RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books... not a neat allegory of environmental racism or the corrupting influence of power. However, it nevertheless insists that we pay attention to relationships between seemingly diverse commodities (coconuts on the one hand, computers on the other), and how difficult it is to wrench them from systems bent on extracting their value. Moreover, Vara adeptly threads her story with a complicated — and never saccharine — story of love; between father and daughter, husband and wife, and, significantly, a coalition of renegades who dream that another kind of life is possible. At just under 400 pages, The Immortal King Rao’s expansive reach might feel a little constrained by its length. Or, perhaps, it deftly mirrors the turbulence of its narrator’s mind. Athena, after all, isn’t only faced with the task of digesting her father’s entire conscious experience — she is up against a history of extraction so wide-reaching that it is almost impossible to know where to begin. But this is the story that, from her prison cell, she has to try her best to tell, in hopes that it might lead to her (and, maybe, humanity’s) salvation.
Olga Ravn, Tr. Martin Aitkin
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksAt first, the statements are chiefly concerned with describing the new objects. Ravn’s imagery in these passages is both beautiful and intensely enigmatic. In many ways, these images drive the plot — the episodic nature of the novel means that much of the plot is relayed retrospectively, and often in abstract or opaque language. While this might feel disorienting at first, Ravn grounds us in rich descriptions of the strange objects and their effects on the workers ... The sharp contrast between passages like this one and the dry, mechanical language used by the board of directors demonstrates that, even as the workers are unable to differentiate \'real\' from \'programmed\' perceptions, the objects nonetheless prompt them to radically reconsider the nature of their perception and the world around them ... By taking a closer look at the fundamental relationship between artificial intelligence and the corporatization of our world, we might understand that the true threat comes in the form of CEOs and boards of directors, rather than technologically advanced machinery ... can be read as a kind of ekphrastic writing that hinges on the capacity for art to help us critically examine the world in which we live (and work).
