First post for the month of July (and my last for a while, as I’ll be travelling next week) and it’s time for my favourite set of literary links, namely the Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate. This month’s starting point is a book that has had everyone buzzing, Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, so of course I’ve completely ignored it. Not that I’m a reverse snob, but I like to wait a little for the buzz to die down. Besides, the whole trad wife concept annoys me, so I may never get to read it.
Sticking to the ‘wives’ theme, my first link is Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives, the original feminist horror story. It’s been a long time since I read it, but I remember both wincing and laughing at it.
Another book that made me wince with self-awareness and which mixes satire with melancholy social commentary is Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection. While this is not the Berlin that I live in, by and large, I do recognise some of those characters or situations, and may occasionally have voiced such opinions myself 😉
For some reason, I don’t read as many Italian authors as I might, although I’ve spent some time learning Italian and love the country and the culture. So my next link is to another Italian author who is experiencing a revival and success at the moment, Natalia Ginzburg and her book of essays Little Virtues.
Ginzburg was also a politician and an MP, so my next link is to another author who was also politically active, namely Mario Vargas Llosa, who was even a candidate for the presidency of Peru at one point. His controversial participation in the inquiry regarding the massacre of eight journalists in Uchuraccay in 1983 resulted in the novel Who Killed Palomino Molero?, in which he tried to exorcise some of the demons he no doubt had to struggle with for the rest of his life.
Book titles with question marks have fallen out of favour lately, but one that I remember clearly is Madam, Will You Talk?by Mary Stewart, a perfect slice of holiday escapism (and suspense) set in the south of France.
From Avignon it’s just a hop, skip and jump to Marseille, and my final link is to the author who IS Marseille as far as I’m concerned, namely Jean-Claude Izzo and his renowned Marseille Trilogy.
So this month’s literary journey has taken me from the American suburbs to Berlin, to Italy, Peru and the south of France. Where will your literary links take you?
This week has been somewhat better, thank goodness, but last weekend we had the hottest days Berlin has experienced since records started. So of course I had to contemplate a few houses built for tropical climates… The key here seems to be having space for the air to circulate, shutters for the hottest time of day and lots of greenery. Which makes me want to rant about city planners who neglect greenery… but that’s perhaps for another post.
If you’ve got trees all around the house, then you’re less likely to be overlooked and also less likely to sweat. From Pinterest
I’ve always loved Brazilian architects, and this example from Tropitecht is no exception. I do wonder if the water attracts mosquitoes though, as I seem to be their preferred food.
Bring back porches or fully outside lower floors that remain shady. From BJA Architect.
Palm trees, pool and air circulation. Matandara Clarke Architects.
There’s even a site and set of guidelines for planning and building a contemporary tropical house and I think we might all need that very soon.
I always get a little distracted in June, since it’s a birthday month for me, my younger son, several of my friends… this year, there has also been severe heat and a Football World Cup to contend with, so my reading and reviewing has suffered quite a bit.
I only read eight books this month and one of those was a re-read (The Investigation), while another was an anthology of brief texts about lazing around on the weekend (Lange schlafen), which I can dip in and out of. I found this one at my local second-hand bookstore, but it’s actually a new book and contains texts by the obvious suspects such as Kurt Tucholsky, Christa Wolf, Klaus Mann and Kafka for the German-speaking world and Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf for the English-speaking one, but also some surprises such as Ovid, Nick Cave and Bolu Babalola.
All but one of the rest of the books fell into my #10BooksofSummer reading challenge and did get reviewed: three books about Berlin, a Romanian and a Japanese book. I also read an enjoyable, fable-like book by a young Swiss author – not out yet, but I hope it gets translated into English as well at some point.
The most memorable book of the month that wasn’t a reread was Ulrike Sterblich’s memoir of growing up in a divided city. It was more fun and observant than the books about the adults living in Kreuzberg on the brink of the fall of the Wall, Pleasured and Herr Lehmann.
As for the most memorable activity this month, could it be being doused by the police water cannons at the Brandenburg Gate (to cool tourists off, not to scare away protestors)? No, it was the last Berlin concert of the rock band The Rose, whom I only discovered about a year ago and now are sadly going to go on hiatus (and probably do solo projects).
