Tiassa, Steven Brust (365 Books, Day 214)
Mar. 31st, 2011 09:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksIf you don't already read Brust's Dragaera books, this is not where you start. Really, really not. You could start with Jhereg, which is traditional, or Taltos, which would be interesting, or The Phoenix Guards if you're heavily into The Three Musketeers, or Dragon if you want to tell me if that works, because I'm curious and feel as though it might. (I met somebody once who started with Issola. The existential confusion had been going on for years; don't do that.)
If you do read Brust's Dragaera books, or want to, you want to read all the other ones before you get to this one, both the Vlad thread and the Khaavren thread. And you do want to read them, because they are snarky and sharp and have multiple different inimitable narrative voices, and worldbuilding that is practically a narcotic (doled out in sometimes very small hits). They vary in individual quality, but the plotting tends to be good on both a book and series level, and I like the characters a lot. The best way I can sum up Dragaera for people unfamiliar with it is to say that The Phoenix Guards is a very good Dumas pastiche while also being totally its own thing. When I read Robert Darnton's recent book about French occasional poetry in the eighteenth century, I found myself thinking of everyone mentioned as Dragaeran because of how they behaved, except that of course Dragaerans are also semi-immortal elves affiliated with seventeen Houses based around various animal species, practice sorcery, sometimes carry weapons of great and powerful might, and conduct epic battles against beings godlike and weirder. People in Dumas only seem as though they do all that. Vlad, our usual protagonist, is an Easterner, which means he's physically human, which means that in some ways he is what you would get if you dropped a (very sarcastic) normal person into an eighteenth-century French court, and in other ways, not, because most normal people aren't actually assassins.
Anyway, this is one of the best fantasy series presently running, and I'm starting to think Brust may actually finish it.
For Tiassa, you may want to have read all the other ones fairly recently, too. This is one of those books that calls back to a lot of different things.
A tiassa is a tiger-like feline with wings. They are associated with creativity, intuition, dreaming, non-linearity of time, some forms of plotting, some kinds of theatricality, and, I suspect, marriage and to some degree parenthood.
I really like this book. It is complex and nonlinear and intuitive and non-obvious in all the correct ways, and coalesces beautifully, and is I think the best of the Vlad books so far on sheerly technical grounds except possibly Jhegaala*, but Jhegaala is sufficiently depressing that I can't reread it very often, whereas this one is (mostly) funny and touching. And that's really all I want to say without a spoiler-cut. Does anyone know which House comes next?
*My Grand Unified Theory of What Jhegaala Is Doing That Is So Awesome is available upon request.
SPOILER-CUT
... so, not my first or even third candidate for Devera's father.
Devera POV! Yay! MORE PAARFI! Yay!
I am fairly sure I was not supposed to figure out exactly what the silver tiassa does while Devera was running around with it at the beginning, but it did take me until Devera's conception to be totally certain.
Also I am SO HAPPY something is finally starting to fix the stuff that went down at the end of Athyra. I had been wondering if that was at all fixable and it had been hanging, uh, a while now.
I loved the motif of marriage/protecting-helping children that ran through this. Daro and Khaavren happy, and Daro shielding her son; Vlad and Cawti happy, and discussing the possibility of children; Piro and Ibronka happy (no child-motif there that I can tell, though they were trying to protect/help a third party important to their relationship); Aliera and Kieron actually conceiving a child, and then Vlad and Sara with Savn as surrogate-child at the end.
I loved that Vlad was more Tiassa than Piro, but Khaavren out-Tiassa-ed Vlad (it took him till the epilogue, but I do think he did).
Do we think we are actually going meta-with-authorial-insertion with the Eastern guy with the widget? I kind of hope not. This has never worked out well for an author that I can recall. *cough*StephenKingIamlookingatyou *cough*
Nice pun on 'Tag' in the section title, there.
I would give so much to know when exactly Paarfi wrote the bit he wrote. Because, given the silver tiassa, it is entirely possible he wrote it well before it happened. But also entirely possible that not. It doesn't really matter, time is intentionally a broken thing in this book, but I am just curious.
This has some of my favorite banter in the entire series, mostly centered around the looks on people's faces whenever Piro calls himself The Blue Fox. "I know an Easterner who calls himself the Warlock." "No, that's what everyone else calls him."
Brust has worked out the ways the different Houses think and behave and so on incredibly well, as distinct separate casts of mind, and this is the book that tells me, as I had suspected, that Tiassa is one way of describing much of the way I personally work. Because this book works the way I think. I kept predicting things two paragraphs in advance because they were what I'd have done in the circumstances. This was delightful, because I know it's not just that Brust writes that way all the time-- he doesn't. I always have to read Yendi twice in a row to have any idea what the hell is going on because my head does not work that way. Usually if an author writes something that works the way I think, I find it boring, because it is predictable. The neat thing about this one was that it was very predictable and it was not remotely boring at all.
