Book Review: The Witch of Prague by J.M. Sidorova

An intriguing magical realism novel set in the run up to the Prague Spring of 1968.

Alica is a dyslexic teenager in Czechoslovakia. She wants a better life than what her mean and often quite thin circumstances will allow. Answering an ad to learn how to type does teach her that, but opens her up to two worlds. One is a chance at a job within the Communist Party, putting her in the halls of power at a propitious time, and a chance to make a life for herself. The other world revolves around a tapestry. A unicorn tapestry, in fact. But this is not just any copy of the famous medieval work. This is a unicorn tapestry that has an interior world of its own for Alica to immerse herself in. An interior world of symbolism that connects to the real world that Alica is faced with. A world that shows that Alica can have and wield more power than she imagines.

This is the story of J.M. Sidorova’s The Witch of Prague.

Sidorova’s novel starts off, strongly and boldly as a historical fiction novel about a time and place that is likely to be unfamiliar to a lot of readers. The author immerses us in Alica’s life, allowing us to get used to what life in a Soviet satellite state on the cusp of a brief and vibrant change is life. Alica’s life is not a happy or easy one when we meet her--she is dyslexic (and only learns that thanks to her typing tutor). The privations, in freedom as well as goods, and quality of life in the time and place of Soviet Czechoslovakia is made clear, in large and small ways. And yet at the same time we get to see the brief cracks in the wall of Soviet control and domination of the country as music and other ideas are briefly and haltingly impinge on Alica. A movie director from Italy. Music from the Rolling Stones. Foods from beyond the Iron Curtain. These small details, these dollops of a world that might be, show the contrast of what the world is, and what it might be, for Alica, and the other denizens of Prague.

As a result, the novel quite effectively captures not just the place of Prague but the moment of the Prague Spring, its run up and its brief flowering. It is the fragilest of flowers, and it did not last, but we can see, through Alica’s story and her interactions, how that brief, beautiful flowering could and did happen. We see the dark and dank soil of the greyness and relentless nature of authoritarian Soviet Czechoslovakia, and then we see that grasping for the light, a grasping and a search for a different way of living. The writing of the novel is immersive, evocative, and a unique and strong voice. Alica makes for an engaging young protagonist as she tries to navigate her family, a potential romance, work colleagues and rivals. Also, Alica finds that benign a woman in a patriarchal authoritarian workforce is often a very dark place indeed to inhabit. The author does not soft pedal what is like for Alica in her job in a Government ministry as a young woman, and some incidents in the book can be uncomfortable to read.

The magical realism elements of the book enter slowly, a steady drip of the fantastic (or fantastika, in the Gary K. Wolfe sense of the word). This is a book I feel that fits his idea of “evaporating genres”, as the novel effortlessly uses its historical fiction chassis to inject the magical realism, but not really to the levels you might expect in an urban fantasy novel. It’s not that the magic isn’t quite real, but it can be quite subtle.

The magical realism relies on the aforementioned unicorn tapestry, which does turn out to have magical power, and Alica’s relationship (such as it is) with it, and with its power. Again, aside from Alica’s brief immersions into the “world” of the tapestry, the magic that we see her eventually be able to wield, through the tapestry, is quite light. But it is the symbolism and the use of the tapestry as metaphor and as a framework for understanding what is happening in the Prague Spring is where the novel shines. If you consider the story told in the Unicorn Tapestries, one can see analogues and parallels between the elements we see in the tapestry and the real world, and Alica is caught, as it were, in between these two worlds. She doesn’t understand or parse what the tapestry is telling her, but the metaphors and literary use of the tapestry is a commentary and a frame for readers to parse what is happening in Alica’s real life. And, inevitably, that commentary has things to say with the burgeoning Prague Spring, too.

As a reader who prefers more fantasy elements than not in a novel, sometimes this novel was a little too mimetic for my general taste--but the historical richness and the attention to detail and the immersion of place helped allay my concerns. The Prague Spring has, in my personal experience, been not much more than a phrase, and some dimly remembered and briefly covered events in High school and college history courses. My knowledge in general of life behind the Iron Curtain has been similarly just some bits I’ve picked up, as well as anecdotes from some friends and acquaintances who had dared to go there.

So, that aforementioned historical fictional detail really did, for me, make up for the sometimes very light touch on the fantasy. In a way, given the time, and distance, and the world having changed so much from now to then, The Prague of 1968 really is a “different country” than anything in the experience of a vast majority of potential readers. As a result, it is a look into a something uncomfortable, sometimes dark, but also a hopeful place. In the slow run up to the actual rush of events of the Prague Spring itself, the author engages us, carefully and in measured portions, of a world that could have been, an awakening that does not fully happen in the end. But part of the point of the book, as we look in the interior life of Alica and the world of the unicorn tapestry, as well as the events of the book, is that the fight, the brief window of resisting a seemingly unstoppable empire, is a fight that is worth having even if the victory is transitory and fleeting. It is worth it to carve out those brief moments of joy, those brief moments of reprieve. It is worth it to fight, even if the odds seem daunting, and even if the victories are small and do not immediately last.

The story of the Prague Spring, as filtered through magical realism in The Witch of Prague, is a story, then, that has strong resonance in a world where authoritarian forces are on the rise and are seeking to shut down dissent and resistance. It is a novel that is ostensibly magical realism historical fiction, but like a lot of fiction, it is a novel about today and a novel FOR today.

The Witch of Prague is currently being funded on Kickstarter.

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Highlights:

• Magical realism novel with a light touch on the magic
• Strong historical fictional detail of Prague in a propitious time
• Strong use of symbolism and tie into its themes and ideas

Reference: J. M. Sidorova, The Witch of Prague, [Homeward Books, 2025 Kickstarter, 2026 General Release]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Film Review: Sinners

A powerful example of layered storytelling that blends horror, history, and magical realism with meaningful social commentary.
 

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a uniquely crafted exploration of culture, connection, and spirituality contrasted against a relentless tide of oppression, manipulation, and cruelty. Using innovative film techniques, Sinners lures us in with an unsettlingly quaint setting and a group of memorable characters who create an allegory for the larger Black experience. The theatrical trailer for Sinners gives us a general overview of a pair of confident Black gunslingers in 1930’s Mississippi who build a juke joint and end up fighting blood-thirsty vampires. But that isn’t all the movie is about. Sinners is an example of layered storytelling which will mean different things to different people. Every scene, word, and reference is heavy with implications and unspoken undertones. The visuals are gorgeous but quietly haunting and the result is an emotional journey that leaves you wanting to rewatch it to discover all the layers of meaning. 

[MILD SPOILERS]

In 1932 Mississippi, Sammie (Miles Caton) is a likeable young Black musician, nicknamed “Preacher Boy” because his protective father Jedidiah (Saul Williams) is the pastor of the town’s very small Black church. Sammie and his father review the scriptures (which Sammie knows perfectly) for the next day’s church service but Sammie is anxious go into town with his older cousins, Elijah and Elias, nicknamed Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan in a dual role). Smoke and Stack are back in town after an adventurous stay in Chicago. Sammie is starstruck about their time in Chicago versus their country town, but Smoke confirms that Chicago is just as racist and dangerous as Mississippi, and the twins would rather deal with the devil they know in their hometown. Smoke and Stack decide to build a juke joint on the edge of town so the Black residents can have a place to enjoy themselves in peace. They buy a slaughterhouse from a smooth-talking racist but are determined to open the place that same night. In a cleverly filmed sequence of scenes, the twins encounter and gather various characters needed to help open the place on short notice. In the process, we learn the backstory of each character, including old musician, Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) who is hesitant to join them because he thinks a Black business won’t survive. In a hypnotic scene, Slim tells a horrific tale of exploitation and cruelty while sounds from his memories float around him. We also meet smart-mouthed Cornbread (Omar Miller), who works as a field laborer. Two of the stores in town are run by Grace Chow (Li Jun Li) and her husband Bo (Yao), so Smoke hires them to provide supplies for the new place. Stack had gifted Sammie a guitar, and Stack and Delta Slim are both amazed when they hear the stunning way Sammie plays and sings. They also encounter another singer Perline (Jayme Lawson), with whom Sammie is infatuated although she is married. Stack runs into his demanding ex-girlfriend, Mary (Hailee Steinfield) who is white but has some Black ancestry and feels close to the town’s Black community. Meanwhile, Smoke asks his estranged wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) to help with the cooking at the new place. Annie understands the supernatural and uses her knowledge to create protection for the twins and she and Smoke revisit their grief over the loss of their baby daughter. But things take a turn when an ancient Irish vampire, Remmick (Jack O’Connell), arrives, fleeing a trio of sharp-eyed Choctaw vampire hunters. Remmick senses the magical power of Sammie’s talent and targets Smoke and Stack’s place. As the evening becomes more dangerous we see how each of the main characters responds to the arrival of a new kind of oppression.