It’s been a busy time, celebrating my birthday, going to The Rose concert, sightseeing with friends visiting Berlin on the hottest weekend on record. But I’ve also read Books 5 and 6 in my 20 (or is that 10?) Books of Summer reading challenge. Both fit into my categories: Berlin and Far East.
5. Ulrike Sterblich: Die halbe Stadt, die es nicht mehr gibt (Half the City, Which No Longer Exists), Rowohlt, 2012.
A little gem among my books about Berlin, which I think I found in a second-hand bookshop by accident. The author is about my age and grew up in that strange little island in the middle of the German Democratic Republic called West Berlin. This is an account of her life there, attending a Catholic school, commuting via the underground (and sometimes forgetting to get off at the right place and going through the rather scary ghost stations of East Berlin), listening to music, falling in and out of love, gossiping about friends. It is and it isn’t a typical teenager experience – we can relate to those high school years, but there are some very specific circumstances which bring the political into everyday life.
Each chapter is named after an area or site in Berlin, and there are brief updates at the end of each chapter about what happened to that area after unification. In many cases, the club or radio programme or building she mentions closed down or was pulled down, but in other instances, it’s merely been repurposed and it’s fascinating to see the evolution of a city.
I really loved this book, it had charm and wit, the stories were often funny, occasionally sad. Written at a time when the old stories and memories are in danger of disappearing. I acquired this book in January 2024, when I was already planning to move to Berlin, but the move itself and the reading of the book took much longer than I thought.
6. Lee Jung-Myung: The Investigation, transl. Kim Chi-Young, Mantle, 2014.
I talked about this book at the Korean Language Speech Contest, because it was my first encounter with Korean literature back in 2014, when I reviewed it for Crime Fiction Lover. I loved it back then, and it was the catalyst for awakening my interest in Korean culture more generally. It is a fictional account of the last few months in the life of the poet Yun Dong-ju, who died at the age of 27 in mysterious circumstances in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War.
The story is told from the point of view of a young, bookish Japanese guard who starts to fall under the spell of the poet, and finds that his predecessor, the brutal, initially illiterate Sugiyama, was equally fascinated by his poetry and started to neglect his censorship duties in order to read more of his work.
I wrote back then that this was not really a crime novel (and in fact the plot twists are often quite obvious), but a book about man’s eternal quest for meaning, beauty and the need to be understood. It is also about how art and words can keep us human and give us hope, even in the most dire of circumstances.
I was not sure if I would still love it as much upon rereading, and perhaps this time around I was more aware that the prose itself was often bland and pedestrian, which is a bit of a drawback in a book that is all about the beauty of language. I do wonder if it has something to do with the translation, but I haven’t read any other books translated by this particular translator, so I cannot be uncharitable. Nevertheless, this book still has a fond place in my heart and introduced me to one of Korea’s most beloved poets.
Thank you to Emma at Words and Peace for keeping this reading meme going. It’s an excellent way to reflect upon what we’ve read so far this year. Although this year I’ve read far less than in previous years, so I may struggle a little to keep my choices distinct for all six categories.
Six Non-Fiction Books
Given that I don’t usually read much non-fiction, I’m surprised I managed to populate this category and that I actually enjoyed most of them.
James Muldoon: Love Machines – riveting study about the relationships people build with AI
Gabriela Adamesteanu: Meserii nerecomandate femeilor (Unsuitable Jobs for Women) – memoir by one of our most impressive Romanian authors
Hugh Battye: A Tale of Two Chinas – a thorough and yet entertaining analysis of the urban/rural divide in China and lives of ethnic minorities
Wladimir Kaminer: Russian Disco – tales of everyday lunacy on the streets of Berlin (that’s the subtitle and it lives up to it)
Uli Hannemann: Neukölln, Mon Amour – similar in spirit to Russian Disco, but written by a German, this one I did not enjoy, as I found it rather patronising and trying too hard to be funny
Six Authors That Are New to Me
And I’ll probably want to read more by them.
