The 10 best novels I read that were published in the current decade (2010-19)

Continuing with yesterday's post on the Best Books I read in the 20-teens (2010-19) - yesterday, the top 10 short-story collections and works newly translated into English; today, the top 10 novels I read that were published in the 20-teens (including works in English translation written and first published in the 20-teen decade):

At Night We Walk in Circles, by Daniel Alarcon (2014). A complex and powerful novel about political and literary radicals in a Latin American country much like Chile; Alarcon is an American author, writing in English, but his style is deeply influenced by Latin American authors - and for the betters. This book is one of the few recent novels both politically engaged and powerful as a narrative.

A God in Ruins, by Kate Atkinson (2016). Yet another novel about Britain and World War II? Yes, but this one rivals Atonement as one of the best on this well-trodden ground. A portrait of a whole family, over the span of a century – and much more readable than its companion volume (Life After Life). 

War and Turpentine, by Stefan Hertmans (2013, translated 2016). A novel in the Tolstoy tradition when it comes to warfare: Battles aren't won by brilliant leadership and strategy, as warfare is chaotic and unpredictable, but rather by the personal strength and valor of individual soldiers - war as seen from the combatants' point of view. Hertmans shows how the experience of warfare shaped (or distorted) the surviving soldier's view of life - and by extension, how the war affected an entire generation and culture: a truly ambitious novel that is sharp and poignant in every scene. 

Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, volumes 1-5 (2009-11, translated 2012-18). Setting aside the somewhat disappointing volume 6, Knausgaard's monumental achievement in the first five volumes recalls in startling detail the course and the events of his difficult life, specifically his struggle to be both a unique and talented person - a writer - and be just an ordinary guy who fits into his society, his family, and his marriage.

Preparation for the Next Life, by Atticus Lish (2016). An incredibly powerful, tragic debut novel about two social outsiders – a combat veteran suffering with PTSD and a Chinese immigrant without documentation – who try to make a life together against great odds.  

The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason (2018). Mason can't resist showing off his knowledge of medical history, languages, and other arcana, but he builds from these details a good story set during the first World War that centers on character and that establishes a milieu and historical setting that's  far from most American fiction, contemporary or otherwise. 

Solar Bones, by Mike McCormack (2016). This tour de force novel follows the flow of the thoughts and remembrances (in one single book-length sentence!) of the narrator in what appears to be a single day or perhaps a single afternoon - though his mind roams freely back and forth in time, including recollections from his childhood right up to present-day events, crises, and issues.

Nemesis, by Philip Roth (2010). Roth's final book - he publicly retired from writing in 2012 and he died in 2018 - was one of his best, providing both a final reflection on the world of Newark in the 1940s that was the marrow of Roth's literary contribution and a sly commentary on the Holocaust, as seen from the U.S. 

My Absolute Darling, by Gabriel Tallent (2017). It’s not always a compliment to describe a writer's style as cinematic, but in this case, yes, Tallent has a cinematic way of building to a complex, tension-filled dramatic climax; his debut novel altogether comprises an unusual mix of high style and vivid dramatic action – but be forewarned, this novel is extremely violent at times.

Sing, Unburied, Sing, by Jesmyn Ward (2018). Though I couldn't buy into all the ghost voices Ward uses to tell her multi-layered story, I was moved and impressed by her use of first-person voice to establish a number of radically different characters, her understanding of the difficult life in rural poverty in the Mississippi delta, her information about the horrors of abuse in a Mississippi work prison, and her ability to create characters who are deeply flawed while maintaining her (and our) sympathy and compassion for them. 

20 Best Books I read in this decade - Part One

The current decade, the 20-teens, comes to an end in a month and, following the lead of the New York Times, it's time to take a brief look at what I've read over the past 10 years. I can't really post on the best works of fiction I've read since 2010; that list would consist of many truly monumental novels - Moby-Dick, Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education, Don Quixote, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Middlemarch, Bleak House, Invisible Man, In Search of Lost Time, et al. - but the list would probably be the same or similar in any decade and would not offer any insight into this decade per se. With that in mind, here is part one of the 20 best books from the 20-teens that I have read:

7 Best Short-story collections from the 20-teens:

Gryphon, by Charles Baxter. 2011. This collection of new and previously published stories shows novelist and old friend Baxter's great skill and broad range in short fiction.

The New Yorker Stories, by Ann Beattie, 2011, gives a complete overview of Beattie's remarkable contribution over so many years to American short fiction.

Can't and Won't, by Lydia Davis. 2015. Very short stories from a completely unique stylist (and excellent translator) - some are moving, some hilarious.

Dear Life, by Alice Munro. 2012. Though she seems to have retired from writing, Munro is without question the greatest living English-language writer.

Tenth of December, by George Saunders. 2013. Saunders is our most imaginative, funny, and disturbing short-story writer, and this collection measures up to his best work.

Selected Stories (2010) and Last Stories (2014), by William Trevor, make it clear that without a doubt Trevor was one of the greatest writers of our time.

3 best Works in Translation I read in the current decade (these are works of fiction published in English for the first time in the 20-teens):

Walter Kempowski, All for Nothing. 2006, tr. from the German 2018, which has everything a reader of literary fiction could want or hope for in a book: historical veracity, family and human drama, fully rounded characters, crisp pacing, highly dramatic action, excellent writing line by line without excess or flourishes.

Lucky Per, by Henrick Pontoppidan. 1904, tr. from the Danish in 2019. This book gives us all we'd want in a major novel: complex and fully rounded characters - particularly the central character - who interact with one another and grow over time, set against a well-realized socio-historic background.

The Door, by Magda Szabo. 1987, tr. from the Hungarian in 2015. Through the course of the narrative, we begin to see how rivals, antagonists with strong and wilful personalities, can clash but also can come to depend on each other. 

In tomorrow's post: The best novels I've read from the current decade (2010-2019)

The flaw in Taylor's portrayal of the romance novelist Angel

Hilary Mantel has some insightful comments in her Foreword to Elizabeth Taylor's 1957 novel, Angel, most notably (and hilariously) noting that Angel is an novel by a shrewd, funny, observant novelist about a novelist who is none of the above. The eponymous Angel, start to finish, in this novel that covers the span of her life, is a narcissist, devoid of wit and humor, a tyrant in the household, cold in every way to family and to her husband, and the author of novels that are at best romantic potboilers, often in poorly rendered exotic settings or distant eras, but that are completely removed from the events and experiences or he life or for that matter in anyone's life - a bad writer. As Mantel further notes, there always will be good writers and bad writers - and the bad writers usually make more money. (Mantel has done all right, though.) And that observation is true only to a point: Angel has her time, but lives far beyond it, and her final books have only minuscule sales (not clear why they're still being published, for that matter). As noted in previous posts, Taylor has inoculated herself against criticism, in that any mistakes she might make in her portrayal of her bitter protagonist pale against the foundational mistakes that Angel makes in her writing - yet I have to say that I think T is fundamentally off base in her characterization of a romance writer. My experiences have shown me that all writers of fiction struggle and suffer and deal w/ failure and frustration - and that as a result writers are almost universally generous and supportive of one another, regardless of genre or talent or sales level. We all know it's so damn hard! (Angel suffers while writing but seems able to produce at will by shutting herself away from the world; she would have been a better writer has she been more open to the world.) John Cheever allegedly said to JP Donleavy, who was being a real asshole during a visit to the Iowa Writers Workshop, that the only real writer who was a shit to other writers was Hemingway, and he was known to be insane. Cheever was right on point I think - and the character of Angel, while a great stalking horse, who provokes in us not only ridicule and hatred but also sorrow and pity, is also off the mark, not, in the end, credible as a writer.