Michael B. Jordan is intriguing in his dual roles as Smoke and Stack, and the entire cast delivers compelling performances. Sinners is not a perfect story and, at times, characters make confusing choices that seem inconsistent with who they are. But it is a powerful example of unique filmmaking that blends horror, history, and magical realism with meaningful social commentary. There are so many thematic elements and symbolic components that viewers may need to see the film several times to catch everything. From a blues jam across the centuries to reciting the Lord’s Prayer while fending off a vampire attack, the film literally gives you a little bit of everything. A few themes particularly stood out. 

Family Relationships

Although the brothers have similar mannerisms, Smoke is more pragmatic and grounded. He is concerned about achieving success through money and power; he is closely acquainted with grief through the loss of his daughter; and he understands true sacrificial love through his connection to Annie. Stack is more lighthearted, reckless, and more compassionate to those who can’t pay the full price. Despite their differences, Smoke and Stack are intensely loyal to each other and they are both protective of Sammie. In a brief but crucial scene, Stack talks about his violent father and asks Sammie about his relationship with Jedidiah, but Sammie confirms his father does not abuse him. We also see a playful scene between Sammie and his mother as they begin the day. Despite his giftedness, both Sammie’s father Jedidiah and his cousin Stack warn Sammie not to pursue life as a blues musician. Jedidiah warns that if you dance with evil, one day it will follow you home. Stack orders Sammie to find a respectable community to settle in and leave the dangerous living to sinners like him and Smoke. 

Economics as Power 

The field workers are paid with wooden tokens which can only be used at the general store. When some of the juke joints customers pay with the wooden tokens, there is a difficult conversation between Smoke who wants real money as payment and Stack who wants to let people have fun and Annie who wants to show compassion for the plight of the exploited Black workers. Despite Stack and Annie’s desire for flexibility, Smoke knows the lack of money is unsustainable and he understands that the larger problem is the manipulative payment which is designed to indenture Black workers and hurt Black businesses. Similarly, in an earlier scene, Smoke takes a moment to teach a young girl how to negotiate a proper salary. 

Literary Symbolism 

The film is filled with archetypal characters and symbolic places: the complementary brothers, the reliable, spiritually attune wife; the angry, selfish girlfriend, the adulterous wife, the wise mentor musician who has seen suffering, and Sammie, the gifted chosen one, who turns out to be the true center of the story. Racist salesman Hogwood (David Maldonado) and slick-talking vampire Remmick are parallel characters, artificially polite, manipulative, and lethal. The juke joint becomes a rebellious center of culture built in a slaughterhouse where the blood has been scrubbed away but the memory of death remains imbedded. In key scenes the doors of the slaughterhouse/juke joint are compared to the doors of the church. Remmick wants to take Sammie’s talent, noting that he once had his land stolen from him. Remmick uses truth mixed with lies to seduce his victims. Sinners has two post-credit scenes and begins and ends with a specific song of encouragement. The music in the film is stunning, and each performance tells its own story. The title of the film gives us a layered meaning of “sinners” as rebellious, independent, broken, cruel, conquering, fearful, and universally all of us who must live with real-life horrors that rival the symbolic horror of the murderous vampires. 

Taking Risks 

A core theme of the story is whether to be bold with your talents or whether to play it safe. That answer may seem simple, but Sinners reminds us that those who are talented become targets for aggression and exploitation. Ultimately, the message of Sinners is finding a path between the extremes of devastation or the safety of hiding. Sinners has echoes of the “Parable of the Talents” where rewards are given to those who take risks with the gifts they are given. It’s a hard lesson for those who want to pursue “goodness” by playing it safe.

Of course, there are many other important messages in the film. And there are layers of meaning that make the story more than just another vampire story. Using unusual film techniques, clever storytelling, and heavy symbolism, Sinners gives us a complex tale that will keep viewers talking about it for a long time.

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The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Highlights

• Thoughtful visuals and music
• Traditional vampire violence contrasted with unique symbolism
• Memorable, layered storytelling

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction-writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, or how to film the unfilmable

For a massively revered classic, a faithful rendering may not suffice

As nation states go, these we have here in Latin America are rather young. The Westernized portion of our history only covers a few centuries, and the much longer Native portion barely survives in mutilated fragments. Unlike the Greek or Chinese or Icelandic peoples, who long ago developed a solid sense of who they are, we're still in the middle of figuring ourselves out. It would seem pointless to attempt to write a national epic about us when "us" still has many blank spaces awaiting definition.

And yet, the multigenerational saga One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez succeeds at both transmitting and creating a portrait of the Colombian nation. Like Don Quixote, it narrates the chaos that follows men when possessed by an idea. Like the Iliad, it laments the escalating destruction that can result from an unyielding sense of honor. Like War and Peace, it traces the ways individual lives intersect with big history. Like the Divine Comedy, it creates its own cosmology and makes the reader take it as true. Like Macbeth, it dissects the forces that lure men toward excessive ambition. Like the Old Testament, it bridges the passage from mythic origins to known history. It's an ostentatious book, the kind that requires a writer to err on the side of overconfidence. Such a bet is risky, but that's the price of admission in this game: you simply can't pull off something of the monumental scope of One Hundred Years of Solitude if you have any humility left in you. You must think yourself worthy of it.

The Netflix adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, released just this month in a first batch of eight episodes out of a planned total of sixteen, faced a comparable challenge. And on the technical level, the challenge is met with the highest excellence: period-accurate costumes, meticulously researched set design, authentic 19th-century furniture, handcrafted props, true-sounding accents, and multiple full-sized versions of the entire town of Macondo. The production's stratospheric budget is noticeable in every scene: in exquisite cinematography, in pitch-perfect casting, in brutally honest war scenes, in taking every opportunity to boast Colombia's gorgeous geography. If the series can be said to commit any fault at all, it's only in its absolute reverence for the source text, precisely the kind of humility with which it couldn't have been composed in the first place.

This degree of allegiance to the source text is understandable given the impossibly high expectations placed on the project. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a sacred cow of our literary canon, so there would have been a loud backlash had the scriptwriters and directors hired by Netflix dared introduce a more personal touch into the story. So what we get is an almost word-for-word translation of the novel, to the point that a voiceover narrator is used (in fact, overused) to explain the plot to the audience.

Now, before someone accuses me of being inconsistent: I'm aware that I praised the film adaptation of Pedro Páramo for staying strictly faithful to the book. So why do I see the same choice as a defect this time? The difference is that, despite being much shorter, Pedro Páramo is a far more experimental book than One Hundred Years of Solitude. The disorienting effect of hearing so many voices at the same time already gave Pedro Páramo (the book) some of the qualities of the audiovisual medium, which made the task easier for Pedro Páramo (the movie). With One Hundred Years of Solitude there's a bigger maneuvering margin to build upon the book, but the directors don't take advantage of it. To rely heavily on a voiceover narrator isn't as jarring in Pedro Páramo (the movie) because Pedro Páramo (the book) is composed as a continuous conversation: the protagonist is being told his father's story in the voices of the dead. So it makes sense for the movie to also be composed as a conversation. One Hundred Years of Solitude uses a more traditional formula (omniscient third-person narrator who is not part of the plot). Giving the narrator such a prominent position in the adaptation feels like an intrusion, almost an admission that the directors didn't trust the images' ability to tell the story. Watching a dramatized adaptation of a book shouldn't feel like a read-along of the book.

This deferential attitude toward our canon has already been defied in literature; audiovisual media shouldn't have to recapitulate the whole progression that went from the generation of writers who prayed at the altar of García Márquez to the generation of writers who spat in the face of García Márquez to today's generation of writers who are neither for nor against García Márquez and are just focused on doing their own thing. For example, in the Anglo world, iconoclastic reinterpretations of Shakespeare are a long-established and respected tradition. García Márquez himself was no stranger to that kind of transformative creation: he wrote the screenplay of a retelling of Oedipus Rex set in the violent 1990s of rural Colombia. It shouldn't be seen as blasphemy to do a less than faithful adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, as long as the core theme is treated with respect.

And what is that core theme? The same as in every national epic: This Is What It Feels Like To Be Us. However, García Márquez wasn't merely reporting on an already existing sense of nationhood; he was codifying it. The earliest Colombian novels were meant to serve as almost ethnographic descriptions of social customs, but the generation of writers to which García Márquez belonged had a much clearer idea of that task. By reading him, we learn to be Colombian. We learn to pay attention to what is at stake in our embarrassing saga of repeated errors. Particularly in One Hundred Years of Solitude, we learn about the folly of putting abstract allegiances above universal human needs, about the dangers of forgetting basic truths, about the poisonous consequences of imposing artificial obstacles to love. Above all, we learn that the one thing you should never be afraid of is love.

One isn't required to 100% agree with the guy's ideas about love, though. His oeuvre was uniformly influenced by outdated and sometimes very harmful views on gender dynamics. In his interviews he blamed women for the problems of sexism. The last book he published before his death is a romanticized account of child prostitution. When approaching his writings, one must keep in mind both his exceptional talents and his abhorrent opinions. Even One Hundred Years of Solitude, the book that got him the Nobel Prize, is replete with instances of unchallenged, as in authorially endorsed, sexual misconduct that can't be easily removed in an adaptation without unraveling the rest of the plot.

