The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker. ISBN: 9780062110831
Read July 23
Magical Realism? Adult Fairy Tale?
First things first - this book is ATTRACTIVE. The publishers
really deserve mad credit for this gorgeous presentation, and I honestly
think I give the insides of the book itself a bit more slack because it
is so damn pretty. The cover is lovely, a moody blue-tone image of a
massive arch, with the title in a vaguely Art-Deco style in metallic
gold, and more gold filigree around the corners and edges, and a rich
hot sliver of a burnt-orange border underneath. Then, if that wasn't lovely enough
on it's own, the page edges themselves are dyed deep midnight blue, with a lovely barely-there bleed into the pages, so each one is trimmed in a rich dark edge.
That's presentation for you. Utterly stunning.
Now, on to the book. I started this book about two weeks ago, put it down for over a good while, then picked it up and finished it Tuesday night. That is ... fairly uncommon for me, with a new book. In fact, the last book it happened with (Gail Tsukiyama's Women of the Silk) I actually DIDN'T like that much, and found to be pedestrian, plodding, and frankly boring.
This book was odd. I was hooked right at the start because I had
never considered a female Golem before. I suppose I'm just not the
imaginative type, but that created a nice solid spark of interest,
because I was in totally unknown territory. Then the interest value of an
unMastered Golem (another novel idea) and the mental anguish of her wanting to meet everyone's
mental needs - how amazing!
Then we get the Jinn, and he was... somehow flat. I felt for him,
and I was curious, but since Jinni are so flighty and unmoored, it was
hard to get a sense of the life he lost, especially since he didn't
remember how he lost it. Not even a hint of memory, and that made it
really hard for me to develop an interest in him. I think if he had
perhaps remembered just a bit more - expansions like that much later
twinge of recognition he had with the prostitute in the Bowery pushing
her hair aside - then I would have felt more attuned to him from the
start. He grew on me, but I didn't experience anything like the frisson
I had with the Golem, and that was a major disappointment to get past.
Then, it was just slow rolling through local community and history
of the community members, and community politics, and the histories of
those politics, and while the characters were interesting, here was
where I really felt the dispassion of that distant narrator - everything
is he said she said they did he thought she wanted... I would have killed for an I AM or an I WILL in
there somewhere. By the Syrian wedding, I had had it. That's where I
stopped for a good while. After slogging through all that, I really
wasn't interested in picking back up.
Of course I had stopped right before the Sophia plotline, and that
made the Jinn much more interesting. Starting from there on Tuesday, the remainder
kept my attention much better, and I read through at more my usual
pace.
On to specific points:
The Sophia and Saleh subplots somehow felt like they were missing
something. Between poor Sophia and poor Saleh (let's not even talk
about Fadwa), Jinn interactions are dangerous for people, and I really
do wonder if the Jinn never actually learned to care about that. He
didn't seem to. The Golem would have cared, but I don't think she ever
realized what was going on, and she didn't ask (which is
odd, given her specifically-created curiousity).
And that leads to another point. The thrust of the novel seems
to be that each of these creatures is bound by their natures, created to
be a certain way, and it's foolish and naive of them to expect that they'll do
anything differently, regardless of their opinions on the matter and
their own intellectual desires. BUT - they do spend the whole novel taking
little steps outside their natures, and those are celebrated, until the
end where their natures constrain them totally again and they have to
be rescued by a "real" person (who, incidentally, was able to be that
rescuer by the actions of the very man he then destroyed... natures in
conflict again).
It's interesting. The question of the book as I read it is whether
to accept as much of your nature as possible, and fight only against
the bad parts (the Golem's approach) or to rage against your
restrictions and refuse to be placated by your current state in the
interests of maintaining your passion to fight for your ideal state (the
Jinn's approach). The funny thing is, with the peculiar "solution" of
the climax, neither approach produces the desired results for the
characters.
Very odd. Between the slow pacing in the mid-section, and the
oddness of the plot culmination, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about
it. A sort of distant fairy-tale or mythological sensibility that I
wasn't expecting.
