I'll start off by saying I really enjoyed the humor and self-referencing nature of this story, I just wish I had the background knowledge to fully understand the work. Despite feeling like quite a bit went over my head, I really enjoyed the writing style - confusing at first but SO addicting when the reincarnation pieces standing to click in my head. The twisty narrative had me constantly guessing what would come next while keeping me invested in how each new perspective would connect to ones already established.

I was impressed with more than just the writing style, Rakesfall also managed to make me want to learn. It sparked a curiosity in me to research the stories, figures, and historical events that were referenced throughout. With that set of knowledge I'd give this a reread with the hopes that I can grasp the full context and better understand the author's vision.

Although I don't feel equipped to give a more in-depth review of this story, I can at least promise you that I enjoyed the time I spent with it. I laughed, I empathized, and I highlighted so many passages. It was a beautifully told reminder that power corrupts and it's negative affects can be felt across multitudes of generations and reincarnations.

Well. This was beautifully written and to some extent, I loved the format of dozens of mini stories with the same characters appearing over and over in different forms. But I was left questioning what the overall point the story was trying to make, in the end, in a story where the point really has to be central given the format. Was it anticapitalist? Pro resistance? (yes, but was that the point?) I don’t know. I just wish the last 10% even had been a tiny bit clearer, woven all of the various threads of the story together better. I also felt like it started to really drag around 70-90% of the way through, or maybe my faith in the idea that I’d stop being so confused and things would start to click just waned at that point. If it had been a little more unified this would have been a 5 star read for me.

I think this is for fans of This is How You Lose the Time War (but without the love story), the humor of Harrow the Ninth (random memes mixed with shakespearean like prose, on occasion) but without the deep dive into the characters. I may like it more on reflection. I do think it’s smart and I don’t think it’s pretentious, though I could absolutely see why someone would feel that way. But I’m not sure it’s enjoyable.

Thank you for the ARC copy, however, this book was not for me. It did not at all feel like what I thought the summary said it was. It felt like one of those movies that wins oscars but no one actually watches because it's pretentious and honestly, quite boring. I did not enjoy a moment of this and it's just not for me. I can see literary awards abound for it and beloved by critics but not by the general audience.

HIGHLIGHTS
~a handful of minutes
~hunt treasure, find demons
~time ain’t what it oughtta be
~the things one will do to get a son-in-law
~grandparents made of abnormal atoms

I’ll be honest: I don’t think I understood most of what was going on in Rakesfall.

But I loved every second of it.

In the simplest possible terms, it is, as the blurb claims, the…story…of two (at least two) souls as they reincarnate again and again. But describing it that way doesn’t even BEGIN to give you an idea of what Rakesfall is, or is like.

<enormity cannot truly, fully be spoken of without recourse to fable. There is a dread scale at which only myth works; only nightmare has the technology. Worlds must be broken to convey that attempts to depict a multidimensionally unspeakable reality in fiction, including this one, are but contemptible in the final reading.>

Part of it seems to take place in the past of our world, and some in our present or near-present – but the vast majority of it, all the stories that are really one story, are taking part in a world that isn’t ours, and then in a future that could be, but could just as easily be the future of this world that isn’t ours. (Readers familiar with Chandrasekera’s debut, The Saint of Bright Doors, will recognise the city of Luriat, which we visit again this book – albeit relatively briefly.

Does that make Rakesfall the/a sequel to The Saint of Bright Doors? I don’t think so, but some of the terms used in TSoBD come up again in Rakesfall, so it is helpful to have read TSoBD first. Very not-mandatory, though.)

Possibly this is the meaning of the title – The Rakesfall, if I understood it correctly, was an event that…‘broke’ isn’t the right term…changed the timeline, and thus the world, into…not what it ‘shouldn’t’ be, but what it wasn’t before. So I think the setting(s are) meant to be…a world our world could have been, or might have been, or would be, if time hadn’t gone the way it did. And/or will be, re the future parts, if we don’t hurry up and eat the rich already.

I’M TRYING MY BEST, OKAY?

