there's a trick with a life that i'm learing to do: the works of guy gavriel kay

I like Kay, btw, for having characters make comments or observations that are totally unexplained and that you'll have to just gloss over as you read unless you really grok what they're going through. Like, someone will have a thought that doesn't seem relevant to anything that just happened, but if you have internalized that character's personal struggle, you realize it relates to something they think or feel that has only been referred to tangentially before. And gradually an impression is built.

It's like his people are defined as much by their negative space as their positive space. Ultimate use of "show, not tell" afaic.

Question, if I don't generally like genre fiction, should I still read this?

its not really that similar to trad fantasy but idk how sum1 who doesnt like any genre fiction f(n)s so

I describe his books more as historically inspired fiction or as historical analogues than anything else - really strong elements of Moorish Spain in Lions of Al Rassan, Byzantine Empire in Sarantium / Lord of Emperors, Viking-age northern europe / Britain in Last Light of the Sun, etc. There are some fantastical elements but when present they're pretty low key in a sort of myth / superstition sort of way (barring the Fionnavar tapestry which is very traditional high fantasy).

Really difficult toss-up between Last Light of the Sun and Lions of Al Rassan for me but I have to give it to the latter; LLotS is better written but Lions had a greater emotional resonance.

I havn't read Ysabel or his poetry collection. Really stoked about his Tang dynasty China analogue coming up, some really rich material for him to draw on.

^^^ just finished the new one "under heaven" & also reread "last light of the sun". bunch of similarities btw the two actually & in a way ysabel. havent really fully worked out how i feel abt under heaven yet but i think its curious & at least to me exciting to see him more thoroughly using the fantastic/mystical in his works. i think the increased presence of the supernatural elements in his historical fiction destabilizes and as he says universalizes his stories - makes them both strange & familiar to us.

lions & the mosaic novels in partic are almost purposefully mundane the hints of the fantastic mostly grace notes and in the 1st sarantine novel p awkward. but in last light and under heaven the fantastic stuff is really deft i think. largely because he seems aware of how much of "history" is just myth & of how the past is its own half-world living next to ours. the parallels he draws in last light btw the dying of the spirit wood & its bloody god and the other vignettes of inconsequential bit characters is p powerful. he has a great grasp of the singularity and inevitability of historical moments & under heaven is really good @ showing the ways that ppl are shaped by these moments & shape them in turn.

also both books have a similar fractured, impressionistic prose style that works better for his "idea" novels. & his humanism and his clarity and his affection are still really in evidence. also its rad to read a fantasy writer who seems to really care abt his female characters & abt making their voices considered and true. it was interesting reading him so soon after (finally) finishing steven erikson's latest which is so pompous and overwritten. & its funny bcuz erikson's obv concerned w/ similar things - the creation of history & identity, the cost of progress, the way power dehumanizes those that wield it - but erikson's vision seems so shallow in comparison. partly i think his hatred of modernity leads him down some p morally uhm problematic paths but its also just so much less considered.

oh lol so tl;dr :/ cliffs: new kay novel is really good u shld read it

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Question, if I don't generally like genre fiction, should I still read this?

Definitely yes. I am not a genre fiction person at all and Kay is one of my faves.

I am unsure how to vote. I want to vote for the entire Fionavar series, and also both Sarantium books.

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awesome

tigana wuz robbed imo

I obviously didn't see this in time to vote b/c would have voted Fionavar Tap. Just breaks me me into pieces.

Finished Ysabel last night, brings it all back.

I'd never heard of the author until just last week when a friend posted about picking up the Sarantium book and recommended it. I've got a bunch queued up, v. excited.

btw i'm finally reading lions about [checks thread] only 10 years later! it's quite a quick and fun read. i do have impressions. the prose writing is strong, the theme is interesting but a little weird (i do get what he's trying to do - recreate these religious dynamics but around totally new theological constructs) tho i'm not sure it makes much sense without the correct theological context. and thematically it's more of a pulpy genre work than literary fiction (which is okay!). one thing about that that struck me tho is that when reading shogun (which is also v pulpy in some similar ways and not even as well written on a stylistic prose level) it helps that it was so intensely researched and you're clearly getting some access to something real in a particular time and place. whereas with this despite understanding the milieu he's drawing from i can't help but wish he just carefully researched and wrote about historical spain you know? i'm not sure how much he gained from fictionalizing it so deeply. also not sure how much the religious schema would work without some tricks he pulled like basically giving the various characters the "correct"(ish) names. "rebka bet jacub" or "ahmin ibn mabn" or whatever.

sometimes the prose writing is strong and sometimes tenses switch btwn present + past for no particular reason within a few paragraphs and i get a headache :/

i'm almost finished reading lions. i did enjoy it, it was well-paced, and although i was ultimately disappointed in its ideas it had a few. re the question of presentation of the kindath it's funny but i'm reminded of the comment lamp made above "he does fail in giving the asharites religious figures a ~human face~" and how that applies the kindath as well whose representatives are only these cosmopolitan highly educated kindath (and really only jehane her family and mazur). jehane doesn't even believe in the traditional kindath god (the only real god she worships is the hippocrates analogue whose name is escaping me). in that sense the kindath really are super marginalized in this book - both by a lack of avatars, their one major example being such an exception, and then finally their major role being as victims (repeatedly) without real agency or even a sense of what they're doing beyond just being tragic. are they writing important medieval texts? maimonides, probably the greatest jewish philosopher, rationalist and legal thinker (as well as court physician), was around the time of this era in spain. mazur is sorta analogous in that the rambam was an advisor to kings and jehane as a physician to kings but neither capture his leadership and service to the jewish community. which is a shame bc some of it would fit this world and this story perfectly - like the rambam answering difficult questions from jewish communities about whether it was permissible to convert to islam rather than submit to bloodshed. here mazur and jehane seem totally cut off from their community. there's great stories to be told about jews suspended between the jewish world and the broader world but even here they seem to lack any real connection to their communities. jehane is closer and talks more with the prostitutes of the city than any other jewish characters.

anyway, this didn't turn me off the book and i have other considerations about other depictions of the world and time tho this one i feel like i could probably speak to the best in so much as i actually know some things about this era spain (thanks to my jewish education also thanks to crusader kings II). ultimately it's good and entertaining and extremely clear maybe too clear in its themes, ideas, politics and characters that there's some level of depth i feel it's missing. maybe i'm asking too much war and peace from a fantasy novel. i did appreciate how little actual fantasy was in it.

sometimes the prose writing is strong and sometimes tenses switch btwn present + past for no particular reason within a few paragraphs and i get a headache :/

btw this only happens once or twice and is not such a big deal and i wonder in those occasions if he was trying to use it for literary effect and it just doesn't work bc i can kinda guess at the purpose for that (a sense of immediate + directness in a dramatic moment) but it's used inconsistently and might just be sloppy editing. anyway it's not a big deal i don't want ppl to think it's terribly written.