/lit/ - Literature

>>21924949
funny, I just read this which is similar. I highly recommend.

Engine Summer - John Crowley (1979)

Engine (Injun/Indian) Summer is the first novel I've read from Crowley, though I've read some of his short fiction. Apparently I didn't find anything notable about them at the time. I found the voice in this to be siren-like: calm, soothing, and entrapping. It was easy to forget what the frame story immediately tells you, and reminds the reader at each break, about how this will all end. Aside from its voice, I don't know that's much reason to read this unless you want a nice slice-of-life story, which it is, more than you know, and can either ignore or be unbothered by the overall situation. Not much of the world is shown, though it's known to take place many centuries after an apocalyptic event. It's an idyllic world satisfied with limitations of all sorts. Almost everyone is illiterate, because there's little need for any sort of knowledge except that which is necessary for day-to-day activities, and for most anyone life is simply a matter of whiling away the years. That may be just be what the novel wanted to present rather than necessarily how it is. Depending on your outlook the societies depicted could be dystopic, utopic, or ambiguous. I think they're the the lattermost.

The narrator begins their story at seven years old and roughly ends it at seventeen years old, so it's a story of childhood and adolescence. That's not only the case for the narrator, as arguably society has regressed to that state as well, or viewed the other way, it's in retirement. As with most children and teens, the narrator only vaguely knows who they are or what they want, but they know that it can't be found where or how they are. So, the narrator sets forth to become who they will be, whomever that may be. That's the entirety of this short novel. The narrator goes a few places, meets some people, and does what's needed at the time, all the while providing their observations and feelings from a first person perspective. They aren't much more than one ought to expect from an average youth. The narrator is involved with a bit of sexual material, mostly in passing, that may discomfort some readers. There's also a peculiar story about a transwoman, which is of its time.

While reading I came across a passage that led me to the idea that the one who prompts the narrator to tell their story was doing so with the hope that if the reader enjoyed the story enough then the prompter would be freed from the book. That wasn't the case, but I liked the idea. In the dedication Crowley writes about how ideas and discursions in a story that are dead ends can be the best part. Despite liking the aforementioned dead end idea, I don't know that I agree. Engine Summer be reductively summarized as a blind alley, but even so that doesn't mean that there won't be interesting sights along the way. I'll probably read more from Crowley, eventually.

Rating: 3.5/5