... this does lead me to suspect that persons who do not think in this particular mode much may have found portions of the book confusing, maybe? Is that the case? This is the kind of book I always insist is perfectly straightforward and then other people tell me it is not.
END SPOILER-CUT
In conclusion: awesomesauce. Made of shiny. One of my favorites to this point; it will need a while to settle and a couple of rereads before I can tell whether it is my favorite.
If you do read Brust's Dragaera books, or want to, you want to read all the other ones before you get to this one, both the Vlad thread and the Khaavren thread. And you do want to read them, because they are snarky and sharp and have multiple different inimitable narrative voices, and worldbuilding that is practically a narcotic (doled out in sometimes very small hits). They vary in individual quality, but the plotting tends to be good on both a book and series level, and I like the characters a lot. The best way I can sum up Dragaera for people unfamiliar with it is to say that The Phoenix Guards is a very good Dumas pastiche while also being totally its own thing. When I read Robert Darnton's recent book about French occasional poetry in the eighteenth century, I found myself thinking of everyone mentioned as Dragaeran because of how they behaved, except that of course Dragaerans are also semi-immortal elves affiliated with seventeen Houses based around various animal species, practice sorcery, sometimes carry weapons of great and powerful might, and conduct epic battles against beings godlike and weirder. People in Dumas only seem as though they do all that. Vlad, our usual protagonist, is an Easterner, which means he's physically human, which means that in some ways he is what you would get if you dropped a (very sarcastic) normal person into an eighteenth-century French court, and in other ways, not, because most normal people aren't actually assassins.
Anyway, this is one of the best fantasy series presently running, and I'm starting to think Brust may actually finish it.
For Tiassa, you may want to have read all the other ones fairly recently, too. This is one of those books that calls back to a lot of different things.
A tiassa is a tiger-like feline with wings. They are associated with creativity, intuition, dreaming, non-linearity of time, some forms of plotting, some kinds of theatricality, and, I suspect, marriage and to some degree parenthood.
I really like this book. It is complex and nonlinear and intuitive and non-obvious in all the correct ways, and coalesces beautifully, and is I think the best of the Vlad books so far on sheerly technical grounds except possibly Jhegaala*, but Jhegaala is sufficiently depressing that I can't reread it very often, whereas this one is (mostly) funny and touching. And that's really all I want to say without a spoiler-cut. Does anyone know which House comes next?
*My Grand Unified Theory of What Jhegaala Is Doing That Is So Awesome is available upon request.
SPOILER-CUT
... so, not my first or even third candidate for Devera's father.
Devera POV! Yay! MORE PAARFI! Yay!
I am fairly sure I was not supposed to figure out exactly what the silver tiassa does while Devera was running around with it at the beginning, but it did take me until Devera's conception to be totally certain.
Also I am SO HAPPY something is finally starting to fix the stuff that went down at the end of Athyra. I had been wondering if that was at all fixable and it had been hanging, uh, a while now.
I loved the motif of marriage/protecting-helping children that ran through this. Daro and Khaavren happy, and Daro shielding her son; Vlad and Cawti happy, and discussing the possibility of children; Piro and Ibronka happy (no child-motif there that I can tell, though they were trying to protect/help a third party important to their relationship); Aliera and Kieron actually conceiving a child, and then Vlad and Sara with Savn as surrogate-child at the end.
I loved that Vlad was more Tiassa than Piro, but Khaavren out-Tiassa-ed Vlad (it took him till the epilogue, but I do think he did).
Do we think we are actually going meta-with-authorial-insertion with the Eastern guy with the widget? I kind of hope not. This has never worked out well for an author that I can recall. *cough*
Nice pun on 'Tag' in the section title, there.
I would give so much to know when exactly Paarfi wrote the bit he wrote. Because, given the silver tiassa, it is entirely possible he wrote it well before it happened. But also entirely possible that not. It doesn't really matter, time is intentionally a broken thing in this book, but I am just curious.
This has some of my favorite banter in the entire series, mostly centered around the looks on people's faces whenever Piro calls himself The Blue Fox. "I know an Easterner who calls himself the Warlock." "No, that's what everyone else calls him."
Brust has worked out the ways the different Houses think and behave and so on incredibly well, as distinct separate casts of mind, and this is the book that tells me, as I had suspected, that Tiassa is one way of describing much of the way I personally work. Because this book works the way I think. I kept predicting things two paragraphs in advance because they were what I'd have done in the circumstances. This was delightful, because I know it's not just that Brust writes that way all the time-- he doesn't. I always have to read Yendi twice in a row to have any idea what the hell is going on because my head does not work that way. Usually if an author writes something that works the way I think, I find it boring, because it is predictable. The neat thing about this one was that it was very predictable and it was not remotely boring at all.