Does Angel grow or evolve over the course of Taylor's novel?

Elizabeth Taylor's novel Angel (1957) is one of the many, many English novels of the 20th century (even the 21st!) to build part of most of its plot around events of the first World War, whether in battle or on the home front. In ET's case, however, the war is largely offstage altogether: Angel's husband, the unfaithful and egocentric would-be artist Esme, volunteers to join the forces (in part to get away from his cold marriage and miserable life in the remote English countryside); we see no direct depiction of the war, though we catch a glimpse of Esme on home leave having lunch with an attractive young woman - Angel doesn't know why he never gets home leave as so many others do, and now we - and his sister/Angel's friend Nora - know why. We have a quick jump to after the war, w/ Esme now home and wounded, having lost the lower half of a leg. Predictably he morose and miserable and a profligate, blowing through a wad of money at the races and the card tables and slithering up to Angel asking if she can pay off his debts. She, however, has no ready cash - sunk it all into renovating their manor house - but she secludes herself in her bedroom for weeks, maybe months, to write a novel. Why she puts up w/ Esme is almost beyond belief but does show once again Angel's strange dependence on the only man she ever loved, if she even loved him; she seems to have little sense in her life of happiness and partnership. At the end of section 4 (of 6, though the last 2 are much shorter than the others) Esme shoots himself to death - with a rifle, it seems, which is almost impossible to do, but never mind, these are like the wayward facts that ET ascribes to Angel's writing, so ET can get away w/ some herself as well (or maybe I'm wrong on this point, wouldn't be the first time). All told, this novel continues to be a good read a sorrowful (if unsympathetic) portrait of a talented yet unlikable woman; she doesn't have the depth of a Wharton or James character, and the last sections will show whether she learns anything from her experiences, whether she grows, gains insight, or whether she dies as lonely and offensive as she has been throughout.

Elizabeth Tayor's novel Angel and its literary antecedents

At its best, Elizabeth Taylor's novel Angel (1957) reminds us of Wharton or even Wharton's friend Henry James, a tale of a young woman who finds through her efforts and talents and in opposition to many, mostly male, disbelievers, finds worldly or artistic success (of both) but suffers for lack of love, or the ability to love, and marries the wrong guy, someone who will exploit her for her money and mistreat her throughout. That's the story of Angel, who becomes a highly successful writer of what today we would call romance novels, ridiculed by critics but not by readers, lifting her at first to wealth but she seeks more: acceptance by high society (which she doesn't attain, at least through the first half of the novel - the London "scene" invite her to many events but is put off by her coldness and eccentricities) and the love of a good man. Unfortunately for Angel, she has no capacity to a snake in the grass when she sees one. She falls in love - based on a one-hour meeting - with a would-be artist, Esme, whose aesthetic is completely opposed to hers - he paints scenes of urban and industrial squalor, which makes him somewhat avant-garde except that he's a phony and lazy and and exploiter of women in every possible way. He sees falls for Angel because of her wealth, but at about the midpoint of the novel, on their honeymoon on the Continent, it's obvious that the marriage is doomed: Angel has no interest in sex and is unable to express any love toward Esme, nor he to her. Unlike most novels w/ similar plots there's no counterpoint to Esme, no man whom Angel should love and should have accepted into her life; she's a lonely and bitter character throughout and it seems Esme is the only man she's ever known at all. At times the novel veers toward the implausible - notably in Angel's complete infatuation with this phony - but it's almost as if the novel is self-inoculated: Any time the narrative veers from probability of verisimilitude we can only reflect that it's far more credible and natural than the writings of the eponymnous Angel (Taylor gives us no more than a sample of her writing, but we get the point: ludicrous settings in an imagined Ancient Greece, e.g.).

The sorrow and pity, as well as the hatred, we feel for Elizabeth Taylor's Angel

The title character in Elizabeth Taylor's 1957 novel, Angel, is hard to like and hard to hate. She's obviously a troubled young woman who, when we meet her at age 15, seems to be friendless, ashamed of her working-class family, aspiring to an upper-class life w/ servants etc., and turning away from the realities of her life and losing herself in her writing, filling many notebooks w/ what she calls her first novel - like thousands upon thousands of young men and women then and now. The only difference is that she has some talent and she has a tremendous ability to focus and actually completes her novel and then sells it. We have a sense that the book is a trashy neo-gothic romance (we never see any significant portion of Angel's writing), but it turns out that her publisher was right and, despite put-downs and disdain from the literary press, her book and several follow-ups become successful romance novels. This success allows Angel to fulfill her dreams, sort of, and move into a country mansion with servants - but she remains a troubled young woman, still without friends of companions save for a vicious dog (in one great scene her dog kills a much smaller pet and Angel refuses to take responsibility). As noted yesterday, we would today recognize Angle as one with disabilities, probably some kind of autism - she seems completely unable to empathize, and she has no sense of humor. In the second (of 6) parts of this novel, Angel meets a young man her age, an aspiring artist, Esme, whose work runs counter to everything in Angel's writings - he does pictures of urban squalor, for ex. - and of course she falls in love w/ him, but from afar: He goes off w/ his sister to Italy, and toward the end of section 2 the sister returns, befriends Angel (who had spoken highly of the sister's poetry in a press interview - she had never read the poems and has no interest in the sister, but she did this to draw the sister, and she hopes the brother, back into her life) and learns that Esme has been a cad and a terrible person, running up and running away from debts, impregnating a young woman and abandoning her: He's so far removed from Angel's life, but we know that he will connect w/ her in some way and ruin her as well. In part, we feel: She deserves it. She's nasty to her mother and her aunt and pretty much to anyone who tries to connect w/ her. But we also feel sorrow and pity for her, a tortured and troubled soul in an era when there was no help for someone in her condition (the novel, btw, is set in  or at least begins in the early 20th century).

