Nonsuch Book

a personal matter by kenzaburo oe

 

Kenzaburo Oe's 1964 novel, A Personal Matter, opens as the protagonist, Bird, gazes down at a showcase containing an unaffordable atlas open to a map of Africa before he purchases the more practical Michelin road maps of the distant continent to which he dreams of escaping. As he wanders the city aimlessly, he ponders his chances of ever using these maps in his pocket as he is soon to be weighed down with the responsibilities of a family. He has left his wife at the hospital in the care of her mother and doctors as she enters labor. Upon returning home, he receives a call that he must return to the hospital immediately. The baby is "abnormal."

And that could be one blurb for this short semi-autobiographical work, and while factually correct, it speaks little to what the book is actually about - the alienation of an individual (and other like him) in post world war Japan. I had great hopes for this book as I read of the controversial Oe and his fusion of Eastern and Western themes and language utilized to create a poetic description of symbolic flight, but the actual execution left me cold. There are the issues of translation and writing that Richard captures quite insightfully here. The novel's themes would have been more powerful to me delivered starkly, without the overwrought prose. Also could not help but feel almost juvenilely taunted by the storytelling as it invites shock while delivering boredom. Like the confused adolescent who fails to emotionally connect to his own acts of rebellion. And perhaps this was intentional as evidenced by the pat ending, but I had ceased to be interested by the time I reached that point.

Disinclined to write about this at all, my thoughts are somewhat abbreviated here but I direct you to the more well-crafted insights of other Non-Structured Book Group readers this month - Emily, Sarah, Richard, Iris, Bellezza, Claire, Amy.

the diary of a disappointed book

The Diary of a Disappointed Book from Studiocanoe on Vimeo. Via The Casual Optimist.

reading without the benefit of electricity...

 

... sucks. Silence all those thoughts that speak to the allure of reading by candlelight or flashlight. Reading in the dark should only be an act of necessity. The necessity of not getting caught reading past "lights out" by your parents, the (quasi) necessity of impressing a new romantic partner, the necessity of print consumption at night in a house with no power. The reality is actually eye strain from insufficient light and dancing shadowy text plus a numb right arm from holding the flashlight. I could not find my book light in the dark so don't go there.

Sunday was a lovely day until the storm and the subsequent power outage that led to this bit of grumpy low light defamation. (The power that did not come back on until late Monday night.) I had the good fortune of book shopping with Teresa and Thomas at the remainder book warehouse, Daedalus Books, in Columbia, MD. Bargains galore of carefully selected stock just right for literary bibliophiles. But the company was the best part of course. The book and web savvy Teresa always brings a certain bookish joy to any conversation, and Thomas is as slyly mischievous as any bright child I know. And they both have tons of great recommendations of course. What did I buy?

• The History of the Siege of Lisbon by Jose Saramago (Teresa also picked up one of these but then switched for a different Saramago)
• Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro (Claire loved so I must have)
• Five Moral Pieces by Umberto Eco (because I blindly pick up all with Eco's name on cover)
• The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald
• A Reckoning by May Sarton (at the urging of Sarton fan Thomas)
• Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie (recently picked up two of these newer Christie editions and could not pass up a third)
• Portrait of a Marriage by Nigel Nicolson
• The Finishing School by Muriel Spark (Spark is my latest acquisition focus)
• Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink (UK edition so that I do not have to crack the spine on US edition whose cover design I prefer, and recently discussed with Ti, and also picked up by Thomas)

Lunch after shopping was also lovely, there was much to talk about, and I look forward to meeting up with these two again sometime soon. Great fun to talk about book blogging with actual practitioners who are much less likely to have their eyes glaze over at the mention of Technorati or BBAW then those folks we encounter in daily life.

books in pictures

 

Cornflower offered this invitation this week to see our current reads in an image.

"We had a lot of fun recently choosing pictures to sum up our reading taste (remember this post?), so why not let's all choose an image as I've done here which in some way represents a book, a character, an episode, say. It could be a painting or a photograph, any visual interpretation of something literary."

