Posted On: Tuesday - April 9th 2024 8:42PM MST
In Topics: Political Correctness Books
In my digesting of VDare daily - before the big hiatus that is coming - I will read most of the Steve Sailer posts. I can't help it. I try not to get over to unz.com, but in this case - Lionel Shriver's Novel โManiaโโAlternate History Of The Great Awokening Era - well, come on!*
Even though she is the only author I come close to following in any sense, I didn't keep up enough to know that Lionel Shriver had a new novel out. In his quick post, Mr. Sailer excerpts a bit of a review from the Washington Post** and provides a few remarks. I am excited, and the book is on the way already!
I'm a big fan of Mrs. Shriver. Peak Stupidity has written about her in other contexts - her political talks, her bugging out of England, to Portugal, and some of her articles (such as one good one in particular against the Kung Flu PanicFest) before. It's her novels though, that we have written the most about: I wrote a 6-part review of her prepper novel, The Mandibles: Introduction - - Part 2 - - Part 3 - - Part 4 - - Part 5 - - and Conclusion.
We featured a review of her dark suspense/drama novel of "kids gone wrong" called We Need to Talk About Kevin. Then, we featured a review of the movie too, with comparisons to the book. We also reviewed The Motion of the Body Through Space. It's from the latter that I will provide a long excerpt here. That is due to the fact that Mrs. Shriver's newest novel is about Political Correctness' successor-on-steroids, Wokeness. From what I can tell from Mr. Sailer's quick take, it's a parody of the most stupid example possible, the cancelling of the idea of stupidity itself. Of course, it's very hard to do parody now, due its very limited shelf life.
In the Motion of the Body ... novel from a few years back, I really thought Lionel Shriver was going in that same direction, but let me just excerpt 3 paragraphs of my review:
Now, let me discuss a really interesting part of this recent novel for us Conservatives, but, unfortunately, a theme that plays only a fleeting part in this story. Likely it's her childhood background from old-timey North Carolina, but Miss Shriver brought up a topic in The Motion of the Body Through Space that could really put her on the outs with any of the NYC or London (her current residence) woke crowd. In the story of why Remington Alabaster, the narrator's exercise freak husband, is retired with time to do any of this to begin with, we learn it's due to the most extreme Affirmative Action, immigration-driven, feminist wokeness that even a Conservative could think of! Oh, yeah, this author goes there. It turns out that Mr. Alabaster's nice and somewhat rewarding city government engineering career got canceled by one sub-standard African immigrant lady. There are a few pages about this, then later some racial discussion in the form of conversation, as usual, between husband and wife. That latter conversation (pages 205 - 207) could have easily been part of a Steve Sailer HBD comment thread.In hindsight, I may have been too harsh. The author had her story, and AA couldn't be a big separate story in the same novel for the sake of ... something I can't explain because I'm not a writer. However, that last bit of back-tracking completely from the point on anti-Whiteness was NOT OK. Really, I wonder if some editor threatened her with the withholding of publishing of the book if she didn't insert that last AA conversation.
To add more anti-woke goodness to the pot, we find out toward the end of the MettleMan exercise madness saga that Serenata's voice-over-artist job is being slowly and surely cancelled, as it has now become NOT OK to appropriate foreigners' or non-anyone-plainly-normal's voices. That puts the kibosh on her part-time, but lucrative, gigs, basically. Though the narrator does mention financial worries, after that anti-White damage to the couple, I honestly don't see how the family was planning on staying in the black - the numbers just don't seem to add up.
It was disappointing to me that this amazingly honest White-people-getting-screwed (twice) background story became nothing more than that, a small sub-plot. The author went nowhere with it. In fact, she reverted at one point. At some point Serenata noted that the MettleMan competition, the business of it, and the family and fans too, were predominantly White. She didn't make anything of that, until one paragraph that I couldn't find right now, in which she seemed to see that as a problem. OK, that was the book character, but was this an effort at plausible deniability by Mrs. Shriver? I don't know why she brought it up in the first case then.
I look forward very much to Mania. Then, I was getting worried again, but finally my 3 copies of Mr. Sailer's Noticing came to the porch. We've been anxiously awaiting this one too. I skimmed through it for 1/2 an hour and learned that I will later definitely be reading this rather than skimming*** it. I'll write both an introductory post on the sections and chapters and then a review of some sort.
There's also a review Peak Stupidity has been meaning to post for some months on a totally different book. Luckily the LittleFreeLibrary I got it from a year back does not levy LittleFreeFines that result in LittleFreeLiens on my LittleFreeHouse.
