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It is probably not excessive to say that every Japanese male between the ages of 15 and 40 knows Black Jack, the outlaw surgeon who features in the series of comics that Osamu Tezuka created in the 1970s and early 1980s — comics that remain (thanks in part to movies and TV) popular today.
That's from my review of Black Jack, Volume 11
—David
The tourist sights deliver. Natural highlights were the blue water and white calcium hot spring pools of Pamukkale, and the fabulously eroded rocks of inland Cappadocia. Cultural highlights began with the houses, churches, underground tunnels and galleries (big enough to house and hide thousands of once-persecuted Christians) burrowed into those Cappadocia rocks millennia ago. On the west coast, walking among the streets and ruins and amphitheaters of the Roman city of Ephesus was an evocative experience. Istanbul features the vast 400-year-old richly decorated Sultan Ahmet (a.k.a. Blue) Mosque, and the nearby, equally huge Aya Sofya, formerly a church, then mosque, now (on orders from Atatürk) museum, a 1500-year-old triumph of engineering with rich Christian mosaics.
Sultan Ahmet Mosque, Istanbul
Walking in ordinary neighborhoods and observing life had its own rewards. As strangers, we aroused benign curiosity. In one village, three children followed us. When we stopped, they approached and said hello, then took our hands, kissing them and touching them to their foreheads. That was the defining moment of our week in Turkey.
The ruins of Ephesus, a wealthy port city until abandoned by the sea 2000 years ago, bring home how the most solid certainties crumble as times change. And times are changing in Turkey. Buildings are going up everywhere. An impressive network of highways is under construction: two lanes or more in each direction, opening up the countryside. Atatürk’s vision of Turkey as a modern European state is being realized. China is also courting. Turkey’s vigor and diversity will be an asset to whichever part of the world offers its alliance.
Solid certainties crumble: Library of Celcus, Ephesus
--Julian (Photos by M)
- NC Tate
- NC Tate
To a resident of Japan, Turkey, with twice the land area, seems vast. We traveled hundreds of kilometers around the western half of the country, much of which was cropped with wheat, rice, sunflowers, cotton, grapes, fruit trees and endless olive groves.
A limited number of ingredients are combined into a dazzling Mediterranean cuisine. Fish. Meat. Eggplants and peppers. Olives prepared twenty different ways; dozens of cheeses and honey-drenched desserts; various yoghurts, both sweet and salty; fruits dried and fresh; nuts and seeds; fresh baked breads.
There are mosques everywhere. The national flag and images of Atatürk, who founded Turkey as a secular state 90 years ago, are ubiquitous. There is separation of sexes similar to Japan, but with even less equality: Men socialize with men in public, often sitting in groups of six to eight, relaxing and talking (about, I’m told, soccer and politics), or playing cards and a mahjongg-like game with numbered tiles. When women are out and about, it’s for utilitarian reasons such as shopping. (Less so in Istanbul: walk down Istiklal Avenue and you might be in Paris.) But on holidays, families go out together, with children secure and indulged. On the west coast, women wearing headscarves were the minority; there were more in the inland areas. Some restaurants are dry, but beer and alcohol is widely served and advertised.
Small town, slow life
The Turkish lira is the official currency, but prices for tourists are as likely to be quoted in euros or US dollars, with yen and other major currencies also accepted. The digital cash register in a coffee shop at Istanbul Airport displayed its prices in six currencies.
Service is efficient but sparked culture shock: it’s delivered with none of the empathetic friendliness found in, say, the US and Australia, or the polite obsequiousness displayed in the UK and Japan.
There are well-fed cats everywhere, and a lot of unthreatening long-legged dogs. Motorcyclists ride without helmets.
Part II follows tomorrow.
