Michel nieva and his novel, dengue boy
We’ve read all magic forms in New Scientist Book Club from Octavia E. Butler’s classic slice of dystopian fiction, Parable of the soFor space research in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay. Michel Nieva’s Dengue boy (And this is not the article for you if you are you to read it: Spoilers in front!) Was something else right: a weird and technical vision of a saying in a flooded world where our perspective is a humanoid and homicidal mosquito.
There were parts of this novel that I loved, especially Nieva’s wild ingenuity in dreaming of his future world. This is a place where the Antarctic ice thawed in 2197 and where rising sea level means that the “Patagonia region oce, famous for its forests, lakes and glaciers, was transformed into a disjoinated trace of small, burning hot islands”.
It is a place where thanks to “the overall deforestation of the Amazon and all proposed in China and Africa, hundreds of thousands of previously not previously recorded viruses were performing every year”. And where humanity’s endless and awness is evidence means that humans are now dealing with the economic virus index. Driven by quantum computers, this is “capable of not only determining with 99.99% powercy that these viruses would detach a new pandemic, but also to gather shares in the companies that are likely to benefit from their effects and offer them up to the market’s hotcakes”. Brilliant idea!
I also think that nieva’s writing (skillfully translated by Rahul Berry) occasionally jumps to elevated levels. At one point, our protagonist is early to school (because she can fly there, unlike her classmates who are smartly in traffic). She has to “wait there, complete still, for several minutes, hours, even, not known what to do with excessive corporal.” Excessive Corporality! What a brilliant appropriate description of this miserable mosquito.
There is an unbearable poiganance that has created with me since completed, in Nieva’s vision of a large Icberg gallery where the super-rich can go to see bits of old ice flight. “You couldn’t go through the Great Iceberg Gallery and not feel the sudden weight of the world in its infacy. A relic of true planetary jewels, its overall age was greater the one for all humanity.
And I can only admire Nieva’s virtuosity by thinking of yourself in a mosquito. I think he largely pills this off, and I enjoyed how my sympathy half would be with our “stubborn homicidal” protagonist, and half were severely exposed by her actions.
Some of you also saw a lot of positive in the novel. “When I’m the world out, this South American magical realism is rather than science fiction, I enjoy it (big fan of Gabriel García Márquez, Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco). It’s a completely different genre,” Emma Weisblatt wrote at Book Club Facebook Group, where is from. “It’s weird, surreal and allegorical, and I think these expressions work quite well.”
For Terry James, the start of the book was difficulty as it requires a lot of suspension of dibelief to accept Nieva’s mosquito (and its unlikely size) – and then you have to tackle the “rough language”. But Terry was glad he continued to go. “The more I read, the more I enjoyed it. I found the literary technique to reveal the interior struggle for the poor together with the absurd wealth, private and lavish extravagance of the rich as extremely effective,” he wrote. “This book is creative.”
I think David Jones spiked it when he said it was “not comfortable to read”, but he “actually quite enjoyed it”. “It is a very dystopian satirical and quite great view of the future. One day to read and one day to digest how I felt,” he wrote.
But – and maybe it’s because I’m not a connoisseur of Steampunk, as the novel is described on its cover – I also found a lot to dislike. The “excessive corporality” that I then enjoyed in the mosquito comes out in various scenes of violence and sexual immersion that I found difficult to read. I’m a Stephen King fan – I don’t mind a bit of horror and gore. But I didn’t really understand what Abunance of Vulgarity B3 I hated the sheep! Really hated them! (Some may say: It was the poenget, but for me it was a point I wasn’t eager to see made.)
And I found the parts of the novel when our mosquito was out on its bloody adventures far more compelling than Borges-Esque “Computer Games in a Computer Game” that we go to later. It was the wrong side of surreal for me or I just didn’t get it. Terry James also questioned the “Mighty Anarch” component of the story and failed to understand any meaning in it. “I call this kind of ideology pseudo-intellectual because it sounds very smart is not meaningful in a holistic, integrated system,” he wrote.
Overall, for me, this was not a book I would return to, and I was always most of our members also negative than positive on this one. Judith Lazell found it “disappointing”. “Free sexual fantasy and undeveloped figures; explicit violence and rebellion. Maybe it was the poenget,” she was – though she did it nievas “Description of the local environment [was] Effective in evoking an awness place to live ”.
For Eliza Rose and Andy Feest, it was their least favorite book club that was read so far. Like me, Eliza was also a fan of Body Horror – but she liked the corrupt companies that were part of the story. “I feel he was telling a story and I suppose it ended the satisfactory, but I didn’t need all Gore,” she wrote.
Andy described the story as “ordinary strange” and felt that while Nieva had come up with an interesting concept, H could have used much more back story and details. “The ending was disappointing (not to say confusing),” Andy wrote. “In general, I was that this was a short book as I’m not sure I would finish it if it was a great novel (and I hate not to end books I’ve started … and paid for).”
Maybe Andy doesn’t have to pay for the next book we read: Larry Niven’s RingworldAn old classic that you can have on your shelves. Come and tell us what you think about it on our Facebook page for Book Club members, try an excerpt here and get an insight into how Larry came up with the mechanics of his epic creation in this piece he has written to us here.
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