It’s always tricky to attempt an annual summary and reduce it to a manageable number of books when you’ve read over 120 books during the year. I’ve tried to organise it by genre or by seasons in the past few years but I’ll keep it really simple this time and just go by first half of the year in one post, to be followed by a second half after Christmas (just in case I get to read something astounding by then).
January has always been about Japan for me, at least since Dolce Belezza started her January in Japan reading challenge. The year did not necessarily start with the best reads in that respect: I did not really appreciate Hunchback or Snakes and Earrings, but one ‘shocking’ novella that did stay with me was Astral Season, Beastly Season by Tahi Saihate. I also enjoyed the return to modern Japanese literature classics like Mishima and Kono Taeko. Finally, a return to Murakami Ryu and the discovery of new-to-me writer Kazushige Abe provided me with more memorable reading – all of them as far removed as possible from the cosy, cat-covered books or puzzle mysteries that publishers have given us in recent years.
February brought a real bout of good reading. I’d been eagerly anticipating Han Kang’s We Do Not Part and it did not disappoint: a combination of eerie, historical, heartwarming and heartbreaking that probably shouldn’t work, but does. Another book by a Nobel Prize winner, The Empusium, I also really enjoyed, although perhaps not quite as much as others by Tokarczuk. I also reread an old favourite for my personal French February reading challenge, namely Saint-Exupery and his Vol de Nuit, which was as beautiful as I remembered, and I discovered a new poet (well, new to me, as he’s been dead for nearly 100 years now): the highly experimental, surrealist Yi Sang.
March and April were largely dedicated to the International Booker longlist, and the books were mercifully shorter and more interesting/varied than the ones from the previous year. I loved the strong narrative voice and irony of There’s a Monster Behind the Door by Gaelle Belem and my personal favourite to win was Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird (it didn’t). I was much more impressed by Murakami Haruki’s non-fiction reportage Underground than I’ve been by his last few novels, and it seemed an appropriate time to read it, thirty years after the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo metro. Another non-Booker book which really stuck with me during April was Ex-Wife by Ursual Parrott, hard to believe that it was written a hundred years ago! Last but not least, I read my first László Krasznahorkai and was absolutely charmed with the Genji reference.
You’ll be relieved to hear that there was only one truly memorable book in May (at the distance of several months now): a collection of surreal short stories by Korean author Lee Yuri entitled Broccoli Punch.
June was another great month for reading. I reread and continued to be very impressed with Small Islandby Andrea Levy. I absolutely loved Jen Calleja’s memoir and manifesto about translation Fair. For a very different change of pace, I absolutely raced through the frighteningly plausible and exciting thriller The Man with a Thousand Faces by Dutch author Lex Noteboom, and was pleased to be back in the company of Ikmen and Mehmet in Barbara Nadel’s The Wooden Library (this time featuring a trip to Romania!).
So that was the first half of my year and I think what’s remarkable is that of the seventeen books I mention here, only three were written in English. And that’s not because the number of translated books have vastly outnumbered the English language books on my reading list (the proportion is probably more like half and half), but because the translated books (and the English books I enjoyed) were mostly published by small indie presses, who are the only respite from a ‘mainstream culture of dumbing down and selling out’, as this furious but accurate and funny article by Lucy Mercer describes it.
As for my favourite book covers (for the books I read during this period)? Well, this time I have to say that although several were ok, none really blew my socks off, but I am including my three favourites in this post (they’re not necessarily the covers of the editions that I was able to find and read in the UK). Am I becoming too prone to noticing fads and copycats now that I am a publisher myself?If I had to pick a winner, it would probably be There’s a Monster Behind the Door, which does a good job of conveying the atmosphere of the book while using the currently fashionable floral design.
If I had to pick a top five from the books listed above, and remembering that Top Five does not necessarily reflect quality, but degree of obsession, I would say We Do Not Part, Fair, Vol de Nuit, Underground and Yi Sang are the ones that have haunted me for the rest of the year.
