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The Adventures of China Iron
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China Iron - General Discussion
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I read it in July. I won't be re-reading but will follow the discussion and chime in if it makes sense. My review -- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....
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I read it earlier in the year and will join in with things I can remember (not going to reread at this time.) I found it highly entertaining.
Just for reference (of the author's name):
The Adventures of China Iron
by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara.I bought a kindle edition of the book. I have several reads going at the moment, so not certain what my participation here will be, although I will certainly follow this. I am hoping it might be a candidate for my f2f book group.
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Lily - thanks - I have added the book to the topic header, so the links to reviews and ratings are now there.
Hi Nadine! I hope to finally read this with you. Searching my bookshelves right now for where the heck I shelved it.
Hoopla has it. I jost got Ted Chiang's new collection, so I don't know how much I'll get done....
Here are a couple of interviews with the author and translators that are getting me excited about the book. Followed by a tantalizing (or frightening, depending on your reading taste) quote from The Guardian's review. Booker prize interview with the author and translators
Interview in The Punch Magazine
"Sentences bound on from one page to another, seeming almost as long as the vignette-like chapters, in a thrilling and mystical miniature epic. This story, drunk on words and visions, is an elegy to the land and its lost cultures."
lark wrote: "Hi Nadine! I hope to finally read this with you. Searching my bookshelves right now for where the heck I shelved it."Great! Judging from the reviews, it's practically vibrating on your shelf, so maybe not so hard to find!
FOUND IT. in addition to review vibration, the vibrating-lime-green cover is helpful, in times like these.
lark wrote: "FOUND IT. in addition to review vibration, the vibrating-lime-green cover is helpful, in times like these."
I love the cover picture of those Pippi Longstocking braids - at least that's what I think they are..... and I'm wondering why one of them is slashed....
The book is in 3 parts. It's a fairly short book and I'm assuming we want to finish up the week before Xmas at the latest, so how does this schedule work for you all (and I think we're a small all)?Part I = p.1-79 begin discussion Mon Dec. 7
Part II = p. 83-138 begin discussion Mon. Dec. 14
Part III = p. 141-188 begin discussion Fri. Dec, 18
That works for me, Nadine. Thanks for the schedule.
I feel the same way, Laurie. In fact, I purposely just started another novel that will quench my thirst for fast and easy reading, (Plain Bad Heroines) and encourage me to do a slow and savoring read of China Iron. I've never done that before!
This novel is actually one where I'm glad to have read the translator's note at the back of the book before diving in. It gives historical and literary context to the novel that Gabriela Cabezón Cámara's original audience would have before they began reading.
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I think you will find that this book is not as heavy as you might expect.
Laurie wrote: "lI think I'm also going to have to find a light book to read around this to let it settle rather than plowing through. ..."
Your comment is interesting to me, Laurie, because I'm also finding it challenging to read through, even though I don't think it's a challenging book in the classic sense. It's frothy and exuberant.
Maybe it's that the prose is less connected with the physical world than I'm used to (?) where I need to work to figure out what's going on, from sentence to sentence.
These first paragraphs, for instance. It took work for me to understand that the narrator sees a puppy and decides to keep it. There is all of this other voluminous and lovely prose going on about forcing offspring into unwonted shapes and white women escaping captivity etc. and it really could have had a declarative sentence in there, to keep me happy, maybe something like: "I saw a puppy and decided to keep it."
It's one of those books where I'm fighting the author's natural storytelling style here in the beginning, and I need to give up and yield to her demands, and stop trying to read the way I want to read, or I won't have a happy reading experience.
lark wrote: "It's one of those books where I'm fighting the author's natural storytelling style here in the beginning, and I need to give up and yield to her demands, and stop trying to read the way I want to read, or I won't have a happy reading experience...."I had the same feeling for the first couple of pages, but when I began to think of the writing as China Iron speaking directly to me, letting me see the world through the eyes of a girl who is being born for real, after 14 years of merely existing, it freed me up, and it became a delight to bounce around with her. I feel like I've left the author far behind - or better yet, the author has found a magic way for me to forget about her entirely. I hope this keeps up for the whole novel - although I'm anticipating that as the novel goes on and China Iron grows, her newborn voice may change too. I agree with Laurie that this book feels like oral storytelling.
