Category: 2019 Reading List

Two poems by Li Bai

From historical sources, myths and stories, and the poetry of Li Bai and his contemporaries, Ha Jin conjures a vivid personality in a richly detailed world a millennium past.  The Banished Immortal, A Life of Li Bai draws us into the life of an extraordinary artist in the turbulent middle years of the Tang Dynasty.  Li Bai never achieved the official recognition that he sought but his poetry was widely admired and loved.  The nickname “the banished immortal” suggests it is so excellent that he must be a heavenly personage, banished to earth for some misdeed.

This short poem was chosen for the UN stamp set commemorating World Poetry Day.

Reflection In A Quiet Night

Moonlight spreads before my bed.

I wonder if it’s hoarfrost on the ground.

I raise my head to watch the moon

and lowering it, I think of home.

Another poem written for his uncle, a conscientious low-ranking official discouraged by court corruption.

Song For Accompanying Uncle Hua on Xie Tiao’s Tower

Yesterday, having left me, couldn’t be pressed to stay.  

Today, still disturbing me, makes me more upset.

The long wind is sending the autumn geese far away,

And viewing them from this high tower, we should drink more.

Your essays are fresh and strong like those of the Han dynasty

While my poetry resembles Xie Tiao’s in vigor and beauty.

We both have lofty spirit, thinking of soaring

To the sky to grab hold of the clear moon.

I draw my sword to cut water, which won’t stop flowing,

And I raise my cup to douse my sorrow, which grows stronger.

Ah, life is such a sad thing that tomorrow

I will undo my hair and sail away in a little boat.

                                                 

 

Is That A Fish In Your Ear?

David Bellos subtitled his book “Translation and the Meaning of Everything” and meant it.  It’s a brisk, occasionally head-spinning, always interesting survey of the nature of Language as the tool of human expression and communication and of the inherent challenges of understanding each other across the boundaries of particular languages.

I can’t say for certain that it was the first work in translation that I read, but I distinctly remember one Saturday morning pausing in my assigned chores to pull The Three Musketeers from the family bookcase – just to see what it was like –  and losing myself for hours in the thrilling world of Dumas.  I did have to finish the dusting, but the world had suddenly become larger, more glamorous and variable than I had known.

As I’ve continued to read the literature and watch movies/tv from as many countries as I can, the work of translation has become interesting in itself.  An early awakening to the difficulties of that work came with my discovery of Hong Kong movies, whose subtitles in the early years were rendered into astonishingly poor English.  My book group years ago read Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo and found ourselves more than usually divided in opinion.  In discussion we realized that members had read two different translations.  We definitely preferred one over the other but had to wonder if one was “truer” to the source or if you can even evaluate that.  I recently read a delightful book One Hundred Frogs by Hiroaki Sato in which he compiles more than a hundred translations of the poem Old Pond by the haiku poet Basho.  It reminded me that language always carries multiple meanings.  The translator tries to carry as much of that multiplicity into the new language as possible.

There are more than five thousand languages in use today, certainly more “major” ones than anyone can master.  Even linguists depend on translation.  So what is it? how is it done? what makes a “good” translation?  And more questions, what is language? how does one differ from another? what kinds of meanings are carried in structure? even, what is wordness?  Bellos explores these and many more with a wealth of historical anecdotes and contemporary statistics.

A particularly interesting chapter discusses the different structural qualities of languages and their implications for thinking and expression.  These create what the linguist Edward Sapir called mind grooves or habitual patterns of thought.  But this doesn’t mean that the meaning of one language cannot be expressed in another or that a language is “primitive” if structured differently from ones own.

Different languages, because they are structured in different ways, make their speakers pay attention to different aspects of the world.

The mind grooves laid down by the forms of a language are not prison walls but the hills and valleys of a mental landscape where some paths are easier to follow than others. 

To expand our minds and to become more fully civilized members of the human race, we should learn as many different languages as we can.  The diversity of tongues is a treasure and a resource for thinking new thoughts.

 

Zama

The opening of Zama by Antonio Di Benedetto  translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen

       I left the city and made my way downriver alone, to meet the ship I awaited without knowing when it would come.                                                                                                             

     I reached the old wharf, that inexplicable structure.  The city and its harbor have always been where they are, a quarter-league farther upriver.                                                                  

     I observed, among its pilings, the writhing patch of water that ebbs between them.

              A dead monkey, still whole, still undecomposed, drifted back and forth with a certain precision upon those ripples and eddies without exit.  All his life the water at forest’s edge had beckoned him to a journey, a journey he did not take until he was no longer a monkey but only a monkey’s corpse.  The water that bore him up tried to bear him away, but he was caught among the posts of the decrepit wharf and there he was, ready to go and not going.  And there we were.                                                                                                                                        

There we were: Ready to go and not going.

