RIBSY

Ribsy, Beverly Cleary, William Morrow & Co, 1964, 220 pp

 

I have been following Henry Huggins all the way from the beginning in My Big Fat Reading Project. Henry is the owner of Ribsy, perhaps the world's most wonderful dog. This book is the 6th and final one in the Henry Huggins series, so it is sadly time to say goodbye.

 

Only one real life dog has ever won my heart. Nipper was the dog of my best neighborhood friend. I longed for a dog but pets that could run around were not allowed in our house. I must have missed my moment because I have had no love for dogs in my adult life.

Ribsy, who is the star of this story, put me back to my 11 year old self when I loved Nipper. The magic of the book is that Beverly Cleary tells it all through Ribsy's point of view. Boy, does she do a great job of it!

She made me love this dog as he tries to find his way home after getting lost. Lassie will make even the most hard-hearted human cry, but Ribsy made me laugh out loud, even as I followed his difficult days looking for Henry.

PS: I just checked and Beverly Cleary is 102 years old. Her birthday is April 12th, so almost 103!!

THE LEAVERS

The Leavers, Lisa Ko, Algonquin Books, 2017, 300 pp

 

 

This excellent novel was the February selection of my One Book At A Time reading group. It was a hit, giving us plenty to discuss.

 

In yet another modern day immigrant story, Polly Guo, undocumented Chinese woman struggling with poverty and young motherhood in New York City, goes missing. Her 11 year old son, Deming, lands in social services and eventually is adopted by an academic white couple from a small town outside the city.

It is a sad story with a satisfying ending as Deming struggles with his identity and his loss. It weaves along and around. We learn Polly's back story and watch Deming grow up, always wondering why his mother deserted him and finally beginning to search for her.

Not until almost the end do we learn the shocking truth about Polly's disappearance. I especially liked the way the author dealt with all the emotions of the many characters and the resolution she created for Deming in the end.

THE ADDRESS

The Address, Fiona Davis, Dutton, 2017, 297 pp

 

I read this for a reading group. The author writes popular women's fiction about historical icons. The "address" is the Dakota, the residence where John Lennon lived with Yoko and where he was shot and killed. This story does not however cover that period.

 

Instead it covers the early years when the building first opened in 1884 and a parallel story at the same location in 1985. The modern part features descendants of Theodore Camden, a real life historical person who was one of the building's architects.

If not for the reading group I doubt I would have read the book. While it was fairly entertaining, I would not have missed much. For me the writing did not stand out. Fine for a popular book but the story was a bit too predictable despite the mystery embedded in it.

In the 1800s a woman tries to rise in the world and runs into the usual pitfalls and barriers for women of those years. In the modern plot, a woman faces similar troubles. Ho hum.

THE OLD MAN AND ME

The Old Man and Me, Elaine Dundy, NYRB Classics, (orig pub by Victor Gollancz, London, 1964) 231 pp

 

 I read this as part of my 1964 list. Just a short review today because I am getting behind on those again. Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado, 1958, is perhaps her best known work. I have not read that one yet, but now I want to. The earlier book is set in Paris, this one in London.

 

Honey Flood (as she calls herself) is an American girl in London. An angry young woman to be precise, looking to recover what she considers to be her rightful fortune.

In those years when the angry young men were all the rage in Great Britain, she gives them the female side. The story is quirky, sometimes dark, but also hilarious in parts. The twisty plot is revealed by the unreliable narrator Honey. I had a great time reading it.

I hope all the women I know have had their wild days or are having them now! Sex and substances with no thoughts of consequences.

Reading this was great for reminiscing. You don't know until almost the last page how it will end. I thought the ending was perfect.

(The NYRB Classics reprint, the edition I read, is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

A TERRIBLE COUNTRY

A Terrible Country, Keith Gessen, Viking, 2018, 335 pp

 

 

I read this for the Tiny Book Club and because it is one of the three books of the play-in round at The Tournament of Books. I expected the novel to be interesting and it was. I don't know why I am so drawn to Russia but I have read many, many books set there as well as written by Russian authors old and current. Perhaps because for all my life they have been our chief enemy.

 

A Terrible Country is somewhat subdued in comparison to all those other novels but in its quiet way gave me a feel for what Russia is like now.

