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Fiction. Literature. Thriller. HTML: Named one of NPR's Best Books of 2021 From the author of Annihilation, a brilliant speculative thriller of dark conspiracy, endangered species, and the possible end of all things. Security consultant "Jane Smith" receives an envelope with a key to a storage unit that holds a taxidermied hummingbird and clues leading her to a taxidermied salamander. Silvina, the dead woman who left the note, is a reputed ecoterrorist and the daughter of an Argentine industrialist. By taking the hummingbird from the storage unit, Jane sets in motion a series of events that quickly spin beyond her control. Soon, Jane and her family are in danger, with few allies to help her make sense of the true scope of the peril. Is the only way to safety to follow in Silvina's footsteps? Is it too late to stop? As she desperately seeks answers about why Silvina contacted her, time is running outā??for her and possibly for the world. Hummingbird Salamander is Jeff VanderMeer at his brilliant, cinematic best, wrapping profound questions about climate change, identity, and the world we live in into a tightly plotted thriller full of unexpected twists and elaborate conspiracy.… (more)
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Jane Smith is a fake name for a security consultant living and working somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. She has a husband and a teenage daughter and a good job. A former college wrestler Jane is a large woman but she continues to work out at a gym and so she has retained her muscular conditioning. One day, as she leaves her favourite coffee shop, the barista hands her an envelope that someone has left for her. Inside the envelope is an address and a key with the number 7 on it. She decides to go to the address and that starts her on a path that will turn her life upside down. The address is a storage compartment facility and Number 7 is an almost empty storage compartment. The only contents are a chair with a cardboard box on it. Inside the box is a taxidermied hummingbird and a note that says "Hummingbird .. .. .. Salamander" signed by someone named Silvina. Silvina Vilcapampa has recently died and she left a series of clues that takes Jane on a quest. Silvina may or may not have been an eco-terrorist. She may or may not have trafficked in wild animals. She may or may not have hoped to establish a new order that would allow humans to interact with the ecosystem in non-destructive ways. And for some reason she has chosen Jane to carry on her work. There are people who don't want Jane to succeed. Jane is watched and followed and attacked and held captive and shot at but, although injured and separated forever from her family, she carries on. It's an epic tale.
I haven't read anything else by this author but I'm thinking, based on this book, that I may have to read more.
Let's start with what I liked. The writing was fantastic. The noir tone was so well crafted that I almost heard Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett calling from between the lines. And what a great character, the
Minor spoilers ahead, just be forewarned.
The inevitable downside to reading about a descent into madness, is you have to let go of any hope that her life, her normalcy as it was when the story began, can return. And the sooner you do that, the better off you're going to be. I spent the first half of the book hoping that she would work things out in such a way that a return to her home and her family would be possible. It would have been better (for me) if I'd let that go earlier on. The clues where there. For reasons that never get properly explained, Jane's insistence in pulling on those threads, causing the unraveling of her own life, left a scorched earth landscape behind her such that there was no going back. My advice to readers is to pay attention to the eco thriller aspects of the novel. The writing is clear on the proverbial walls. The landscape that Vandermeer is painting for us is bleak. Jane's story is a mirror of that.
Once I let go of those hopes, I realized how all the narrative paths lead to the same logical conclusion. And when Vandermeer took me there, I wasn't surprised, but I also wasn't disappointed. The ending is a little fantastic, but just a bit. I'm willing to suspend my disbelief and cling to the glimmer of optimism embedded in the finale.
Final thought: after struggling mightily (as I did) with Dead Astronauts, Vandermeer has completely redeemed himself. This book is another excellent example of his powers as a great writer.
Thank you NetGalley and FSG Books for the ARC.
A mysterious and unreliable narrator tells how she was given a stuffed rare hummingbird by a dead woman named
I happen to like Nolan's movies and this was okay except it dragged on and on. The payoff at the end was meh, but the writing is very good.
Recommended as a great speculative thriller.