Agnes Owens: A Working Mother – what a deadpan, dangerously subversive voice
Anjet Daanje: The Remembered Soldier (also fits into the most memorable category)
Philip Hensher: Pleasured – can’t say I loved the book, but it was an interesting snapshot of Berlin
Takagi Akimitsu: The Informer – a classic of Japanese crime literature
Masatsugu Ono: At the Edge of the Woods – an enigmatic little tale, translated by the much missed Juliet Winters Carpenter
Laura T. Ilea: N-am chef să mor– contemporary Romanian author grappling with universal themes and experiences
Six Authors I’ve Enjoyed Before (But Not So Much This Book)
Sometimes authors disappoint you – well, not all their books can be brilliant.
Pascal Mercier: Lea – a slight book, perhaps too straightforward a story
Volker Kutscher: Rath – towards the end of the series, things started getting a bit repetitive and the arch-nemesis story got wearisome
Daniel Kehlmann: The Director– wanted to love this more, and it worked in parts, but it felt a bit uneven and overdone
Mathias Enard: The Deserters – not bad, but the two stories never resonated with each other to my mind (plus, he’s got us used to very high standards)
Gwendoline Riley: The Palm House – despite her customary sharp eye for human foibles and dialogue, it left me a little cold
Shin Kyung-Sook: The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness – again, not a bad book, but proves that fiction is better/more moving than memoir
Six Books That Led Me to the Past
Elinor Glyn: Three Weeks – goodness me, what an overwrought piece of Edwardian prose destined to shock people in salons all over England!
Yokomitsu Riichi: Shanghai – uncomfortable and fascinating piece of Japanese occupation history and literature
Olga Ravn: The Wax Child – our International Booker Shadow Panel winner
Murata Kiyoko: A Woman of Pleasure – the making of a courtesan in early 20th century Japan
Sophie van Llewyn: Bottled Goods – a short trip down memory lane to Romania under the socialist regime
Six Books That Were Most Forgettable
A bit uncharitable, but these felt like fast food: most of them slid easily down my throat, but didn’t leave a lasting impression. Good for reading while commuting, flying, or on the beach.
David Magarshack: Big Ben Strikes Eleven – started well but got bogged down in personal details
Ia Genberg: Small Comfort – just not my kind of author
Daniel Glattauer: Die spürst du nicht– this could have been a thought-provoking book but the execution fell far short of its concept – that will teach me to read Spiegel bestellers!
Rene Karabash: She Who Remains – sorry, I know many people loved this, but I didn’t find myself thinking about it afterwards
Park Eun-Woo: Le procès des otages – hostages, negotiations and revenge thriller – felt more like a film script than a book, insufficient characterisation
Six Most Memorable Books
Let’s finish on a positive note though!
Murakami Ryu: From the Fatherland, with Love – alternative reality, terrorism, political shenanigans and weirdos – what’s not to love?
Ferenc Karinthy (whose name should also be in the Japanese order – Karinthy Fernec): Metropole – stranger in a strange place, with yet another of my favourite topics – linguistic philosophising
Anjet Daanje: The Remembered Soldier – intricate psychological exploration of war, marriage, heroism, memory
Mo Yan: Red Sorghum – I may not have liked it, and found it very difficult to read the endless descriptions of relentless violence, but it certainly isn’t easy to forget
Lavinia Braniște: Camping – at first it feels like a collection of vignettes and relatable problems, but it slowly builds up to a portrait of any immigrant who’d always intended to return to the home country but is no longer sure s/he belongs there
It’s a wonder what a little ambition and focus can achieve – I’ve now read two more books that fit into my #20BooksofSummer category, and, since my next one is Dream of the Red Chamber, which is a bit massive, it’s just as well that I can write two more reviews now (and that I’ve in fact chosen to do only 10 Books of Summer). The reviews will be quite brief, because, to be honest, neither of the two books wowed me. I think they were both trying to achieve more in the terms of social or philosophical commentary and that affected the flow of the story or the characterisation.
