This is How You Lose the Time War

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (2019) 209 pages

I listened to the audiobook on Libby narrated by Cynthia Farrell and Emily Woo Zeller. Amal answers a reader's question on Goodreads about how the two authors divided the writing with "In brief, Max wrote all of Red and I wrote all of Blue." I struggled to follow the story and understand what was really happening in the early chapters of the book. It is a very abstract book with lots of poetic language and mind-bending multi-verse time jumps. The two main characters named Red and Blue are female time agents from two warring factions. If you are a fan of espionage stories, I wouldn't recommend this because the spy work of these two time agents is left pretty vague, or, at least, it is difficult to follow the thread of the consequences of their actions forward and backward through time. There are letters that Blue and Red send to each other in this short book, which start as taunts between competitors and turn into proclamations of love. Red's world includes many more references to human civilizations throughout history and has a sci-fi bent. Blue's world has many references to plants and animals and has a fantasy angle. Ultimately, I think this is really talking about the competition between humanity and nature through the millennia, and a star-crossed couple representing these two things begins to see value in each other.

 

Mark Rothko: toward the Light in the Chapel / Annie Cohen-Solal 282 pp.

Another Yale University Press title from the Jewish Lives series.  This was originally written in French and translated, as far as I can tell, by the author.  Rothko's story is interesting and multi-faceted, from boyhood in a shtetl in present-day Latvia complete with Talmudic school,  adolescence in Portland, Oregon, to New York artist.  And after reading, I may now be able to look at a Rothko painting and say something besides, "Hunh.  Colored stripes."  But I can't tell if the author simply tried to cover too much in too little space, or if she simply should have allowed someone else to translate, but the text feels full of holes.  Part of the problem is certainly the difficulty in writing about a non-verbal creative process.  An added shortcoming is that long stretches read more like a history of 20th century American art rather than the story of one man.  A book this length requires greater focus, or maybe simply a different focus.