Susan Barker (1) (1978–)

This is one of those books where everything that happens is bad but you enjoy reading it anyway because it's beautifully written and moves you through so many different places. Stories over a thousand years of China's history about the lives of people who apparently reincarnate in each time period and find each other by happenstance. A present day man is getting these stories mailed to him in letters by someone who claims to be one of the incarnated people and says the man is one as well. I liked that the incarnations were always related to each other differently or not at all throughout the ages, and often at odds with each other. Such a consuming book.… (more)

This book is a series of love stories woven together as an epistolary novel with Chinese history as the backdrop. But not the rise of a nation type of history, but the repetition of unbearable cruelty and loneliness and despair. It is also a political history of sorts. Old forms of slavery evolve into new forms of slavery. The kind of negative freedom we enjoy in the west -- freedom from shackles -- has modern equivalents. In how we treat sexual sub-cultures, in how we abuse children, and most certainly in how we enslave women to this day. The landscapes in this novel are smoky, polluted, damp, and mosquito-infested. The passion is intense. The betrayal unnerving. When you pick up this novel get ready for a roller coaster of passion and flat out terror. Even some great gallows humour.… (more)

I almost put this down unfinished. I think I was feeling too tender for the considerable violence, even though it read to me more like Bluebeard, fairy-tale brutality. But then, I kept reading and for the second half could hardly put it down.

The writing is terrific, scenes and characters so vivid and visual. These were not characters I fell in love with but I did come to care about them and about how the book would end. The novel is different from my usual fictional fare, which I tend to read as commentary or for philosophical underpinnings. I like making, perceiving connections to my own time and my own experience of the world. At the point at which I almost abandoned the book, I would have said it was too unrelievedly bleak. But I think I finished it by reading it more like an adventure story—always wanting to know: What Happens Next??

The Incarnations is a most original and unexpected novel that Susan Barker realized well.… (more)