In a nightmare/vision Zama sees horses in the street trample a small girl.

I withdrew.  My boots dragged in the dirt; I could not lift my feet.  Had my arms been longer, my fingernails, too, would have been encrusted with red earth…I know nothing more.  Night, my benefactress, came to my tired body.

Later, Zama goes with a military detachment into the jungle.

The sun was a dog with a hot, dry tongue that licked and licked me until it woke me up.

 

How Fiction Works by James Wood

Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring:  it all begins again with him.”

This is a wonderful sentence and wonderfully reassuring to an attentive, eager, self-educated reader of novels, i.e. myself, seeking to enrich her appreciation of fiction.  Wood proves himself an excellent guide, knowledgeable and witty, widely read and articulate in analysis.  He asks a critic’s questions – is realism real, how does point of view work, why do we love to read? – and offers answers from his work as a writer and a lifetime of reading.

Flaubertian realism, like most fiction, is both lifelike and artificial.  It is lifelike because detail really does hit us…in a tattoo of randomness….The artifice lies in the selection of detail.  In life, we can swivel our heads and eyes, but in fact we are like helpless cameras.  We have a wide lens, and must take in whatever comes before us.  Our memory selects for us, but not much like the way literary narrative selects.  Our memories are aesthetically untalented.

Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or life-sameness, but what I must call “lifeness”: life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry.

What James calls “the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.” … And in our own reading lives, every day, we come across that blue river of truth, curling somewhere; we encounter scenes and moments and perfectly placed words in fiction and poetry, in film and drama, which strike us with their truth, which move and sustain us, which shake habit’s house to its foundations.

 

Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada

It’s not the only irony of this novel that such a title leads a deeply life-affirming story.  The book is essentially a meditation on individual response to unjust corrupt authority.  The setting is Berlin at the start of World War II, an unambiguously evil authority in political control.  Through the choices and actions of the characters, Fallada urges the essential questions for us:  how do we live in an unjust society? is resistance moral, even possible? is resistance worth the cost of the almost inevitable failure to effect change?

Fallada faced that issue himself as he attempted to maintain his writing career through the 1930’s and by choosing to remain in Nazi Germany rather than emigrate.  His own experiences and observations carry into the novel and give it powerful immediacy and authenticity.  The story revolves around a working class couple whose son has died in the early months of the war.  They decide to write postcards with anti-war/anti-Nazi messages and to leave them in public places to encourage others to resist.  A small, probably futile scheme that nonetheless risks their lives and eventually the lives of others.  They get away with it for a couple of years and imagine that the cards are having an impact.  Like most people, they “believe what they hoped.”

Their are several other interlocking stories which show the whole range of responses to life in Nazi Berlin – enthusiastic participation, trying to live a separate private life, passive resistance, criminal opportunities, gaming the system and more.  There is humor mixed with the horror, not all of the black variety.  The repellent basement dwelling “super” is obsessed with stealing the goods from an upstairs apartment.  His schemes are continually thwarted, though, like the rat he resembles, he survives all the destruction around him. The characters are well-drawn and much of the story is carried in dialogue which gives it an unexpectedly fluid easy-reading quality. As with a classic studio period movie, it’s easy to miss the structural care and skill in a “new realism” style novel.

All of the efforts at resistance fail, as we know they failed historically.  It took armies and lives to bring down the Hitler government.  Repeatedly, the resisters ask each other and then are asked by their interrogators, “Why? why do it?”

Eva Kluge, postmistress, quits her job and leaves the party to preserve her self-respect.  Facing up to life alone, thinks maybe she can amount to more.

Judge Fromm retires rather than serve this government and tries to help threatened neighbors.  His actions are undetected but “bombs fall on the just and unjust alike.”

Trudy, the son’s fiance, not sure what can be done, but knows the “main thing is that we remain different from them…Even if they conquer the whole world, we must refuse to become Nazis.”  We can be “like good seeds in a field of weeds”

Otto Quangel, the card writer, a man who loved peace and quiet, but refuses to let that make him a coward who can ignore the oppression and injustice around him.  Reflecting on his “crime” he thinks “my only crime was thinking myself too clever, wanting to do everything myself, though I know that one man is nothing.”

Dr. Reichardt, orchestra conductor, sharing a prison cell with Otto, asks him “who can say (if the cards did any good)?  At least you opposed evil.  You weren’t corrupted.” The time for a big plan was before Hitler came to power.  “As it was, we all acted alone, we were caught alone, and every one of us will have to die alone.  But that doesn’t mean that we are alone or that our deaths will be in vain…we are fighting for justice against brutality”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Books for Living by Will Schwalbe

2017 Knopf

In this collection of short conversational essays, Schwalbe takes us on a tour of books that have had meaning in his life and offers observations on the ways certain books have particular impact, when they seem to speak to our life at that moment – “the right book at the right time”.  The books we return to for insight or comfort, the books that link us to a person or memory, the books that helped us see other lives and other possibilities, these would make an interesting bookshelf  of a life.

