Scars

4.5 out of 5: Luis Fiore just shot his wife in the face after a day of hunting with his family. This fictitious brutality serves as the plot hub for Scars, a 1969 novel by Argentine writer Juan José Saer (1937-2005) that was recently published in an English translation by Open Letter Books. Four spokes radiate outwards from the novel’s murderous hub, each one comprising a stand-alone vignette with a different protagonist and a unique connection, some intimate and some remote, to Fiore’s crime. Other than the final section of the novel, which is told in the voice of the murderer himself, the other three sections revolve around their own unrelated events and distinct motivators. With this unique structure, Saer seems to be making the point that even the most dramatic event matters only to those directly involved in it. For the rest, the event is merely a blip in everyday life.

In a very brief space, Saer creates four distinct protagonists. In the novel’s first section, a young journalist struggles to write daily (usually fictional) weather reports while living with his irritable mother. In the second and third sections, a lawyer is hopelessly addicted to gambling, and a judge recognizes the meaninglessness of his life. Even the judge’s hobby of translating Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray into Spanish adds nothing to the world (“Whole passages come out exactly the same as the versions of the professional translators.”). In the final section, the novel telescopes into Fiore’s day of hunting and his fatal moment of misjudgment.

Scars is a beautifully-structured lesson in humility and perspective, accented with sparkling, if dark, humor. Dolph’s lively translation captures the underlying play and tension in Saer’s writing. I would have preferred more resolution of the distinct stories and less focus on hyper-realistic details (do we really need to know every turn the judge makes in his car on his way to the office every time he makes the trip?). Nonetheless, Scars delivers the rare combination of entertaining suspense and thought-provoking, intelligent writing.

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Review of From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjón (translated by Victoria Cribb)

From the Mouth of the Whale
4 out of 5: Icelandic author Sjón’s latest novel follows the life of Jónas Pálmason, an Icelandic man sentenced to live out his life on a bleak and uninhabited island after being convicted of outlawry for practicing the arts of sorcery and necromancy. The novel, which is set in the years 1635-1639 when Jónas is in his mid-sixties, is Jónas’s poetic and surreal stream of consciousness touching on the major events of his life, including laying to rest a troublesome ghost who haunts a remote village and meeting and falling in love with his wife.

Aside from a brief trip to Copenhagen to plead his case, the whole of Jónas’s story is confined to his island. After years of solitude, Jónas’s identity has merged with that of his desolate surroundings:

I am the brother of all that divides, all that curls, all that intertwines, all that waves … after the day’s rain showers the web of the world becomes visible … the moment night falls, the beads of moisture glitter on its silver strings … nature is whole in its harmony.

Jónas’s weighty and formal voice makes his story feel almost Biblical, calling to mind the universal conflict between innovation and repression. And, like that of many visionaries throughout history, Jónas’s tale is filled with loathsome villains “who every day outlive their victims, sprawling in their high seats and thrones, gorging themselves on meat, dripping with grease, from the livestock that grew fat on the green grass in meadows tended with diligence by innocent, God-fearing souls; congratulating themselves on having stripped this man of his livelihood and that woman of her breadwinner.”

Victoria Cribb is to be commended for capturing Sjón’s unique voice in her English translation, a difficult task to be sure. While this is undeniably a fictional account of a man living during the 17th century, it shares few characteristics with those novels described as historical fiction. This is not a realistic rendering of a specific historical time and place so much as it is an exploration into the ravaged mind of a persecuted man. Reading From the Mouth of the Whale is like studying one of those gruesome Goya paintings of the interior of an early 19th century madhouse: a fascinating, if unsettling, experience.

A Review of The Book of Happenstance by Ingrid Winterbach (translated by Dirk and Ingrid Winterbach)

The Book of Happenstance

3.5 out of 5: Open Letter Press recently published an English translation of The Book of Happenstance by well-known South African author Ingrid Winterbach. As the novel opens, Helena Verbloem has just moved to Durban, a port city on the east coast of South Africa, to undertake a special project. Verbloem is to work with the elegant and learned Theo Verway to create a compilation of obsolete Afrikaans words. She brings along her collection of seashells, which is a kind of spiritual talisman for her:

Meditating on the shells is one way of centering myself and lowering my levels of anxiety. These shells are a source of infinite beauty and wonder to me. I can rely on their beauty to divert me from vexation and discontent.

