Barely a Book Club #7: The Greatest Empire That Never Was
I’ve described the general topic of this season of Barely a Book Club as “travel writing, about places real and imaginary.” Our next selection leans very much towards the latter, although, as I think we’ll see, it’s rooted in a very real place and time, one that coincides neatly with our previous selection.
I first learned about Angélica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was in a comment by BABC reader Rox on our concluding Hav post. A history of an imaginary nation, by an Argentine writer, and translated by Something Good patron saint Ursula K. LeGuin? This hit too many of my bulls-eyes to not interest me. And when I picked it up a few weeks later, I was immediately rewarded.
I’ve written about good-handedness before, the immediate feeling on reading the first lines of a book, or starting a movie, etc, that you are in good hands. In that spirit, I’m going to leave you here with Kalpa Imperial’s opening sentence:
The storyteller said: Now that the good winds are blowing, now that we’re done with days of anxiety and nights of terror, now that there are no more denunciations, persecutions, secret executions, and whim and madness have departed from the heart of the Empire, and we and our children aren’t playthings of blind power; now that a just man sits on the Golden Throne and people look peacefully out of their doors to see if the weather’s fine and plan their vacations and kids go to school and actors put their heart into their lines and girls fall in love and old men die in their beds and poets sing and jewelers weigh gold behind their little windows and gardeners rake the parks and young people argue and innkeepers water the wine and teachers teach what they know and we storytellers tell old stories and archivists archive and fishermen fish and all of us can decide according to our talents and lack of talents what to do with our life—now anybody can enter the emperor’s palace, out of need or curiosity; anybody can visit that great house which was for so many years forbidden, prohibited, defended by armed guards, locked, and as dark as the souls of the Warrior Emperors of the Dynasty of the Ellydróvides.
Go find the book at an independent bookseller and I’ll drop an introductory post about the book, and Gorodischer herself, little-known in the English-speaking world, and who passed away last year at the age of 93, in a few weeks.
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