Ancillary Justice. Anne Leckie

Ancillary Justice is a science fiction novel, and the first part of the Imperial Radch Trilogy by Ann Leckie. In this novel, a former ancillary who calls herself Breq is determined to assassinate the Lord Anaander Mianaai of the Radch Empire in revenge for killing her commander, Captain Awn, some 20 years before. When the novel opens, Breq has come to the wintry planet of Nilt. There, she stumbles across a former ship officer named Seivarden Vendaai with whom she had briefly worked. Vendaai has been brutally beaten up, so Breq administers medical treatment and provides shelter. Breq has a difficult time understanding why, because until 20 years ago, she had served the starship Justice of Toren as both part of its Artificial Intelligence system and an ancillary (a human with surgical implants to create a mindless slave soldier), where she had no free will to do such things. Breq has quickly become a believer in human free will, even if she cannot understand why she does the things she does, sometimes.

Breq learns that Vendaai has been frozen for 1,000 years, and on coming out of sleep, discovers how dramatically the Radchaai Empire has changed. For example, Vendaai’s own noble family now no longer exists, while the Radchaai have entered into an embarrassing non-aggression treaty with the alien Presger Empire. Vendaai, reeling from the changes she experienced during the glory days of the Empire, has turned to drink and drugs. With Vendaai in tow, Breq seeks out a doctor and collector of ancient artifacts named Strigan, whom she believes to possess a rare gun not accounted for by the Radchaai. Breq explains to Strigan and to Vendaai that she wishes to assassinate the Lord of the Radch.

It is revealed that Breq, once both ancillary and AI system for the starship troop carrier Justice of Toren, was present during the last annexation and expansion of the Empire, of the planet Shis’urna. Breq, then known as the ancillary One Esk Nineteen, served as adjutant to Lieutenant Awn, who was tasked with keeping the postwar peace in the town of Ors. There, Awn and One Esk Nineteen uncovered a plot by the Lord Radch, who, like One Eask Nineteen, was split into numerous ancillaries to ensure a presence in all times and all places while avoiding assassination of her one true self. Some of the Lord’s ancillaries had taken on a reformist streak, which was unacceptable to the real Lord Radch.

Hoping to root out the traitor ancillaries, the Lord attempted to stage a bout of violence to determine how the other Lord ancillaries would respond. Awn and One Esk Nineteen uncovered the plot, which the Lord realized presented a problem. The Lord then accused Awn of reformism, and ordered One Esk Nineteen to kill Awn, then destroyed the Justice of Toren to ensure all data the ship had collected on the plot was destroyed. One Esk Nineteen was cut free by the Lord to continue to serve her in the long run. It was then that One Esk Nineteen, in command of most of her faculties, decided on revenge.

Back in the present, Strigan sells Breq the gun she has requested. Vendaai decides to accompany Breq on her quest, for Vendaai is inspired by Breq’s commitment to doing right. The two travel to Omaugh Station Palace where they are granted an audience with the Lord, and sped through security by an old friend of Awn’s, Skaaiat Awer. The Lord appears before them in the form of two ancillaries. By singing a song known only to Breq, one Lord is able to distinguish herself from the other, leading to Breq’s decision to shoot the other.

The Lord then confirms she is at war with herself, and decides to destroy the entire Station to prevent word of the civil war of her self from leaking out. Breq refuses to allow this to happen, and a massive fight breaks out between forces allied with several different ancillary versions of the Lord that all happen to be present at the Station. Breq is successful in her efforts to stop the Station from being destroyed, but now knows an all-out civil war has erupted. The real Lord of the Radch appoints Breq captain of the ship Mercy of Kalr, and names Breq as her moral advisor. Breq has no choice but to accept things as they are for the time being.

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

 

About

The Covenant of Water is the long-awaited new novel by Abraham Verghese, the author of Cutting for Stone. Published in 2009, Cutting for Stone became a literary phenomenon, selling over 1.5 million copies in the United States alone and remaining on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years.

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. The family is part of a Christian community that traces itself to the time of the apostles, but times are shifting, and the matriarch of this family, known as Big Ammachi—literally “Big Mother”—will witness unthinkable changes at home and at large over the span of her extraordinary life. All of Verghese’s great gifts are on display in this new work: there are astonishing scenes of medical ingenuity, fantastic moments of humor, a surprising and deeply moving story, and characters imbued with the essence of life.

A shimmering evocation of a lost India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. It is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.