Philip Hensher: Pleasured, HarperPerennial, 1998
Described as a ‘literary and cinematic, intimate and epic’ ambitious novel, this one is about the year 1989 in Berlin through the eyes of two men and a young woman who happen to come together on New Year’s Eve through a car share trip from Cologne to Berlin. Very similar in subject matter to Sven Regener’s book, it describes a drifting sort of lifestyle, and the major historical event here too gets relegated to the background while the self-absorbed characters worry about their personal lives.
The difference here, however, is that the characters do have some political aims – to fight capitalism and gentrification by throwing paint, blood and pig’s heads in cafes, for example, or bringing about the fall of the GDR by getting East Berlin hooked on drugs. Needless to say, both misguided actions descend into farce. The cafe owners are Turkish so the incident is blamed on right-wing groups. Friedrich cares more about money than politics, so he decides to substitute the Ecstasy pills with paracetamol, and run away with the money from Mr Picker, the rather shady Englishman who so desperately longs for the fall of the GDR.
Although the author does seem to have an eye for describing the streets and bars of Berlin at the time, his characters seem a little less convincing and at times a bit of a caricature. However, there’s no denying that some of the dialogue is quite funny – the kind of humour that would appeal to English people though, rather than Germans, which is why it feels a little unrealistic to me.
Here’s one of the funniest scenes from the book, when the Englishman Picker and the German Friedrich are brainstorming ways to bring about the downfall of the GDR. Can you spot which one of them feels more English?
‘Better to use something very small, that pretty soon you could persuade them they couldn’t do without.’ [said Friedrich]
‘Drugs.’
Friedrich looked at Picker; he seemed overwhelmingly excited with his excellent idea…
‘Not very moral, of course.’
‘No, but perfect. You know East Germany.’
‘I think so.’
‘You know what they lack in the DDR.’
‘Freedom. Fun. Money. Food. Whatever. Go on.’
‘Pleasure.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘So anyway,’ Picker started. ‘We find some really reliable seller of drugs…’
‘A dealer?’
‘Sorry, can you say the word?’
‘Dealer,’ Friedrich said carefully. Picker got out a small red notebook from his pocket, from which a stub of pencil on a string dangled. He made a little note… ‘Spell it, please. I don’t know the word,’ he said. Friedrich spelt it. ‘That’s the English word,’ Picker said.
Laura T. Ilea: N-am chef să mor (I don’t feel like dying), Cartier, 2026
When I said the book is set in Romania, actually, most of it is set elsewhere: Montreal, Machu Picchu, the US and some South American jungle. The author is Romanian but has been living in Canada for quite a while, and her main protagonist, the 42 year old journalist Anne Legendre, is in exactly the same situation. Her parents are still in Romania, and her much-loved father has been ill for quite some time. She is a single mum (we find out very little about her son’s father) and her 19 year old son seems to be succumbing to the influence of the manosphere.
The author does capture a certain malaise of a contemporary 40-something woman stuck between cultures, with her elderly parents on a different continent, who has sacrificed family for her career and is now worried this may have caused her son’s estrangement, and who fears that this may be her last chance to have another child, although she has no truly suitable candidate to be the father of her second child.
So far, so familiar, and I thought the whole ayahuasca scene and other extreme travel accounts were the author’s effort to show how well she can keep up with those Western trends. Perhaps this type of soul-searching is less familiar to Romanian readers, but to me it’s something I’ve grown a little bored with after seeing it so often in essays, autofiction and films.
Where the book does succeed, or at least where it moves me most, is the way she calls her home country ‘my father’s country’ and associates it with the childhood trips they used to take together. There are lyrical descriptions of moments of bonding… but she is also realistic about how much she has distanced herself from Romania. [My rapid and rough translation below.]
I was on the plane going to Montreal and was saying loud and clear how glad I was that I was able to escape. Because, no matter that it was coursing through my veins, my father’s country was still rejecting me. With its innate resistance towards foreigners, towards women, towards minorities, with its children who were living without parents, with the parents who were working themselves to exhaustion abroad, with its violence and anger, with its frustrated people, who rejected political and environmental issues, because they wanted to punish corrupt politicians. That was their only joy. My son couldn’t understand why my heart would skip a beat every time I heard my language and how I’d take part in futile demonstrations, without growing tired or despairing.