So what can be salvaged from One Hundred Years of Solitude? What justifies its continued place of honor in world literature and the undeniably beautiful adaptation Netflix threw bucketfuls of money at? I've already mentioned how it conveys the general feeling of what it's like to be Colombian. Let me give a more concrete example: a few years ago, when I reviewed Encanto, I briefly considered mentioning a factoid that existed in parallel with the announcement of the movie but was completely unrelated. What happened was that, on the same day that the first trailer for Encanto was released, it was reported in the news that the murderers of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse were Colombian ex-army mercenaries. I didn't include that bit of news in the review because it was already long enough, but it's relevant here: Encanto was offering me a rare occasion to feel good about my country, but it was instantly ruined by the revelation about the murderers. That whiplash of incompatible emotions, that corrosive question in my head (Why did I bother getting excited?), that millionth refusal by history to let us feel proud of anything, that abrupt cold shower of pointlessness—that is what it feels like, every day, to be Colombian. And the biggest artistic merit of One Hundred Years of Solitude lies in capturing that infernally complicated feeling and exploring how we live with it and through it, and how we stubbornly keep looking for a way to someday live past it.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: Pedro Páramo

Netflix adapts one of the most acclaimed classics of Latin American literature

Latin American history has been stained with blood since the time of colonization. The respective canons of our national literary traditions have variously grappled with the sense of disorientation of having to figure out how to build new nations after finally winning our independence; and the ever-present shadow of violence that haunted those first attempts (and that still haunts us in many ways) left a clear mark on our writers. But the special blend of Indigenous and Catholic beliefs that occurred in Mexico created a unique cultural relationship with death.

One of the manifestations of the role of death in Mexican consciousness is Juan Rulfo's 1955 novel Pedro Páramo, one of the biggest masterpieces of the Spanish language. Told in a minutely fragmented, extremely nonlinear style, it anticipated many of the technical innovations of what would eventually be called magical realism. It follows multiple first-person accounts in the remote town of Comala, where the main narrator travels to look for Pedro Páramo, his father. Pedro Páramo embodies the archetype of the Mexican macho: a selfish, violent authoritarian who exploits men and consumes women. His inner demons gradually turn him into a bitter loner, feared and hated by everyone. By the time the narrator arrives looking for him, Comala is an abandoned waste, its inhabitants long gone. But the deep pain that lived there still echoes in the walls and in the streets. Pedro left behind many tormented, restless spirits, from whose voices we piece together his story.

Pedro is a rich landowner at a time when the Mexican Revolution is trying to put an end to the outrageous inequality that has always been the scourge of our countries. Through shameless fraud, manipulation and murder, he gradually becomes the uncontested authority in the town, but all his money and his power are useless against the capricious hand of death that continuously denies him any morsel of happiness. One character defines him as "living rancor," and that sentiment takes hold of him until nothing else remains.

Of many classics of literature it has been said that they can't be adapted to cinema. Curiously, the numerous jumps in the narration of Pedro Páramo, from past to present and from one narrator to another, feel ready-made for the screen. The Netflix adaptation follows almost exactly the sequence in which the text is written, and that structure, full of abrupt breaks, which in book form demands constant attention and effort from the reader, lends itself to the audiovisual medium with surprising ease. (Rulfo also wrote movie scripts, so maybe he had a sense of the possibilities of scene cuts when writing his novel.)

Precisely because the movie didn't need to add more technical embellishments to a text that was itself quite complex, some Anglo reviewers have reported feeling left unimpressed by it, describing it as too long and not experimental enough for its source material. My suspicion is that they watched the movie in its lackluster English dub instead of the powerful dialogues of the original Spanish, most of them taken verbatim from the novel. I'm not surprised to find that, where English media have assigned this movie to a Hispanic reviewer, its reception has been more favorable. The languid, understated tone is part of the point. The trip to Comala is a descent into hell, and when these ghosts speak, they have much to lament. You can get bored with Pedro Páramo if you're not intimately familiar with the way the real and the unreal are experienced by Latin Americans. The generational shock of colonization and the repeated shocks of subsequent civil wars built a collective mindset where no assumptions are guaranteed, where things can crumble down at any moment and the most delicate beauty coexists with utter terror. You don't need fancy CGI to tell our stories. Our mundane, common lives are already full of the impossible.

Director Rodrigo Prieto masterfully communicates the intensity of the events in Pedro Páramo with vivid colors and stark chiaroscuros. The result is a slow-paced account of a life of frustrated desires painted with heightened accents. Nothing much seems to happen while a tempest of emotions roars under the surface. That's the tension in the heart of a Mexican macho, who is expected to show at all times a hard face that nothing can move, even as his unacknowledged feelings eat him alive. Here's where we can notice the ace up the sleeve of this movie: Gustavo Santaolalla's monumental soundtrack, at the same time unobtrusive and ominous, matching the all-consuming resentment and fury that hide in the ordinary flow of everyday moments.

This production lives up to the thorny responsibility of adapting a national epic. Many classics of Latin American literature took upon themselves the task of expressing an entire country in a book. To get a feel for the soul of Argentina, you read Martín Fierro. To get a feel for the soul of Colombia, you read One Hundred Years of Solitude. That's the position that Pedro Páramo occupies for Mexico. And the many souls trapped between the empty houses of Comala tell of a land mercilessly punished by men's ambitions, a land that resonates with the clamor of a very old pain that still hasn't found peace, a land where the melancholy of memories finds some comfort each time someone listens to them.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Review: Fantasmas

A loud, cheerful satire of the roles the world demands we play

From the same mind that produced the horror/comedy show Los Espookys and the heartfelt immigration dramedy film Problemista, the new HBO Max series Fantasmas dials the surrealism up to eleven and makes the screen explode in possibilities.

Fantasmas is set in a world where colorless crayons are a hit idea, where an expressionless robot can become a talented actor, where a performance artist stays in character 24/7, where the letters of the alphabet have distinct personalities, where you can send your dreams to a lab for interpretation, where all men of a certain age secretly share a bottle collection hobby, where doctor appointments last exactly 90 seconds, where Santa Claus is sued for exploiting his workers, where customer service agents are subject to karmic justice, where the TikTok algorithm is a jealous goddess with no love for her faithful, where mind uploading is a viable treatment for a skin condition, where a fashion designer specializes in listening to toilets and dressing them, where gay hamsters have their own dance club, where water speaks, where gossipy mermaids hate Halloween, where an evangelist Smurf made of ceramic is a social media manager, where all online influencers live in the same house, where a portrait of a corgi hosts a trapped demon, where a goldfish runs a private detective business, where a reality TV producer keeps his mother's living brain in a jar, and where being hit by lightning gives you special perceptive powers. Somehow, all this fits in six half-hour episodes.

None of this is treated as strange or unusual. This is the hallmark of magical realism: the noteworthy thing about the social media manager is not that she's a ceramic Smurf, but that she's mediocre at her job and her fees are outrageous. The fact that a demon is trapped in a portrait isn't as interesting as his lack of success on Grindr. We're not expected to focus on the impossibility of a goldfish detective, but on the fact that she's mean to her assistant. This constant realignment of perspective is a requisite for the message contained in Fantasmas. In this world, false things are transparently portrayed as false, even though they continue to have their effects. The absurdity of bureaucracy is highlighted by the way IDs are called: "proof of existence." You can be standing right in front of a potential employer, landlord or doctor, and still they'll ask for your proof of existence.

The set design for the show goes out of its way to draw attention to the artificiality of institutions: the interior of a corporate office, an apartment, a hospital, a school, a courtroom, a restaurant, a jewellery shop will be shown from a wide angle so you can see the false walls that delimit the set. On the other hand, exterior shots use an obviously painted background to represent the streets of New York, another sign of artificiality. The fictitious spaces where the story happens don't bother hiding that they're fiction. Accordingly, this version of New York is populated by image-obsessed aspiring celebrities, Instagram junkies jumping through the hoops of brand promotion, fake friendships, performative social advocacy, commodified identities, staged drama, plastic surgeries, and the occasional murder. It's a voracious place where survival requires compromising more and more parts of your true self.

Which leads us to the hidden heart of the show: a teenage student who resorts to bullying to hide his insecurities about masculinity. By reinforcing in himself the expected norms of male behavior, he's put himself on the road to becoming another bearer of falsehoods. The narrow mental trap he's living in doesn't let him notice the vigorously queernorm milieu that is the adult world. This character has very few scenes in only half of the episodes, but his arc is the whole point of the story.

It takes a while to notice this, because the narration in Fantasmas has an extremely unconventional structure. The random appearance of a secondary character will often prompt a prolonged digression about their personal life and worries and quirks. The trick is that these digressions are so interesting that the viewer never notices that the episode's pacing has been broken. Many of these disparate subplots converge in the season finale, in a manner that may land a bit too conveniently, but the sweet earnestness makes up for it. In the middle of such fierce competition for likes and gigs and sponsorship deals and other substitutes for human validation, the world of Fantasmas still has spaces where true self-expression can flourish.

