71 pages
Published 2021
Read September 27
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
“Memory is a form of fiction — a story that keeps the days threaded together in proper order.” Memory is the central motif in The Necessity of Stars. It’s a quiet novella of layered beauty, the sea-level rise of tragedy and loss.
Bréone is an aging diplomat in a climate-ravaged future, one where capitalist interests and authoritarian governments maintain the fiction that humans didn’t cause climate change, that there was nothing poor little humanity could have done on such a vast scale, even as the Earth burns and floods and ecosystems collapse. Delphine, once a science advisor, ekes out her days alongside Bréone, both of them occupying the Normandy garden estate of Irislands. Bréone narrates, “Why fight for a thing that is falling apart, she asks. Because it is falling apart, I say each and every time.” Words slip from Bréone, lost one by one.
And then Bréone finds an alien in the garden. Tura is one of the last of their kind, a species exploited nearly to extinction, hiding away on Earth because they thought it was already a dead world.
The thematic parallels — aging and ecocide, the loss of faculties and species — are elegantly understated, welling up through Tobler’s magnificent prose. “Humans are often foolish, when it comes to squandering a heart, or a planet.” This brief book feels expansive, freighted with the grief of our species, personal and vast.
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