<Georges does not ask himself why the Christian devil has hooves and horns, which is of course that they are satyrical.>

There is wordplay and mindplay and a rapid cycling through perspectives, sometimes several perspectives of the same event or events. We jump from the colonialisation of Indonesia to the far-future when humanity has left Earth behind entirely, and a whole bunch of places – some real, some meant-to-be-real, some meant-to-not-be – in-between (and before, and after). I don’t think it’s accurate to say that there is one clear, linear story being played out over all these lifetimes and timelines (if there is, I missed it) but it would be equally untrue to claim that Rakesfall has no plot; each section of the book – most of which cover one lifetime or time-period – covers a series of events that I was very invested in, even when I knew I was missing some nuance or only comprehending a piece of the whole. There is a murder-mystery; there are many attempts to ‘regreen’ the Earth after climate collapse; there is identity-theft with souls; there are quests, kind of; there is subtle and unsubtle resistance to political oppression; there are ghosts being taken to court to stop their hauntings. There is a LOT.

<It is difficult to stay in any one place, one world, one life. Each life is hard time, requiring painful incarnation, carceral enfleshment, the performativity of renaming and reliving, learning new histories, wilful forgettings and distancings, whatever is needed to maintain narrative continuity and protect genre boundaries.>

But it is not a collection of short stories – not even a collection of interconnected short stories – nor is it a mess. Rakesfall is cohesive, though I’d forgive anyone for not seeing how it COULD be, after the description above. I said I didn’t see one obvious story that these smaller stories are all a part of, and that’s true, but they still share something fundamental; they still form a whole, even if the whole isn’t anything as simple as what (white, Western) readers are used to thinking of as a story. Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends; Rakesfall doesn’t, really, because for all its fantastical elements it is mimicking (echoing? copying? replicating? recreating?) reality, which is also made up of stories but does not form one big easy-to-read here’s-the-climax there’s-the-moral Story.

And for all that the individual stories don’t click together like puzzle pieces to make another, bigger story, the various parts – facets – incarnations of Rakesfall do fit together. Rakesfall is eat-the-rich anarchist, anti-facist, anti-capitalist, deeply concerned with the idea of the visible and invisible worlds, the latter of which is by turns a place of spirits and one of digitally uploaded personalities (and really, when you think about it, what’s the difference?) Exorcisms, conceptually, come up again and again, as does the theme of losing your skin, casting it off, getting it back, it being stolen, reclaiming it, the raw-red-primality that lies beneath it and must sometimes be bared (defiantly, joyfully, wrathfully). Quantum physics melts gleefully and purposefully with history, folklore, philosophy, religion without the religion.

<Objects are not discrete. The perception of time is an illusion. Seeming biological realities are socially constructed: gender is only genre, race is a race to the bottom, species as arbitrary as specie. Seeming social realities are machinations of power hiding their inverse: slavery is called freedom to disguise its exploitation; ignorance is called strength, to champion political illiteracy; and most of all, most of all, war is called peace, the peace bought by murder, the peace of the unmarked grave.>

I also think…possibly…that the reason all these parts, all these smaller stories, work together is because it’s like…it’s like watching two people go through life. Even though they are actually going through lives, it somehow doesn’t feel too different from watching how a person – ‘develops’ is the wrong word, it implies a set end-point that doesn’t exist when you’re talking about people/souls – throughout their life. You watch a single life for a lifetime, you see the person go forward, stumble, go forward, two steps back, now take a step to the right, forwards again, stumble again, always themselves but always changing, always different, too (unless they stagnate, and we all hope we never get caught in that trap). The two souls we follow through Rakesfall are like that – even if I wasn’t always sure which character in Part III or Part VI etc was which soul (because, of course, they change names and genders and their personalities are not identical in every life, why would they be, they are not replicas of their past-selves, they are them-selves) – even so, I think there’s a quiet, subtle sense that you are still following the same people, lifetime after lifetime. We’re seeing them in different contexts, different times, seeing them as they grow, as they stumble, as they take a step to the right…but they’re the same two souls. There’s something, something I can’t articulate, something that proves Chandrasekera is a genius (as if his debut didn’t prove that, as if every other aspect of Rakesfall doesn’t prove it), that makes me feel, ‘ah yes, it’s these two again’.

EVEN WHEN I DON’T KNOW WHICH IS WHICH.

WHAT CAN ONE CALL THAT BUT GENIUS???