By page five we learn that Theo is to die within seven months and that Helena’s shells have been stolen by a burglar. Herlena spends the rest of the novel in a kind of spiritual quest. Not only is she seeking her shells, but she is also trying to understand her attachment to them. She enters into extended conversations with her coworkers about the origins of life on the planet and the miracle of evolution. Throughout it all, she examines her own life, which includes a lover who inspires nothing more than “great affection.”

Not much happens in The Book of Happenstance, but there is a pervasive sense of foreboding as if the narrative is suspended in a moment of pause right before a dramatic denouement. Clearly, this is Winterbach’s intent, and she goes so far as to have a friend of Helena’s vocalize this: “That’s how I would have liked to write if I could … with little happening ostensibly, but everything charged with meaning.” That promised drama never arrives, however, and I found myself wishing for either an exciting event or a resolution to the many subplots. On the whole, The Book of Happenstance was unsatisfying, though I enjoyed many of its constituent parts.

Review of The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am by Kjersti Skomsvold (translated by Kerri Pierce)

The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am

4 out of 5: This debut by Norwegian Kjersti Skomsvold is a sparkling jewel of a novel. At around 140 smallish pages, The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am is not much more than a novella, really, but it tackles big themes like aging, mortality, and the loneliness of the human condition. The novel’s first-person narrator, Mathea Martinsen, has outlived her peers and is fed up with being invisible to the world. Even people Mathea interacts with take no notice of her, including the grocery store clerk: "When I give him my money, I touch the palm of his hand, but he doesn't notice. ... And if I was kidnapped five minutes later, and the cops came by and showed him my picture, the boy would say he'd never seen me before in his life."

In a quest to increase her social footprint, Mathea decides to take a series of actions to force people to notice her. She starts wearing a watch in the hopes someone will ask her what time it is, but nobody does. She bakes buns for a residents' meeting at her condominium but eats them all before mustering the courage to go to the meeting. She calls information and asks for her own number because "maybe Information keeps statistics as to the most requested and most loved person in the nation ... and I shouldn't just sit here moping around because my name isn't on it."

Because Mathea has always spent most of her time sequestered at home, her personality hasn’t been dulled by the hundreds of minor social corrections most of us experience every day. Her voice is a compelling mix of naiveté, blunt observations, and dark (often unintentional) humor. While reading passages like this one, I found myself alternating between cringing and laughing out loud: "I talked Epsilon [Mathea’s husband] into buying a rabbit, but didn't tell him it was because I couldn't be alone in the apartment anymore. He wouldn't understand. ‘I just love animals,’ I said. ‘Almost as much as Hitler did.’"

The ending of The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am is beautiful, tragic, and surprising. Best of all, it just might change the way you interact with the people around you who you’ve always ignored.

Literary License Fiction Round-Up

Loving Frank by Nancy Horan: Nancy Horan’s debut novel—a fictionalized account of renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s adulterous relationship with Mamah Borthwirk Cheney—explores the tension between duty to family and freedom to pursue love. When Frank and Mamah, who hires Frank along with her husband to design a house for their family, fall in love, they are ostracized by their former friends and denigrated in the press. Horan portrays Frank and Mamah’s relationship unsentimentally and, at times, in an unflattering light. Frank and Mamah are self-absorbed and arrogant in their love, but Horan elicits sympathy for these two talented and passionate people who are confined by their society. Intelligent historical fiction.

