Two more episodes to go in season two! For this one, Bethanne sits down with Laila Lalami to discuss the impact of technology on identity and how we are catering ourselves towards algorithms, the role of community in freedom, and the relationship between privacy, dreams, and personal integrity. You can buy The Dream Hotel wherever books are sold.

George Orwell makes another appearance on the TBM podcast, this time with his novel 1984. Will Bethanne let another Orwell book live in the canon, or will she kick this ‘mother of dystopian novels’ out for good?

Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists, this week focusing on feminist dystopian classics. Titles include: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, The Power by Naomi Alderman, Severance by Ling Ma, Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch, The City We Became N.K. Jesmisin, and Afterland by Lauren Beukes.

Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack.

All titles mentioned:

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami,

Show Don’t Tell: Stories by Curtis Sittenfeld,

Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me: A Memoir by Deirdre Bair,

The Chosen and the Beautiful by Ngih Vo

1984 by George Orwell,

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel,

The Power by Naomi Alderman,

Severance by Ling Ma,

Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch,

The City We Became N.K. Jemisin, and

Afterland by Lauren Beukes.

Transcript

Bethanne: Welcome to season two of The Book Maven: a Literary Revue. This season, we'll talk to leading authors, dig into the classics to decide which should stay in the literary canon, and recommend some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all that and more in this episode, but this week, I talked to Laila Lalami about her latest novel, the Dream Hotel.

We discussed the role of community in freedom, the impact of technology on identity, and the relationship between dreams, privacy, and personal integrity. Join us in conversation as Laila discusses her exploration of immigration and dystopia in The Dream Hotel.

I don't think that people understand how much immigration is based on. Selection and eugenics and things like that. And so, in the Dream Hotel, I found so much that spoke to the immigrant experience. How does that resonate with you, especially because you've written before about the immigrant experience and what it is like for people to come to this country specifically?

Laila: Yeah, this is a fascinating question. When I set out to write a book, it was. I started working on it 10 years ago, and it was a book that came to me as a question, like, what if we keep going like this? And data collection continues to be more and more. Precise, granular, and invasive, the next step is our interior lives.

What would happen if we lose privacy in our dreams? It was just a question, and that was what the book started as for me in the form of a question. Then I set that aside and ended up writing The Other Americans. I picked up the manuscript again in 2020 and finished it last year. Interestingly, this idea of estrangement was that our relationship with technology almost encourages an estrangement from the self.

Where we start obeying these extremely arbitrary rules about how we present ourselves in public. So, for example, you might take a picture of yourself instead of a photo. This way, you might angle the camera at 45-degree angles because that's more flattering. Whatever flattering means, you might post it between this hour and that hour because that's when you'll get the most views.

You might answer your comments this way because that's what will get the most engagement. We are training ourselves to behave in ways that satisfy these algorithms. But in the process of doing that, we estrange ourselves from our instincts, our beliefs, and our morals.

From our sense of what is correct and estrangement from the self, we have these different selves, the cells we present to the public, and all that. First of all, it is a feeling that is universal and deeply human. But I think what happens in immigration is that you move from one country to the next, you have to build a new identity.

Sometimes, that process might involve taking on new names and all of that. So yes, I can see a connection; indeed, the book can be read as a dystopia. You can read it as a reflection of the past and that experience.

Bethanne: I was thinking very specifically at first about the experience of immigration as a kind of fragmentation in the sense that you're talking about because when you do go to a different country to live as opposed to simply visiting with a visa and a passport, you have to break your identity down into all of these documents.

Sarah, of course, has her identity broken down in slightly different ways because of the digital and invasive nature. And Layla, what you were talking about is speaking to the idea that we want to give away all the things that make up an individual? And if we do choose to give some of it away, how do we understand that?

So I guess in the case of Sarah, who is already being held in this detention center when we meet her, that's not giving anything away. We know that she was living a, you know, new mom of twins, she's married, she's living a very everyday life, and it turns out that because of some things in her dreams.

She can be detained and told, look, we don't want you to do anything terrible, so we're gonna hold you until we're sure you won't. It's a wild, wild idea, and it's also an idea that came from the question you asked. When did you know? That this is where Sarah was. When did you know that she was in this place?

Laila: Yeah, remember I said earlier that I started working on the book in 2014? So initially, my idea had been, okay, I'm gonna imagine a future in which dreams are no longer private. How would I get there if I were to imagine this world? Immediately, I had the idea of a device that would help you sleep because of most of the technology that we use.

It has become a part of our lives because of its convenience. So if I can create a device that helps me sleep, especially since I'm an insomniac, and I would be like, yes, I'll sign up. I'll get this device. If you can guarantee me nine hours of sleep, sign me up. I will do anything, right?