These are not necessarily topics I deliberately seek out, having had my all-too-real life blighted by them, but nor do they provoke any overreaction in me nowadays, since it all feels like a lifetime ago. So it was pure coincidence that over the past week I finally got around to reading Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott and also saw a J-drama on Netflix called Anata no Koto wa Sorehodo (translated as ‘I love you just a little bit’ – literally best translated as ‘I love you up to a certain point’), which both handle these topics far more realistically than I was expecting. Perhaps I’m not that familiar with romance tropes, but they both felt quite different, far more thoughtful than the stories I’ve read in this genre before. I know that some people avoid these topics at all costs, and both of these could be triggering if you are currently going through such emotional trauma yourself.
Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wifewas published in 1929 and set in 1924, and it feels amazingly modern for a book that is nearly 100 years old. Then again, maybe it feels modern because it’s about a particular class of people (relatively privileged, even though there is talk of money worries at least initially) living in New York City. It certainly captures the frenzy of the 1920s in a big city, the hard living and hard drinking culture (in spite of the Prohibition). After all, London had its Bright Young Things, Berlin had its Babylon Berlin cabarets and Kit Kat clubs, Paris had its authors and painters congregating at cafes and indulging in all sorts of affairs. Yet I’m sure my grandmother’s life in rural Romania at the time would not have borne any similarity to these stories if she’d gotten divorced.
Quick summary of the plot: Patricia and Peter had married young, but were very much in love and so managed to survive living on very little in Britain for a while, even managed to survive the death of their baby. They try oh so hard to be modern, hard-drinking, casual about affairs, but they break up after she has an ill-advised one night stand with his best friend but rather than admit to that, she claims she has slept with several other men. Suddenly, Peter can no longer see her as the sweet innocent woman he’d wanted to marry, so he asks for a divorce. She keeps stalling, even when he gets involved with other women, but moves into a friend’s place. And, slowly, bit by bit, she learns to get over him.
At first she pursues a wild lifestyle, putting up a brave façade, but she soon discovers that gives her no relief or satisfaction:
That feeling of running, of having been running endlessly, so that I was breathless, yet must go on running forever, seemed to sum up my life. Running through days of posing as an efficient young business woman, through nights of posing as a sophisticated young woman about town. Running from the memory of Peter, toward something or nothing, it did not matter which.
It is hard to believe that for some years between the end of WW1 and the Great Depression at least, there was a period when educated women could pursue careers and not be solely considered marriage material, that although divorce had some stigma attached to it, it did not necessarily mean becoming a social outcast, that in an era before birth control become widely available and well-known, there was this degree of sexual freedom. I suppose I should have expected some of this, given the liberalism and wit of the pre-code Hollywood movies, but the frankness about one-night stands, which can still provoke outrage in some quarters today, still caught me by surprise.
There were men. When, as occasionally, their desire was sufficient to break through the defence of my indifference, I was neither glad, nor very sorry. Hoping some time to wake and find I had slept beside a lover and a friend, I slept to wake beside a stranger exigent, triumphant or exasperated, or perhaps as bored and as polite as I.
We follow Patricia’s journey over a few years, as she grows and matures, as she suffers but also experiences some true friendships and love. She keeps hoping that her husband will come back to her after his ‘adventures’, although her friend Lucia warns her that men might come back from little excursions, but once they embark upon world cruises from port to port, there is no turning back. Nor can she quite buy her friend Lucia’s recipe for happiness, of marrying a nice banker who dotes on her, but about whom she’s not crazy:
‘How do you feel about sleeping with him?’
‘I’d rather sleep with him the rest of my life, for the sake of having his kindness and good humour and honesty around; than put up with the selfishness and vanity and casual, heartbreaking infidelities of any “attractive” man I know, for the sake of occasional golden moments in bed.’
