Books by the Lake

Review

1:13 am 25 February 2013

I read through this book in just two days. It was difficult reading at first, because of its harrowing premise (which I will try not to detail, because it's supposed to be a surprise, even though it seemed to me to be stated on the first page); and because its narrator, Kathy, starts out by expressing her support for the system she lives in in an off-putting manner that made it hard to listen to her at first. But Kathy grew on me somewhat, and certainly the storytelling is compelling.

This is an alternate-history version of the 1990s where the development of medical ethics was the opposite of that in the real world. In truth, there has been a steady expansion of care taken toward informed consent by patients, less paternalistic decision making by doctors, inclusion of disabled people in decisions about their lives, recognition that people with conditions like autism should be speaking on their own behalf, and so on and so on. In the world of Never Let Me Go, the donor system is stated to have started in the 1950s -- which was the era of the Tuskeegee experiment and Willowbrook School, so I suppose that if that sort of thing had become more widespread instead of less, we might have ended up in the ethical situation of Ishiguro's society; but he never gives any sense of the wider social context in which such an alternate cultural development could have occurred, so that weakens the story as science fiction somewhat. Madame says, about a pivotal moment, "I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world..." The old world was not kind: read about the treatment of women and minorities in early 20th century medicine, never mind disabled people, in a manner unthinkable in the 21st century. I can't decide if Madame's society is so awful that this all actually looks good to her by comparison, or if Ishiguro is actually unaware of history and falling prey to good-ol'-days thinking, which would completely negate the science-fictional value of the book, since you can't say anything valuable about a subject you don't understand to begin with.

No matter, though: the depiction of how people actually live in the closed world of Hailsham House, and the moral failures of the people who run it, are as finely drawn as you'd expect from Ishiguro. This is not, primarily, a social novel, far less a revolutionary manifesto, which may account for the author's choice to not depict any donors who seriously struggle against their fate. But really, what he's interested in is exploring everything on a deeply personal level. The personalities of the "guardians" at Hailsham house are sketched; but the three main characters are shown in great detail. Perhaps their acceptance is understandable because of their utter isolation: physically, never been outside Hailsham; psychologically, unable to think outside the course of life plotted out for them. I haven't decided whether I find this plausible.

The core of the novel is the nuances of what unites the donors with one another, and particularly the strained but ultimately firm bond between Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy. Kathy's strength (as well as vulnerability) is her refusal to let go of these companions of her childhood; and in an incomprehensibly hostile world, Ishiguro is saying, such bonds may be the greatest blessing possible.

Review

The Samurai's Garden

7:00 pm 10 February 2013

There’s a lot going on in this novel. A young man is sick with tuberculosis, sent to a remote seaside village to recover (or die, though no one mentions that possibility). He’s a would-be artist, experimenting with expression in painting. The life of the family he left behind turns out to be less secure than he imagined. And this is 1937, the Japanese are invading China, he’s Chinese, and he’s staying in Japan -- he’s conflicted thinking about people he knows suffering while the people around him only think of Japanese casualties in the war; and it comes between him and a young woman he’s interested in.

So, plenty of turmoil in the circumstances of Stephen’s life. How will he respond to it internally? While he’s there, he becomes very interested in a different, but equally stressful story that began years ago, involving the caretaker of his house, Matsu, and an epidemic of leprosy, which infected Matsu’s sister and the woman he loves, Sachi. Sachi now lives in a village in the mountains where people disfigured by leprosy, hiding from the scorn and fear of the world, lead a difficult life. The story of how she came to be there, and grow into her present peaceful life, is fascinating. Key to her peace is her garden: all stones, which she rearranges. This is the most important symbol in the novel -- it indicates that art can be made from stones, because beauty comes from within -- Sachi says "its beauty was one that no disease or person could ever take away from me." Matsu, too, is an artist, cultivating a garden near the ocean, which he recreates every time a storm uproots it. Together the two of them survived a lot of heartbreak although some of the people they loved didn’t do as well.

Even though Stephen realizes how helpless he is in the face of the forces of nature and the folly and cruelty of humans, the year he spends in the Japanese village before returning home provides him with the beginnings of a lasting internal stability.

