The Melancholy of Mechagirl Kindle Edition

I went back to this book to look up the bits I had highlighted for review, and I ended up re-reading Fade to White, the story in this book that I found creepiest and best.

The whole book is an excellent assemblage, and I especially loved the poem at the beginning, about the titular mechagirl.
~Boys won’t do; the memesoup is all wrong. They stomp when they should kiss~

Silently and Very Fast is a singularity story without being the kind of singularity story that makes me want humanity to just go ahead and never transcend. Thirteen Ways of Looking at Spacetime made me cry a bit, because the language was so tuned to my frequency, because the pain was familiar. It was like hearing an old sad lovesong you thought you knew, and hearing the lyrics in a different way all at once.
~Hermes breached the matter/antimatter boundary and found Persephone hiding herself in the chromodynamic garden, her mouth red with the juice of hadron-pomegranates. She had eaten six seeds and called them Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top, and Bottom. At this, Hades laughed the laugh of unbroken supersymmetries. He said: She travels at a constant rate of speed and privileges no observer. She is not mine, but she is not yours. And in the end, there is nothing in creation which does not move.~

But Fade to White, ah, this one haunts me, because it is close to the dystopias of my childhood, the radiation and the fear of infertility, and all of the things you would grow up with if you knew that you would have 2 minutes from the flash bright as the sun. And she takes all of that and filters it down into a coming of age story that keeps me up at nights.Read more ›

This book was not what I was expecting, nor anything like what I usually read and had I know just what it was I probably wouldn’t have bought it and that would have been a real shame. This book challenged me in ways I haven’t been challenged in a long time.
Many of the stories felt more like extended poetry than narrative and were so heavily influence by Japanese myths and culture that they were very hard for me to follow, some didn’t feel like stories at all. Once I fell into the rhythm of her writing though, and accepted the lack of a straight forward narrative I began to really appreciate the beauty and flow of her words, I got a sense of place, color and feel for what she was writing even when I didn’t fully understand what she was referencing.
I would be hard pressed to pick a favorite story out of this collection, there were a few I didn’t like at all but of the others each one I liked I liked for completely different reasons. I would have to pick three. The first is One Breath, One Stroke, reading it felt like being inside a Japanese myth or a Miyazaki film. The second would be Story No. 6, it is harder to explain why. It’s sort of eerie without being creepy or unsettling, a mystery that never really gets answered. And lastly is Silent and Very Fast. I guess you could call this a Singularity story, it had a cyberpunk feel without the cynicism and the most beautiful imagery and ways of expression.
The one thread through these stories that stand out once you are done is that they all feel so personal, like you got a peek into the authors mind in a more intimate way than I’m used to, there was not “story” or character to distract and hide behind. Some of the stories were unsettling and uncomfortable, all were well worth reading.

A wonderful, magical collection of stories that made me think about my own time living in Japan in a new light.

I have had this book for a while to read, it’s a collection of short stories by Valente and has some excellent and some good stories in it. I have read most of Valente’s novels and really enjoy her prose-like and sometimes ambiguous writing style.

This book is a collection of thirteen stories. Most of the stories are somewhat science fiction in theme and have a very Japanese feel to them (they deal with Japanese mythology or culture).

There were a few stories I absolutely loved, some I liked, and a couple that were a bit too far out there even for me. Valente’s writing style is absolutely beautiful and sparkling, but it is also something best read in small doses (like eatingn a rich chocolate). You do have to concentrate as you read and really pay attention because some things can be a bit ambiguous and have multiple meanings.

I’ll go through my favorites first. I really enjoyed Ink, Water, Milk that tells the story of scroll and a paintbrush and a woman lonely and alone in Japan. This story starts out as three stories that all tie together in the end. I also loved The Ghosts of Gunkanjima; which gives a little history lesson about Battleship island and tells a story about the wind on the abandoned island...it was absolutely beautiful and melancholy and interesting.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at SpaceTime was probably the most ironic and funny story of the bunch. I enjoyed the way Valente blended creation mythology with scientific terminology in this story….it was very cleverly done. One Breath One Stroke was my absolute favorite of the whole bunch and is about a man who lives in a house where he is human in one half of the house and a paintbrush in the other half.Read more ›