George R. R. Martin (1996--2011)
This is five books, not one, but I didn't set the time aside to write a review for each of them, so here it is in aggregate. It's pretty well known these days, on account of the television show, but the first book especially was quite refreshing to me in how restrained the role of magic and the fantastic was in the story. Supernatural happenings grow more abundant over the series' length, but as it starts the world feels little removed from our own there — and this despite the elongated seasons, summers and winters lasting years at a time.
There's a criticism often levelled against these books that they exist only to revel in brutality and cynicism, to deconstruct the fairy-tale hopefulness of older fantasy stories; and indeed they are brutal. Sexual violence especially occurs with such frequency and casualness that it gets a bit wearisome, but there's something to be said for the willingness to depict that reality of war which so many stories just ignore. And certainly much of what happens is grim and depressing: many leading viewport characters die horribly. But I don't agree that ASOIAF is truly “grimdark,” that it's a work without hope. It depicts a sort of cruel political realism, that most who try their hand at governance will fail and die, but it's simply not true to say that there are no good characters, or that there is no hope for anyone.
George R. R. Martin's world contains a lot of neat little parallels to our own. Worship of R'hllor, the Lord of Light, fills a similar relation to Westeros' Faith of the Seven as Islam did to medieval Christianity, in that it is a strongly iconoclastic, evangelistic religion being spread through conquest after Stannis Barratheon converts, but the dualist cosmology and practice of keeping sacred fires are plainly Zoroastrian (and I'd be surprised if the messiah figure Azor Ahai was not named after Ahura Mazda). The customary practice of incest by the Targaryen dynasty (Valyrian nobility overall?) has parallels in the Egyptian pharaohs and Zoroastrian Xwedodah.
Jaime Lannister threw an 8-year-old out a window in the opening chapters of the first book, and by the last he's somehow become a sympathetic character. Highly recommended.
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1542); trans. Fanny Bandelier (1905)
This is a relatively short translation of La relación de Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, a first-hand account of the disastrous Narváez expedition. To put it mildly, this was not a competently run project by the standard set by its contemporaries, and the Conquistadors were not as a rule known for competence. All men who set foot in the New World under Pánfilo de Narváez's command died save four, who wandered barefoot and naked across a land unknown then to any European; they set out to conquer and steal, battered themselves against the Texas coast, and were left to find each other by chance. Cabeza de Vaca never turned altogether against the colonial project, but having faced cold and hunger alongside the people there, having been beaten and banqueted, he did grow disillusioned with brutality.
For me the most haunting part of this narrative is how, at the end, Cabeza de Vaca — now a prominent faith healer and even a partly successful evangelist — leads several hundred natives back into Spanish-held territory. The Spaniards they meet wanted to enslave them on the spot, and after being rebuffed, try to keep these people from following the party, as they had for hundreds of leagues, by relating through interpreters that these were Spaniards gone astray, unlucky castaways who ought not be listened to.
The Indians gave all that talk of theirs little attention. They parleyed among themselves, saying that the Christians lied, for we had come from sunrise, while the others came from where the sun sets; that we cured the sick, while the others killed those who were healthy; that we went naked and shoeless, whereas the others wore clothes and went on horseback and with lances. Also, that we asked for nothing, but gave away all we were presented with, meanwhile the others seemed to have no other aim than to steal what they could, and never gave anything to anybody. In short, they recalled all our deeds, and praised them highly, contrasting them with the conduct of the others.
But the four survivors do move on, eventually. They convince many of the people who had fled that area to return to their fields and homes, saying that they would not be hurt or molested so long as they live in peace and do as these new lords ask. And all those hundreds of followers who had accompanied these preachers back to their own people were, as soon as they'd been abandoned, rounded up and enslaved. Cabeza de Vaca did all he could to effect a “gentle” colonization; he was one of the few colonizers who spoke out against the abuses he saw around him; and it did precious little to stave off the evil in his wake.