A little-known English author who merits re-discovery

Who knew that Elizabeth Taylor was a novelist? Well, not that Elizabeth Taylor; this one is among the slew of mid-20th-century British novelists who wrote primarily about women and women's issues and were extremely prolific and most of them quite well-read - but for some reason ET was never known in the U.S. as well as some of her contemporaries, Murdoch, Pym, Stark,  et al. Now she's yet another of the authors re-discovered by the great New York Review Books series, and judging from the first third or so of her 1957 novel, Angel, she deserved much greater renown in the U.S. In this novel, the eponymous Angel is 15 at the outset, attending a private school in a remote industrial English city. She is deeply ashamed of her family background - her mother runs a little grocery stores, father deceased - and she tells other students at the school that she lives in a mansion w/ many servants, etc. (in fact, her aunt is a maidservant in such a household - btw, this theme was central to a recent season of the Spanish series Elite). When the truth comes out, she pretty much fakes her way out of school by pretending to be ill, opens a huge rift with her mother and her aunt, and spends her days writing a novel in longhand in a series of notebooks. She sends the completed work to various publishers; of course we know it will be over-written and puerile - but amazingly one of the publishers makes her an offer; we see that they think the book will get a lot of attention because it's so over-written and self-indulgent and full of archaic language (the publisher and editor joke about how many pages contain the word "Nay!") - the foresee a hit much like "Springtime for Hitler," a work so bad that it's good, or at least popular. And that's kind of what happens - but the key is ET is sharp and sensitive about Angel and her troubled behavior. Today, we would clearly say that she has autism of some sort - all the signs are there, she has absolutely no sense of humor and is unable to communicate at any length with strangers, yet is bold and uncompromising about things that matter to her - for ex., she refuses to make any editorial changes in her mss (and gets away w/ it!). The first third of the novel covers about 2 years of her life, as her book has some success and she embarks on a 2nd and a 3rd, while the rift between her and her mother and aunt widens and she seems to have no friends whatsoever - a sad story for sure, but not w/out some wry amusement and literary gossip In publishing, things have changed: Imagine sending a novel mss to a publisher's slush pile and expecting - and getting! - a response within a few days.

A Personal Matter: A great novel that may be difficult to love

By many measures, Kenzaburo Oe's A Personal Matter (1964) is a great novel, but it's a great novel that's hard to love, perhaps intentionally so. The protagonist, Bird, is both someone we detest - an irresponsible dreamer who at the greatest crisis in his life (the birth of his first child with a seemingly fatal brain malformation) abandons his wife and takes up with an old girlfriend and even plans to leave with her for an adventure in Africa, who resorts to serious bouts of drinking to try to wash away his troubles, and who toward the end decides, as his newborn son begins to make strides toward recovery and survival, determines that life would be too difficult with a brain-damaged infants and removes the child from the hospital and takes him to a shady clinic where he will be "put to sleep," so to speak. Terrible - yet we also feel sympathy for this poor young man, facing the burden of major medical decisions and a lifetime commitment to care w/ no support from anyone, especially the so-called caregivers in the 2 hospitals caring for the child (nor from his family: His father-in-law, for example, gives him a bottle whiskey to ease his troubles). The ending will come as no surprise to most readers, who will know well that Oe has been an inspirational father to his son with severe disabilities; not that this is a strictly autobiographical novel or a memoir - Oe may be entirely innocent of Bird's sins and crimes - but the novel does bring Bird redemption in the end, and we are left wondering: How would I behave? What would I do? What decisions would I make, were I in his shoes? Oe's writing is clear and powerful and suitably strange, sometimes surreal; the secondary character, Himiko, Oe's college girlfriend w/ whom he reunites, is a fascinating and troubled person, strong enough to carry a novel in her own right: She's a sexual adventuress, and the sex scenes in this novel, ranging from brutal to tender, are vividly depicted; we can't help but feel sorrow for Himiko and concern about her fate, as she's obviously a troubled woman, suffering from trauma of her own (her husband committed suicide), in ways in which Bird does not seem to recognize: Her behavior, toward him, her other boyfriends, and the helpless infant, is bizarre and abnormal, but Bird is so consumed by his own needs he recognizes nobody else, including his wife, who appears in only one brief scene in this novel. Oe himself deserves much praise for laying his life bare - or perhaps for creating a fiction that most readers will identify as Oe's life. The title itself is ironic: This intensely private family crisis is no longer a "personal" matter.

To what extent is A Personal Matter a confessional novel?

Kenzeburo Oe's novel A Personal Matter (1964) continues to get even stranger as the plot moves along; essentially this novel depicts a few days in the life of a 27-year-old man whose first child has been born with a "brain hernia" that at first the doctors say will cause his death within a few hours. The young man (Bird), totally distressed about the birth of this child, goes on a drinking binge and then tracks down a former girlfriend (Himiko). Amazingly, he has not - 24 hours after the child's birth - spoken to his wife, who remains in the hospital, presumably w/ her mother. When Bird returns to the hospital the 2nd day he learns that to everyone's surprise the baby is flourishing and there's a good chance he will survive - although there's no sense as to what kind of life the child will lead. This new development sends Bird into even greater distress, as he realizes he was hoping for the death of the child rather than facing a lifetime of care for a boy who is likely to be, as they put it, "a vegetable." He still doesn't see his wife, and the doctors and other hospital staff are despicable - pushing he to fill out paperwork and to provide a large retainer to cover expected hospital costs. OK, we should be entirely sympathetic to this character, especially w/ the widely known fact that Oe has a child born exactly w/ these disabilities (we would hope that this novel is not fully autobiographical, as Bird's behavior is quite irresponsible, to say the least), but Oe - deliberately - keeps us from emotionally engaging with Bird. Guilty about his conflicting emotions, Bird returns to Himiko's apartment and engages in some violent and debasing sex w/ her; he sees her as a sexual adventurer, but we can see even if he can't that she's a deeply troubled young woman, still recovering from her husband's suicide of a few years back. It's not just Oe's infidelity at such an important point in his marriage and family life - it's also his physical cruelty and even his thoughts about killed Himiko if she rejects him. All told, it's a sad and dark novel, and to the extent that it is truly "personal," as the title has it, it's a brave and puzzling act of confession, about as painful as any first-person narration I've encountered.

The strangeness of Oe's A Personal Matter and what that may represent

Kenzaburo Oe's most famous work, his 1964 novel A Personal Matter, is strange on so many levels. It recounts the experience of a 27-year-old man, beginning on the day that his wife gives birth to their first child, a little boy with an extremely rare malformation, a gap in his skull where the brain had protruded forming what almost looks like a 2nd head. As the novel begins, a trio of doctors explain to the young man, named Bird (because of his birdlike appearance) inform him that the boy is sure to die and asking him for various permissions, notably transferring the child to a bigger and more equipped hospital so that doctors can learn about this rare occurrence. All of this trauma is made more terrifying and poignant in that most readers will surely know that this account is to a degree autobiographical; Oe has a son born with this condition who is still alive and although still suffering w/ many disabilities he has developed a successful career in musical composition. So w/ that knowledge, what do we make of the bizarre and self-destructive and even cruel behavior of Bird?: a recovering alcoholic, he goes on a series drinking binge (enabled by his father-in-law no less!), goes off to see his "girlfriend" (someone he sees about once a year it seems, and w/ who he had sex only once, way back in college days, who nevertheless takes him in, drinks w/ him, and philosophizes about death and resurrection), and over the first two days since the birth makes no effort to see his wife, to discuss this matter with her, and to console her (it's not clear that, 2 days after the birth, she knows anything about the boy's condition). So to what extent are these strange (to me) plot elements part of Japanese culture at the time (would it be typical for a husband to be away from the hospital and from his wife for days, for the parents and in-laws to be going about their lives and not close to the couple after the birth?); to what extent are these behaviors the weird and idiosyncratic behaviors of Bird and his family members; to what extent is this an indictment of the medical establishment then and later (the doctors and medical staff are almost entirely unsympathetic to any feelings Bird may have about his poor son and are far too quick to anticipate an imminent death), and to what extent if any does Bird's behavior serve as a painful confession from Oe, who may look upon his youth and this turning point in his life with some share and regret (for which he has more than made up over the course of his life)?

