Kindred

Kindred is intense and unabashedly unsentimental. I would recommend it to everyone. It feels fresh and pertinent even (especially?) in 2019. Butler does a beautiful job of unraveling the majority-serving narrative that we are fed in grade school and in the media: “slavery is a thing of the past” and “it wasn't so bad for everyone”. (Utter BS, am I right?) Butler really calls out and challenges this narrative by placing modern-day characters (well, modern for the 1970s) in the antebellum South and exploring how they fall into their prescribed societal roles. How easily they did so was extremely frustrating to me as the reader, as were other action by the characters, but I think that this drove the message right home. The plot is griping and fluid, and I read most of the book in one sitting. This is my first time reading Butler, and I definitely plan to read more of her work in the future.

“Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of ‘wrong‘ ideas.”
Hace tiempo que tenía esta lectura pendiente. Estaba buscando el libro en español, ahora me arrepiento de haberme tardado tanto. Así que empecé a leerlo para ver que me parecía y ya no pude parar de leer. Aunque algunas veces lo tuve que poner a un lado e ir a despejarme un rato. Es un libro con partes bastante duras y difíciles de leer.

El libro está narrado desde el punto de vista de Dana, una escritora en el año 1976 que se ve arrastrada sin alguna explicación a una plantación en el sur de Estados Unidos en el año de 1815. Dana se ve atada de alguna manera a Rufus, hijo del dueño de la plantación, al que salvará la vida en diferentes ocasiones. Así formará un lazo no solo con sus antepasados, sino también con los diferentes personajes que son esclavos en la plantación.

En el presente Dana está casada con Kevin, formando una pareja interracial que en 1815 era imposible y en 1976 tampoco es que sea lo más fácil del mundo. Los dos han tenido que enfrentar prejuicios de conocidos y familiares de ambas partes. En el pasado Dana se tendrá que enfrentar a todo tipo de pruebas no solo para sobrevivir ella, sino para no poner en riesgo la existencia de su familia.

He leído otros libros sobre viajes en el tiempo y me gustó mucho como lo maneja la autora aquí, de verdad es terrorífico el no tener control alguno de la situación.

Creo que este libro formará parte de mi lista de mejores de este año. Si le tengo que poner un pero, tal vez sea el final que me pareció apresurado. Sobre todo por una escena que yo me esperaba desde el inicio y me quedé esperando.

Pero es una lectura que a pesar de lo difícil de algunas de sus escenas me atrapo completamente.

“He was like me, a kindred spirit crazy enough to keep on trying.”

This is a good story and important–the experience of a 20th century black woman who experiences 19th century slavery through the “joys” of time travel, but is shunned by other slaves for being too “white.” But given Butler's reputation, I had higher expectations for the writing, which I found clunky. From a craft point of view, it's interesting to note that she uses the structure of beginning with a glimpse of the story's climax and then goes back to the beginning to show the reader how the characters got to that point.

I'm not very much into time travel tales, but this one is terrifying, riveting and irresistible. Worth a read for the chills and the chance to reflect on racial issues.

Esperava uma boa leitura quando peguei o livro, mas não imaginava o que estava por vir. Uma história super importante. A ficção científica não é nem um pouco o foco, mas a relação entre as pessoas, a história de Dana e de todas as pessoas negras que um dia lutaram (e ainda lutam) para se libertar da escravidão, do preconceito, da marginalização construída por toda a História.

Oh my word! One of the greatest books I've ever read!

I can only imagine what it was like to be a slave, but the artful wresting with issues related to slavery and more general in nature, the portrayal of many different perspectives and survival mechanisms, the mystery within which the entire story is framed, the counterpoint relationships... It is just brilliant.

I've been a fan of Octavia Butler for years, having most recently read the Xenogenesis series (Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago) and felt they were solid, imaginative, compelling, and provocative. This one is head and shoulders above those. Rave. Rave. Rave. Cannot say enough, so I'll stop saying more.

Kindred gets lumped into SF because of its quantum leap/time travel premise, but this novel belongs in the canon of great African-American literature... no, great American literature. I would recommend this book to anyone wanting a deeper understanding of America's shameful history of slavery.

Hard to get into, but then hard to put down. I just wanted to know how it would all end.

I'm not really sure where to start with this book. It's in that category of “classics that everyone should read” and having finally read it, I agree. It's really, really, really good. It's a hard read at times - it takes you right into the antebellum south and the heart of slavery. It's actually set in Maryland, which is a little jarring for me - in today's political climate, Maryland isn't really considered part of “the south” - it's far more liberal than most of the south. A blue state, where those are all red. But it WAS a slave state. It is below the Mason-Dixon line, and reading the wiki, slavery was actually legal here longer than it was in the south. (Mostly because the Emancipation Proclamation only covered the Confederate States, not the slave-holding Union states of Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland. That's screwed up. You can't have slaves, but it's totally cool that the people that fought for us still keep them?)

