Slightly Off Center

I've had this post written and locked for over 2.5 hours, hoping that the next snowflake_challenge prompt would be posted so that I could add it here and then unlock things, but it's getting to the point in the day when I close all screens and step away from the internet, the next prompt is still not posted, so I'm going to unlock things now and update ... who knows when?

We were promised apocalyptic storms and snow all weekend, but apart from a bit of sleet on the ground yesterday, and now some wind that keeps blowing our green bin out of the front garden and onto the footpath, the dire warnings were not necessary in this part of the world. Nevertheless, it was a weekend for hunkering down at home, although I was out at the sports centre for my classes yesterday and my swim this morning (nearly slipping over on the ice as I walked there both days), and Matthias and I did a quick run into town to return a bunch of library books this morning. The heating has been on almost constantly all week, and I supplemented it last night with a fire in the wood-burning stove. I added branches from the Christmas wreath, and the whole living room smelt of pine sap.

The combination of global politics and some difficult stuff with my family back in Australia have rendered me incapable of getting to sleep without watching dialogue-free cottagecore videos of Youtubers gardening, cooking and cleaning their cosy houses, but between that, and deliberately selecting yoga classes which feature kittens (my yoga teacher fosters cats, and tends to foster mother cats with new kittens when she does so), and ruthless avoidance of social media and news websites, I'm doing about as well as I can to manage the situation.

Last night Matthias and I picked the Guillermo del Toro Frankenstein adaptation for our Saturday movie night. It's been over twenty years since I read Shelley's novel, but as far as I could remember, this was a pretty straight adaptation — some characters fleshed out and some details added, but in essence faithful to the ideas of the source material, unsubtle biblical and birth and death metaphors and Victoriana included. This was a real labour of love for del Toro, and he and the cast clearly had a fantastic time bringing the story to life.

This week's reading was two novels, and a couple of SFF short stories, one of which I found bafflingly unsatisfying (the characters' choices and motivations seemed to boil down to 'I love you so I'm going to order my underlings to stop torturing you' and 'I love you so I'm going to forgive the fact that your underlings tortured me and we are on opposites sides in a cosmic battle, and clearly your side is in the right'), the other of which I found hauntingly folkloric and charming.

The first of the novels was The Lantern Bearers, as I continue to make my way through Rosemary Sutcliff's works for the first time. This one is set at the moment in which the last Roman legions are withdrawn from Britain; our point-of-view character is a legionary who opts to desert rather than forsake his family and their farm in Britain, and then barely survives defending said family and farm against Saxon raiders, in an attack in which his father and most of their employees (their farm does not use slave labour) are killed, the farm is destroyed, and his sister is carried off by the raiders and later goes on to marry one of them and bear his child (with, it is assumed, not much choice in the matter). Aquila — the protagonist — is left embittered and broken, unmoored in the aftermath, drifting into the orbit of the remnants of the Romano-British order, pushed out into what is now Wales, struggling to hold back the tide. Here we are treated both to a retelling of some Welsh Arthuriana, and also a very painful personal story of the limits of revenge as a motivating factor, and how to survive and carve out a life when you are hollowed out by grief and loss. I liked it a lot, but found in this book that Sutcliff's appparent absolute lack of interest in the interior lives of women almost tipped over at times into actual misogyny, which I had to essentially push aside and ignore in order to enjoy and appreciate the story she was interested in telling.

Also, sentiments like:

'I sometimes think we stand at sunset. It may be that the night will close over us in the end, but I believe that morning will come again. Morning always grows again out of the darkness, though maybe not for the people who saw the sun go down. We are the Lantern Bearers, my friend; for us to keep something burning, to carry what light we can forward into the darkness and the wind.'

are almost painfully relevant but also excruciatingly optimistic, given the state of the world. Ooof.

Finally, I picked up The Silver Bone (Andrey Kurkov, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk), the first in a series of historical mystery novels set in post-First World War Kyiv. This one takes place in 1919, at a point when the city kept changing hands between White Russian, Red Army, and Ukrainian nationalist control, and Kyiv residents are just trying to keep their heads down and survive. Kurkov strikes a great balance between conveying both the terror (the novel begins with the protagonist's father's death before his eyes at the hands of a bayonet-wielding Cossack, an attack which he survives but costs him his ear), and the absurdity (all these different armies keep issuing different documentation and currency and the population struggles to know what to use, in the end settling on bartering things like fuel, salt and sugar, which at least remain useful no matter who is in charge). Via a convoluted series of almost comedic events, Samson (the protagonist) falls into a job working with the police while Kyiv is under shaky Soviet control, and, after overhearing (via an almost magical realist mechanism) the nefarious plans of a pair of Red Army soldiers who have commandeered most of his flat, he has his first case to crack. There's also a charming subplot about Samson's halting courtship of Nadezhda, an earnest, idealistic young woman who works in the Soviet bureau of statistics. In terms of historical mysteries, I would say this is heavier on the history and lighter on the mystery — a great evocation of a city and its people experiencing (as they are also, tragically, now) turbulent change. I'm very much looking forward to the following books in the series.

I'm going to spend the rest of the afternoon watching the rain on the windows and the wood pigeons frolicking in the hedgerows over the road, as the weekend draws to its grey, windy close.