And, of course, the fine, that's the device. Then I started working on how the novel started, which began in this tech company. But after I wrote a couple of chapters, I just. I couldn't stay in the tech company. I couldn't make myself and use my imaginative powers to remain inside the tech company for 400 pages.

I just didn't. I worked at a tech company long before I wrote my first book, so I knew about the culture and what goes on there. But I didn't have fun with it and didn't want to stay in it. So, I set the book aside and decided to work on this other manuscript that I had also. But when I returned to it in 2020, I thought, "Wait a minute."

If I were to use this device, the idea for the book would be that it's liberalizing the fact that we are losing our freedoms. Your dreams are deeply intimate. No one else shares them with you. You can be as close as you want with another human being. Say, for example, your partner, and you can share many of your thoughts and feelings, your petty jealousies, and the less savory aspects of yourself with that person who loves you and doesn't judge you.

You can have all that, but that doesn't mean they can share this part of you. That part of you is yours. It is intimate. It belongs only to you and to me. It starts getting into these ideas of personal integrity, like basically the fact that you own your body, you own your mind, it is yours.

You think about it; everything inside it belongs to you. It's a human right. If we keep having this data being collected about us, and let's say that in the world of the novel, I have literalized a debt loss of privacy, to the extent that you know your dreams can be seen by these tech companies.

Let's say I've literalized it, then. What would be the next logical step? How can I make that idea come out more? Since this is all about the loss of freedom, I will put this character in a semi-carceral, confined environment. So think asylum, think psychiatric hospital, think leprosarium.

All of these areas that you think of as being locked, Ward. Yes. Yes. Yeah, exactly. They're little mini societies, and I will put my character in there to literalize that idea and then see what happens next.

Bethanne: Do you know what I think is hilarious about this? And there's not much hilarious about it on the page, but I.

What is more boring than hearing someone else talk about their dreams? Layla? Yes. Yes.

Laila: But not in this

Bethanne: book, I don't think. I hope not. Not in this book. Not in this book. And here's the thing. This is what is so essential about the privacy you're talking about, to each of us. Our dreams are exciting because of all the parts of us that make up those dreams, and there is no one in our life saved, perhaps for a parent.

Who has all of that except us? And then, of course, the fact is that we start as children and become adults. So even parents don't have access to everything in our lives, but our dreams have that access.

Laila: Power is most successful when it has been internalized. If we look at it, then we are surveilling ourselves.

My fear with technology is that we are in the early stages of that, where we are internalizing, oh, I have to post at this hour. I have to have this many followers, and I, you know, have to do this, and I have to behave in specific ways online. I agree to the terms of service, and my phone has to know how many steps I take every day, and it tracks me from this.

We accept all this. And where are we headed with that? Are we bringing yet another form of control into our lives, and we have begun to internalize it? So, the book internalizes that control by saying, "Here's a device that gives access to dreams and kind of opens up."

Drawing parallels between things like patriarchy, colonialism, and surveillance, like all of these are systems of power, and none of them would survive without the surveillance that allows it to remain in place.

Bethanne: That is fantastic, and I could end there, but there's one more thing that I have to bring up because this is very important.

Her being a new mom. It is crucial because there is perhaps no time in any person's life, any person who bears a child. That is the time in your life when you become public property. Oh my

Laila: God, yes. No, I get exactly what you're saying. I mean, yeah, I get it. Yeah. And so.

Bethanne: It's not just that Sarah is already in this state of belonging to a state, but also she's in a state where she realizes that she can't be free without her children.

Her children are vital to her, but it's a time when you also realize your ability to rely only on yourself. Is that an act? Yeah.

Laila: Yeah. It's a very vulnerable time in people's lives. And I get what you're saying about like the loss of privacy, the fact that you're in hospital rooms and strangers are coming in and you're entirely at their mercy.

And then, of course, when you meet your child, they'll roll your life for the next few years, the absolute desperation for a good night's sleep. Again, technology has all the answers and is undoubtedly very convenient. Still, its costs are just now beginning to reveal themselves.

Bethanne: Thank you, Layla, for joining us this week. You can find all of Layla LA's books wherever they are sold. Let's move on to Friday reads, where we'll see what you've been reading this week.

We are back with another round of Friday reads, a post sharing what you all are reading. As always, my producer, Jordan, is here to help me comb through. So what do we have up first, Jordan?

Jordan: First, we've got from Kurt, whose hashtag for Friday Reads is Show Don't Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld.

Bethanne: This is the cover of Curtis Seinfeld's new book of short stories, which Kurt has put up.

It is a woman floating in blue water. She's down toward the bottom of the cover with her hands behind her head in a one-piece bathing suit, and then the titles are in yellow. It's really striking. And what I wanted to say about this is that Seinfeld is one of those authors who switches between short fiction and novels with great aplomb.

