2011 books

[peteryoung]

17) Joanna Russ, We Who Are About To..., 1977
I read this last month but needed to get some perspective on it, as it was not the book I was half-expecting. Eight people crash-land on an uninhabited planet, yet as they go about the business of survival only one woman questions what they are doing: instead, shouldn't they be preparing themselves to die? What I was unprepared for was the sheer force with which the story is told entirely from the unnamed narrator's viewpoint, a viewpoint that pushes out the extraneous details of survival or much in the way of scene-setting, and instead focusses on her inner motives and, to put it mildly, unexpected consequent actions. The narrator is far from being an 'attractive' person; while possessing much wit and cynicism she's also chronically self-justifying and insular, although the rest of the survivors have equally unattractive traits (or worse). Again, with Russ, I particularly liked how the book ended, with the narrator drawing her memoir to a close while taking refuge in memories and music. A tough but elegant read, and also one that opens my eyes a little further on the most positive way to view Russ herself.