I was reading this book to see if it might be suitable to pitch to a publisher to be translated, but I don’t think I’m passionate enough about it to attempt that. It was interesting enough to see how contemporary Romanian fiction is embedding all those foreign influences (and relatable as a Romanian a little older than the main protagonist, living abroad, with inreasingly fragile elderly parents far away), but it’s not as outstanding as some other projects which I’ve been peddling around for a while and still haven’t had any takers.
I can never resist participating in what is probably one of my favourite bookish memes to write and to read on other people’s blogs – the Six Degrees of Literary Separation – or wild association – as hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best.
This month we start off with an old favourite author of mine – a must-read for anyone who grew up in Vienna – Stefan Zweig and his posthumously published fragment of a novel which has been translated as The Post Office Girl.
That is a gift for my first link, which is to another famous posthumously published book, one of my favourite books ever, which I have in multiple translations. It’s The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov and it’s probably not its first appearance on my six degrees post. I’ve even written a post about the various covers. It’s a shame that one of my favourite covers is NOT by one of my favourite translators.
The next link is to another book featuring a giant cat – Bagheera in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book. Long before I read the book with my sons, I loved the animated film and still know every word to each of the songs. The live action remake wasn’t too bad, compared to all the other live actions which followed.
Speaking of animations, I recently rewatched the definitely NOT for children Perfect Blue on the big screen, but I haven’t read the book it is based on Perfect Blue: Complete Metamorphosis by Yoshikazu Takeuchi. It seems a bit hard to find in English translation, although there is a sequel to it which is more readily available on Abe Books, for instance.
For my next link, I’ll stick to books with blue covers rather than simply the word ‘blue’ in the title. I believe I read this one but cannot remember much about it since I didn’t review it at the time, which is a shame. It’s The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman.
Lighthouses and lighthouse keepers play an important part in the Stedman book, but I avoided the obvious link with the Moomins, which I probably have used many times already in a Six Degrees post. So instead I opted for the lighthouse designer/engineer featured in Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss, probably the first book by Sarah Moss which I ever read. An intriguing historical novel featuring Cornwall, Japan, a flawed marriage and lighthouses – what more could one want?
For my final link, I’ll admit somewhat shamefacedly to a mistake of mine. I keep mixing up the title of the Sarah Moss novel with another one by Valeria Luiselli, namely Lost Children Archive. I still haven’t read it, although I eagerly downloaded it when it first came out. Other than the title, there is no similarity at all between the two books.
So this month my Six Degrees of Literary Travels have taken me to Russia, India, Japan, Australia, Japan again and Cornwall, and the United States. Where will your Six Degrees take you?
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by Jana @ That Artsy Reader Girl and I occasionally join in when I can.
The topic this week is:Books I Can’t Believe I’ve Never Read. These can be super popular books you’re surprised you haven’t read yet, books that have been on your to-read list forever, review copies you’ve been sitting on for a decade, books you were so excited to get your hands on and haven’t read yet. I’ve got quite a few of those, that I was so adamant I needed to acquire IMMEDIATELY and then they never made it off my shelves onto my bedside table. But I’ll also add another sub-category: ‘Books other people couldn’t believe I hadn’t read, so I had to do it and rather regretted it afterwards’.
The three that fall into this last sub-category (and that will teach me never to rely on buzz alone) are:
Now for the more interesting ones, that I look forward to reading… some day… Many of these are on my Kindle, because out of sight means out of mind.
Don Winslow: The Cartel – a Netgalley request which has been lingering there for 11 years now!
Joyce Carol Oates: The Dollmaster and Other Tales of Terror – I’m still trying to find a way in to reading this author, and I thought short stories might be an easier start
Colson Whitehead: The Underground Railroad – ten years on my Kindle, keep hearing good things about it
Viet Thanh Nguyen: The Refugees – you know how I can’t resist a novel about immigrants, but why have I not got around to reading it?