Andrei Kaplan, single, early 30s, son of Russian immigrants, dragging out his PhD dissertation in New York, has been called by his brother Dima to return to Moscow and care for their elderly grandmother. Dima had been living back in Russia for some time, as a kind of lesser gangster, but one of his schemes has landed him in enough trouble that he must leave the country or risk going to jail.

Andrei goes. He finds his grandmother in a progressive dementia. He finds Moscow fairly unrecognizable from what he knew in his youth. His Russian is rusty and his money is tight.

His grandmother is confused, a bit rickety though she likes to walk, but when she is not moaning about how all of her friends are dead and how lonely she is, she is sweet. My dad had Alzheimers and though he was not always sweet to my mom or his caregivers, he was always sweet to me. Some years after he died I cared for my mom who had had two bad strokes. So I could relate to the scene of Andrei in a small apartment with this elderly woman, his fumbling attempts to help her out, his frustration and apprehension about losing her. Both of Andrei's and Dima's parents are dead. She is the only family they have left.

Over the course of a year, Andrei learns his way around, his Russian comes back, he finds some guys to play hockey with and he befriends a group of activists who stage small protests against the Putin government. The pace of the story is a bit slow but I didn't mind. Spending 335 pages inside Andrei's head, I came to a fondness for him despite his loser demeanor. He even finds a girlfriend. 

 

But he is no match for these people who grew up under communism and have lived through all the changes since. This is a political story but Keith Gessen makes it personal. That was the main appeal of the book for me since I only know of today's Russia through the news. The other characters make more clear how the country is made up of people, not just their leaders. 

Beyond that I got a poignant look at an immigrant who goes "home" only to feel like an exile from America and then to find out how American he actually is.

(A Terrible Country is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.

ARIEL

Ariel, Sylvia Plath, Faber and Faber Limited, 1965, 81 pp

 

 

I finished reading another poetry collection on the Read One Poem a Day plan. It was the first poetry I have read by Sylvia Plath.

 

I am no expert on poetry. Except for short bits in my school days I have never studied the genre. I have not wanted to learn about the techniques, the rules, the forms; I have not wanted to dissect poetry too much but rather to simply experience the poems.

Reading Ariel gave me pause though. In many of these poems I could only guess at what she was expressing. The imagery is so sharp it almost caused me pain, physical and mental, yet I could not exactly grasp what she was saying in many of them despite reading them again and again.

Knowing this was her last batch prior to taking her own life, successfully after several attempts, may have colored my reactions. I felt she was in deep psychic pain but was also in a deeper love with life and the world.

After finishing the book I read somewhere that her husband, Ted Hughes, edited the poems for publication. Knowing only the speculations and rumors that he was somehow responsible for her death, I was shocked! Was this another F Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda story?

One of the best things about reading as much as I do is how I discover my deep pockets of ignorance. What do I actually know about either of these people? Not much. So I went looking. Now I have a list of biographies about Sylvia and collections of the poetry of both.

I see that I have yet another project. Oh my. In my research I got the sense of a strong creative bond between the two poets. I am the most interested in that and look forward to learning much more. Anyone who could write the poems in Ariel had to have been imbued with the level of creativity I admire in many artists.

WARLIGHT

Warlight, Michael Ondaatje, Alfred A Knopf, 2018, 226 pp

 

 

Somehow I have never read Ondaatje's most famous book, The English Patient. I think I saw the movie. I did read The Cat's Table and liked it more than many other readers.

 

I liked Warlight but did not love it wholeheartedly. As in The Cat's Table, there is a boy trying to figure out his parents. In the year following WWII, in London, a 14 year old boy named Nathaniel and his older sister are left in the care of some dodgy characters when their parents leave for Ceylon, or so they are told. It is all quite mysterious concerning those parents.

The kids are supposed to be in boarding school but they hate it there. Their enigmatic guardian, The Moth, arranges for them to live at home and commute to school. Eventually he does not even insist they go at all.

Thus Nathaniel has an unsupervised coming of age that includes his adventures with a criminal friend of The Moth's and a passionate affair with a wild girl. Then life becomes dangerous, the mother reappears, the father never does.

I liked the first section when the parents are gone. Nathaniel is a plucky lad, learning the ways of the world.

The second section after the mother returns and supposedly finishes raising her children was less satisfying. She is the ultimate secretive woman and later in life Nathaniel figures out why. In this section, it is all terribly sad and his life goes nowhere. All the highlights were in that year with The Moth.