Scenes from a broken marriage in Weike Wang's current New Yorker story

Weike Wang's story in the current New Yorker, The Trip, has us off guard at the outset and it takes a while for readers, or at least for this reader, to figure out exactly who's who in this scenes-from-a-marriage tale. Eventually we, or I, recognize that the husband in this young, so far childless couple is American, presumably (this is never stated definitiely) a white male, and the wife is what the story refers to as an ABC: American-Born Chinese. And as the story opens they are on a guided tour of China, hitting all the main tourist spots w/ various reactions to the crowds and inconveniences. The wife is the casus bella, bringing her husband on this long and expensive journey in order to introduce him to Chinese culture (her relationship to Chinese culture is an open and ambiguous matter, as she is by her own account more typically American) and to her many family members in China. Both, for what it's worth, are children of divorce; we know little about her parents but we see that the husband's mother is intrusive and annoying - calling them multiple times during the course of the narrative (the husband ignores many of the incoming calls and messages). There's a shift about midway through the story, as the wife becomes more "Chinese," eventually speaking to her husband only in Chinese (which he has to translate through Google Translator, notoriously unreliable and even comical, though WW makes no use of that possibility) until she declares she's going to stay in China, perfect her Chinese (a topic of some joshing throughout the story) and perhaps work as a tour guide. Husband flies home; that's it. All told, the story seems to require more willing suspension of disbelief than I'm able to give - it's such odd and extreme behavior, not really fully grounded in the characterization or the back story - but I suppose anything's possible, and maybe WW will further examine the remains of this broken or at least damaged marriage in further writing: This could well be the first chapter of a novel or the first in a series of stories, in which maybe we'll learn why the wife takes such drastic and unexpected action and how the husband endures, or doesn't.

The absence of trauma in Family Lexicon and how that shapes the work

Not much more to say than a brief follow-up on Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon (1963), in particular noting the weird emphasis and ellipses in this novel/memoir. As I finished  reading this book it was astonishing how little NG wrote about the major traumatic events of her life, especially the imprisonment, torture, and murder of her first husband. One one paragraph he gets a brief mention - he left home that day and I never saw him again, she writes (I'm paraphrasing but it's close). In another paragraph toward the end she makes the only reference to the fact that he was imprisoned and killed by the fascists in Italy during WWII. But this is not to say that the novel/memoir isn't all the more powerful for its deliberate omissions; by focusing on the goofiness of family life, the petty rivalries of the various anti-fascists parties and factions, the eccentricities of the owners and employees of the publishing house in Turin where she worked, and most of all the bullying but oddly lovable, as in a sit-com, behavior of her father she paints a picture w/ many ominous blank spaces: how people just became accustomed to the many arrests, imprisonments, and inexplicable releases of so many friends and family members (oddly, we see the same thing in a TV series I'm currently watching, A French Village), the disappearances and deaths, the need to relocate multiple times, the suicides, all these are mentioned in passing and then passed over, which in its strange way makes this book all the more horrifying. Plenty have testified to the horrors of deportation and imprisonment, particularly in the occupied countries, but in her portrayal of ongoing family life, with songs, puns, paternal tirades, skiing excursions all under the shadow of death, NG has created here a unique memoir. Think of how different this work would feel had it been set in another time and place: A schmaltzy lighthearted look at life in a neurotic, artistic family as perceived by the youngest of 5 children. But thanks to the "empty spaces," that's not how this book feels at all. Nobody will make a sit-com of this work.

Why Ginzburg's Family Lexicon has the power of great fiction

As I hoped it would, Natalia Ginzburg's novel/memoir Family Lexicon (1963) gets a lot better in the second half, in which the narrator is a young married woman and the family and friends are caught up on the politics and repression that engulfed Italy just before and during the 2nd World War. In fact, NG's curiously reticent narrative style, in which she keeps a cool distance from bullying behavior of her father and in which she seems to deliberately befuddle us with the many characters whom we struggle to keep clear in our minds. As noted yesterday, she presents some of the most dramatic events - such as her brother's escape to freedom in Switzerland and her father's imprisonment - in such an offhanded manner, without much emotion and without vivid topical detail, that it almost seems as if she's intentionally avoiding drama (and melodrama). She sticks closely to what she knows first-hand, never speculating or imagining herself present at a scene where she was not. This reticence pays off well in the 2nd half of this book, as her style becomes almost frightening in its intentional reservation. For example, her marriage: She drops it into the narrative with the barest mention; same w/ her motherhood. But by this time, the late 30s early 40s, one after another among her friends and family become exiled, imprisoned, deported, torn from their roots. Some resist; most don't. Her father - the main force in this entire book - is forced to leave Italy and works for years in Belgium, while his wife stays behind, for the most part. These upheavals are recounted in the same cool and abstract tone that NG used in describing various family jokes and childhood games. We sense that the world is coming apart at the seams, and as she looks back at these days from the vantage of 20 or so years she can only tell them with the most cool dispassion; the memories are too painful otherwise. In short, this is a novel, if you will, that creeps up on you - and there are other books about this same period that do the same, notably The Garden of the Finzi Cortinis and perhaps the work of Primo Levi. This book may or may not be best classified as fiction and no doubt part of its effect comes from our confidence in its veracity, but Family Lexicon has the power of great fiction as it builds toward its inevitable conclusion.

How well does Ginzburg's autobiographical Family Lexicon hold up as a novel?

If we were to follow the author's suggestion, as stated in her foreword, and read Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon (1963, McPhee tr.) as a novel, how would it hold up? Not well, I'm afraid. I'd say that a huge portion of the interest in this so-called novel (at best grouped as "autobiographical fiction") is in learning about the Levi family and their many contacts, connections, and misadventures in Turin in the 1930s. Unfortunately, these bits of preserved history are of much greater interest, I think, to Italian readers who will be familiar w/ many of the famous and infamous people the Levis knew in prewar Italy, to people who've read many of NGs other works (the same kind of interest I felt in reading, say, Roth's The Facts), and to those w/ a lot of background in the history of Italy in the 20th century. Not that this work is without its pleasures and at least limited interest to all readers: the portrait of the tyrannical father is one of the best characterizations (assassinations?) I've read, and the tone throughout is sharp-witted, observant, and accessible. But it's not Knausgaard or, not even close, Proust (he subject of much admiration in this literary/intellectual family). To give just one example: By far the most dramatic incident in at least the first half of the narrative is the escape of older brother from the fascist police: He's in the act of smuggling antifascist literature into neutral Switzerland when he's stopped at customs and shaken down; as the police are leading him toward, presumably, the police HQ he dives into the freezing river, fully clothed, and swims toward the Swiss shore - to be eventually pulled to safety on a rowboat that the Swiss police launched. Well, in any novel this scene would be presented dramatically by an omniscient narrator, but in this work it's coldly reported to the family, and to us, via letter (I think). Other examples abound: The hypersensitive father is arrested and spends weeks in prison, but we learn little or nothing about how he adapted to life in jail; in a novel, that would be fleshed out fully - but NG is strict in her telling and won't go beyond the scope of her own, first-hand childhood experiences and memories (to be fair, perhaps she has written about these matters in other works - again, the Roth comparison is telling, giving readers opportunity to compare the fiction w/ "the facts"). The Levi family, as noted, knew many key players in the intellectual, artistic, political community in Italy, many of whom went on to great prominence in postwar life; McPhee is helpful on these points in her notes, but these detailed will never reverberate to most American readers as they do inevitably to many Italians: It's a book worth reading (it's relatively brief) but probably not the best intro to NG's works of fiction.