Bernardine Evaristo: Girl, Woman, Other – have even seen the author talk a couple of times and loved other books by her, but somehow…
Kapka Kassabova: To the Lake – Balkanic history is certainly something I like reading about
Cheon Myeong-Kwan: Whale – I was waiting for the buzz to die down and then forgot about it – but it’s only been three years, a youth on my list!
I’m setting off at high speed, because I fear I will be slowing down dramatically later on. I started reading these two books in May but finished them on 1st of June, so they fall into my approximate and very lazy #20BooksofSummer plans.
Sven Regener: Berlin Blues, transl. John Brownjohn, Vintage, 2004
I had no idea that Sven Regener was a musician, but it turns out that Berlin Blues (called Herr Lehmann in German, far less evocative) is his first novel, published in 2001. He adapted it as a screenplay and later wrote a number of prequels and sequels to the Lehmann story.
The story is set in summer/autumn of 1989 in West Berlin, when you’d think that people could feel something explosive in the air. However, Frank Lehmann (jokingly called Herr (Mr) Lehmann by his friends, because word had got around that he’d soon turn thirty) is more concerned with his personal life: he’s working at a Kreuzberg bar, he’s not made much of himself, he’s not very successful with women either, and he’s told his parents he is a manager at a restaurant because he doesn’t want to disappoint them. He drifts into a vague relationship with the chef Katrin, and he goes out drinking with his best friend Karl, who also works at the bar but aspires to be an artist.
The aimless, ambitionless drifter lifestyle and series of linked anecdotes of city life and types reminded me very much of the earlier Berlin novel Fabian by Erich Kästner. This too is a depiction of a stagnant city and a stagnant group of people, perhaps less desperately poor and violent than in the 1930s. The terms that best describe Herr Lehmann are probably ‘hapless loser’. He overthinks everything and ends up in farcical situations. The book opens with a hilarious drunken encounter with a dog. Then there is the chapter where he tries to get on time to his parents’ hotel on the Kudamm and everything goes wrong. He also fails miserably in his attempt to visit East Berlin to meet his long-lost aunt. The fall of the Wall is a sidenote in the final scene – less impressive than shown on TV. The dialogue is often full of banter and in-jokes which must have been a challenge to translate – and not just to an English-speaking audience, but possibly to a lot of the rest of Germany as well, who had not experienced that particular hothouse of encircled West Berlin populated by misfits and loafers in the 1980s.
Yet there are serious moments too in all of this absurdity. Karl gets anxious about the works he has to produce for an upcoming exhibition and starts behaving erratically. It’s Lehmann who tries to take him home to rest and ultimately ends up taking him to the hospital – then realises that Karl has no one else to help, and that he knows nothing about his family or where he’s from. The drinking buddies are actually not all that close, relationships come and go and linger in a limbo, and it’s easy to get lost in the big city.
This is the evocation of a particular disengaged generation ”that came of age between the crushing of the Baader-Meinhof underground and the demolition of the Wall’ (as the blurb on the back describes this), and it’s interesting to compare this with the chic expats thirty years later portrayed in Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection.
2. Murata Kiyoko: A Woman of Pleasure, transl. Juliet Winters Carpenter, Footnote Press, 2024
This is my homage to the translation skills of Juliet Winters Carpenter, who translated many of my favourite Japanese books by women writers (Enchi Fumiko, Tawara Machi, Minae Mizumura) and also the newest translation of one of my favourite novels of all time, No Longer Human by Dazai Osamu. A Woman of Pleasure book was published in Japan in 2013 and won the Yomiuri Prize there, but it’s historical fiction, set in 1903 in Kumamoto on the island of Kyushu. Fifteen year old Aoi Ichi stems from a family of women divers (known as ama) and fishermen from Iwojima. Her family are very poor and sell her off to a luxury brothel in Kumamoto, where she is teamed with the reigning queen and highest earner of the establishment, known as the ‘oiran’ – and expected to become one herself.