There's a meaningful blend of magical realism with queernorm in Fantasmas. Latin audiences will recognize the deadpan casualness with which robots, ceramic Smurfs, talking hamsters and incorporeal people coexist with the rest of New Yorkers. Magical realism is all about close familiarity with the fantastic in everyday life. But in addition to it, Fantasmas takes this acceptance of difference and paints it queer: the fact that people of all body types interact without creating arbitrary hierarchies means that there's no single mandatory way to exist. Fantasmas proposes a world where no one raises an eyebrow because your cab driver dresses more fabulously than anyone else in the city, where the undocumented worker delivering your dinner also happens to be the world's most talented tailor, and most importantly, where you shouldn't have to prove to others again and again that you exist.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Review: The Book of Clarence

A unique, irreverent, genre-mixing dark comedy wrapped around deep messages on race and class

The theatrical trailer for The Book of Clarence left me feeling confused and a little uneasy about seeing the film. Was it an alternate history, a comedy, a parody, a tragic epic drama? Was it an allegorical Black social commentary, fantasy/sci-fi, religious, anti-religious? After seeing the film, the answer to all of these questions is: yes. There was so much going on in this story. The quirky presentation style is so unique that it’s hard to know who the target audience is. But sometimes weird is good.

The story is set during the last year of the life of Jesus. Yes, the Jesus. Jesus is a popular local celebrity in the area (due to his legendary miracles) but initially he remains mostly offscreen and is barricaded by an entourage of disciples. Clarence is a local hustler, but with a good heart. He gambles, sells drugs, drag-races chariots, and takes care of his ailing/aging mother. When his ill-gotten debts catch up to him and the local mobster threatens to kill him, Clarence hatches a scheme to make money by taking advantage of Jesus’s popularity as the Messiah. At first he tries to join the disciples but is immediately rejected by them, including his twin brother Thomas (yes, the famous doubting Thomas) so Clarence is prevented from any access to Jesus. Then he gets a better idea. He decides to con people into believing he is a miracle worker to get money.  Clarence enlists his best friend Elijah and recently freed fighter Barabbas to help with the scheme. But things take a turn when the occupying Roman military catches up with Clarence leading to an unexpected encounter with the real Jesus. The additional twist in this film is that, other than the occupying Romans, every character is Black.

The film is initially a parody of classic Bible epics such as Ben Hur or The Ten Commandments, using ironically epic background music, dramatic chariot races, and even 1960s-style gold-framed title pages in between the major acts of the story. On the other hand, it is also fantastical. The drugs Clarence smokes with his friends cause them to temporarily float in the air with their bodies turning and spinning, gravity-free. When Clarence gets an idea, it materializes as an actual light above his head. The fantastical special effects are a surreal juxtaposition against the retro epic vibe.

At first, the feel of the film is epic and historical but also slightly comical/absurd. However, the film eventually dives into the true nature of belief, loyalty, and morality. Although the people in his community have a range of spiritual beliefs, particularly as it relates to the Messiah, Clarence seems to be the only one who doesn’t believe in any form of God or spirituality. However, he is willing to use the existing belief systems to achieve his goals by being a con artist and pretending to be an alternate Messiah. In a dual role, LaKeith Stanfield plays both Clarence and Clarence’s twin brother, Thomas the apostle, who has abandoned everything, including their ailing mother, to follow Jesus. Thomas despises Clarence’s petty criminal behavior, even as Clarence has devoted himself to caring for their mother. Thus we have the set-up of religious piety versus cynical pragmatism that permeates the film.

The best character in the film is Clarence’s best friend/sidekick Elijah. Elijah is open-minded about his beliefs, but also comfortable running scams and being loyal to Clarence and their bestie, chariot racer Mary Magdalene. In a pivotal scene, Mary Magdalene has been accused of adultery and chained to a wall to be brutally stoned to death. Elijah intervenes to protect her, risking his own death, but he cannot free her from the chain. Clarence is nowhere around and death seems imminent for Mary and Elijah until the real-deal Messiah shows up in a quietly jaw-dropping, Marvel-worthy scene.

The set design and costumes of the film are outstanding, making you feel transported to the ancient Jerusalem setting that has been reimagined for the story. The film also benefits from a strong cast reinterpreting classic characters, including Mary, the Mother of Jesus (hilariously played by Alfre Woodard), John the Baptist (David Oyelowo), and an irritable Pontius Pilate (James McAvoy). We also get quirky new characters played by Babs Olusanmokun from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Caleb McLaughlin from Stranger Things, and an almost unrecognizable Benedict Cumberbatch who takes the film to new irreverence as an accidentally mistaken version of Jesus.

All these strange, quirky characters revolve around Clarence as he tries to make a better life for himself and prove himself worthy of his ill-fated love interest Varinia (Anna Diop). LaKeith Stanfield leans into the cynical, skeptical, onscreen personality he has used effectively in prior fantastical films like Sorry to Bother You, Haunted Mansion, and even Get Out. Despite his cynicism, Clarence has enough cliched character growth to make some positive societal choices for others, even as he still scams those around him. Clarence continues to pursue his fake Messiah miracles with growing success until he finds out the true cost of the path he has chosen. Then the film takes a serious and dramatic turn into a violent exploration of racism and classism. We think we know what is going to happen, but the final crucifixion scenes subvert both traditional narratives and cynical new viewer expectations.

The Book of Clarence throws many important social justice themes and philosophical questions at viewers who may ultimately feel overwhelmed and disoriented by the irreverent and quirky delivery style. The trope of the lovable rascal with the heart of gold is quickly subverted into an ultimate theme of “mess around and find out.” It’s been a long time since a film completely bewildered me in such a good way. This movie is not for everyone. But, if you have an appetite for quirkiness and a tolerance for explorations of hard truths wrapped in an allegory, The Book of Clarence will give you a great deal to think about.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Highlights:

• Weird and provocative. Not for everyone.
• Quirky subversive messaging.
• Strong performances by the lead actors.

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Microreview: 'The Crane Husband' by Kelly Barnhill

Giant birds are weird and unnerving. So is abuse.

I’ll admit I’m at something of a loss of words to describe Kelly Barnhill’s The Crane Husband. It’s a slim volume, solidly a novella, which I read in a single night having found it at a local library (but I find a lot of books like that). It has a science-fictional patina over it, set in a pastoral, American-Gothic-esque town somewhere in the Midwest, surrounded by drone-fertilized fields and owned by corporations that won’t let anyone walk in (although the local teenagers party there anyway). That alone would be an interesting premise, the makings of a heartland version of Anne Charnock’s Bridge 108.

But Barnhill has more up her sleeve than just mere near-futures. The basic premise is this: there’s an unhappy family of three living in a house. There’s the mother, who is single; the teenage daughter, the narrator; and the younger son. The mother has a series of trysts with local men that never amount to anything, until now. Her new paramour takes up a lot of her time, clearly the most exciting thing to happen in years, leading her to neglect her children.

Also, he's a six-foot-tall crane (the bird, not the construction vehicle).

The admittedly amateur literary critic in me is tempted to brand The Crane Husband as magical realism (its approach to the supernatural reminded me of Shaun Prescott’s The Town). What is so striking, and so unnerving, about this book is how the fact that the mother’s new beau is a giant walking bird is never thought of amiss. It’s just… normal. It feels like this is a world where humans hook up with sparrows and elope with ravens, but this crane is the only bird, indeed the only animal, that shows up in a human-like context. Combining this with the subtle but clear demonstration that this is the near future, The Crane Husband is suffused with a dreamlike atmosphere, a feeling of being unmoored from reality that reminds me of perhaps Jorge Luis Borges, and as hard as it is to describe, it is very compelling.

This book can be challenging to read, not because of any body horror, but through the quotidian horror of dysfunctional families. As Tolstoy said, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and this family’s problems only begin with the crane. The choice of narrator really shines here; a teenage protagonist is old enough to understand what is happening, and has a good inkling of why it is happening, but is vulnerable enough for the pain of it all to strangle her with no easy exit. It is a coming-of-age-story, albeit a twisted one, a way I wish no child would ever have to come of age (but far too many do). It is a story of parental neglect, pure and simple, and it will move you, enrage you, and force you to cry in equal measure.

This is yet another narrator who reminds me of /r/raisedbynarcissists, and of abused people I have known; I give my kudos to Barnhill for getting the psychology of this so right. Parental abuse is a deeply isolating experience, and our narrator is isolated in more ways than one. She finds her classmates in school to be practically an alien species, and a high school party to be a deeply foreign experience. I get it; I was like that once, and this book felt very real to me because of that. Abuse is weird, and it is total. It changes everything about a victim’s life, and destroys their ability to relate to others. It’s not uncommon for survivors to simply not be believed as their experiences are so out of the norm for most people. That truth, I think, is the core of The Crane Husband: that life would be easier for survivors if every abuser had a coat of feathers. They’d be easier to avoid, for one.

--

The Math

Highlights: The really unsettling atmosphere.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Reference: Barnhill, Kelly. The Crane Husband [Tor, 2023].

Microreview: This All Come Back Now edited by Mykaela Saunders

Mykaela Saunders lovingly curates a mixtape of Australian First Nations speculative fiction in this ground-breaking anthology.