My current read is The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman, and even though this image is a rather literal interpretation of content and mirrors the cover image, it speaks volumes to me. As a conjured image from the reading of a book about the long descent of newspapers, it offers both an image that appears old, wrinkled and worn and an image that speaks to comfort, routine and long Sunday mornings in bed with the paper and tea. Two varying diagnoses of the viability of newspaper print. Will the choice fall to practicality or sentimental attachment?

There is no denying that the life is being quickly sucked from the Roman produced small newspaper with worldwide audience featured here. As in this excerpt from the first short profile in the book:

"Lloyd opens a French current-affairs magazine in hopes of stealing a story idea. He flips the pages impatiently - he doesn't recognize half the names. Who the hell is that guy in the photo? He used to know everything going on in this country. At press conferences, he was front-row, arm raised, rushing up afterward to pitch questions from the sidelines. At embassy cocktail parties, he sidled up to the ambassadors with a grin, notebook emerging from his hip pocket. Nowadays, if he attends press conferences at all, he's back-row, doodling, dozing. Embossed invitations pile up on his coffee table. Scoops, big and little, pass him by. He still has smarts enough to produce the obvious pieces - those he can do drunk, eyelids closed, in his underwear at the word processor."

Desperation. The papers where he wrote successfully are as old and weathered as the image above.

Read the first chapter here.

the most beautiful book in the world by eric-emmanuel schmitt

 

The cover caught my attention first, a woman elevated from the mundane by love of a book. And it was an ever reliable Europa Editions release. And a few thought the prose as spare and elegant as de Maupassant. And this book translated from the French by Alison Anderson fit in nicely with my Paris in July plans. And then this final encouragement from the publisher - "Behind each story lies a simple, if elusive, truth: though we may be frequently blind to it, happiness is often right in front of our eyes." I cling childishly to the belief that all can find happiness so I had to read it after that marketing push.

Despite having little time to read, I sailed right through this, often greedy to get to the end of each short piece so I was surprised to feel so conflicted about the collection once I finished. As if I had been oversold in a way. These eight novellas are in fact just short stories but could easily have been novellas. Should have been novellas. When I reached the end of the book and read the author's note, it made perfect sense that he squeezed the writing of these in on the sly while directing his first feature film. While wonderfully written, they are not wonderfully or fully developed. While the simplicity of each story is intentional for the parable genre adopted, the obvious ways in which the author resolves each story line neatly becomes a dull refrain (all seem destined for death and illness just in time for denouement).

The "feel good" elements of the book kept me reading, an attachment to a belief that all are capable of finding or learning the simplicity of truth, love and happiness. However, I felt beaten down by the theme by the last page. And then I questioned my assessment of the book as if I had become one of the characters found here, too bookish or educated to seize the truth found in the simplicity here. Surely writing this occasionally clever and precise prose speaks to a deeper purpose than reflected on these pages? But I really don't have the inclination to puzzle through right now. It was a disappointment and just OK.

sunday salon: the dirt

 

My book blogging has been half-hearted this summer as I have been working overtime with a group of very smart and very dedicated and very large-hearted folks to install a half acre urban farm on the school campus where I work. And finally, there is money en route, planning and permitting for a water cut, support from many quarters, and, as of just this Thursday, the beginnings of turned over beds with the promise of limited fall harvesting.

This will be a tremendous gift to our young urbanite students, and I am deeply touched and grateful to be a part of it. But I want to put the phone down for a minute, not hear my voice soliciting for one kind of support or another, and just dig in - literally. So for this morning, in the stifling DC summer heat, the husband and I will be outside getting dirty. For the love of an ideal and some very cool short people.