... this does lead me to suspect that persons who do not think in this particular mode much may have found portions of the book confusing, maybe? Is that the case? This is the kind of book I always insist is perfectly straightforward and then other people tell me it is not.
END SPOILER-CUT
In conclusion: awesomesauce. Made of shiny. One of my favorites to this point; it will need a while to settle and a couple of rereads before I can tell whether it is my favorite.
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no subject
Date: 2011-04-01 02:43 pm (UTC)*My Grand Unified Theory of What Jhegaala Is Doing That Is So Awesome is available upon request.
ooh. Requesting, please. I liked Jhegaala an awful lot but, as you say, it's extremely depressing, which has unfortunately limited the amount of brain-cycles I can usefully expend on it. As a result I feel like there's an overall shape and point to the narrative that I've not been able to get my head around. (Only having read it twice may have something to do with that as well; see "extremely depressing.")
no subject
Date: 2011-04-02 12:28 am (UTC)The books usually have the following things associated with their titular Houses: 1) there is a major Dragaeran character (or several) of the House involved; 2) Vlad behaves like a Dragaeran of that House and uses that cast of thought during the book; 3) we learn something about the actual animal, what it is and what it philosophically represents.
Also, and usually unrelatedly, the books tend to have a framing thing that takes place at the beginning of each chapter-- Vlad's laundry list, the menu at Valabar's, etc.
Jhegaala has no obvious characters of its House in the book, though it does tell you a lot about the animal. And its chapter-framing thing seems to confuse a lot of people (not the bits that describe the life-cycle of the jhegaala, but the play in which a couple of incompetent detective-types are discoursing on a crime which they never solve).
In point of fact, the reason there are no obvious characters of House Jhegaala is that House Jhegaala is about metamorphosis, and the book is about Vlad's metamorphosis into a Dragaeran: realizing that he cannot live in the East, because of who and what he is, and becoming a person who knows that, deep down. He is the character of the appropriate House, not just acting like it. We know from before that he has the soul of a Dragaeran from previous lifetimes.
The life-cycle of the jhegaala at the chapter-headings charts the progress of his transformation. The play, and this is what I think is so awesome, is an incredibly careful allegory of what the people who are trying to catch Vlad are doing-- the incompetent cops talking about their crime that may or may not have even happened are trying to catch, on an existential level, Vlad, but because he keeps shifting, they are always several steps behind him. You can go through and compare the philosophy they discuss with the actions taken by Vlad's enemies in the chapter; they are working with the roots of whatever motivation his enemies have. I find this so cool I can't even tell you.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-04 06:07 pm (UTC)the book is about Vlad's metamorphosis into a Dragaeran
Huh. I'd not thought of it that way. I agree that it's clearly about Vlad's metamorphosis, it's about his transition from _Jhereg_-era Vlad to _Issola_-era Vlad (Athyra and Orca being weird inbetween books that I'm not sure what to do with yet). I'm... not sure what I think of the notion of Vlad becoming a Dragaeran. I suspect you're right and I'm resisting it because I've read the _Jhereg_-era books so many times I'm more used to "Vlad as outsider Easterner surrounded by Dragaerans."
I hadn't made the connection (at least not consciously) between the play-snippets and /everyone else's/ actions. That makes a great deal of sense.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-01 02:44 pm (UTC)Which is a long way of saying that I found it a weird book. I'm not sure an actual theme is enough to reconcile me to it, mind, but it helps.
not my first or even third candidate for Devera's father -- really? IIRC the Brust mailing list has had that worked out for years and years.
So what do you think the silver tiassa does, then? I thought the Devera-POV section (Devera POV!!!) made it clear that it facilitated creation and growth, but I didn't think it was more complicated than that. And we've established with Westlake that we don't think the same way, but I didn't find any of these sections confusing, so now I'm wondering what I'm missing.
Finally, Paarfi doing Vlad's dialogue is HILARIOUS.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-02 12:00 am (UTC)I am not on the Brust mailing list. This may be an existential error on my part, but Kieron was not a theory I'd heard.
I agree with your point (1); we spend much of the book watching the tiassa move. I consider your point (2) to be precisely backward to the actual situation, because of what the silver tiassa does. The silver tiassa doesn't just facilitate creation and growth-- it's more powerful than that. It helps you create a dream and then carry it out. The artists that Devera leaves it with come up with things that are outside their capabilities (Paarfi writing Vlad? Seriously? NOT HIS FIELD) and then carry out those things perfectly. The silver tiassa makes dreams come true, no matter what needs to happen to make them so. "Tiassa dreams, and plots WILL WORK", is the way I'd put it.
