MINI BOOK CLUB: Story of Your Life (Patreon)

[Pictured: Stories of Your Life and Others' cover]This is the first and only discussion thread for Story of Your Life, our first short story of July's mini book club!Once again this write up is brought to you by Ellen because I have overthrown CJ in a NON! hostile maneuver that will allow me to scream about the narrative significance of shifting tenses multiple times mid sentence, and CJ to decide what kind of experience these heptapods needed to get with Adobe Premier before they were allowed to help edit the upcoming video.Short stories are one of my favourite literary forms, and Ted Chiang is powerfully adept with them. Story of Your Life was adapted into Arrival (2016), and although it's a cinematic triumph I'm going to be ignoring it completely for the sake of this post (of course no such restriction applies to you) because it is so dense as a literary work that there's no need to look away to find things to discuss.So many things are threaded together here that I think it's useful to gesture enthusiastically at the overall story before diving into the individual composite pieces of it that jumped out.---------------------Gesturing EnthusiasticallyChiang's holistic imagining of life feels beautiful and hopeful. You DO experience yourself as a fully integrated being, and no part of your identity exists in vacuum, thus existing in your community is also an extension of the self. It makes social responsibility into self-care.That holistic feeling carries over into a ruthlessly coherent story structure that makes me feel, frankly, insane. Each plotline/section reinforces the other plotlines and sections.I'm a fan of "nontraditional" conflict structures, and this is that. Man VS? Nature? It's more Man VS Inevitability, Grief, Physics. Yet there's tension and momentum the whole way through. Louise is facing down her understanding of her own life, particularly the disaster that kills her daughter, unable to fight back because what would that even look like? Her hands are on the reins the whole time but what does that even mean?Then there's constant, genius, one-liners. So many as section transitions and just mid paragraph makingme clutch My head and go AAH! "It will remind me, again, that you won't be a clone of me; you can be wonderful, a daily delight, but you won't be someone I could have created by myself." makingme go AAH!---------------------Literary TechniquesShifting. Tenses. I'm going to eat Styrofoam.Paragraph one: "Your dad and I have just come back from an evening out, dinner and a show; it's after midnight. We came out onto the patio to look at the full moon; then I told your dad I wanted to dance, so he humors me and now we're slow dancing, a pair of thirtysomethings swaying back and forth in the moonlight like kids."On your first read through this is just flagged as a normal (conversational!) tense shift to make the storytelling more interesting as Louise sinks into her memory, and it's only when you've read the wholeeee story that you realise this dance is the instant Louise is literally suspended in while she's talking. His Insane.The non-chronological fakeout gets me EVERY time; the pivot point of non-zero-sum-game, Louise learning information at the SAME moment the reader does and jumping across the years wildly but it's finally, so suddenly clear that you and she have both been experiencing the same order of events in this electrifying stare-right-at-you perspective shift. Scream.I'm excited to cheerfully disagree with those of you who interpret chronology things differently--one of the most fun parts of talking about Story of Your Life is asserting fundamentally different understandings of the basic premise.Another thing that I love: Chiang's efficiency and clearness of description. He is so economical and direct, and the poetry of that sings.The efficiency of this: "[The Heptapods] looked like a barrel at the intersection of seven limbs. It was radially symmetric, and any of its limbs could serve as an arm or a leg." No wasted word and no missing word.---------------------Characters and RelationshipsIt's refreshing that the military isn't treated like a complete clownshow, despite the protaganist's politics/worldview diverging from them. I admire Chiang's commitment to giving every person human dignity instead of taking the easy way out by relying on archetypes or tropes, and reducing Colonel Weber to a moron with a gun going Alien Bad. He feels like a realistic guy who Louise disagrees with in a normal, proportional, sense.Louise and Gary's marriage is an interesting nonentity in the background that informs both characterization, again, SO efficiently.Gary is constantly reinforced as being disrupting in Louise's life, abrupt. "'Hey Louise, want to go out for dinner? My treat.' I was mildly surprised. 'Sure,' I said." His word choices too: "I couldn't believe it; I was working with someone who modified the word 'neat' with 'highly.'" The story is visually interrupted by his contributions with the diagrams of Fermat's principle, and even his hair/eye colour is described as startling.Yet he still totally blends into the background of Louise's life. Early on we learn he only talks with her once a year or so. The particulars of his science don't matter until it's intersection with Louise's research and their child's homework. One single, very missable, sentence discloses that Gary came up with the name heptapod; its constant use in the story swallows up its own origin story.It's correct; he's a supporting character. It's sad; he's a representation of how perceiving time as the heptapods do complicates relationships infinitely (but doesn't ruin them!). Gary's just a guy, but he's a briliant physicist, and he wants to make a baby. In classic Ted Chiang style, it's all simply and straightforwardly accomplished. ---------------------Theme and NarrativeI LOVE that it's so CLEAR the concept of free will still exists and that human choice is still meaningful even with this wide perception of time. Very difficult to make this almost-determinism worldview actually give people MORE agency rather than less.It's choosing to see dignity in the human spirit and inherent goodness in life even if it's "cut short" without "achieving anything" because the existence of people = value. Life is just good. Living is just good.Another massive focus in the narrative is obviously perception, and that's actually a big blind spot for me. There's a lot in here having to do with patterns/possibilities of understanding time: I'm not as interested in studying that literally. Being coaxed through the technicalities of linguistics and physics was great for me as a reader, but I'm not sure how I feel about some of the bluntness in those descriptions from a critical point of view. The emotionality was what I liked most.These themes act as threads for Chiang to braid into this delicately gorgeous statement about the influence of time on our ability to communicate with other people. Slowly growing maturity. When does trust come. Sometimes things proving to not work, like Louise/Gary's marriage, but always with a core that germinates when you choose to invest in relationships over the course of years, making something meaningful despite (because?) of its brevity. For the same reason, this story is very satisfying on rereads.---------------------Our next book club meeting is July 30th, for "Authority and American Usage," by David Foster Wallace.If you can't find it under that name: it was originally published under the title "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage." Catchy. And if you really desperately want to get ahead, August's book is Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death.My recommendation for those of you on the fevered hunt for more Chiang is Understand, the second offering in the "Story of Your Life and Others" compilation book you likely acquired for today. Chiang describes Understand's protagonist's goal in this New Yorker article as, "[Searching] for the perfect language, a cognitive language in which he can think. A language that will let him think the kinds of thoughts he wants."Okay, now I want everybody to gather below for some literary vivisection. But you'll do what makes you happy, and that'll be all I ask for... 🍓