The Years of Rice and Salt

A clever alternative history epic that is very delightful, very dense, and VERY KSR. And I very love KSR, though to be fair YMMV. The book has two big ideas:
1. It imagines a world where ALL Europeans (not just 33%) die off from the bubonic plague.
2. It imagines a world where Tibetan Buddhism is literally true (like I did once! like George Saunders did once!).

I had heard of this book, and Idea #1, long ago, and was always intrigued about how KSR would play it out. I didn't know about Idea #2 until like three months ago, and I was less intrigued by it. My post-read thoughts are: Idea #2 is strangely delightful! Enough to overshadow Idea #1 often!

Plot summary: So this book is LONG. It's DENSE. By design, it covers multiple lifetimes of multiple characters. Or just a handful of characters, if you count the whole reincarnating-souls business. The two main characters are the क (“ka”) and ब (“ba”) characters - YES I WENT THERE, I WENT ALL DEVANAGARI UP IN THIS REVIEW. But when KSR started dropping his gigantic meta explanations of the Book You Have Just Read in the final chapters of the book, and he mentioned the “ka” and “ba”, I was like, “OMG ROBERTO CALASSO'S KA! THE MYSTICISM OF KA!” (I have not actually read Roberto Calasso's book yet.) Anyway, point is, I think KSR is a smart dude and so was very intentional in the consonants he chose for his angry/indignant firebrand “ka” and his salt-o-the-earth, easy-going “ba” protagonists. Also, fun fact: ka is the first letter you learn when learning Hindi! Or the first one I did anyway.

Okay, ANYWAY, so the book opens with a friendly Mongolian warrior, Bold ( ब/ba!), coming down the steppes to find all the Magyar kingdom (Hungarians) dead, many lying ghoulishly dead in the middle of their Budapest square. Bold is horrified and, after wandering down through the Balkans, gets captured by Arab slave traders, where he meets Kyu ( क/ka!), a young African who's been enslaved. They get carted off to China, Kyu is castrated and turned into a palace eunuch, eventually shit hits the fan (hey, this book IS Buddhist).

Bardo intermission 1.

The rest of the book is much of the same structure, as we hop through the centuries, and as the “ka” and “ba” souls are reincarnated again and again: as pirates, as widows, as Sufi mystics, as scientists auguring an Age of Reason in Samarkand, as generals, as samurai, as a tiger (!), and so on. There are a few other reincarnating souls who always pop up too, and this group form the “jati” (caste?! I read it more as a “jodi”/जोड़ी/multi-lifetime pairing). After every lifetime, they all rendezvous in the bardo, where they usually argue and bicker, remembering every past life, lamenting the samsara (cycle of death/rebirth) and vowing to get better.

So this book is fun and imaginative and super smart. It is also marred by imperfections - in other words, it's classic KSR!! Gosh, I love KSR books. Anyway, the smart bits:
- I had a major dharma awakening moment of myself reading this when I was like, omg, reincarnation == living many lives == empathizing with many lives == compassion for all, omg.
- The inevitability of history. Much of the major notes of our history (a world war, an Age of Reason/Enlightenment, colonialism, industrialization, a Karl Marx analog, an Isaac Newton analog) are the same, and feel inevitable.
- The above made me think of how scientific breakthroughs often coincide: as two great minds from a generation, pushing against the same boundary of contemporary scientific knowledge, break through in the same way. Inevitable!
- Most interesting, and heartbreaking, of course, was the NON-destruction of the New World, and the counterfactual of Incas and Haudenosaunee societies surviving, thriving and being powerful playersin a 21st century analog. I read this book over Columbus Day/Indigenous People's Day, and thought a lot about Charles Mann's book during this, and... yeah. It was interesting, and devastating.
- Like Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which I consider one of the best alt histories of ALL TIME (both real and alt!!!), KSR does a fun/interesting job of weaving in the styles of each alt historical period (Victorian seances, Mughal court intrigues, dadaist post-war cafe culture) into the chapters. This is not AS meta and brilliant as Clarke, but it was there and fun.

Okay, now the dumb/not so great stuff:
- Oh man, the portrayal of Islam was... well, FRAUGHT sometimes. I mean, I just felt a bit uncomfortable when the post-war Islamic states are suffering under huge reparation payments, causing hyper-inflation, and I was like, “oh snap, KSR, do not make Islam the alt history Nazis!” And there's looots of stuff about the veil and poor oppressed Muslim ladies and stuff, and Akbar is portrayed as NOT an enlightened multi-faith tolerant ruler but kinda loose-cannon despot. I dunno. The positive/best notes of Islam are the Sufi mystics, esp. Rumi (a fave of earth mothers such as myself), and even then KSR calls Rumi “Buddhist in all but name”, which - again - fraughtness?
- KSR looooooves angry, indignant ladies. See: Maya from Red Mars, Swan from 2312, that one lady from Aurora. It's like, okay, fine. He likes ladies who are basically walking “if you're not mad, you're not paying attention” bumper stickers. I, personally, find that personality type a LITTLE TIRESOME. And so, the “ka” character - who often shows up as an angry lady - was, ooooof.
- TALKY! KSR also loves intellectual discussions, where characters talk through BIG IDEAS, about capitalism! oppression! history! Basically I imagine these to be KSR's #showerthoughts, which is fine, and mostly interesting, but also sometimes indulgent, and OKAY OKAY WE GET IT WE HAVE NOT YET BEEN SUBLIMATED INTO THE POST-CAPITALIST UTOPIA.
- Yo, I found the “War of the Asuras” chapter - about the “long war”/WW1 analog - oddly lazy!?! That was a major turning point in the book's alt history, and it felt so sloppy?!
- Also, some of the middle bits went VERY INFODUMPY, but I survived.

Overall, not perfect, but generally wonderful.