I can only rate this novel three stars because, in spite of the good qualities I highlighted above, there’s something a bit pedestrian about the way it’s written, the dialogue doesn’t always ring true, and it occasionally has difficulty with emotional tone.

Review

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

7:00 pm 29 November 2012

I used to wonder why fiction didn't often use metaphors drawn from modern physics. Mostly stuck to at best the classical concepts, or even totally outdated "folk" theories. Well, now I have found a book of 21st-century metaphors; and, not surprisingly, reading it is hard work. (There is one beautiful and comprehensible Newtonian passage: the parabolic trajectory of a life, with weightlessness at the highest point.) If I hadn't just finished The Future of Spacetime I would have struggled even more.

What I can make of this novel is, I think, a success. It is a time travel story, but its time travel is "chronodiegesis", that is the subjective narration of time, that is the memory of the past, the perception of the present, the fear of the future. Its narrator, Charles Yu, has a need for "time traveling" because his present is dominated by not being able to cope with painful memories of the past -- he may not be able to change the past, but he sure needs to change his current attitude. That is simply said, but unpacked at length, it makes a novel with many beautiful moments and a high level of difficulty for the reader. It is an entirely interior, subjective novel: in older works, it would be called a "psychodrama", where characters that the protagonist interacts with are imaginary beings of his own creation; here, they are computer programs created by the "time machine", that is, the mind. I wonder why the author chose to name his protagonist after himself: is he really processing his own issues in fictional form? That would be so personal as to be rather uncomfortable for me.

However, on another less personal level, this is also a work of philosophy and narratology. I am not well equipped to consider those subjects; I would need to read the book again to tease out the ideas. Please consult a philosopher if you want an opinion on whether anything coherent was said in this novel. I'm not at all sure it was, but I did enjoy the reading experience.

Review

Tom-All-Alone's

7:00 pm 15 November 2012

Is it "fanfic" or the more grecolatinate "intertextuality"? It's clever, anyway. I guess I just didn't find it clever enough to justify its lack of other qualities. It's fannish in that it relies on either recent or repeated reading of Bleak House to find all the shout-outs, and the audience may well congratulate themselves on spotting them (and the ones to other novels and to well-known historical figures). It's geeky in that there is an afterword that explains all that. (I don't think that the author was well-advised, though, in directly co-opting some canon characters and then creating others that are extremely like canon characters but not the same ones, at the same time the original story is going on in the background: there's an unavoidable sensation that London is populated by doppelgangers unaware of each other!) And this novel is intended to be "darker and edgier" than Dickens; but, in spite of the fact that it can talk at length about prostitution and incest, and can include the words "rape", "buggery", and "pregnant", it really isn't grimmer than Dickens's depictions of crushing poverty, in my opinion. And it does oddly little to correct one of the Victorian author's greatest failings, the lack of a middle ground, in his female characters, between comic monsters and "the angel of the house". There are plenty of victims in Tom-All-Alone's, but no fully-developed women with agency. No sooner is a potentially interesting woman introduced, than she either is killed or vanishes from the story -- particularly striking in the case of the protagonist's putative love-interest, who remains shadowy and wholly objectified seen through his eyes, and is apparently forgotten by the author after the plot has advanced far enough that she ends up in his bed. And twenty-first-century myopia probably explains the author's tendency to confuse innocence with imbecility: the girls at the Solitary House, especially Hester (cf. Esther), parody angelic good girls but they are quite literally feeble-minded, and are contrasted with street-smart prostitutes -- no nuanced depictions of sheltered existences here, a lack of trying for real empathy with Victorian girls. The attempt at a "god's-eye narrative" lurches uncomfortably every time the author inserts a comment from modern perspective, and falls far, far short of its goal of matching Dickens's finely-honed moral outrage.

Review

Drowning World

7:00 pm 27 October 2012

This was a wonderfully fun read, and as soothing as a warm drink. It fits into an old-fashioned optimistic mode of thinking about human expansion among alien species, that surely we are enlightened enough to solve everyone else's problems for them. This was a book that continually brought TV Tropes to mind -- so very genre-typical. Set in a Hungry Jungle on what appears to be a Single-Biome Planet (at least, whatever is beyond the jungle area is never mentioned); it is inhabited by a warlike native species and an enterprising immigrant species (both are vaguely humanoid), naturally in conflict, under the benevolently paternal administration of the Commonwealth, but coveted by the Empire which is led by the reptilian Aan. Just don't think about the Unfortunate Implications of this situation given that most alien species are stated to have fairly uniform personalities whereas humans, explicitly, have a wider range -- no wonder we are fated to rule!