--Julian
- NC Tate
Harvey, Alex: Song Noir: Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles (Reverb)
This is a good overview of Tom Wait's career up to around "Swordfishtrombones." Waits is an interesting enough guy, and Alex Harvey a skillful enough writer, that one isn't really disappointed that the book is about eighty-five percent Waits and only fifteen percent "the spirit of Los Angeles." Likewise, one isn't too bothered by odd errors that suggest that Harvey is much more interested in and up to speed with Waits than in the metropolis and its literature, the raw materials that made Waits possible. (Homer Simpson—no relation to the character of the same name on a popular animated TV series—is an important character in Nathaniel West's classic LA novel, The Day of the Locust, but he is not an artist or the protagonist of the book as Harvey claims.) There's no evidence Waits or his partner and collaborator Kathleen Brennan, who, Harvey rightly recognizes, reinvigorated Wait's work and perhaps even saved his life, talked to him at all; Harvey did a good job with what he had.We're left eager for their version, but maybe they've been giving us their version all along, in the art.
Miskowski, S.P.: Knock Knock (Skillute Cycle)
I haven't read a horror novel since . . . maybe I've never read a horror novel. (Surely Frankenstein doesn't count.) I heard about this one from an acquaintance on Twitter, and thought I might as well try something different. I'm not sorry I did, because in addition to the, well, horror, there's an excellent picture of life in the Pacific Northwest and—if a man can get away with saying this—what seems like an excellent depiction of what it's like to grow up and live female. The novel follows three girls in the small Washington town of Skillute from the time they innocently perform a half-understood ritual in the forest (this is a horror novel, after all) in the late 1960s up through the present day, though actually not all the girls make it that far. We come to know and care about these girls and then women through alternating sections devoted to each of them. Most interesting, perhaps. is the dreadful thing that is at the root of the horror Miskowski gives us: an alien life invading and then emerging from your body: pregnancy and childbirth. That's what the initial ritual is meant to ward off, and it's from this that the horror emerges.
von Reinhold, Shola: Lote
To misquote Eliot Weinberger, this is not a novel about someone "getting divorced in Connecticut [written] by someone . . . getting divorced in Pennsylvania." That is, it is not conventional lit-fic. It is, instead, a work that is informed by literature, art, and theory. The protagonist, Mathilda, is a black Briton fascinated by the bright young things, a group of flamboyant and mostly gay socialites on the scene in the 1920s and 30s. She notices that in their milieux, and among the somewhat more restrained Bloomsbury bunch, people with her pigmentation are, to say the least, underrepresented. She begins to look for them and, finally focusing on an (imaginary) black poet named Hermia Druitt, sets out in search of this Afro-Scottish artist who, Shola von Reinhold convinces us, hobnobbed with BYTs and Bloomsberries alike. Mixing actual scholarship with historically grounded fiction, von Reinhold lets us follow Mathilda on her quest. Mathilda's efforts to bring attention to the forgotten Druitt remind us of actual black artists whose lives and works have been suppressed.
West, Nathanael: The Day of the Locust (New Directions Paperbook)
The Day of the Locust is one of those novels that gets better with every reading. Thanks to West's ruthlessness and the clarity of his vision it is certainly the best Hollywood novel we have seen or are likely to see. And in the great mob scene that closes the novel can any contemporary reader fail to see a Trump rally?:
" . . . the cultists of all sorts, economic as well as religious . . . all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence. A super 'Dr. Know-All Pierce-All' had made the necessary promise and they were marching behind his banner in a great united front of screwballs and screw boxes to purify the land. No longer bored, they sang and danced joyously in the red light of the flames."
For "Dr. Know-All Pierce-All" read, well, you know who.
Cross, Amanda: In the Last Analysis (Kate Fansler)
Amanda Cross was the pseudonym of Carolyn Heilbrun, a professor at Columbia University—the first woman to obtain tenure in the English department there—who specialized in modern British literature. She tried to keep her mystery-writing alter-ego a secret, but a fan ferreted out the truth, and one can see why that fan was suspicious. All of the many entries in this series are set in academia, and the detective is a professor in the English department of a university not unlike Columbia. I should know by now that I don't do well with insufficiently hard-boiled mysteries, but the literature jokes and references made this one a bit less of a slog than it might have been for this one-time English major and incessant reader. Maybe I'll read another one someday?