The central character in Ginzburg's Family Lexicon, and his repulsive flaw

Natalia Ginzburg's "novel" Family Lexicon (1963?, NYRB publisher, Jennifer McPhee tr. and excellent notes!) exists right on the border between fiction and nonfiction; she says in her forward that she uses real names throughout and everything in the book is to her memory accurate - however, she notes that it's not a memoir in the conventional sense in that there are many "lacunae" that she makes no attempt to fill, nor does she do any fact-checking or historical research. OK, it's therefore just about her family and centers on the many family phrases and sayings and scribbled poems and neologisms. I expected more, and I suspect would be getting (I'm about 60 pp, of 1/4 through the work) more out of this had I read more of NG's fiction and had I known more about her long career in the postwar Italian politics and the antifascist movement. I'm not so interested in the squabbles among the five siblings, sometimes breaking out in fist-fights among the brothers, nor in the many friends and acquaintances of the family during the prewar years in Turin; there are a few references to struggles against the fascists, and maybe will be more later in the book, but I expected more of a political document - my bad, as the title promises nothing like that. What does hold my interest and I suspect that of most readers is the portrayal of her tyrannical and eccentric father (Leopold Levi, I think is his name) - a brutal man, critical all the time of everyone but himself, a snob who claimed to detest snobbery, subject to such violent fits of rage that one would think he may have an illness or a brain tumor. He bullies his wife and children - and amazingly NG gets some comic moments out of this, e.g., her father insisting that they all go off for mountain hikes almost every day - and that they tromp along in hobnailed books with many provisions (others are hiking in shoes or sandals) and snow-glare glasses but no hats. Sadly, at least one of the sons/brothers seems to have inherited his father's propensity for pointless rage - and we wonder what damage he did to the young NG;s psyche (she does not reflect on this). The success and quality of this work will depend, over the next 150 or so pp., how her father develops or changes and how the family is caught up, or not, in the political currents in Italy in the 1930s and 40s. Also worth noting that the father speaks at times with horribly racist language - which McPhee makes no effort to disguise - a reprehensible trait in any adult but especially so in a Jewish scientist and supposed intellectual. Did he change his views when the axe was about to fall on him and his kin?

The ambition and accomplishments of Strout's Olive, Again

In the end, we see that it is Olive Kitteridges's role thoughout Elizabeth Strout's Oive, Again (2019) to cut through all the crap and obfuscations and to get to get to the heart of everyone's story, her own included. Virtually every character in this novel, and in this fictional town of Crosby, Maine (correct name, which I got wrong in some previous posts), has a tragic history - suicide, madness, fatal accidents, infidelity, for some examples - that nobody discusses (though everybody seems to know, at least as a piece of gossip); most of the children of the "next" generation - Olive's son and his cohort - have moved to big cities, NY or Boston for the most part, and come back hoe if at all only to deal w/ family crises. Olive is in a sense a novelist in that she elicits the stories of the lives of others and, on occasion - in fact in some of the best stories in this collection - comes to realization about the failures in her own life, most notably her failure as a mother (see the story about her son's first visit to see her in 3 years). This is maybe not a great work of fiction, but it's at least a very good one - largely because of Olive's character and characteristics, though if I read one more "Godfrey" or "Yup" I would have screamed; most of the stories are narrated through extensive dialog, so the novel is like a retrospective on lives led rather than a dramatic presentation of powerful scenes, w/ a few exceptions - most notably to me in the aforementioned son's-visit story and in the scene in the nursing home where O's friend engages in an imagined dialog w/ the long-deceased mother. I never quite bought into the character of 2nd-husband, Jack, who in no way seems like a retired academic, let alone the youngest person every to receive tenure at Harvard - but that's a quibble. There's much power in these stories of loss and sorrow, there's some redemption toward the end - who wouldn't like Olive's defense of the weak and oppressed, particularly the Somaili exiles now populating rural Maine (though I don't know why ES would go out of her way to take pot shots at "President" Trump - I despise him as well, but those comments seem self-congratulatory and smug - not a way to make others see things from Olive's and Strout's POV) - even if the turnaround in her relationship w/ her son seems ungrounded. Strout is an extremely popular novelist - she seems to have picked up where Anne Tyler left off in the 90s or so - and this novel gives us updates on characters from throughout her writing career, not Olive only but also the Burgess Bros. and Amy and Isabel, maybe others. Quite an accomplishment - but where do you go from here?

The essence of the stories in Strout's Olive, Again

In essence, all (so far) of the stories in Elizabeth Strout's collection, Olive, Again (2019), are about lives of people living with terrible secrets and with guilt, lives seemingly pleasant and calm but, internally, her characters are living with tempestuous thoughts and memories: marital affairs of course, but also sexual abuse, guilt over the childhood mistake that led to the accidental death of the father, sex discrimination (#metoo), repressed yet thinly disguised hatred and prejudice, and the list could go on. Making matters worse, all of this plays out in a small town, where the secrets keep getting unearthed as old antagonists are frequently crossing paths. Some try to escape this small coastal town (the fictional Cosby, Maine - do I have the name right? If so, what an odd coincidence!), generally by moving to "the city," either Boston or New York - but the people are drawn back to their home town for one reason or another - sometimes on a fateful visit to family, in which the fissures and faults will be revealed, sometimes on business or wrapping up a family estate, sometimes in retreat from the pressures of urban life - and often the characters have regrets about the life path they avoided: city dwellers think of returning to Maine (one of the stories follows up not on the eponymous Olive but on the Burgess Boys, from another Strout work, one of whom left home and one who stayed), those who stayed resent the (financial) success of those who left. Most, maybe all, of these stories involve a scene of confession or a moment of epiphany, in which the characters unearth buried guilt or sorrow or in which they come to a realization about the course of their lives. Overall, it's a powerful collection - although my quibble would be that many of these stories involve extensive dialogue, much like a one-act play, and we rarely get much of a sense of place or of interior lives - though I concede that the use of dialog rather than other narrative devices - symbolism, dreams, interior monologue, omniscience - makes these stories quite accessible.

