Kindred

This was great. For lack of any good comparisons, because this book is pretty genre-defying, her writing reminded me a bit of Philip K. Dick, in that the general ideas and plot execution are really interesting, and the social commentary is direct without being too heavy-handed; similarly to Dick, too, the dialogue is relatively stilted.

Still, it's a really interesting read.

What a remarkable book! Even though it sometimes depicts terrible suffering, and raises serious questions about human morality, it never comes across as despairing. The story is so compelling, and Dana such a marvelous, fleshed-out character, I couldn't wait to find out what happened next.

At times I was cheering Dana on, impressed by her grit and courage, while other times I wanted to shake her and save her from her own decisions. I think Butler very deliberately crafted the narrative so the line between the two reactions will vary for different readers. This is reflective of the overarching questions: How much can a person put up with? When does understandable self-preservation cross into unforgivable collaboration? How does privilege skew our moral judgments?

But again, all of this weighty philosophy springs naturally from an amazing, thrilling, harrowing adventure tale. The book never bogs down but maintains tension beautifully, until coming to a fitting conclusion.

Butler's bibliography is going on my Must Read list - not only does she tell a fabulous story, but she transcends the time she was writing in, delivering a story that is fresh and relevant more than 35 years later.

I'm not really sure where to start with this book. It's in that category of “classics that everyone should read” and having finally read it, I agree. It's really, really, really good. It's a hard read at times - it takes you right into the antebellum south and the heart of slavery. It's actually set in Maryland, which is a little jarring for me - in today's political climate, Maryland isn't really considered part of “the south” - it's far more liberal than most of the south. A blue state, where those are all red. But it WAS a slave state. It is below the Mason-Dixon line, and reading the wiki, slavery was actually legal here longer than it was in the south. (Mostly because the Emancipation Proclamation only covered the Confederate States, not the slave-holding Union states of Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland. That's screwed up. You can't have slaves, but it's totally cool that the people that fought for us still keep them?)

So Kindred is set mostly in pre-Civil War Maryland, with a few scenes in modern-day California. The mystery of how Dana time-travels is never explained - but it doesn't really need to be. That's not the point of the story. The point of the story is a modern-day black woman transplanted to the antebellum south and learning to understand slavery in a very intimate manner. Dana mentions a couple of times how easy it is to forget that she has another life - that's she's a free black woman from the future - because the way they keep slaves in line doesn't give you time to think past the present. You work too hard to think of the future, and if you don't, all you can think about is the pain from your punishment for not working hard enough.

The book is a very visceral portrayal of a somewhat pampered slave's life - she's not a field hand, her masters are what passes for “kind.” Dana's fellow slaves live in fear of being sold down south to Mississippi - they know Maryland is better. As hard as some of the scenes are to read, the book explicitly says it could be harder.

The conflict Dana feels between rescuing her white, slave-owning ancestor again and again, and standing back and letting nature take its course (but dooming herself) is one of the central points of the book. It's a moral quandary that she never really answers.

Ultimately, there's no way to do this book justice in a review. I think it should be required high school reading. More than that, I think it should be required reading for white people. And if you haven't read it yet, you should. I knew on an intellectual level what slaves went through - but this book doesn't look at it from a distance. It doesn't divorce the reader from the violence. It puts the reader right there in the dirt of the yard with the whip exploding across Dana's back.

I think it took me so long to get around to this book because it IS a classic. And so many classics I was forced to read in school were boring and dry and hard to read. I'm starting to find that some are classics because they're just that good. Good and necessary and written about critically important topics. Kindred is one of them.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

Octavia E. Butler???s Kindred, first published in 1979, is an incredible novel. Though it???s speculative fiction utilizing time travel, much of its focus is showing a glimpse into the past, and the way the author incorporated so much about society into such a well paced story is nothing short of masterful. It???s a book I find difficult to recommend because it???s filled with ugliness and brutality due to its forthright examination of slavery, and as such, may be too grim for some to endure. Yet I want to recommend it to everyone because it is a powerful book showing exactly what fiction can be.

Full Review

Kindred is intense and unabashedly unsentimental. I would recommend it to everyone. It feels fresh and pertinent even (especially?) in 2019. Butler does a beautiful job of unraveling the majority-serving narrative that we are fed in grade school and in the media: “slavery is a thing of the past” and “it wasn't so bad for everyone”. (Utter BS, am I right?) Butler really calls out and challenges this narrative by placing modern-day characters (well, modern for the 1970s) in the antebellum South and exploring how they fall into their prescribed societal roles. How easily they did so was extremely frustrating to me as the reader, as were other action by the characters, but I think that this drove the message right home. The plot is griping and fluid, and I read most of the book in one sitting. This is my first time reading Butler, and I definitely plan to read more of her work in the future.

Kindred is a very thought-provoking read. Dana is a modern black woman (well, a woman of the 1970s) in a marriage with a white man. She finds herself sent to the 1800s South on multiple occasions – sometimes with her husband – and the common theme is the same boy (and, eventually, man) is in danger and needs saving.

She quickly determines the person she is saving is her great, great grandfather. She is surprised, because she doesn't know the Rufus in the family Bible is white.

