some books i read lately (june edition)
No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai
This book is a resounding counterexample to that old adage of "write what you know."
I loved Dazai's "Schoolgirl" even though the narrator was so unlike the author himself, and the author nailed the perspective perfectly: I felt very sharp memories of what it’s like to be a thirteen-year-old girl, reading it. By contrast, Dazai's protagonist here is almost autobiographical (bookish suicidally depressed rich kid from Hokkaido; am I describing Dazai or our protagonist?), and while some of Dazai’s razor-sharp insights are still there (I enjoyed his strangely-motivated childhood friendship with Takeichi, and wondered quite a lot about his good-for-nothing drinking buddy Horiki), it meanders into a rather unappealing of self-absorption and rumination. And the behavior of the cast of characters around the protagonist is a little bewildering-and, I mean, the protagonist himself is bewildered, so it makes sense. But I found myself wondering if I needed translator’s notes (was I missing something), or if this was just a symptom of the character’s all-too-evident myopia and depression, or just flat writing, and it just didn’t work for me.
It may simply be a matter of form. Schoolgirl kept such a tight, documentarian focus on the minute-to-minute thoughts of the protagonist that the structure flowed effortlessly from there: the structure of a single day: quick beginning, languorous middle, wistful ending. A book written in the form of a journal is a dangerous thing: it meanders, it mopes, it focuses on feeling and pain, and if you don’t connect with that feeling and pain right off, there’s not much else to grasp.
The forward was interesting, pointing out (back in 1958!) that Japanese folk are just as Westernized as many European countries, based on the literature & education of their effete members, and recounting how his literary friends in the country get annoyed at being classified as “Japanese” or “Asian” or “World” literature. (Those barriers have broken down a bit, in the half-century since that writing, though not enough.)
The claim on the back cover is that this is one of the “ten bestselling books in Japan”-I’m not sure what metric they used, but it seems poor Dazai has since been whalloped by, among other things, Harry Potter and Who Moved My Cheese? Comparing it to Kokoro, the other Super Famous Classic Modern Japanese Novel TM I know about, might make an interesting exercise-I haven’t read Kokoro since high school, and both novels do the weird frame-narrative thing, but I think Kokoro touched me more, ironically, by having more distance between you and the story. I’ll probably be musing on all the different ways distance works in fiction, I guess, for a while.
(Oh, also, a reference to Christianity as a weirdo death-obsessed religion came up, as it did in the last Japanese novel I read-might just be a common characterization there?)
On Writing by Stephen King
Plenty who do can’t teach.
I’ve generally avoided the “how to write” genre in recent years, mainly because I was pretty sure those books didn’t have anything to teach me that I couldn’t figure out by just writing. That’s still true, actually, but going to a few one-day writing workshops this past year convinced me that’s there’s still value in hearing a writer say “here’s what it’s like for me; does it work like that for you.” I came out of a Henry Lien workshop with all sorts of neat tricks for imbuing fresh life into limp stories (like, all his little parlor games and tricks were presented in the form of, “so here’s the thing I did that produced the idea for story such-and-such that got published a year later,” which sure felt practical and fun); I came out of a Steifvater workshop feeling quite vindicated in trying out some different ways of approaching very long works (tl;dr for a long time, she couldn’t figure out the difference between the novels she was able to finish and the ones she wasn’t able to finish-she claims that she actually has to brainstorm and think for a very long time, because she needs to know exactly what kind of novel she wants, in terms of mood/theme/etc, before ever putting a word to the page-only the desperate drive to make that extremely vivid vision real can push the novel through-which surely isn’t how it works for everyone, but resonated for me, and helped me understand how I can barf up 20 pages in a day for something I’ve ruminated over for ages, but taper out on things that seem like they “should” be better ideas).
Anyway. So those workshops were useful. All King really does here is bark Strunk and White at you for 200 pages, which, yawn.
I don’t mean that as a potshot at King; I picked the book up because I know the dude can write a book that sells, I’m not sitting over here being a literary snob. But it seems he’s better at doing than teaching, alas.
The first hundred pages, strangely but somewhat delightfully, are just a memoir of his life, and that bit was quite fun. That part may be worth reading if you’re a King fan; skip the rest.