Two strong stores in Olive, Again

One of the shortest stories in Elizabeth Strout's latest collection (Olive, Again, 2019), The Walk, is one of the strongest as well, closely following a man who takes a walk through his town (the fictional coastal town of Casby, Maine, the setting for all of the stories in this collection and in its predecessor) as he ponders various moments and troubles in his life. In particular, he thinks of a very beautiful and intelligent girl in his high-school class, who befriended him, to his wonder, and with whom he shared many long conversations, though nothing more than that. She went off to college (Vassar); college was never part of his life plan, and he married his h.s. girlfriend and has had a long career first at a local mill, now defunct, later at an outdoors-clothing/sporting goods store (sound familiar?). He learned a few years after h.s. that his friend had committed suicide and that she was a victim of abuse at home (her father, a physician). This is a powerful revelation, though it stretches credibility - one would think he and others would detect some signs of her disturbance, but, OK, I'll accept it as is. Later in his walk he discovers a man nearly unconscious - whom he recognizes (Casby is a small town) and whom he saves. By the end of the night-time walk this man recognizes something about the sadness of his own life. Note that Strout shoehorns Olive (Kitteridge) into this story - the walking man has a brief recollection of something Mrs. K said back in h.s. days; I appreciate that ES is playing up her most successful and famous character, but let's be honest - her presence does nothing for this story. Another strong story in this collection, Light, is very much about Olive (and not so much about Casby, Maine - it's a story that could take place pretty much anywhere), showing another aspect to her personality and she spends time w/ a former student now in her 40s or so, in the last stages of chemotherapy; Olive as it turns out is one of the few people to visit this woman, with most of her family and friends afraid to confront an image of death; Olive's acerbic and no-nonsense personality serve her well here, as she has no trouble visiting this woman and talking w/ her honestly about matters of life and death. ES has a lot of fun w/ Olive, or at times at O's expense - there's a bit too much of her folksy ways (Yuh; Godfrey Daniels - phrases like that) but overall the more she's present in these stories the better.

Thoughts on characters, setting, and dialogue in Strout's Olive, Again

Somewhat surprisingly, Olive Kitteredge is not the main character in several of the stories in Elizabeth Strout's collection of linked stories, Olive, Again (2019) - well, why not brand the collection with the name of your most famous character, even if the title is slightly misleading. One of the best stories for sure in the collection is very much about Olive and her troubles: Motherless Child, which appeared recently in the New Yorker. This story is painful in its analysis, like a patient etherised upon a table to coin a phrase (not), of the relationship between OK and her son, Christopher and his wife and children: an extraordinarily painful visit, first time in 3 years OK has seen her son, of the son and his wife and their brood of 3 children (two of them hers from previous relationship/s). Olive's bluntness and impatience, charming in its way in many of her appearances in ES's fiction, here is her undoing: She is rude and inconsiderate of her guests, for ex. her utter failure in having the refrigerator stocked and ready for the arrival of 3 young children. Toward the end of the visit, OK tells her son that she's planning t marry her new/current partner, Jack (I mistakenly called him George in a previous post), which sends son into a fit of self-pity; ultimately, when they meet, the two guys shake hands and seem willing to make the best of things - but Olive sees the terrible state of her son's marriage and comes to the painful realization that he had married someone much like her, his mother. In another story in this collection Olive makes no appearance at all - but even w/out her it's a powerful piece about a woman whose father has just died in a house fire who comes home to Casby, Maine to deal with his estate, during which time she engages in a long discussion w/ the estate lawyer and old family friend about her father and his infidelity. This story is especially "talky," and it seems as if it could a brief play - probably too much dialog and not enough setting and atmosphere as this collection merits. It occurs to me that, despite her use of this fictional Maine coastal town as her locus, ES makes little of the setting in this collection; at least through the first half, the stories could have taken place pretty much anywhere in the U.S. (or Canada - many of these stories seem like homages to Alice the Great Munro).

The world embraces Olive

Seldom has a book of (linked) short stories been as anticipated and as welcomed as Elizabeth Strout's Olive, Again, which continues the life story of the greatest of grumps, Olive Kitteredge. Whether or not ES knew from the start that she would resurrect her most famous character is irrelevant - as the tv miniseries on O made her return inevitable. And it's virtually impossible now to read of Olive without picturing has as embodied by Frances McDiormand. In any event from my first dive into O Again we seen right away that the writing is clear and accessible and if there's a flaw it may be that ES too readily plays up the comic side of O's misanthropy. Oddly, O does not appear in the first chapter/story, which centers on her late-life love partner George, a gruff curmudgeon himself (I don't find him credible as a retired Harvard professor, but it's too late for ES to walk that back). But when O enters the picture in chapter 2 she's immediately recognizable - and funny: eg she's at a baby shower and realizes that she never thought to bring a gift. Who does that? And she spends most of the time criticizing (to herself) everyone else's gift- until she notices that one of the guests is in distress and she in her bossy way gets the young woman - 8+ months pregnant - into her car where she delivers the baby. No nonsense, no sentimentality- and probably poised on the runway for takeoff into season 2 of the miniseries.

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Interpreting Joseph O’Neill’s story

Joseph O'Neill has seemed to me, based on my readings of some of his fiction, like a guy whom I'd along with if I knew him (which I don't), though I'm afraid he wouldn't like me at all if he reads this interpretation of his story, The Flier, in the current New Yorker (which he won't). The story is about a 30-something man who's been wasting away w an illness for some time and has suddenly learned that he is able to fly. Long story short toward the end of the story a woman friend shows up at flier's apartment threatened by her gun toting partner; flier decides to use his magical power to fly down to lobby of the building at defuse the fight. He does fly down but it doesn't seem he does anything other than recount to us what happens in the lobby and elevator - turning him in effect into an omniscient narrator. So what I would say the flying represents is the "magical" ability of a narrator to relate to readers a story - beyond the narrative capacity of a human. And at the end as the flier looks back many years on his lost ability to "fly" I suspect what lies behind this is the mature O'Neill's loss of his early narrative success - in particular w his great novel Netherland, which drew attention and praise beyond any young writer's hopes and dreams - and a renown JO has not (yet?) replicated. Or maybe I'm way off but if so you tell me: what's this story about?

