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veryreaderie's review
4.0
Picked up this collection because of the recommendation for Travel Light in This is How You Lose the Time War. My library didn't have Travel Light—but it did have this!
There's an everythingness to Mitchison's writing that I find hard to describe. It seems like she's trying to drill down to find some sort of core truth to human nature in each of the stories collected here. I loved the socialist bent of many of the stories (most prominent perhaps in The Wife of Aglaos) and was less enthused by some of the musing on men and women and how they're bound to interact and/or relate to each other. In the 'drilling down to some core truth' there was plenty of sexual violence, but no mention or hint of alternate gender identities or sexualities. Still, if my main complaint about stories written decades and decades ago is heteronormativity the stories must hold up pretty well—plus, I only minded so much because some of the other 'truths' were so well depicted.
This collection takes the reader to human prehistory, to tribes in the south of Africa, to Paris, to the highlands of Scotland both in the heyday of the clans and after a nuclear war, and Ancient Greece besides. There's lots to unpack and analyse, even for this fairly non-analytical reader. I'll be seeking out more of Mitchison's work in the future; she makes me think.
There's an everythingness to Mitchison's writing that I find hard to describe. It seems like she's trying to drill down to find some sort of core truth to human nature in each of the stories collected here. I loved the socialist bent of many of the stories (most prominent perhaps in The Wife of Aglaos) and was less enthused by some of the musing on men and women and how they're bound to interact and/or relate to each other. In the 'drilling down to some core truth' there was plenty of sexual violence, but no mention or hint of alternate gender identities or sexualities. Still, if my main complaint about stories written decades and decades ago is heteronormativity the stories must hold up pretty well—plus, I only minded so much because some of the other 'truths' were so well depicted.
This collection takes the reader to human prehistory, to tribes in the south of Africa, to Paris, to the highlands of Scotland both in the heyday of the clans and after a nuclear war, and Ancient Greece besides. There's lots to unpack and analyse, even for this fairly non-analytical reader. I'll be seeking out more of Mitchison's work in the future; she makes me think.
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