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A Memory Called Empire Q9: Teixcalaan
Teixcalaan. The Empire / The World / The City. Container of all things.
There's a lot in this book, and many things I couldn't frame into neat discussion starters.
- Violence, and its role in diplomacy and politics.
- Identity, belonging, exile, and bridging gaps between cultures.
- Gender identity and gender roles
- Privilege and aristocracy
- Individuals vs groups, diversity vs homogeneity
What else should we talk about?
Comments
Something that probably fits here is a thought that occurred to me over the weekend. For all that I really loved the book (have I mentioned that elsewhere?
) it did occur to me that I didn't have much of an emotional reaction to it. I can't remember any parts which I found deeply moving. Maybe that's elated to what @Apocryphal said about the lack of quotable parts?
Other thoughts here: you mentioned individual vs group. In one sense the book ought to have been a simple individualistic society (Stationer) meets groupish one (Teixcalaan)... but it wasn't. The people in Teixcalaan come over as strongly diverse individuals (except for the Sunlit, of course) and the people on Lsel are organised into what you might call guilds. Again it's a case of each culture carries the germ of the opposite one within it.
Exile - an interesting point to bring up. It reminds me a bit of some Chinese literature (again, a possible model for Teixcalaan culture) in which diplomatic exile from the power and culture of the city is often a major theme.
Oddly I have been reading (with a local book group here in the village) another book which also tries to tackle the issue of language and rhetoric at its core - it also has a lesbian relationship between two of the main characters, and was also written by a woman author. But I found that book (it's called The Liars Dictionary for anyone interested, though I cannot in all conscience recommend it) very dull and prosaic compared to A Memory Called Empire and I have been trying to think through why that is the case. Partly it's that the world-building here is just so much better - Liars Dictionary is set in London in two time periods, Victorian and contemporary, and I suppose the author felt she did not need to spend much if any time building the world. But partly that the language of the book, and the way language is used to convey something of the central idea, is again so much better in Empire.