A few months after I finished reading Vajra Chandrasekera’s debut novel, The Saint of Bright Doors, Lesley asked me if I’d like to review his sophomore novel Rakesfall for Apex Magazine. I responded with an immediate resounding yes. I really enjoyed reading Bright Doors, and Vajra Chandrasekera’s prose is absolute gold.
I am a serial devourer of books. But Rakesfall is not a book to be devoured. It’s one to be consumed in slow and wondering bites, chewed over for days or years or perhaps millions of eons, depending on which part of the book you’re at. I’m not going to try to give you a short synopsis of the plot, because there are many plots, folded within each other, scraped out of each other, torn apart and resurrected by each other.
Rakesfall is not going to hold your hand. It’s not going to sit you down and say, “Here, now, this is the theme, this is the plot, and here is what I hope you think.” It presents a series of lives and deaths and undeaths and rebirths of what might be one or two or infinite beings over the course of worlds and universes and time, invites you to watch the ways in which they explode and repair and explode again, and challenges you to think about the porosity of souls and the responsibility you bear for past lives. Chandrasekera’s got an incredible talent for speaking to unthinkably massive themes, and smoothly adding modern bites of humor to passages of gorgeous prose.
I’d strongly recommend this one to anyone who’s looking for a non-Western plot, prose that reads like poetry more often than not, and something that’ll make you slow down, take a breath, and enjoy. I really enjoyed this book, and I’m grateful I got the chance to read an early ARC!
Information about Rakesfall:
Author: Vajra Chandrasekera
Publisher: Tordotcom
Release date: June 18th, 2024 Print length: 304 pages