The other girls are surprised, since she seems very uncouth and can barely speak in intelligible Japanese. However, the Shinonome brothel is a touch more enlightened and respectable than others: the girls are sent to school to learn to read and write, in addition to also learning about sexual techniques. They are not expected to start prostitution until the age of 17, they are allowed to rest on their ‘red silk days’ (when they are on their period) and they are regularly checked for venereal diseases.
However, Ichi is not quite the submissive, downtrodden type and her non-conformity means she forfeits her chance to become an oiran, and becomes an ordinary prostitute instead. Despite her youth and inexperience, and despite her bitter disappointments (a young man from her hometown whom she thought of as an ally, her father whom she missed and hoped would be concerned how she was doing), she makes friends among the other women and won’t let herself be brought down.
Hearing rumours of workers’ strikes in Nagasaki, and learning about money and social justice from their dedicated teacher Tetsuko, the daughter of a former samurai, they organise a strike of their own and make their bid for freedom. This last part is apparently based on real events, although nothing is known about the fate of the historical strikers.
This is a fascinating book, and clearly the author has done a lot of research. I wonder to what extent the way the knowledge of the inner workings of a woman’s body is passed on verbally has ever been captured in writing quite like this before. And how Murata captured that knowledge (perhaps from talking to former courtesans, although the type described in this book is obsolete by now). Maybe a little too much research is visible when she talks about the writing of educator Fukuzawa Yukichi, who is initially venerated by the teacher Tetsuko, but then ultimately disappoints her when she realises he does not consider the women who work in the pleasure districts to be human at all. According to him, even those who eventually married into good families were still disgraceful and not fit for the company of fine ladies.
It’s been a long time since I read Memoirs of a Geisha (and I still haven’t read the response to that by the former geisha Iwasaki Mineo, whom Golden used for research purposes), but I felt this book was more realistic but not unbearably miserable, and did an excellent job in conveying female solidarity not just rivalry.
As for the translation, Juliet says in the afterword just how much of a challenge it was to convey the local dialect. Ichi herself is at times incomprehensible to the other women in the story and is scolded for using ‘bird talk’, but the translator felt that trying to replicate it with some English dialect or making her writing compositions barely readable would be too distracting for English readers, and I heartily agree with that.
I’ve gone a bit missing in action since I started my part-time job, while still doing all the other things I need and want to be doing (translating, editing, hip-hopping, Korean lessons plus lots of admin). Not that I actually work very long hours… but I’m just exhausted when I’m not working, and this has had an impact even on my reading, but especially on my reviewing. I was also laid low by the flu for a few days, and I just slept most of the time instead of reading. I don’t think I’ll do a lot more reading over the next few days, so let me write the wrap-up post now instead of my usual Friday Fun.
Eight books which took me to a total of six countries (or even seven, depending on how we count the travelling undertaken in Elinor Glyn’s novel). China and the UK were represented by two books each, then one each set in Romania, Germany (Berlin) and South Korea, and then finally Three Weeks which describes a young Englishman touring Switzerland and Italy. Only three of the books were in translation though, because the Romanian author Sophie Van Llewyn wrote Bottled Goods in English. The Russian author Kamier wrote Russian Disco in German but I actually read it in English translation (having bought it long before I moved to Berlin).
Hugh Battye’s bookA Tale of Two Chinas is non-fiction and based on the author’s many years spent in China, first learning the language and then completing his Ph.D. on ethnic and religious minorities there. The two Chinas he talks about is the urban vs. rural divide, and it was full of fascinating and detailed information that was entirely new to me, but also quite humorous and easy to read.
I’d read and enjoyed novels by Shin Kyung-Sook, but this one entitled The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness is pretty much a memoir (perhaps with a little poetic licence), about young people moving from the countryside to work in factories in Seoul and attending night schools in the 1970s and 80s against a complicated totalitarian political backdrop. The author (or her alter ego) keeps asking herself throughout why she finds it so difficult to write about that period and why she has almost wilfully forgotten her colleagues from that time. The answer, of course, is that it was too traumatic.
But if I thought that was depressing, then Red Sorghum by Mo Yan definitely trumped it. No amount of lyrical descriptions of the sorghum fields in all seasons could make up for the sheer brutality (against the oppressive Japanese forces, against other fighting factions, against neighbours, against animals) described in stomach-churning detail. There was a stench of blood on every page almost.
