Yamasaki always wagered that he would be disillusioned; it was as if he kept up a constant bet with his youthful hopes. Yamasaki ranked as a genuine veteran in election campaigns, and he was absolutely indomitable, but a kind of masochistic fervor lodged within him. Corruption in an election or the victory of moneyed power did not in the lease surprise him; they seemed as natural as stones and horse dung along a road…(he was an) epicure of disillusion
After The Banquet by MISHIMA Yukio
I started writing a book…I was able to concentrate and became for some time a sort of gargantuan ear that listened to murmurs and echoes and whispers, far-off voices that filtered through the walls. But I never became a real writer. Life always managed to elude me. I’d only ever find its tracks, the skin it sloughed off. By the time I had determined its location, it had already gone somewhere else…
Anyone who has ever tried to write a novel knows what an arduous task it is, undoubtedly one of the worst ways of occupying oneself. You have to remain within yourself all the time, in solitary confinement. It’s a controlled psychosis, an obsessive paranoia manacled to work, completely lacking in the feather pens and bustles and Venetian masks we would ordinarily associate with it, clothed instead in a butcher’s apron and rubber boots, eviscerating knife in hand. You can only barely see from that writerly cellar the feet of passersby, hear the rapping of their heels. Every so often someone stops and bends down and glances in through the window, and then you get a glimpse of a human face, maybe even exchange a few words. But ultimately the mind is so occupied with its own act, a play staged by the self for the self in a hasty, makeshift cabinet of curiosities peopled by author and character, narrator and reader, the person describing and the person being described, that feet, shoes, heels, and faces become, sooner or later, mere components of that act.
from Flights by Olga Tokarczuk
The enemy’s victory was achieved entirely thanks to sinister machinations and money…a tremendous flood of money…swirled through the streets with manic frenzy … The money shone like a sun through the clouds, an evil, baleful sun. And while it winked in the sky, plants with poisonous leaves wide-spread grew thick, and rank grasses, cropping out in every direction, stretched sinister feelers from here and there in the city toward the clear summer sky.
After The Banquet by MISHIMA Yukio
I had a good year in books with a total of 68 read. My goals were to read more fiction in translation, something I’ve been consciously pursuing for several years, and to read at least one nonfiction work each month.
Fiction: 46 (27 in English translation)
Nonfiction: 22
Here’s my 10 + 1 list of books I most enjoyed and admired this year. I had to make it +1 because I read Moby Dick and it just seems silly to measure anything against it.
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt
Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada
Homeland by Fernando Aramburu
After the Banquet by Yukio Mishima
The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth
The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov
Almost Nothing: The 20th Century Art and Life of Jozef Crapski by Eric Karpeles
The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai by Han Jin
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
A Primer For Forgetting: Getting Past the Past by Lewis Hyde
The post “Books Read 2019” lists all the titles with a capsule description/comment for most.
Most of the talk about a supposed imminent and inevitable “death of the book” reflects a sincere concern, no doubt, but is generally too confused and dramatic to be helpful. I want a definition of terms before I can evaluate the danger…just what is meant by book? Is the concern for the physical object, its tactile pleasures, history or beauty? Is the concern for the kind of content and form of expression we experience in books? Perhaps it’s worry that the change of delivery technology will diminish the benefits we associate with reading?
Leah Price points out in her recent book What We Talk About When We Talk About Books that all of these issues have caused anxiety among readers for a very long time. There was never a “Golden Age” of reading but always a mix of purposes and quality for books and other forms of printing. I love books, in any definition, as much as the next reader. While for years I only cared about the content of what I might be reading, I’ve developed a strong interest in book history and appreciation for the artistry and craft of production. There will always be people who appreciate the beauty of fine printing, so I am confident that the book as art object will continue. I don’t expect to ever own one of those small press run gems but I can enjoy the trade edition.
There is unquestionably a lot of trash/junk/drivel, pick your own label, published now. But does it actually drive out good writing or is that an illusion? The range of fiction writing in the nineteenth century was similarly wide but we only think of the great works that continue to speak to us. As a bookseller, I sighed to see children loading up with the Babysitter or Goosebumps series; in a few years will they be the adults with the latest James Patterson or Danielle Steele novel? “At least they’re reading” isn’t a comfort. Reading is a skill that needs to be developed by engaging with good writing. The readership for literary fiction has never been large; it’s hard to make a case that it’s any smaller today.