Being a black woman in the antebellum South, she is treated like a slave, and for all intents and purposes, becomes a slave, with all the danger and abuse inherent to the institution. Her husband when he is with her tries to protect her, of course, but cannot experience what she is experiencing. She is automatically treated as lesser because of skin color, he is automatically treated as better, and even to the extent he wants to help her he is up against systemic racism.

Dana believes that if she can survive long enough, and help Rufus survive long enough to sire her next ancestor, that she will no longer be needed – that her freedom will be obtained by returning to modern times. She has to explore that she will allow, what she will do, what she will encourage others to do, and how she will change as a result of her captivity.

Her relationship with Rufus is complex, at least on her side. He is her kin(dred), but he is also someone who benefits from slavery, who thinks of black people as inferior, and who becomes a slave owner. She meets him as a little boy, and likes him while seeing he's troubled, and can't help but wonder if her influence will change him for the better. Will knowing her – an educated black woman who saves his life again and again – improve the lives of the black people he owns by making him question his beliefs? Will it even persuade him to free his slaves? Or will the system win out, corrupting Rufus beyond redemption? And at what point does the bad in a person outweigh the good?

I believe the reader will not find Dana a perfect person, and I don't believe she was meant to be. She was thrust into a world where she had to make difficult decisions, and decisions only become difficult when they're based on complex situations and when no answer is completely without drawbacks. I imagine most people will struggle with what she asks of another character. She asks her great great grandmother to willingly submit to repeated rapes. She feels that submitting is better than fighting, and inevitably losing the fight. There's certainly a pragmatism at work since these rapes are what will lead to her ancestor being born, and this is a battle this woman is unlikely to win. Dana might not be wrong, but it just doesn't feel like her decision to make, even knowing what she does. How a woman handles a situation like that, even if she wants to fight it to the death, is her decision. But... Impossible situation. But the interesting result of this is the reader sees Dana, while talking quite frankly to Rufus, and caring about the slaves, over time and without realizing it slipping into choosing her own path of least resistance. I've read the author did want people to think about how history has judged the enslaved men and women who took a path of pleasing the enslavers in order to improve their lives to the extent they could.

Since I finished this a day or two ago, Kindred has been in my thoughts quite a bit. I found myself saddened that I would never meet Octavia Butler outside of her books. I feel I lost something in not discovering her earlier.

This isn't my favorite Octavia Butler book, probably because it's true historical fantasy instead of one of her amazing science fiction epics. That said, it is still a very powerful book, and one that I'm glad I read. The story follows a black woman in 1976 through a bizarre series of time travels to repeatedly save the life of her white, slave-owning ancestor. Each time, she her journey is fraught with peril from all directions, and she is repeatedly forced into the life of a slave on her ancestor's plantation.

Butler makes slavery viscerally real in a lot of ways, from her no-sugar coating descriptions of the beatings slaves received (and the horrors of the relatively mild beatings Dana receives) to her fully-fledged, multi-faceted portraits of the black characters living under the Weylin estate. Dana is an easy character to see through, as she has witnessed all of the slave stereotypes modern media has furnished and also the complicated lives of African-Americans in what is still relatively early on in the Civil Rights Movement. Dana, a writer in her own time, chronicles the people she meets not as Mammies or Uncle Toms or noble martyrs, but as flawed humans struggling to survive however they can, sacrificing whatever levels of pride and dignity they can individually bear.

Dana's relationships with the white characters are just as complicated. From Rufus, the man she is called again and again to save for whom she feels something despite is reprehensible treatment of her and those she cares for, to Kevin, her progressive, white husband who seems to, if not belong in 1819, at least manage to justify and fit in even as he forms his own stop on the Underground Railroad. The ties we forge for ourselves, the ways we let coventions and society make slaves of us, make us believe things have to be certain ways, these are themes Butler's works bring up again and again. Here, though, they are not cloaked in alien metaphor, but very real and remarkably present.

Butler's work is as relevant (maybe more relevant?) than when it was written, and while I don't claim this book to be an easy read, I think it's an important one.

Completely engaging. This is a marked divergence from the more fantastical Patternist series; here Butler uses time travel as a completely unexplained mechanic to provide a uniquely sci-fi perspective on first-person slave narrative. In doing so, I think she shows us things about slave America than a contemporary account would not necessarily be able to do.

For me, the most surprising realisation was that even though we're taught about the existence of slave stereotypes, having not read first-person slave narratives before it's startling to see the ways in which characters draw from or step outside of those stereotypes. Sarah is my favourite example of this. She talks Dana down from all sorts of foolhardy choices, so we begin to think of her in an Uncle Tom kind of role, but we learn that underneath she is simmering with more anger and resentment at the loss of her children than Dana, or I, could really understand.

Other interesting points come in the relationship of Dana and Rufus; she is his savior several times over and yet is not just unable to wrest Rufus from the mindset of a white man of his time, but he actively forces her into compliance with his wishes when he sends her to bring Alice to him. Despite her self-loathing, she does as bid (as does Alice), and it is not until she is pushed to killing him that she is freed.