So Kindred is set mostly in pre-Civil War Maryland, with a few scenes in modern-day California. The mystery of how Dana time-travels is never explained - but it doesn't really need to be. That's not the point of the story. The point of the story is a modern-day black woman transplanted to the antebellum south and learning to understand slavery in a very intimate manner. Dana mentions a couple of times how easy it is to forget that she has another life - that's she's a free black woman from the future - because the way they keep slaves in line doesn't give you time to think past the present. You work too hard to think of the future, and if you don't, all you can think about is the pain from your punishment for not working hard enough.

The book is a very visceral portrayal of a somewhat pampered slave's life - she's not a field hand, her masters are what passes for “kind.” Dana's fellow slaves live in fear of being sold down south to Mississippi - they know Maryland is better. As hard as some of the scenes are to read, the book explicitly says it could be harder.

The conflict Dana feels between rescuing her white, slave-owning ancestor again and again, and standing back and letting nature take its course (but dooming herself) is one of the central points of the book. It's a moral quandary that she never really answers.

Ultimately, there's no way to do this book justice in a review. I think it should be required high school reading. More than that, I think it should be required reading for white people. And if you haven't read it yet, you should. I knew on an intellectual level what slaves went through - but this book doesn't look at it from a distance. It doesn't divorce the reader from the violence. It puts the reader right there in the dirt of the yard with the whip exploding across Dana's back.

I think it took me so long to get around to this book because it IS a classic. And so many classics I was forced to read in school were boring and dry and hard to read. I'm starting to find that some are classics because they're just that good. Good and necessary and written about critically important topics. Kindred is one of them.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

yes it's 2:30 in the morning and I can finally go to bed because I've finished this book. so good.

Kindred is a very thought-provoking read. Dana is a modern black woman (well, a woman of the 1970s) in a marriage with a white man. She finds herself sent to the 1800s South on multiple occasions – sometimes with her husband – and the common theme is the same boy (and, eventually, man) is in danger and needs saving.

She quickly determines the person she is saving is her great, great grandfather. She is surprised, because she doesn't know the Rufus in the family Bible is white.

Being a black woman in the antebellum South, she is treated like a slave, and for all intents and purposes, becomes a slave, with all the danger and abuse inherent to the institution. Her husband when he is with her tries to protect her, of course, but cannot experience what she is experiencing. She is automatically treated as lesser because of skin color, he is automatically treated as better, and even to the extent he wants to help her he is up against systemic racism.

Dana believes that if she can survive long enough, and help Rufus survive long enough to sire her next ancestor, that she will no longer be needed – that her freedom will be obtained by returning to modern times. She has to explore that she will allow, what she will do, what she will encourage others to do, and how she will change as a result of her captivity.

Her relationship with Rufus is complex, at least on her side. He is her kin(dred), but he is also someone who benefits from slavery, who thinks of black people as inferior, and who becomes a slave owner. She meets him as a little boy, and likes him while seeing he's troubled, and can't help but wonder if her influence will change him for the better. Will knowing her – an educated black woman who saves his life again and again – improve the lives of the black people he owns by making him question his beliefs? Will it even persuade him to free his slaves? Or will the system win out, corrupting Rufus beyond redemption? And at what point does the bad in a person outweigh the good?

I believe the reader will not find Dana a perfect person, and I don't believe she was meant to be. She was thrust into a world where she had to make difficult decisions, and decisions only become difficult when they're based on complex situations and when no answer is completely without drawbacks. I imagine most people will struggle with what she asks of another character. She asks her great great grandmother to willingly submit to repeated rapes. She feels that submitting is better than fighting, and inevitably losing the fight. There's certainly a pragmatism at work since these rapes are what will lead to her ancestor being born, and this is a battle this woman is unlikely to win. Dana might not be wrong, but it just doesn't feel like her decision to make, even knowing what she does. How a woman handles a situation like that, even if she wants to fight it to the death, is her decision. But... Impossible situation. But the interesting result of this is the reader sees Dana, while talking quite frankly to Rufus, and caring about the slaves, over time and without realizing it slipping into choosing her own path of least resistance. I've read the author did want people to think about how history has judged the enslaved men and women who took a path of pleasing the enslavers in order to improve their lives to the extent they could.

Since I finished this a day or two ago, Kindred has been in my thoughts quite a bit. I found myself saddened that I would never meet Octavia Butler outside of her books. I feel I lost something in not discovering her earlier.

So good. Can't wait to read more Octavia Butler!!