<Reincarnation is horizontal, and always plural: no person survives death, but all worlds live and die together, and lives echo like waves upon waves in the great akashic ocean because we choose to work together across time. We choose!>

I can’t narrow down Rakesfall to just one thing; I can’t sum it up in a nice, pithy little quote with a bow on top. There are layers and layers of meaning here, a serpent with endless skins where each shed skin becomes a new snake that is itself but is the old snake too, repeating on and on in an infinite, dizzying, constantly-creating ouroboros. Except it’s not an ouroboros, because in an ouroboros the snake is eating its own tail and that’s not what’s happening here, the snake is not devouring itself, the snake is holding hands with all the other snakes born from its shed skins and that is how they form a circle, an endless chain across eternity all holding hands, all of them unique and all of them the same.

(Yes I said hands, I meant hands, don’t you see the impossibility is the point.)

The snake isn’t trying to eat itself; there are other people trying to eat the snake. And maybe the only black-and-white thing Chandrasekera has to say is that those people are bad.

Everything else is complicated as fuck. But the people trying to eat other people – that’s simple. That’s easy. They are the only ones who are truly monstrous, and the only ones who cannot be forgiven, and the only ones who must, must, be completely and utterly destroyed.

<you speak of our innocence and ignorance, and you weren’t wrong about that. We have forgotten so much from the human eon. But we remember the parts that matter.>

(The people trying to eat the snake are the CEOs and presidents and dictators and war-mongerers and I think you get the demographic I’m describing here.)

It’s funny; I have to reach for poetry and metaphor to describe Rakesfall, and one of Chandrasekera’s (many) points in it is how some concepts/truths/stories are too big, too much, too true for us mortals to begin to grasp without poetry and metaphor. (‘enormity cannot truly, fully be spoken of without recourse to fable’ is the first quote I quoted.) Which, following that reasoning, makes Rakesfall, too, something too big, too much, too true to comprehend fully without the…the protection, which is also the filter, of poetry.

Which. Yes. Yes it is.

<Family legend had it that when Vidyucchika’s father was born, her nonbaryonic grandfather sighed to see the child’s traitor penis.>

So one of my favourite things about reading with an e-reader is the built in dictionary. (I’m going somewhere with this, bear with me.) But because I read SFF, it’s not unheard of for a book to present me with a word my dictionary doesn’t know. Sometimes it’s a very specific niche thing, like a minor part of a ship built in the 1600s, or a very archaic term for a colour, something like that. And because this book is by Chandrasekera, I wasn’t surprised when it happened in Rakesfall.

Nonbaryonic, I said to myself. What does that mean??? To a search engine!

As you might guess, it means ‘not baryonic’. Okay, so what does baryonic mean?

I DON’T KNOW.

I MEAN, I KNOW THE DEFINITION

<baryonic
adjective

all objects made of normal atomic matter>

BUT IN NO WAY DOES THAT HELP ME. Vidyucchika has a baryonic set of grandparents and a nonbaryonic set of grandparents and I don’t understand

But I fucking LOVE IT

Because seriously, how cool is that concept? GRANDPARENTS…NOT MADE OF NORMAL ATOMIC MATTER??? SO WHAT ARE THEY??? I don’t know! I have pieced together some things that happen so I kind of understand, or think I do, some of the practical effects of having nonbaryonic grandparents, what having them allows to happen in the story – but I don’t really understand what the grandparents are.

And I don’t feel patronized, I don’t feel like Chandrasekera is showing off or trying to make me feel stupid or anything of the kind. For one thing, I feel honoured that Chandrasekera thinks I have a chance of keeping up with him as he tells this story, and that makes me work harder, focus harder, trying to understand as much of it as I can. But ultimately, I think Chandrasekera is just light-years ahead of the rest of us; he is on another level so far from mine, from anyone else’s, that my elevator doesn’t even have a button for it. I don’t know what is going on in his head, but I am mesmerised, I am entranced, I am loving every second of it.

I understand enough to appreciate what I don’t understand.

<Time elapses, or does not lapse. Time elongates; time elopes; time lopes like a leopard that is not a leopard.>

Obviously, this is not a book I’d recommend for readers who need to understand everything, who must have all the answers by the final page. There’s nothing wrong with that whatsoever, it just means that Rakesfall isn’t for you. (Although who knows; maybe if you give it a try, you’ll get a taste for books that leave you flailing in bedazzled bewilderment. Weirder things have happened.

