World War II and Tanizaki's fiction

As readers can surmise from previous posts, Junichiro Tanizaki's novel The Makioka Sisters (1943-48, serial publication) is a terrific novel about the complex relationships among 4 sisters, a smart study of individual psychology and family dynamics, set against the background of life in Japan ca 1935-41. The Makioka family is one of fallen wealth and stature, and the sisters, particularly the elder ones, cling to tradition in every way - their taste in music and the arts, in fashion, most of all the social proprieties regarding arranged marriages - in a world in which tradition is crumbling and falling away: they are, as the increasingly become aware, relics from a lost age. On finishing reading the novel, which has a surprisingly abrupt conclusion, I have to think about all the JT excluded from this novel, and what that signifies. As you look at the dates of serialization, you can see that the novel began publication in the midst of World War II and was completed five years into the American occupation of Japan; the events of the novel, however, conclude just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. JT has many shadings of the effect of the war on life in Japan - references particularly in book 3 to shortages and to concerns about travel abroad - and JT includes several letters from a
German family to the M sisters, especially at the end of the novel, so the shadings are present: how can we not feel a chill when reading the letter from Hamburg saying that everything looks great from Hamburg and they expect soom to celebrate a victory? Still - how can a Japanese novel completed in 1948 fail to mention or allude to Hiroshima and Nagasaki? To the Holocaust? To the fall of the Emperor? Just as the M sisters are relics of a lost age, so, in a way, is Tanizaki: living in a world in ruins, writing about a world that no longer exists. I have to wonder as well whether there was official censorship or self-censorship during the war years, which may have prevented JT from telling the story of Japan in the war in any way but through allusion and indirection. And then in the post-war years: Was it just too painful and humiliating to write directly about the postwar Japan? To reconcile with history and try to make sense of Japan's alliance w/ Nazi Germany? Or was his subtle treatment of the war an accurate picture of how most Japanese felt about the war before 1941 - that it was something off in the distance that wouldn't affect them much aside from raising the price of groceries? The war is the dark cloud of truth that casts its shadow across this work of fiction.

Why William Trevor should have won a Nobel Prize

I felt a bit sad to see a William Trevor story (Mrs. Casthorpe) in the current NYer, mainly because it reminded me that Trevor died, w/ little notice, about a year ago and we won't be seeing more stories from one of the greatest writers of our time. You can't say that Trevor was unrecognized or unrewarded, though he was by no means as well known as many of this contemporaries and near equals and it's a shame that he never received a Nobel - I think they should have split the award between him and Alice (the Great) Munro, but so be it. To my knowledge this is his first posthumous story in the NYer, and maybe there are enough uncollected to make one last book. His previous NYer story was from a year to so before his death and to be honest it showed diminished powers. Similarly, Mrs. Casthorpe will not be ranked among his greatest works - the conclusion is a little forced and too dependent on coincidence or chance - but it does have some of the great Trevor qualities and characteristics: Sorrowful people, some (like the title character) w/ quite an edge, living lives of quiet desperation, disrupted by desires and aspirations, all of which are generally frustrated or unfulfilled, generally leaving the central character with a sense of their loneliness or social isolation - in other words, not exactly cheery stuff, but work in a direct line of descent from Chekhov. His earlier works tended to be set in rural Ireland; later works, such as this one, in contemporary England, often in the remote suburbs our out districts of London. This story involves a relatively young widow who hopes to carry on her sex life and emotional life with a younger man - though she greatly over-estimates her powers of attraction and goes into a spiral toward death. Trevor alternates among three different POVs for this story - a little rough going at first, but the strands of the story do tie together by the end. Not sure why this was left unpublished, perhaps WT felt  it was unpolished or incomplete, but despite my quibbles I finished reading it hoping that there are more Trevor stories waiting to see the light.

The Makika family pride and its fatal consequences

Is it another death scene? I don't know yet, but The Makioka Sisters (Junichiro Tanizaki, 1943-48) takes another sharp turn toward the dramatic as youngest sister, Taeko (Koi-san), comes down with a serious infection while staying at the house of her male friend possible fiance, Okabatu (sp?). Her older sister the unmarried Yuchiko comes in to help care for the gravely ill Taeko, but things get worse and worse, and once again we see the disparity in medical care: the doctor treating her is obviously out of his league; the sisters try to get some other medical help involved, but Taeko, with her last strength, resists and protests - she cannot abide having the family doctor see that she is living with a man. She may die for this. This family crisis plays out against yet another failed marriage match-up for the pathetic Yuchiko; an intelligent and attractive older man completely breaks off their arranged courtship after he's unable to get more than a word or two out of the incredibly shy Y. He assumes, as anyone would, that she's not interested in him, but that's not the case - she's almost pathologically shy and withdrawn during each of these arranged meetings w/ potential husbands. Is she too tied to the family? Too picky? Does she have some morbid fear of sexual relationships? Is she attracted to women? JT leaves all of these possibilities open, at least a little, but I'm thinking that w will never get a definitive answer as to why Yuchiko repels or rebuffs all suitors. Of course it's in part the Makioka family pride: Just as Yuchiko can never make the effort to communicate with her potential husbands, Taeko puts her life at risk rather than reveal that she is living with a man.

Why The Makioka Sisters is more than a soap opera in prose

Crisis for the four sisters in Junichi Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters (1943-48) as, following the death of the young photographer Ikaburo (?), the youngest sister, Taeko, aka Koi-san, has begun surreptitious visits to her Okabata, aka Kei-boy, who was her former love interest and now is emerging as a serious potential husband. But the older sisters are disturbed by Taeko's blatant scorning of convention and flaunting her independence and, in their view, amorality - visiting Okabata in his home, even at night! The sisters are not really sure what to do as, on the one hand, Okabata might make a good match for Takeko - he's profligate, but wealthy - yet there's always the issue of daughter #3, Yochiko: Taeko can't marry until her holder sister is married. The sisters write to sister #1, Tsuruko, who lives apart from the other 3 w/ her husband and 6 children in a crowded house in Tokyo and who is horrified by Taeko's behavior and demands - easy for her to do from afar - that Taeko break off relations w/ the unsuitable Kei-boy. Taeko decides to leave home (she's in her 20s, by the way). Meanwhile there has been yet another marriage inquiry regarding the beautiful but morbidly shy and physically weak Yochiko - this time from a very wealthy widower; after the clumsily arranged meet-up, the miai in Japanese, the man (Sawazaki) sends a brief not to the intermediary that says sorry, no longer interested. This is another blow to the pride of the M sisters, as up to now it had always been the sisters who rejected the potential suitors; now the shoe is on the other foot. Perhaps Yochiko's time has passed? All this to give you a sense of the soap-opera qualities of this novel - I have to believe it has been adopted for TV or screen somewhere, and you can see how it was popular as a serial novel in Japan in its time - but there's much more to the novel that the goings-on; it's really a portrait of a segment of Japanese society in decline set against the backdrop, only just barely sketched in (for example, a passage of one of the characters admiring the diamond-like designs seen around Tokyo at this time - obviously, swastikas) of Japan heading toward an alliance w/ the hateful German regime and near-total devastation in the war. It's in the tradition of Buddenbrooks, Gone with the Wind though without the romance, and even perhaps War and Peace though without the war.

