Only a Blockhead

Unsheltered

Sometimes a book is too good to just hide down in the column on the right. Barbara Kingsolver's novel Unsheltered is one such book.

Unsheltered is about a middle-class family in contemporary New Jersey, and people in the same town—what was a utopian community—a century earlier. And about the startling human tendency to be blind to truth when the truth is unsavory. Compelling characters. Great intelligence. Humor. Writing so good it’s invisible. There are even hard-won artistic flourishes to ice the cake. A deeply satisfying delve into human psychology, and fiendishly clever at drawing parallels between past and present. This is a work of art. (From personal taste, and my extremely limited viewpoint) it seems a novel of the decade.

American and British publishers often take a different approach to a book cover. 

Left is the US Harper cover. Yes, you can go that way, but to me it misses something in scope and tone. Right is the UK Faber & Faber cover, which feels closer to the book in theme, mood, weight.

--Julian

Dances with readers

In the sidebar of this blog (below David’s notes on what he reads), I try to capture the books I read and the movies I watch in a paragraph. I do it to both clarify and savor my experience, and possibly steer others toward (or away) from the work, and I try to do it without giving away plot, or raising hopes too high. I write before reading other criticism, reviews, or blurb so as not to be influenced, for others inevitably put things better than I do.

The last book I read was “My Name is Lucy Barton” by Elizabeth Strout, just out in paperback. What I said about it was: “Centered on a stay in a New York hospital, a woman relates incidents from her life. This novella is artfully artless, with an honesty that leads deep into human motivation and emotions, including the functions and dysfunctions of family, how we hurt ourselves and others, and the aching ecstasy that accompanies love. This is my second Elizabeth Strout, and it’s every bit as good as her ‘Olive Kitteridge.’” which I was satisfied more or less captured it. Then I read the review excerpts printed in the book. They are so superior to what I said that I’ll quote some of them here:

“unsparingly honest and forthright” (Chicago Tribune); “I was frequently put in mind of Hemingway’s famous injunction to write ‘the truest sentence that you know’” (The Wall Street Journal); “careful words and vibrating silences; a rare wealth of emotion” (The New York Times Book Review); “You think, that’s it. That’s what life is like.” (NPR); “attention to reality so exact that it goes beyond a skill and becomes a virtue” (Hilary Mantel).

How does Strout do it? She recently contributed to the Guardian's My Writing Day series, and I think there are clues there. For the honesty and attention to reality:

“Almost always I will start by writing a scene or a piece of a scene. I have learned over the years to take anything that is most pressing to me – it may be as mundane as a concern about upcoming dental work, or as serious as worrying about the safety of my child – and to transpose that emotion into a character. This will give the scene life, as opposed to having it wooden.”

And for the way Strout draws her readers in. This is less mentioned by reviewers: if you are being taken expertly through shimmering countryside, you are not aware of the vehicle.

“The actual writing of [the book or story] – deciding what the reader needs and when the reader needs it – is not as fun as writing the scenes; I feel less free, but there is a pleasure in drawing myself – and the reader – together this way. I always imagine an ideal reader: someone who is patient, but not too patient; someone who needs the book and wants to read it, but may not read it if I do not write it honestly. For me, it is a dance with the reader.”

In two books (three? I immediately read “Lucy Barton” a second time), Strout has become a favorite author.

--Julian

Don Wong

My review of Running Through Beijing by Xu Zechen is on-line at Kyoto Journal.

Different times call for different literary forms, and in an age during which more and more people are leaving the security and poverty of the country for the insecurity and poverty—but also possibility—of the city one suspects we will see more picaros—engaging underclass rogues—in the novels that define our time.

Read the rest here.

—David

Oh, Tama!

Here's a  short review by me from yesterday's Japan Times.  See if you can find the small blunder, one that, I trust, doesn't obscure how much I enjoyed the book.