The Three Weissmanns of Westport by Cathleen Schine: A clever reimagining of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. When the husband of septuagenarian Betty Weissmann decides to divorce her to pursue a relationship with his much younger co-worker, Betty moves out of their shared Manhattan apartment into a dumpy beach cottage in Westport. Betty’s two unmarried, middle-aged daughters move in with her to provide emotional support but end up needing more support than Betty. Although Schine’s novel is loosely based on Sense and Sensibility, the novel’s resolution is original and unpredictable. Filled with clever dialog, quirky characters, and enough humor to maintain a light tone despite weighty issues like divorce, aging, and death, The Three Weissmanns of Westport is a perfect summer read.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett: Marina, a pharmacologist at a large pharmaceutical company, travels into the heart of the Amazon jungle to check up on a reclusive colleague (Dr. Swenson) engaged in researching a remote tribe that’s discovered the secret to lifelong fertility. Patchett has developed some wonderfully vivid characters, especially Dr. Swenson. The jungle is portrayed in lush detail, and the science is meticulously described. However, this novel is overloaded; there’s too much science, too much complicated backstory, and too many long passages devoted to characterization. The overall effect is a sluggish read, and Marina doesn’t even make it into the jungle until midway through the novel. State of Wonder is a worthwhile read but doesn’t live up to all the hype.

Domestic Violets by Matthew Norman: Despite the fact that most of us spend the majority of our waking hours sitting at our office desks, there are relatively few novels that explore this setting. Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris is one good example of such a book, and, now, Domestic Violets can be added to the (relatively short) list. Clearly, Norman has some experience with office work. He portrays the petty feuds, the office flirtations, the awkward boss-employee relationships, the stolen afternoons at the golf course, and the overall cynicism that monotonous office work can breed perfectly. Other aspects of this novel ring true to life, including the marital difficulties and the challenges of the writer's life, but I most appreciated Norman's treatment of office life. Norman tempers the novel's cynical tone with plenty of humor to create an enjoyable read.

A Cupboard Full of Coats by Yvvette Edwards

A Cupboard Full of Coats

4.5 out of 5: Yvvette Edwards’s debut novel, A Cupboard Full of Coats, is an elegantly structured story of guilt and redemption. Fourteen years after her mother’s murder, Jinx still blames herself for her role in the crime. She is living alone and in a state of emotional exile in London’s East End, separated from her husband and young son, when Lemon arrives on her doorstep unexpectedly: “He just knocked, that was all, knocked the front door and waited, like he’d just come back with the paper from the corner shop, and the fourteen years since he’d last stood there, the fourteen years since the night I’d killed my mother, hadn’t really happened at all.” An old friend of Jinx’s mom and her abusive husband, Lemon blames himself for the death. Lemon’s arrival sparks “some kind of voyage of discovery” for Jinx and Lemon as they spend the next few days revisiting old wounds and reliving past events.

Jinx’s first-person narration is emotionally raw and brutally honest. Her edgy voice is counterbalanced by Lemon’s melodic, Caribbean diction. Over several days, the healing process begins as Lemon breaks down Jinx’s self-defenses with home-cooked meals and other ministrations, including a foot massage that left Jinx a “shapeless, boneless heap of melted contentment.” Edwards’s vivid language captures the full range of human appetites and emotions with admirable precision. Jinx’s dark thoughts are portrayed in clipped, brusque sentences—“I wanted to kill him. I’d been angry before in the past, but nothing on this scale ever. I wanted him dead”—but the passages of longing and desire are flowing and sensuous:

“He’d cooked oxtail and butter beans for dinner, with small round dumplings the size of marbles, brought it to me in my bedroom on a tray, waited while I adjusted the pillows behind my back and smoothed a level space on the duvet for him to put it down. … The meat was so tender it fell from the bone, melting inside my mouth, the gravy spicy and so compelling I found myself unable to stop eating even when the plate was empty, sucking out every crevice of the bones, using my mouth like a bottom-feeder, my tongue like a young girl French-kissing an orange.”

The narrative alternates between the present day interactions of Jinx and Lemon and Jinx’s memories of her mother’s last months of life, culminating in the events leading up to her violent death. A Cupboard Full of Coats is a masterfully structured novel, building suspense even though the ending is revealed on the first page. Impressive in its psychological complexity, this is one of the best novels I’ve read this year.

Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? By Johan Harstad (translated by Deborah Dawkin)

Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?: A Novel
4.5 out of 5: “The person you love is 72.8 percent water and there’s been no rain for weeks.” So begins Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?, the impressive debut novel by Norwegian author Johan Harstad and translated into English by Deborah Dawkin. After losing his girlfriend and his job, first-person narrator Mattias leaves his home in Stavanger, Norway to travel with a friend’s rock band to a concert on the remote Faroe Islands, located halfway between Scotland and Iceland. Following a series of events he can’t remember and carrying an inexplicable pocketful of cash, Mattias ends up living in a kind of commune for people existing somewhere between a mental institution and normal society. Their limited interaction with the world matches Mattias’s own desire to disappear:

"I’d decided I didn’t need to be the best, the most popular, or even liked, I just wanted to find myself a vacant space and stay there, do my thing, maybe I was just frightened of disrupting something, of knocking the world out of its delicate balance by being in the way, in the wrong place, if I was too visible, tied people to me."

Buzz Aldrin is a long, blowsy, meandering novel crammed full of digressions and unnecessary scenes. Mattias’s extreme passivity and self-destructive tendencies have the potential to annoy readers, and, near the novel’s end, Harstad introduces some plot elements (including a journey and some secret psychiatry files) that seem overly contrived. Nevertheless, these narrative flaws are more than made up for by this novel’s abundant charms. From the very beginning of Mattias’s story, I was hooked by his voice, a compelling mix of humility, melancholy, earnestness, and humor:

“It is a Tuesday. There can be no doubt about that. I see it in the light, the traffic outside the windows will continue to stream all day, slowly, disinterestedly, people driving back and forth out of habit rather than necessity. Tuesday. The week’s most superfluous day. A day that almost nobody notices among all the other days. I read somewhere, I don’t remember where, that statistics showed there were 34 percent fewer appointments made on an average Tuesday than on any other day. On a worldwide basis. That’s how it is. On the other hand a much greater number of funerals are held on Tuesdays than during the rest of the week. They sort of bunch up, you never get on top of it.”

Buzz Aldrin is filled with an emotional exuberance that’s rare and a joy to experience. Deborah Dawkin’s translation preserves that exuberance along with the brisk pace of Mattias’s narration. Over the course of almost 500 pages, I became thoroughly immersed in Mattias’s world, and even though I finished reading Buzz Aldrin more than a week ago, I still wonder how he’s doing. My strong emotional connection to this story proves what Mattias eventually realizes: “[E]ven an invisible person will be seen in the end, as a white aura flickering through nature, and there are no places to hide.”

Please Look After Mom by Kyung-sook Shin (translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim)

Please Look After Mom

4 out of 5: In Please Look After Mom, Korean author Kyung-sook Shin gives us a beautifully written (and translated) admonishment not to take our parents for granted. When an elderly mother (Park So-nyo) goes missing from the platform of a Seoul train station, her four adult children are plagued with guilt. Why didn’t they offer to pick up their mother from the station after her journey into the city from the country? Why didn’t they pay more attention to her after moving away from home? Why were they such ungrateful children?

The novel is told in alternating perspectives, beginning with So-nyo’s daughter. Shin’s unusual use of the second-person point of view depicts each narrator’s thoughts as an internal dialog:

When you first heard Mom had gone missing, you angrily asked why nobody from your large family went to pick her and Father up at Seoul Station. ‘And where were you?’ Me? You clammed up. You didn’t find out about Mom’s disappearance until she’d been gone four days. You all blamed each other for Mom’s going missing, and you all felt wounded.

This technique brings much-needed dynamism to a story that mostly takes place inside the narrators’ minds in the form of memories and guilt-laden thoughts. Shin depicts the life of a family as a complicated web of ever-changing relationships. Never over-sentimental, Please Look After Mom succeeds as a sensitive and powerful examination of the selflessness of parental love.

