The Spear Cuts Through Water, Simon Jimenez

 

The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez

Started: 6/15/2023
Completed: 6/21/2023
Recommendation: Mildly Recommended
Recommended By: A list of international fantasy books

Review:

This is a hero story.  It is interesting that I listened to this book at the same time as I was listening to Joseph Campbell's, Hero With a Thousand Faces, and this book tracks with the general description of a hero from Joseph Campbell with remarkable detail.  It is different in that almost everyone in this story is homosexual or bisexual.  I know that this is a trend in fantasy (maybe lots of authors are taking the chance to explore sexuality in novels where it normally is minimal--"rescue the princess" is about as close as most of these come to talking about sexuality or, perhaps, abusive relationships).  The world is really engrossing and the approach to magic and gods makes internal sense.  The visceral descriptions were so clear that I nearly vomited with the characters on more than one occasion.  This also made the violence so detailed as to make me miserable.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the constantly changing first person views.  Particularly on an audio version this was remarkably disconcerting as characters seemed to speak differently at some points and then become first person narrators in the narrator's normal voice.  It was hard to feel the transition.  This was particularly true with gender change, it was very difficult to pick up on who was talking at any given moment.  On the other hand, this left an immediacy to the book that was extremely immersive despite being very disorienting.  I don't even want to try and begin to talk about people reading other people's minds in the first person.

Finally, the number of different perspectives from which the story was told were simply jaw dropping:  a child listening to his grandmother's stories, a person watching a play, players on the stage, people involved in the action that is behind the play, etc.  I found myself on several occasions unaware of the perspective from whom the first person narrative was coming and had to go back in order to figure out where I was.  Forget the when, it is just too difficult to try and figure out the sequencing mid-flight and better to complete the portion of the story and then try to figure out where it fit in the overall novel.