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A Desolation Called Peace
I finally got around to reading this book, the follow-up to A Memory Called Empire, and found it extraordinarily good. Beautifully crafted language, some fascinating world-building of different facets of the universe of the first book, and some fascinating plot ideas. Without (hopefully) giving away any spoilers, the novel explores multiple ways that individuals can share identity, memory, and self with one another. Some of the reviewers seem to have got hung up on the lesbian relationship aspects of the book, but that is only a single facet of the whole, making use of sexual intimacy as a parallel to other kinds of relational intimacy. It's hard to say which of the two I enjoyed more - Memory had a freshness about it whereas Desolation comes across as a more finely crafted piece. Anyway, I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoyed Memory.
Comments
I enjoyed Memory, even though I wasn’t able to join in the conversation, and I have Desolation in my to-read queue.
Thanks, @RichardAbbott - I'll probably read this one, too.
I read it immediately after Memory and enjoyed it immensely!
I've also read Desolation. It was good, but not as good as Memory, I thought. The main strength of Memory, I thought, was it it was set in the pressure cooker of high politics in Teixcalaan and everything related to that. Desolation was about an external threat, so removed some of that pressure and focus from the Teixcalaanli culture.
As for the same-sex relationship: there's absolutely no homophobia in the book. The relationship is about a romance and all the problems that surround it. The genders of the people are irrelevant, so that was good to see.
But it was also (again trying to not give stuff away) about exploring different ways of going beyond individuality and isolation, and it seemed to me that a same-sex relationship provided a better and more focused parallel to some of the other threads than a different-sex one might have been.
Indeed.