A Review of Victor Halfwit by Thomas Bernhard (translated by Martin Chalmers and illustrated by Sunandini Banerjee)

Victor Halfwit: A Winter's Tale

4.5 out of 5: Victor Halfwit is a (very) short story by Thomas Bernhard. Seagull Books, with the help of translator Martin Chalmers and the invaluable contribution of illustrator Sunandini Banerjee, has elevated this story to a work of art with this lavishly illustrated edition. What would easily fit on two pages has been spread over more than two hundred pages, many of which contain just a couple words or even no words at all. Without a doubt, Banerjee’s illustrations take center stage in this production. Composed of intricately layered collages in lush colors, these illustrations are gorgeous and eye-catching. Their surrealistic elements and juxtapositions of images from different time periods complement Bernhart’s prose, and the book’s high production value, including thick creamy paper and flawless color printing, show off Banerjee’s art to great effect. Bernhardt’s simple fable, however, cannot support the weight of its powerful artistic accompaniment and ultimately reveals itself to be nothing more than flimsy scaffolding. Read this book for the art or give it as a gift but don’t expect much from the story.

A Review of Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras (translated by Frank Wynne)

Kamchatka

4 out of 5: Kamchatka, a novel by Marcelo Figueras, is a fictional first-person remembrance of childhood in Argentina during the Dirty War (1976-1983), a time of political instability and government-sponsored violence when thousands of civilians were “disappeared.” The story begins when the narrator, then a ten-year-old boy, is uprooted from his comfortable life in Buenos Aries and forced to go into hiding in the country with his activist parents and younger brother.

Kamchatka is a realistic imagining of a child’s experience of political turmoil. The potential dangers take the form of vague references in overheard conversations and other oblique manifestations. In general, the narrator spends most of his time describing his (often humorous) exploits with his younger brother, his attempts to emulate Harry Houdini’s daring escapes, and his love of Superman. The overall effect is that of a happy childhood occasionally marred by darker overtones (e.g., the unexpected and unexplained death of a young family friend and the need to assume fake names). The narrator’s voice is charmingly naïve and optimistic except for those instances where his adult persona intrudes on his childhood experiences with over-long lectures on academic topics like astronomy or the changing concept of fatherhood over time. Kamchatka would have been better without these digressions, but the novel still succeeds as a tribute to the resilience of children and the strength of family, even in the most difficult circumstances.

A Review of Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Cold Comfort Farm (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

4 out of 5: In Stella Gibbons’s contemporary classic novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932), the orphaned, 20-year-old Flora moves in with distant relatives living on a remote farm in Sussex, England. Accustomed to glamorous London, Flora is not equipped to handle the hardscrabble life of a farmer, but with unflagging enthusiasm, she makes the best of her bleak circumstances. Flora sets about improving the farm and the lives of its inhabitants, who have suffered under the tyrannical influence of Aunt Ada Doom for many years.

Flora’s first glimpse of Cold Comfort Farm is anything but cheery:

Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns. The wind was the furious voice of this sluggish animal light that was baring the dormers and mullions and scullions of Cold Comfort Farm.

As this overwrought passage suggests, Cold Comfort Farm is intended as a parody of the sentimental and grim novels of rural life popular during Gibbons’s lifetime (see, e.g., Mary Webb’s The Golden Arrow). Despite a limited (or nonexistent?) collective memory of books like Webb’s, Gibbons’s parody remains fresh and accessible and, most importantly, hilarious. Overall, Cold Comfort Farm is an entertaining and unique reading experience.

A Review of Stone Upon Stone by Mysliwski Wieslaw (translated by Bill Johnston)

Stone Upon Stone

4.5 out of 5: Stone Upon Stone is the first-person narration of the fictional life of Szymek Pietruszka, a Polish farmer living during and after World War II. At various points in Szymek’s life, this proud bachelor worked as a barber, a fighter in the resistance against the German occupation of Poland, and a government administrator. With charming honesty and rambunctious humor, Szymek covers all the details of his life from the banal (the proper technique for mowing a field), to the lurid (his womanizing and knife-fighting) and the universal (his deep love of family and the land).

