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416 pages, ebook
First published March 2, 2021
“Bodies die, or suffer, or are imprisoned. Memory lasts.”When your brilliant and polished first novel - intelligent, original, and engrossingly clever - is a clear crown jewel of Hugo Awards, you have big shoes to fill with the follow-up. Even if they are your own award-winning shoes. Arkady Martine makes it seem like easy work, though. (It must be that History PhD of hers).
“Mahit was too many people, since she’d overlaid her damaged imago with the imago of the same man twenty years farther on down the line. She’d had a while to think about it. She was almost used to how it felt, the fault lines between the three of them grinding together like planetary tectonics.”
“Loyalty wasn’t transitive. It didn’t move up and down the chain of command smoothly. It could get cut off, or rerouted. Especially if someone else powerful was intervening in the movement of information.”
“We’re both exiles, she’d thought, right then, and had hated herself for thinking it. She’d been gone a few weeks. She had no right to the name. She was home. She wasn’t, and she knew it.”
“That Dzmare is a disruptive person. Whether she means to be or not.”
“She hadn’t been doing nothing. She’d been trying to recover her balance, her sense of herself, the shape of a life—any life—that could encompass both Lsel Station and Teixcalaan, two Yskandrs and one of her and whoever they were going to be.”
“As she said it, she realized she was apologizing. [...] For assuming she would come with her, of course she would—and not thinking that when the Empire asked, even in the person of a friend, a maybe-lover, there really was no way for a barbarian to say no and keep being the kind of barbarian the Empire thought of as a person.”
"To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles—this they name empire;
and where they make a desert, they call it peace.
—TACITUS (QUOTING CALGACUS), AGRICOLA 30
“but what better way to draw a monstrous thing to its death than to use its functions against itself? teixcalaan wants; its trust is rooted in wanting; it is in this way you and i will destroy it.”in a memory called empire, we meet ambassador mahit dzmare as she tries to complete the momentous task of finding out who killed her predecessor AND try to keep her home, space station lsel, from being annexed by intergalactic empire teixcalaan.
“to hear that there was nothing of how you loved one another that was clean.they talk about love and seduction and spying and identity, and how neither of them were ever free -- could ever be free -- of the looming jaws and bonemarrow-deep infiltrations of teixcalaan.
‘a man pretends,’ yskandr murmured. ‘a barbarian pretends that civilization might grow in the small hours of the night, between two people.’
mahit imagined it, civilization — humanity — blooming like tiny flowers, caught between mouths in the dark, lips that kissed and talked and built.”
(… it didn’t matter at all, she wanted to never think of anything again, except for desire, except for triumph, except for being wanted —)but i think my favorite part about the writing might be the dialogue.
distant, as desire-choked as she felt: ‘that’s the way we fall — being wanted.’
“it felt good to say. to be vicious in her own despair, to display the wound of her desire in full: no, i will not be teixcalaanli, i am incapable, i know, let me hold the bleeding lips of this injury open for you to see the raw hurt inside. to say, i would never compare myself to one of you, with full consciousness that she would, and had, and could not stop.”conclusion: reading this book hurt, and it did so in the best of ways.
“Trust is not an endlessly renewable resource. Loyalty might be. For longer.”