The very best thing about this book is its human hero, Lauren Matthias, a fully-developed female character for a wonder, a mature married woman at that. She is the chief Commonwealth administrator of the planet, dragged into a far more complicated situation than she ever bargained for, to which she responds with guile (including a few actions that ought to be frankly illegal), political and diplomatic savvy, and even a few acts of physical courage, though nothing unrealistic for a plump middle-aged civilian. The author even has a realistic view of some of the problems facing women in authority -- though Matthias relies on emotional support from her husband (a scientist), she can't consult him too much because this would undermine her position. It's an unusual set of gender roles in a marriage, pretty well portrayed.

Review

Drawing Love

7:00 pm 7 September 2012

A beautifully written short tale about an 18-year-old woman's self-discovery through art and love. I know that's by no means an uncommon theme. But what distinguishes one such story from another is the writing, and this one is worthwhile, absolutely.

Jousan writes so well about making art and especially music that I have a hard time believing she doesn't do both herself. Mo's summer of love and self-discovery is bittersweet but nonetheless exhilarating.

Review

Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

7:00 pm 3 August 2012

This is a harsh tale, and the first-person narration is written in short, hard sentences, in simple blunt words, very corporeal, unsparing of ugly bodily details; emotions are depicted simply, mostly harsh emotions, but allowing for moments of joy and tenderness. It's an unusual style, over the course of the book it increasingly seemed to me unique.

The story, though, invites comparison to others: the situation is similar to that in The Lord of the Flies, but playing out quite differently. These boys, evacuated in wartime, are unexpectedly abandoned to themselves. But they're reformatory boys, the unwanted and imprisoned, and in spite of their little group being wracked by fear and uncertainty, they cling together; in spite of occasional dominance struggles between the narrator who's sort of the leader of the group, and Minami who's the other most prominent personality, they remain friends. The world of the grownups is corrupt and brutal, this is something that the narrator comes to understand clearly, and he can also see possibilities for things to be otherwise. Yet after all these young people are part of society, they have trouble thinking of alternatives to it, and they too participate in its corruption in some ways -- it's complex. Will they grow up without learning from their experiences? Will society co-opt them, "nipping in the bud" their moral growth? The ending is like Catch-22, the one who can see clearly fleeing alone into an uncertain future.

Does it make a difference that the narrator survived and is telling us this story? Does it make a difference that Kenzaburo Oe survived the war and the militarization of Japan to write this novel? This is a shout of rage, urging the young generation to remember the past and reject it; it is one of the classics of teen rebellion, like Rebel Without a Cause or Zéro de conduite. In the introduction, the author is quoted saying that this was his "happiest" novel that gave him a feeling of "liberation" as he wrote it. Anger can be a gust of fresh air; this novel may be liberating, but it takes the reader through strong, almost unbearable emotions on the way there.

I might have rated this five stars, but I'd have to read it again to decide on that. It troubles me that women are not present at all except as relates to the narrator's sexuality. I don't yet have any thoughts about the important role that sex plays in the novel. In any case, the weaknesses of the translation bring the rating down a bit.

Review

In a Dark Wood Wandering

7:00 pm 22 July 2012

Writers have a natural reason to find the minds of other writers interesting—hence, the proportion of literary figures represented among the heroes of biographical novels is high compared to the general population. Hella S. Haasse, in this case, was attracted by Charles d’Orléans (1394 –1465), the author of celebrated poems. There was so much more to fill a 600-page novel than just the writer’s inner life, however; few poets have the fortune to be a royal prince of France, or the misfortune to live through a particularly troubled time in the history of the country.