--David

Gothic / Decadent / Noir

Where the gothic and the decadent meet: me on Hisaki Matsuura's Triangle:

For most of us the notion of life in a tight-knit village is pure fantasy: We have lived our whole lives in and around cities. One would think, therefore, that we would have grown comfortable with the anonymity and the promiscuous mixing with strangers that define city life. Novels such as Hisaki Matsuura’s “Triangle” suggest, however, that cities, particularly those as multifarious as Tokyo, still make even seasoned urbanites nervous. Rich with possibility, cities are also rich with peril: They are places where anything can happen.

Read the rest here.

—David

Disney's "Frozen"

Did I say no review spoilers yesterday? Can I add an exception to that: Less than great films may have semi-spoilers because (a) you’re less likely to go, and (b) I want to indicate why I believe the film didn’t completely succeed. OK? And so my review of Frozen.

Did the scriptwriter not realize that two heroines aren’t better than one because they cancel each other out, and neither can be given a proper rousing conclusion. Frozen is imaginative and there’s lots to enjoy, but it seemed long and rather flat. I’m giving it an extra star for the eye-popping 3D animation (3 stars).

I got questions from friends about why I wanted to go see Frozen in the first place. My answer was, in a word, Tangled. I really enjoyed that, calling it “Grade A fun” and giving it 5 stars. Coincidentally, I found in yesterday’s Guardian that I'm not the only person so enamored.

--Julian

Full moon / Philomena

Coming home after dark, after dinner, tonight’s full moon was big, yellow, bright, and low in the sky so that it linked with the house lights and street lights and the headlights of the traffic, lending them its weight, dignity, beauty.

I was out watching Philomena, which opened here in Japan this week, and will soon be available on DVD in the UK (March 24) and US (April 15). Here’s my spoiler-free review. I insist that reviews be spoiler-free. In the theater, I close my eyes and cover my ears if there’s a preview of a movie I plan to see. The ideal review tells me if it's something I might want to watch, without telling me any of the details. (Discussing a film after watching, well, that's a different matter.)

Philomena. It’s a mother/child (based on a true) story designed to move, with optional indignation at the powers that caused the pain. It tries a bit hard, and hypocritically exhibits the kind of journalistic manipulation criticized in the film itself. But that’s all and only the better to deliver the kind of Good Story we crave. Steve Coogen is as winning at obnoxious/serious as he is at obnoxious/funny. And Judy Dench does full, delicious justice to a wonderful part. Screw it, for pleasure and emotional satisfaction I’m giving this 5 (out of 5) stars.

--Julian

旅彩 賢母

Once upon a time, not so long ago, it was unusual for a Japanese woman to aspire to be anything other than a “good wife and wise mother”— an aspiration so predominant that the Japanese for it, ryosai kenbo, is a set phrase in the language.

That's from my review of The Japanese Family in Transition by Suzanne Hall Vogel.  Read the whole thing here.

David

Two film reviews

This week, I opened a bottle of wine, kicked back and watched Black River (newly available in a Criterion Eclipse DVD set of director Masaki Kobayashi’s 1950s movies). Right from the jazzy, Saul Bass-esque opening credits, it was fresh and thrilling: a young Tatsuya Nakadai smouldering charismatically as a small-time yakuza; the fascination of its sleazy setting outside a post-war American army base. The script was superb: unlike most genre film, I had no idea what the characters would do next as the story developed apace. I was elated by both cinema artistry and alcohol when “The End” came up on the screen.

Last night I watched it again sober. Except for the setting, it was vastly ordinary, by turns shrill and turgid, borderline overacted, and directed with zero inspiration. Nakadai was still great, but his character is despicable. Although there were familiar points in the story, it turned out that I hadn’t registered many of the intervening scenes, including the cliché set-piece ending.

Watching films sober has to be better then watching them drunk. Except when it isn’t.

--Julian

Speculative Japan 3

One pleasing quality of the third volume of Kurodahan Press's "Speculative Japan" series of anthologies is that it exists at all.

That's from my review of the third entry in Kurodahan's Speculative Japan series of anthologies.  Read it all here.

--David