The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner
I was delightfully surprised that
lavendre read this right about the same time as me :) I’m not sure I have much to add to her review. These books were sold to me as “Game-of-Thrones-style plotting, but sans grimdark, and targeted at YA,” which doesn’t fully capture the spirit of the books (they have a delicious Mediterranean setting all their own, and it feels much more like an adventurous romp than GoT ever did, even when the politicking is thick), but it’s certainly a fair enough pitch that it compelled me to read, and I enjoyed the ride. The Queen of Attolia herself is a really fun character (her super keen awareness of her delicate circumstances, as a brutal ruler of a tiny kingdom, was so delicious), and I really hope we see more of her in the next book (which I have already checked out from the library!).
Words Are My Matter by Ursula Le Guin
As a 90's kid, I adored fantasy and science fiction with no inferiority complex about it whatsoever: the world was already shaping itself to meet my tastes. I saw Fellowship of the Ring in theaters with my dad, when I was eleven. By the time Return of the King came out just a few years later, all my teenybopper friends were standing in line with me. The closest thing to a literary snob in my life was, uh, Time magazine’s list of the “100 Best Novels of All Time,” which in hindsight was full of awful selections (The Fountainhead?!?! The fucking Fountainhead?!?!), but it was all I knew to judge The Best by at the time, and Lord of the Rings was on there, so of course I thought fantasy and science fiction were Real Literature, with Real Hollywood Budgets, who the hell thought otherwise?
I mention this because in Words Are My Matter, Le Guin has several essays where she still-still!-is beating the drum about how fantasy is Real Literature, and all these snobs don’t understand. I don’t deny that was very much the case when she was in her writing prime, but it’s amusing how often public intellectuals fail to notice when they’ve won, the world has shifted to their point of view, they can move on!
Amusing, but not awful or bad. Compare Le Guin’s quirky insistence against, say, Paul Graham, the venture capitalist who got high on his own supply and still insists that nerds are some embattled minority entitled to uproot everything they can sling Javascript at despite the fact that oh my God the year is 2019 and Google is worth a bajillionty dollars. Or compare against Jared Diamond, once-edgy pop-anthropology guy who’s just making up random theories for whatever now.
(An interesting corollary to this: it’s interesting how much of cultural change is governed not by active battle with the old vanguard, but mere boredom with it. “Oh, Paul Graham’s tweeting again, who cares, I stopped reading his shit years ago.” Stephanie Coontz mentioned this phenomenon in passing, in The Way We Never Were-she remembered how her Greatest Generation mother thought The Feminine Mystique was a revelation. Her mother nattered to her on the phone about all the ways The System held women down, and she-couldn’t be more bored. Blah blah, the system held women down, okay whatever, she was college and it was the 60s and she was busy getting dates and passing tests and joining clubs and making her own way in the system, which had, bit by bit, already begun to change.)
ANYWAY. So Le Guin beats a few old hobby horses here and there, but overall she’s still an engaging and delightful essayist, and this collection is great. A few standouts, to me, were “The Beast in the Book” (a reflection on the significance of animals and animal transformations in literature, particularly children’s literature, and with a particular focus on The Once and Future King), “Learning to Write Science Fiction from Virginia Woolf” (short, but moving), and “Living in a Work of Art” (a really lovely portrait of her childhood home). The book reviews, too, are all lovely, and damn near all of them convinced me to go buy or request the book from the library immediately, so I’ll report back on her taste in a few months, haha.
Oh, also her essay on abortion was stunning.
BONUS ROUND: COMICS
I impulse-read a bunch of random comics/manga of highly varying quality these past two months!
I Hear the Sunspot
Eh. Very light boy’s-love-ish romance story between a deaf dude and some other guy in college. It wasn’t offensively bad, but didn’t seem to ascend beyond the level of a Very Special Episode.
Halfway through I found myself thinking, "y'know, this really seems like a disability narrative played straight, rather than an actual boy's love thing or whatever." Then the author's notes at the end specifically mentioned that, apparently, she submitted the original version to her publisher, her publisher said “hey this is really good, but uh, this is a BL magazine, did you put any actual boy’s love in there?” and she was like OH SHIT and jammed in a final chapter with some actual romance. Called it.
Go With the Clouds: North by Northwest by Aki Irie (Volume One)
I already gushed about this one in a strange, sideways sort of way. For those who can’t be bothered to read my full-on incoherent rambling, the short version is probably something like: “This is a gorgeous manga with an intensely unique setting and I wanted to fall into every page. The conceit is clever and, modulo a few mildly-distasteful off-color jokes, I’m hooked by the setup. Will report back in August whether Volume Two lives up to what’s here.” Oh, and also, yes I bought it because of the birds on the cover, do you know who I am.
