On spies and yearning: a book review
I’ve never written a book review before, so I’m going to try my best at attempting one. The fact of the matter is that Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This is how you lose the time war was one of the most beautiful books I’ve read and I just felt…compelled to write about it.
Disclaimer: I did see that this book went viral recently, due to the efforts of a Twitter user by the name of Bigolas Dickolas, but I assure you I’d seen the book months earlier at a local bookshop and was already intrigued. Dickolas no doubt helped, I’ll admit.
I can’t describe what kind of a writer I think I am. I’ll admit to having much of my writing style being undeniably infected with over two decades of browsing the internet and scouring forums and subreddits and sports sites like Deadspin (now Defector). And what got me really writing was Jason Pargin’s “John Dies in the End” book. I’ll admit that years of shit talking on Xbox-live and shitposting on Twitter has undeniably seeped into my writing so it feels…stilted. Reactionary. Self-centered. In other words, I don’t think I’d consider myself the type of writer who can write captial-L literature; it’s not that I don’t want to–I just don’t have those skills yet and maybe I never will.
But reading this book was what I imagine experiencing mushrooms must be like: vivid colors, sharp contrasts, everything simultaneously in crystal clear detail and hazy colorful clouds blending into each other. At its core it’s an epistolary tale between time-traveling spies moving from a mutual admiration society to star-crossed lovers. The letters between the characters Red and Blue begin as boastful, calling cards that serve as testimonies of each other’s respective victories. But as the story escalates the letters are imbued with an ever growing, painful yearning that, in clumsy, brutish writing like mine would be over the top. El-Mohtar and Gladstone play with their prose, showing you a lover’s tennis match that you never want to end. This novella was a master class in prose and it’s the type of work that inspires even bumbling dipshits like me.