This isn't my favorite Octavia Butler book, probably because it's true historical fantasy instead of one of her amazing science fiction epics. That said, it is still a very powerful book, and one that I'm glad I read. The story follows a black woman in 1976 through a bizarre series of time travels to repeatedly save the life of her white, slave-owning ancestor. Each time, she her journey is fraught with peril from all directions, and she is repeatedly forced into the life of a slave on her ancestor's plantation.

Butler makes slavery viscerally real in a lot of ways, from her no-sugar coating descriptions of the beatings slaves received (and the horrors of the relatively mild beatings Dana receives) to her fully-fledged, multi-faceted portraits of the black characters living under the Weylin estate. Dana is an easy character to see through, as she has witnessed all of the slave stereotypes modern media has furnished and also the complicated lives of African-Americans in what is still relatively early on in the Civil Rights Movement. Dana, a writer in her own time, chronicles the people she meets not as Mammies or Uncle Toms or noble martyrs, but as flawed humans struggling to survive however they can, sacrificing whatever levels of pride and dignity they can individually bear.

Dana's relationships with the white characters are just as complicated. From Rufus, the man she is called again and again to save for whom she feels something despite is reprehensible treatment of her and those she cares for, to Kevin, her progressive, white husband who seems to, if not belong in 1819, at least manage to justify and fit in even as he forms his own stop on the Underground Railroad. The ties we forge for ourselves, the ways we let coventions and society make slaves of us, make us believe things have to be certain ways, these are themes Butler's works bring up again and again. Here, though, they are not cloaked in alien metaphor, but very real and remarkably present.

Butler's work is as relevant (maybe more relevant?) than when it was written, and while I don't claim this book to be an easy read, I think it's an important one.

What a remarkable book! Even though it sometimes depicts terrible suffering, and raises serious questions about human morality, it never comes across as despairing. The story is so compelling, and Dana such a marvelous, fleshed-out character, I couldn't wait to find out what happened next.

At times I was cheering Dana on, impressed by her grit and courage, while other times I wanted to shake her and save her from her own decisions. I think Butler very deliberately crafted the narrative so the line between the two reactions will vary for different readers. This is reflective of the overarching questions: How much can a person put up with? When does understandable self-preservation cross into unforgivable collaboration? How does privilege skew our moral judgments?

But again, all of this weighty philosophy springs naturally from an amazing, thrilling, harrowing adventure tale. The book never bogs down but maintains tension beautifully, until coming to a fitting conclusion.

Butler's bibliography is going on my Must Read list - not only does she tell a fabulous story, but she transcends the time she was writing in, delivering a story that is fresh and relevant more than 35 years later.

Octavia E. Butler???s Kindred, first published in 1979, is an incredible novel. Though it???s speculative fiction utilizing time travel, much of its focus is showing a glimpse into the past, and the way the author incorporated so much about society into such a well paced story is nothing short of masterful. It???s a book I find difficult to recommend because it???s filled with ugliness and brutality due to its forthright examination of slavery, and as such, may be too grim for some to endure. Yet I want to recommend it to everyone because it is a powerful book showing exactly what fiction can be.

Full Review

Two hundred (plus) years
ignoring our history
to feel better-than.

Truly captivating. I didn't want to put it down.

A black author in the 1970s finds herself sent to the time of slavery, with her fate tied to that of a young slave owner. The book was powerful because of the subject matter, but I didn't find it especially gripping in terms of storyline or character development.

Okay so this one was un-put-down-able. Just riveting. Kind of like Connecticut Yankee meets Time Traveler's Wife. An important inversion of one of the core tropes of the white-centered SF/fantasy canon.

Everyone should read this book.

Short Review: This is a fabulous book. I have only read one other of Butler's book (Fledgling her last book). Kindred was her first book that really sold so they are book ends of her career. I have not really read anything quite like it. A 26 year old newlywed African American woman from 1976 gets sucked into 1815 to save the life of a young white boy in antebellum Maryland. There is a relationship between them and for a reason that is never explained Dana keeps returning to him every time his life is in danger. It is at great danger to herself that Dana has to act on his behalf.

What really stands out about this book is that for all of the very real descriptions of slavery, this is not a book that unfairly looks at pre-Civil War whites. They are real people, tainted by the culture that allows for slavery, but still real people. And the slaves are real people as well. They are stuck in their situations, but still are real.

This is a book that you need to read. The narration of the audiobook is also excellent but I don't want to describe the book as much as strongly encourage you to read it. Slavery is a part of American history that we need to explore and understand and this is a book that looks at in in a different way than any thing else I have read.

My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/kindred-octavia-butler/

This was great. For lack of any good comparisons, because this book is pretty genre-defying, her writing reminded me a bit of Philip K. Dick, in that the general ideas and plot execution are really interesting, and the social commentary is direct without being too heavy-handed; similarly to Dick, too, the dialogue is relatively stilted.

Still, it's a really interesting read.