Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The Windup Girl starts off promisingly: we get hints of a large story, and the details of the milieu are filled in in tantalizing glimpses--as is customary in science fiction. But then the novel fails to deliver, petering itself out in redundant action sequences, flat characters, and whole chapters spent listening to the same internal monologues over and over. For me the novel simply felt amateurish and poorly written. Much of the writing is small, repetitive, and procedural. A typical example sentence is when a character muses: "Ah, Jaidee, she thinks. I am sorry. So sorry. For everything I have done to you and yours. I did not set out to hurt you." (p. 211) Here Bacigalupi has taken the merely functional statement of "I am sorry" and stretched it out to 26 words while adding nothing. And take this monologue where one character muses: Is she alive? Is she dead? Was it Trade? Was it another? A 'jao por', incensed at Jaidee's audacity? Was it someone within the Environment Ministry? Bhirom-bhakdi, irritated at Jaidee's disregard for protocol? Was it meant as a kidnapping, or murder? Did she die fighting to get free? ... Does she float in the Chao Phraya, food now for the Boddhi Carp rev 2.3 that the Ministry has bred with such success? (p. 168) Here not only is Bacigalupi padding his book by just having a character ask questions (and ones which range from obvious to ridiculous), but he's even repeating the same questions in superficially different ways: "Is {x} true? Is {not x} true? Was it {y}? Was it {not y}? Or perhaps {z}? ..." The reader learns nothing, but words are used up. (And that excerpt was significantly abbreviated, by the way.) Bacigalupi's action sequences are also propelled by similarly vapid bits of commentary from the characters, as when they say things like "I jumped, she thinks. I jumped." (p. 200) As the book drags on, Bacigalupi seems to resort to writing in nothing but staccato sentence fragments. Clichés are also out in force, such as when he starts off a chapter with some non sequitur rambling, then breathlessly segues back to his story with, "This is what Kanya thinks as she rides her bicycle across the city." (p. 192) I found this writing hardly conscientious, and it made me wish that standards were higher in science fiction. Another thing that grated on me was Bacigalupi's use of extraneous foreign words. Introducing foreign words can be fascinating when they embody unique concepts. I remember an engaging scene in a Hiroshima docudrama where President Truman and his advisors are trying to interpet the Japanese response to the Potsdam Declaration, and they have to call in an expert to translate the word 'mokusatsu' for them because it has no English equivalent, yet its precise meaning was crucial to determining whether Japan was going to surrender or continue the war--and so then whether the US should use the atomic bombs. That was intriguing. But in The Windup Girl foreign words seem to be used in only two ways. The first is for something that will only be mentioned once and that doesn't matter at all, such as the names of foods: He misses Hainan chicken and 'laksa asam' and good sweet 'kopi' and 'roti canai.' (p. 69) The sentence seems intended as mere flavor text to remind the reader that this book takes place in Thailand. Yet this establishment is still going on by page 69, and far later, with throwaway references to 'jinjok lizards,' 'takram balls,' 'laab mu', and 'gaeng gai.' The second way in which Bacigalupi uses foreign words is as stand-ins for perfectly equivalent English cognates. He maintains a corpus of about two dozen foreign words, and he either leaves the reader to figure them out, or he introduces them as risibly as this: She has no appreciation for 'sanuk', for fun, even such intense fun, such 'sanuk mak' as successfully shaking down the Trade Ministry ... (p. 49) For myself, I don't see any crucial difference between the concepts of 'fun' and 'sanuk.' And yet from then on Bacigalupi insists on using only 'sanuk.' Perhaps because copping out to a foreign word relieves him of having to think of a synonym such as 'cheer,' 'amusement,' or 'mirth.' Combine this with Bacigalupi's reliance on repetition to make word count, and one ends up seeing sentences like this over and over: Not like Kanya, dour Kanya, all 'jai yen' all the time. Not 'sanuk' at all, but certainly 'jai yen.' (p. 84) While the Thai words escaped me, Bacigalupi also uses some Chinese words, which I did understand, and so I knew exactly how silly he was being. For example he says 'yang guizi foreign devil,' as if oblivious to the fact that he's repeating himself on the level of, 'What's your soup du jour of the day?' And he uses 'Xiansheng' several times without explanation, despite the fact that all it means is 'Mister.' Yeah, you can see how much that loses in translation. It is not hard to write a good book or at least a passable one, but it is far easier to litter it with repeated mistakes, which is how The Windup Girl felt for me. I wish I could read a tighter version of the story with the clunky and redundant writing removed. But I don't have much incentive to read another offering from Mr. Bacigalupi since his writing style has already proven sufficient to clinch the top two awards in science fiction, so there is little chance that he will see any need to alter it. This seems a telling referendum on the state of science fiction itself, and reminds me why I moved away from it to other genres.