Tag: literature

Books: There Are Rivers in the Sky, A Novel by Elif Shafak, 2024

It is an amazing, deeply moving, and very ambitious piece of literature.

The novel spans centuries while unfolding a parallel narrative set in Ancient Mesopotamia, Victorian England, modern London, and tracking the devastating story of the Yazidis genocide in Iraq and Kurdistan over several decades. This is not just a novel based on historical research. Shafak is able to morph her literary style to sound like Scheherezade when talking about Mesopotamia, or like Dickens when describing Victorian London which is quite a feat and requires talent! The most fascinating reading for me were the pages dedicated to Victorian London and the fictional character King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums (based on the real person George Smith, the Assyriologist credited with deciphering the cuneiform tablets and especially The Epic of Gilgamesh.) But of course, there were many more parts of the novel – from the description of 19 c. Istanbul to the lifestyle of a modern tattooist in London who drinks coffee with dried lavender leaves, that bring real jouissance of reading.

Another literary feat that this novel is able to pull off is the use of the metaphor of water – in its various forms. From the single drop of water falling on Emperor Ashurbanipal’s beard to the muddy waters of the Thames and the Tigris, and the tears of the main characters (abounding), the clouds and the underground rivers burried under the cement of big cities – the story of water which has its own DNA ties together the various narratives.

This is an example how a novel can be educating, expanding one’s knowledge of the world, compassionate, as well as promoting its own political agenda but also talented, written in a way so that language becomes the device of expanding your world and allowing you to discover your own humanity. But beware, a wave of sadness descends on the reader as she progresses through the book’s pages.

Books: Yesteryear, A Novel by Caro Claire Burke, 2026

This book was “workshopped” by film producers and Hollywood executives from its very first draft. As a result, it becomes a product of the very process it claims to criticize: marketing shapes creation itself, substance is overtaken by image, and the fake replaces the real. The Hollywood “influencers” behind the project manufacture a business product designed to appeal to a mass audience, and that audience is implied in every sentence. That is why the book’s politics feel so transparent.

The novel sets up a simplistic opposition between the “tradwife” and “the feminist” through Natalie and Reena, two characters constructed largely as clichés. Natalie is raised with conservative Christian values and wishes to become the perfect tradwife. Deeply unhappy, however, she builds an online influencer business around a fabricated image of idyllic family life on a traditional farm. Her supposedly Christian lifestyle is carefully produced for broadcast and, beneath the performance, proves abusive both to her children and to the people working around her.

Reena, meanwhile, is presented as the embodiment of modern feminism: promiscuous, detached from family life, and unable to succeed in her desired career because she is constantly undermined by the boys’ club around her. Both women are reduced to flattened cardboard characters.

Another contrast the novel exploits to advance its political message is the opposition between the fake tradwife lifestyle and the “real” life of a pioneer woman. Through its depiction of nineteenth-century rural America, the novel ultimately arrives at the predictable conclusion that modern women, unsurprisingly, have it better.

Because the book appears to have had “too many cooks,” the plot twists often feel confusing, with characters making arbitrary choices that do not emerge from any coherent inner logic. Natalie, for example, is the supposedly devout Christian girl, yet from the very beginning she is deeply cynical and frequently turns into the kind of “angry woman” the novel seems eager to critique elsewhere.

The book also tries to catalogue nearly every contemporary social issue imaginable: gender politics, child abuse, political campaigning, the MAGA movement, and even “mother’s little helper.” It wants to address everything and everyone, all while pushing an unmistakably clear agenda: the children who do not know what the “ocean” is and have never seen it are meant to symbolize people trapped within the Bible Belt — an extremely easy metaphor. Easy metaphors may serve propaganda, but they rarely serve literature.

As literature, the novel is quite boring. It could easily have been at least 150 pages shorter. Some sections — especially those depicting the hardships of the pioneer woman — read as though they were written by AI.

It would actually be interesting to see the novel’s original draft before the workshop process reshaped it. Perhaps, in that earlier version, the witty lines prevailed.