Character List

Parambil

Big Ammachi, the twelve-year-old bride, who in time becomes the matriarch of the family and is named “Big” Ammachi by Jojo

Big Appachen, the widower, father of JoJo, who marries Big Ammachi

Thankamma, older sister of Big Appachen

JoJo, son of Big Appachen, born to his first wife, and stepson of Big Ammachi

Baby Mol, Big Ammachi’s first-born, a daughter

Philipose, Big Ammachi’s son

Shamuel, a member of the pulayar caste, whose family has worked for the Parambil family for generations. He is the most senior of the other pulayar.

Sara, Shamuel’s wife

Joppan, Shamuel’s son and classmate of Philipose

Ammini, Joppan’s wife

Damodaran (Damo), an elephant nursed back to health by Big Appachen

The Kaniyan, teacher and astrologer belonging to the kaniya caste

Georgie, Big Appachen’s nephew. He and Ranjan are the identical twin sons of Big Appachen’s oldest brother who cheated Big Appachen out of his inheritance

Dolly Kochamma, Georgie’s wife

Ranjan, Big Appachen’s nephew, twin of Georgie

Decency Kochamma, Ranjan’s wife

Odat Kochamma, a widowed lady who comes to stay with the family. She is Big Appachen’s distant cousin.

Mar Gregorios, born in 1848, a deceased bishop and first saint of the St. Thomas Christians in Kerala. His tomb in the Parumala Church draws worshippers from all over

Koshy Saar, a retired lecturer in English, who introduces Philipose to Moby-Dick and other novels

Broker Aniyan, a marriage matchmaker

Uplift Master, a clerk in Madras who returns to Parambil when his wife inherits her brother’s property

Shoshamma, Uplift Master’s wife and heir to her brother’s land in Parambil after he dies unexpectedly

“Manager” Kora, his father was a distant cousin of Big Appachen and he was given the title of “Manager” by the Maharajah. When Kora’s father was financially ruined by his son’s business failings, Big Appachen gifted the father land at Parambil. On the father’s death his son moved to Parambil to take over the land as “Manager”. He is the husband of Lizziamma (Lizzi) and father of Lenin Evermore.

Lizziamma (Lizzi), an orphaned girl, convent educated, who marries “Manager” Kora. She is Lenin’s mother, and a favorite of Big Ammachi

Lenin Evermore, Lizzi’s son

Baby Ninan, Elsie’s son

Anna Chedethi, a woman who comes to Parambil to help Big Ammachi and stays, becoming Mariamma’s wet nurse and later managing the Parambil kitchen and household

Hannah, Anna Chedethi’s daughter, deeply religious, she becomes a nun

Mariamma, Big Ammachi’s granddaughter

Podi, Joppan’s daughter

Cherian, owner of Cherian’s Tea Shop, located outside the Triple Yem Hospital

Right Reverend Rory McGillicutty of Corpus Christi, Texas. A guest speaker at the Maramon Convention

Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.

 

Reimagining ordinary words for a deeper sense of belonging

The inspiration for Consolations was born in 2010 with an invitation from The Observer to write a short essay on regret. The limit for the piece was 300 words - barely enough, David exclaimed, for an Irishman to catch his breath. But he took up the challenge and met it with the full power of the poetic imagination, writing of regret’s haunting ability to make us appreciate just how high the stakes are in any human life, describing regret as “an elegy to lost possibilities, even in its brief annunciation.”

Over the next few years, David turned a poet’s eye for evocative imagery and a philosopher’s reflection on meaning and context toward 52 ordinary words - coincidentally and somehow appropriately, a deck of cards. Beginning with Alone, and concluding with Withdrawal, the collection inspires and nourishes, offering the deepest consolation a human being can experience - a profound sense of belonging and connection to the world.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

 

A Skillfully Composed Space Opera In 'Ancillary Justice'

October 8, 20137:00 AM ET

By 

Genevieve Valentine

Ancillary Justice

by Ann Leckie

Paperback, 409 pages

purchase

"My heart is a fish, hiding in the water-grass."

Breq has found someone in the snow: a stranger to everyone on this planet, a thousand years old, a relic out of time — but despite all that, Breq remembers.

Breq used to be the ship that carried them both.

The assured, gripping and stylish Ancillary Justice is, in its broadest strokes, the tale of an empire, and in its smallest a character study, and part of debut novelist Anne Leckie's achievement is how she handles her protagonists in both of those contexts.

