KINGS reasonable in Canada
Dec. 8th, 2007 10:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellenkushnerMy Bantam editor, Anne Groell, wrote to tell me that The Fall of the Kings has just gone back to press for another printing of many more copies - hurray! - and with a new, lower cover price in Canadian loonies, reflecting the US$ miserable fall against world currencies (- she didn't say that. I said that.).
Coincidentally (OK, actually while lazily googling my own damn webpage) I just came across a well-written, thoughtful, deep, and - I think - accurate review of The Fall of the Kings, written a couple years after the book came out by the admirable Robert M. Tilendis for Rambles.net. Here are some of my favorite bits - or you can read the whole review here.
In The Fall of the Kings, Kushner and her collaborator, Delia Sherman . . . avoid the usual devices of heroic fantasy; 'magic' is a matter of the workings of myth on the minds of men, making those places within each of us that respond to those motifs and stories that resonate in our deepest levels of engagement the real substance of the story.
....[Campion & St Cloud's] affair, as seems to be the rule among Kushner's protagonists, is a highly charged, tempestuous, often cruel relationship, qualities which are only emphasized as St. Cloud's researches into the history of the Kings and their wizards bring the myth and its magic more and more to the forefront of the story and he and Theron begin to take on their roles as priest and sacrifice. (In light of the increasing tendency to attempt the use of elements of modern paganism in contemporary fantasy -- usually with the result of trivializing the former with no appreciable gain to the latter -- that Kushner and Sherman have cut to the heart of the matter, not in their use of a central myth in itself, but in the color and structure they assign it and the depth that it brings to their story, only sets a new standard for the examination of religion and its conflicts in the genre.) [Cool! - ek]
....'What is this book about?' Ultimately, The Fall of the Kings is about itself, about its richness and complexity, its passages of uncomfortable intensity and dream-laden mythic potency, its juxtapositions of substance and triviality, and about the resolution of where our arbitrary but rational reality meets the coherent and unreasonable legacy of the past.
As![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
deliasherman, looking reading over my shoulder, just sighed, "Wow! That's the novel we were trying to write!"
Coincidentally (OK, actually while lazily googling my own damn webpage) I just came across a well-written, thoughtful, deep, and - I think - accurate review of The Fall of the Kings, written a couple years after the book came out by the admirable Robert M. Tilendis for Rambles.net. Here are some of my favorite bits - or you can read the whole review here.
In The Fall of the Kings, Kushner and her collaborator, Delia Sherman . . . avoid the usual devices of heroic fantasy; 'magic' is a matter of the workings of myth on the minds of men, making those places within each of us that respond to those motifs and stories that resonate in our deepest levels of engagement the real substance of the story.
....[Campion & St Cloud's] affair, as seems to be the rule among Kushner's protagonists, is a highly charged, tempestuous, often cruel relationship, qualities which are only emphasized as St. Cloud's researches into the history of the Kings and their wizards bring the myth and its magic more and more to the forefront of the story and he and Theron begin to take on their roles as priest and sacrifice. (In light of the increasing tendency to attempt the use of elements of modern paganism in contemporary fantasy -- usually with the result of trivializing the former with no appreciable gain to the latter -- that Kushner and Sherman have cut to the heart of the matter, not in their use of a central myth in itself, but in the color and structure they assign it and the depth that it brings to their story, only sets a new standard for the examination of religion and its conflicts in the genre.) [Cool! - ek]
....'What is this book about?' Ultimately, The Fall of the Kings is about itself, about its richness and complexity, its passages of uncomfortable intensity and dream-laden mythic potency, its juxtapositions of substance and triviality, and about the resolution of where our arbitrary but rational reality meets the coherent and unreasonable legacy of the past.
As
deliasherman, looking reading over my shoulder, just sighed, "Wow! That's the novel we were trying to write!"![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-12-08 04:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-08 05:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-08 05:26 pm (UTC)Obviously, you need to write a NEW essay. *g*
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Date: 2007-12-08 05:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-09 04:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-08 04:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-08 08:55 pm (UTC)will you be my new best friends?
love, miep
ps. you could even drop by for cookies when you're in town...
pps/
that's what I would have said about it, too, if I were good at that sort of writing.
ppss.
how many posts can a postscript have?
no subject
Date: 2007-12-08 09:10 pm (UTC)If a postscript did script posts?
no subject
Date: 2007-12-09 12:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-09 02:19 am (UTC)And in a postscript of my own, a friend of mine posted something the other day about a book she was reading, and said of the author: "she suggests that a lot of writing about history has devolved into writing about the history of history -- historians reviewing each other's theories and pronouncements, rather than going back to contemporary original sources for the events they're writing about." And I immediately thought about all the scholarly disputes in Fall of the Kings.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-09 04:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-09 01:06 am (UTC)a postscript did script such posts as it did post..
eh. I lost it.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-09 04:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-09 12:49 am (UTC)I'm with on the "wish I coulda said that" - especially in interviews, where what I *meant* to say was, "Yes, well, our book is really about the resolution of where our arbitrary but rational reality meets the coherent and unreasonable legacy of the past" but never quite made it past "Well, um...It's about how if you ignore the past it comes up and bites you on the butt." Yes, I'm afraid that is a direct quote. By Me.
P.S. Can we be Friends & Evil Overlords, too?
P.P.S. Seeing that you're already our Appointed Minion and all....
no subject
Date: 2007-12-09 01:05 am (UTC)I thnk it could work, the whole bff/evil overlord combo....
your interview do-over wish sounds like my classroom do-over wish, where I am kind and witty and utterly firm, like mary poppins, all the time.
more often, I say, "because I'm the teacher, and I said so."
no subject
Date: 2007-12-09 04:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-08 11:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-09 04:43 pm (UTC)