Australia's speculative fiction scene has long been very white. Indigenous speculative fiction has been particularly hard to find... until now. Editor Mykaela Saunders has brought together what may be Australia's first anthology of First Nations speculative fiction. In doing so, she follows in the tradition of such anthologies as So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial science fiction and fantasy edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan, and Walking the Clouds: An anthology of Indigenous science fiction edited by Grace L. Dillon.

This is a book worth reading simply for the introduction, or the Overture as it is called. Saunders frames the anthology as a mix tape, which I found to be a delightful concept. However, the Overture itself works as a sort of literature review, making it a good place for finding other resources (Australian and otherwise). It perhaps also gestures to the editor's academic background.

Saunders addresses the reasons for the dearth of Indigenous speculative fiction. To begin with, the term speculative fiction is a problematic one in relation to Indigenous writing. This broad category is largely defined as covering things that aren't considered real by Western cultures. However, some tropes popularly considered as speculative fiction are reality in an Indigenous worldview, such as the existence of ghosts, or time travel in a culture that experiences all time simultaneously.

Another reason for the difficulty in finding Indigenous speculative fiction is simply that Australian SFF publishers won't take it on... though I note that Australian SFF publishers have been in decline for a number of years, so any Australian author looking to be published on home turf is facing slim chances to begin with. Where Australian SFF publishers have turned Indigenous authors away, the Australian literary scene have been more welcoming. One does not need to look further than the reception of this anthology to see that playing out; most Australian literary review outlets have devoted space to discussing this book, while there have been crickets from speculative fiction outlets in Australia and beyond.

Awards, too, have tended to favour non-Indigenous writers of Indigenous stories, though there are signs this is starting to shift in the speculative fiction scene. Since the publication of this anthology, Lisa Fuller won two Aurealis Awards (Australia's premier juried speculative fiction award) for her story "Don't Look!". On the international SFF scene, Darcie Little Badger is also becoming a familiar face on the Hugo shortlists.

And again, while the SFF awards scene has not exactly been welcoming, it's quite a different case with literary awards. The contributors to this anthology are a well-decorated bunch, who seem to have won just about every literary award Australia has and a few more besides. They're also a multi-talented mob, with many being known for other forms of writing or art, such as poetry, journalism, music and visual art. Generally speaking, they are not writers at the beginning of their careers. Rather, This All Come Back Now is an anthology that has been carefully curated to show their best, with most of the stories being reprints.

But show to whom? The Overture states that this is an anthology written by and for First Nations people, and certainly the editor didn't make it easy to access by starting with "Muyum, A Transgression" by poet Evelyn Araluen. The story is a surreal trip through time and space, but beautifully evocative. Although I didn't entirely understand what was going on, I enjoyed it enough that I'll be trying Araluen's recent poetry collection Dropbear, once it makes its way through the long queue at the library.

After this evocative but challenging start, the stories settle into something a bit more accessible for a white (or at least Australian) audience. There's a wide variety of stories on offer.

"Closing Time" by Samuel Wagan Watson is a Covid-era story that examines what this time of isolation means to a character who is already feeling isolated.

The anthology also contains a story by Wagan Watson's father, Sam Watson Snr. The Kadaitcha Sung was the first Aboriginal speculative fiction novel, published in 1990, and the anthology has included an extract of this seminal work.

Kalem Murray and Lisa Fuller write horror stories about teaching the new generation the importance of respecting traditions around how and where to travel; there are some places one should never tread.

Alison Whittaker looks at transhumanism from an Indigenous perspective, particularly how it might be used as another form of colonisation or segregation. This sits interestingly with Protocols of Transference by Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker, which looks at the combination of Indigenous worldview and technology through the protagonist’s relationship with the robot they’re building.

Climate concern shows up in more than a few of the stories, including Muyum, A Transgression; Lake Mindi by Krystal Hurst (whose Big Fire is something any Australian and many Americans will find all too easy to picture); Nimeybirra by Laniyuk (which I loved for the solidarity envisioned with the Maori of Aotearoa); Water by Ellen van Neerven; An Invitation by Timmah Ball.

I particularly enjoyed Snake of Light by Loki Liddle. It was intense and a bit violent (as many vigilante stories are), but the surreal aspects were managed well and there was a queer edge I enjoyed.

The extract from Alexis Wright's The Swan Book showed her superb command of language.

As is usual with anthologies, there were a few stories that didn't really do much for me, but none I actively disliked. It doesn't always make for comfortable reading, but nor should it. Rather, it should be appreciated as a ground-breaking work that has been sadly overdue. May it open the gateway for more.

The Math

Baseline assessment: 7/10

Bonuses:  +2 for collecting together a representative sample of Indigenous speculative fiction, +1 for an excellent introduction placing the anthology in context.

Penalties: -1 for the challenging start to the collection.

Nerd co-efficient: 9/10

POSTED BY: Elizabeth Fitzgerald, a writer, binge reader, tabletop gamer & tea addict. @elizabeth_fitz

References

Saunders, Mykaela. This All Come Back Now [University of Queensland Press, 2022]

Araluen, Evelyn. Dropbear [University of Queensland Press, 2021]

Dillon, Grace L. Walking the Clouds: An anthology of Indigenous science fiction [University of Arizona Press, 2012]

Fuller, Lisa. “Don’t Look!”, Hometown Haunts: #LoveOzYA Horror Tales, [Wakefield Press, 2021]

Hopkinson, Nalo, and Mehan, Uppinder. So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial science fiction and fantasy [Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004]

Watson, Sam. The Kadaitcha Sung [Penguin, 1990]

Wright, Alexis. The Swan Book [Giramondo, 2013]

Microreview [Book]: Lakelore by Anna-Marie McLemore

A lyrical, magical realist story about accepting the difficult parts and learning to love yourself.

Lakelore by Anna-Marie McLemore focuses on what’s above and below not only the surface of the titular lake, but also the two point-of-view characters, Bastián and Lore. In this magical-realist, young adult novel, Bastián, Lore, and the lake all have trouble fitting into society’s designated roles. Bastián and Lore are both neurodivergent, trans, and Latinx, so they are often made uncomfortable by those around them and struggle with what to do with these feelings. When they meet, they find kindred spirits in each other and work to understand the other’s unique way of experiencing the, often magical, world. Bastián and Lore find solace in each other, even though that means developing a certain level of trust they don’t share with many. Over the course of the novel, their attraction turns to love in a slow, touching way that reminded me of Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. But their friendship and burgeoning love is threatened by their secrets and the pain stored beneath the lake.

As suggested by the focus on the world under the lake, much of the novel centers the interiority of the characters, demonstrating how Bastián and Lore understand themselves and their places in the world. While not a coming out story—both characters are very established in their trans identities—Bastián and Lore are figuring out when their bodies feel true, such as Bastián taking testosterone and Lore fluidly changing whether they present more masculine or feminine. While these moments are sometimes painful, such as remembering when they’ve been misgendered or scenes of bullying that could be triggering for some readers, there’s also a lot of joy in being accepted, particularly between Bastián and Lore, such as a delightful passage where they talk about making a “gender forecast” for each other. Bastián describes the day’s gender as “a perfectly folded T-shirt,” which feels absolutely accurate for them that day. As Lore says, “Sometimes you can’t separate the hard things from the good things” (213).

Similarly, McLemore doesn’t shy away from describing Bastián’s life with ADHD and Lore’s dyslexia impacting their schooling. According to the author’s note at the back of the book, this is an own voices story as the author is writing from their lived experience being neurodivergent (with both ADHD and dyslexia), nonbinary, and Mexican American. In the novel, the ADHD and dyslexia feel integral to how the characters experience the world rather than simply being tropes or tags. Through the novel’s alternating POV structure, McLemore shows how Bastián and Lore each adapt, spending time describing how each character feels inside their head. While developing their friendship, Bastián and Lore describe how their brains work to each other, which creates a greater depth of understanding, regardless of whether the reader experiences ADHD or dyslexia or not. 

A highlight of this book is certainly the lyrical prose. While the description can be skimpy at times, McLemore focuses their writing prowess on the lake and its magical moments. For instance, one of my favorite moments occurs after Bastián gives Lore a glitter jar. The lake’s underworld spills its shores and imitates the colorful curves created by the glitter, as McLemore writes: “High above us, [the bubbles] break like they’re reaching the surface, the glitter spreading out and sticking there in constellations of cotton-candy pink and deep green, pale blue and copper” (177). Such lyrical passages provide a balance to the passages of interiority. 

While the novel accomplishes the goal of capturing the characters’ successes and struggles, the structure of the novel made it harder to sink into a single character. Alternating between Bastián and Lore as point-of-view characters often feels unnecessary because the characters are together and experiencing the same things. Where the POV switching is effective is when they are having separate experiences that speak to their own identities, pasts, or passions. For instance, the scenes where Lore meets with an education specialist about their dyslexia or the scenes where Bastián is creating alebrijes (sculptures of mythical beasts made from papier mâché). In contrast, switching POV when Bastián and Lore are having similar experiences with the lake or are in the same location feels jumpy and scattered. Additionally, the chapters are usually the length of a single scene, and sometimes that scene is less than a page. Especially in the beginning of the novel, I struggled to engage with both characters because of the constant switching after only a page or two, even when the characters would be together in the next scene, thus making me question why we’d switched POV to begin with. 