And so the scope of the story is actually continuously getting larger, because there are two long cons, two underplots that take up the entire book: a) Verra's and Devera's plot to get the silver tiassa into position for Devera's conception as Kieron would not otherwise have been alive enough to father a child; and b) Vlad's plot to do anything necessary to get it to Savn-- without hindering Devera's conception, which he doesn't actually know about. And both plans are complicated by the fact that plans involving the tiassa fracture time around themselves, and that thinking like a tiassa means acting on intuition before you actually know, which means that Vlad starts his plot before he is aware of starting it. The way that House Tiassa works is, effect before the cause.
Vlad is still narrating the third-person non-Paarfi bits, by the way, to the guy with the box. He had the silver tiassa long enough to be able to do that. I could tell by the underlayer of laconic snark.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-02 01:03 am (UTC)Clearly I do need to re-read. Thanks.
How, by the way, do you account for _Athyra_?
no subject
Date: 2011-08-13 11:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-02 12:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-01 03:51 am (UTC)I would like to hear the Grand Unified Theory about Jhegaala, which I appreciated but am not sure I fully got.
SPOILERS FOR JHEGAALA
Date: 2011-04-02 12:26 am (UTC)The books usually have the following things associated with their titular Houses: 1) there is a major Dragaeran character (or several) of the House involved; 2) Vlad behaves like a Dragaeran of that House and uses that cast of thought during the book; 3) we learn something about the actual animal, what it is and what it philosophically represents.
Also, and usually unrelatedly, the books tend to have a framing thing that takes place at the beginning of each chapter-- Vlad's laundry list, the menu at Valabar's, etc.
Jhegaala has no obvious characters of its House in the book, though it does tell you a lot about the animal. And its chapter-framing thing seems to confuse a lot of people (not the bits that describe the life-cycle of the jhegaala, but the play in which a couple of incompetent detective-types are discoursing on a crime which they never solve).
In point of fact, the reason there are no obvious characters of House Jhegaala is that House Jhegaala is about metamorphosis, and the book is about Vlad's metamorphosis into a Dragaeran: realizing that he cannot live in the East, because of who and what he is, and becoming a person who knows that, deep down. He is the character of the appropriate House, not just acting like it. We know from before that he has the soul of a Dragaeran from previous lifetimes.
The life-cycle of the jhegaala at the chapter-headings charts the progress of his transformation. The play, and this is what I think is so awesome, is an incredibly careful allegory of what the people who are trying to catch Vlad are doing-- the incompetent cops talking about their crime that may or may not have even happened are trying to catch, on an existential level, Vlad, but because he keeps shifting, they are always several steps behind him. You can go through and compare the philosophy they discuss with the actions taken by Vlad's enemies in the chapter; they are working with the roots of whatever motivation his enemies have. I find this so cool I can't even tell you.
As far as what actually happened, in the plot,
no subject
Date: 2011-04-01 03:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-01 11:40 am (UTC)SPOILERS FOR TIASSA
Date: 2011-04-02 12:08 am (UTC)And Vlad saves Savn. He could not have done that.
The underplot of the book is the machinations necessary to get the silver tiassa where it needs to be to make everyone happy without anyone's plans interfering with anyone else's plans. In order for this to happen the chain of events cannot be bound by linear time (hence Devera).
It is entirely possible that Paarfi wrote the entire section about Vlad before it happened. Because he had the thing before it got to Vlad. That is the kind of device we are talking about here.
Re: SPOILERS FOR TIASSA
Date: 2011-04-03 04:25 am (UTC)I read this book thinking "Ah, it's fun to revisit the early Vlad romp where this absurdly elaborate scheme comes together," but it did not occur to me that _Tiassa_ exists to demonstrate what *changed* between the early books and the later ones.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-01 04:42 am (UTC)Yeah, haven't a clue why you're interested in that.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-02 12:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-01 05:05 am (UTC)If so, HOT diggity.
---L.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-02 12:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-02 04:55 pm (UTC)Okay, I may need to get this in hardcover.
---L.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-02 05:47 pm (UTC)I just finished the book, loved it, and am still kind of teary over the Athyra stuff beginning to resolve. But I have to say, that Whitecrest section really threw me for a loop. It wasn't Vlad's voice, but it sure wasn't Paarfi's, and what argh. Do you have any idea why that was in the style it was in? (You are so much better at dissecting books than I am, it's not even funny.)
no subject
Date: 2011-04-01 12:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-02 12:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-01 08:41 pm (UTC)Yes, please! Thus far I am only familiar with Alexx Kay's (http://lists.dragaera.info/pipermail/dragaera-dragaera.info/2008q3/004523.html), which is indeed grand and unified but not, for me, entirely convincing.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-02 12:13 am (UTC)Mine is more thematic stuff, and is above as a reply to