This was a time when for a little while it seemed that France might cease to exist in its own right, with the king of England claiming its throne and the Duke of Burgundy, who controlled large parts of its territories, declaring independence from the crown. More importantly, France had been terribly impoverished by misrule and internal strife among the great feudal lords. But though it did not become apparent immediately, there was a fundamental shift of power taking place, with the feudal lords inevitably losing their importance in national affairs in favor of royal and economic power, just as their chivalric style of military operations was now obsolete. (Haasse has King Louis XI explain all this to Charles d’Orléans in a speech at the end of the book.)

During this pivotal century, Charles was a passive observer, both because he did not have the skill to intervene effectively, and because he spent 25 years a prisoner in England, having been captured at the battle of Agincourt. This allows Haasse to not focus too narrowly on the fortunes of the house of Orléans, important to Charles but ultimately barely relevant to France, and portray larger developments which the hero would have attracted attention away from if he’d been more dynamic.

The political aspect of the novel is interwoven with an introspective account of Charles’s mental and emotional life. These are not two independent matters, being as Charles’s ideas and poetry are profoundly affected by observing the troubles of his country, as well as by his own many sorrows and few joys. However, in the final conversation with King Louis which I already alluded to, when Charles attempts to sum up what he has learned about life, the two men cannot understand each other. Both points of view have nonetheless been carefully explored in the book; it is up to the readers to synthesize them, if they can.

Haasse writes in a plain, un-clichéed style that allows her ideas to come across clearly; she manages to impart the necessary masses of historical information to the readers in a relatively unobtrusive manner. Having a great length of time and many developments to cover, she necessarily writes rather briefly of numerous episodes that would be interesting in themselves, and characters come and go quickly; though distinctive enough, important personalities are portrayed in broad strokes only. One fault that I can find with her pacing is that she develops the beginning of the novel much more fully than the end, with a very long prologue and first chapter which are focused on Charles’s father; although much necessary information is imparted here, the initially slow, then accelerating pace unbalances the novel somewhat. On the whole, it is a thoughtful, informative, and involving work.

!!! spoiler alert !!! Review

Rates of Exchange & Why Come to Slaka?

7:00 pm 19 July 2012

The hero (I use the word ironically) of this story, Angus Petworth, goes to Slaka and comes home again. (He is a linguist who’s asked to give lectures, and this is a very routine trip for him, so he thinks.) While there, he meets the novelist Katya Princip who tells him that he is in a story with her. She means the kind of stories that she writes, ones based on folktales. She has cast him in the role of the young prince who goes into a strange forest, and herself in the role of the witch he meets there—as she points out, it is often hard to tell whether a witch is good or bad at first meeting, but she insists she is a good witch. But it turns out that all expectations that a reader has in this narratively subversive novel are doomed to disappointment (as Petworth is doomed to disappointment). This is not a hero tale: as is well known, a hero is expected to return from his journey having proved himself and bring back something of value. Though Katya Princip tries to encourage Petworth to develop a "sense of existence", in fact he returns home feeling just as empty as when he left (worse, even, since he now knows that he is missing the sense of existence). And he fails to bring back an object of value; it is true, this is not his fault, but then he has never been in control of events for one moment. He has always been completely passive. No wonder it is a failed hero tale.

Another possible narrative model is provided by the legend of St. Valdopin, whose body was bought back by his countryfolk for an equal weight of gold, the scales finally being tipped by the very small contribution of an old woman. This comes close to truth, for commerce is everywhere in Slaka, unsurprisingly (this, in a country that boasts of its rational economy). Yet, if the relationship of Petworth and Princip is transformed into a transaction, it is a deal that ends up bringing no advantage to either party, since Princip, unlike the old woman, cannot buy honor for her country, and she cannot (though she tries) give Petworth what he needs either.

What about the narrative provided by Petworth’s most reliable lecture, "English as a Medium of International Communication"? Although most of the people Petworth meets speak English, international communication most definitely does not go smoothly. In fact, Petworth is left bewildered in Slaka. He is a linguist who completely fails to learn any of the local language and doesn’t even try to; more importantly, there are language-related events going on in the country, apparently of great moment, yet he sees little of them and understands nothing. The ways he knows to talk linguistics, in terms of Derrida and Saussure, are utterly inadequate to give him any insight into the situation. We know from the appendix that Petworth made that lecture into a book after his return, another sign that he learned nothing.

