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.