The writing is beautiful, I must admit. The story of what happened to the characters is a piece of little known Postwar history and undoubtedly important, but lives are ruined in a John le Carre type of wasted lives story. No redemption.

It was not that I was surprised by how horrible the world can be. I just think the second section laid it on a bit too thick.

The novel is a contender for the 2019 Tournament of Books, pitted in the first round with Call Me Zebra, a book I loved. I predict that Warlight will win that round and that is also sad to me.

(Warlight is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. The paperback will be released in April, 2019.)

THE LOVED ONES

The Loved Ones, Sonya Chung, Relegation Books, 2016, 279 pp

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: In this masterful novel of inheritance and loss, Sonya Chung (Long for This World) proves herself a worthy heir to Marguerite Duras, Hwang Sun-won, and James Salter. Spanning generations and divergent cultures, The Loved Ones maps the intimate politics of unlikely attractions, illicit love, and costly reconciliations.

Charles Lee, the young African American patriarch of a biracial family, seeks to remedy his fatherless childhood in Washington, DC, by making an honorable choice when his chance arrives. Years later in the mid-1980s, uneasy and stymied in his marriage to Alice, he finds a connection with Hannah Lee, the teenage Korean American caregiver whose parents' transgressive flight from tradition and war has left them shrouded in a cloud of secrets and muted passion.

A shocking and senseless death will test every familial bond and force all who are touched by the tragedy to reexamine who their loved ones truly are--the very meaning of the words. Haunting, elliptical, and powerful, The Loved Ones deconstructs the world we think we know and shows us the one we inhabit.

 

 

My Review:

This amazing novel surprised me. It was the next book on my stack of unread Nervous Breakdown Book Club selections, from October, 2016. The title made me expect some kind of "women's fiction." Well, it is family fiction but not the bestseller kind I tend to avoid. 

 

Generations, divergent cultures (Korean, Black American), loss, finding the ones you love outside the box of "loved ones," and so much heart.

 

It is not perfectly written per popular fiction or even literary fiction directives. It goes back and forth through time though in the best possible way. The characters are not likeable. They are real like the rest of us.

 

Actually the writing is fearless, taking the reader to places and emotions that continue to astonish. The way Sonya Chung demonstrates the interactions between politics, society, belief systems, all these weighty topics, through stories that happen to everyday people is what I expect from great fiction. 

 

 

(The Loved Ones is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.) 

THE OLD BOYS

The Old Boys, William Trevor, The Viking Press, 1964, 191 pp

 

 

It seems I have been hearing about this author for years, probably because he was shortlisted several times for the Booker Prize. The Old Boys was his second novel. He immediately won prizes and went on to write novels, short stories, and even plays. Whatever he wrote, he kept winning prizes, awards and at last a KBE: Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Though he was born, raised and educated in Ireland, he emigrated to England and stayed there.

 

I was therefore expecting a great deal as I finally came to William Trevor on the 1964 list of My Big Fat Reading Project. The first unsettling surprise was that the "old boys" are quite old, in their 70s. Why would an author starting out in his 30s write about such old guys?

The plot concerns a coming election for the next president of the Old Boys Association which is connected with the boarding school (called public school in England) these old guys attended. Anyone who has read British literature knows about the cruel and unusual goings on in those places, often leaving people scarred for life. I was not excited about reading another one of those stories.

My boredom with these old boys continued to the end but since the story was contemporary with the early 1960s in Great Britain, I found a little to interest me. This is the time and environment that gave us all those great bands from Britain: the Beatles, the Stones, etc. This was when the rebellion was born.

Though no one in the book starts a band, the story of these guys dredging up all their old friendships and hostilities as they dodder through meetings, had a quaint historical feeling, showing me what the lads of the 60s might have been wanting to shake up.

In fact, many British writers in the 50s and 60s did write about the hidebound, stuffy but crumbling and defeated British class system and mores of the Postwar era: Muriel Spark, A S Byatt, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch and more. They eventually moved into more modern stories.

I am sure William Trevor did so as well. Since his writing style is already quite good in The Old Boys, I will keep reading his novels as I move through my reading project, hoping to enjoy them more than I did this one.

Have you read this author? If so, which books did you enjoy the most?

