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9/8/10 10:49I'm late getting to Nnedi Okorafor's "Who Fears Death," and I must admit to buying it largely to spite Paul Di Filippo (WHY, in such a largely positive review, did he have to go for "Sisterhood of the traveling chastity girdle," to use "teenage girl" as a stick for beating a book that's very much not YA?) --
But he's right about one thing and I wish he would have given more space to this, because I think (only ~70 pages into the book) that perhaps Okorafor's greatest achievement here is in creating an idiom for fantasy that doesn't rely on the kind of writing that is formal and heroic when it's done well, and pretentious and overblown and just plain incorrect with thees and thous when it isn't. If we want to get past the kind of fantasy that is mostly concerned with kings and queens, I think, we have to get past the expectations of high formal prose -- without using language that could just as easily come from Poughkeepsie, to borrow Ursula Le Guin's bad example from The Language of the Night.
Okorafor's writing here is simple and precise and direct, the furthest thing from pretension, but so skilled that it manages to be both an intensely vivid and believable voice for a teenage girl, and something close to poetry.
I've faced a similar challenge in the novel that I'm writing -- to create a voice that is believably colloquial and not necessarily formally educated, but also isn't necessarily a fantasy calque of the style of contemporary chick-lit -- and it's not a little intimidating to see it done so well, but, oh, goodness. It's worth running out and buying it.
But he's right about one thing and I wish he would have given more space to this, because I think (only ~70 pages into the book) that perhaps Okorafor's greatest achievement here is in creating an idiom for fantasy that doesn't rely on the kind of writing that is formal and heroic when it's done well, and pretentious and overblown and just plain incorrect with thees and thous when it isn't. If we want to get past the kind of fantasy that is mostly concerned with kings and queens, I think, we have to get past the expectations of high formal prose -- without using language that could just as easily come from Poughkeepsie, to borrow Ursula Le Guin's bad example from The Language of the Night.
Okorafor's writing here is simple and precise and direct, the furthest thing from pretension, but so skilled that it manages to be both an intensely vivid and believable voice for a teenage girl, and something close to poetry.
I've faced a similar challenge in the novel that I'm writing -- to create a voice that is believably colloquial and not necessarily formally educated, but also isn't necessarily a fantasy calque of the style of contemporary chick-lit -- and it's not a little intimidating to see it done so well, but, oh, goodness. It's worth running out and buying it.
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