I read Big Ben Strikes Eleven intermittently while I was ill and, although it started off well enough, and I had high hopes of it becoming very political, it became a little too bogged down in family relationships and budding love stories and alibis. But it’s interesting that David Magarshack turned his hand to fiction as well.
Wladimir Kaminer left Russia for Berlin in 1990, when it was still possibly to leave the Soviet Union to go to GDR and then, upon unification of the two Germanys, remain there forever. The book Russian Disco includes a little bit of autobiographical detail, but it is in fact a collection of vignettes about his life and that of his friends in Berlin, from Russian-speaking and other communities. There are some witty observations, but I didn’t find it as funny as some others described him (comparing him to David Sedaris), and some of his stories fell completely flat.
Bottled Goods is a novella in flash about a marriage and a family that is torn apart by the secret services in Romania, when one of their relatives defects to the West. I liked the way the story was not always told directly, but from multiple perspectives, in different styles, in little vignettes. And, compared to the Asian books, it wasn’t quite as harrowing, although it certainly isn’t light-hearted.
After all the trauma books, I wanted something very different and silly. I can’t remember who recommended Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks, or maybe I just impulse bought it in a second-hand bookshop, but it was a scandal when it was published in 1906 for its frank portrayal of sex without marriage. That may be the case for the English-speaking world, but to be honest, I think the French and the Austrians had written far worse by then. A naive young Englishman is sent off to Europe to get over his desire to wed the local squire’s daughter, and promptly gets besotted by a mysterious older woman. They spend a total of three weeks together, but apparently it completely changes him – and he suddenly matures and becomes subtle and all. Because, you see, it was not just lust, but he was also really taken by her mind (and they both have no money worries, so they can recreate all sorts of romantic scenarios in mountain cabins in Switzerland and palazzos in Venice). It was sickly sweet and needlessly melodramatic, and not very raunchy at all, with high-falutin’ speeches that made me laugh.
The best book of the month was A Working Mother by Agnes Owens. I knew I had it on my shelves when I read Jacqui’s excellent review of it, so I searched for it and read it in pretty much one day. It’s so deadpan and clever, yet also quite heartbreaking. As Jacqui says, it has something of Muriel Spark or Beryl Bainbridge about it, with a dark underbelly but a deft and light touch.
It has been a quieter month in terms of events as well. I had a nice day out on the 1st of May and did a guided tour of the notorious Kreuzberg neighbourhood at the start of the month. I saw an exhibition about the Bauhaus women photographers. I took part in a literature get-together organised by Lettretage, where I met a lot of budding and established writers, translators and event organisers – hugely enjoyable to talk about books and creativity once more! And then last Sunday I watched the Carnival of the Cultures parade – Brazil being the great mood-maker, as usual. I only found later on, sadly, that a Korean friend had prepared a T shirt for me to join the parade, but I’m not sure I could have lasted the whole route in the blazing sun.
I also watched and even rewatched some good films and series this month, six of them, which took me to a total of four countries. The rewatched ones were even better than I remembered. First of all, the Japanese TV series Long Vacation from 1996, which had all of us Japanese students drooling over Kimutaku, but is also an excellent depiction of those years when the Japanese economic bubble burst (and we were all a mess in Romania as well). Paprika remains utterly crazy and fun, but also sad and anxiety-inducing, with beautiful imagery and saturated colour. I also watched two films about people working behind the scenes in stores, a world I now know from my own experience. The German In the Aisles with Sandra Huller and Franz Rogowski felt much more realistic than the Korean Pavane. The Frog and the Water was the only one I saw in the cinema this month, a film that was trying perhaps too hard to say something about how we treat people with Down’s syndrome, but it did have its moving moments, although it occasionally descended into farce and a sheer unbelievable ending. Finally, Innocents with Dirty Hands is a film in which Claude Chabrol seems to mock his own film style – over the top, camp, with too many twists and turns. But Romy Schneider is luminous, so I awarded an extra half-star for her alone.
findingtimetowrite 
