Bibliopath #24: In which we spin silver
Dear reader,
Here's our topic sentence:
Silver coins were going out with the water like leaping fish, tumbling away between the shards, a treasure that was nothing next to the water itself: that clear cold water that was life, all their lives, draining out of the mountain to slake a thirst that had no end.
It comes from Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver. You may remember that I adored Novik's Uprooted, a book that is in the derived-from-a-fairy-tale subgenre of speculative fiction, but deviated from the mean thanks to a basis in Novik's Polish background, a tender sharpness of writing, and an incredible empathy that ran through her work.
Spinning Silver begins with a similar fokloric premise: when Miryem, the daughter of a moneylender turns out to be good at her work, the fairy king of winter hears that she can 'spin silver into gold', and demands that she does so, if she succeeds, she must marry him and be doomed to winter, if she fails, she dies. But it continues thanks to that same radical empathy, the narrative splintering into different perspectives, again and again, as Novik seems determined to not let there be an 'other', an enemy whose perspective we cannot understand, or a servant who only exists for your plot purposes.
And it's also a beautifully tense ride—where many writers would take a fairy story and use it for the whole of the structure of the book, Novik essentially uses it as her inciting incident, which leaves the rest of the book as a taut chain of what's going to happen next, as various people become wrapped in the cost of Miryem's scheme to earn her way to freedom.
And finally, the sentence above is beautiful, coming near the end of the book, in the fairy king's mountain kingdom. Firstly, the sentence mirrors the movement of the river that it depicts the phrases "going", "like silver fish", and "tumbling", then "out of the mountain"—our mind's eye can basically follow the movement of the camera down and out and down.
But the sentence also moves in focus, from the coins to the water, to the comparison between both, which turns out to be no comparison at all: between the treasures we chase after, because of the stories we've heard—the folklore of our times—and the water that is life. But also the kicker: the ending of the sentence which finds itself in a "thirst that has no end"—where the sentence ends, we cannot.
Thinking about my myths,
Guan