2023 read #59: The Past Is Red by Catherynne M. Valente.

The Past Is Red by Catherynne M. Valente

151 pages

Published 2021 (contains "The Future Is Blue," originally published 2016)

Read from May 28 to May 31

Rating: 4 out of 5

Catherynne M. Valente was one of the first new favorite authors I found for myself after I began this blog. I first encountered her in short story form in The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition; went on to be impressed by Six-Gun Snow White and Deathless; read the entirety of the uneven but memorable Fairyland series; was floored by Radiance; was let down by Speak Easy; and so on and so forth. The last book of hers I read was The Refrigerator Monologues, which of course is a modern classic. All told, this is the thirteenth Valente book I've had the pleasure of reading, placing her behind only a handful of authors on my most-read list. (Still a ways to go to the top, where Ursula K. Le Guin sits alone at seventeen.)

At first, The Past Is Red didn't quite click with me. The first chunk of the book is a novelette, "The Future Is Blue," which drifts between present-day scenes of our narrator, Tetley Abednego, enduring the torment and abuse of her neighbors with characteristic optimism, and flashback scenes of Tetley's childhood in Garbagetown, a fairy tale logic version of the Pacific Garbage Patch where floating mountains of refuse have been sorted and piled into neighborhoods like Candle Hole, Mattressex, and Far Boozeaway. This narrative structure quickly became monotonous. We'd get a page of grown-up Tetley's neighbors beating her before flashing back once again to her life story, before looping back once more. It felt like the story was spinning its wheels for the bulk of "Blue," before an almost perfunctory reveal of what Tetley had done that resulted in all this torture.

The rest of this short novel is "The Past Is Red," a much more satisfying exploration of Tetley's life a few years later, when she is roped into the orbit of would-be King Xanax and receives clandestine visits from a young stranger she names Big Red. Here Valente's uncanny ability to pull your heart from your chest with a gentle observation before stabbing through it with a gut-punch of insight finds its full expression. Every couple pages Valente pulls together paragraphs of the most heart-breaking sincerity and human fragility and rage at the loss of what we, in our modern culture, are busily burning down. It is terrifying and tragic, empathetic and full of yearning desperation. The story itself may be slight, but any book freighted with this clarity, this simultaneously cynical and wistful remembrance of the modern state of things, deserves to be read and remembered... for however long such things have left to be remembered.