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UBC: Troll: A Love Story
Nov. 28th, 2007 08:12 amSinisalo, Johanna. Troll: A Love Story. Originally published as Not Before Dark in the UK and as something with a heck of a lot of รค's in Finnish; as I don't have my copy with me, I cannot transcribe it at the moment. Won the Tiptree in 2004.
And I have to admit, I am a little puzzled thereby.
( spoilers and possibly more crabbiness than the book deserves )
So, leaving aside the expectations engendered (so to speak) by the Tiptree and then not met, my problem with Troll is the problem I'm finding with more and more fantasy and science fiction these days, which is that the novel stops just as the story gets interesting. Or, in other words, a lot of sf is about setting up a catastrophe in the same way a joke is about setting up a punchline. Ergo, once we get to the catastrophe, we stop. But, see, the interesting part of a story is what happens after the catastrophic punchline, when the protagonist has to pick him- or herself up off the floor and figure out what to do next. That's the hard part, both to live and to write, but by the same token, it's the part that matters. It's the part that would force Sinisalo's characters--Angel, Spider, Palomita--to become real people, queens (to borrow a metaphor from Carroll which has its own gendered and sexualized freight when applied out of the context of chess) instead of pawns.
And I have to admit, I am a little puzzled thereby.
( spoilers and possibly more crabbiness than the book deserves )So, leaving aside the expectations engendered (so to speak) by the Tiptree and then not met, my problem with Troll is the problem I'm finding with more and more fantasy and science fiction these days, which is that the novel stops just as the story gets interesting. Or, in other words, a lot of sf is about setting up a catastrophe in the same way a joke is about setting up a punchline. Ergo, once we get to the catastrophe, we stop. But, see, the interesting part of a story is what happens after the catastrophic punchline, when the protagonist has to pick him- or herself up off the floor and figure out what to do next. That's the hard part, both to live and to write, but by the same token, it's the part that matters. It's the part that would force Sinisalo's characters--Angel, Spider, Palomita--to become real people, queens (to borrow a metaphor from Carroll which has its own gendered and sexualized freight when applied out of the context of chess) instead of pawns.
