Swimming for my life

This weekend I finished two books, the first of which was The Seep by Chana Porter, which has been on my TBR for years. In this book, Earth has been peacefully invaded by a parasitic alien which goes about solving all of Earth's problems in exchange for insight on what being human is like. 

If you're looking for a SFF book with heavy world-building, this is not it. Very little explanation is ever given about the Seep (the alien, not the book), how it works, how it got here, what its initial invasion was like. The practicalities of the Seep are not what this book is about; this book is about its protagonist, Trina, learning to live in a world where the Seep dominates everything, for better or worse.

The Seep itself could be an allegory for any number of things, but to me, it correlated strongly with modern technology, especially since the advent of AI, although the book was published in 2020, before AI hit the public market. The way Trina's misgivings about the Seep are brushed off as a sort of Ludditism, an old fogey being old (Trina is 50 for the better part of the book), the way even Trina acknowledges a lot of the good the Seep does but no one is willing to seriously discuss what's being lost, the way it has so quickly and totally seeped into every aspect of life on Earth so that those who choose to live without it are relegated to an isolated, ostracized community roundly mocked by everyone else. 

However, while the book starts off with something to say about Trina feeling lost, about being unwilling to give everything up to the Seep, it peters out at the end without anything really to say about Trina's society (and by extension, our own). It floats around the idea that friction in our lives is good--various characters admit, under pressure, that they miss some of the more difficult aspects of life before the Seep, perhaps the sense that accomplishments meant more when you really had to work for them. Now everyone does whatever they want and it's easy, everything's easy. It hints that Trina, who is trans, has some resentment about how easily people are able to modify their bodies now with the Seep--friends walk around with angel wings, cat ears, change gender by day of the week--while Trina had to fight so hard to become who she is and feels that struggle is part of what made her who she is. It makes salient points that part of freedom is the freedom to chose wrong (the Seep is fixated on keeping humans from any unhealthy behaviors, and Trina longs for the days when she could have a drink without the overwhelming sense of alien disapproval, or the chance to grieve as she wishes to without someone trying to fix it for her). It implies that immortality takes some of the meaning out of life, because part of what makes our experiences meaningful is knowing that we only have so much time for them.

Yet the climax lacks a follow-through to these premises, in my view. When a book starts off with such strong opinions, I expect it to conclude with a solution, a criticism, a proposal...something. But here, Trina makes her speech to the Seep about why each person's individual experience shapes them and why we're all unique, but she also returns to the fold of the same community she left before, which, I think, substantially failed her in her grief for her lost wife, and partakes in the social rituals they had been demanding of her. Her end feelings on the Seep aren't even clear. She just sort of...goes on with life as she was doing before her wife's departure. Which would be perfectly fine if the story was only about grief, but this one felt like it was about a lot more than that. 

I still think The Seep raises interesting, and very relevant in today's world, points, but I wish it did more with them in the end. However, the book is quite short, so I do still think it's worth the read.

If Mexican Gothic left you craving more South American fantasy horror, Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez of Argentina (translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell) has you covered. This is a family epic intertwined with the dark machinations of a macabre cult and its impact. It's also a splendid allegory for the evils of colonialism and generational trauma. This book was #15 from the "Women in Translation" rec list.

The book begins with Juan, a powerful but ill man who acts as a "medium" for the cult to commune with its dark god. Juan, struggling with the health of his defective heart, the wear-and-tear of years as the medium, and the grief and rage of his wife's recent death (he suspects, at the orders of the cult he serves) is desperate to keep his son Gaspar from stepping into his shoes, as the cult wants. Juan's opening segment of the book is about his efforts to protect Gaspar.

From there, the book branches off into other perspectives which give background to both the cult and the family. This is a great way of giving us a holistic and generational view of the cult, but it does drag occasionally. Gaspar's sections--in his childhood and then later in his teens/young adulthood--together make up the majority of the book, and while enjoyable, do amble off into great detail about his and his friends' day-to-day lives, such that I did wonder sometimes when we were getting back to the plot. I don't like to cite pacing issues, because I think that gets thrown around a lot whenever someone didn't vibe with a book, but the drawn-out length of these quotidian sections doesn't fit well with how quickly the climax of the book passes and is wrapped up. I would have liked to have spent less time with Gaspar at soccer games and more on his plans for addressing the cult.

However, on the whole, the book is a fun, if very dark read. It also serves well as a critique of Argentina's moneyed class and of colonialism in general, and how money sticks with money even across borders. Here, Argentina's wealthy have more in common with English money than with the Argentine lower classes (and that's how they want it). The cult, populated at its upper echelons by the privileged, is an almost literal blight on the land, willing to sacrifice an endless amount of blood, local and otherwise, to beg power off a hungry and unknown supernatural entity.

It brutalizes its mediums, which it often plucks from poverty to wring for power and then discard. Juan was adopted away from his own poor family at six, under the insistence his parents would not be able to pay for the medical care he needed, and he is the least-abused of the cult's line of mediums. As soon as the cult sets their eye on his son, Juan must begin scheming how to keep Gaspar away from them.

Although he acts out of love of his son, Juan is also a deeply flawed person. He is secretive, moody, lies constantly (there is actual gaslighting here) and doesn't hesitate to knock Gaspar around to make him obey. The more he deteriorates--a common problem with all cult mediums--the less human he becomes. Part of this is his work, but much of it is also attributable to years of being used by the cult for its ends and the accumulated emotional trauma. This, of course, is then inflicted on Gaspar through his father's tempers and secrets.

Similarly flawed are the other members of the immediate family. Juan's wife Rosario, despite a better nature than her parents, still supports this cult and is eager for Gaspar to follow in his father's footsteps as a cult medium, in part for the prestige it will bring her as his mother. Gaspar, although far more empathetic and gentle than either of his parents, eventually grows up with his father's temper. Watching him grow from a sweet-natured little boy into the troubled young adult he becomes after years of his father's abuse and neglect is painful, but realistic.

The book is also unexpectedly queer. It's not often a book surprises me with its queerness, because that's usually what landed it on my radar in the first place, but this one did. Juan and Rosario are both bisexual and later in the book we spend some active time in Argentina's queer scene, including during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. 

The translation was great! It read very naturally, even the dialogue, and it never felt stilted or awkward in its phrasing.

An ambitious novel that for the most part, pulls off what it's trying to do. As mentioned, I wish the ending had gotten more room to breathe, and I would not have minded this coming at the cost of some of the middle bits of navel-gazing, but I still felt the story was satisfying.