Seconds by Bryan Lee O’Malley
Hey, did you know Bryan Lee O’Malley wrote more comics after finishing Scott Pilgrim vs. The World? I sure didn’t!
Seconds is a standalone graphic novel, and both the art and humor styles are comfy and familiar if you’re a Scott Pilgrim fan. While it didn’t quite have the frenetic action and story highs that I remember from Scott Pilgrim (I adore the series, but it’s been years since I read it, so my memory’s fuzzy), it’s still perfectly fine.
Actually, I can put a finger on why it’s just fine, to me.
See, our main character, Katie, is introduced as a struggling, striving, stressed twentysomething. She’s a bang-up chef who singlehandedly transformed her first restaurant into the hottest place in town; now she’s trying to start a new restaurant, one that’ll be her own. Of course shit’s going down-the repairs on the venue for the new restaurant are taking too long and taking up too much money, her boyfriend broke up with her a while back, one of her best line chefs has a not-quite-appropriate crush on her, and so on.
So the story’s whole schtick, right, is that Katie finds some magic mushrooms, and she can eat one to get a “do-over” on something in her life. She starts out with just “don’t make the mistake I made this morning”; obviously she gets carried away and starts trying to fix stuff that goes way further back. In particular: she uses a re-do to avoid breaking up with her boyfriend.
So she wakes up in a new universe, where she didn’t break up with the boyfriend. But also, she doesn’t own her own restaurant anymore. He’s the “co-owner”, but really he’s calling all the shots, and they chose a design that’s not her own, and he’s doing a worse job dealing with the contractors and getting repairs done, and when she tries to talk to the contractors they get annoyed, because they talk to the boyfriend, not her.
I expected Katie to think: well, damn, turns out breaking up with him was a good idea. I expected her to try and revert the choice right away, because even in the struggling, striving, stressed universe, she was fulfilled. Maybe unhappy, maybe wigged out, but she was really alive.
Does this make me a cold bitch? I dunno. I expect a partner to be a multiplicative force, not a subtractive one. I think that just makes me idealistic, if anything.
But that’s the ending I wanted. The ending you get instead isn’t awful, but it’s just too have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too, and it just doesn’t cut to the core of anything I particularly think or feel or know to be true.
This book is a resounding counterexample to that old adage of "write what you know."
I loved Dazai's "Schoolgirl" even though the narrator was so unlike the author himself, and the author nailed the perspective perfectly: I felt very sharp memories of what it’s like to be a thirteen-year-old girl, reading it. By contrast, Dazai's protagonist here is almost autobiographical (bookish suicidally depressed rich kid from Hokkaido; am I describing Dazai or our protagonist?), and while some of Dazai’s razor-sharp insights are still there (I enjoyed his strangely-motivated childhood friendship with Takeichi, and wondered quite a lot about his good-for-nothing drinking buddy Horiki), it meanders into a rather unappealing of self-absorption and rumination. And the behavior of the cast of characters around the protagonist is a little bewildering-and, I mean, the protagonist himself is bewildered, so it makes sense. But I found myself wondering if I needed translator’s notes (was I missing something), or if this was just a symptom of the character’s all-too-evident myopia and depression, or just flat writing, and it just didn’t work for me.
It may simply be a matter of form. Schoolgirl kept such a tight, documentarian focus on the minute-to-minute thoughts of the protagonist that the structure flowed effortlessly from there: the structure of a single day: quick beginning, languorous middle, wistful ending. A book written in the form of a journal is a dangerous thing: it meanders, it mopes, it focuses on feeling and pain, and if you don’t connect with that feeling and pain right off, there’s not much else to grasp.
The forward was interesting, pointing out (back in 1958!) that Japanese folk are just as Westernized as many European countries, based on the literature & education of their effete members, and recounting how his literary friends in the country get annoyed at being classified as “Japanese” or “Asian” or “World” literature. (Those barriers have broken down a bit, in the half-century since that writing, though not enough.)
The claim on the back cover is that this is one of the “ten bestselling books in Japan”-I’m not sure what metric they used, but it seems poor Dazai has since been whalloped by, among other things, Harry Potter and Who Moved My Cheese? Comparing it to Kokoro, the other Super Famous Classic Modern Japanese Novel TM I know about, might make an interesting exercise-I haven’t read Kokoro since high school, and both novels do the weird frame-narrative thing, but I think Kokoro touched me more, ironically, by having more distance between you and the story. I’ll probably be musing on all the different ways distance works in fiction, I guess, for a while.