Weirder things have happened IN THIS BOOK.)

Who is it for? Anyone who wants to be challenged. Anyone who likes the sensation of their mind stretching to accommodate new knowledge, new ways of thinking, just newness. Anyone whose heart beats faster when you come across a SFF story that really is like nothing else you’ve ever read (or watched, or heard) before. Anyone who craves layers and layers of thought and myth and meaning in their fiction, who wants to sink their teeth into a Rôti sans pareil of a book and feel it bite back.

Anyone who is happy to be light-years behind, and wants to chase the comet anyway, even if you might not ever catch it.

Rakesfall is phenomenal. It’s a masterpiece of mindfuckery and spirituality, a manifestation of exquisitely incomprehensible imagination and undiluted emotion, a manifesto of anarchism and akashic freedoms and the wryly joyful impossibility of writing the mythic, at which one can never truly succeed but where the meaning lies in the trying. It’s a thought experiment and an argument and a case study, a high-speed race through the spheres, a merciless dissection of the laws and powers mundane and metaphysical, and all of it brutal and beautiful and breathtaking.

It is, in a word, unmissable.

As someone drawn in by the striking cover and intriguing synopsis of "Rakesfall" by Vajra Chandrasekera, I approached the book with high expectations, especially anticipating a unique sci-fi experience. However, my reading journey diverged sharply from what I anticipated.

From the outset, the novel proved challenging. The narrative introduced a multitude of names, characters, and places in rapid succession, leaving me struggling to keep pace. Coupled with references that were unfamiliar to me, this initial confusion hindered my ability to immerse myself in the story.

The language used throughout the book was undeniably verbose and often overly intellectual, which disrupted the flow of the narrative. I frequently found myself re-reading passages or losing focus, unable to connect deeply with the unfolding events.

While I appreciate the ambitious concept Chandrasekera aimed to explore, the execution ultimately didn't align with my personal reading preferences. Despite my initial disappointment, I remain intrigued by the potential of "Rakesfall." I am contemplating trying the audiobook version, hoping that a different format might enhance my understanding and appreciation of the story.

In conclusion, while I admire the author's intentions, this particular novel did not resonate with me due to its style and complexity. I may revisit "Rakesfall" in the future to see if a different approach alters my perspective.

This book was unique in a lot of aspects. It is not my go to genre, so I think this book is for a very specific audience. However, it made me think.

Brace yourself for a wild ride through cascading realities, where the dead and living intermingle in daily life, and exploding time scales from Sri Lanka’s present and recent past to the far, far future of an earth boiling under an expanded red sun. This is the world and universe of Vajra Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall. It offers a startling contrast to the author’s award-winning The Saint of Bright Doors. The story, really a melange of stories mixing myth, history and personal memory, may be hard to follow at times, but Rakesfall is always dazzling and fearless in its scooping up of realities and turning them inside out. I was consistently pulled along by the writing even when I was completely losing track of which reality I was following.

The novel begins with chapters that were originally published as a stand-alone short story. (There are four other sections that had a similar origin, which adds to the sense of abruptly jumping from one reality or time scale to another.) Those opening chapters immediately let you know that you will be stepping through boundaries of many types. We are said to be watching a TV show that follows teenagers Annelid and Leveret. (We later find out that their real names are Vidyucchika and Lambajihva, as they recur in different forms throughout the novel.)

When not playing in the jungle, which is actually an abandoned colonial plantation, they go to school where the main assignment is to watch a TV show about those who are watching the show, the fandom. Emphasizing the fluidity of states of being, the fandom consists of those who are dead. As the narrator says, we watch them, and they watch us. And, they add, “we”, the fandom, are watching the living in a dead place “while we are the dead in a living world. We are the ones who make this a haunted world.” The dead assume many roles in this novel, and they often inhabit the world of the living, as they go to work or take their places in the homes of their still living relatives. We also learn that the TV is deeply committed to “unreal time, seeming to glide back and forth across the spans of our lives.”

