Kindred - Prologue, The River, and The Fire (some spoilers allowed) (Jan 2018)

[Caroline]

This thread is for discussing the prologue and first two chapters, "the River" and "the Fire" of this month's Wild(est) Card pick, Kindred by Octavia E. Butler.

I've included a summary of this section behind the spoiler tags below.

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Prologue: Dana, the protagonist, informs us that she lost a year of her life and her arm on her last trip home. It's not clear what happened but everyone believes her husband, Kevin, has hurt her. They both acknowledge that they can't tell anyone the truth because no one will believe them.

The River: It's June 9, 1976, Dana's 26th birthday; Dana and Kevin have just moved into a new home; Dana gets dizzy and finds herself saving a boy named Rufus who's about to drown in a river; his mother is screaming at her; she then sees a man pointing a gun at her, things go black, and she wakes up back at home; she doesn't know what happened but Kevin saw her vanish and reappear in another part of the room; she is wet, covered in mud, and parts of her body hurt where Rufus' mother hit her; Kevin tells her she was only gone a few seconds.

The Fire: Dana gets dizzy again and finds herself in a room with Rufus, who is now a few years older; he has set the drapes on fire; Dana saves him by throwing the drapes out the window; Dana learns that she's in Maryland and that the year is 1815; she also realizes that Rufus is her ancestor and that he will one day have a child with a slave named Alice; Dana meets Alice, who is a girl at the time; Dana sees Alice's father beaten by Patrollers; one of the Patrollers beats Dana until she winds up back in 1976; she prepares for her next trip by packing a canvas bag; she and Kevin realize that she goes back in time when Rufus needs her and only comes back when she believes her life is in danger
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What do you think of the book so far? What do you think of the characters and their relationships with one another? There seems to be an immediate intimacy between Rufus and Dana - does this make sense?

Do you like the use of time travel? My copy of the book includes a Reader's Guide by Robert Crossley at the end. In it, he writes, "In Kindred the most powerful metaphor is time travel itself. Traveling to the past is a dramatic means to make the past live, to get the reader to live imaginatively in the recreated past, to grasp it as a felt reality rather than merely a learned abstraction." Do you agree with this so far?

[Kathleen]

I'm about 100 pages in. It's very fast reading, with lots of dialog.

At first, I was a little uncomfortable with it. I couldn't figure out why, until I realized it wasn't that long since I read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. It was weird for me to experience this perspective switch. At first it felt like the experiences of the people in the time Dana travelled back to was sort of trivialized, As I read though, I realized it was just hard for me to get used to her seeing things through her more modern viewpoint when I'd just spent a long time in the past viewpoint. I don't think that makes sense--sorry!

Now that I'm used to it, I'm enjoying it. I agree that the time travel aspect forces us in the present to grasp things in a new way.

[Caroline]

The time travel aspect is an interesting tool. I think one of the hardest things for me to wrap my head around was how quickly she adjusted to the fact that the time travel would likely happen again - and soon. She doesn't really get used to her experience in the past, or to being back home, but she pretty easily embraces the knowledge that she's going to go back so she might as well be prepared for when it happens.