ORFEO

Orfeo, Richard Powers, W W Norton & Company, 2014, 396 pp

 

 

Last year I read The Overstory. I was majorly impressed. I had not read Richard Powers before but the minute I finished that novel I wanted to read everything he wrote. Rather than go back to his first novel and read forward, as I usually do with an author, I decided to do the opposite. I created a personal challenge to read his novels in reverse order of publication, one per month throughout 2019. Orfeo is the novel that preceded The Overstory.

 

I loved this one as much though for different reasons, the main one being it is centered around music, the deepest love of my life. Peter Els is a composer, just about my age. The novel begins in the present time of post 9/11 days with a catastrophe and then proceeds forward with interspersed sections that trace Peter's entire life. I loved that too because it was like looking at a parallel history to my own.

Catastrophe, mostly self-created, has defined his life. His goals have included composing music that pushes boundaries, seeking connection between music and science (he is also a biologist), and loving his wife and daughter.

These goals clash and bring about a desperate friction between his drive to create and his need for love and human connection. That line from Joni Mitchell: "Caught in my struggle for higher achievement and my search for love" (from the song "Same Situation" on Court and Spark.)

Due to his latest experiment in his home microbiology lab, Peter is being pursued by Homeland Security as a possible terrorist. He goes on the lam, hoping to tie up the loose ends of his life or even possibly escape capture.

After completing this one, I see that to read Richard Powers you must be in shape as a reader. Like being trained for a marathon because you need fitness and stamina. Reading him is exhausting, though in a good way. You must be willing to learn stuff you didn't know before and to suspend disbelief to the utmost.

The reward is to have your thinking opened wide, possibly disarranged, and to find yourself with more ways than previously conceived of looking at life, people, history, science, and the world we live in today. 

Not for everyone, I concede, but I love that.

(Orfeo is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

WOMANISH: A GROWN BLACK WOMAN SPEAKS ON LOVE AND LIFE

Womanish: A Grown Black Woman Speaks on Love and Life, Kim McLarin, Ig Publishing, 2019, 182 pp

 

 

In this brilliant and truthful essay collection, Kim McLarin covers just about every aspect of living in America as a Black woman. I was enlightened, amused, made quite uncomfortable at times, and impressed over and over by her intelligence. You know I have a thing for intelligent women.

 

Everything she covers is important to a grown or growing woman: on-line dating, depression, racial injustice in the courts, anger, marriage, motherhood, bad partners, revenge vs non-violence, and more. The whole perspective is a Black woman's. I know, it says that in the subtitle, but it bears repeating.

The essay that punched me the hardest, "Becky and Me," considers friendship between Black and White women. As I read I felt there was not any way for me to be a good friend to a Black woman. I had to look at why I have not had a Black female friend since the third grade. I spent hours trying to figure out how I could make a Black female friend at this point in my life and to reason out why I do not even cross paths with Black women in my daily/social activities. I wondered if Kim McLarin would accept me as a friend and truthfully I felt unworthy, unsure of myself, even kind of rejected.

As I gradually got over myself, I realized (not for the first time) that Black Americans have spent way more time observing and figuring out White Americans than we have spent attempting to get a true picture of them. It was James Baldwin who got me started thinking about all that but he is a man.

My education is not complete, nor is my experience. The inherent and continuously glossed over racism in this country will give us problems for a long time to come, perhaps always and forever. This book is a valuable resource I think for both Black and White women and men.

Kim McLarin is bold, intelligent, relentless and brave as a writer and as a human being, but what stood out most for me in her collection was her honesty. A Grown Black Woman Speaks. Yes, she does.

(Womanish is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE IMMORTALISTS

The Immortalists, Chloe Benjamin, G P Putnam's Sons, 2018, 343 pp

 

 

Sometimes I love a novel because I feel so at home with the emotions, the characters, and the author's theme. That was the case with this book.

 

On a hot summer day in 1969, four children from the Lower East Side, aged 7-13, sneak away to consult a woman rumored to have the power to tell fortunes and name the day you will die. Two sisters, two brothers, led along by the older brother, agree to go because it is hot, it is summer and they are bored. Each one is filled with his or her unique brand of trepidation.

By the time each child has received, separately and alone, that death date, I felt I knew the personality of each. The rest of the novel follows what they made of their lives and how the death date influenced their actions.

It is a wondrous family tale, full of repercussions from the Holocaust, the changing mores of American society over the next several decades, and enough joys and sorrows, hopes and dreams, births and deaths, secrets and revelations, to make every page shimmer.