Oscar Wilde (1890)
A more lighthearted read than most of the others in this list, even though its main subject is the slow corruption of Dorian Gray, from vanity to callousness to, eventually, murder. The general tone is, however, highly abstract for most of the book; there are a lot of vague references to the depredations of Mr. Gray without any specificity, and it takes a fair while for the main conceit (a soul contained in the portrait of its owner) to take effect, but overall still enjoyable.
As with the ASOIAF books, I read these back to back — for school reasons, as I'd been writing a short story about nostalgia with the protagonist being fixated on this time and place — and my memory of what happened where may be a bit inaccurate. The first two are autobiographical accounts, one from the perspective of the medicine man and last resisting war leader Geronimo, and one from that of Herman Lehmann, a white settler who was captured as a child, raised as an Apache warrior (which was standard practice for captives who didn't get traded away) before having a falling out with members of his band, joining the Comanches, and subsequently being sent back to his birth family after surrendering to the reservation system.
Geronimo's account especially has a classic heroic arc to it: he claims to have lived at peace with his wife and children, swore vengeance after their slaughter in Mexico, and lived a life of intermittent raids on whites and Mexicans alike, in and out of the growing reservation system, until his final surrender and permanent separation from his home in Arizona (which had been promised to only last two years). The end of his autobiography has a fawning and deeply desperate tone, saying that he held great respect for president Roosevelt, that his people “would be prosperous and happy in tilling the soil and learning the civilization of the white men, whom they now respect,” that he would die happy — if his people, the Chiricahua Apache (technically not a single band, but several distinct ones with a mostly shared language and a similar role in the Apache Wars), would be granted a reservation in Arizona. They never were, and wound up split between New Mexico and Oklahoma. Geronimo's last words were that surrender was a mistake.
Once They Moved Like the Wind contextualizes a lot of this, in saying that when engaged in dictating his autobiography, Geronimo (who always was deeply paranoid) suspected the whites wanted him to confess to more deeds than they already knew about, so that he might be punished for them. Thus it's not just an autobiography, but an attempt to protect the good image of himself and his people, and a plea for return to their lands (which Roosevelt denied Geronimo in person when they met). Additionally his picture-perfect turn from peace to vengeful warfare after the deaths of his family may have been reordered either deliberately or by faulty memory, because the only Mexican account for an attack like Geronimo's first successful retaliatory strike occurred before his family's deaths — though this proves little, as things may easily have progressed as he said, and just been lost to time. Outside of that, Roberts' book gives a solid overview of the Apache Wars, drawing from both white and native accounts.
Apache Voices consists of first-hand accounts recorded by the historian Eve Ball (1890-1984), whose published work consisted of semi-fictionalized rewritings instead of quoting what she'd been told, which was criticized by other historians even at the time. Nonetheless she went further than her contemporaries in closely befriending her informants instead of maintaining a professional distance, and therefore learning things others would never have been told (many were loathe to share stories about the woman warrior Lozen, sister of Victorio, for fear that people hearing of an unmarried woman riding into battle would think dishonorably of her). Many of Ball's notes were unused in her own publications, so Robinson has more to work with than just correcting where her publications fictionalized or editorialized their sources. Frustratingly it has one throwaway line about Lehmann's account, in the context of fakers claiming descent from notable Apache chiefs:
Though I know it is too trivial for anyone’s notice, I can’t help being annoyed by the ridiculous claims of this so-called Niño Cochise. He may believe his story, but no Apache does. And I’m more annoyed at Western Publications for being took. I do understand that once having won recognition for the Lehmann story, which the Comanches and Kiowas say is untrue, that they naturally wish to affect another startling discovery.
But I can't find a single thing about it online. Her sources for the statement may have died without telling anyone. Lehmann's habit of eating raw organs from a fresh kill is certainly quite strange in a non-ceremonial context (by all accounts the Apaches cooked their meat, and when they didn't it was generally dried jerky anyway), but it doesn't seem impossible that the chief Carnoviste who raised him was just a deeply strange and cruel person.