The death scene in The Makioka Sisters and what it signifies

He doesn't exactly measure up to the standard of the master - who does? - but Junichiro Tanizaki's death-scene account (spoilers coming for those of you who actually might read this novel) in The Makioka sisters belongs at least in the same arena as Tolstoy's death scenes (Ivan Ilych, the prince [?] in War and Peace) - a terrific and harrowing account of the painful death of Ikatura (sp?), the young photographer who hopes to marry youngest sister, Taeko. Aside from the harrowing description of the pain Ik endured in the last days of his life, there is an equally painful social context to this death scene. It's obvious that Ik is dying because of medical malfeasance - he was in a hospital to have an ear infection removed by surgery (this is in 1939, and apparently there were no antibiotic treatments at that time?), a botched operation that led to blood poisoning and a slow and painful death. We know that the M sisters, from a once-prosperous family that is desperately trying to hold on to its social grandeur, would never have had the same kind of medical treatment as Ik, a man from a peasant background with no social status or wealth: his hospital room is crowded and dingy, the doctor who botched the operation basically disappeared for several days rather than talk to the family, the doctor was apparently an alcoholic and had a record of many failed surgeries, etc., and all this made worse by Ik's family coming in from the countryside and having no idea how to make vital medical decisions when needed. This disparity plays out against the social snobbery of the M family, as the sisters, especially the elder 2, Tsuruko and Sachiko (sp?), have been scheming as to how to preserve the family honor and have Taeko marry the wealthy but worthless older suitor, Okabato (sp?). Fate - or actually social prejudices and inequality - have made the decision for them; S. feels guilty about this, but part of her thinks that Ik's death is a blessing for Taeko. This kind of thinking, however, seems doomed and tragic by the end of Book 2, which, surprisingly, concludes with two completely oblivious letters from the Stolz family, now relocated in Hamburg, encouraging the M sisters to pay a visit. The world around the Makioka sisters is falling apart as the World War seems more and more inevitable, but they just don't get it, focusing on family honor and tradition while their nation lives in the shadow of war and, of course - JT was completing this novel in 1948 - of aerial attack.

A family tries to hang on to tradition as the world falls apart around them - Tanizaki

Sister #2 (Sochiko) gets a letter informing her than the unmarried Sister #4 (Taeko) is secretly meeting w/ the young photographer, Ikatoro (?) who rescued her when she was about to be swept away in the flood. Contemporary readers would say: Big deal, but for this family - The Makioka Sisters (Janichiro Tanizaki, 1943-48) this is a big deal: The sisters are one of the last, or so it seems, surviving "good" families of Osaka and they go to extraordinary lengths to maintain all social conventions, to honor the traditional Japanese arts (dance, kabuki) and dress (saris, obis), and especially marital: sisters must marry in age order, the husband must pass all sorts of scrutiny and investigation, and of course no premarital sex! The youngest sister is considered them most modern, and she pushes against convention - but maybe too much for the family and for herself. Once she confesses to Sochiko that she loves the photographer, who has no social background, the plan is to send her off to France for a year or so to study dressmaking - obviously a way to avoid problems rather than solve them. But this avoidance, and obliviousness, is at the heart of this novel; we see a dying social class clinging to the last threads of what they see as honor and dignity while the world around them is in turmoil. The trip to Europe is an absurd idea, as this is 1938, the world is on the cusp of war, even the sisters recognize the impossibility of a year in Europe. Here at about the midpoint of this 3-volume novel we get our clearest look at the background of the family: both parents died when Taeko was an infant, most of their wealth is gone, the remaining fortune is entrusted to the husband of Sister #1; he's a banker, but he and his family of 8 are suffering from poverty as they try to make a life in a cheap, crowded rental in Tokyo. He's reluctant to give any of the trust fund to Taeko for her travels and studies. And the older sisters are so worried about scandal and reputation - years ago there was an article in the newspaper about Taeko's having an affair w/ a young man - not a true account, and why would that be a news item anyway? - but they are swimming against the tide, so to speak. It's painful to watch these women try to hang on to the vestiges of a world that is crumbling into ruins all around them - as I'm sure we'll see more of in the 2nd half of this work as Japan enters the war and suffers devastation.

Symbolism in The Makioka Sisters

Let's look at all the odd things happening to the eponymous Makioka Sisters in Junichiro Tanizaki's novel: they live through a horrendous rainstorm and flood in their Osaka suburb during which the youngest sister is almost swept to her death in a torrent and hter brother-in-law risks his life trying to find and rescue her; Japan is at war with China (this is the late 1930s) which creates shortages and business failures and their next-door neighbors (a German family, the Stolzes) have to leave Japan and return home; the sisters and the daughter of sister #2 are suffering from weird maladies, such as vitamin shortages, and they repeatedly give one another injections of vitamin B and they take the daughter out of school for what seems to be weeks for her to see a specialist in Tokyo; the oldest sister, forced to relocate to Tokyo because her husband has a new job in banking, is living in a house far to small for their six (!) children and the parents (and 2 servants), and the house literally almost blows to the ground during a typhoon. I could go on - but it's obvious to all readers that their world is falling apart around them, they are no longer a prosperous family, the nation is in crisis - yet their continue to try to maintain and live by the code of various traditions, most notably keeping the youngest from marrying until her older sister marries and engaging in elaborate courtship rituals involving formal meetings and detailed background checks, which seem to be making it impossible for daughter #3 (Yochiko) to find a husband - and for that matter she seems to be afraid of marriage (and possible of sex?). JT is not one to write w/ heavy symbolism - this was a serialized novel (1943-48) and he was obviously trying to make the novel popular and accessible, much like a soap or a miniseries today, but we have to see the sisters as emblematic of an old and privileged way of life that is being crushed - much like their flimsy houses in the typhoon and the flood  - by the forces of modernism, nationalism, isolationism, militarism, and - perhaps, depending on how JT treats the alliance w/ Nazi Germany - racism.