Babel, Isaac: Collected Stories (Penguin Classics)
I'm not the first to note the similarity between Isaac Babel's stories and the paintings of Marc Chagall. In that both rose out of the Russian Pale of Settlement, the similarity is unsurprising. As much pleasure as we take from Chagall's work, though, for all its similarity with Babel's fiction, we can't help but note that the violence among which Babel's stand-in, "with spectacles on [his] nose and autumn in [his] heart," moves in the stories gives his fiction a harder edge, a conflict—Babel, the consummate Jewish intellectual, rode with Cossacks during the Russian Civil War—that seems absent from the nostalgia of Chagall's canvases. For that reason, the stories seem to evoke a level of existence that Chagall's work neglects. In the laconic detachment, too, Babel's creations seem quite different from those of the Russians we have known. Those of us fortunate enough to discover the Russians in our youth will always return to them and always be rewarded.
Celestin, Ray: Dead Man's Blues: A Novel
Dead Man's Blues is as good, or maybe better, than the first in the series. Author Ray Celestin continues to trace the black diaspora North from New Orleans to Chicago, and uses history effectively (rather than drowning us in fustian).
Louis Armstrong, who was, history attests, on good terms with Al Capone, reappears, and the mobster, too, takes a turn. I'm eager to move on with Celestin and his characters, to a new city, New York City, and a decade further on to the place and time where the next novel is set.
Ames, Jonathan: The Wheel of Doll: A Novel (The Doll Series, 2)
Happy Doll, having lost his private eye license after his shenanigans in the previous book is now a "security consultant." His new calling takes him to the Pacific Northwest, but there are still lots of good LA moments, including a bit in Marina del Rey where my parents lived for a while. One understands, somewhat in advance of detective Happy Doll, who the villains are in this book, but that doesn't matter. The fun is watching him find out, and then react. I wonder when book 3 will be out.
Ames, Jonathan: A Man Named Doll: A Novel (The Doll Series, 1)
I'm a sucker for LA noir, so when I heard about Jonathan Ames's Doll series I dove right in. In this, the first of the two Ames has written so far, Doll spends a lot of time close to my old neighborhood, so it was fun to read things like "went up Hillhurst and made a right on Los Feliz." The action is action, and the plots are well-wrought, but the main attraction is the pot-smoking dog-loving detective named Happy Doll. He sometimes uses the name "Hank" in this book, but by book two (spoiler alert) he's decided to own his given name.
The implausible enters the book in how Doll manages to commit the many crimes he does in solving the big crime with few or no repercussions. But in this kind of book one waves that sort of thing away and buckles in for the ride. Also implausible was Doll's beloved dog George (spoiler alert) coming back to life after having been poisoned and presumed dead. But I was willing to accept this, because George is one of the book's most compelling characters.
Erskine, John: The Private Life of Helen of Troy
This odd novel, written mostly in the form of conversations between the characters, was published just five years after American women got the vote. One imagines the "radical" women who made this happen were an object of interest at the time, and perhaps that's why Helen, in Erskine's account, seems more like a modern and progressive (circa 1926) woman, and also why the novel seems to be as much about the mid-1920s as it does about the ancient Greeks, who were surely much too different from us to be slotted into the sort of family drama that Erskine has written. Still, it's an interesting retelling of the story of Helen and those around her.
