Only a Blockhead

Portrait of a Pickpocket

In simpler times, in simpler tales, authors pitted heroes against villains, and there was no confusion about who wore the black hat and who the white. We no longer live in those simple times, and most of us have grown bored with those simple tales. We want, in the books we read, something that at least approaches the complexity of the lives we lead outside of those books.

Read the rest of my review of The Thief by Fuminori Nakamura here.

—David

We've Needed this Book for a Long Time

My annoyance really peaked when I read through these catalogues, and saw that the endless sessions advertised in them all seemed to sit happily side-by-side. Yet if you literally believed the metaphysical and empirical claims they made and implied, they were more often than not logically incompatible. There seemed to be an illogical almost anti-rational and extreme open-mindedness. No claim, no matter how preposterous or unfeasible, seemed to be unacceptable—and to question the claims was seen as either spiritually naïve or as being locked into some kind of pro-conflict, old-religion mindset of harsh exclusivism. For me, when looking at particular new-age material this ‘everyone is right, all paths are valid’ approach was not only untenable and intellectually insulting, it all too often edged into smugness.

From How Contemporary Spirituality Makes Us Stupid, Selfish, and Unhappy by David Webster.

—David

Draw Your Own Conclusion

Here are the first two paragraphs of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes, a book thought suitable for boys and girls back in the days before they were called "young adults."

I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own skeptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale.

When my convivial host discovered that he had told me so much, and that I was prone to doubtfulness, his foolish pride assumed the task the old vintage had commenced, and so he unearthed written evidence in the form of musty manuscript, and dry official records of the British Colonial Office to support many of the salient features of his remarkable narrative.

Here are the first two paragraphs of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, a book published in 2010 and marketed to "young adults" of all ages.

When I wake up the other side of the bed is cold.  My fingers stretch out, seeking Prim's warmth, but finding only the rough canvas cover of the mattress.  She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with our mother.  Of course, she did. This is the day of the reaping.

I prop myself up on one elbow.  There's enough light in the room to see them.  My little sister, Prim, curled up on her side, cocooned in my mother's body, their cheeks pressed together.  In sleep, my mother looks younger, still worn, but no so beaten down.  Prim's face is as fresh as a raindrop, as lovely as the primrose for which she was named.  My mother was very beautiful once, too.  Or so they tell me.

—David

Should Have Stuck to Skating

The five stories that constitute Hans Brinckmann's "The Tomb in the Kyoto Hills" are all competent. The prose seldom obtrudes on the reader's consciousness; the characters are sometimes slightly implausible, but never enough to be awful. The focus on men at loose ends, and the manner in which women exist in some of the stories primarily as vehicles to aid men in their quest for whatever it is they're questing for, is tiresome, but not unusual. If the author displayed a sensibility that was profound or a vision of life that was startling and fresh, his stories might transcend mere competence, but unfortunately, though Brinckmann is neither insensitive nor dim, one sees little evidence in these stories of superlative sensibility or insight.

That's from my review of The Tomb in the Kyoto Hills by Hans Brinckmann.  Read the rest here.

—David

Murder in the Red Chamber

Anthony West has called "Dream of the Red Chamber," a Chinese novel written in the 18th century, "beyond question one of the great novels of all literature," and many eminent scholars and critics have agreed with him. That being the case, one feels one really should read it. Many will hesitate, though, before committing themselves to David Hawkes' five-volume translation — as excellent as that translation is reputed to be. They might turn instead to Chi-Chen Wang's much shorter abridged version, and, as Arthur Waley has written, "in Wang's hands [they] will be perfectly safe." If, however, even a safely abridged version of a novel that is, after all, from a very different time and place seems daunting, there is now another port of entry: Taku Ashibe's "Murder in the Red Chamber."

That's from my review of Taku Ashibe's Murder in the Red Chamber.  Read the rest here.

