Hugo & Nebula Awards: Best Novels discussion

Got a lot of hope riding on this one.

I'm not completely sure what I think about this book.
It definitely kept my interest until the end but the fact that the stories were always interrupted when they got interesting made me very impatient.
I did like the stories in stories approach, in a way, but it was also challenging.
Really enjoyed the story about the guy in Belgium and the dystopian future , though it all doesn't end well.

Finished it yesterday. An interesting read but not exactly my cup of tea: a bit too much preaching. I plan to write a review in a day or two.
I liked the 2nd part of Cavendish story

I finished this book, finally; 3½ years late, but who's counting? I'm surprised to see so few comments here in the spoilers thread, but then again there's not much to spoil; this simply isn't that kind of book.

I liked the nested structure, how the stories nested first forward and then backward.

So, let's see. There were six stories:
1) the Pacific tale told through a diary (Adam Ewing)
2) the Belgian epistolary story with the composer (Robert Frobisher)
3) the action/detective story in the imaginary US city of Buenas Yerbas with the journalist (Louisa Rey)
4) the comedic "movie" about the vanity publisher sent to an old folks' home in England/Scotland (Thomas Cavendish)
5) the oration record from the dystopian Korea with the cloned waiter-slave (Sonmi~451)
6) the post-apoc oral tale about Hawai'i (Zachry Bailey)

All the stories were pretty good but I, too, enjoyed the Korean and Belgian stories best.

There are pretty dark themes repeated through the book. Greed, ignorance and a will to subjugate others follows people across centuries, destroying almost all of humanity in the end. But still, most of the stories end with an optimistic note. Even the tragic future stories have a silver lining: at least Sonmi manages to create her magnum opus; at least Zachry stays alive and saves Meronym.

Part 2, about the composer, has a lot in common with the story of composer Delius and his helper Eric Fenby. The story was made into a film "Song of Summer".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of...

Of the film: A theme that is quite overtly explored is the dichotomy between a composer who is an egotistical and tyrannical monster and womaniser (his blindness and paralysis were the result of tertiary syphilis contracted at Paris brothels and with other women), but who writes ravishingly beautiful, lyrical, sensitive music. Fenby himself comments "I can't reconcile such hardness with such lovely music".

Yeah, I found the book to be pretty bleak. There are glimmers of hope but each of the stories features some element of the dehumanizing effects of oppression. The Wachowskis' film adaptation was much more optimistic in tone, even with many of the same narrative arcs.

You read it in translation, right Antti? I'm curious how the middle (far future) section worked. In English the entire section is written, both narration and dialogue, in a speculative "evolution" of English which I found incredibly impressive but difficult to follow. I can't imagine it being translatable.

Antti wrote: " I'm surprised to see so few comments here in the spoilers thread, but then again there's not much to spoil; this simply isn't that kind of book.."

Yes, to discuss one usually concentrates on a plot, while here it is more of theme instead. Also language play, mentioned by Kalin, makes it hard to follow on audio for me.

Kalin wrote: "I'm curious how the middle (far future) section worked. In English the entire section is written, both narration and dialogue, in a speculative "evolution" of English which I found incredibly impressive but difficult to follow. I can't imagine it being translatable."

I read a Finnish translation, yeah. I haven't read the original, but I checked some samples online, and I'm pretty happy with the translation. The translator obviously put a great deal of work into that middle bit: he mixed words and expressions from various dialects, invented new words and combined old words in a way that really aren't combined today, but with an internal logic. It's pretty different from the original, but the end result is similar: slightly hard to understand at times, but still it feels like a language that some people could use. I guess the translated version feels less like a pidgin and more like a new dialect, though.

yes, this one was not for me. Too many story lines. But someday I intend to finish "The Bone Clocks." A much better book, IMHO