Laurie wrote: "I'm also loving the way she captures the feel of half-communicating in two languages with the repetition of the names and the struggle to explain abstract concepts when there isn't always a precise translation...."Yes! It's especially funny to me because I'm living it - I'm tutoring a spanish-speaking person in english, and I'm also a beginning spanish learner, so she tutors me too. (It works surprisingly well on Zoom!) High school me thought french class was a fate worse than death, and social security me thinks learning spanish is so much fun ;)
Nadine, the answer to why the pigtail is slashed on the cover appears on page 30.
Mark wrote: "Nadine, the answer to why the pigtail is slashed on the cover appears on page 30."I got there last night :) Thanks!
Excited to discuss this magical little book! I finished it last night and really enjoyed it.
We can discuss Part I with spoilers now. (I'm going to call China Iron "Jo" like Liz does, because calling her China is an insult and calling her China Iron is awkward.)I am struck by the contrast between Jo's joyous narration, and the grimness of their environment - they are wading through a pampas that's literally a charnel house of human and animal remains in various stages of decomposition. I like the way the author has Jo take this in stride for the most part, while us modern readers (or at least me) finds it so jarring.
I love the way Jo is discovering life the way an infant discovers it's body - with surprise and wonder that it belongs to them.
Nadine, I like your point about the facts of their environment across the pampas vs. the luminous description of it. Jo makes a wagon wheel sunk two feet into the mud an exciting thing and her delight in cuddling at night in the wagon visceral.This book is apparently intended as a corrective story to Martin Fierro, which is seen as a pillar of Argentine literature. Jorge Luis Borges agreed, though he drew a clear distinction between the writing and the character of its central character. It's worth reading at least a bit of Martin Fierro, to get an idea of what an Argentine reader would come to this novel expecting. There are versions on the internet: A full text-only translation at:
http://sparrowthorn.com/
and samples of the Google Books scanned Spanish/English version at:
https://books.google.com/books?id=-Jk...
Mark wrote: "It's worth reading at least a bit of Martin Fierro, to get an idea of what an Argentine reader would come to this novel expecting. There are versions on the internet: A full text-only translation at:..."A footnote in the translation (I found it in the Sparrowthorn edition) explains the word China:
"China - meaning indian woman, affectionately extended to any criolla country girl. Legal marriage was uncommon."
Affectionately??? In whose mind?
Well, apparently the meaning varies country and year. Spanish dictionary.com gives two definitions: 5.
(old-fashioned)
(female companion of a charro, gaucho, or peasant)
(Argentina)
(Chile)
(Mexico)
(Uruguay)
a. woman
El gaucho y su china esquilaron las ovejas.The gaucho and his woman sheared the sheep.
7.
(old-fashioned)
(pejorative)
(maid)
(Chile)
a. serving girl
(old-fashioned)
Dile a la china que ponga la mesa.Tell the serving girl to set the table.
On page 15, Jo doesn`t mind it at all, though she is delighted to add "Josephifa" to it. (Apologies for the strange formatting of the definition. )
(Sorry, this is from part 2, but it's not a spoiler) I was charmed by the line on page 90; "the master makes them eat vegetables." Many years ago, my sister spent a (North American) summer in Argentina training for ski racing, junior level. While there, half a world away from her family, she fell ill with something flu-like. The doctor's remedy was _plenty_ of blood rare beef steaks.
I'm arriving a little late to the discussion here - just started reading today. Loving it so far, hoping to get far enough to join in the conversation.
Sue wrote: "I'm arriving a little late to the discussion here - just started reading today. Loving it so far, hoping to get far enough to join in the conversation."Glad you're here, Sue! I don't think you're far off our schedule - the book reads pretty quickly, even when you try to slow yourself down to savor it, which is what I'm doing. Also, for me, it's turning out to be the kind of book that isn't spoiled by disclosures, although YMMV.
We can start talking about Part II tomorrow. I'm going to start reading part II tomorrow. If anyone feels like their comments could affect the spoiler-sensitive among us, you can always hide those sentences using spoiler tags, which you can find by click on 'some html is ok' above the text box.
Part II is quite a change from part I - a Rabelaisian farce!
I'm part way into Part II and I agree it's very different from Part I - different setting, more (and crazier) characters.But a comment back in Part I - Just how big was that wagon? Art canvases and books and oranges and clothes for every imaginable occasion. Dishes and silverware, food and spices. I feel like there's an element of magical realism here.
I found this in the review in the Guardian which sums up my impression so far (https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
"The Adventures of China Iron sets British industry and Argentine expansion against the sisterhood of the wagon and an indigenous society of fluid genders and magic mushrooms."
