#JLit
Yoko Ogawa's writing topics are so diverse.
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The Housekeeper and the Professor (2003) is a touching story of a professor who loves mathematics but can retain 80 minutes of memory only, and his friendship with and his influence on the housekeeper and her teenage son. .
Hotel Iris (1996) is an unsettling novella of a sadomasochistic relationship between a young girl and a middle aged man. It's not for the faint of heart.
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The Diving Pool (1991) is a collection of eerie and quirky three short novellas about obsession, love and pregnancy.
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Whatever her subject matter is, Ogawa's writing is exquisite, suspenseful, and darkly humorous.
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I'm looking forward to reading her upcoming translation The Memory Police, out on Aug 13.
#FrenchLit
This novel surprisingly has the same structure as The Ten Loves of Nishino. In the Cafe of Lost Youth also has multiple POVs, 3 centering around Louki, and one of Louki's own POV.
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Louki is the nickname the regulars at Condé, a cafe for the bohemian student, artists, and philosophers gave Jacqueline Delanque. Jacqueline is a young girl in her early 20s at a loss for her identity, philosophy, and religion. Through the multiple narrators, you can only form a vague picture of her from the beginning to the end.
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The non-linear and no-plot-line narratives showcase the nostalgia, the melancholy, and the fleeting feelings and moments of the past. And an attempt to explain events in this infinite life utilizing Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. That I think is the essence of Modiano's writing in this novella. He creates an atmosphere, a feeling, a longing which draw you into the book and leave lingering emotions long after you finish reading it.
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"I stood still a moment and I held her arm tightly. We were there, together, in the same place, for all of eternity, and our stroll through Auteuil, we had already taken it during thousands and thousands of other lives. No need to look at my watch. I knew it was noon."
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First published in 2007 by Éditions Gallimard
Translated from the French by Chris Clarke
Published by @nyrbooks in 2016
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#inthecafeoflostyouth #patrickmodiano
The novel has 10 chapters, each is told by a female character involved with Yukihiko Nishino at some point in his life. These stories portray Nishino as handsome, tidy, smooth talking, courteous, polite, and understanding of women, in essence a womanizer. Women fell for him even with the cliché compliments he gave them, which they told themselves they wouldn’t fall for but they did, due to some mysterious aura emitted from him.
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Nishino’s relationships recounted thru the ten women seemed very superficial, and the relationships did not last long, since Nishino was afraid of committing and living a straight life. The root cause of his problem was revealed in the last chapter, and until the end he remained an emotionally immature man.
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From the ten female characters’ narrators, the recounted stories beautifully showcased 10 shades of love: love with your boss, an affair with a married woman, a short relationship with your neighbor, sex with your college classmate, sex with your girlfriend’s girlfriend, a cohabitation without love with a much younger girl… Through these narrations, love was experienced in varied moods and states.
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“I loved the idea of falling in love with someone, but the actual being in love part was difficult.”
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“The moment he said those words to me, I forgave Nishino everything.
I forgave Nishino his past, I forgave Nishino his present, and I forgave Nishino his eternal future.”
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“At any moment, I was about to fall in love with him. But I wouldn’t love Nishino....I had already decided that."
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Unlike many female characters in Kawabata’s novels or Murakami’s, most of the female characters in this novel were strong willed women. They decided they wouldn’t love Nishino and ended the relationships themselves, sensing that there was some idiosyncrasy about him.
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Hiromi Kawakami’s writing is warm and charming, and her characters are well fleshed out. The ten chapters read like short stories revolving around the center male character, and interweaving a colorful portrayal of love, life and relationship in modern Japan.
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Translated from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell
Out today 6/4/2019 from @europaeditions
#FrenchLit
The Life before Us (La Vie devant soi) portrays a heartbreaking parental love story between a sensitive and prematurely wise boy, the child of a prostitute, and his adoptive mother who is an ex-prostitutue.
