Awake in the Floating City
[A] thoughtful novel about art, creation and the ways we care for one another.
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There is a curious lack of tension in Awake in the Floating City that grows curiouser as the book goes on; we are always waiting for something to happen, for some event to shake up the foundations of Bo’s world. Yet the only movement is the inexorable forward creep of time, of age, of water, of mold—and the yearning backward pull of memory, not quite strong enough to stop the decline or even delay it ... Awake in the Floating City is troubled by some of the same problems that plague many books about fictional artworks; describing a thing that is supposedly sublime is always difficult for the writer who sees it clearly in their mind’s eye and the reader, who cannot ... Nevertheless, the book asks haunting questions about the ability of art to contain or transmit memory. The results are also indicative of a turn away from solution-oriented speculative fiction toward a different kind of warning—of how we might live with an end that is already in progress.
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Elegiac ... Kwan nimbly constructs a dystopic San Francisco populated by the leftover few. Impermanence is delicately threaded throughout—disappearing landscapes, buildings, landmarks, records, archives. But Kwan also deftly intertwines centuries of Asian American history.
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