Later in the day I will be back to the very engaging The Most Beautiful Book in the World, a collection of eight novellas by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt translated from the French by Alison Anderson that are also all about the love in all its surprising forms. What will you be reading in the Sunday Salon today? And what is keeping you away from your books this summer?

lit by mary karr

 

It is easy to hate the contemporary memoir. Many an over-share of information with little relevance (or interest) to most or a maudlin stain on the page that attempts to elevate the commonplace to the unique or a crime scene for unreliable narration. These are the charges, but I find myself enjoying more and more memoirs in recent years because to me they are indistinguishable from fiction for the most part. Just a story. A condensed peek into a life, the same narrative arc as fiction, similar emotional content to fiction. So much fiction is thinly veiled autobiography anyway. Unless a memoir has skewered objective facts, the subjective realities of the genre fail to register as fault with me. So I especially appreciate the sentence with which Mary Karr begins her third memoir, Lit - "Any way I tell this story is a lie..."

Because I enjoy Karr's poetry, because this book garnered such glowing reviews, I decided to read it, but without those two factors, I would never have sought out a book pitched as the story of a recovering alcoholic who discovers God and her craft ("learning to write by learning to live.") Ouch. Her previous two memoirs, The Liars' Club and Cherry were never on my radar. So you can imagine my surprise (and embarrassment) when I shed a few bookishly infrequent tears for the rawness of her share, especially for her relationship with her father whom she has to painfully separate from his home about a third of the way through the book to move him to a nursing home.

"We loved each other this way, Daddy and I, from afar. We're like totem animals in each foreign cosmologies - like islanders whose ancestral gods favor each other. Each of us represented to the other what little we knew of love inside that family, but whoever I've turned into has wiped away who I was as a kid, whoever he once loved."

Out of context it seems a simple enough passage but within the memoir has impact from what has led to this point. Karr finds herself a part of a foreign cosmology no matter what space she occupies. She is distant from her Texas white trash, alcohol-infused upbringing. She attends graduate school where she is only required to show up a few times a year avoiding that sense of community she often views from the outside. She marries a man of aristocratic ilk whose world she fails to permeate, whose distance she mourns at the same time she intentionally distances him from the razor sharp observations to which others in the book are subject. Even the intense feelings brought on by motherhood are at times observed from a place outside herself.

For a while, the only place she fully aspires to join is the world of literature so that one sees that the title of the memoir refers to not just her frequent state of being pre-rehab but to a potential source of resolution. Seen through drunken dazes, the "nervous hospital," the trials of motherhood and troubled marriage, where the reader finally arrives with Karr seems less improbable than originally conceived as even her faith sings smartass songs of doubt. Karr's intelligence and literary occupations and eloquence make for excellent storytelling whether truth or lie.

For synopsis and links to other reviews on this TLC Book Tours event, please click here.

reading schedule for the captive by marcel proust

 

And now we reach the tricky part of In Search of Lost Time. The part that an ailing Proust never found time to edit in the obsessive compulsive manner with which he treated the first four volumes. And we are back to the obsession with Albertine who Marcel will never fully possess in the way he requires. He loves her fully only when she is asleep, when she once again becomes object and ideal. Marcel spends many hours just watching her sleep.

"By shutting her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had stripped off, one after another, the different human personalities with which she had deceived me ever since the day when I had first made her acquaintance. She was animated now [when asleep] only by the unconscious life of plants, of trees, a life more different from my own, more alien, and yet one that belonged to me. Her personality was not constantly escaping, as when we talked, by the outlets of her unacknowledged thoughts and of her eyes. She had called back into herself everything of her that lay outside, had withdrawn, enclosed, reabsorbed herself into her body. In keeping it in front of my eyes, in my hands, I had an impression of possessing her entirely which I never had when she was awake. Her life was submitted to me, exhaled towards me its gentle breath."

We will, uh, have much to discuss as you can see. This time around I will be reading a volume from the Folio Society set translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin and revised by D.J. Enright. For all those interested in reading along or in joining the conversation, we will post and chat on August 31. Will Albertine submit to her beautiful prison? Well, that seems highly unlikely especially as the next part of the story is titled "The Fugitive." Please join us?

Lovely photo from voxtheory's photostream on Flickr.

the sweet life in paris by david lebovitz

   

Love the photo above. Borrowed (pilfered) it from David Lebovitz's blog Living the Sweet Life in Paris because I enjoyed the idealized attachment I immediately had to the image and then laughed out loud when reading the caption, "Like most good people of Provence, she consulted the best book on authentic French cuisine available, The Sweet Life in Paris, and used my recipe." This sums up his book The Sweet Life in Paris perfectly, neither a saccharine, romanticized view of the French or a bitter indulgence of misplaced loathing. And I did mention laugh out loud funny?