* I've kept up with the comments for this special case. I really wanted to chime in, but I won't.
** Upon reading Mr. Sailer's title, I first thought, "Hey, why didn't John Derbyshire alert me to this book?! He's the guy who turned me on to Lionel Shriver a few years ago with her The Mandibles. I get it. John Derbyshire reads the New York Post, while Steve Sailer reads the Washington Post (along with The New York Times, The Atlantic, and what-have-you).
*** The latter was anticipated only if this book was a collection of short columns of which I'd already read the majority of. That's not the case.
Comments:
Adam Smith
Wednesday - April 10th 2024 6:33PM MST
PS: Good evening, everyone,
Much like Sailer's new book, I have been unable to source a digital copy of this new Shriver novel. I'm assuming it's because it is too new, but I also feel a little like I'm loosing my touch. I'm really not used to not finding the things I want to download. I suppose I'll just have to wait a little longer. (Unless I want to buy a digital copy and strip the DRM code from the file which I was apparently too lazy to do today.)
(Anyway...)
While I was searching for ๐๐๐๐๐ I came across a collection of Shriver's essays titled ๐ด๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ก๐๐๐๐ . I don't know if anyone here has read it, or even heard of it, but here it is...
Lionel Shriver - Abominations (747kb .epub)
https://tinyurl.com/2hmku53f
Cheers! โฎ๏ธ
Much like Sailer's new book, I have been unable to source a digital copy of this new Shriver novel. I'm assuming it's because it is too new, but I also feel a little like I'm loosing my touch. I'm really not used to not finding the things I want to download. I suppose I'll just have to wait a little longer. (Unless I want to buy a digital copy and strip the DRM code from the file which I was apparently too lazy to do today.)
(Anyway...)
While I was searching for ๐๐๐๐๐ I came across a collection of Shriver's essays titled ๐ด๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ก๐๐๐๐ . I don't know if anyone here has read it, or even heard of it, but here it is...
Lionel Shriver - Abominations (747kb .epub)
https://tinyurl.com/2hmku53f
Cheers! โฎ๏ธ
Moderator
Wednesday - April 10th 2024 6:06AM MST
PS: I saw one headline, Alarmist, that said pretty much all rapes in Germany were perpetrated by foreign thugs, aka, newcomers. Don't call them migrants. That's a slur! (Now it is, you know, once people caught on.)
Yes, I see the game they are playing. If you point out their skin color and features to point out differences from actual Germans, the authorities will call you mean names and maybe put you in prison.
The only reason I can see that Mrs. Shriver's bug-out location of Portugal has missed lots of this is that it's out of the way. After a while, it's no longer out of the way.
Yes, I see the game they are playing. If you point out their skin color and features to point out differences from actual Germans, the authorities will call you mean names and maybe put you in prison.
The only reason I can see that Mrs. Shriver's bug-out location of Portugal has missed lots of this is that it's out of the way. After a while, it's no longer out of the way.
The Alarmist
Wednesday - April 10th 2024 4:38AM MST
PS
In a pique of political correctness gone wrong, German crime stats show a marked increase in violent crime, but as bad as that may seem, it turns out the stats show that much of that uptick comes from migrants, and not just recent arrivals. The answer from Berlin to that more pressing problem has been to loosen the naturalization requirements to make as many of the new arrivals into Germans as soon as possible so that their crimes arenow tallied as crimes by Germans. Unlike Denmark, Germany would no longer follow these criminals as ethnically distinct from actual Germans.
Ms. Shriver fled formerly Great Britain probably for the harvest of results from BS like this, which has been endemic in British policing for years now.
Theyโre not just replacing the population, they are attempting to dumb it down in as many ways as possible.
In a pique of political correctness gone wrong, German crime stats show a marked increase in violent crime, but as bad as that may seem, it turns out the stats show that much of that uptick comes from migrants, and not just recent arrivals. The answer from Berlin to that more pressing problem has been to loosen the naturalization requirements to make as many of the new arrivals into Germans as soon as possible so that their crimes arenow tallied as crimes by Germans. Unlike Denmark, Germany would no longer follow these criminals as ethnically distinct from actual Germans.
Ms. Shriver fled formerly Great Britain probably for the harvest of results from BS like this, which has been endemic in British policing for years now.
Theyโre not just replacing the population, they are attempting to dumb it down in as many ways as possible.
I was wondering btw where you went to on iSteve so I thought I'd better check Peak Stupidity