The short chapters and switching POV between the characters could help keep a young reader hooked in what is, in many ways, a slow, character-driven story. Rather, I found the structure works against this issue because it doesn’t allow the characters to really develop until much later in the book. Because this novel is more character-driven than plot-driven (what’s happening with the lake is not so much dangerous as spooky and beautiful), hooking the reader with these thoughtful, brave narrators is necessary.

All that being said, a voracious young reader would probably blow right past that opening, and for a young person who identifies with Bastián and Lore, the passages that detail their experiences with adapting to a system that their brains work against, their identities, their passions for art, could help a reader feel seen an understood, which is what the best young adult literature accomplishes.  

_________

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10 

Bonuses: +2 for lyrical prose that can describe an alebrijes-filled lake and living with ADHD and dyslexia.

Penalties: -1 for a novel structure that felt jumpy and undermined getting to know the characters

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10: an enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws

Reference:  Anna-Marie McLemore, Lakelore [Feiwel and Friends, 2022]

Posted by: Phoebe Wagner is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and ecology. She tweets as @pheebs_w.

Microreview: One Arm Shorter than the Other

This book starts as a simple story collection, but before you notice, it grows into a mind-blowing trip across time

Gigi Ganguly's debut novella, One Arm Shorter than the Other, is a marvelous surprise. For half of its length, it holds its cards close to its chest, before sweeping you off your feet with a royal flush of high concepts and intricate plotting.

The first half is composed of a series of sweet vignettes around a kindly repairman who does wonders from his unassuming little shop in Delhi's old district. These three stories start simple enough, but gradually turn more and more surreal. In Some Things (Like Upholstery) Remain Unchanged, a widower bonds with his grandchildren by having his old film projector transformed into a window to the past. In Be Careful with the TV Settings, an embittered actor with a fading career discovers that his newly fixed TV can place him in any story he chooses... so he must take care not to choose wrong. In Turn Up the Radio (Only) When It Rains, a lonely old woman receives a radio as a gift, and with it, a new friend, and a new future.

Film, television, radio: these are stories about media and interactivity, about the act of watching and the magic of human connection. Little clues reveal that these stories share the same continuity, and if the book stopped at them, this would be in itself a valuable collection.

But then comes the second half of the book, and the panorama expands to cosmic proportions. We jump to the 71st century, a time when cities have layers upon layers, but people can fold their houses into flat rectangles and carry them around. We meet Samay, the architect behind this revolution in portability, and it turns out he's in need of repair services. Fortunately, his civilization has mastered time travel, so he pays a visit to old Delhi... and meets our trusty old repairman.

By the way, Samay is Hindi for time. I can't spoil anything more. I can't in the sense that I'm not capable, because the various moving parts in this meticulous clockwork of a plot exceed my ability to reduce them to any description, and I can't in the sense that it wouldn't be right, because the delight of this story lies in experiencing its mysteries firsthand.

What I can say is that this is one of the most elegant time loop puzzles I've ever read, as well as a thought-provoking allegory about the passing of time over physical space, over the human body, and over our material possessions.

I already spoke about the role of media in the early sections of the book. We all know there's something of time travel in our access to recorded content. But this book further suggests that there's something of time travel in the act of repairing. To repair is to take the old and make it feel not old, to try to bestow a semblance of newness onto it. To repair is to try to work against time. But rebuilding is also a form of repairing, in the sense that working along with time and building over what has crumbled down can make the old fully new again. This is not only a book where old objects can acquire new forms, but also where an old city can remake itself by pushing a button, and where old people can migrate into new bodies.

You can experience that contradiction in the real Delhi, a cosmopolitan megalopolis where the future coexists with antiquity, where the many cities this city has been are overwritten on each other in that special way that landscape historians call urban palimpsest. In Delhi, an ordinary walk across neighborhoods is indeed time travel.

So Delhi's relationship with time is central to One Arm Shorter than the Other (a title that not only describes our protagonist, but is also a sneak reference to clocks). The text namedrops, for example, Jantar Mantar, one of the most notable landmarks in the city. It is an astronomical complex built three centuries ago whose function was to keep track of the movements of stars. Basically, it was a clock.

There used to be another clock in Delhi: the Ghantaghar tower, which was built during the British occupation and accidentally collapsed after independence. The fall of this tower, a symbolic break with the past coinciding with the birth of modern India, is a key event in the book, the inciting incident that ripples across time and closes the loop that links old and new Delhi.

The older clock still stands, while the newer clock is no more. Such is the nature of cause and consequence in the city that is old and new at the same time. Such is the nonduality of a culture with a cyclical concept of time, where the same word means "yesterday" and "tomorrow." Such is the rich ambiguity at the heart of this exceptional book. One Arm Shorter than the Other will wind up your mind and set it running. It is a very brief read, but it contains eons.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10.

Bonuses: +1 for forging a solid thematic link between the aging and rebuilding of objects, the aging and rebuilding of place, and the aging and rebuilding of human life; +1 for achieving a tangible, almost physical sense of location. I myself have only ever spent one week in Delhi, and the descriptions in this book took me right back.

Penalties: −1 because the tying up of the time loop at the end of the book requires some railroading that constrains the characters' choices. This is always the tricky part about writing time loop stories, and its final execution here tends a bit toward the just-so. To be fair, the repairman has tight logical reasons to suddenly withhold information in the way he does, but Samay's growing frustration is the side the reader ends up identifying with.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Ganguly, Gigi. One Arm Shorter than the Other [Atthis Arts, 2022].

I'm Colombian. Here's what 'Encanto' means to me

You've been dazzled by the toucans and the capybaras and the bougainvilleas. Now let me give you the whole context.

After the end credits of Disney's new animated musical Encanto, there's a brief shot of Mickey Mouse in his iconic Steamboat Willie pose, whistling and dancing, while the beats of cumbia keep playing in the background. It's a powerful juxtaposition: from now on, there will forever be a piece of Disney official canon where Mickey is dancing cumbia. He's obviously not doing the right moves, but the moment is important in view of how aggressively protective Disney is about the uses of Mickey's image.

When a media megacorporation places its sights on an underrepresented culture, it's inevitable to perceive the interaction in terms of unequal power dynamics. So one has to be very careful when assessing the result. A great deal of the discussion around previous production Raya and the Last Dragon had to do, on one hand, with Disney's unfortunate choice to hire East Asian instead of Southeast Asian voice actors for the majority of the cast, and to summarize the enormous diversity of the region in a single mixture that wasn't very convincing to actual Southeast Asians. On the other hand, you had American critics being clueless about the source cultures and therefore unequipped to interpret the movie's symbolic content.

So when I, a Colombian reviewer, draw attention to the significance of Mickey Mouse dancing cumbia at the end of Encanto, I'm absolutely not in any way framing it as our culture being finally worthy of being showcased by Hollywood. The question to ask is exactly the opposite: it's whether Hollywood is worthy of getting its hands on our culture.

Fun fact: Colombia's literacy rate is 95% for adults and 98% for children!

Also fun fact: Americans just can't be bothered to spell Colombia correctly!

It needs to be set in those terms because American movies have so far done a horrendously offensive job of representing Colombia. Examples abound, of which the absolute worst is Romancing the Stone, whose influence on American perceptions of Colombia has done damage comparable to what Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom did to perceptions of India. So Disney had to be aware that, after the multiple ways Hollywood has mistreated us, they needed to put in a lot of extra effort to earn our good will. Fortunately, Disney did its homework this time.

Encanto is set in a deliberately ambiguous location on the Andean mountains, in a town built in the Spanish colonial style of architecture and surrounded by the emblematic wax palms, Colombia's official national tree. (Remember the "wax" part. It'll be important later.) From the start, that choice of location is loaded with tension. It's true that the natural habitat of the wax palm is breathtakingly beautiful, and a suitable stage for a fantasy story...

Fun fact: Colombia has the world's highest diversity of bird species!

Also fun fact: Colombia has the world's seventh highest rate of tropical deforestation!

... but Andean locations, peoples, and cultures have been overemphasized in Colombian popular media (and in government budgets), mainly because our most important industrial centers and the best-funded universities and theaters and libraries are located in Andean cities. Movies and television shows produced in Colombia have tended to reinforce a narrow idea of what our society looks and sounds like, and when stories choose to include characters from disadvantaged regions, it's done via tired stereotypes that often veer into blatant derision. So, while the wax palm forest is a gorgeous sight that clearly lends itself to magical storytelling, you need to keep in mind that it's impossible for one single location to represent the entire country, and that the locations that have nevertheless been selected for that purpose have usually been the same few, while the peripheral regions are only allowed to represent their isolation.

Fun fact: Colombia is the third richest country in South America by GDP!

Also fun fact: Colombia has the third worst income inequality in South America!