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Surprising chapter near end of Red Sorghum

Toward the end of Mo Yan's novel, Red Sorghum, there's a surprising chapter. The novel was published in 1987 w apparently was a version w some cuts mandated by the Chinese government. Th 1988 version, published abroad (how he managed this is a good question) included these excised passages acc to the note from the translator, Howard Goldblatt. I can't be sure which are the restored passages - clearly the Chinese leaders had no problem w extensive scenes of the brutality of the Japanese occupiers in the 1930s and 40s - but there's little doubt that the penultimate chapter did not appear in the first edition. This chapter moves well forward - to 1973 - and centers on a man now 80 and known as Old Geng (he was not a major character up to this point). We find him now living in poverty and near starvation in the rita collective that has been established in in Shandong province, where the novel is set (in MY's how town apparently). Geng basically burns all his belongings to fight off the cold and eventually sets off to plead his case to the leader of the collective. He is unable to reach the head man who is perpetually at a meeting- though Geng gets some solace from a sympathetic commune member. But it's not enough - and the old man dies of cold and starvation. We can see MY's goal here: the failure of the collectives to thrive and provide, the indifference of the leadership caught in a bureaucracy worse than that which the communists replaced, the need for charity and social justice, and ultimately the failure of the ideology to provide and to share equitably: from each according to his ability, etc. What surprises me is that MY would even tempt the fates by writing such a chapter and why he would provoke them even more by restoring the chapter. I don't know how well his works have been received in China but suspect that his eventual Nobel would insulate him to a degree or at least given him a pathway to the west if needed - though I think that he has remained in China and, I hope, been able to continue his work. Red Sorghum has some amazing scenes and the high ambition of portraying an entire culture through the history of one family - the narrator's, whom we see closely resembles the author - although at times I think most readers will get lost among the many plot strands and family/military rivalries the tormented the Chinese during their wars w Japan. Toward the end this diffuse plot centers on the shared loathing of the Japanese - a bitter ending and, w the restoration of the penultimate chapter, a sad sense of the futility of ideological and political struggles.

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Red Sorghum: Historical fiction or magic realism?

In the end, or near the end, of My Yan's 1988 novel, Red Sorghum (Howard Goldblatt, tr.) I may have oversold this work in my enthusiasm about the first section; going through the novel, now nearly at the end, I have to say that the graphic detail of violence and putrefaction becomes repetitious and overbearing - and the many complex relationships among the various military factions (some of which are political, others are just banditry) that fight one another for control of the region (Shandong Province) gets ever more complex and confusing, at least for this poor reader. I admire MY's creative narration, which keeps circling back to a single epochal event - the massacre at Blackwater River Bridge of the troops the narrator's grandfather led - but perhaps a straightforward narration would have helped readers, or this reader anyway. That said, there's no question that the writing is powerful and we have to suppose that, exaggerations aside (and there are many - it would be impossible to live through the wounds and injuries that the soldiers suffered; likewise, the heroic defenses and the perfect shots push this narrative toward magic realism), this does seem to be the author's attempt to bring the attention of the world to the atrocities that rural families and communities endured during the Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s and 40s. This plot element reaches it's apex in the final (5th) chapter or section, in which MY depicts in graphic detail the day in which the invading Japanese forces gang raped his grandmother, then a young and pregnant mother, in the presence of her young daughter. He flinches at nothing, and in this instance breaks the 4th wall and addresses the reader directly as an aggrieved witness to history - at this point the novel, for all its extremities, approaches the mode of historical fiction.

An exhumation, a funeral, more violence, and conflict between rival Chinese armies in Red Sorghum

Part/chapter 4 (of 5) in Mo Yan's 1988 novel, Red Sorghum, depicts the funeral for the narrator's grandmother, who was killed by gunshot in a failed attack by the Chinese resistance forces (led by her husband, Commander Yu) on the Japanese occupying army. The catch is that her funeral is taking place 2 years after her death. At this point, Yu is a legendary leader with tremendous number of well-armed soldiers at his command. So the funeral for Yu's late wife/partner (not clear if they ever married) is a show of military strength, not just to the Japanese but to various rival Chinese resistance armies. As with virtually every event in this novel, the funeral becomes a violent shootout w/ many horrific and gory deaths; further, the funeral process begins with the exhumation of the corpse, which is reeking and putrefying - nobody's better than MY at depicting that. While centering on the funeral, this section, as is typical of this novel, ventures onto a few side trips, including Commander Yu's affair with the nubile young servant, named Passion!, while his wife's away tending to the death of her father; they fight violently when she learns of his infidelity on her return - but that seems to be just one passage or trial in their tumultuous relationship (that began when they had a passionate encounter while Yu was transporting her to her husband to be, then was sealed when Yu murdered her new husband and her father-in-law - that just for starters!). MY includes in this section a reflective passage from what I think is 20 years later, with Yu in exile in Japan (I think), looking back on his life, escaping from a prison, making his way back to his home village in Shandong Province. There's also much talk of various alliances between the different Chinese forces, some communist, some nationalist, others such as Yu's apolitical, just either patriotic or opportunist, depending on how you look at things. Toward the end of the section, most of which takes place in 1941, Yu is intrigued by the arguments of a young soldier from another resistance army who argues that what China really needs is a return to the days of an Emperor.

A section in Red Sorghum that's about dogs - but not for dog lovers

Section 3 (of 5) in Mo Yan's 1988 novel, Red Sorghum, is called "Dog Ways" - but it's not for dog lovers! I've never read such a brutal account of canine behavior. In this section MY depiicts the small Chinese village of Gaimo (apparently, a city in Shandong province, SE of Beijing; not in Manchuria as I'd mistakenly surmised and posted previously; it's also MY's home town) in 1939, following a massacre by the occupying Japanese army (aided by a Chinese "puppet" army, as he calls it) that leaves only a handful of survivors, including the narrator's father and grandfather (the resistance leader Yu). With the battleground littered w/ bleeding corpses, the "dogs of war" are let loose, and MY gives a graphic account of the rival dog packs and leaders, fighting over the corpses, and the attempts of the few surviving people to eradicate the dog packs. There are some obvious parallels between canine and human behavior in time of war, and afterwards. This section includes a dog attack on the narrator's grandfather that is so gruesome that I had to skim, as I think most readers will do. This novel remains as a terrific piece of historical fiction, told through the vantage point of a single family through multiple generations - yet the vivid descriptions may be unbearable for many potential readers; I have in previous posts compared this novel w/ the work of Garcia Marquez, and I think the comparison still stands, but as I go deeper into Red Sorghum it becomes obvious why his work is less popular and lesser known among English-language readers: it's a love story and a family saga but far more brutal and graphic than anything that GM ever wrote.

Mo Yan's fiction compared w/ Garcia Marquez and Faulkner

Mo Yan's 1988 novel, Red Sorgham, keeps circling around the central point in the narrative: the attack that the Chinese resistance forces, led by the narrator's grandfather, Yu, and initiating his father into the ways of guerilla war. The attack was a disaster for the Chinese (and the narrator's family), largely because reinforcing troops from another division never arrived on the scene. Outnumbered at first, but not for long, the Japanese tore through the village and left few survivors. Section 3 (of 5) in this novel begins w/ the aftermath of the massacre, with the narrator's father mourning the death on the field of his mother (the narrator's grandmother), and Grandfather Yu is set on vengeance, both against the Japanese and against the Chinese leader who never arrived at the attack site. Throughout this section we see more of the brutality and the gruesome side of combat - lots of blood and oozing, lots of broken bones and worse - the battle site feels closer to medieval warfare than to modern combat. The narrative at times flashes ahead to china ca 1980, so we know that some of the characters, aside from the narrator, endure and live to fight w/ the revolutionary army and perhaps beyond. This novel continues to be that rare combination - I mentioned Garcia Marquez in a previous post, and the comparison still seems apt - of life in a small and remote community, essentially seen through the viewpoint of one family, that gives us a sense of all of humanity, though I would say that MY's novel is more overtly a piece of historical fiction than most other novels of this type (compare, say, w/ Faulkner, in which there is little depiction of the major historical events w/in its scope).