As Poland rushes towards modernization, Szymek attempts to establish a sense of purpose and stability in his life. In particular, he seeks permanence in the form of an elaborate family tomb, despite the fact that nobody else in his family seems interested in the project. The building of the tomb provides an overall framework for Szymek’s story; it is the physical embodiment of his metaphysical struggles. Although Szymek’s lengthy monologues are occasionally tedious, his (often unintentional) humor keeps the story lively and entertaining. Only Szymek, for example, could turn dangerous food shortages into something funny:

No one bothered setting snares anymore, there was no point when they had rifles, handguns, automatic pistols. And how many hares could there be left after that long of a war? When you saw one hopping by somewhere it was like seeing a miracle. Look, a hare, a hare! And it didn’t even look much like a hare, it’d have its ears shot away or a missing leg and it’d be peg-legging it along more like an old man than a hare.

Szymek’s no-nonsense attitude often leads to distasteful actions (like the time he sold his dog to a dogcatcher to get money to go to a dance) but also provides a hopeful contrast to the often bleak postwar conditions:

I was always more interested in living than in dying. Living and living, as long as I could, as much as I could. Even if there was no reason to. Though does it matter all that much whether there’s a reason or no? Maybe it actually makes no difference, and we’re just wasting our time worrying about it. … People don’t need to know everything. Horses don’t know things and they go on living. And bees, for instance, if they knew it was humans they were collecting honey for, they wouldn’t do it. How are people any better than horses or bees?

This 500+ page novel will reward the patient reader with a remarkably detailed understanding of postwar life in rural Poland and, by extension, the human condition in general.

Literary License Fiction Round-Up

A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear by Atiq Rahimi (translated by Sarah Maguire and Yama Yari): In Kabul in 1979 Farhad, a 21-year-old university student, is out after curfew to celebrate a friend’s imminent escape to Pakistan. After suffering a vicious beating by soldiers on patrol, a mysterious and brave woman rescues the unconscious Farhad from the sewer. A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear consists of Farhad’s splintered memories and dreams mixed with his brief moments of lucidity as Fahad slowly returns to awareness. A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear is a disturbing and masterful depiction of the harrowing circumstances suffered by both men and women in war-torn Afghanistan.

A Thread of Sky by Deanna Fei: Spurred on by the unexpected death of her husband, Irene Shen organizes a trip back to her family’s Chinese homeland for herself, her three daughters, her sister, and her mother. Told from alternating perspectives, this novel of family (dys)functioning touches on just about every drama-filled issue imaginable. Although never boring, A Thread of Sky takes on too many topics to address them all with satisfying depth. Nevertheless, the novel is a thought-provoking look at family dynamics on the road.

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles: This debut novel is a Wharton-esque tale of post-Depression New York City during the year 1938. The action follows the ever-morphing relationships of several young men and women as their fortunes rise and fall, seemingly overnight. The self-assured voice of 25-year-old Katey Kontent leads the reader through it all with confidence and verve. Rules of Civility is an entertaining exploration of the whims of Fortune.

Seven Years by Peter Stamm (translated by Michael Hoffman): In this novel of obsessive love, Alex, an architectural student in Munich, vacillates between his admiration for a fellow-student (Sonya) and his irrational attraction to a dumpy, taciturn Polish woman (Ivona). Although Alex eventually marries Sonya and starts an architectural firm with her, he remains strangely drawn to Ivona. What at first seems to be Alex’s inexplicable obsession with an unworthy woman is slowly revealed to be Alex’s desire for unconditional love and the freedom such a love provides. Seven Years is a masterful exploration of forbidden love and its consequences.

A Review of Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke (translated from the Chinese by Cindy Carter)

Dream of Ding Village

4 out of 5: In Yan Lianke’s novel, Dream of Ding Village, a remote, agricultural village in China suffers from an AIDS epidemic. Ten years ago, the inhabitants of Ding Village sold their blood to blood collectors to increase their wealth and improve their standard of living. While the blood sales allowed the villagers to replace their traditional mud and thatch huts with two-story houses made of brick and tile, the unclean blood collection practices infected many villagers with AIDS. This novel’s disturbing premise is based on the true story of the 1990s AIDS scandal in Henan Province.