How The Makioka Sisters improves as it moves along into Book 2

I have to admit that, after a slow start, Junichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters (1943-48) gets ahold of you. It takes a while, especially of English-language readers, to become familiar with the names of those in the family, including the 4 sisters (I still can't spell each name from memory, and it's particularly irksome that 3 of the 8 or so main characters have names beginning w/ T), but I'm now pretty familiar w/ each of the main characters (and have recognized the naming convention that female characters have names ending in -ko and the servants have names beginning w/ O- - not sure why that is) and their traits and plights. Much of the 150-page book 1 concerns efforts to find a match for 3rd sister Yochiko, especially important because 4th sister, Taeko, cannot marry out of sequence - this family being one of the last it seems to cling to tradition as if to a lifeline in a changing, turbulent world. Toward the end of book 1 we see the psychological cost of this prescribed marriage ritual; Yochiko obviously resists the various suitors who come to the Makioka family seeking to make the match, and she seems to suffer from depression and a # of other, probably psychosomatic, ailments. By the end of book 1 we feel pity for her. Book 2, of about the same length, begins much more dramatically, in 2 ways. First, much more than in book 1 world event begin to play a role in the shaping of character: There are several references to the "China Incident," which involved a Japanese attack on China in the early 1940s - this seems to have created a sense of crisis and material shortages in Japan, so we begin to see that the Makioka sisters are fighting in a lost cause as the cling to traditions and to quaint cultural ceremonies, such as elaborate Japanese dance recitals w/ full costume and hair done up in elaborate styles. Near the beginning of book 2 there is a tremendous storm and flooding on Ashiya (the small city near Osaka where 3 of the sisters live together w/ spouse of sister #2 and their daughter), which endangers everyone's life - by far the most active and visceral chapters in the novel so far, plus JT also gives some depth to sister #2, as she, pushing a travel commitment too far, comes home w/ severe cramps and miscarries, sending her swirling into a deep depression. These sisters are trying to live a life of decor and tradition, but the world is too much with them.

Is it possible for a Japanese novel from 1948 to avoid the subject of Hiroshima!

It's by no means an action-packed or even eventful novel, but in its slow pace Junichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters has a certain charm and fascination: For the first 100 or so pp it seems we're watching a tightly wound, conservative, traditional Japanese family circa 1940 as they try to maintain the social order in which they've been raised: the 4 sisters are so committed to tradition that they to countenance the idea that the youngest sister could possibly marry ahead of her older sister (Yuchiko, sister #3); since the youngest - the most modern, artistic, and unconventional of the 4 sisters - has a serious love interest, the pressure is on to find a husband for Yuchiko, but the sisters are completely committed to the complex traditions of matchmaking: a recommendation from an intermediary (who will be rewarded if the match occurs), an arrange formal meeting, research by both families to ascertain the suitability of the match. What we see from the outset is the that M family is very picky - no match is good enough for Yuchiko (one suitor has a mother suffering from dementia - no good; another has something like Tourette's Syndrome - cross him off the list, and so on). The effect on Y is predictable, and here the novel begins to get interesting: She suffers from a # of physical and psychological ailments, she withdraws from the family; sent to live w/ the oldest sister who has just relocated to Tokyo - a big trauma and disruption in the family dynamics - Y spends time in her room, alone. It's obvious that she doens't really want to get married - but why, and what will her fate be? Similarly, the daughter of sister #2 begins to have strange symptoms, perhaps life-threatening. This is all played out in a minor key, but I think what JT is getting at is the dissolution of a way of life under the pressures of modernism, Westernism in particular. Japan seems to be entering the modern age, and the nation is developing an aggressive, militant stance: There is talk of a war with China, in fact. As the world moves forward, the sisters and their way of life seems increasingly antiquated, even absurd. The big question is to what extent JT will put Japanese militarism in the forefront in the 2nd and 3rd volumes of the novel; is it possible for a serious Japanese writer publishing a serial novel from 1043-48 to ignore the attack on Hiroshima/Nagasaki and the end of the imperial government? Only in a nostalgic novel, which this does not seem to be.

Potential clashes of cultures in Tanizaki's Makioka Sisters

Corection to yesterday's post on Junichiro Tanizaki's three-book novel, The Makioka Sisters: The setting is either the late 1930s or early 1940s in Japan (Osaka and nearby) - as I should have noted from the use of taxicabs and a few other details. That said, some of the puzzlement I expressed yesterday still stands, stands stronger in fact. What JT is presenting in this novel is the last vestige of formal Japanese society and values: reverence for the elders, strict protocol regarding matchmaking, absolute requirement that the sisters (4 of them) get married in birth order (2 are already married and most of the action, such as it is, in book 1 involves the efforts to marry sister #3, especially important as sister # 4, the rebellious and artistic one, has a serious love interest but she's holding off on marriage in respect for the tradition. Through much of book 1, we see several matchmaking arrangements - an intermediary brings the two families together, they plan a formal meeting in a public space such as a restaurant, both sides engage in extensive research, as for a job applicant or a security clearance - I guess it makes sense but it seems so antiquated, and I suppose it was already somewhat antiquated when JT was writing and publishing - this work appeared serially from 1943 - 48. And there you see the other peculiarity, which I mentioned yesterday: we see the old traditions but JT does not generate any sparks by clashing it against the new ways of the "modern" world, and there is no reference to the events leading up to Japan's disastrous and shameful participation in WW2. There are hints: the Makioka sisters become friendly with a Russian family, emigres from the Communist takeover of Russia some 2 decades back, and on of the daughers/nieces plays with the children of a neighboring family, the Stolzes - and what Germans are doing in Japan in the late 30s is not yet made clear. So there's a bit of a sense of Japan's being open to interaction w/ foreign powers, being a little more culturally international that I'd have imagined (the sisters talk about going out for Chinese food, for example) - but JT is subtle about these relationships and tensions, perhaps too subtle. The first volume flows along pretty well, as you;d imagine for serialized work in the popular press, but so much is left unsaid or unexamined that it's hard to know whether to treat this novel as more than a storyboard for a soap opera; I suspect and expect and hope that it will develop more depth as it moves along, as this has been touted as one of the great works of modern Japanese literature, but so far - about 80 pp in - it's pretty flat.