(Oh, also, a reference to Christianity as a weirdo death-obsessed religion came up, as it did in the last Japanese novel I read-might just be a common characterization there?)
On Writing by Stephen King
Plenty who do can’t teach.
I’ve generally avoided the “how to write” genre in recent years, mainly because I was pretty sure those books didn’t have anything to teach me that I couldn’t figure out by just writing. That’s still true, actually, but going to a few one-day writing workshops this past year convinced me that’s there’s still value in hearing a writer say “here’s what it’s like for me; does it work like that for you.” I came out of a Henry Lien workshop with all sorts of neat tricks for imbuing fresh life into limp stories (like, all his little parlor games and tricks were presented in the form of, “so here’s the thing I did that produced the idea for story such-and-such that got published a year later,” which sure felt practical and fun); I came out of a Steifvater workshop feeling quite vindicated in trying out some different ways of approaching very long works (tl;dr for a long time, she couldn’t figure out the difference between the novels she was able to finish and the ones she wasn’t able to finish-she claims that she actually has to brainstorm and think for a very long time, because she needs to know exactly what kind of novel she wants, in terms of mood/theme/etc, before ever putting a word to the page-only the desperate drive to make that extremely vivid vision real can push the novel through-which surely isn’t how it works for everyone, but resonated for me, and helped me understand how I can barf up 20 pages in a day for something I’ve ruminated over for ages, but taper out on things that seem like they “should” be better ideas).
Anyway. So those workshops were useful. All King really does here is bark Strunk and White at you for 200 pages, which, yawn.
I don’t mean that as a potshot at King; I picked the book up because I know the dude can write a book that sells, I’m not sitting over here being a literary snob. But it seems he’s better at doing than teaching, alas.
The first hundred pages, strangely but somewhat delightfully, are just a memoir of his life, and that bit was quite fun. That part may be worth reading if you’re a King fan; skip the rest.
The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner
I was delightfully surprised that
lavendre read this right about the same time as me :) I’m not sure I have much to add to her review. These books were sold to me as “Game-of-Thrones-style plotting, but sans grimdark, and targeted at YA,” which doesn’t fully capture the spirit of the books (they have a delicious Mediterranean setting all their own, and it feels much more like an adventurous romp than GoT ever did, even when the politicking is thick), but it’s certainly a fair enough pitch that it compelled me to read, and I enjoyed the ride. The Queen of Attolia herself is a really fun character (her super keen awareness of her delicate circumstances, as a brutal ruler of a tiny kingdom, was so delicious), and I really hope we see more of her in the next book (which I have already checked out from the library!).
Words Are My Matter by Ursula Le Guin
As a 90's kid, I adored fantasy and science fiction with no inferiority complex about it whatsoever: the world was already shaping itself to meet my tastes. I saw Fellowship of the Ring in theaters with my dad, when I was eleven. By the time Return of the King came out just a few years later, all my teenybopper friends were standing in line with me. The closest thing to a literary snob in my life was, uh, Time magazine’s list of the “100 Best Novels of All Time,” which in hindsight was full of awful selections (The Fountainhead?!?! The fucking Fountainhead?!?!), but it was all I knew to judge The Best by at the time, and Lord of the Rings was on there, so of course I thought fantasy and science fiction were Real Literature, with Real Hollywood Budgets, who the hell thought otherwise?
I mention this because in Words Are My Matter, Le Guin has several essays where she still-still!-is beating the drum about how fantasy is Real Literature, and all these snobs don’t understand. I don’t deny that was very much the case when she was in her writing prime, but it’s amusing how often public intellectuals fail to notice when they’ve won, the world has shifted to their point of view, they can move on!
Amusing, but not awful or bad. Compare Le Guin’s quirky insistence against, say, Paul Graham, the venture capitalist who got high on his own supply and still insists that nerds are some embattled minority entitled to uproot everything they can sling Javascript at despite the fact that oh my God the year is 2019 and Google is worth a bajillionty dollars. Or compare against Jared Diamond, once-edgy pop-anthropology guy who’s just making up random theories for whatever now.