Just like in the United States you hear of a divide between the prosperous, educated, productive coastal cities vs. the neglected flyover country, in Colombia we have prosperous, educated, productive mountain cities vs. the neglected coasts and forests. It has become a habitual refrain to say that ruling elites in Colombia live secluded between mountains and oblivious to what goes on elsewhere. In the flashback scene where the matriarch of the Madrigal family loses her husband, bursts into tears and magically creates an entire town (am I the only one getting WandaVision vibes here?) so that she can raise her kids in safety, the most striking image is the rising of the mountains that keep her refuge closed off from the world. This is a symbolic clue to the persistent anxiety that defines this character: she's afraid of everything outside of her microcosm.

It's a brilliant move by the film to establish the grandmother's character flaw in terms of her relation to physical space. It has been pointed out that Encanto is the rare adventure story where the adventure doesn't leave the home, and there's a solid reason for that. There's a certain current in Colombian literature that treats the extended family household as a metaphor for the country. You may have perceived this trope in One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, but it's present in many other novels, such as The Big House by Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, The House with Two Palm Trees by Manuel Mejía Vallejo, and House of Fury by Evelio Rosero. In the Colombian narrative tradition, if you want a practical way to write a "total novel" about the country, you write a novel about a house, one where the family members suffer under the constraints of arbitrary authority, and the elders' emotional trauma is inherited by every subsequent generation.

Fun fact: Colombia has been ranked multiple times as the world's happiest country!

Also fun fact: Colombia has the world's highest percentage of former child soldiers!

When viewed through this "house-as-stand-in-for-the-country" lens, Encanto's focus on a single authority figure dictating the lives of others resonates with a well-known mindset of centralism that has caused much resentment in the peripheral Colombian regions. One of our most consequential historic missteps was the failure to set up a federal system that would integrate the immense diversity of cultures contained within our territory while allowing them enough breathing room to decide on their own affairs. To give you an idea of just how disastrous our rulers have been: the entire countries of Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama used to be part of Colombia, as founding members of a titanically ambitious project to harness the momentum of the recently liberated colonies and turn South America into a world power. But they went their own way, and for roughly the same reason: our central government's frustrating refusal to look beyond the tiny space between the mountains.

The breakup of Greater Colombia is one of the foundational traumas of our national identity. But today we don't even give it a moment's thought, because much worse traumas have overshadowed it. Once we had failed to keep other nations living with us, we went on to fail to keep ourselves living together. For our entire history since independence, we have disagreed so ferociously over every detail of our form of government (centralism vs. federalism, protectionism vs. free trade, church schools vs. secular schools, land concentration vs. land reform) that the Wikipedia entry for "Colombian Civil War" is a disambiguation page. More recently, when the Juan Manuel Santos administration asked the Colombian people to vote on a peace agreement to end the last armed conflict of the Western Hemisphere, the most traumatic thing wasn't even that the total count turned out against the agreement, but that it did so by a negligible margin. If the house represents the country, the reoccurring cracks in the house in Encanto represent the numerous disputes that continue to hurt us. Our most persistent notion of ourselves as a people is that we are a house divided against itself.

Fun fact: Colombia is the oldest standing democracy in Latin America!

Also fun fact: Colombia has been climbing the list of most fragile states for the past 5 years!

In an interview with The Wrap, Encanto co-director and co-scriptwriter Charise Castro Smith pointed out the symbolic importance of keeping the open crack in the mountains after the Madrigal house is rebuilt. According to her explanation, part of the emotional healing process is being able to see out of your shell and acknowledge the roots of your pain. This is a key element in any story that aspires to represent Colombia. We eat transgenerational trauma for breakfast, both in the sense that it's given to us as a common part of daily life, and in the sense that we pretend we're over it and we keep it stored inside us until we burst (see: Luisa's character song). It's no coincidence that "open your eyes" becomes a motif in Encanto, because it truly is our superpower to live in denial. Colombia, as a whole, is a traumatized society. Our families are traumatized families that excel at perpetuating trauma. There's only so much of Colombian rural violence that you can show on a fantasy musical for kids, but the horrific backstory of the Madrigal grandmother, as well as the effect such violence has had on her personality and her parenting style, is vividly recognizable to us as a still ongoing tragedy, repeated millions of times upon millions of widows and orphans. It's notable that Pedro's killers are never identified in the movie. Liberals? Conservatives? Far left militias? Far right militias? To the victims, it's all the same.

Instead, let's talk about raccoons.

Before the start of Encanto, Disney has inserted the animated short Far from the Tree, which, perhaps intentionally, summarizes the themes of Encanto. It shows us a raccoon that protects its offspring with excessive zeal because it was injured by a predator and wants to prevent that from happening again. Alas, it does happen again, and the baby raccoon barely escapes death. The parent then scolds the baby with a severity that we know comes from pain, but ends up causing lasting fear and insecurity. When that baby raccoon grows up, it replicates the same behavior with its offspring, but quickly learns that it doesn't need to repeat the same overprotective parenting style. Instead, it accompanies its baby in exploring the world safely.

Fun fact: Last year, Colombia was selected as the top trending destination for tourism!

Also fun fact: Colombia is ranked as more violent than Myanmar, Palestine and Ethiopia!

The tendency of parents who were traumatized as children to engage in hypervigilance that in turn traumatizes their children is the emotional core of Encanto (and of many Colombian life stories). It's valuable that this societal problem is recognized, but the way the movie resolves it leaves much to be desired. Here I'm going to have to speculate a bit, but I'll present evidence to support my interpretation.

Twice in the movie, in the songs "The Family Madrigal" and "All of You," protagonist Mirabel refers to the members of her family as comprising a constellation. Once would have been attributable to a whimsical turn of phrase, but twice signals meaningful intention. And I find that intention questionable.

Family constellation therapy is a scientifically dubious and unproven approach to the processing and overcoming of transgenerational trauma. It treats family roles as archetypal connections that continue to influence descendants, even those who don't know their ancestors' life stories. There are a lot of charlatan red flags in the theory, which, depending on the practitioner, can include total nonsense like morphic resonance and quantum mysticism. The idea is that our elders' experiences leave ripples in the unseen fabric of the family, and the way to break free of them is to openly acknowledge their effects. A session of family constellation therapy involves roleplaying in order to question the roles assigned to each family member. However, the emphasis is on the acknowledging, and that is assumed to be enough for closure. No actual changes of behavior are indicated. If Mirabel's scene of reconciliation with her grandmother by the river feels somewhat off, I suspect it's because it's written from this theory. They just voice their roles to each other. They declare what they have experienced. But there's no admission of wrongdoing, no commitment to amends. This may explain why, as others have noted, Encanto comes off as promoting the dangerous idea that you should forgive your family just because they're family and not because they're going to start treating you better.

Fun fact: A Colombian pediatrician pioneered the Kangaroo protocol of
neonatal care, which is estimated to reduce preterm deaths by more than 36%!

Also fun fact: Out of 180 countries surveyed, Colombia
is ranked 126th in quality of childhood life experiences!

Fake psychology is terrible for real life, but it's useful for making (and reading) fiction. The theory of family constellations helps explain another plot point of Encanto. As it happens, one key step of its therapeutic method is the reintegration of members who have been erased from the family. And this brings us to the topic of Bruno, a bearer of unpleasant truths who represents one of the most enduring and venerable Colombian traditions: shooting the messenger.

The original sin of Colombian society is fear of truth. The grandmother's nervous reassurances that everything is fine, and the house stands strong, and what are you waiting for to go back to the dance floor, call to mind the amazing Colombian ability to not ignore the elephant in the room but successfully pretend to ignore it. (Yes, that's two levels of self-deception, and we're the masters at it.)

To be fair, our selective attention is not a personality flaw, but a survival strategy. We live surrounded by incomparably beautiful landscapes and appalling political violence, we have a ridiculously fertile land yet every year there's news of malnourished children somewhere, we are inexhaustibly creative and hardworking and dedicated while the rest of the world thinks we're only good as hired guns or drug mules, every day we make a monumental effort to put on a happy face and build something resembling a normal life while things around us keep breaking into pieces, and we're barely holding it together. When Luisa protests that she can't go on carrying the weight of everything, when Isabela protests that she's sick of keeping up appearances, we hear them and nod. When Mirabel cries because she hasn't been given a chance to pursue any achievement to be proud of, we cry with her.

Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges put it best when he declared that being Colombian is an act of faith.

Many Colombians end up feeling they don't really have a place here (or are forced to relinquish their place). The character of Bruno represents the human cost of social exclusion. It may be in the form of Native Americans (there's a lot of Native imagery in Bruno's bedroom, on which more below), who are made to feel like strangers in their own territories; or the growing numbers of people who are forcibly displaced from rural areas, are rarely helped back to their feet, and end up as beggars in the cities; or the portion of Colombians who leave the country because our society turns too hostile. However, like Bruno, exiled Colombians keep a close eye on events at home, maintaining an ambivalent relationship to a place they want to love.

Fun fact: Colombia is the world's eighth most welcoming country for foreigners!

