SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Kalpa Imperial by Angélica Gorodischer (Translated by Ursula K. Le Guin)

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was by Angélica Gorodischer (Translated by Ursula K. Le Guin): https://t.co/eB7WJgXlCL Short Review: 7 out of 10 (1/3)

— garik16 (@garik16) March 5, 2019

Short Review (cont): Kind of Literary Fantasy, Kalpa Imperial features a series of stories by storytellers through the ages of the people, places, and legends of an Empire - from its times ascendant to its many falls. Not really my thing, but really beautifully written (2/3)

— garik16 (@garik16) March 5, 2019

Kalpa Imperial is a type of SF/F that really isn't my usual cup of tea, a more "literary" type of novel than the typical genre work.  Written by a famous Argentinian author and translated by the legendary Ursula K Le Guin, the book certainly has a hell of a pedigree.  The book definitely reminds me of some of Le Guin's work that I've read, in how it focuses entirely upon descriptions of situations and people as it tells repeated stories throughout.

And that's really what Kalpa Imperial is, a series of stories (technically it's 11 stories if you go by the total of chapters, but some of the stories in each chapter have stories within the stories) about the repeated rise and falls of an Empire.  It's a cohesive book in how each of the stories follows the same mode and it's written really well honestly.  But it's just not quite the type of book I love for all that it's written beautifully.


-----------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------
The Greatest Empire of all time has had its share of good and bad emperors, of cities that have risen and fallen, of capitals that have come and gone.  It has sometimes ruled the South from its home in the North, and other times simply "ruled" the South in name only.  It has had rulers who have been loved by their people and those who have been hated.

But no one knows all of the histories of the Empire, of what has come before, except for the storytellers, and there were always storytellers to tell the tales.  And Kalpa Imperial is a compilation of the tales of the storytellers telling of the Greatest Empire that Never Was.
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Kalpa Imperial is basically a book containing eleven chapters featuring a single storyteller - sometimes with commentary from other individuals - telling a story about the "Empire" in this world.  There are no clear connections between the stories for the most part (the one seeming commonality in all the stories is that the power-base of the Empire is in the "North" and that the "South" is thought of as uncivilized and potentially resistant to Northern power in practically every era)- the book never revisits or references earlier eras that are told in earlier chapters to make it clear whether the chronology is straight forward or if the book is jumping all over the place in time.  And well, none of that really matters, as the thematic elements of the stories remain very similar.

For as the tales continue it becomes clear that the Empire is destined to rise and fall repeatedly, with Emperors good and bad, loved and hated, and different in various ways.  Some stories follow specific rulers as they come and go - such as one about a beloved Empress who rises from being adopted by a raping beggar on the streets to the most beloved Empress of all and who proposes a plan in the end that seems extreme but naturally works in a fascinating way to reduce violence and crimes that plague the city.  Some instead tell the stories of the rise and falls of individual cities as rulers and people change throughout the Empire.

Besides thematic similarities all these stories are told beautifully with masterful descriptions by Gorodischer (and Le Guin in the translation).  Some stories are short and some long, but in general they all work rather well.  There aren't really any notable characters throughout, owing to the fact that we never stay with any given character for more than a single story, although that beloved Empress is probably the easy highlight.

It's just...not really my thing.  This is easily a book that could be taught in a Literature class, and I'm sure you can do some really interesting analyses of what the stories are saying, but there just wasn't enough here to really grab me, even if the descriptions were vivid and in some stories I really did want to learn what happened next - and Gorodischer has some witty descriptions that help this along.  Others may like this a lot more than me.