What's missing in Junichiro Tanizaki's Makioka Sisters

Junichiro Tanizaki's most famous novel - or so I've been told - The Makioka Sisters - was published as a newspaper serial in Japan over the span of five years (and three book volumes) 1943-48. The serial novel is a now near-defunct genre (Tom Wolff revived it briefly w/ Bonfire of the Vanities), and JT's Makioki novel shows why: For contemporary readers, it feels awkward and flat, never really delving deeply into character, psyche, setting, or mood. Each short chapter reads like a plot summary, w/ a lot of overlap, necessary repetition of key points and character traits, as if his readers would forget from week to week or day to day or whatever the publication schedule entailed. The set-up is pretty good: 4 adult sisters, the older two married and now faced w/ the task of finding husbands for the younger 2. Daughter No3 has been proposed to a # of times but seems reluctant to get married; youngest daughter, the artistic and rebellious one, is in the midst of a serious relationship, but she can't get married until her older sister does so, according to strictly adhered-to tradition. I've read about 50 pp., which is to say about 1/3 of the way through the first of the three "books," and so far it's not holding me rapt. The extreme devotion of the family members to tradition, protocol, and ritual - there's a whole process for introducing a woman to her potential suitor, for example - seems so antiquated today (I think the setting of the novel is the 1920s?), although maybe deeper into the book the characters will unfold, so to speak - become more complex, scrap w/ one another, mature in some surprising ways. One thing that is surprising, no matter when JT set this novel, is that there is absolutely no reference, direct or oblique, to the times in which he wrote this piece, with Japan in the midst of a losing, humiliating, and devastating war that would upend the government and every aspect of Japanese society. Beneath the social examination in this novel there lies a deep nostalgia, even a fantasy about the beauty of Japanese life back in the days when everyone followed protocol - kind of like the Japanese Gone with the Wind, nostalgia for an era that perhaps never really existed.

Kushner's fine story in current New Yorker w/ a twist at the end

Rachel Kushner has a terrific story, Stanville, in current New Yorker double issue, a close look at life inside a max-security eponymous prison in California Central Valley, story told in alternating points of view, overlapping, of two people: a young man, somewhat of an idealist and devotee of Thoreau, who has chosen a career or teaching prison inmates and preparing them for their GED exam, choosing to work in a women's prison because he thought it would be somewhat less dangerous than a men's, and one of the inmates, Romy, a lifer, an attractive black woman who is among the most intelligent - scorns the GED prep as she already has a h.s. diploma and pushes the teacher, Hauser, to provide her w/ more challenging assignments. The story peripherally deals w/ the hardships and dangers of prison life, but is mostly about the boredom of the life and the contempt that all the employees feel for the prisoners: One harrowing episode involves a woman on death row spending hours piecing together some  kind of blanket or poncho, which ultimately gets thrown in the trash. You can see the arc of the story develop as Hauser becomes attracted to and gradually even obsessed w/ Romy - and how he resists his obsession. He seems to be leading a completely isolate life in a one-room cabin up in the mountains; he calls it his Thoreau year; a friend whom he writes to calls it his Kaczynski (Unabomber) year. You pick. In any event, Hauser resists the urge to Google Romy - he knows  a few salient facts about her life, but does not know what sent her to prison - protocol is that one never asks this question directly - until his year of service is completed. I was pleased to see that one of the books Hauser recommends to Romy is Pick-up, set in SF (where she is from); they both note the surprise at the ending, which I won't give away; similarly, Stanville has a bit of a surprise ending as well, esp is you follow Hauser's lead and do your own Google search. This was a really fine and engaging piece - not sure if it's part of a longer work, bu it seems Kushner is onto a story line and setting that has more possibilities - which of course might mean it's a perfect place to call this a completed short story and just stop.

Why Henry IV Part 2 may be Shakespeare's most cynical history play

You can see why Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 2 is rarely performed and rarely read except for those seeking to read the overall arc of S's history plays. Taken alone, it's a great play, of course, in many way, but it is so dark, even cynical - in spirit more like Troilus and Cressida or any of the so-called "problem plays" than like the comedies (w/ which HVI1 bears some similarities - in fact I included a chapter on HIV1 in my book of decades ago on S's comedies). First of all, the historical aspect of the play - the forces and armies massing on the borders, ready to attack England and restore the crown to the House of York - and then the Lancaster forces meet the conspiring generals on neutral ground before the battle. Westmoreland convinces the rebels to give up their arms and he promises on his word of honor to meet the rebels' demands (one of the rebellious forces, Northumberland, has ominously sent a message that he wouldn't join the battle and was retreating I think to Scotland). The rebel leaders agree and dismiss their troops, and then W and others double-cross them and say traitors can never be pardoned, etc., hauling them off for prison and probably execution. What kind of king/kingdom is this? Henry IV - pretty much confined to his castle (and deathbed) throughout this play was rebellious himself and now his forces double down - w/ some obvious parallels to our own time, regarding hypocrisy and treaty-breaking. On the other side, all of the Falstaff scenes are tired, old, and nasty  - the humor (and the byplay w/ Prince Hal) are completely gone. When Hal, as Henry V, banishes Falstaff, we feel like cheering, and yet - Hal/Henry V is such an opportunistic prig. I think his father has him right - he's cutting up as much as he can and just waiting to grab the crown and call the shots. I don't for a second believe his tears for his father nor his many protestations about his plan to surprise the world by his sudden reformation. Like his father, he'll take what he can get. Of all S's history plays, this one may be the most opportunistic and real-politick; Hal/HV is a bully posing as a nobleman, an opportunist posing as an idealist. It's no surprise, therefore, that his next move is to shift the optics, as we say to day, from domestic strife to foreign, as he prepares, for no good reason, to invade France. This, too, sounds sadly contemporary.

Sequel trouble - the problem of Henry IV Part 2

Inspired and made curious by watching Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight I've begun reading Henry IV part 2 , which I have neither read nor seen in decades. It's clear from the start that this is a more dark and more dry play than h41  a Shakespeare perhaps trying for a reprise but the jokes and barbed fun of part one seem tired and cruel in part 2 , which of course is part of the point . There's nothing funny about Hal's disguising himself to spy on Falstaff. Similarly f's running out on his debts and taking bribes to recruit soldiers whom he know will die in battle is cruel and mean-spirited. Reading or seeing this play we wonder how Hal could have slipped back from the heroic story of part 1 - dramatically it doesn't work and we keep straining toward the famous conclusion - I know you not old man etc.  easy for the callous Hal to say btw.  Welles wisely usd some of the best material in chimes not only the king's famous soliloquy- uneasy lies the head that wears a crown - but also falstaff and shallow reminiscing about the old days (w shrewdly cuts the followup when F says that shallow is a liar). Some of the poetic language is al,Ostroff cryptic - unusual for the generally crystal verse of S - Andy some of falstaff's prose rantings may even top his audacity in part 1 a butnthenrelation between F and Hal is so strained and unbalanced here that the play feel s out of synch - we begin to despise not only F Andy his crew but the crown prince as well. Sequ