THis is the first non-speculative Vandermeer book I have read; the rest are SFF to some degree (as far as I know.) Some parts of it I loved, and some parts I struggled with, but I overall
For the areas I struggled with, I think this was largely down to expectation. The book is billed as an eco thriller, but it doesn't really meet my internal definitions of thriller, and I'm not sure it would meet industry ones either? I spent a year reading commercial thrillers to prepare for writing a thriller myself, and my understanding was that thrillers have a certain kind of structure. In HS, very few of the MC's plot goals are accomplished in the way that she hopes, put it that way, and the structure is sprawling rather than corseted.
When I let go of the idea that this was meant to be a thriller, and read it more as a deeply literary meditation on the collapse of civilisation as part of the aftermath of humanity's destruction of the natural world, then I found I enjoyed it much more. I stopped expecting certain plot point to unfold in certain ways, and could just embrace the book for what it was trying to do, and what it was trying to say.
In that sense, I approached Hummingbird much as I approached Dead Astronauts: by letting go of the proverbial wheel and trusting Vandermeer to present something artistic and unusual, a liminal book that defied its own supposed structure.
The writing was gritty and sad, a slow drip of clues/revelations kept me reading, but really I think it was the amazing performance of the narrator that kept me listening. She was PERFECT for this book.
Where is it set? Unnamed location in the Pacific Northwest, but context tells me it's mostly set in Oregon.
What I liked: The hard-boiled detective is a middle-aged female ex-wrestler who's not that great at
What I didn't like: The plot was convoluted and sometimes hard to follow, but I find that's true of all hard-boiled detective novels. There were a lot of fight scenes.
What it compares to: It didn't move me as much as either the [Southern Reach] trilogy or [Borne]. Reminded me of [12 Monkeys].
VanderMeerās story takes place in the near future when the United States is near collapse because of climate change and environmental disaster.
A large woman (six feet tall, 230 pounds) who works as a security consultant. "Jane Smith," as she calls herself, has a husband and daughter at home. One day she receives a box containing a stuffed hummingbird, possibly the last of that particular species. A cryptic note from someone named Silvina hints that there is a stuffed salamander out there somewhere that she should find.
Jane once thought she might like to become a detective, and so she begins trying to unravel this mystery. It dominates her life, causing her to neglect both her job and her family. She and those around her are soon in grave danger. The mystery deepens, bodies pile up and eventually her quest takes her back to the beginning ā her own beginning.
By the novel's end it begins to read like science fiction, but until then it reads like a thriller, an unusually good one.
At first, this reads like William Gibson on steroids. Paranoid, rightly so, and so darn tense. I almost couldnāt continue or put it down either. Of course itās a huge story and not entirely comprehensible, which is perfectly fine and so very Vandermeer. As ever, Iām not sure the payoff warranted the ordeal but it was delicious while it lasted.
Definitely recommended for those who enjoy this kind of thing. (Which sometimes includes me.)
I personally really enjoy VanderMeer's writing style and the themes he covers. I liked the main character as a character, but not really as a person. The side characters were maybe a little undercooked sometimes, but then again this was strongly a story from our main character's point of view, and to her, other people aren't really all that important.
The conflict resolution towards the end is pretty anti-climactic, and the actual end of the book is one that I'm sure will divide people in whether it's good or bad.
For me, the thing that keeps this book from being five stars is just the lack of impact. I guess I need to care about the characters and the plot in addition to merely being interested in them for the book to warrant the highest rating.
Still enjoyed it though.
Hummingbird Salamander is not at
Our unreliable narrator, Jane Smith, must navigate a world of intrigue and crime. Must explore her own grief and discover the grief that was welling up within her all along for the world falling apart around her. Jane Smith must follow the traces and pieces left behind by Silvina Vilcapampa and her family and her families nefarious network of companies and criminals. The book section by section and part by part whilwinds and vortexes into a tale that only Jeff Vandermeer could have told. The present moments leaks into the work in the best ways possible and demands an urgency about the failing world around us. It as ever in Vandermeer work is also about family and love and struggling to be a person in the world. In a world so full of humans but lacking in actual people.
An epic work. As ever looking forward to the next thing from Jeff Vandermeer.