Barbara Kingsolver: Prodigal Summer
On farmland in southern Appalachia on the edge of National Forest mountainside, teeming with animal, vegetable and human prey and predator, local inhabitants and outsiders clash, come to terms and strive for survival. Wonderful characters and a story that is realistic, bracing and sensual, and bursting with love and anger. Overall, this novel is a wise and ecstatic celebration of life and nature, human and otherwise. (*****)
Elizabeth Strout: Lucy by the Sea
A 60ish writer is taken to Maine by her ex-husband in a bid to escape the Covid pandemic in New York. This is the next chapter (after Oh William!) in the lives of Lucy Barton and other of Strout’s recurring characters. It bursts with insight and empathy, and I found it as compulsively readable as her other novels. (*****)
William MacAskill: What We Owe The Future
I’m not sure I “got” this book, but I don’t want to invest more time in going back to check. The philosophical speculations about possible future scenarios are carried out in their own happy bubble with no mention of alternate points of view (like Lovelock’s Gaia for example). This disassociation made me wary of joining the author in his hot air balloon. The book was recommended by someone I respect, so I may have misjudged. (*)
Alison Bechdel: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
A memoir of a daughter growing up in an artistic family in small town USA, and the strange parallels, literary and otherwise, she finds with her unique and mysterious father. Compelling images and insightful text combine in a highly readable search for truth hidden in the familiar and often humorous everyday lives of all concerned. Or as The Times puts it far more succinctly on the back cover: "A sapphic graphic treat". (****)
Charles Portis: True Grit
In later life, a woman narrates her memories as a 14-year-old improbably setting out to avenge her father’s murder. It’s a glorious telling in a singular voice that immerses us in the bad old days of American West. Here is history and heart-stopping adventure, with plenty of wry comedy mixed in. The Coen Brothers nailed it in their recent movie, but of course, as always, the book is better. Pure pleasure. (*****)
Damon Galgut: The Promise
On the eve of the end of apartheid, an omniscient, smart-ass narrator sweeps us around, through and into the often venal thoughts and lives and deaths of a white South African farming family and diverse characters in their orbit in a way that fuses inhabitants, landscape, and politics to compelling and often humorous effect. (***)
Maggie O'Farrell: Hamnet
An account of the family of an English playwright so revered that His name is not mentioned. It immerses us in a credible recreation, accurate or not, of the everyday life of ordinary people 500 years ago. The conjuring of the gifted wife is particularly compelling... until she become a puppet of the plot, and the whole thing tips over into grief-porn. (**)
Alice Oseman: Heartstopper
Volume 1 of a graphic novel about teens navigating love and sexuality in a British grammar school. It’s a delight, and evidence that, while democracy and the environment appear to be crumbling, we are also making leaps of empathy toward a future where, despite our differences, we can -- as Rodney King hoped for -- “all get along”. (****)
Evan S. Connell: Mrs Bridge
Set between the World Wars, written in the 1950s, a knowing, affectionate look back at the life and thoughts of a Kansas City country-club matron, mother and “office widow” (husband barely home), told through day-to-day vignettes. It reminded me quite a lot of my own childhood and upbringing (UK 1950s). (***)
Jonathan Franzen: Crossroads
Midwest US, early 1970s. A middle-class family--pastor father, enabling mother, kids Clem, Becky, Perry, Judson--navigate the counterculture and the religious beliefs offered as guides to the chaos of life, then as now. Intriguingly labyrinthine construction; penetrating psychological analysis. Funny, empathetic, thought provoking, unpredictable, smoothly and simply readable, Crossroads is a thing of beauty. (*****)
Scanlan, Kathryn: The Dominant Animal: Stories
This is a book of super-short fiction. Of the 40 or so stories, most are less than two pages. Nothing in the writing here is beautiful or kind, but somehow I whizzed thought it all. Some stories leave out points that would have made them more accessible. What the heck happened? A lot of the stories end on a sudden whim of observation and leave one wanting to read more. Most of the stories focus on a negative experience with a male, with strange detail, and after finishing a story, I often wanted to take a hot shower to get clean. I did enjoy "Design for a Carpet" and "Mother's Teeth." (**)
Woodrell, Daniel: Woe to Live On: A Novel
Confederate soldiers on a journey to fight Yankees in Missouri and Kansas. Woodrell's voice in this novel is similar to Cormac McCarthy's. Lots of brutal killing and torture and the story seems to float along on southern dialog and an internal monologue of fear by the speaker. There are moments of occasional humanity, but for the most part the plot is a thin gruel of spilt blood, wandering, waiting, and revenge. (***)
Munro, Alice: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