(An interesting corollary to this: it’s interesting how much of cultural change is governed not by active battle with the old vanguard, but mere boredom with it. “Oh, Paul Graham’s tweeting again, who cares, I stopped reading his shit years ago.” Stephanie Coontz mentioned this phenomenon in passing, in The Way We Never Were-she remembered how her Greatest Generation mother thought The Feminine Mystique was a revelation. Her mother nattered to her on the phone about all the ways The System held women down, and she-couldn’t be more bored. Blah blah, the system held women down, okay whatever, she was college and it was the 60s and she was busy getting dates and passing tests and joining clubs and making her own way in the system, which had, bit by bit, already begun to change.)
ANYWAY. So Le Guin beats a few old hobby horses here and there, but overall she’s still an engaging and delightful essayist, and this collection is great. A few standouts, to me, were “The Beast in the Book” (a reflection on the significance of animals and animal transformations in literature, particularly children’s literature, and with a particular focus on The Once and Future King), “Learning to Write Science Fiction from Virginia Woolf” (short, but moving), and “Living in a Work of Art” (a really lovely portrait of her childhood home). The book reviews, too, are all lovely, and damn near all of them convinced me to go buy or request the book from the library immediately, so I’ll report back on her taste in a few months, haha.
Oh, also her essay on abortion was stunning.
BONUS ROUND: COMICS
I impulse-read a bunch of random comics/manga of highly varying quality these past two months!
I Hear the Sunspot
Eh. Very light boy’s-love-ish romance story between a deaf dude and some other guy in college. It wasn’t offensively bad, but didn’t seem to ascend beyond the level of a Very Special Episode.
Halfway through I found myself thinking, "y'know, this really seems like a disability narrative played straight, rather than an actual boy's love thing or whatever." Then the author's notes at the end specifically mentioned that, apparently, she submitted the original version to her publisher, her publisher said “hey this is really good, but uh, this is a BL magazine, did you put any actual boy’s love in there?” and she was like OH SHIT and jammed in a final chapter with some actual romance. Called it.
Go With the Clouds: North by Northwest by Aki Irie (Volume One)
I already gushed about this one in a strange, sideways sort of way. For those who can’t be bothered to read my full-on incoherent rambling, the short version is probably something like: “This is a gorgeous manga with an intensely unique setting and I wanted to fall into every page. The conceit is clever and, modulo a few mildly-distasteful off-color jokes, I’m hooked by the setup. Will report back in August whether Volume Two lives up to what’s here.” Oh, and also, yes I bought it because of the birds on the cover, do you know who I am.
Seconds by Bryan Lee O’Malley
Hey, did you know Bryan Lee O’Malley wrote more comics after finishing Scott Pilgrim vs. The World? I sure didn’t!
Seconds is a standalone graphic novel, and both the art and humor styles are comfy and familiar if you’re a Scott Pilgrim fan. While it didn’t quite have the frenetic action and story highs that I remember from Scott Pilgrim (I adore the series, but it’s been years since I read it, so my memory’s fuzzy), it’s still perfectly fine.
Actually, I can put a finger on why it’s just fine, to me.
See, our main character, Katie, is introduced as a struggling, striving, stressed twentysomething. She’s a bang-up chef who singlehandedly transformed her first restaurant into the hottest place in town; now she’s trying to start a new restaurant, one that’ll be her own. Of course shit’s going down-the repairs on the venue for the new restaurant are taking too long and taking up too much money, her boyfriend broke up with her a while back, one of her best line chefs has a not-quite-appropriate crush on her, and so on.
So the story’s whole schtick, right, is that Katie finds some magic mushrooms, and she can eat one to get a “do-over” on something in her life. She starts out with just “don’t make the mistake I made this morning”; obviously she gets carried away and starts trying to fix stuff that goes way further back. In particular: she uses a re-do to avoid breaking up with her boyfriend.
So she wakes up in a new universe, where she didn’t break up with the boyfriend. But also, she doesn’t own her own restaurant anymore. He’s the “co-owner”, but really he’s calling all the shots, and they chose a design that’s not her own, and he’s doing a worse job dealing with the contractors and getting repairs done, and when she tries to talk to the contractors they get annoyed, because they talk to the boyfriend, not her.
I expected Katie to think: well, damn, turns out breaking up with him was a good idea. I expected her to try and revert the choice right away, because even in the struggling, striving, stressed universe, she was fulfilled. Maybe unhappy, maybe wigged out, but she was really alive.
Does this make me a cold bitch? I dunno. I expect a partner to be a multiplicative force, not a subtractive one. I think that just makes me idealistic, if anything.
But that’s the ending I wanted. The ending you get instead isn’t awful, but it’s just too have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too, and it just doesn’t cut to the core of anything I particularly think or feel or know to be true.