The novel is not a comedy in the classic sense, since it does not end with lovers uniting. Instead it ends with Petworth returning to his wife, from whom he is, and will presumably remain, totally estranged. The possibility of a better, truer love was raised in Slaka, then dissipated, illusory. As if in a comic Bildungsroman, Petworth had various sexual adventures, but he did not learn or grow from them; he’s too old for that genre anyway.

So, not only does all possibility of accomplishment or growth fail for the protagonist, the narratives that might belong to various genres all end in failure too. Subversion of expectations is a form of humor; a bitter humor here. To be sure, there are plenty of other reasons to laugh in this book—for instance, it makes abundant use of sexual farce, and there is the reliable subject of the discomforts of a traveler in a foreign country which is not at all suited to journeying in comfort. But from Petworth’s point of view, the story is nearly a tragedy—just the fact that he has been aware that his life is empty, and returns with that emptiness unrelieved, is enough. So the closest I can come to describing it is as a laughing tragicomedy.

Review

Not in God's Image: Women in History from the Greeks to the Victorians

7:00 pm 16 July 2012

Julia O’Faolain was a novelist strongly concerned with the condition of women; in this volume, she compiled original historical sources in a work of research that would inform her later novels, most obviously the medieval drama Women in the Wall. It is by no means a systematic history, just a collection of excerpts, arranged roughly thematically. However, the claim in the introduction that "The book differs from others recently published in that its aim is not polemical" is an exaggeration, for many of the editorial contributions do indeed contain polemical comments. O’Faolain was not a professional historian, but her coauthor, her husband Lauro Martines, was (he specialized in the Italian Renaissance). Given that, I might have expected a little more theoretical sophistication and nuance than I found in the writing -- for instance, the sentence in the introduction, "The double standard had no other basis" than to insure "incontestably legitimate" heirs "and neither had the practice of keeping women in relative subjection and seclusion;" or the uncritical acceptance of the now-abandoned idea that there was a prehistoric period of matriarchy. Of course, we must keep in mind that this book appeared in 1973, and thus had as yet very little basis of feminist scholarship to draw on.

In the selections dating to antiquity and the middle ages, sources are pretty much limited to legal codes, rare court cases, and religious or medical pronouncements about the fundamental nature of woman. This leaves us lacking insight into the patterns of daily life, such as an anthropologist would like to have: for instance, we learn that the houses of ancient Athenians had separate secluded living quarters for women if they were large enough, and we have a mention of a two-storied house where husband and wife slept upstairs and the children and servants downstairs, but there is hardly enough material for an anthropological analysis of the ways that domestic space shaped life and thought. It is an unavoidable part of presenting extended texts, however, since the necessary evidence would be scattered and largely archaeological.

The variety of material available increases over time, and begins to expand enormously by about the 17th century. It is at this point that the book abandons any attempt to be generally representative, and instead becomes a scattering of interesting examples, with some chapters being more like case studies: for instance, the discussion of prostitution centers on an analysis of the 18th and 19th century police records in Paris, and the gradual expansion of women’s legal rights in England during the 19th century is seen through the lens of the life and writings of Caroline Norton. The arrangement of these chapters is guided by one of the chief structuring principles of the book: to attempt to portray a progression of gradually emerging female self-expression and emancipation.

It is obvious that this relatively brief book barely skims the surface of the material that might have been included. In spite of its shortcomings, it succeeds because most of us don’t have access to original sources at all, and O’Faolain and Martines discovered some really interesting ones; the book tantalizes and raises an appetite for more. It must have long since been surpassed by newer works, but is good for what it is.

Review

Fiela's Child

7:00 pm 16 May 2012

A story of two families as different as they could be, and a court that wasn't as wise as Solomon when asked to choose between two women claiming the same child. Fiela Komoetie, living on the open veld, raised her white "hand-child" (adopted child) Benjamin with all the love she gave her other children, and then some, though half-knowing that the government wasn't going to allow the child to stay with her when they found out. At the other end of a landscape of contrasts, in a dark forest, lived Barta Van Rooyen who would eventually claim Benjamin. The contrast between Fiela's pride and dignity and Barta's family's scrabbling, violent, fearful lives was equally great.