When Patricia has one last meeting with her ex-husband – and the author is very good at describing the way Patricia still dresses up and has to calm herself down as she goes to the meeting, even though she tells herself that she has no expectations – she muses:
It is not true that, in time, one ‘gets over’ almost anything. In time, one survives almost anything. There is a distinction.
Then, when she hears Peter’s news – that he is planning to remarry, we have a lovely understated sentence:
And some absurd remnant of belief in miracles curled up and died in me, almost painlessly.
I won’t give you a blow by blow account of how Patricia manages to rebuild her life – in fact, you might argue that one is not quite sure that she really does. But she does move on, after a fashion, not always entirely happily. This is what made the book feel so realistic, as well as the observations about the differences between passionate love and married love, sex, desire and friendship, the men who are boyfriend material vs. those who are husband material – discussions that are not that dissimilar to the ones I’ve had with friends over the years.
It’s sad, though, that, although this book catapulted the author to a succès de scandale in the winter of the 1929 Crash, she never quite reached that same level of success ever again, although she wrote constantly, earned money with it, and tried to ‘find the one’ to marry over and over again, but finally lost all her money and died in poverty and alone.
I Love You Just a Little Bit – Japanese TV Series (on Netflix)
I started watching this series because I thought it would be an easy-breezy, slightly titillating comedy about marriage and temptation, first love and mature love. But it ended up being much more serious and painful than that – clearly, there is to be no escapism for me! It is based on a manga series – for grown-ups, obviously – which just goes to show the great variety of topics covered by manga.
Optician assistant Mitsu had a crush on charismatic classmate Arishima in middle-school, but they never quite got together before he moved away with his parents. Nevertheless, she has judged all subsequent men by how far they fall short of the perfect dream she has created in her mind about that first love. She wants to believe in fate and in finding ‘the one’ that will give her butterflies, and in this regard she is subconsciously imitating her mother, who never married and kept going out with new men as Mitsu was growing up (much to her daughter’s dismay).
Nevertheless, when she meets shy but wholesome Ryota (portrayed – oh the irony! – by actor Higashide Masahiro, who was embroiled in an extra-marital affair of his own at the time, although that was only revealed a few years later) she decides to marry him even though he doesn’t quite make her heart flutter. And he proves to be a caring husband, who cooks for her, remembers anniversaries, decorates the house etc. Then Mitsu bumps into Arishima one evening and they share a drink or two together reminiscing about old times, then suddenly find themselves tumbling into bed together at one of Tokyo’s many love hotels. Neither of them tell the other that they’re married at this point.
Arishima, who has always been the popular guy and attracted attention without making much effort, comes across as well-intentioned but slightly dim and weak, looking perhaps for a little distraction while his wife is nearly ready to give birth. For Mitsu it’s much more: it’s about reconnecting with the love of her life, and she’s prepared to continue with the relationship even after she finds out that his wife has just given birth to their first child. She is not very good at lying to her husband, however, and he becomes suspicious and sneaky. When he finds out what’s happening, he becomes downright creepy, in his determination to love his wife regardless and keep her by his side by playing on her guilt.
What raises this above the average TV viewing is that it’s not about the sex (there’s remarkably little of it on offer) – it’s all about examination of pursuing one’s own happiness versus caring about the other, where sacrifice turns into masochism, how we repeat patterns of behaviour we have seen in our parents, whether we like it or not. I started off really annoyed by Mitsu’s childish belief in soulmates, but none of the characters, not even Arishima’s wife Reika (who is far too good for him) are perfect or blameless. These subtle character studies of individual acts of selfishness and how marriages work in very imperfect, often manipulative ways, make this a worthwhile watch and an excellent partner to Parrott’s book, even if they are 90 years and continents apart.
These kind of stories may be upsetting and the characters may not be particularly likeable, but they happen far more frequently than one would think. If handled with sensitivity rather than in gossip-column, celebrity break-up fashion, they can teach us a lot about ourselves, the mistakes we make (or very nearly make) in our own relationships, and how we must learn to forget if not forgive, so that life can go on in spite of all that.
findingtimetowrite 