That span includes the long civil war in Sri Lanka, which the teacher in the TV show explains, “is now over but never over.” The TV show (both the show fandom is watching and the show within it) is like life in that it has no episodes, names, just occasional breaks, like the flow of consciousness, yet those watching reorganize that flow with borders, breaking it into episodes and seasons.

We get drawn deeply into the reality of Annelid’s and Leveret’s lives and hear the lore and warnings of their grandparents, especially about not going into the jungle. Those watching the show point out that these are forebodings of what is about to happen when they do go there. Leveret has joined a revolutionary group and tries to persuade Annelid to join. In the midst of this conversation in the jungle, Annelid hits Leveret in the back of the head with a rock, and the show abruptly ends. The show is suddenly cancelled so we never learn if he is dead, but fandom divides into factions to explain what must have happened. Some believe the characters have been trained to emerge into the world of fandom when the show ends, others believe they have already emerged.
...........

Rakesfall keeps the mind buzzing with its multiform beings, its twisting perspectives on the real and the invisible, its pulling down of barriers between levels of life and death, its sheer vastness of invention. It’s full of rough edges and abrupt shifts of story lines that turn the whole idea of a novel inside out. This is not a novel for those seeking a conventional story, but it is a work of genius that changes the way I think of the world and of the act of writing itself.

I don’t know what happened in this one but I enjoyed the ride. It is very lyrically written and I’m realizing more and more that style may not be for me. I sat and thought about this one for a few days but I still just don’t know how to feel about it. It’s well-written but hard to follow at times. Maybe a second read will allow me to follow better.

⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

RAKESFALL is a book that takes place over many generations and many years from history to the far distant future. Annelid and Leveret first met as children against the backdrop of the Sri Lankan civil war. In the demon-haunted woods there is more violence and this sets off a cycle wherein their souls continue forward across the ages, finding the pair continually reincarnated into the future to the point where nothing is recognizable any longer.

I started reading this back in April and I quickly realized at that time that I wasn't in the right headspace for this book. This is a true lesson about picking up the right book at the right time because when I restarted this, I really enjoyed it. This is the type of book where you have to be okay going into it to have things a bit vague and unexplained at times. There are places where the author seems to be focused more on the play of language in a really beautiful way, but it sometimes felt like it was leaving the rest of the narrative behind.

I especially enjoyed seeing the author's ideas of the future and the way things change beyond the bounds of our human concepts of the world. I would definitely be interested to read from this author more in the future!

Reminds me of The West Passage: weird, unclear, about decay, people will call it queer but it's really hard to tell.

Like the Saint of Bright Doors it's well written but unlike this one, the "plot" is impossible to follow. Despite being warned about reincarnation the book tells you itself that one of the character isn't consistent. Knowing its made up of a several short stories plus new chapters kinda made the experience worse?

I mean it's a ride, it has a lot to say and banger quotes but what the fuck and I love time war

Honestly I'm not sure how to review this book, cause I'm not sure I actually *got* or understood it properly. I think this is one of those you have to read atleast twice, like This is How you Lose the Time War, to understand the plot and themes properly. For the most part, I still really enjoyed this!
The prose here is truly stunning, and I really look forward to reading anything the author writes in the future (and I still have to get to the Saint of Bright Doors, so I'm very excited for that now). The prose is what kept me reading even when I could make no sense of the plot or characters.
This story has a bit of everything honestly - its got elements of myth, folklore, history, science fiction, fantasy - I've never read anything quite like it. I really struggled with getting into it at the beginning though, but as I started to realize the whole story is traveling forward through time, with death and reincarnation at its center, it became easier to just enjoy the ride for what it is. For me it ended up almost feeling like I was reading a short story collection, with each section being about a specific period of time. I in particular enjoyed the last few sections the most, as they were set in the future and had some great social commentary (this is also where the plot started to make more sense to me, so that also helped).
All in all a very interesting book!

I really wanted to like this book. The plot sounds so interesting, souls that continue to find each other over multiple lifetimes. However, I just couldn't get into this or keep track of what was happening. I think there could have been a better explanation earlier on as to how it all works/world building needed. Unfortunately did not finish.

I wrote a review for Dragonmount.com, which I added in the links.

After reading Chandrasekera's debut book, The Saint of Bright Doors, I was prepared for a challenging but ultimately rewarding book. For me, the level of challenge in Rakesfall rose even higher, but the reward was less. It was ambitious and brilliant, with mesmerizing language and mind-blowing concepts, but ultimately it felt more intellectually impressive than emotionally enjoyable.

