The Winged Histories

The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Turns out there is such a thing as a beach read. And this is definitely not it. After finishing a fast paced thriller at the beach, I started on this which promised brilliant writing and mythical adventure. That may be, but the writing, at least the first couple of chapters is dense and demands close attention, so that it took too much concentration when the waves were beckoning. Once I got home, I enjoyed it much more. It’s about three women who defy conventions in surprising ways. Samatar does a brilliant job writing four distinct voices, and telling four distinct stories while connecting them and carrying the theme throughout. My favorite was the last story (as stand alone it would have been 5 stars) and I wanted to know what happened after the book ended. A couple of the other tales ran on too long in my opinion.

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pulled me down the bank till we crashed in the stream, like running into a sheet of lightning.

two forms of pain: the loss of happiness and the coming of grief.

He held that the phantoms of memory, like ordinary shadows, only appear in the presence of light. Events are lamps of varying strength: a strong lamp, such as a painful or dangerous event, causes shadows to spring out on the wall of the mind.

Without habit, he would explain to Lunre years later, we should all of us run screaming out of doors. It was habit that made life possible, both for individuals and for the empire.

Habit is a curtain. It dims the lamp.

For the memorial does not preserve the memory of suffering, but rather transforms it into habit.

Sometimes, yes, sometimes an aching sadness comes to me across the plain. I think of the girls in stories who are set impossible tasks: count every grain in the field, weave a net out of water. Always a girl. She’s bent over, counting grain. She doesn’t know why. It is her fate. She is the victim of a closed and shining logic. Why does she never stand up? She says: “I have to save the world.”

The che inside me like a well of gold. And then I grew up and this gold was worth nothing, nothing. You can’t use it anywhere. It’s only for fighting with other women, or for crying.

You have to forget, but at the same time you remember. This is how it makes a circle.

Light from an inner room, translated light.

there was simply a desire for bruises, for the uncomplicated sensation of physical pain, for a pain that could be solved,

Perhaps, in some terrifying, mysterious way, our most fearsome dreams belong to paradise.