Chloe Benjamin is a phenomenal writer with imagination to spare and a big, huge heart.

(The Immortalists is available in paperback on the shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

FEBRUARY READING GROUP UPDATE

Recap from January: Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban turned out to give us much to discuss in One Book At A Time regarding Cuba, sex workers, and family connections. The Immortalists was loved by all at Molly's Group and would make a good reading group selection for any group I think. The Bookie Babes were somewhat underwhelmed by Hillbilly Elegy though we discussed the issues it covers for a long while.

Now for February:

Tiny Book Club: 

 

 

Tina's Group:

 

 

One Book At A Time:

 

 

Bookie Babes:

 

 

What are your groups discussing in February?

BOOKS READ IN JANUARY

Most places in the northern hemisphere, January was a cold, cold month. Of course the opposite was true in Australia, etc. Cold weather is great reading weather and I took advantage of it. Since I exceeded my goal of 144 books read in 2018, I am challenging myself to read even more this year. So far I have. I did not get all of those books reviewed and posted here but I came close. The rest will be posted in the next week.

Stats: 15 books read. 14 fiction. 8 written by women. 1 non-fiction. 4 for My Big Fat Reading Project. 2 translated. 4 historical. 1 thriller. 1 dystopian.

Authors new to me: Oyinkan Braithwaite, Buddadeva Bose, Lisa Wixon, Uzodimna Iweala, Chloe Benjamin, William Trevor.

Places I went: United States, Scotland, France, Nigeria, India, Japan, Great Britain.

Favorites: I gave 5 stars to 7 of the books. Top two favorites were The Lost Queen and The Immortalists.
Least favorite: not a one!

What were your favorite reads in January?

SPEAK NO EVIL

Speak No Evil, Uzodima Iweala, HarperCollins, 2018, 152 pp

 

 

What is it with human beings always trying to fix each other and make us all the same so we fit into a box of being and looking the "right" way? The latest example that keeps coming up on my radar is gay conversion therapy. Not that this is a new human endeavor. It just keeps coming up.

 

I recently saw the movie, The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Cameron, a teenage girl who is attracted to girls, gets sent to a gay conversion camp run by religious people. Camp is bad enough but Gay Conversion Christian Camp? What could be worse?

 

Speak No Evil revolves around the teenage son of Nigerian immigrants in Washington, DC and the white girl who is in love with him. When Niru becomes aware of his sexual orientation (gay), his father drags him back to Nigeria to the village church where he is prayed over so he can cast the evil from himself. That scene is like a compressed version of the one in James Baldwin's Go Tell It On the Mountain. 

 

Of course, Niru is not cured. He just has to go underground while still living at home. When Meredith realizes why Niru does not return her advances, she flips and supports, even encourages, his inclinations because first and foremost they are best friends. Tragedy ensues. Nearly everyone in the novel is destroyed in some way.

 

This is a powerful novel, full of surprises that creep up on the reader. I finished it almost a week ago and it took me all this time to figure out what it meant to me. I still don't have it all figured out, except that it behooves no one to play God. 

 

 

(Speak No Evil is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. The paperback will be published on March 5, 2019 and is available for pre-order.)

 

 

 

 

 

HAZARDS OF TIME TRAVEL

Hazards of Time Travel, Joyce Carol Oates, HarperCollins, 2018, 324 pp

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: "Time travel” — and its hazards—are made literal in this astonishing new novel in which a recklessly idealistic girl dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled (future) world and is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North America — “Wainscotia, Wisconsin”—that existed eighty years before.  Cast adrift in time in this idyllic Midwestern town she is set upon a course of “rehabilitation”—but cannot resist falling in love with a fellow exile and questioning the constrains of the Wainscotia world with results that are both devastating and liberating. 

 

 

My Review:

I am well aware that Joyce Carol Oates is not every reader's cup of tea. I happen to find her brilliant. I have read 18 of her books. I know people who feel as I do about her and I feel friendly towards those people. So I am not so much recommending this novel to any but those JCO lovers. I am wanting to share my thoughts with my JCO tribe.

 

Ms Oates, as far as I know, had not gone in a post apocalyptic/dystopian direction before. I know she likes to try new things and doesn't worry if she comes out on top of any specific genre. It is exciting to see how she goes about putting her own stamp on whatever she attempts.