Rakesfall demands a lot of the reader, and unapologetically makes references that many American audiences may not catch. It shifts genre, tone, characters, setting. That’s part of the metatextual point: all these stories are one story. Perhaps all stories, truthfully told, are one story. But it left me grasping for something more solid to seize and draw me through the book.

Big thanks to @tordotcom for this arc and physical copy received for a honest review. Oof this one was a doozy Some pages had to constantly be reread and required full attention, but the payoff. The last 40% came together in this beautiful web of centuries and lifetimes. The book on a whole was original and unique. So beautifully written I feel like I made it to the golden city. 5⭐️

Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera is a surreal, speculative fiction. It deals with philosophy, reincarnation, and death. Chandrasekera's writing is lyrical and something to be savored. This is a book to take your time with. I look forward to anything Chandrasekera writes!

I requested this ARC because the description sounded nice and the cover was beautiful. This was also the first time I read anything from this author so I was excited to try something new. However, this book just didn't fit my tastes. I got through about 9% of the book before deciding that it wasn't for me. I just didn't understand this world. But the writing was beautiful. Maybe I'll pick this book up again later. But right now, I would rather be enjoying some other books.

This was stunning and complex. A portrait of death (and dead things walking) and incarnations and reincarnations, of gods playing games and being caught in the same cycle. I think it would help the reader to have some knowledge of South Asian religions (it helped me certainly) to have a deeper connection to the landscape at play. Chandrasekera's prose is lyrical and inventive. This book is bolder than Saint of Bright Doors in style. Despite magic and zombies-of-a-sort this feels more comfortably science fiction than fantasy or horror.

A portrait of death (and dead things walking) and incarnations and reincarnations, of gods playing games and being caught in the same cycle, woven seamlessly with South Asian religion and lore. The story spins out over millennia and lifetimes, reaching into the distant past and stretching into the future to the ends of the earth.

I find Vajra Chandrasekera difficult to review. His prose is lyrical and inventive and his style intensely complex in an intellectually stimulating way. Knowing his style, I fully intended to take my time reading Rakesfall, and yet at halfway through I was so invested in the spiral of reincarnation and destruction that I read the entire book in an evening. Having some knowledge of the South Asian religious landscape - the Vedas and Upanishads and Sri Lankan Buddhism helped me connect to the text more deeply. Chandrasekera is playing with traditional themes of reincarnation and mixing with his own interpretation.

This book is bolder than Saint of Bright Doors in style. Despite magic and zombies-of-a-sort this fits more comfortably in the science fiction genre than fantasy or horror. At times it reminded me of a more personal or a slice-of-life version of The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson, with the winding epic quality of iterations of life after life. At other times, it reminded me of This is How You Lose the Time War, with entities altering the fabric of the world.

Rakesfall is stunning and complex. The pacing is slow and the book is wordy - I’ve never been more thankful for having wikipedia and a dictionary connected to my kindle - but utterly beautiful. Lush worldbuilding through myth and a variety of styles is a similar technique to Bright Doors, and yet gives us an entirely different and purely wild setting.

Saint of Bright Doors absolutely blew away what I thought I could expect of fantasy to the point where Rakesfall almost scared me. It's stranger, less linear, but I love it just as much. Rakesfall feels like a personal haunting. It is gorgeously weird and personal and tied to history and home. I will read anything Chandrasekera writes from this point on. I love all of it.

Rakesfall's description suggests the story is a “science fiction epic,” and it is an epic in the way that The Ramayana and The Iliad are epics- a great lyrical journey intertwined with culture and myth, all the while exploring life, death, and the meaning of it all. There is not much of a concrete plot to grasp onto, and I often found myself getting lost in the prose and having to re-read several sections. But I’m glad to have read it, and glad for the break from mainstream fiction. Potential readers will immediately be drawn to Rakesfall’s vibrant cover art, but this surreal fever-dream of a book will undoubtably be polarizing in its reception.

I absolutely love Vajra Chandrasekera! After readign Bright Doors and was so excited to hear they are releasing a new book. rakesfall did not disappoint! Add this to your TBR NOW!