There’ve been emperors who dreamed of subjugating the South. There’ve been emperors who tried it, and some thought they’d done it. But with what? I ask, with what? With power, weapons, armies, fire, terror? Useless, all that, completely useless: all power can do is silence people, keep them from singing, arguing, dancing, talking, brawling, making speeches and composing music. [p. 184]
The Empire has always existed. It extends so far that a man can't cross it in a lifetime. The North is, generally, the seat of power: the South is uncivilised, rebellious, perhaps not quite human.
There is no map at the beginning of this book, no glossary or family tree or pronunciation guide or recurring characters, unless you believe (I don't) that the storyteller narrating each of these eleven stories is the same storyteller throughout. There is no magic, except the magic of transforming chaotic reality into coherent, specific narrative.
These are stories about power, about repression, about 'long history' where changes take place over a lifetime, or several lifetimes, or several millennia. It's rooted in the power of storytelling, of the skill of a storyteller in shaping and interpreting events -- and in one story, only one story, affecting them. A fatherless prince, an empress who's risen from poverty to power, a physician who prescribes the drawing of trees, and a story-within-a-story that seems to conflate a version of the Trojan War ('a thousand ships') with Marilyn Monroe (Marillín) as Helen, Kirk Douglas (Kirdaglass) as Paris, and Clark Gable (Clargueibl) as Odysseus ...
Kalpa Imperial (the title references the Hindu/Buddhist term for a single cycle of creation, 4320 million years) is not an easy book to summarise. The stories are connected by their themes, rather than their characters, and the settings range from hunter-gather to industrialisation, though not in an orderly progression. Human nature, though, is universal. The underdog rises, the revolution cannot be silenced, kindness can (but doesn't always) defeat hatred. Art matters more than origin or genealogy.
This was originally published in Argentina in the 1980s, a period of repression and military dictatorship. Perhaps it's a way of talking about the vastness of human history in a young country cobbled together by colonists out of the defeated fragments of indigenous empires: perhaps it's a way of talking about oppression, corruption and the uses of power in an environment where free speech was at a premium.
Fulfils the 'A Book by a South American Author in Translation' rubric of the Reading Women Challenge 2021. If one is going to read a work of fiction in translation, a work translated from the Spanish by Ursula le Guin surely starts with a huge advantage: and I'm thoroughly convinced that le Guin's humour, warmth and simplicity are in synchrony with Gorodischer's. The two were friends and Gorodischer has spoken (20 Questions with Angélica Gorodischer) of her joy in the collaboration. The prose is glorious and reminiscent, to me, of le Guin's own work: I now want to reread Orsinian Tales ...
One complete story, The End of a Dynasty or The Natural History of Ferrets, on the Small Beer Press site.
Great review here by Jo Walton, with a lengthy quotation from the beginning of the book.
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