 

In the novels and stories of hers I have read so far, the thing she always, always does is explore emotional and psychological trauma. Hazards of Time Travel follows a female high school senior who has grown up in a future, extremely tightly controlled society. She dares to think for herself in the Valedictorian talk she will give at graduation. Her punishment is banishment to an earlier time, loss of her family and even her own name.

 

Despite her intelligence and daring, she has been so impregnated with the concepts of her upbringing that her resulting fears never leave her. She is not ever going to be free, whether she stays in 1950s Wisconsin or is allowed to return to her own time and place.

 

All the details are exactly right. I would not expect anything less. But those details are not just used to orient the reader in the story. They are used to show that the details of daily life, the details of behavioral control, mind control, the details of love and loss, are the very things that keep us trapped, alone, depressed and fearful.

 

Then there are some odd sentence structures. For me those sentences put me in the minds of the characters. We don't think in carefully constructed sentences, do we? We certainly don't feel emotion in them. Brilliant!

 

Hazards of Time Travel seems like a Trump timely novel but, according to Ron Charles in his Washington Post review, JCO had started the novel in 2011 and finished it before the 2016 election. I like to think of novelists as our modern day prophets. This book is an example of that.

 

 

(Hazards of Time Travel is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

DIRTY BLONDE AND HALF-CUBAN

Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban, Lisa Wixon, HarperCollins, 2005, 298 pp

 

 

I read this for my One Book At A Time reading group. We all mostly are drawn to a Cuban setting but due to some reviews I read, I had my doubts this time. So much so that I almost skipped the whole enterprise. I am glad I didn't.

The writing is not great, at least for a novel format. As it turns out, the author had a series on Salon.com called "Havana Honey," loosely based on her experiences in Cuba. She developed that into a novel which explains the writing style to me.

Alysia Briggs, a privileged American young woman, bound for college and a career in diplomacy, had made a death bed promise to her mother to find her real father, who is Cuban. The summer before starting college she decides to go and fulfill her promise. At the time, travel between America and Cuba is heavily restricted but her American "father" pulls some strings.

Alysia arrives in Cuba and all the cash she brought with her is promptly stolen. Because she is on a two month student visa, she is not allowed to have a job. She quickly learns that not much in Cuba is as it seems, that many women (and men) have a second job as sex workers, and she ends up joining them as a way to make some cash. She makes a friend who is a surgeon by day, earning less than $100 a week, and is one of the "jineteras" on the side. The woman becomes her mentor. Their clients are wealthy tourists.

In some ways the novel is a companion to my recently read Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn. Except while that book was sad this one is more lighthearted. Eventually I got involved in all of Alysia's adventures as she learned the trade while continuing to search for her real father.

Most of all I liked the story for its look into what life in Cuba was like in the early 2000s. It was eye-opening! I also learned that not all sex workers are abused slaves, as the news would suggest. Not that I don't abhor the practice of indentured women; I do. However, since the beginning of time, women have practiced prostitution as a solution to making a living. I have decided that the distinction is worth making. In any case, what has happened to the Cuban people is the bigger crime.

Once again I took a chance on a book and came away with new knowledge about the world.

A PERSONAL MATTER

A Personal Matter, Kenzaburo Oe, Grove Press, 1969, 165 pp (originally published in Tokyo, Japan, 1964; translated from the Japanese by John Nathan)

 

 

By chance I read another translated novel, not from my challenge but from the 1964 list for My Big Fat Reading Project. Bonus!

 

Back in 2010 I read this author's 1958 novel, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids. As far as I could tell, that was his first novel. In both books the writing is powerful and clearly influenced by Western literature while putting the reader smack into 20th century Japan.

In A Personal Matter a frustrated intellectual named Bird is awaiting the birth of his first child. The child is born with a brain abnormality. If he lives he will be handicapped for life. Bird's mother-in-law is desperate to keep the newborn's condition from his mother. She is afraid it will frighten her only daughter too much to try for more children. 

Bird is ashamed to have produced such a child. He is not happy in his marriage but his job was gotten for him by his father-in-law and he is rather terrified by the mother-in-law. Should he just let the child die and lie to his wife about it? Should he approve an operation that may still leave him a vegetable?

He takes refuge in the arms of a former girlfriend. Over the period of a week, when the child's life hangs in the balance, Bird struggles with his conscience. He has long harbored a dream to visit Africa and had planned to make the trip shortly. Now everything is in chaotic flux.