I’ll admit to sharing some of the concern for the possible implications of the new delivery technologies. Tiny screens, blue light, multiple constant visual distractions, never reading more than a few sentences at a time…what might these do to our physical brains, to our abilities to concentrate, to think? Price writes about the explosion of new kinds of print media in the nineteenth century – pocket-sized paperbacks, news digests, tabloid newspapers – to meet new needs in the urbanizing, industrializing society. People needed something convenient to read for short intervals of waiting in lines, in offices, on the train or to provide isolation from the strangers around them. Sounds a lot like how we use electronic devices, so perhaps we’ll survive them too.
Price tells an interesting story of William Morris, the great champion of design and craftsmanship, who criticized the small paperback book because it is difficult to hold for comfortable reading. He also recognized the human bias to value things based on scarcity and effort required. His books are designed to encourage what we might call “slow reading”, by which the physical qualities of the book call attention to the quality of the content. By restoring the sense of occasion that he associated with medieval manuscripts, Morris hoped to forestall the always-on reading that we equate with the smartphone but that he blamed on cheap print. Like familiarity, ubiquity breeds contempt.
Those of us who love books, who love to read for any of the many reasons there are to read, want books to continue to be valued in our world. We respect the power of good writing to focus critical thinking and to enlarge our lives. It’s the writing that matters. A book is thinking and feeling made visible. The ‘book’ has had many forms over the centuries. How will it adapt in this one? That is what we should be talking about when we talk about saving books.
If you value the union of opposites brokered (sometimes but not always) by long-form, long-term reading–emotional absorption with intellectual reflection, inwardness with empathy, the capacity to withdraw from those around us while remaining attuned to distant minds–then the book may no longer be the only place to look. If we think of printed paper not as an inert collectible but as a cue or catalyst, then fetishizing the wood pulp and thread or glue onto which attentiveness, curiosity, and imagination have sometimes piggybacked means looking in the wrong place. More useful might be exploring what new–or old but forgotten–ways of circulating and sharing and responding to words might allow those habits to flourish.
At 163 pages, this book invites consumption in two or three bites, like eating a rice ball or other snack food from the store. It’s better, though, to nibble. The protagonist is a very unusual woman and her observations and story are highly unsettling. I read it again immediately and find it lingering in my mind, like the flavor of an exotic food upon the palate.
Keiko, a social misfit from childhood, makes an unlikely heroine. She doesn’t understand why her family is so anxious to ‘cure’ her and have her behave like everyone else. It’s not hard to sympathize with them when Keiko uses a shovel to clobber a classmate on the playground. Everyone wanted him to stop beating up another child so she simply took effective action; the adult reaction baffled her. So it goes until she learns to not speak or act; she no longer stands out. She hasn’t changed internally, though. Stroking the cheek of her baby nephew, she finds it strangely soft, like stroking a blister. When her sister tries to quiet the child’s crying, Keiko looks idly at a knife on the table – it would be easy enough. It’s a chilling moment. She doesn’t act on those thoughts any more but still wonders why people don’t use the simplest means to accomplish what they say they want.
A job in one of Japan’s ubiquitous 24-hour convenience stores is a common temporary job for many, quickly left behind for a ‘real’ job or marriage. The structured routine of the store proves ideal for Keiko, however. Indeed, she feels “reborn” as a worker. She stays on for 18 years as managers (currently #8) and staff come and go. The store manual tells her how to act, other female staff provide models of clothing and speech which she can mimic, and the work gives her a sense of purpose. She thinks she’s finally pulled off being a person. We see that’s not quite the case outside the store environment when her sister pleads with her to go to counseling because ever since you started working at the convenience store you’ve gotten weirder and weirder.
The Convenience Store is both microcosm and metaphor of society. Both are forcibly normalized environments where foreign matter and exceptions are removed. Unruly customers, expired milk, and unreliable workers are expelled from the store. Young adults (especially men) who don’t pursue careers or (especially women) marriage are shunned, culled from the herd. Any oddity in a person’s life is massaged and interpreted until it can be explained and fit into a conventional social pattern.