This was a memorable portrait of the natural world of 19th-century South Africa, with its forests, elephants, ostriches, and birdsongs, already passing away under the axes and plows. As a depiction of the social world of the time, it was more particularistic, taking in only a few families. The author was more interested, I think, in exploring Benjamin's identity crisis, unable to identify with the family he'd been told was "his" when taken to the forest; a crisis she brought to a height by the rather obvious plot device of having him fall in love with his "sister". She was also interested in reflecting on "the power of a woman", the instinct of love and protection as she sees it, so lacking in weak Barta.

Review

Last Night's Fun: In and Out of Time with Irish Music

7:00 pm 12 May 2012

When Ciaran Carson plays the flute or listens to other musicians, as he tells it, his mind wanders among the turnings of the ever-new variations on the tunes, and also rambles among the memories of other times the music evokes. He's written a rambling book, here, woven of memory and reflection. It does have structure, though, and repetitions, in a canny evocation of the form of traditional music and narrative. The prose is incantatory, often brilliant. I lingered over many pages in sheer pleasure, and found many a touching or hilarious anecdote here. But it expressed best of all a way of thinking about music that I had only half-understood until now.

Review

A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare's Plays Teach Us About Justice

7:00 pm 23 March 2012

A charming exploration of Shakespeare's plays from the point of view of law and justice. Though the book is short on specific applications to today's events (which is not a fault in the book itself but rather in its marketing), Yoshino finds much to say on more general themes, and full of an appealing skepticism and passion and real moral thought.

Review

Hobson's Island

7:00 pm 10 February 2012

This is a note on both The Mystery of the Sardine and Hobson's Island, Stefan Themerson's two final novels before his death in 1988. According to the introduction to the latter, the previous thing that Themerson had published was an essay suggesting that a university should fund a "Chair of Decency". "Contrary to what clergymen and policemen want us to believe, gentleness is biological, and aggression is cultural; not vice versa.... All ideologies, all missions, all aims corrupt.... Because, when all is said and done, decency of means is the aim of aims." These are themes emphasized over and over in Hobson's Island and, to a less obvious extent, in The Mystery of the Sardine. They are books written by someone who is not afraid to turn conversations into philosophy lectures, for whom characters are vehicles for ideas, and whose plots are quite deliberately ridiculous; after all, nothing could be more absurd than the human predicament in that Cold War age when all ideologies and all reason had led to the brink of global annihilation. To judge by these novels, Themerson seems similar to one of the characters in Hobson's Island, Sean D'Earth: a reluctant atheist who thinks there ought to have been a just God, and a betrayed lover of science who sees his beautiful vision of evolution thriving on the love of parent to child cruelly perverted by weapon-builders. Yet, until the despairing end of the second book, the mood is mostly one of gentle, if uneasy, lunacy, in which terrifying events can be overcome by those characters (mostly women) who understand that "Axioms are mortal, politics are mortal, poetry is mortal,–good manners are immortal."

Review

The Mystery of the Sardine

7:00 pm 9 February 2012

Review

War Trash

7:00 pm 7 February 2012

This book is the "memoir" of the experiences of Yu Yuan, former student at the Huangpu Military Academy, during the Korean War, most of which he spends imprisoned by the Americans. Actually, you might say "during the Chinese civil war", because the effects of that conflict are everywhere. You might even say "during the Cold War". Yuan initially believes the reason he was given for his division being sent to Korea, to prevent the Americans from invading China; he has been told that the Chinese soldiers are heroes. But he soon begins to feel more like a pawn than a hero. He's seeing that his superiors are playing a political game, and national and global interests are being pursued in which individuals have no worth.

In part, this novel gives a view of the Cold War as seen very partially by its obscure narrator. But it is also a character study, as Yuan grows increasingly isolated. He often retreats into introspection, and reads when he can get printed material. He does not want to join any party or "side", and could not if he wanted to, having been involuntarily involved with both sides of the civil war, and thus not trusted by either. Yuan quietly resists being mere "war trash", used and thrown away. He can speak good English and can recognize individual Americans, addressing them by name. This ability saves him and others several times. He navigates through the dangers of being in the middle of the great conflict by negotiating with other people as individuals. But ultimately, this can't entirely save him, because these other people are just as manipulated as he is.

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