13 books finished this month, 11 of them from my Asian reading month; that helped me get to 12 by women/POC, with the usual 4 in German.
- Happy Stories, Mostly — Norman Erikson Pasaribu tr. Tiffany Tsao
- Frösche — Mo Yan tr. Martina Hasse
- Die Ungehaltenen — Deniz Utlu
- Aspects of Nature — Alexander von Humboldt tr. Elizabeth Juliana Leeves Sabine
- Arid Dreams — Duanwad Pimwana tr. Mui Poopoksakul
- Love in the Big City — Sang Young Park tr. Jan Henrik Dirks
- Moving Parts — Prabda Yoon tr. Mui Poopoksakul
- The Book of Human Insects — Osamu Tezuka tr. unknown
- Chinatown –Thuận tr. Nguyễn An Lý
- Dawn’s Left Hand — Dorothy M. Richardson
- Tomb of Sand — Geetanjali Shree tr. Daisy Rockwell
- Dschinns — Fatma Aydemir
- Diego Garcia — Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams
This month was a Tilted Axis festival, five of the books being theirs, while another (Love in the Big City) is published by them in English (I listened to the German version). This story of gay life in Seoul is structured around the narrator’s relationships with a series of largely unlikeable men, but the central character’s friendship with his flatmate keeps the reader’s interest, and the final pages are very moving.
Three of the Tilted Axis books were collections of stories. Happy Stories, Mostly (from Indonesia, and not obviously a reference to Alasdair Gray) also focuses on gay characters, but particularly on their difficult relationships with their families. Interpreting the title as “not quite happy stories” gives a better idea of the predominantly melancholy tone. There’s an interesting conversation between the author and translator at the end of the book, which sent me back to re-read some of the stories.
The other two collections are both translated from the Thai by Mui Poopoksakul. Moving Parts is splendidly zany, with a sense of unity generated by the theme of body parts in each of the stories; both books feature stories involving men having their penises cut off (not sure if this is coincidence or a particular element of Thai culture), but otherwise Arid Dreams is quite different: more traditional, realist with a feminist perspective, and with an empathy for characters on the lower rungs of Thai society.
Chinatown (from Vietnam) is written in an uncompromising style, rather Beckettian, using repetition and absurdism to “challenge and encourage the reader’s patience” (according to an interview). I’m certainly intrigued enough to look for more of Thuận’s work.
Finally, Tomb of Sand is an absolute romp — Joycean puns somehow translated from Hindi, tragedy balanced with comedy, and perspectives of crows and inanimate objects complementing those of the family members at the centre. The English translator of Love in the Big City, Anton Hur, mentioned in an interview that he was he was attracted to the book by the lack of western-centrism (“I can’t even tell you how revolutionary it is to even read an Asian gay book where the Asian gay protagonist isn’t paired with a white partner.”) Similarly, this book is not written with a western audience in mind, making it at times baffling (the references to Indian and Pakistani writers, for example), but all the more exhilarating.
My other favourite publisher, Fitzcarraldo, produced Diego Garcia, a patchwork of texts created by two writers — bearing some kind of relationship to the two authors of the book — who are trying to write about the scandal of the Chagos Islanders’ treatment, without appropriating their story. Their manic lives in Edinburgh and elsewhere are set against the dignity of the Chagossians, to great effect.
Suspect sexual politics was quite a feature of some books this month, with Frösche (China) a notable example. To his credit, Mo Yan has to walk a fine political line in a novel centring on the one-child policy, and for most of the novel he manages to portray characters on both sides of that line with sympathy. The later treatment of the main character seemed to me a cop-out, however, and the narrator, in an increasingly odd ending, beats up his wife, and then apparently realises the error of his ways after being himself beaten up by a street thief.
My graphic novel of the month was The Book of Human Insects (Japan), and it was certainly an interesting experience. The story of a young woman who takes on the talents of whoever she meets could have been very good, but we see very little of her implied talents, and a lot more of her physical charms (and she also get beaten up). The visual storytelling is full of energy, which compensates in part for the sketchy, uncredited translation.
From Germany, there were two novels focusing on the lives of Turkish (and Kurdish) Gastarbeiter. Die Ungehaltenen is an angry and compelling picture of the racism they face. The fringe characters, especially Onkel Cemal, are memorable, though the central pair struck me as underwritten: it’s not clear what the narrator or the love-interest really see in each other. Dschinns seemed to me more successful, exploring each member of the family in turn. It’s a devastating portrait, but there’s hope at least that the younger generation are not making the same mistakes as their parents. The mother recalls Jeanette Winterson’s (“Why be happy when you could be normal?”):
Warum reden die Kinder staendig vom Gluecklichsein? … Warum wollen sie immer, dass man gluecklich ist? Kann man nicht einfact normal sein? Warum reicht das nicht?
Finally the two non-Asian books: Aspects of Nature provides a fascinating insight into the state of scientific knowledge in Humboldt’s time. What he got wrong, he got wrong for intelligent reasons; here wondering why the Mediterranean countries have relatively little vegetation:
The great catastrophe which occasioned the formation of the Mediterranean, when the swollen waters of what was previously an immense lake burst through the barriers of the Dardanelles and of the Pillars of Hercules, appears to have stripped the adjacent countries of a large portion of their coating of vegetable mould.
And explaining how fossils of tropical plants are found in temperate countries:
It may be that in the Ancient World, exhalations of heat issuing forth through the many openings of the deeply fissured crust of the globe may have favoured, perhaps for centuries, the growth of palms and tree-ferns and the existence of animals requiring a high temperature, over entire countries where now a very different climate prevails.
The month’s instalment of Pilgrimage centres on Miriam’s relationships with Hypo Wilson and Amabel, the first finally consummated, but the later involving far more genuine feeling. Richardson is infinitely quotable as always:
But he would understand that discovery about oneself is impersonal, as well as personal, like a discovery in chemistry.
the kindly humanity most of the Lycurgans possessed only as a dogma with which to bludgeon their opponents.
Miriam rhapsodises on the doors of her boarding house:
The state bedroom behind it, whose door moved discreetly on its hinges over a fairly thickish carpet and shut with a light, wooden sound. The door of the little draughty room at the end of the passage, clapping abruptly to over its thin linoleum with a comfortless metallic rattle of its loose fastening. … All beloved. For a moment she listened to the prolonged squeak, running cheerfully up the scale and ceasing suddenly as the door stood wide, that was the voice of her old garret.
Miriam empathises with dental patients:
by those moments in the chair when publicly, in one’s own hearing and that of another, one’s hardest tissues, mysteriously stricken, are ground away, of bodily failure and ultimate dissolution.
The ugliest word in the language:
Egypt. Neither the sound nor the sight of the word was lovely. Written, with its three differently tailed letters properly joined, it was unmanageable: the tails competed. In the whole written language surely no word was more difficult to beautify. The opening sound uglier even than ‘cheese,’ the pouting spit of the conclusion: hopeless.
Poor men:
giving women the reputation for scandal-mongering from which most men are free only by reason of their social blindness and incapacity
Miriam struggling socially:
of herself who could not be counted upon to follow even the most unmistakable clue, and had the socially inconvenient habit of going off on long journeys and leaving her thoughts in her face.
Next month is Black History Month (British/Irish version), so that will be my main focus….