James Nicoll Reviews

As White as Snow, the second volume in Salla Simukka’s Snow White trilogy, was originally released in fall 2013 under the title Valkea kuin lumi; the English translation hit virtual bookshelves on March 3^rd of this year (2015). It is a great compliment to the first book in the trilogy, As Red as Blood, that I hurried to buy the second book as soon as it was available.

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2014’s As Red As Blood, first book in the Snow White Trilogy, answers a question I didn’t know I had, which is ​“what would happen if a plucky girl detective like Nancy Drew wandered into a Kurt Wallander [1] novel?” Not that seventeen-year-old art student Lumikki Andersson had any intention of playing detective or getting involved in the affairs of three foolish classmates.

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I didn’t expect my second review of a novel by a Nobel Laureate to arrive so soon after the first but … not only did author Selma Lagerlöf win a Nobel, she was the very first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she accomplished in 1909. Go, Lagerlöf!

That’s not an approving gaze I am getting from the author 

so let’s just move on to the review.

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Mór Jókai’s 1879 Told by the Death’s Head: A Romantic Tale was inspired by an encounter the author was kind enough to describe in his preface: 

In Part II, Vol. 2, of the Rhenish Antiquarius, I once came across a skull that is said — see page 612 — to swing, enclosed in a metal casket, from an iron bar in the foundry of Ehrenbreitstein fortress. Distinction of this order does not fall to an ordinary mortal. Yon empty shell of human wisdom once bore the burden of no less than twenty-one mortal sins — the seven originalia trebled. Each crime is noted. The criminal confessed to the entire three-times-seven, and yet the death sentence was not passed upon him because of the twenty-one crimes. His fate was decided by the transgression of a military regulation.
What if this skull could speak? What if it could defend itself? — relate, with all the grim humor of one on the rack, the many pranks played — the mad follies committed, from the banks of the Weichsel to the delta of the Ganges!
If my highly esteemed readers will promise to give me their credulous attention, I will relate what was told to me by the death’s head. 

And so he does, in a tale that takes us across Europe and beyond, a tale of love, adventure, and casual anti-Semitism. 

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Karel Čapek’s 1936 satire War with the Newts was published towards the end of Czechoslovakia’s inter-war golden age, a time when the writing was already on the wall for unfortunate Czechoslovakia. One can sense from the novel’s wry, often bitter, humour that Čapek had pretty clear views about what people were really like and those views were not positive ones. Čapek is often funny but it’s a dark funny.

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Apparently this is the week for novels about obsessive love and survival past death. Which I guess is appropriate for the final week of the year.

Yuka Nakazato’s Silver Wings of the Campanula takes us to 1928 Oxford, where Andrew Borden is a diligent, if reclusive, student who plans make the best of the access to higher learning that a family fortune makes possible. In Paris, Andrew Borden is also a hopelessly addicted degenerate who, thanks to the same family fortune, is conducting an informal scientific experiment: will the ample supply of illegal drugs to be obtained in Paris kill him before syphilis does? Hmmm. 

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Translated by Amalia Gladhart.

Angélica Gorodischer’s Trafalgar: A Novel was first published in 1979 but in Argentina and in Spanish, which is why I missed it. The subtitle is a lie; this isn’t a novel but a collection of short stories. That the subtitle is a lie is foreshadowing; Medrano Trafalgar is a charming raconteur who entertains his friends with amusing tales of his adventures trading on alien worlds, rambling accounts told over endless cups of coffee, and he does not come across as a man much inhibited by the truth. 

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First published in China almost a decade ago under the title 三体, Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem has finally been brought to audiences in l’anglosphere (at least the l’Amérique du Nord part). This is due to the efforts of translator Ken Liu, publisher Tor Books, and the China Educational Publications Import & Export Corporation. In this novel, Liu grapples with a classic SFnal question — how might contact between two civilizations of vastly different technological ability go? — and the answer is, rather unsurprisingly for anyone familiar with terrestrial history, very poorly for the less advanced civilization.

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2013’s HWJN offers a glimpse of contemporary Arabic fantasy in the form of a romance featuring Hawjan son of Meehal al-Fayhee, a love-smitten Jinn obsessed with a Human woman of good character. For various right and good reasons such things are frowned on but this particular example is complicated by certain facts about Hawjan’s family of which the young Jinn is not fully apprised.

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The shared world anthology Dreaming 2074: A Utopia Created by French Luxury puts its central conceit right there in the subtitle. Commissioned by the Comité Colbert — ​“78 firms from the French luxury sector and 14 cultural institutions, which have joined together through common values” — the anthology (comprising short stories and other works) uses a shared universe to paint a picture of a 2074 that has weathered calamity to become a world materially and culturally superior to our own. 

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