—David

Better Angels

It’s a paradox that when there’s more information available than ever before, we don’t know what’s really going on around us. These are violent times. The news features murders, massacres, terrorism, wars without end… or threats of same. In the past, we may not have had painless dentistry, but we also had fewer ways and opportunities to imperil each other. They were relatively peaceable times.

Except they weren’t. Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, spends hundreds of pages carefully documenting the worldwide decrease in violence from prehistory to modern times. With a hiccup here and there—the 1960s in the West, for example—the decline in levels of violence of all kinds, war included, continues right up to today.

Pinker also searches carefully to account for the decline and the hiccups, and concludes that our hard-won peaceability isn’t inevitable: we should be aware of the reasons for it, the better to preserve and extend the gains we’ve made.

In a book that constantly surprises, the greatest for me was the rise in IQ scores over the last 100 years. Testers have to keep recalibrating their scores to maintain a constant average. But crunching the numbers shows that the gains are not across the IQ board, but restricted to one particular aspect of intelligence, rarer a century ago and now commonplace: abstract reasoning--the ability to stand outside ourselves, to put ourselves into others’ shoes, and to empathize with them. We really are different people than our grandparents were. This helps me better understand--and forgive--my own grandfather. He was highly intelligent and a musical genius, while sometimes managing the grossest prejudice in his writing.

Another information age paradox: it’s responsible for our skewed view of present times. But by bringing the lives of others into our own, it also encourages the empathy that makes violence against others a less attractive option. 

--Julian

Mars-Jones Failing

The Japan Times, quite sensibly, discourages reviewers from writing about books that are worthless.  Why waste the space?  Exceptions, however, are made when a book is overhyped or particularly egregious.  This was the case with Adam Mars-Jones's Noriko Smiling.  They let me take the gloves off:

"I can hardly be accused of being an expert on Japanese film," Adam Mars-Jones assures us early in "Noriko Smiling," his monograph on Yasujiro Ozu's "Late Spring." Such protestations at the beginning of a work are not, in an age that distrusts expertise and celebrates ignorance, unusual. In most cases, though, a writer who makes this move goes on to demonstrate, however obliquely, that he or she is not, in fact, ignorant at all. Mars-Jones takes a different approach.

Read the rest here.

—David

A Monument of World Literature

And you've never heard of it: Land by Pak Kyung-ni.

Given its length — the 1,167 pages translated, in three volumes, into English, are only one section of a five-part, 6-million word epic — and given its scope, comparisons between Pak Kyung-ni's "Land" and Tolstoy's "War and Peace" are inevitable. The titles, however, illuminate a key difference between the two sagas.

That's from my Japan Times review.  Read the rest here, and then get your hands on the three volumes of it that are available in English.

—David

Reading 2011

The only New Year's resolution I ever make is not to make any New Year's resolutions.  I did, however, begin 2011 with an ambitious project in mind.  I decided that, other than books I was compelled to read, I would read only books by women.  As I'm told happens with most resolutions, this one fell by the wayside pretty early for lots of not very good reasons. I was, for example, taking a trip to Finland, so I had to read a history of Finland, and a couple of thrillers set in Finland, and the first volume of Väinö Linna's national epic; the authors of all these were male, and once I'd fallen off the wagon, I never quite climbed back on.

Actually, I didn't read very many books by men or women this year: only about sixty in total, though there were some mega-tomes among them.  That more than a third of the sixty I made it through were written or edited by a woman--twenty-three to be exact--, a proportion higher than it would otherwise have been, suggests that my resolution was not all for naught.

My non-resolution for 2012 is to read more poetry.  (And in fact I read more poetry than is evident from my booklist.  Because I only list books I've finished, all the odd dipping into collections and selecteds that I do is unaccounted for.)

Looking forward to reading more in 2012.

--David

Nagai Kafu: Rivalry

Geisha, we've often been told, are not prostitutes, but some of Kafu's characters engage in prostitute-like behavior considered shocking enough that the unexpurgated novel was not published until 1947, 30 years after it was written.

That's me in the Japan Times on Nagai Kafu's Rivalry.  Read the whole review here.

—David