The Actual Star

DNF: In theory I should really like this book, but I got 20% through and found myself thinking “ugh, am I really only 20% through?” so felt it was probably time to cut my losses. There's not anything about it I really dislike, it's just that it didn't really grab me the way I wanted it to.

i deeply and profoundly loved this book and there were many MANY things that spoke to me about it and which i have been thinking about for weeks since finishing it:

* everything about gender and identity
* the search for connection and belonging as a human universal
* found family
* gods of a place, your path through life being represented literally
* the idea of reparenting yourself to resolve past traumas
* connections with others that are strong enough to recur in different lives / reincarnations
* the search for transcendence and whether/when a desire to connect with a larger truth can masquerade as self-harm or obsession... or vice versa

I heard such good things about this book that i'm almost a bit disappointed that i just did not love it as much as perhaps it deserved. Took three starts to get through it and although well crafted it did npt quite resonate.

The structure of this book is both its cleverest thing and its weakest thing. We follow three parallel timelines, one 1000 years in the past, one in the present and one 1000 years in the future. The way this allows myth to be developed and shown how mundane things can be mythologized into the future is clever but the problem with multiple timelines is keeping them all engaging and relevant and this book falls down big time on that.

The first timeline takes place in the ancient Mayan world following the destiny of a brother and sister (‘the hero twins') trying to defend their kingdom. This is an interesting story to follow with its delving into Mayan mythology and culture. The second timeline follows a young adult in the modern world who decides to go on a vacation to Belize and falls in love with a cave important to the ancient Mayan culture in the area. Again, this is an interesting and well balanced story that kept me engaged - probably my favourite of the three timelines. Its main weakness was a tendency to dive into creole at times, which for a non speaker is painful to read. The third timeline is where the book fell completely flat for me. Here we end up in the future where humans have become nomadic relationships have completely changed meaning and the disappearance of someone into a cave has become mythologized into a new religion. This story was so out, so completely detached from any grounding to common motifs that I struggled hugely with it. The characters were irritating, the random spanish words thrown in were irritating. It was all a huge mess.

I see this has been referenced with Cloud Atlas a few times - this is no where near on the same level. The structure is less clever and the stories less engaging. This novel struck me as over ambitious with the execution falling short of the intent. If it had worked, it could been a very clever novel. It just didn't work for me.

Whew. This is the sort of saga that demands a deep exhalation upon completion.I'm still not sure how I feel about it. So much of it was annoying: the reincarnation gimmick; the need to Suffuse Everything With Meaning, to believe that the Universe cares about individual humans (or is even aware of us), that there are Deep Connections that we could see if only we had a broad enough view. The presence (in the 3012 sections) of astonishing technology with no acknowledgment of the infrastructure needed to create it. The expectation—counter to all human history—that, a thousand years from now, the remaining humans can share common language and beliefs. Recurring mentions of psilocybin but only in its vision-inducing aspects, never in its sublime ones. And, in a book so concerned with the Actual, so much more talking-about cunnilingus than actual cunnilingus.And yet, I couldn't stop reading. Byrne is a helluva storyteller, gifted with language (although not Spanish: I wish the editors had sprung for a Spanish-language proofreader) and imagination and a pretty serious understanding of human foibles. She explores how religions are invented, how they grow or stagnate; how cultures progress and transform; the impossible yet impossible-to-deny quest for utopia; attachment, non-attachment; the difficulty of communication; and she does an exquisite job of envisioning future gender roles (including using the everyone-is-She device, which I so loved in [b:Ancillary Justice 17333324 Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch, #1) Ann Leckie https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1597476110l/17333324.SY75.jpg 24064628] and hope more writers will adopt.So, yes, I exhaled deeply at the end. And sat and thunk a while. And am writing so much more here than I usually do, yet not even close to what I think the book deserves. It's a story I'm going to be thinking about for a while, imperfect as it may be. Recommended. (I can't believe I'm giving it five stars. I was aiming for four... but no, it's four-plus, and rounding up seems fair).

Today's long count date is 13.0.8.17.1 in the Mayan calendar system. Dec 21st 2012 was 13.0.0.0.0, the end of the supposed last cycle of the Mayan calendar, by some believed to be the end of the world. On that day in The Actual Star a young woman follows her inner voice and descends into an ancient Maya cave. Her story will bloom into a new world order and religion centuries later, in the futuristic world that emerges after climate catastrophes. The novels follows three timelines millennia apart (1012, 2012, 3012), connecting from royal siblings at the collapse of the Maya civilization to a tourist in present day following her ancestral roots, to an utopian civilization of travelers who survive on a strict ruleset forbidding them to settle and to amass property. The complementary forces and dualities of twins, inspired by the Maya Hero Twins, are at the heart of the story. This is a story about power, sacrifice, ritual trance, the underworld, belonging, and belief systems. This novel toys with mysticism and reincarnation AND YET I loved it! This goes to Byrne's wonderful, immersive storytelling and complex, smart world-building (in fact the extensive glossary for the future world at the end convinced me to round this 4.5 read up to 5). Absolutely worth the long wait since [b:The Girl in the Road 18297954 The Girl in the Road Monica Byrne https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1379897131l/18297954.SY75.jpg 25782502]! In addition, the acknowledgement section at the end is full of intriguing and inspiring book recommendations, which I will have to all look up now.

The plot is good, it could have even been great but the book is ruined by SO MUCH cringe.

There are so many contemporary social agendas scattered throughout the text it's really hard to stay engaged with the plot at all.

Among them:
* whiteness, the great evil (“four great evils: capitalism, whiteness, patriarchy, nationalism.”)
* lotssss of starry-eyed anti-colonialism
* the tourist gaze (lol)
* fetishization of “other ways of knowing”
* lots of anti/post capitalism represented as some type of very late stage Marxian utopia (ie. incompatible with human nature)
* lots of fat studies influence. “Noticing how her potbelly hung over the hem of her spandex” is said with a straight face and supposed to be sexy...
* lots of pro-prostitution in the most naive way imaginable. “I remember what you said in the van,” he said, “that you have many boyfriends.” “Oh sí, soy una puta también,” she said. He was surprised that she referred to herself as such—not as a joke, but with pride”
* lots of “fun” new pronouns and not in the cool Le Guin way.
* and a genderless future utopia that's basically Brave New World, but glorified instead of cautionary
* x endings for Latinos a thousand years in the future (hermanix lol)
* over-emphasis on consent in “romantic” scenes. “She reviewed how many she'd made love to before her ai warned her she was unable to consent. Four!”
* hyper sex positivity. The main focus of the book is sex. Consensual sex is always good and nobody every gets hurt or jealous no matter what. On top of it all, the sex scenes are... embarrassingly bad. I was going to quote some but I can't bring myself to do it.
* strange obsession with justifying and explaining self-cutting
* weird incest that almost felt glorified in a Game of Thrones type way.

It's not even that I necessarily even oppose most of those agendas. I expected to be “challenged” by it and was hoping to learn from something different from my standard fare. The problem is that they're so overt, so omnipresent, and so distracting. For a book with no aliens, the characters all seem to be human adjacent, but not quite human. I was unable to finish it. It was a 19 hour audiobook and I bailed at 17 hours.

My thoughts here:

http://www.nerds-feather.com/2021/10/microreview-book-actual-star-by-monica.html