Melville and racism

There's no doubt that Melville's Benito Cereno (1855) contains some reprehensible statements about race. The novel/tale sets as a basic assumption that the "negro"'is of an inferior race. Are these, however, Melville's views? He doesn't explicitly assign these statements about white supremacy to his protagonist, capt Delano - but the whole novel (aside from the transcript of testimony at the end) is from Delano's POV, so we can assume the white supremacy and racial stereotyping are of the character and of his time (setting is 1799' 50 years before the composition of the work). In fact we might say that at the 2nd level the novel itself refutes the racist presumptions of the protagonist. Because he presumes that the blacks are childlike and suited only for loyal servitude to their masters, Delano misinterprets everything he sees: he cannot comprehended what every reader will see well before he does that the blacks are in control of the ship, that capt cereno is being held captive. Delano's racist assumptions therefore almost become his own undoing. So is this a progressive novel?  Not really, because on the next level, the third level we might say, we have to a look at what Melville does not say: There is not the slightest bit of sympathy for or understanding of the plight of the blacks aboard the ship, who are to be sold in slavery to a Peruvian landholder. At the time of composition, just 5 or so years before the civil war, slavery and abolition were obviously huge topics in American public life , but Melville's does not even hint at this. His silence about the plight of the blacks and their bravery in taking control of the ship and of their lives - at the end we learn nothing of their fate only of the demise of the eponymous cereno - is a silence that speaks to us, or should. How can readers not see beyond the scope of this novel, beyond 1799 or 1855, and recognize that not only did Melville's protagonist miss the story but so did Melville?

The issues of Melville's Benito Cereno in the 21st century

Herman Melville's short novel/story/tale Benito Cereno (1855), from late in his writing life (4 years post Moby-Dick) makes Melville devotees queasy. Should it? There are a # of ways to read this tale, it's hard to say which is the "right" way or even what that means. In short - and I haven't finished re-reading the tale yet so there may be additional twists and elements - it's a story of an American sea captain, Amaso Delano, who comes upon a near-stranded ship off the cost of Chile, in 1799 (I think this may be based on real events and characters, however loosely) and approaches the boat to offer help. There he finds what appears to him to be a boat in severe distress, w/ the eponymous captain tended closely by several black (negro, in the parlance of the tale) attendants. Cereno tells Delano that they lost most of the Spanish crew to illness and suffered problems at sea while trying to make port. The black men (and women) aboard are slave cargo, but because most of the crew was lost the blacks have been impressed into service. Many aspects of this story puzzle Delano, and he suspects that perhaps he's being lured into a trap - that the crew of Cereno's ship will attack his when he lets down his guard. Now - spoiler here sort of but any contemporary reader I think will immediately pick up what Delano does not - the blacks have evidently revolted and seized control of the ship, and they watch Cereno and the other Spaniards closely to ensure that they give nothing away. The trouble for contemporary readers comes from the many racists remarks and observations: for example, Delano is amazed at the competence of the blacks, whom he believes to be an inferior race, and he's impressed by what he seems to believe is a childish, fawning loyalty to their beleaguered captain, for which he condescendingly admires the blacks. How to take this? On one level, Delano is merely accepting the received ideas of his time - and the joke is on him. His very inability to imagine that the blacks could act in their own interests, could stage an uprising, could successfully navigate a ship and retain control over the Spanish captain - all are Delano's (and Cereno's) own undoing. By underestimating the capacities of the slaves aboard, they have lost control of their world. On another level, however, and more distressing - Melville may hold these racist views himself (although the Melville of M-D does not appear to be racist) - he never explicitly puts the racist thoughts regarding white supremacy into Delano's consciousness, they're always stated as facts. the conclusion of the tale, which involves I think excerpts from a sea log, should further clarify how to read Benito Cereno in the 21st century.

A fine piece of fiction concludes 100 Years of Best American Short Stories - but is it a story?

The final selection in 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories is At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners (2014), by Lauren Groff, and it's an excellent story in many ways though I have one objection, which I'll get to, but first: Yes, this story, like few others, tells the life story of a young man in a short space. It feels neither rushed nor truncated, it's unusual and vivid in its setting, and gives a good sense of the man's personality as it evolves through various crises and in the shadow of two odd, powerful parents. The protagonist is raised in Florida swampland, where his father, a herpetologist, captures snakes for study and for sale. His father is abusive and self-centered; the mother abandons the family when the boy is young, and he suffers  through a painful adolescence. Shortly after he's reunited w/ his mother in his college years, she dies (cancer?) and later his father dies, despite his boasting of immunity, from a snakebite. The young man marries well, and sells off various pieces of his inherited property to the university of Florida, eventually becoming wealthy from the sales and from shrewd investments (he seems like a complete social misfit, but evidently he's quite capable). Some kind of illness of trauma causes him to lost all sense of hearing, leaving him isolated and depressed - and we build toward a scary ending, which I will not divulge. Nice work in a short story, but - is it a short story? Many readers will recognize that Groff went on to include this piece - verbatim perhaps, I'm not sure - in her well-received novel Fates and Furies, where it serves as the lengthy back story to one of the characters. Well, perhaps she composed this initially as a story and then saw broader possibilities and expanded it into a novel; that does happen. But I have a sense that, certainly by the time the story was published, let alone re-published in the 100 Years anthology, that she and the editors knew this was an excerpt from a longer work. As a piece in a magazine, I don't care whether it was actually a story or an excerpt; however, in an anthology that unabashedly boasts that it represents a selection of the best American short stories, couldn't, shouldn't the eds (Lorrie Moore, Heidi Pitlor) have been more vigilant and actually select pieces that represent short stories, not merely short fiction?

Otsuka's excellent story about dementia, with an unusual narrative technique

Julie Otsuka's excellent 2012 story Diem Perdidi (which, as we learn from the story, means I have lost the day) in 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories is an excellent example of experimentation in form to good ends - clear and moving delineation of character, emotional and moving, a life portrait. The story is told from the POV of a late 40s narrator in regard to her mother, a Japanese-American, who is suffering from early or perhaps not so early stages of dementia in progress (or regress). Almost every sentence begins with the phrase She remembers of She does not remember, and with this unusual narrative device we see, in fragments, the life story of this woman. She remembers much of her life - w/, as is often the case with the elderly, an unusual focus on the distant rather than recent past - remembering her first love with more affection, it seems, that toward her faithful husband, remembering her first born who died within hours of birth with much more intensity than she remembers or recognizes her oldest living child (the narrator, sort of - she doesn't narrate but only from her close POV can the story be told). This story would make a great prose poem, if the sentences were arranged as such - lines and stanzas rather than paragraphs and sections. We feel the pain of the woman with her uncertainty about her present life (she believes every day to be Sunday, when she goes for a ride w/ her husband), her sufferings (particularly in an internment camp during the 2nd world war), her inability to remember what she was told or what she said just a few minutes ago - all tied to her deep memories and strong feelings about long ago - and as a result we feel the pain of her family, the daughter often forgotten, the husband whom she can barely recognize. In a particularly smart closing of the narrative loop (minor spoiler here) the last section f the story repeats, more or less, the list from the first section of what "she remembers" but now "she does not remember" - giving us a sense of the inevitable course of the dementia: the main character disappears like smoke before our eyes.