The complex family background revealed in Part 2 of Mo Yan's Red Sorghum

Much of section 2 (of 5) in Mo Yan's excellent 1988 novel Red Sorghum (available in English/Penguin edition, 1993, Howard Goldblatt tr.) is an account of how the narrator's grandmother, in what seems to be the 1920s or so on NE rural China, wiped out the family of her husband, took over the family business, and got together w/ her beloved, who become the narrator's grandfather and who also became a military leader of the resistance to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and the leader of the unsuccessful attack on the Japanese at a crucial river crossing - the subject of most of part 1. Whew. I can only say that it's not as complicated as it sounds in summary; MY does an excellent job laying out the various plot strands and clarifying the overall picture. Key events in the 2nd section involve the grandmother's visit to the local justice/political leader to get clear title to the family business (a distillery of a sweet white wine or liqueur from the eponymous sorghum) now that she's widowed (even though we know that she in part engineered the killing of her leprous husband). We get a good look at the way justice was administered at that time, with a lot of physical punishment and completely dependent on the ruling of an all-powerful man. Once she takes clear ownership of the distillery, Yu arrives on the scene and gets a job working the in distillery; we know, though none of the others on the scene know, that Yu had seduced the grandmother on the way to her abortive wedding and that it was Yu who killed the husband and father. Eventually she is more public in her taking on Yu as her husband de facto. We learn a lot about the distillery process, and in particular about one repulsive aspect to the distillation. All told, this section is not as exciting as the first, but it establishes the family background and complex loyalties and clearly leads up to another military action (these take place ca 1939), as Yu has vowed vengeance against another Chinese military officer who failed to show up for the attack on the bridge, leading to the nearly complete annihilation of Yu and his forces.

An overlooked novel by a Nobel Prize winner little read in the West

I'm looking for ways to praise Mo Yan's 1988 novel, Red Sorghum, without going over the top - I've read only the first 1/3 of the novel and am sadly aware of how many books start off well and lose steam and direction as they chug along - but at least from what I've read so far this novel, about the narrator's family and their village life in Manchuria beginning ca 1939 with the resistance to the Japanese occupation of NE China - this novel deserves comparison w/ the much more famous (to English-language readers) 100 Years of Solitude. Interestingly, YM also won a Nobel Prize for literature, but his work has never earned the readership in the West that it probably deserves (I picked up this novel almost randomly and know nothing about any of his other works). Perhaps the comparison w/ 100 Years isn't entirely apt, as RS has much more violence and brutality than that work; much of it is set during the war, and YM depicts horrible atrocities by the occupying Japanese forces. But there's also much violence outside of the wartime setting; much of the novel, at least in the first third, involve the narrator's grandmother's marriage: She was betrothed, with no say in the matter, as a teenage girl to the son of a wealthy family in a nearby village; the fiance seems to be dying of leprosy and of course the bride is horrified and repulsed. En route to her wedding, to which she's carried by 4 strong men in one of those "sedan chairs" on long poles, the group is attacked by a bandit, whom one of the bearers brutally kills. The man - Yu - returns to to the bridal village where he murders the new husband and his father and carries away and has sex (consensual!) with the young bride. Their resultant child is the father of the narrator - though his parentage is kept secret. Anyway, this novel consists of many adventures, often ending in brutal deaths, but all of which show us some of the hardships, the values, the resistance of the people in this era and this culture. It's in some ways a book about warfare, but also it's a book about family legends - reminding me in some ways of American Westerns (Lonesome Dove comes to mind for some reason). Over the next few days of reading, I'll of YM can maintain this intensity and his focus.

Is the Chinese novel Red Sorgumn cinematic?

Catching up w/ a few "international" writers whom I've somehow overlooked, I am currently about 60 pp. in to Mo Yan's 1988 (English tr., 1993) novel, Red Sorghum. The narrator of this novel recounts the experiences of his grandparents and his father and others in their small Manchurian (or at least NE China) village during - at least in the first section of the novel - the Sino-Japanese war int he 1930s. The first chapters are full of drama, violence, and brutality, very vividly depicted, maybe too much so for some readers, but it all has the ring of authenticity and veracity. Most English-language readers will have a lot more information about Japan during this period - from novels and films as well - and will have read/seen little for the Chinese standpoint, so here it is - and it's a grim depiction of the Japanese atrocities, to put it mildly. In the first section, a Chinese military commander, Yu, leads a small military unit to the highway that the Japanese had been building with enforced slavery of the men from nearby villages; the Chinese army is planning a surprise attack on the Japanese, but another expected division fails to show - we don't yet know why, so the attack is called off. The youngest member of the army unit is the narrator's father (the commander may be his actual grandfather, through an illicit relationship w/ the grandmother). Powerful scenes in this section include the torture and death of a man who mutilated his mules rather than let the Japanese army seize them, the execution of a Chinese soldier who'd raped a young village girl, and the marriage day of the narrator's grandmother, whose wedding party is attacked by a bandit en route to the ceremony (the young Yu helps kill the bandit and wins the grandmother's heart - with complications to follow). I might describe these scenes as cinematic - they are certainly dramatic - but "cinematic" often means "would make a lousy movie"; I believe Red Sorgham was filmed (in China?), but I don't know anything about the movie version. I suspect that what seemed "cinematic" at first would be overbearing on screen.

A novel so low key as to be nearly inaudible: Walking on the Ceiling

Though this novel has some strengths, including the writer's clear and confident writing style and an unusual structure in which the narrative, such as it is, is broken into 72 short chapters presented in seemingly random order, in the end Aysegul Savas's debut novel, Walking on the Ceiling (2019), is so low-key as to be nearly inaudible. She does a nice job introducing the protagonist, as young woman living in Paris who befriends and older, famous author with whom she takes many walks around various Paris neighborhoods, but after a point I just threw up my hands in frustration and annoyance. Nice set-up, but we expect something to happen, somewhere, somehow, in a novel: some kind of collision of forces, some course of development and maturation, some crisis or conflict, something! But in fact we get all of the pieces of the novel up front, and there's no discernible plot whatsoever. The writing style is fine, as noted above, but there are no striking passages or Proustian observations; in fact, the entire novel is something like the first 20 pages or so of a Sally Rooney novel - but Rooney knows that there comes a time when the author has to set her plot into motion. The protagonist has a # of potential or past love interests - including the famous author - but nothing is made of any of these relationships, actual or potential. Savas never tells us directly the identity of the "famous writer," whom she calls M., and of course he is something of a pastiche; my guess from the outset was Modiano - tall, living near the Luxemburg Gardens, famous novelist, a wanderer among obscure Paris neighborhoods, though to my knowledge he has never written about Turkey (as M. has). A little poking around on line reveals that Savas sent a day walking in Mexico w/ Paul Muldoon, erstwhile New Yorker poetry editor, in a relationship that seems to have meant more to her than to him - so who knows? In any event, there's enough here to expect more and better from Savas as her career develops, but this novel - despite a bit of a surprise in a late chapter about the death of the narrator's father - is a thin reed, or read.