Suppose you haven't read her most recent. Novel romantic comedy. It's hilarious. Don't waste any more time. Anyone who loves Katherine Haney or Haney, however, Katherine, I've forgotten how you pronounce your name, Karen Russell, who's more sci-fi, but still very fun, very funny. This is an excellent short storybook for women looking for something that isn't necessarily light but has.

Heart and compassion. So there we go. What's next?

Jordan: Second. Today, we've got from Esther, who says, as a lifelong reader of biographies, I'm really enjoying Deirdre Bair's memoir Parisian Lives about writing the biographies of Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir. Bair faced enormous challenges, including finding research and money, balancing work and family, and dealing with sexism.

Bethanne: There's so much going on in the lives of both Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, and I'm not surprised. Deirdre Bair, a well-known biographer, received a national book award for the Beckett biography, which came out in 1978. She was also nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize twice, once for Simone de Beauvoir and once for a biography of Carl Young.

So she's gotten a lot of kudos for her biography skills. And let me tell you, everything I know about biographers shows something like this. It is a labor of love and expertise and something that can make fantastic reading. You know, you would think, Deirdre Bear, who's that?

I mean, I know who Samuel Beckett is, and I know who de Beauvoir is, but somehow, Bear is so talented that her placing herself in this one just makes sense. It's a really fantastic book. I highly recommend it. It just happens that I read it. I don't always pick Friday Reed's recommendations that I've read, but in this case, I have. I guess I've read all three this week.

I don't know Jordan, and I don't know what's going on with me, but what? This is our last post.

Jordan: Our last post today is from a library that says it's Friday. What are you reading? And shared a lovely cherry blossom themed graphic.

Bethanne: This is precisely why I chose it; it's because of the library thing. Hello? Library thing.

Tim, I thought that cherry blossoms were so perfect here in DC. It's been a big cherry blossom week. Everything's gorgeous, and The Chosen and the Beautiful by Ngih Vo is also gorgeous. This book is a sci-fi take on The Great Gatsby. I happened to have been talking a great deal about The Great Gatsby last week in a conversation with Andrew Keen that I'll share.

In the newsletter at some point. But this one by Nivo enchanted me. Not just because it had the sci-fi aspect but because VO as a queer Asian novelist has a really different take on the class structure that is so vaunted by so many critics in The Great Gatsby. So. check this one out.

Definitely get out and see any blossoms in your area. Jordan and I will be back next week with some more Friday Reeds. Thank you, Jordan.

The Dream Hotel is Layla Emmy's latest novel. In it, we learn a lot about what it means when people's lives are interfered with by an overreaching, overarching government, or, shall we say, a regime of a sort. And so, in this week's Canon or Can It, I wanted to take a look back at that mother of all dystopian novels, 1984 by George Orwell, but there is another book.

I'm in contention with 1984, and I'll let you find out when you listen.

Do you think it's a coincidence that just as the dystopian The Dream Hotel comes out with its description of a police state, we're also seeing a new season of Black Mirror, which is also dystopian, and at the same time we're all talking about the Mother of all Dystopias George Orwell's 1984? By the way, that was published in 1949.

It shouldn't be a coincidence. My friends, I don't think so. We are just beyond the 40th anniversary of 1984, the actual year, and still, we're living in Big Brothers' world. It's an Orwellian story, no doubt. Inspired. Not just because of the rise of fascism among the Axis powers but also because of the rigidity of life in wartime, England tends to resonate with readers due to its themes of brute power, free speech suppression, and dystopian dismissal of facts.

The regime Orwell writes about is known as “the party” and its preferred means of communication is referred to as newspeak, which attempts to eliminate all cues about identity, emotion, and privacy, as many of us around the world watch groups that would eliminate those things to the parallels in real time to 1984, grow more frightening, even scarier.

Some people have adopted the slogan and made Orwell fiction again. Still, they are members of the far right who think that what they call woke politics are responsible for the rise of censorship. If you ask me, and I realize nobody did. Those sloganeering have got the wrong end of the manuscript. Those in academia and the media who have attempted to change how we refer to people in different groups may have made mistakes. Still, they've made those mistakes in the service of historical justice and deep compassion for lived experience.

They haven't. To give an example that just popped up this week, no one has attempted to incorrectly revise history so that it sounds like Freedom Fighter Harriet Tubman was collaborating with the Confederacy. The party, or well-invented, loved to create false narratives and loved even better to encourage its, Hmm.

Is citizens the right word? Well, its inhabitants used double thinking whenever they felt confused by something, like informing a neighbor or looking away when someone was arrested for carrying a classic novel. One of the smartest things about 1984 is how Orwell demonstrated that language can be weaponized.

I recently watched a silly show in which two security guards listened in as an intelligence officer conducted a routine investigation of an embassy employee through a series of blunt questions about the employee. Mother's health, the officer reduces her to tears. He made her cry without laying a hand on her, says one guard to the other.

