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Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr
Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr
Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr
Audiobook15 hours

Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

Written by John Crowley

Narrated by John Crowley

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this audiobook

From award-winning author John Crowley comes an exquisite fantasy novel about a man who tells the story of a crow named Dar Oakley and his impossible lives and deaths in the land of Ka.

A Crow alone is no Crow.

Dar Oakley—the first Crow in all of history with a name of his own—was born two thousand years ago. When a man learns his language, Dar finally gets the chance to tell his story. He begins his tale as a young man, and how he went down to the human underworld and got hold of the immortality meant for humans, long before Julius Caesar came into the Celtic lands; how he sailed West to America with the Irish monks searching for the Paradise of the Saints; and how he continuously went down into the land of the dead and returned. Through his adventures in Ka, the realm of Crows, and around the world, he found secrets that could change the humans’ entire way of life—and now may be the time to finally reveal them.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 24, 2017
ISBN9781543614152
Author

John Crowley

John Crowley was born in the appropriately liminal town of Presque Isle, Maine in 1942, his father then an officer in the US Army Air Corps. He grew up in Vermont, northeastern Kentucky and (for the longest stretch) Indiana, where he went to high school and college. He moved to New York City after college to make movie and found work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues. He published his first novel The Deep in 1975, and his fifteenth volume of fiction, Four Freedoms, in 2009. Since 1993 he has taught creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 2006 he was awarded the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. He finds it more gratifying that almost all his work is still in print.

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Reviews for Ka

Rating: 3.793650825396826 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I have a tendency, in my reading, to put off tackling the really great, difficult stories. No time now, life is busy, I wait for the opportunity. Obviously, this habit needs to be broken. And so, John Crowley's most recent novel, from 2017.To start, this is a beautiful hardcover physically: a black illustration by jacket designer Sonia Chaghatzbanian, plus white lettering, on a lovely green background, with the "KA" in gold. There are some fine interior illustrations by Melody Newcomb.Crowley's stories are fractal, in some sense, each part echoing every other part and the whole. His great theme is, not Story itself, but our human tendency to structure our lives as stories, pulling narrative out of the buzz of events. His novels are difficult to read, at least for me, requiring much paging back and forth to see the parts referenced by the passage I'm on now. Ka is less resistant in this sense, though, and perhaps a good first Crowley for anyone new to him.The novel's unnamed narrator is an elderly man somewhere in the USA, ill and recently widowed, living in a decaying society and a wounded climate, not too far in our future. The narrator's own tale is briefly and vividly limned. The bulk of the book's story is that of Dar Oakley, who is a crow, Corvus brachyrhynchos, an American crow, although he has been other sorts of crow in the distant past - for Dar does not age, and is reincarnated after each time he dies. The narrator nurses Dar back to health from an injury, and Dar tells the man his story after the two have learned to converse, as he has told it to other humans in eras past - or is our narrator simply imagining the relationship?In earliest memory, Dar was an ordinary crow, without a name yet, maturing, eating, nesting, and reproducing. The arrival of stone-age humans was very good for his region's crows, because human wars produced lots of carrion for them. Dar befriended a human child, the girl called Fox Cap, who learned his speech and gave him his name. Fox Cap grew to be her tribe's shaman, and took Dar along on a trip to the land of Death. There, he stole that which made him immortal in his peculiar way. Through the centuries, Dar watched humans grow to dominate the planet. The crow's journey has the episodic nature of many a fairy tale. Dar lives with medieval monks, travels to the new world with the help of Brendan the Navigator, and befriends a US Civil War widow whom Crowley models on Emily Dickinson. Crowley's gorgeous language has a fairy tale character at times, too:Dar Oakley didn't have that name then, or any name. It would be eons before Crows had each a name, as they do now; then, no, they had no need of them, they called those around them Father, Brother, Older Sister, Other Older Sister; those they didn't know as relations, or forgot in what degree, were spoken of as Those Ones, or Others, or All of Them There, and so on.Many of the stations along Dar's path involve death. Humans associate crows with death; the birds feed on dead creatures. During his sojourn with the war widow, he communicates with the shades of some of the men killed in the Civil War. He travels to that part of the land of Death that belongs to humans, and that part that belongs to crows. He is present at the first contact of the Old World with North America, and witnesses the Great Dying as the Native Americans are killed by European diseases. As I write in late March 2020, with COVID-19 looming, this last part is uncomfortably resonant. The novel's narrator must eventually come to his own accommodation with death. Crows, imagines Crowley, have a bluntly materialistic view of the world. A dead thing is "dead as dead," and Dar and his fellows struggle to understand the human idea that something alive still attaches to the bits of fat and muscle crows eat. What do these stories mean for the narrator, here at the end of his life?One content warning: one of Crowley's Civil War characters uses the N-word in a short passage. That's expected from someone of the era, but still jarring.To describe a book by John Crowley in terms of its parts, or its plot, is like describing a quilt by naming the fabric patches that went into it, while leaving out the quality of the whole. There's no way to summarize Crowley; he must be read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a strange book, and I had the sneaking suspicion all the way through that Crowley is doing something really complex and profound and completely over my head, because that's how a lot of his other books are. It tells the story of humanity's relationship with crows, and humanity's legends about crows, but it is told from the filtered viewpoint of one crow who has lived for all eternity and has been the object of these legends. I say "filtered" because the story is narrated by a man to whom the crow told his life story: the crow doesn't always remember the details, so the human fills some of them in, so there's some unreliable narrator stuff happening.The crow's life explores many themes. One is story and storytelling, and the need to tell stories to make sense of the world. Another is death - Dar Oakley frequently travels to the realm of the dead, and human legends about crows often involve crows' ability to travel between the worlds of the living and the dead. The book explores the theme of human history (starting in prehistory and ending in the present day), and humanity's changing relationship to nature, death, and the divine.I enjoyed reading this, even if it did go quite long.