May09_1
It's odd that a blog read by no-one is still a burdensome responsibility. Here's an odd book read in May: 'The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation', futher subtitled 'Volume I: The Pox Party', by M T Anderson. What a title. The back blurb is enthusiastic but uncommunicative: "A tremendous read" - Nicholas Tucker, TES (what's TES?). I read the first page or so in Kinokuniya and came away with the impression that it was a fantasy borrowing its aesthetics and idiom from the 1800s. It's not. This is a book about slavery in Boston just before the Revolutionary War, human scientific experimentation, about racism and child abuse. A boy and his mother are raised and educated in a bizarre Scientific Society in an extended experiment to resolve the truth or otherwise of Negro intelligence. It was an odd read because for most of the book I was reading it as wonky fantasy with a Gothic tone, not political parable (parable? more a ti...