Englander's nearly great story that falters at the end

Nathan Englander's well-known story with the terrific title of What We talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank leads off the final section (2010s) in 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, a fitting opening with its glance backward toward Raymond Carver, not only in the imitative tile (One of Carver's most famous stories is What We Talk About When We Talk About Love) but also in the style of the story, at least up to a point. The story entails two couples who have not seen one another for a long time; the two wives were best friends in youth - now, the couple that includes the husband/narrator has settled in as secular Jews in S Florida and they're being visited by the other couple, strict Orthodox Jews from settled in Israel, parents of 10 girls (!), taken on new Hebrew names (Shoshana and Yuri). Their discussion over drinks and eventually, pot - extremely popular and mainstream in Israel apparently - can recall some of the ambling conversations -  mostly among working-class couples - in Carver, but here we veer onto issues of faith, Israeli politics, the challenges of keeping Kosher (and the annoyance when observant Jews ask: Hey, are you allowed to eat that?), and especially the Holocaust and its repercussions in the present (Yuri in particular expresses some extreme views, notably that intermarriage in which children are not being raised Jewish is a 2nd Holocaust). Englander writes well, carrying us along the evening's conversation, sometimes witty, sometimes revealing - but the story stumbles badly in the closing stretch I'm afraid, when the American couple talk about the game they sometimes play regarding Anne Frank, wondering if there were a 2nd Shoah and they had to hide, would so and so be likely to protect them or betray them? OK, that can be a two-minute conversation topic, but a game? In any event, they ask the Israeli couple, if Yuri were a Christian and he had to hide his wife, would he betray or protect? After some hesitation (spoiler here) everyone senses he would betray. End of story. Now seriously, this story could have been so much better had the couples truly entered into a parlor game like truth or dare, say, but in this so-called game what's revealed? Somehow they all "sense" that Yuri would betray. Please - dramatize this, don't just state it! I'm reminded of a fine movie in which a couple goes on a hike and they're confronted by an armed man; the guy immediately steps behind his girlfriend, positioning her as a shield. Nothing came of this at the moment, but that gesture completely changed (ruined) their relationship. This story, great up to a point, should have built to a truly dramatic conclusion and not to some elusive, allusive moment of recognition.

A good story but not great literary fiction - Pachinko

After two days of reading that brought me haltingly to about the 15-percent mark, I recognize that Min Jin Lee's 2017 novel, Pachinko, is a really good novel of a certain type that just isn't my type. She does a great job establishing the main players in what looks to be a multi-generational family saga, beginning in the 1930s in a southernmost Korea fishing village where a young woman devotedly helps her widowed mother run a small boardinghouse for fishermen. A prosperous and dashing Japanese man about twice her age, who travels in and out of the village as a powerful fish wholesaler, is smitten w/ her, pays her elaborate, secret courtship, and eventually she's pregnant. When she tells him, he informs her that he's already married back in Japan but he would be honored to set her up in a nicer house and she could be his Korean mistress. She refuses. One of the key elements in this novel is the tension between Korea and the occupying government of Japan, and I think Lee will develop this further over the course of the work. Eventually, the young woman marries a Christian minister who stays at the boarding house, and the two of them head off for a new life in Osaka. On the plus side, the characters are clearly delineated, Lee keeps the plot moving along at a good pace, and she does an excellent job conveying life in a time and, for most English-language readers, in a place that's largely unfamiliar and seldom if ever depicted in English-language literature. On the down side, the writing is so plain and straightforward that it's bland and unengaging - no real descriptions, nothing lyrical or memorable about the style or phrasing. It's a work that would translate well, I think, into a movie or miniseries, though whether it would be commercially successful is an open question. For those wanting to get lost in a good, long story Pachinko seems like a great choice, but as a work of literary fiction - which I would expect of a National Book Award finalist - it doesn't measure up.

A story about "passing" in the military

The selection from Tobias Wolff, from 2009, in 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories. Awaiting Orders, is a military story, but not one that draws on TW's experiences serving in Vietnam. It's a stateside military story (come to think of it, so was his short novel, The Barracks Thief, which pretty much launched is writing career). The story was most likely in the era of don't ask, don't tell, and TW does a short character sketch, based on one incident, of a soldier who is not telling. We sense near the start that the sergeant is probably homosexual, and as TW fills in on his back story we see that he's had a series of clandestine relationships w/ a # of soldiers - we get the sense that there was and is a whole gay undercurrent to military life, talk about don't tell - and is at the time of the story living off base with another soldier. Though the sergeant is a lifer with about 20 years of service, it's obvious he has to watch every step he takes. We are w/ him on one day in service when he gets a call from a woman seeking to locate her brother, and the Sgt informs him that the brother has been sent overseas into combat. The woman seems in need of help, and the Sgt agrees to meet her in a coffee shop after his shift. She's there w/ a young boy - her nephew - and she had no capacity to care for this child. The Sgt offers to help her financially, but nothing comes of this. So why the meeting, why the story? From a few hints we see that it's important of the Sgt to be seen - there were others from the base at the coffee shop - w/ a young woman and child, whom others may assume to be his wife, his son. (The waiter makes this assumption.) We sense that this kind of calculation, the need to establish a false front of heterosexuality, pervades every day of his life in the Army. There's not a lot to this story; it's one of the more understated - I suspect TW could have addressed this topic and this soldier's life experiences in a more dramatic, violent manner - even minimalist stories (echo of Carver?) in this anthology, but it's also one of the few to take on the issue of "passing" - even in an age supposedly of civil rights and laissez-fair tolerance.