The "sisterhood of the wagon" made me laugh out loud, and the reference to magic mushrooms really does capture the dreamy and otherworldly aspect to the wagon journey.
Sue wrote: "But a comment back in Part I - Just how big was that wagon? Art canvases and books and oranges and clothes for every imaginable occasion. Dishes and silverware, food and spices. I feel like there's an element of magical realism here."Ha! And don't forget at least one barrel of whiskey, and one bed, big enough for at least 2. A moment of silence in honor of those poor oxen ;)
I finished Part II. Love the contrast between Hernandez's view of the world vs Jo and Liz. And I really enjoyed the way Liz used Hernandez's vices against him. She not only made off with the best of Hernandez's men but he essentially thanks her for doing so.
I really, really didn't like the continual violence, but I did like Miss Daisy's sons getting a taste of their own medicine.
We can start discussing the whole book now. My first impression after finishing it is that it's filled with a kind of joy that coexists with death and suffering in a way I can't remember in any other book. Here's a little passage from the very beginning of Part III that hit me hard (and made me glad I'm a vegetarian):
"There was no other sign of life until Rosa caught three cuys and the little critters began to scream, their little paws scratching at this giant man, their bodies arched in pain; we were their Campo Malo, poor things. Then, a little while later, the smell of their flesh browning in the fire wafted over, and we were satisfied body and soul."
Nadine, your quote reminded me of Margaret Visser's thought in Much Depends on Dinner, (from memory) "Factory chickens suffer terribly, but they're _so_ delicious! "More to the point of this discussion, the magical realism meter starts swinging toward full-scale 100 Years of Solitude territory. The novel begins as apparently fully realistic. Toward the end of part 1, the magical capacity of the wagon starts to raise the needle. I was concerned in Part 2 that they were going into extreme jeopardy; the estancia was based on force, after all, and there was a lot to protect. That diamond, most of all. Jo's secret seems to be a danger, but they escape both the estancia and any suspicion of being behind the desertions! Magically, Liz even is gifted that diamond!
Part 3 goes full magic, with cattle getting stuck in trees, the pursuing soldiers routed, and Liz & Jo completely adopted into the tribe.
It's wonderful, but it's a long way from the world of the opening.
The world of Part 3 is tickling a memory of a very similar tribal life in another novel, but I can't put a name to it. Does anyone else have an idea?
Finished reading. I liked part 3 better than the first two parts. It felt like Jo and Liz and the many people they accumulated along the way ended up in a good and happy place.
I agree that the "magic" grew throughout the book, and really bloomed in part 3.
After I finished the first section, I couldn't figure out why the New York Times blurb on the cover said "Revolutionises all genres." Now I know ;) This author feels utterly fearless to me - she goes from realism to Rabelaisian satire to cartoon utopian fantasy without preparing the reader in any obvious way - although Sue, I can see what you mean about the fantastical elements growing - they took me by surprise, but I still accepted them without a second thought. Maybe it's affection for China Iron and her mix of common sense and whimsy. An entire village surfing the river as it floods and ebbs, lowering cattle out of the trees - why not? And a gender fluid Martin Fierro!I'd love to have been in on her meetings with editors. All I can picture is them saying "you go girl!"
I just checked out my library's copy of her book Slrum Virgin. Judging by the publisher's description it's just as wild a ride as China Iron.
Well, I'm really late to this discussion but I was glad to be able to read through the comments. I was reading it for Women in Translation month but have ended up abandoning it. My review:
This feels endless to me (as in, I keep checking how much further until the end).
It's supposed to be the feminist/queer/anti-colonial/etc. take on The Gaucho Martín Fierro. (Hooray!) And I suppose it is, but mostly feels like it's so over the top that it's sheer farce. Normally I would welcome these topics & upending of the old for something new but I find myself plodding through rather than enjoying it. I think I would have better appreciated something a bit more subtle rather than feeling like I'm being hit over the head with a cinder block.
I just don't understand the hype.
21st Century Literature
Books mentioned in this topic
The Gaucho Martín Fierro (other topics)Slum Virgin (other topics)
Plain Bad Heroines (other topics)
The Adventures of China Iron (other topics)
The Adventures of China Iron (other topics)
Authors mentioned in this topic
Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (other topics)Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (other topics)
I haven't started it yet, but it's sitting on my shelf.