The novel is narrated from the grave by the murdered son of Ding Village’s primary blood collector. The dead boy describes the slow and painful deaths of the AIDS-infected villagers, as well as the actions taken by the villagers in response to the calamity. Some attempt to profit from the tragedy (stealing from the sick or selling coffins, for example) while others seek to alleviate the pain of the sufferers or to bring hope to the dying. Lianke’s prose embodies a sing-song, repetitive quality reminiscent of an oral storytelling tradition, and the plight of the dying villagers is reflected and magnified by the parallel destruction of the village’s land, which suffers from drought and neglect.

Dream of Ding Village occasionally loses focus and, near the end, approaches absurdity with a complicated subplot about arranged marriages between dead people. While a tighter narrative would have increased this novel’s power, Dream of Ding Village remains a compelling portrayal of humanity’s ever-present potential for self-destruction.

A Review of The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto, translated by Michael Emmerich

The Lake

3.5 out of 5: The Lake, the latest novel by well-known Japanese novelist Banana Yoshimoto, is an enigmatic love story told from the first-person perspective of Chihiro, a muralist and “going on thirty” daughter of unmarried parents. Chihiro’s unconventional childhood and the recent death of her mother contribute to her sense of isolation and unrest, and she spends hours staring out of the window of her Tokyo apartment. Eventually she notices a man (Nakajima) across the street engaged in the same activity, and they forge a window-to-window relationship made up of shy glances, waves, and smiles. As the connection grows, the couple spends increasing amounts of time together in Chihiro’s apartment, and Chihiro learns Nakajima is haunted by a terrible past experience. Ultimately, Chihiro must decide whether to commit to a relationship with the mysterious and damaged Nakajima.

In her typically compact style, Yoshimoto creates a relationship of ever-increasing power with minimal words. The conversational casualness of the prose keeps the story rocketing along. While the overall effect is potent, the story is marred by too many clichés (“sleep like a log,” “bored me to death”). It’s difficult to know whether such imperfections arise out of the translation or from a conscious choice by Yoshimoto to give Chihiro a naïve and relatively uneducated voice, but, either way, the resulting prose is often uninspiring. Nevertheless, The Lake is a unique love story and a quick, entertaining read.

A Review of Beautiful & Pointless by David Orr

Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry

In honor of Poetry Month (April), here’s another piece on poetry:

Despite its subtitle, Beautiful & Pointless is not really a “guide” to modern poetry. I would call it more of a meditation. Orr, the poetry critic for the New York Times Book Review, doesn’t really explain the various poetic forms or the different methods for deconstructing and understanding a poem. He doesn’t give any helpful tips to the beginner for how to read and appreciate poetry. Instead, Orr describes his task as “try[ing] to give you a sense of what modern poets think about, how those poets talk about what they're thinking about, and most important, how an individual poetry reader relates to the art he usually likes, always loves, and is frequently annoyed by.”

Using many examples of contemporary poetry, Orr discusses how poets inject the personal into their poetry (and, just as importantly, how some poets avoid the personal altogether) and how poets address and respond to current politics through poetry. There’s a chapter on form, but its main point seems to be that contemporary poets feel free to bend the rules of form. Two chapters (titled “ambition” and “the fishbowl”) discuss the inner workings of the poetry world, from the aspirations of contemporary poets to their reactions to each other to the difficulty in getting poetry published these days, much less read. A regular reader of poetry will find much of interest in Beautiful & Pointless and is likely to discover even more reasons to love poetry. For the poetry novice, however, this book is not the best choice of a guide as it assumes a certain, not insignificant level of prior knowledge and appreciation. In the book’s last chapter, Orr attempts to identify what makes poetry (both in the writing and reading) worthwhile. He dismisses the predominant views (i.e. poetry’s special connection to language, to ourselves, or to our society/culture and concludes that “[p]oetry is a small, vulnerable human activity no better or more powerful than thousands of other small, vulnerable human activities” such as gardening or movie watching. In the end, Orr believes we read poetry simply because we love it: it “seems beautifully pointless, or pointlessly beautiful.”