16 Follower
Do you know that feeling of jealousy when listening to a native speaker, who so effortlessly performs this language that you struggled so bad to learn and still feel like you will never live up to the spoken quality of a native, even though your fluent? And after that the embarrassment of being jealous off something like this? Something the native speaker can’t even change? I’ve felt like that a lot of times. My English is good, but I’m still so far away from being as good as a native speaker and maybe that day will never come and this book actually made it very obvious for me. It taught me about my ignorance. It made me feel literally stupid at times because I had to look up so many words, but here comes the twist: Exactly that feeling made me give this book five stars and love it like I do. These moments made me sympathise with the main character even more, because she feels this exact same feeling. She’s caught up in her fascination for a culture, a people, a language, and learns and studies and memorises their books, their poetry, but once she gets there, apart from the obvious things that go wrong, she realises how much she is different from them, how much this language is designed for foreigners to feel like a foreigner. She is stuck in this cycle of jealousy, because she wants to use this language so effortlessly and beautifully as the Teixcalaanli do, but she isn’t one of them and as such she will never master it like they have. Her struggle feels real and in return brings life to the book, more than all of the beautiful descriptions of flowers and ornaments and clothing. Those were greatly appreciated as well of course, but this cultural barrier between the Stationers and the Teixcalaanli is a masterpiece. Other than that, this book managed to surprise me with its’ ending. That’s something I haven’t experienced in quite a while, either because it was obvious or I didn’t care. The end of A Memory called Empire on the other hand I did care about a lot. „How wide is the Teixcalaanli concept of ‘you’?“ This is a frequently asked question in this book and at first I thought it was an unnecessary question, because everything seemed logical to me. There is Mahit and then there is the imago machine, which introduces the recorded personality aka memories and personality of another person into Mahits mind. I thought it was clear, where Mahit ended and Yskander began, but that changed throughout the story, as I began to think of Yskander a an individual mind, a person trapped within a person and I came to wonder, maybe I understand something the wrong way. How alive is he really? How much does he feel like himself? Can he feel trapped and can he go crazy in the darkness and loneliness of being shut off of Mahit… An intriguing question and I have asked myself the same thing multiple times, while reading this book, but on a different level, as compared to Three Seagrass or any other Teixcalaanli citizens. My version of this question is: How alive is the imago inside someone’s imago machine? How much of their own individual „you“ do they still feel? Does Yskander know how long he is locked out off Mahits mind? Does he feel alone? Will he go mad? Can he go mad? Does he feel at all? I hope I will get more information in Part 2… I would recommend this to anyone looking for a decent Science Fiction read, that does not have too much of science in it, but a lot of plot to unravel. For me personally this was a five star book, no doubt about it.
26. Aug. 2024
Do you know that feeling of jealousy when listening to a native speaker, who so effortlessly performs this language that you struggled so bad to learn and still feel like you will never live up to the spoken quality of a native, even though your fluent? And after that the embarrassment of being jealous off something like this? Something the native speaker can’t even change? I’ve felt like that a lot of times. My English is good, but I’m still so far away from being as good as a native speaker and maybe that day will never come and this book actually made it very obvious for me. It taught me about my ignorance. It made me feel literally stupid at times because I had to look up so many words, but here comes the twist: Exactly that feeling made me give this book five stars and love it like I do. These moments made me sympathise with the main character even more, because she feels this exact same feeling. She’s caught up in her fascination for a culture, a people, a language, and learns and studies and memorises their books, their poetry, but once she gets there, apart from the obvious things that go wrong, she realises how much she is different from them, how much this language is designed for foreigners to feel like a foreigner. She is stuck in this cycle of jealousy, because she wants to use this language so effortlessly and beautifully as the Teixcalaanli do, but she isn’t one of them and as such she will never master it like they have. Her struggle feels real and in return brings life to the book, more than all of the beautiful descriptions of flowers and ornaments and clothing. Those were greatly appreciated as well of course, but this cultural barrier between the Stationers and the Teixcalaanli is a masterpiece. Other than that, this book managed to surprise me with its’ ending. That’s something I haven’t experienced in quite a while, either because it was obvious or I didn’t care. The end of A Memory called Empire on the other hand I did care about a lot. „How wide is the Teixcalaanli concept of ‘you’?“ This is a frequently asked question in this book and at first I thought it was an unnecessary question, because everything seemed logical to me. There is Mahit and then there is the imago machine, which introduces the recorded personality aka memories and personality of another person into Mahits mind. I thought it was clear, where Mahit ended and Yskander began, but that changed throughout the story, as I began to think of Yskander a an individual mind, a person trapped within a person and I came to wonder, maybe I understand something the wrong way. How alive is he really? How much does he feel like himself? Can he feel trapped and can he go crazy in the darkness and loneliness of being shut off of Mahit… An intriguing question and I have asked myself the same thing multiple times, while reading this book, but on a different level, as compared to Three Seagrass or any other Teixcalaanli citizens. My version of this question is: How alive is the imago inside someone’s imago machine? How much of their own individual „you“ do they still feel? Does Yskander know how long he is locked out off Mahits mind? Does he feel alone? Will he go mad? Can he go mad? Does he feel at all? I hope I will get more information in Part 2… I would recommend this to anyone looking for a decent Science Fiction read, that does not have too much of science in it, but a lot of plot to unravel. For me personally this was a five star book, no doubt about it.
26. Aug. 2024
