The Actual Star

What an ambitious novel! I mostly loved it for its tone, the mood it creates. Also some of the quirkiness of the writing. It's an idiosyncratic book, and personal, and I like it much for that. To me it felt like a riff on Cloud Atlas in terms of the multiple-lives-across-centuries narrative structure. And Station Eleven for the somewhat magical mood, not to mention the plot device of staging a play. But then Actual Star has its own particular depth of rooting the narrative in a Mayan legend.

The general theme of the book is seeking satori, or perhaps internal peace, or reconciliation with oneself across millennia. Three intertwined stories: 1012 (Mayan world), 2012 (modern world, Belize tourism) and 3012 (future world, global). Characters with echoes of each other bridge the millennia stories but not in any clumsy or literal way. I particularly liked the slow character reveal of Leah in the 2012 story, what to me seemed the main narrative.

I also have to write a bit about the sex scenes. I liked them! Also they are very quirky. Written in a quite detached style, almost clinical, and it's all very much the opposite of intimacy. It reminded me of how some women I know have talked about bad experiences with men, the detachment they felt, and that makes sense in this narrative. Also in the far-future everyone has both sets of genitals so sometimes the action gets a little alien.

All in all a satisfying and emotionally complex book. I'll be thinking about it a long time. I wonder how well it'd adapt to screen?