It all begins as for so many with a visit and a memory:

"I had fallen in love with Paris when I had attended some advanced pastry classes at the prestigious Ecole Lenotre a few years earlier. One night after a lively dinner with friends, I was walking alone across one of the graceful bridges that cross the Seine. If you've ever walked through Paris at night, you can't help noticing that its beauty is magnified in the darkness; lights glow softly everywhere and frame the centuries-old buildings and monuments in spectacular ways. I remember that evening breathing in the damp air rising off the Seine, watching the Bateaux Parisians gliding on the river, loaded with awestruck tourists, and illuminating the monuments in their wake, the dramatic light hitting a building for just a few moments before moving on to the next."

So this statement would be like getting to know someone, the early days of dating. Well then Lebovitz actually decides to move to the city of lights after the sudden death of his partner, departing his northern California world for a fresh start in Paris. What follows is the very amusing story of how Lebovitz navigates the perplexities of his new home peppered along the way with a variety of recipes prompted from each chapter's theme. By book's end, the author's relationship with Paris has progressed from infatuation to committed relationship, successful despite the revelation of all the beloved's faults.

And the faults? Well, I particularly enjoyed reading of the author shedding his sweats and shaving and dressing quite neatly in order to take the trash out. So as not to be seen by his neighbors wearing his Sunday worst. Then there are the stories of French painters and housekeepers who seem to never want to leave your home once employed. The lack of shower curtains and the wet disgusting rags popular in French households for the required mopping up. Optional refrigeration of some foods like uh, mayonaisse and milk. Navigating the unspoken rules of obtaining less hostile customer service. Peeing in public or why the French consume tiny bits of water, don't care to use bathrooms in a host's home and have few available public toilets. And why one should not have to wait in that atrociously long line if one does not feel like it.

A perfect quick read for anyone with a sense of humor who has ever idealized what living in Paris might be like. Or foodies who would like a window into Parisian life with asides about the cuisine. If you wonder if the book could be right for you, check out Lebovitz's blog (it will make you hungry and/or inclined to cook) for the tone and type of content are the same. The smartass quality was good for me but maybe not all.

Read for the Paris in July event being hosted by Book Bath and Thyme for Tea.

doctor zhivago newly translated by pevear and volokhonsky

 

Have been working the mail carrier a bit the last week or so but there are a lot of goodies coming a reader's way this summer and fall. And in the way of translations of classics? First I was so over-the-moon about the upcoming Lydia Davis translation of Madame Bovary due out in September that I decided to sponsor a read-along in October. Now a galley for the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of Doctor Zhivago has slipped through my door, and I am wondering how many would like to read this in November. Hmmm.

Doctor Zhivago is on my Hall of Shame list, books I should have read by now but have not. So the time is now (or at least this fall) for my experience with the story to extend beyond the David Lean film and tapping out a little "Somewhere My Love" stuff on my grandparent's piano as a child. Pushed further along when I stumbled upon this from The New Yorker, November 15, 1958 by Edmund Wilson: 

"...one of the very great books of our time.... The incidents succeed one another with so much invention and vivacity, with such range of characterization and description, each submerges us so completely in the atmosphere of its moment of Russian life... Doctor Zhivago will, I believe, come to stand as one of the great events in man's literary and moral history. Nobody could have written it in a totalitarian state and turned it loose on the world who did not have the courage of genius.... His book is a great act of faith in art and in the human spirit."

And then really curious about the promise of the new translation when I read Pasternak's reaction to the first English translation of his lauded novel in 1958:

"Do not blame [the translators] too much. It's not their fault. They are used, like translators everywhere, to reproducing the literal sense rather than the tone of what is said - and of course it is the tone that matters."

Oh, and love that retro styling on the cover. Never hurts to be wearing a great cover.