Justice of Toren is a living ship far beyond AI, spending millennia carrying officers and troops for the Radchaai Empire's endless planetary annexations. Those troops are ancillaries — sometimes called corpse soldiers — reanimated bodies that now share a single consciousness and act as one. Breq was once the ancillary One Esk and the ship Justice of Toren. But now, separated in a moment of trauma, she's autonomous. It's a condition so rare no one suspects what she is.

It's an advantage: She's out to kill the Lord of the Radch, and her only hope is that no one remembers her.

Though framed like '70s grindhouse — there was a setup, and someone's out to clean the slate — things unfold studiously, reminiscent of the deliberation underscoring Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. (Several chapters take place during negotiations over a single gun.) Each character adds texture to the picture that slowly emerges: Skaaiat, cynical noble caught in political wheels; many-bodied dictator Anaander Minaai, Lord of the Radch; Awn, One Esk's last commander; and Seivarden, the dissolute exile she rescues, who joins her suicide mission.

Ancillary Justice is Ann Leckie's first novel.

missionphoto.org

The story moves in and out of perspectives and time periods, from the millennia-long view of Justice of Toren to the solitary Breq, looping this space opera from long history back to the immediately personal and highlighting Breq's double motives: Toren wants to disrupt a cycle of corruption; One Esk is out to revenge a friend.

It won't be easy. The universe of Ancillary Justice is complex, murky and difficult to navigate — no bad thing, as Leckie's deft sketches hint at worlds beyond, none of them neat. Most obvious are the linguistic disconnects: Breq's home tongue uses only "she," reinforcing her otherness as she constantly guesses at genders in other languages.

Then there are disconnects of culture when she returns to the heart of the Empire and contends with loaded expectations of dress and behavior. There are cruelties and power differentials between colonizers and colonized that make easy resolution impossible. And cleverly, personal disconnects that are never directly stated — because despite knowing thousands of protocols designed to smooth social interaction, Breq herself doesn't yet recognize her own emotional reactions.

Instead, her inner life thaws slowly, making for a protagonist who's sometimes oblique but never opaque; her fondness for singing is considered a quirk of programming, but there's a reason she thinks so often about a children's song of hidden hearts.

A space opera that skillfully handles both choruses and arias, Ancillary Justice is an absorbing thousand-year history, a poignant personal journey, and a welcome addition to the genre.

Genevieve Valentine is the author of Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti.

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The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

 

With its seven interrelated parts--rich in story, character, and imaginative range--"The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978) is the novel that brought Czech-born Milan Kundera his first big international success. Aaron Asher's new translation, commissioned and monitored by Kundera himself, conveys beautifully into English the nuances and the tone of the author's original text. " Part fairy tale, part literary criticism, part political tract, part musicology, and part autobiography" (as the New York Times described it), "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is, above all, the wonderfully integrated stories of men and women living in a world of public oppression and private longings, a world in which history may be rewritten overnight and in which love may fall victim to either political intrusion or personal betrayal. 

The seven parts of Kundera's novel explore different aspects of human existence in the twentieth century, particularly as they are affected by life in the police state of the narrator's fictionalized Bohemia. In 1971, three years after the Russian occupation of his homeland, Mirek--under surveillance by the not-so-secret police--seeks to retrieve his love letters from his former lover, Zdena. Marketa and her husband, Karel, must cope with Karel's increasingly childlike mother while at the same time dealing with the amoral Eva and memories of past desires. At a small French summer school, two American girls learn the lessons of laughter. Displaced to a provincial town in Western Europe, Tamina (" all the other stories are variations on her own story" ) urgently tries to retrieve memories of her husband and their past together in Bohemia, memories recorded in notebooks that she left behind at her mother-in-law's house in Prague. And forty-five-year-old Jan prepares to cross several borders--geographical, existential, erotic--for a new life in the United States.

Set in postwar Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the Stalinist purges of World War II, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is “a novel in the form of variations” that explores how totalitarianism affects individual and collective, national and personal, memories. Milan Kundera (1929– ) traces the interrelated lives of a handful of characters who are each trying to recover or banish poignant memories. Much of the novel is based on Kundera’s own knowledge of totalitarianism; following the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Kundera lost his teaching post at the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, saw his books removed from the shelves of public libraries, and was banned from publishing in his homeland.