Two stories of late adolescence

Two stories: First, Jeffrey Eugenides's story Bronze in recent New Yorker is another example of JE's exploration of his college years and how his generation (mine, a decade removed, but a long decade spiritually) weathered the storms of early adulthood and intellectual and sexual awakening. This story covers a really short time span - one day in the life of a Brown U freshman, leaving NYC where he spent an escape weekend exposed for the first time to the gay/artistic culture of the city, returning to Brown w/ many questions in mind about his own sexuality. The story is unadorned stylistically, aside from its narrative shifts from the main character, the Brown student, to the consciousness of a man he meets on the train who gets him drunk and stoned and tries to seduce him. This story feels like the first incarnation of a novel in progress - rich w/ insight, but kind of thin re atmosphere (I can see this developed into a screenplay as well). JE's earlier works were rich in character insight and description - he really got down his native Detroit in his firsts books - but judging from this story and his most recent (I think) novel, The Marriage Plot, aside from a few characters clearly recognizable to anyone familiar w/ the Brown writing program, for him Providence, so rich in literary possibilities, is just a proper noun - these stories could take place on or near any college campus of the era. Missed opportunity, I think. Second, Benjamin Percy's Reset, Reset, including the 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories anthology, and rightly so - a complete surprise to me, as I'd never heard of this writer and, sadly, he hasn't emerged in the decade since this story appeared in the Paris Review as a major writer. Not sure why not - this story is powerful, moving, a little scary: story of two h.s. boys in a remote Oregon town whose fathers are both called up (from the guard) for service in Iraq - and how this event frightens and toughens the two and puts them at odds w/ others in their community, particularly the feckless Marine recruiting officer. Is this story just too far out of the NY mainstream, has Percy just made the wrong connections, or is this a one-off story not equaled in any of his other works? Even if that's so, he should be proud of this one, which really captures some of the angst of machismo and male adolescence.

Ghosts in Sing, Unburied, Sing and the strength of Ward's vision of her characters

It's in part a tribute to and recognition of Jesmyn Ward's excellent writing, but as I approach the end of Sing, Unburied, Sing I continue to wonder whether she really needed to include not one but two ghosts in this novel. We get in the final chapters not only the voice of Richie - who narrates two (or three?) of the chapters and who seems to have appeared to the 13-year-old Jojo because he has wakened from the dead and wants to know what J's grandfather (Pop, aka River/Riv Red) did to save him from abuse in prison but also the appearance - to Jojo and his mother, Leonie - of the ghost of the dead/murdered uncle/brother Given, who comes to the Stone household to escort the spirit of the dying grandmother to the world of the dead. OK, Ward tells this beautifully and rhythmically and it's possible to get caught up and lost in the beauty of her prose - and evidently the life of the spirit is important either to Ward or to the impoverished black community of Southern Missisippi or both - but as one who can't help but re-write the work of others (sorry) I wonder about this novel with the absence of Richie and, to a lesser extent of the spirit of Given. If Richie were not in the novel as a ghost, it would fall on Pop to tell Jojo of Richie's fate and of his ghastly role in Richie's death (I won't give that away) - and I think that would be a more powerful, dramatic scene, forcing Pop to a moral reckoning and forcing Jojo to rethink his relationship to his grandfather, maybe for the better. Similarly, why do we need the spirit of Given? His death has caused a terrible animosity between the to halves of Jojo's family - the white father's and black mother's families, to be precise - and somehow I'm hoping that in the final two chapters this rift will be closed and that the 2 families may reconcile. Hoping - but I don't actually foresee a happy ending, and that's to Ward's credit as well: She completely understands her characters, she empathizes w/ them, but she never romanticizes them: Near the end, after the grandmother's death, the daughter/other (Leonie) and the son/father (Michael) head of to get high once again on crystal meth. These are terribly flawed, suffering characters, and Ward resists the temptation to soften our view of them: The story remains three-dimensional and complex,

Further thoughts on the supernatural and other aspects of Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing

Jesmyn Ward continues her fine writing as she moves Sing, Unburied, Sing closer to its conclusion; the five travelers reach their family home in southern Mississippi, after their arduous trek from the prison, where Michael was released. They stop at Michael's family's house where they hope (against hope) to be welcomed: M's father has never recognized his relationship w/ Leonie, who is black, and has never met their two children (Jojo and Kayla). When they show up unannounced M's mother is slightly conciliatory - it's evident that she and her husband had talked about someday recognizing their grandchildren - but his father stands his ground, threatens them all in vile, racist terms, and engages in a fistfight w/ Michael, who eventually retreats. I hope that Michael's father will appear again and that his character will show or develop some moral complexity; right now, he's just a caricature, an easy target for our wrath. They had on to Leonie's family, where they all had been living during and previous to M's imprisonment (it's not clear, or at least I don't remember, why he was imprisoned, and it seems a very long time to be living w/ her family, as Jojo is now 13 years old). Michael before imprisonment had worked on a BP oil rig in the Gulf, and unsurprisingly he's traumatized by the rig explosion that killed a # of his co-workers and has poisoned the Gulf; he expresses some not really credible sorrow for the dolphins that we killed and for the spoiled fisheries. Leonie's family welcomes the travelers home, but much of the home life concerns the children's g-mother, who is on her deathbed. I have to say that at this point in the novel, about 3/4 through, I could do w/ less of the ghost voice of Richie, who had been imprisoned years ago along w/ the grandfather and is hanging around the family to learn how the g-father stood up for him in prison. Though Ward is a good enough writer to carry off this heavy narrative baggage, I'm feeling toyed w/ a little bit: why can't Pop tell his own story? Why do we really need this device of a ghost (who appears to JoJo only)? Each writer present the story in her or his own way, but the debt here seems heavy, to Morrison and Garcia Marquez I would say. Ward would have done better to stay closer to the Faulkner model - a story told by several near-omniscient narrators. That said, there's still so much in this story, enough to hold anyone's interest and attention right through to the end

Ward's use of the supernatural in Sing, Unburied, Sing

Is the voice of the ghost - Richie, the young man imprisoned alongside Jojo's grandfather (Pop, aka River Red, Riv, and Red) - necessary in Jesmyn Ward's novel Sing, Unburied, Sing? As readers of this blog will know, I generally prefer straightforward realistic or naturalistic narrative when I read fiction - narration that does not draw attention to itself or to its style but that is "transparent," that we can see right through as we observe the development of plot, character, mood, and setting, That said, how can one not like the great writing of Joyce, Faulkner, and many postmodernists (Hawkes, Coover, Gass) that draws attention to the writer and to the writing, and how can one not like stylistic innovators such as Woolf, or pure stylists such as Proust, Updike, Roth at times? So, yes, I think Ward could have written her novel without the voices of the ghosts (the unburied of the title, I assume) as there's enough rich material in the novel that it could stand on its own - a mixed-race family with serious drug-addiction problems - sets off to bring home the father/son/boyfriend from a northern Mississippi prison and faces various hardships and scary encounters along the way. Plus, Ward has a deft hand at fractured narrative; she tells the life story of several of the family members in counterpoint, easily shifting from one narrative to another, so that only as the novel progresses to we get a full view of the life story of the various characters: Pop's time in prison and how he survived, the murder that built animosity between the two families white and black yet brought the families together through the love of two characters - a bit R&J but without the tenderness and romance. Yes, she didn't need the ghostly voice of Richie - who appears only to young Jojo as a spirit that speaks to him, curled up in the foot space in the back seat of the car. But her writing is strong enough to carry the day - we feel that we're in the hands of a self-assured and trustworthy narrator and that the plot won't dissolve at the end in a puff of supernatural whimsy or narrative sleight (flying away on the back of an angel, waking from a dream) - a sad copout in many amateurish novels and stories. Ward's style draws heavily on the magic-realist tradition, but she is grounded solidly in American vernacular and in contemporary issues of racism, addiction, and rural poverty.