Nothing is static or uniform, of course, despite the bemused comment of an elderly customer that this place never changes. Keiko reflects that all the units of the store – products, staff, customers – are constantly being replaced with the same but different units, like the cells of her body. The old lady was like one of eighteen years earlier, the eggs sold today are like those of yesterday but different, and she herself is a unit that will be replaced. Problems of the world intrude into this controlled environment too. A recently hired foreign worker, chronic staffing shortages, and a mentally deranged customer hint at the labor and social crises in Japan.
The author is very clever to let Keiko tell her story; a reader almost automatically feels a sympathetic interest in a narrator’s point of view. But the ambiguities and uneasiness created by such a heroine are considerable. Keiko, whose name means “happy child”, is not happy nor does she understand or want “happiness”. She sees society as a kind of hive or herd in which everyone unconsciously copies others’ behaviors – infecting each other like this is how we maintain ourselves as human is what I think. She has admirable qualities as an employee but her complete identification with the store is deeply odd. She is bereft when she leaves her job and can no longer hear its voice caress her eardrums.
The novel is a deft and deadpan satire of that universal human inclination to sort and explain everything/one into familiar patterns and categories. It’s easy to criticize Keiko’s conventional family and workplace for the excessive pressures for conformity that we associate with Japanese society. But I found myself trying to ‘understand’ her too, though in a more enlightened way of course. The English language edition subtly guides our expectations with the translation choice in the title. The title is more properly translated as Convenience Store Human or Person. (The word is also used as urban slang and in Dragonball circles as an insult meaning something like “idiot humanoid”.) “Woman” is a significant change and closes off a more open reading at the outset by emphasizing gender and the individual. My feminist instincts were easily engaged when she’s badgered to marry, or to find a more worthwhile job, or when she’s not promoted despite her exemplary performance in the store. Her return to a store that ‘needs’ her, crying out to her in its distress, feels like a victory and affirmation of personal choice. But really? What will become of her when she’s unable to meet the physical demands of the job, when she’s a worn cog and an unusable tool?
I think “Human” is a more interesting title, as well, as it encourages us to think about those qualities that make us human. Keiko in some respects seems like an AI construct of a human being; she’s a humanoid robot designed to serve this complex structured machine called a Convenience Store. How different, we should wonder, is our own life? how unreflecting our judgments? The career professional never unplugged, the retail worker whose personal life is captive to erratic shift scheduling, social media pressures to have a shiny smiley life – we can see much of contemporary life mirrored in this insightful and entertaining novel.
Homeland is a wonderfully rich and intricate novel of two Basque families during the decades of ETA violence. Aramburu takes the thinnest possible tissue slice of a community, the lives of these two families, and examines the impact of civil strife on individuals, families, and communities.
It’s not a political novel, we don’t learn anything about the separatist movement beyond the slogans. We do learn how people respond to threats, fear, and loss. How the young are manipulated, how a cause can be cover for the selfish and malicious, how much courage is required to live with integrity, loyalty and love. And how bitter is regret.
The families, lifelong best friends, are divided when one man becomes the target of ETA harassment. Immediately he and his family are ostracized in the village, from either fear or conviction. His murder is the central event of the story, dividing all their lives into ‘before’ and ‘after’. Aramburu spins threads from each character, weaving back and forth between them, between their pasts and the present, and leaves the threads dangling into the future.
The 2018 disbandment of ETA and its apology for the decades of violence and murders committed for its political goals have prompted efforts toward social reconciliation and justice. The themes of responsibility and forgiveness, social and personal, are central to the novel. The widow returns to the village as the novel opens, determined to reclaim her life. She is ready to forgive her husband’s killer, but she wants him to acknowledge responsibility and to ask for her forgiveness. That issue of guilt and forgiveness ultimately seems straightforward and possible compared to achieving reconciliation with her estranged friend; can the wounds of such intimate betrayal ever heal? In a poignant, wonderfully ambiguous final scene the two women meet unexpectedly in the village square. Eyes watch as neither woman will alter her path to avoid the encounter, whispers speculate and recall “they were such friends”, they meet…
That’s how I remember our friendship. We passed our stories back and forth until they merged. And with each pass, we lightened our own burden….
