SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Dark Constellations by Pola Oloixarac (Translated by Roy Kesey) https://t.co/d5t6Pgb2Ld Short Review: 4 out of 10 (1/3)— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) July 3, 2019
Short Review (cont): A short Argentinian novel featuring men in different time periods getting deep into technology/drugs with the power to give major control of others' lives -physically or electronically- is oft-cryptic if not confusing and in English didn't work for me. (2/3)— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) July 3, 2019
Translated fiction is a tricky thing - because not only is the reader having to deal with a story written from the perspective of a different culture - with its own norms and values - but the reader is not able to read the book in its original form, and nuances are often lost in translation, to say nothing of references. This doesn't mean that translated fiction can't succeed - on the contrary, because works aren't as likely to get translated unless they succeed in their original country, they probably have a higher hit rate than normal fiction. But at the same time, when they don't seem to work, I can't help but wonder how much of that is the translation rather than the author's fault.
All of which is to say that Dark Constellations rather frustrated me, and I wonder how much of that is the author's fault and how much is something being lost in translation. This is a book that confused me, to the point where I'd have DNFed if it wasn't so short (216 pages per Amazon), and the end product just didn't make it seem like what I'd read had much point. Honestly, I'd be even less sure of what I'd just read if it hadn't been for a few reviews I've read of this book. So yeah, this didn't really work for me.
A short review, after the jump:
--------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------
1882, plant scientist Niklas Bruun goes on an expedition with other scientists, whereby he discovers a plant that seems to induce strange reactions in people, affecting their minds and inhibitions - particularly sexual inhibitions - in extreme ways.
1983 Argentina - a young man named Cassio grows up to become a brilliant hacker, with the ability to drastically affect the world through his techniques. But Cassio's growth from childhood to young adulthood has been a sequence of pitfalls, causing him to swear off women several times, and leaving him without direction.
2024 Argentina - Cassio, now fully entrenched in a company working on combining technology and biological resources to perform unprecedented global surveillance, finds his views challenged by a young woman of the biological sciences named Piera, leading to skills and ideals long forgotten coming back up to the surface.....
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If the above plot summary seems to show three different plotlines, or well two really, since the latter Cassio plotline is very much just an extension of the first one, well that's not wrong: this is not a book where the two major timelines interact with each other in any way, instead they're meant to draw parallels to one another. Both Cassio and Niklas often show little regard for others in their work, both share misogynistic views, and both go on to take part in some pretty horrible stuff.
But otherwise, the parallels feel weird at best, and the book's switching back from Cassio to Niklas at times is never done in a way that feels natural and instead feels random. The book also randomly inserts some weird asides that I couldn't quite figure out in at times, which is just awkward. And the book starts Cassio's storyline with the story of his mother, which seems like it might've intersected with Niklas only to lead to nothing? It's very strange and doesn't work.
If anything works in this book, I guess it'd be Cassio's story, in showing how a young man could obtain a misogynistic attitude at times and be so truly lost in this world. But again, the book doesn't seem to do much with it, and the book's jumping back and forth in time doesn't form a coherent narrative to make it clear what the point of it all is. It all culminates in Cassio remembering a skill from earlier in the book that he never quite used and using it for a particular purpose in a massive shift of ethics....although the book is clear that it's not truly an ethical decision but something Cassio does for himself instead. Still, this shift in Cassio occurs incredibly fast, with events in the book's final act, when Piera gets involved, moving at a ridiculous pace with jumps of time in between that just seem weird.
The result is a book that feels incredibly disjointed, with narratives that jump back and forth without much purpose, with one character who is built up in weird ways but again, without really any direction. The book's talk about global surveillance doesn't pop up outside of Cassio's hacking until the final 20%, and even there it feels incredibly abrupt and is written in such a way to be incredibly confusing as to what is being talked about. This is where I wonder if there's translation issues here, because it's so not clear what the project in question actually is, which doesn't help a rambling plot by adding more ambiguity.
So yeah, Dark Constellations doesn't work for me, and I wonder if the original language helped give it more clarity, to make it more of an interesting whole. Because the English translation does not.
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