That's raw power. Orwell reminds us that the cruelest torment isn't always physical. It's psychological. And that's where Orwell also lost me long ago. If you've read 1984 and you think it's a masterpiece, please continue to do so. However, in 2023, I read and reviewed a retelling of 1984 called Julia by Sandra Newman.

Here, Winston Smith's lover, Julia Worthing, takes the stage and makes it her own, too. I'll spare you the agony of quoting from my review. Still, Newman's version of Oceania shows a greater understanding of how things might have come to be in the party's control and a much greater understanding of how those not in the patriarchy learn to manipulate it.

Julia is a highwire act, for sure. The literary establishment does not like to see its sacred cows tipped. But I stand by my review and say that if 1984 belongs in the canon, so does Julia. Sandra Newman dives so deep into how women and femmes might have found ways around fascism that it's less a retelling and more a revisioning of its source material.

George Orwell, after all, was more of a sociologist at heart than a psychologist—and one more thing. The greatest poets, Dramatists, and novelists have always known that a powerful story deserves more than one telling. By building out Julius's story and blowing up Winston's essential weakness, Sandra Newman has followed in the footsteps of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes Dickens, and scores of others, responding to a fellow artist's statement with one that.

Only she could have written. I am Canoning Julia by Sandra Newman, and I welcome your comments on that decision.

Our themed book list, Six Recs Are Back Again, is back again, as always. This week, after The Dream Hotel by Layla Ami, I thought I would give you some new feminist dystopian classics. I've never talked about any of these before. If I have, excuse me. I get excited sometimes about some of these authors.

They're so good. But if you are a Book Maven subscriber, listener, etc., these books are all new to you. So, Jordan, I will make six recommendations in less than three minutes. And if I don't make it, I know the bookshelf falls over, but I will be pretty good today.

Jordan: Alright, well, we'll see how that goes. And for now, we're rolling. Okay,

Bethanne: So first up, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. And this has a band of survivors, in case you haven't. I've seen the TV show or read the novel, and they're mainly from Canada. The author herself is originally from British Columbia. So they have become a performing troop staging King Lear in all places around the Great Lakes.

Another ragtag group of survivors is the New York Times, named Station Eleven. One of the top books of the 21st century, and something that moves me every time I read them or see the show, are the sort of amateur museums, one of the characters put together that have things in them, like laptops that can't be operated.

These things could become museum artifacts, but we don't think of them that way right now. Next up, Naomi Alderman's The Power is a very powerful book. It's about young women worldwide discovering they have power at or really at their fingertips, and society's turned upside down.

It's a book within a book. Supposedly, a man wrote this manuscript, which was stolen by a woman with the real author's real name. However, a female-dominated society might not be all good. Severance by Ling Ma. Many of us know this one because it came about around the time of Covid, the global pandemic. And in Severance, which did come out before COVID-19 began, a virus infects offices and turns employees into zombies. People started to flee, and Ma was inspired by events like Hurricane Sandy and Sars, et cetera, but received so much intrusive PR that she no longer accepts interviews focusing on this novel.

Onto The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch, and this is about what it might be like if Joan of Ark were an eco-warrior. So, in this dystopian future, human beings have become devolved. They're sexless, they're hairless, they're powerless. They can't fight back against a cult leader, but freedom fighter Joan helps them revolt against a ravaged earth and a person who might suck them all dry.

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin is sci-fi, and this one is really amazing. I don't want to describe it too much because this book has layers upon layers. Just read the series The Fifth Season. But the stillness is a supercontinent. In every fifth season, catastrophic climate change occurs.

And so it's really about these three Orogenes, these characters who have the power to help save the earth. Jemisin delineates a great deal of womanly experience through those three characters.

Finally, Afterland by Lauren Beukes, a South African novelist. In Afterland, there is something called The Man Fell. 99% of men and boys have been wiped out, but Cole is determined to keep her son Miles safe from harm. Meanwhile, they're on the run from her sister, who has a really creepy purpose in finding them. I recommend all of Beukes’s work, but if you like this one, read The Shining Girls. You won't be disappointed.

There we go. Six Recs. How did I do?

Jordan: We came in at three minutes and 43 seconds today, so, the shelf will call once again.

Bethanne: You know what? That's not too bad. Thank you all for listening and putting up with my descriptions. I appreciate it. And Jordan, thanks, as always.

Well, that does it for this episode of The Book Maven: A Literary Review. Follow us on substack for our weekly newsletter containing new book releases, commentary, and more. Talk to you next week.

The book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted and produced by me, Bethanne Patrick. Our producer is Christina McBride with engineering by Jordan Aaron and our booking producer is Lauren Stack.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebookmavenunbound.substack.com