What mattered most was that memory was stripped of bitterness and retold with joy. And once it took root, it grew bigger, this story of how things had been. It was a voice speaking through us, inexhaustible, it seemed, past resentment and sorrow. Past all that could not be resurrected.
from Walking On The Ceiling Aysegul Savas
I met the challenge, I finished reading MD a half hour before Book Group. In my defense, I was reading in the two weeks available after a long vacation trip. Everyone in Group finished the novel in similar style except one, and we gave her a pass because she’s working and very pregnant. Everyone enjoyed the reading experience but there was an occasional struggle. You can’t make it a quick read no matter how pressed for time. It really is a most curious novel. It’s undeniably long, and heavy with facts, and nothing much happens until the final few chapters. It’s also engrossing, populated with memorable characters, full of striking imagery and language and entertaining digressions into philosophy and political commentary. This is a book for endless discussion.
Moby Dick continually surprises the reader and defies convention. Everyone knows the opening, right? Call me Ishmael is among the most famous of opening lines. Only it isn’t. There are pages before we read that sentence. The mock-serious tone is set when we’re given an etymology of ‘whale’ by a late consumptive usher and extracts from literature compiled by a sub-sub librarian. Only then do we arrive at Chapter One and meet our narrator. You can say the line opens the story, but attaching this prelude material gives our expectations a little shake out of comfortable convention.
Ishmael is a terrific companion and guide on this journey. He has many admirable qualities; he’s curious, adventurous, willing to accept people and situations as he finds them. He is practical, interested in science and facts, and a self-educated independent thinker. Alone and rolling unattached through life, he is the outsider/observer reporting and commenting on the comedy and grief of life. I try all things; I achieve what I can.
And he’s so funny! Why doesn’t anyone comment about how witty Ishmael is? I loved listening to him talk.Coming to an inn for the night, with anxious grapnels I had sounded my pockets and only brought up a few pieces of silver. Frightened that night, had not the stranger stood between me and the door, I would have bolted out of it quicker than ever I bolted a dinner. His philosophical reflections are marvelous and delightful in their unexpectedness. When Tashtego falls into a sweet spermaceti coffin Ishmael muses How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato’s honey head, and sweetly perished there?
Melville’s writing is richly descriptive. A face showed a congruent small-pox had in all directions flowed over his face, and left it like the complicated ribbed bed of a torrent, when the rushing waters have been dried up. Starbuck is a long, earnest man…flesh being as hard as twice baked biscuit…his thinness…merely the condensation of the man. Moby Dick viewed: the appalling beauty of the vast milky mass, that, lit up by a horizontal spangling sun, shifted and glistened like a living opal in the blue morning sea. Wonderful language that slows an appreciative reader’s pace like a sea anchor.
I’m trying to imagine where we – Ishmael and I – are as he tells the story of this fated voyage. Possibly he is sitting alone and writing his recollections for later perusal. But the narrative has the leisurely discursive quality of conversation and storytelling. It has the pace of a voyage with long periods of near idleness and of simple repetitive work conducive to reflection or talk. Perhaps I’m the new hand and he’s filling the days with instruction and tales. I hope that he’s off the sea and snug in a comfortable sailor’s bar, spinning his tales for a mesmerized audience.
Every so often, when the interval between meetings will be longer than usual or when a consensus choice for next month doesn’t emerge or when, perhaps, we just feel a bit bolder one of my book group will look around and say, “what’s on your ‘to be read’ stack?” It’s an opportunity to pull out that giant Victorian novel (The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope) or serious social novel (The Street by Ann Petry) or unaccountably missed classic (Don Quixote by Cervantes).
One member asked if we were willing to read Moby Dick with her. Another said she’d never read it either. I admitted to reading it only a few years ago but had loved it and was eager to read it again. The others had all read it a long time past and were ready to revisit. So Moby Dick it is.
A great book doesn’t require embellishment, of course, but often inspires it. I had been lucky years ago to find a copy of the beautiful Random House edition (from the Lakeside Press edition of 1000) illustrated by Rockwell Kent. It was an extraordinary reading experience.
Curious about other fine editions, I learned of a 1979 printing by Arion Press with illustrations by Barry Moser. I may never see one of the 265 original copies of that hand press edition, but The University of California offers a handsome trade edition.
Andrew Hoyem, the publisher of Arion Press, on the opening page: “The wave of the ‘C’ of “Call me Ishmael” almost jumps out of the book like a Hiroshiga wave.”
Time to dive in…
A Bookwoman’s Holiday 