Divided into seven parts, the first section of the novel follows Mirek, a once-celebrated researcher who has been forced to leave his job and is surrounded by undercover agents. The character observes that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Yet throughout the novel, Kundera demonstrates that historical revision occurs not only at a national level but in private, everyday life as well. Kundera alternates between presenting characters’ interior monologues and the narrator’s reflections on philosophical and theoretical questions that arise, including: What constitutes history? Where do memories adhere and how are they recovered? What are the origins and characteristics of laughter? As usual, he presents these brief narratives using flashbacks, authorial asides, and other frameworks. The novel is comprised of revealing episodes, often of a sexual nature, that function as studies of larger, pervasive themes.

Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère

 

Emmanuel Carrère is a renowned writer. After decades of emotional upheaval, he has begun to live successfully―he is healthy; he works; he loves. He practices meditation, striving to observe the world without evaluating it. In this state of heightened awareness, he sets out for a ten-day silent retreat in the French heartland, leaving his phone, his books, and his daily life behind. But he’s also gathering material for his next book, which he thinks will be a pleasant, useful introduction to yoga.

Four days later, there’s a tap on the window: something has happened. Forced to leave the retreat early, he returns to a Paris in crisis. Life is derailed. His city is in turmoil. His work-in-progress falters. His marriage begins to unravel, as does his entanglement with another woman. He wavers between opposites―between self-destruction and self-control; sanity and madness; elation and despair. The story he has told about himself falls away. And still, he continues to live.

This is a book about one man’s desire to get better, and to be better. It is laced with doubt, animated by the dangerous interplay between what is fiction and what is real. Loving, humorous, harrowing and profound, Yoga hurls us towards the outer edges of consciousness, where, finally, we can see things as they really are.

How We Live Is How We Die By Pema Chodron

 As much as we might try to resist, endings happen in every moment—the end of a breath, the end of a day, the end of a relationship, and ultimately the end of life. And accompanying each ending is a beginning, though it may be unclear what the beginning holds. In How We Live Is How We Die, Pema Chödrön shares her wisdom for working with this flow of life—learning to live with ease, joy, and compassion through uncertainty, embracing new beginnings, and ultimately preparing for death with curiosity and openness rather than fear.

Poignant for readers of all ages, her teachings on the bardos—a Tibetan term referring to a state of transition, including what happens between this life and the next—reveal their power and relevance at each moment of our lives. She also offers practical methods for transforming life’s most challenging emotions about change and uncertainty into a path of awakening and love. As she teaches, the more freedom we can find in our hearts and minds as we live this life, the more fearlessly we’ll be able to confront death and what lies beyond. In all, Pema provides readers with a master course in living life fully and compassionately in the shadow of death and change.

My Notes (EWR)

Her writing seems to reflect a lifetime of dedication to her practice. What comes through is that she took and takes her practice very seriously and wants to share what she has learned with others. There's a certain kind of earnest compassion that comes through. Wholesome is another word that comes to mind.

As I read the descriptions of the various Bárdos I found myself thinking once again of the similarities between Buddhism and Catholicism. In Catholicism it was heaven, hell, purgatory and limbo. In both cases the lessons are how you live your life now will determine what happens in the afterlife.

I was appreciative of the fact that she tackles head on the issue of reincarnation, which is mostly ignored in the Buddhist literature that I am familiar with. It's a challenging concept, full of contradictions, suppositions, what looks like some very active imaginations. She suggests a way to deal with it is to suspend judgment and open yourself up to whatever lessons you might derive. That was a good advice because it allowed me to suspend my skepticism long enough to read through the descriptions, despite the fact that they seem bizarre and otherworldly.

I have a hard time with lists: 4 of this, 5 of that, and I tend to skim over those descriptions without much consideration. Some of that may be that I already have a map in my head of how to categorize my life experiences, and it resists revision and learning a new system.

I was trouble by the amount of attention she spends on Chogyam Trumpga. Perhaps elsewhere in other books she deals with his less wholesome habits, alcohol and womanizing. But it raises for me a core issue: what do you do when you find out the people that you seek to admire and learn from have significant flaws. Call it the Woody Allen syndrome, there's a part of me that never feels quite the same about people after I'm exposed to their shadow side.

A couple of passages I’d like to discuss further:

“Ignorance” as a destructive emotion is a little harder to understand. It’s a dull, indifferent state of mind that actually contains a deep level of pain. It can express itself as being out of touch, being mentally lethargic, not caring what we’re feeling or what others are going through. When this state of mind dominates us, it can turn into depression.”

“The five buddhas and all the other brilliant appearances are not the product of our usual confused, dualistic mind. They come from our true nature, which is ineffable, unprejudiced, and nondual.”