Kevin and Dana's differing relationships to the period are also worth looking at. Dana thinks she should be able to wrest control of the situation, but instead ends up needing to ride it out, and even then she cannot return from the experience whole. Kevin thinks himself able to manage, and does in fact survive for five years and help slaves, but Butler shows us that he doesn't have the kind of awareness of the dynamics at play. His request of Dana to scribe is eerily similar to Rufus'.

Overall, Kindred is incredibly gripping. The pacing is fantastic, episodes slowly building up, the characterisation of the cast is extremely moving, down even to more minor characters like Nigel or Tess. I read this in basically one sitting! If you want to examine our modern relationship to historical slavery, why not literally place a modern character into slavery?

It's hard to say I enjoyed reading this book, as the scenario and plot are far from being comfortable and easy to read as any other book portraiting the horrible times of pre “liberation” of enslaved people.

The science fiction piece was definitely not my favorite, and I know that Octavia herself has made several disclaimers saying that this is not to her considered a science fiction novel, however this is how this book is usually categorized and I (unintentionally) was expecting more to it on this side. There's no explanation as to what takes Dana out of her house to save Rufus everytime - and to me their blood relation is not enough -, there's no explanation as to the difference in time lapse between each trip, there's no explanation to how each trip occurs. After finishing the book I got to terms as that was not the intention of the author, that was not the story she wanted to tell and I respect that.

In the end, this is the story of how the United States, like many other countries, was built. On the blood of innocent people. On the rape of innocent women. The main conflict on the book is that of Dana as she knows that she need to save that white man every time as he is her direct blood relative from the 19th century, and you see how much that destroys her physically and psychologically.

CAWPILE SCORE
C-10
A-9
W-9
P-8
I-6
L-9
E-7
TOTAL-8.29/10

Very intense book. lots of powerful moments. This is definitely a character story.

CAWPILECharactersThis story is all about the characters and the relationships they have. Mainly about Dana and Rufus. Octavia Butler writes an amazing cast of characters.AtmosphereWhile reading this, i could truly feel like I was there with the characters. and while the Present never felt as fleshed out as the past, thats not the story being toldWritingAmazing Prose, short and Sweet. Although I was deceived by seeing it was only 6 chapters and expecting it to be shorter. but thats on me.PlotLess of a plot story that even while its there the characters are more central to the story.IntrigueThe interest of what will happen to Dana and Rufus kept me heavily invested in finishingLogicThe characters all behaved like characters from this time period would in the situation they found themselves in.EnjoymentWhile I liked reading this book, its tough to say I enjoyed it. and I probably won't be rereading it anytime soon
I will be talking about it on Libromancy 03/20/2022 https://libromancy.podbean.com/

I was expecting this to be painful. I expected to feel rage, helplessness, fear, disgust.

I was not expecting serenity. That's an incongruous word for a book on this topic — I'm uncomfortable writing and even thinking it — but that's what fits. Dana, the protagonist, demonstrates an astonishing inner strength, a quiet fire manifesting as wisdom, patience, remarkable tolerance. The result is a nuanced and complex book: kindness, resilience, fortitude; also monstrous cruelty, with clear villains who — much like today's Republicans — are simply weak worthless subhumans, products of a deep-rooted and enormously broken system, incapable of breaking out of it and too stupid to understand a bigger, broader, better world. Butler, unlike me, is able to find compassion even for those creatures. Her Dana is a memorable character: soft front, strong back — Brené Brown would approve. Every character rings true, with believable emotions.

// the speculative fiction authors challenge
// octavia butler

Octavia Butler is on my must-read challenge list. Her back catalogue is massive. Where do you even begin?

Kindred, apparently.

I finished last week but didn't have the words to write a review. I still struggle.

Kindred is about Dana, a young, black woman of the 1970s who suddenly finds herself being time-traveled to antebellum Maryland (ca 1815).

Butler is a science fiction writer, but Kindred is on the low end of the sci-fi scale, if at all (the time-traveling bit just is, no explanation). I am rather ignorant about the history of the USA (I am from a small European country), but from my perspective, this book felt like a very insightful and trustworthy depiction of a historical time.

Butler's writing flows easily. English is not my native language, but I never felt I read a book from 1979 (before I was born).

I stayed up late on several occasions to finish another chapter (and hated myself a bit because this book really hurts and it's never fun going to bed with a broken heart).

The verdict?
This is certainly not my last Butler novel.

Very gripping yet very enraging.

I understand the point of the book was how easy it was to accept the way things are, even if those things are horrible. And the complexities of caring for people who perpetuating those horrible things.

But

Dana is way too accepting of a rapist. She even encourages her ancestor into accepting being raped, and is happy when they have a child together. Would I really want my ancestor to be raped just so I could exist?! I'm not sure my family tree or existence is worth someone else's pain and suffering. Of course if it hadn't been Rufus, it could have easily been someone else. Who knows what would have happened to Alice if Rufus wasn't around. But Dana's attitude still feels icky.And then Dana kills Rufus when he tries to rape her. That seems very hypocritical


This is also a book about a concept. I would have preferred it be a book about characters. We didn't see the deeply intense internal personal conflict that could have easily arisen from a story like this.