His reading list included many familiar titles but also several unknown to me.  Some of the familiar ones are unread as well.  I’ve shelved many copies of Anne Lindbergh’s Gift From the Sea at the library booksale but never given it a look.  His enthusiasm makes me reconsider my casual dismissal of a “celebrity” book.  Several others have been added to that long list of books I’d like to read or at least sample.  I’m generally content to let those come to me by chance in a used bookstore, but I think I’ll go looking for A Journey Around My Room written by Xavier de Maistre in 1790 while he served 42 days of house arrest for dueling. Too intriguing to miss.

Books connect us to other readers, to authors, and to other books in an unending chain or web of language and associations.  Schwalbe urges us when we read to think about the ways those connections of language and ideas shape our lives.  Talking about literature can help us understand ourselves better and can foster deeper connections with the people we care about.   He suggests we greet friends with “what are you reading now?”  And most importantly, to share what we read.  He used to say that a book is the greatest gift you can give anyone, but no longer.  The greatest gift is to give a book and then share it in conversation.  “What did you think? Did it make you remember/feel/want to do…?  I was moved by…”  We give ourselves when we meet another person over a book.

 

on the nature of Writing…

an excerpt from Memoir of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada

I have to admit: my life changed because I’d made myself an author.  Or to be precise, it wasn’t exactly me who did that, I was made an author by the sentences I’d written, and that wasn’t even the end of the story: each result gave birth to the next, and I found myself being transported to a place I hadn’t known existed.  Writing was a more dangerous acrobatic stunt than dancing atop a rolling ball.  To be sure, I’d worked myself to the bone learning to dance on that ball and actually broke some bones rehearsing, but in the end I attained my goal.  In the end I knew with certainty that I could balance on a rolling object – but when it comes to writing, I can make no such claims.  Where was the ball of authorship rolling?  It couldn’t just roll in a straight line, or I’d fall of the stage.  My ball was supposed to spin on its axis and at the same time circle the midpoint of the stage, like the Earth revolving around the sun.

Writing demanded as much strength as hunting.  When I caught the scent of prey, the first thing I felt was despair: would I succeed in catching my prey, or would I fail yet again?  This uncertainty is the hunter’s daily lot.

 

The Tale of the 1002nd Night by Joseph Roth

(c1939)  1998 St. Martin’s Press

How surprising that a novel by Roth should only find English translation (by Michael Hofmann) and publication nearly fifty years after it was written.  It’s an unusual book, not so much a story as a series of vivid scenes of Vienna life in the last years of change and decay before the Great War, scenes strung together like the pearls of the fabulous necklace gift of the Shah.

Roth conjures the physical Vienna with great specificity, walking us around the city with the details that prompt that “I know that place, I’ve been there” feeling in any visitor.  But we know only too well that the social world is decayed and dying.  We meet characters across the social spectrum but there will be no happy ending for any of them.  Roth is an incomparable stylist whose work gives the reader an exquisitely melancholy pleasure.

“…she sometimes surrendered to her dangerous dreams, knowing full well how foolish they were, and how bleak and bitter it was to wake from them.  Ridiculous dreams, fleetingly kind and beatific, for all the misery of waking from them.”

The last word from the waxworks sculptor: “I might be capable of making figures that have heart, conscience, passion, emotion, and decency.  But there’s no call for that at all in the world.  People are only interested in monsters and freaks, so I give them their monsters.  Monsters are what they want.”

Tapping the Source by Kem Nunn

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1984 Scribner

I have a strict rule that I will always buy something when I visit an independent bookstore.  It’s sometimes a bit of a challenge in a small shop like the combination coffee and book shop I visited in Bend Oregon last summer.  So I was pleased to find this reissue edition of a novel I’d enjoyed quite a few years ago.  I was even happier to find the story still fresh and engrossing, a really excellent novel.

It’s the original surfer noir novel,  well-plotted, strong characters, wonderful descriptive language eg when our young hero comes home after a shocking party night. “The sun was climbing fast by the time he reached the Sea View, heating up the streets, and the machinery of the town was heating up as well, moving into high gear now, the boomer gear, greased with hash oil and cocoa butter, hot-wired with cocaine, chugging to some New Wave anthem, and his heart was beating time, hammering erratically as he reached his room and stepped inside.”

or in a better moment in the surf – “On the horizon, the sun had begun to melt, had gone red above a purple sea.  The tide was low and the waves turned crisp black faces toward the shore while trails of mist rose from their feathering lips in fine golden arcs.  The arcs rose into the sky, spreading and then falling back into the sea, scattering their light across the surface like shards of flame.”