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In this novel, Romain Gary wrote with great compassion for the pimps, the prostitutes, the travesties, the poor, the sick, the abandoned children, the old, the Jews, and the Arabs. In my opinion, this is how great literature should be - it shows the compassion, the empathy, and the humane side of people in dire situations in intelligent, captivating and witty prose. This is contrast to many other works in which the authors just showed off their little knowledge or pretentious writing skills. I guess I believe in art for life's sake, not art for art's sake.
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Romain Gary was a French writer who won the Prix Goncourt in 1956 for his novel The Roots of Heaven (Racines du ciel). He won the prestigious prize again in 1975 with this novel under the pseudonym Émile Ajar.
Translated from the French by Ralph Manheim
Published in English in 1986 by @ndpublishing
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Highly recommended.
#FrenchLit
"I often think of the image I can see now, and of which I've never spoken. It's always there, in the same silence, amazing. It's the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight."
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Marguerite Duras wrote this novel when she was 70 years old, reminiscing of the years she lived in Sa Đéc and Saigon under French colonization. The image that she mentioned many times in the novel is etched in my mind - a young French girl of fifteen and a half years old riding the ferry across the Mekong River. She was standing on the deck, wearing a dress, a pair of gold lamé shoes, and a fedora hat. It was a fateful day that she met a wealthy Chinese Vietnamese man who later became her lover.
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The Lover was written in disjointed vignettes which jump oddly in time and settings. Through the lushly written ramblings, the novel painted the cultural segregation between the French and the Asians in the French Indochina, the hard life of a financially struggling and depressed French family, the violent relationship between them, and above all the desire for love of a fifteen and a half year old girl. She was too young to know what love was, and stated more than one time she did not love him. The novel was titled The Lover yet the lover was not introduced until one third into the book of just a little over 100 pages long. .
Yet she realized years later that she did love him. And the novel was ended on a very touching and romantic note.
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L'amant was first published in 1985
Translated from the French by Barbara Bray
Published in English in 1997 by @PantheonBooks
May was officially designated as Asian-Pacific American Heritage month in 1992 (the bill was signed by president George H.W. Bush and passed by Congress in 1990) to “recall the challenges faced by Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and celebrate their great and significant contributions to our society” (Wikipedia).
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Weekend 4 topic of #APICelebrAsian is Unread Shelf. Pictured above are 3 novels by Vietnamese American authors on my TBR.
The Bookf of Salt by Monique Truong (2003)
The Lotus and the Storm by Lan Cao (2014)
Dragonfish by Vu Tran (2015)
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Most people would know Monique Truong from her debut novel The Book of Salt. I in fact haven’t read it but have read her second novel Bitter in the Mouth years ago. It’s a brilliant novel about a girl with synesthesia which causes her to “taste” words. It’s a well crafted story telling her journey in search of her root and her identity. Truong’s writing is so beautiful I have no doubt The Book of Salt is amazing, too. That’s why it came as no surprise when I saw The Book of Salt was voted one of the 100 best books of the 21st century (so far) by the Vulture.
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Lan Cao is an attorney from Southern California. The Lotus and The Storm is “a profoundly moving novel about the shattering effects of war on a young girl, her family, and her country. In sensuous and searing details, Lan Cao brings Saigon’s past vividly to life through the eyes of her narrator, Mai, following the girl and her father halfway around the world, to a suburb in Virginia, where forty years later, Mai’s trauma unravels.” - Ruth Ozeki
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Dragonfish is Vu Tran’s debut novel. It’s a literary thriller exploring cultural clash in a marriage between a white man and a Vietnamese woman where the woman left and the male protagonist chased her in Las Vegas or rather the ghosts of her past. It’s hailed as a "remarkable debut, a noir page-turner resonant with the lasting reverberations of lives lost and lives remade a generation ago" (Amazon).
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Many thanks to @wellreadhuman @postgradreads @sachireads @read_tmc and @aquietnook for hosting this important heritage month.