Also fun fact: Colombia is the world's fourth largest source of political asylum seekers!

Since much of Encanto has to do with a reappraisal of people's ties to home, it's worthwhile to analyze the symbolic weight of places in the story. There's a very Pan's Labyrinth feeling to Mirabel's exploration of locations in her house that lead to huge, magical spaces for adventure. Of course one child exclaims that the house is bigger on the inside, because Mirabel's journey to uncover her family's history has the qualities of time travel, starting with the hourglass carvings and flowing sand in Bruno's bedroom. The fact that Bruno's bedroom is located in a tower also has its own significance, and to untangle it, we're going to need a bit more context.

French philosopher Gaston Bachelard is most famous for his contributions to epistemology, but he also wrote about the meaning-making power of architecture. His book The Poetics of Space describes the house as a literary analogue of the human psyche: it has hidden rooms, and forbidden doors, and places we go to for comfort, and memories attached to every corner. In Encanto, each Madrigal descendant has access to a private world in a bedroom, a sanctum uniquely theirs, furnished with objects that reflect their personalities. In chapter 8 of The Poetics of Space, Bachelard speaks of the vast places contained within us: "Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone." Mirabel's forbidden visit to Bruno's bedroom resembles the laborious work of introspection done during therapy when a patient explores past incidents too painful to admit.

Regarding Bruno's abode in a tower, we find in chapter 1 of The Poetics of Space: "And all the spaces of our last moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us, and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged from the present, when henceforth, it is alien to all the promises of the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. We return to them in our night dreams."

For Bachelard, the attic's position at the top of the house brings up unconscious connections to the roof's protective function. It is a refuge of serenity. It is where the mind can sustain an illusion of safety from the secrets buried below, in the cellar.

Of the traditional components of a house, the most prominent spatial referent used in Encanto is the door. Chapter 9 of the The Poetics of Space has this to say on the matter: "the door is an entire cosmos of the half-open [...] one of its primal images, the very origin of a daydream that accumulates desires and temptations..." The door both connects and separates; both contains possibility and hides consequence. As long as Mirabel doesn't have a place of her own (she's still sleeping in the nursery, effectively infantilized), she has no access to the realm of possibility. Going into the hidden rooms of the house occurs in parallel with going into the untapped potential of her maturity.

The first inner space we see in the house is Antonio's new room, a piece of Colombian jungle meticulously represented in all its diversity. Here it must be admitted that we've not developed a healthy relationship with nature. Colombia prides itself in its ecological tourism destinations, but we've seriously missed the mark when it comes to conservation efforts. We treat our forests as pretty promotional material for travel brochures (and, by extension, as a tool to sell tickets for Encanto), but at every opportunity, we've cut them down to use the land for mining or raising cattle. Antonio's ability to talk to animals reflects our need to reconnect to a natural space we've mostly spoiled and mismanaged. (Also, it's interesting that his side of the family has all the gifts of empathy: he can communicate with those who can't speak, his mother has the power to make her true feelings visible, his sister has the power to listen, and his brother has the power to put himself in anyone's shoes.)

The next inner space we see is Bruno's bedroom, the place where he retreated to hold prophetic ceremonies. For Colombian viewers, the geometric patterns and carved faces on the walls of this vault have an immediate resonance: they resemble the Native art found in the subterranean tombs of Tierradentro, a place loaded with religious meaning. It's thematically fitting that the place where Mirabel starts to reconnect with her history resembles the most important Native American burial site in Colombia, a place whose construction deliberately used the symbolic power of architecture to express the connection between the individual and the ancestors, a place built by people whom Colombian society has treated with criminal neglect and often tried to write out of history.

You'll recall that, when Mirabel enters this vault, a giant door closes and she finds herself in complete darkness, and then green lights appear from a circle on the ground. The experience will be familiar to you if you've visited the Gold Museum in Bogotá, our largest collection of Native American metallurgy. At the end of your visit, you're invited into a closed room where all the lights are out. Suddenly, a circle on the floor is illuminated, and you see wondrous emerald jewelry encased in gold.

That's the green crystal Mirabel takes from the vault: it's emerald.

Fun fact: Colombia produces the world's finest and most valued emeralds!

Also fun fact: Emerald mining is one of Colombia's bloodiest industries!

The next inner space we see is Isabela's room, an immaculate garden kept with painstaking care until Isabela learns to create a more spontaneous form of beauty. There are several possible readings of this moment. For Mirabel, her sisters are extreme poles of femininity, with Isabela standing in for the oppressive beauty standards that continue to constrain Colombian women. Almost every town in Colombia has its own beauty pageant, and such contests are often used as ladders of social mobility for disadvantaged women. Another possible reading of Isabela's growth, if we see her as a creative type of character, is the rebellion of Colombian artists against a strictly conservative establishment that has historically been eager to impose censorship and enforce antiquated aesthetic canons.

Fun fact: Colombia is the world's second largest exporter of flowers!

Also fun fact: The Colombian flower industry has outrageous labor conditions!

Finally, the location where Mirabel reconciles with her grandmother is not the inside of a bedroom, but it nevertheless has a powerful meaning for Colombian viewers. The river used in this scene is inspired by the real river Caño Cristales, an impossibly beautiful spectacle that you almost can't believe can happen on this planet. In a country that has failed to protect so many of its natural wonders, Caño Cristales still explodes in color every year due to the life cycle of the algae that dwell under the waters. This river's yearly resurgence has made it, in Colombian consciousness, a hopeful signifier of perseverance, and that makes it the perfect stage for the rebuilding of the Madrigal family ties.

The fragility of Colombian ecosystems is visible to us from the start of the movie. Wax palms are protected by law, but they're endangered because their leaves are popular in a Catholic festival and their wax (remember I said I'd come back to the wax?) can be used to make candles, which are important in another Catholic festival, very likely the one where the grandmother met her husband. In the vaguely-early-20th-century setting of the movie, the possible sources of wax for candles are either beeswax (which would explain why Mirabel's father has so many encounters with bees) or wax palms. The grim realization is that it would take several wax palms to keep that miraculous candle lit for decades. Were it not for magic, the continuous burning of that candle should require mass-scale environmental devastation, which, if it was an intentional choice by the filmmakers, would be a brutal hidden metaphor for the cost of Colombia's often unrealistic projects.

In the reconciliation scene there is, of course, an even more powerful symbol. If you're not familiar with Colombian literature, you need to know that it's absolutely crucial that the butterflies that appear through the grandmother's backstory happen to be yellow.

Yellow butterflies are the most famous motif employed in the works of Gabriel García Márquez as a visual shortcut for hopeful love. By extension, they have become a symbol of the entire genre of magical realism. We did not invent magical realism, but we put it on the map. It was almost mandatory that a fantasy tale about Colombia should feature yellow butterflies.

(Another recurring shoutout to García Márquez in Encanto is the hurricane, which famously ends One Hundred Years of Solitude. Both Luisa and Pepa speak of the hurricane as a threat to the family's stability, but Isabela celebrates it as an explosion of joy.)

The grandmother's flashback is accompanied by the song "Dos Oruguitas" ("Two Caterpillars"), which ties together all the movie's themes. The grandmother's character flaw is to anxiously try to keep her family sheltered in a coccoon; as said above, both geographical and emotional barriers are among Colombia's longstanding problems. But also, caterpillars are baby butterflies. To pass from caterpillar to butterfly is to achieve maturity and freedom.

Inner conflict has been an interesting substitute for traditional villains in recent Disney productions. In Coco, what saves the day is the power of memory. In Raya and the Last Dragon, it's the power of trust. In Luca, it's the power of acceptance. In Encanto, the power that Mirabel discovers, what one could call her gift, is the power of community. Time and again, that's what has saved Colombia from falling into the abyss. The Madrigal family share their gifts with the town without compensation, to the point that they can be said to have built a literal gift economy. Their generosity is rewarded when the community comes to their aid and Mirabel finally gets to see herself.

Earlier I said that Mirabel's sisters are two poles of femininity, basically the butch and femme archetypes. If we take Bachelard's image of the household as a symbol for the self, Mirabel's sisters are the potential paths of her own womanhood (including also her mother as the archetype of the selfless caretaker), which is why it's so meaningful that her definitive moment of growth is to see herself in her fullness. The limits of gender expectations are another of the many ways Colombia has continued to cause itself lasting harm (see how both Bruno and Mirabel start being mistrusted by the family when they each disrupt the rituals of traditional marriage). The restoration of the self and the restoration of the home are the dearest wishes of every Colombian, and to reach that goal our best tool is the same that saves the Encanto: the power to rebuild together.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10.

Bonuses: +1 for the care to animate gestures and facial expressions that are uniquely Colombian, +1 for the accuracy in plant leaf shapes, all of which correspond to actual plants we've had at home, +1 for skillfully employing Colombian cultural imagery to bolster the story's meaning, +1 for honestly addressing the sequelae of violence on Colombian families.

Penalties: −3 for a muddled psychological foundation.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Bachelard, Gaston [author], Jolas, Maria [translator]. The Poetics of Space [Penguin, 2014].