There are three standout stories in this very fine collection by Alice Munro. She has a real knack for creating a variety of believable characters. The title story was my favorite: two teenagers pull a sour trick resulting in a surprising ending. In the story "Queenie" we see a young woman scrambling to make her way in the world, using a bad marriage as a way to make some progress. The final story, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" veers off into occasional long-winded reflection, as one man struggles with the loss of his wife to Alzheimer's. Munro is a master story teller. (*****)
Waters, Sarah: Fingersmith
Sarah Waters: Fingersmith
Such a good story: the get rich scheme of a handsome scoundrel twists and turns into... Two women in the story are quite duped into role playing. A lot of playful sex is talked about, but not much happens in the way of happiness or fulfillment. As always, Waters is right on target with the voices and the atmosphere in this London area thriller. (*****)
Barry, Sebastian: The Temporary Gentleman: A Novel
What a sad story. This novel takes place on the Gold Coast in Africa, where an Irish soldier/engineer recounts his life growing up near Galway and Sligo. Back and forth we go between Ireland and Africa. Like an unseen shadow, in Ireland, what slays the characters in this novel is alcohol. Back in Africa, the memories of the homeland, and the attempt at living again are equally daunting foes. Excellent story telling. (****)
Donna Tartt: The Little Friend
Donna Tartt's second novel does not disappoint. The story of a young girl, Harriet, who seeks to revenge the death of her brother, Robin. The backdrop is a small town in Mississippi, and the goings on of 4 or 5 sisters, whose lives all changed with the murder of young Robin; hung from a tree. Harriet wants to solve the mystery. Who killed him? She gathers clues, and encounters the wrath of the local druggies. Quite a page-turner, and like Tartts' other two novels almost nothing is left out or glossed over. There were times in the novel where I felt her writing fell short; places where I couldn't actually see what was happening from the writing, as is the case when she encounters the villainous brother, Danny Ratliff on top of the water tower. The writing perspective seemed off (who was where and when?) as a battle ensued. But one is so caught up in the narrative we read on and on. Also, who is the little friend who is suggested in the title? Harriet? Hey? Robin? I don't think it is the best title she could have thought of for such a wonderful and awful story. (****)
Strout, Elizabeth: Olive, Again: A Novel
A wonderful sequel to an earlier collection of stories, Olive Kitteridge. Clearly, Strout is a masterful writer; each of the characters in her stories I can see clearly in my mind. These stories span Olive's life from middle-age to old-age, with thoughtfulness, kindness, reflection, and regret. In a general way of summing up, this collection tells us that life sends us problems that are most times not of our own making-- and that we do our best with what we have to work with, and what we think is best to do at the time. The prevalence of loneliness that comes with old age is a dominant theme in the later stories here. Read this book. (*****)
Strout, Elizabeth: Olive Kitteridge
It's been more than a few years since I first read this wonderful collection of stories. As a prelude to reading her next collection, Olive, Again, I read these stories again. Wonderful insight into a community in Crosby, Maine and how they encounter each other. Henry and Olive Kitteridge function as the main characters, and each story includes them if in even a small way. Prior to my second reading, my favorite story was The Piano Player, but this time I enjoyed Incoming Tide most. Her stories can veer into a local gossipy mode, yet there is always tension lurking in the next sentence. (*****)
Alan Hollinghurst: The Folding Star: A Novel
Edward Manners goes to Belgium to teach English to two boys who are getting below average marks in high school. When not teaching, he helps out at a museum focused on a Jewish painter who was hidden from the Nazis during WWII. Manners falls in love with one of his students, and a lively adventure ensues as Manners undertakes to seduce him. The narrative is fun, at times cynical of gay life, and there is a lot of sex. One also learns a good deal of personal history of growing up in post-war England and Belgium. Hollinghurst is a brilliant writer, and I learned many new words. (*****)
Alison Moore: The Pre-War House and Other Stories
After reading the Booker Prize nominated The Lighthouse, I was excited to read this earlier collection of 24 short stories from Alison Moore. They are a little underwhelming; as if written by a grad student. Moore is great at creating tension and awkward scenes. She is an artist when painting a picture of place and atmosphere. Some stories are creepy, and one longs for a hot bath. However, I found them to be a bit formulaic. By the third or fourth story, I was keeping my eyes open for the one clue in the narrative that I would return to in climactic ending sentences. I like Moor's sparse style, and I will read more of her work (written after The Lighthouse) in the future. (***)
