conceptkin — people who identify, on the level of the Self, as something specific, from an animal to something like a feature of the natural world, a void, fire, a river, the sea, a machine or satellite, etc, but in more careful specificity. The book’s definition of the ‘soul’ is ‘what makes you identifiable to yourself.’ For example, as Eliya ponders her process of Theurgy, she thinks:
“But flames, she’s still not satisfied. Is she really *just* the wind? And also, why?
Or maybe she’s at least an entire scene, an entire image, an entire place, not just the wind but also the open desert, and completely open sky, that too, she hasn’t factored in her tendency to look at the sky and horizon yet. And even then, is that incorporating every detail? She’s not sure, but she still seems to be onto something.”
Or take Yenatru, the much more natural theurgist with a very easy time of it:
“Because what he is, what he’s telling the world again and again and again that he is until it becomes true, is a soft breeze around his arms.
Because he’s the wind in the meadow too.
He’s crying; he wants this with all he is. He wants to be this wind, to be there when he touches. To be all that he is, so soft, so subtle, but there, there, there. And his says it over and over again in his heart until he makes it true: he already is this.
He focuses and feels, and feels, and feels, knowing how soft this wind can be and will be and already is, because he is it, he is it, he is it. He feels what it is to be air moving across his skin, because he is that, he is that, he is that. And he feels it, is it, ”
My biggest interest though, is in the characters of Tamar and G-d, the first ones introduced in the prologue, which bewitched and riveted me instantly. She has a vastly different self-conception:
“Then again,” Tamar says, shrugging. “Back then, I didn’t have myself, not really. There wasn’t much opportunity as a secondary school student to do anything with myself, carve out something that was myself. But now I have. And maybe that’s different. Look at me. My whole life, with what I’ve done to it. What I’ve done to myself. I’m blind…”
I am fascinated by her. She means more to me than any fictional character ever has. I am fascinated also by the concept of the Holies (the people who have been burnt into disability by G-d’s fire, which also then continues to stick to their bodies and minds (or souls) after the encounter like radioactivity or memory. It’s loaded with applicable comparisons and partial metaphors, though it clearly isn’t actually a direct metaphor for anything in real life), and the accumulative, Clarice Lispector-like becoming-through-time conception of their selves. Tamar, not unlike her namesake from Bereshit (Genesis), is, in a book that already combines and condenses and strings many ideas and themes into a single knot of a concept, is a character filled with recognizable-to-me jewishnesses of rude bluntness, passion, relishing of wrestling with challenges including but not limited to the endlessly confusing alien ideas of G-d, keen awareness of her own particularism and difference from the vast majority of the people around her and a callous sort of respect for others’ dignity. But by the same token, with a strain of also recognizable jewish-feeling subversion against many traditional jewish virtues that were impressed upon me as normative and prescriptive all my life. She is selfish, ethically dubious, greedy, vain, undutiful, a promise-breaker, and has what many would call an inflated ego in her demanding greed and irreverence for G-d and for the world at large. Through her, throughout the book, subtly and implicitly but tauntingly, the riddle is asked — in this world which is a near-utopia with very little poverty, bigotry, or war, thereby ridding the problem of immediate survival needs, what does it look like when a person knows themself, knows what it feels like to be smitten with a desire and what it is worth to be truthful about it, who have begun to make something of their life as their own life; as opposed to those who are held back from doing so by pearl-clutching, fear of regret, prescriptivism, lack of exposure, or most of all, especially in Lucifer’s case, trauma.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Cursing, Mental illness, Toxic friendship, Ableism, and Fire/Fire injury
Moderate: Religious bigotry, Self harm, Dysphoria, and Blood
Minor: Child abuse and Death
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