 

In this, as well as other Japanese literature I have read, most of which was written in post WWII times, the country's traditional culture is in crisis due to its defeat, the end of the Emperor, the American occupation and the beginnings of democracy. It is as if the entire ancient culture is suffering from PTSD.

 

A Personal Matter is gritty, sometimes grotesque, especially when it comes to sexual matters. Bird's former girlfriend is a deeply immoral being and an enabler for his plans to deny responsibility for his baby. Yet there is a sort of dark humor and a psychological viewpoint to the plot, both of which make it feel as modern as any American novel from the 1960s.

 

At first I was put off by the characters and the ways they approached their problems, but the pace is fast, almost frenetic, and I became hooked on wanting to find out what Bird's decision would be. In an author bio, I read that Kenzaburo Oe himself had a disabled child. Perhaps that is why the story felt so real.

 

The author continued to write about the effects of the atomic bombing of his country and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994. 

(A Personal Matter is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

MY KIND OF GIRL

My Kind of Girl, Buddhadeva Bose, Archipelago Books, 2010, 138 pp (originally published in India, 1951, translated from the Bengali by Arnuava Sinha)

 

 

I have always read some translated literature in my mix of books. This year I decided to create a challenge to read one translated novel a month. I did make a list of countries, especially ones from which I had not read much, but then I remembered I had quite a stack sent to me some years ago, without charge, by Archipelago Books. Being me, I felt guilty for never having read and reviewed those so I started with the one on the top of the stack.

 

My Kind of Girl takes place in a cold room one December night. Four strangers have been given this room in a Bengali train station to wait out the hours while some rails are being repaired. All these men have is coffee and a few blankets.

A young couple, obviously deeply in love, maybe on a honeymoon, come to check out this room but go away. After some discussion about how these young people probably want to be alone and a bit of reminiscence about being that young and that much in love, each of these middle-aged men tells the story of his first love.

The pattern of this novella is based on the great story-cycles of the past such as The Canterbury Tales or The Decameron by Boccaccio. The difference is this is Bengali in the 1940s and the tales take place in the 1920s when India was still under British rule. It was a time when traditions concerning marriage and women were beginning to change.

Each of the four stories is as charming and various as are the ways of the human heart. Though the point of view is decidedly male, or perhaps because it is, I was captivated by this look into young men's hearts told by looking back from their older selves.

Buddhadeva Bose (1908-1974) was a celebrated and award winning writer who brought modernism to Bengali literature, as well as a translator of European literature.

I am off to a good start on my challenge.

WASHINGTON BLACK

Washington Black, Esi Edugyan, Alfred A Knopf, 2018, 334 pp

 

 

Back in 2014 I read this author's amazing second novel, Half-Blood Blues. I said in my review that I would never forget it and I have not. With Washington Black she has outdone herself.

 

Esi Edugyan has a fine pedigree. She was born in Alberta, Canada to Ghanaian parents. Her first novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, which I need to read, explores those roots. All three of her novels deal with the complex particulars of racism and their psychological effects.

Washington Black was born into slavery on a Barbados sugar plantation in the mid-19th century. All he knows is hard labor in the fields and the unspeakable brutality of the plantation owner. When he is brought into the master's house to serve the master's brother as an assistant, he experiences for the first time kind treatment from a white man. He also discovers he has an ability and passion for drawing.

Christopher, his new master, is a naturalist, inventor, and an abolitionist. The Wilde family however is full of troubled eccentrics and the safety Wash feels with Christopher is still disturbed by a constant fear of violence to himself and his people.

The plot includes the many travels of Wash with Christopher all the way through the American slave states and on to the most remote outposts of the Arctic. Wash is never secure. He is trailed by a slave catcher and then abandoned by Christopher in the Arctic. That trauma is only the beginning of his wandering and the rest of the story traces Wash's struggle to find safety for himself and his talents while he searches within himself for the reasons he has been so often abandoned.

How does the least free, the most betrayed of men find freedom? What is freedom? Can a man keep reinventing himself against all odds and find a way to heal his psyche from all he has experienced?

Esi Edugyan writes with incredible intensity and grace. Her sensitivity to human feeling is as deep as, if not deeper than, many authors I have loved. She has filled in her picaresque frame with truth and took me on another journey I will not soon forget.

(Washington Black is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)