Some thoughts on Jesmyn's Ward's narration

Jesmyn Ward's novel Sing, Unburied, Sing, settles more into the somewhat conventional mode of "road story" as it moves through the first 5 chapters, as it becomes clear that the 10 chapters will alternate between two narrators, the young boy JoJo, who shoulders much of the responsibility for caring for his younger sister (Michaela or Kayla) and his irresponsible and drug-addled mother, as they head north through Mississippi to pick father/husband, Michael, on his release from prison. The journey to the prison includes a harrowing stop at a backwoods compound of a meth dealer - not exactly clear why they make this risky purchase, especially heading to a prison w/ all the risk that entails, but perhaps it's to pay the fee for Michael's lawyer, whom they meet w/ in chapter 5. The magic realism seems somewhat toned down by the midpoint of the book, except that JoJo's mother has an affinity for natural healing and herbs, although w/out the real touch that her mother brought to herbalism. Most of all, though, Ward's writing holds up its power through the first half of the novel, both in re her attention to detail and in her ability to weave various narrative strands together so that the narrative is rich and complex but still easy to follow, almost seamless. For ex., JoJo's grandfather (Pop) tells the story of his own stay in prison and his relationship to a much younger and more vulnerable inmate, Richie; he starts the story at one point but gets distracted or interrupted, and the story resumes later in the narrative - it's like a running commentary on the forthcoming visit to the prison. As noted yesterday, the characters are vivid and we feel sorry for them, in their struggles against poverty, racism, addiction, and prejudice - but they're no angels, either: the mistreatment of the youngest child, Kayla, who becomes pretty seriously ill during the journey to the prison, disgraceful and you have to wonder about any family that would expose their children so openly to the purchase, use, and sale of drugs - especially travelling for from home, en route to a prison no less. This double capacity - building both contempt and sympathy for the characters - is a rare accomplishment in narrative.

Surprised by how much I'm liking Sing, Unburied, Sing

I've put off reading the fiction of Jesmyn Ward because I rarely care for fiction that includes lush prose, lavish descriptions, touches of the supernatural, voices from the dead, but at last began reading her recent novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing (you can see how the title itself touches on the elements of fiction that I don't care to read) and, guess what?, I'm a believer - she has completely captivated me (through the first two of ten chapters) with the beauty of her prose, the level of detail in her descriptions, her ear for dialog, her subtle wit, and her capacity for telling a complex narrative that weaves back and forth through time and involves many complex relationships centered on one family (each chapter focused on a single family member but through his or her perceptions touching on all the others). Her antecedents are obvious, of the highest order, often imitated, rarely successfully - Faulkner of course comes to mind, also Garcia Marquez. It's too soon to say whether Ward measures up to that high standard and if so whether she can maintain that over a career, but she's off to a great start. The plot so far involves a family in the Mississippi delta shortly after the hurricane (there was a recent movie w/ a similar setting - have to look up the name), the young son, JoJo, more or less abandoned to his grandparents - or actually his grandfather, as grandmother is dying of cancer - as his father, a white man, is in prison and mother, black, working in a back-country bar and heavily into coke and other rx,. JW writes w/ a lot of tenderness and sympathy for the family member and their struggle against poverty and the racism of the deep South, but she pulls no punches, either - the characters have flaws and failures of their own. The crisis of the plot seems to involve the pending release of the father, Michael, from prison and the wounds that will open - the white family and black family are mortal enemies, stemming back to an incident in which one of Michael's relatives (a brother?) shot to death Jojo's uncle, a rising star athlete who provoked jealousy and animosity among his white teammates and so-called friends. This is a complex web of a plot, a la Faulkner, and requires more than the usual attention during reading, and JW smoothly slips about among the various characters and time frames - but I suspect that in the end she will develop a complete and complex family and community portrait. She hasn't yet quite staked out the delta community has her Yoknapatawpha or Mocondo - that will take further unraveling of the long social history of these and other characters - but that may come, later in this novel or perhaps in the future.

Is Life and Times of Micheal K a political novel?

Most of J.M. Coetzee's novel Life and Times of Michael K (1983) is written in close 3rd person, a detailed account of K's life in Cape Town, a city torn by some kind of war, with shortages of all staples and w/ the constant movement of troops and surveillance by authorities, and their journey about 250 miles inland - a hazardous trip that leads to his mother's death, K's illness and capture in a labor camp, and his eventual try for freedom, living off the land and surviving on roots and melon seeds until his arrest my military authorities who believe that he is providing shelter and supplies to a band of insurgents or rebels. Many writers might have tried to narrate this story in 1st person, but I think close-3rd is the right choice, as K does not have the perspective or the analytic ability to make a credible narrator - in fact, part of his personality and character is that he is unable to put his life into narrative form, when questioned (and threatened) by authorities. The 2nd part of the novel - about 30 pp or so, compared w/ about 150 in part 1, is from the POV of a physician in the prison camp where K is being held; the physician wisely understand that K does not have the capacity to help or ally w/ any gang of rebels or insurgents, and gets the authorities to go (relatively) easy on K. In part 3, even shorter, K escapes and heads back to Cape Town, and gets taken in by what seems to be some type of street gang, who more or less watch out for him, as the narrative ends. Oddly, the war is never explained or discussed, and there is literally no reference to racial tensions; I guess it's an open question as to the race of the main characters, although I sense that most or all are white until the gang that befriends K in part 3, who may be clack of "coloured," as they were known in SA. So it's a weirdly apolitical novel in a sense, oblivious of the social forces shaping Africa at the time of its composition - yet in another sense, topicality aside, it's a highly political novel, that feels true today, telling a story of exile and wandering and despair that's taking place in many countries today;  compared w/ the many dystopian novels that involve post-apocalyptic journeys through wastelands - e..g., The Road - Coetzee's is much more political, not about a journey after a disaster but about ordinary, troubled people seeking refuge, solace, even survival in a time of uncertainty and upheaval, again, like many places today and in other times, even Biblical: it may not be explicitly of its time, but it's of our time and universal.