I started one of these books on the 31st of July, so it gets reviewed here alongside the two Women in Translation books, because it fits in with the subject matter. The two translations are brand new releases, which is not typical of my #WITMonth reading.
16. Kanai Mieko: Mild Vertigo, transl. Polly Barton, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023. (In the US: New Directions Press, with an afterword by Kate Zambreno)
This is like a shorter, less overtly political version of Ducks, Newburyport set in Japan. I say that as someone who hasn’t actually read more than 50 pages or so of Ducks, Newburyport, so don’t hold me to this purely impressionistic view! It is the quiet story of the day-to-day life, minor disappointments, small satisfactions of a perfectly ordinary middle-class Japanese housewife, Natsumi, living in Tokyo with her husband and two sons. Except we find out that she is not quite ordinary: first of all, because the pure housewife role is no longer that commonplace and so she finds herself isolated among her friends; secondly, because there is a constant monologue running through her head and we are privy to it from the very first disorienting, dazzlingly long sentence with its endless flourish of commas.
This study of capitalist ennui may seem like a first world problem – we have seen it before in Sophie Divry’s work – but of course it is also a critique of a society where material culture and possessions are prioritised above everything else. Natsumi is not even able to articulate exactly what she finds unsatisfactory about her life, but she struggles to connect with her husband and children, to keep up with the neighbours’ gossip or with her girlfriends’ activities, to go about the daily business of shopping and cleaning. She feels she should be acquiring some other skills with the Lifelong Learning Programme at th elocal Cultural Education Centre: swimming, flower-arranging, blade-sharpening…
The novel itself contains layers. The most obvious superficial layer consists of that relentless piling on of repetitive domestic details and apparently random thoughts to convey the humdrum existence of this bored and alienated housewife. There are quite relatable and funny moments on trying to keep a conversation going with a non-responsive husband, supermarket shopping, keeping the peace with one’s neighbours. The second layer is that something more profoundly disturbing is going on – the sense of dizziness (the mild vertigo of the title, which is only mentioned with those precise words in the very last line of the book) is almost like a warning signal and it appears at various points throughout the book. There are other danger signals too – which never quite turn into something explosive, but have you as a reader slightly on edge: the woman who threw herself from the roof of the apartment-block, the dead cat which leads to a discussion about the folk belief in the curse of the cat, the uncle who died in a psychiatric ward, other couples getting divorced… I kept expecting any of those elements to turn into Chekhov’s gun at some point, but they never did. Then we have a third layer, with the seemingly unconnected essay about the street photography of Kineo Kubara (contrasted to the rather sadistic and shocking posed photography of Nobuyoshi Araki), which one of her friends gives her to read.
And yet the staggering number of Kuwabara photographs that so vividly capture these lost scenes and memories of passing moments cannot but bring about a peculiar silence, a peculiar surprise in their viewer. The act of casting their eyes on the great bustle formed by the lives of all the various unknown bystanders in these photographs, all the adults, children and women who here appear detached from the narratives of their own private lives and histories, which they of course all possess, and yet who seem, in spite of that detachment, as though their lives would not be so difficult to imagine, this all leaves the viewer with a sensation similar to a kind of vertigo.
Upon reading this, I felt I finally grasped something about the technique of this novel: detaching one particular woman whose life we can imagine all too well, especially given the amount of details we read about her, using her as an example for something that describes all of us, not just this particular place or particular time (although it does help a bit if you know something about Japanese culture and how women are viewed there). Written in 1997, and translated a quarter of a century later – should we feel nostalgic about that time, like people were feeling nostalgic in the 1990s about the time of Japanese economic boom in the 70s and 80s? Or is it true that no matter where we are or what we do, if we do not have a strong sense of purpose – and, let’s face it, most of us don’t – we can fall prey to a sense of overwhelm, depression, frustration and that sense of yearning for we don’t even know what.
This book is a Keeper (I have it both on Kindle and in paperback, as I was planning initially to read it in Japan on Kindle).
17. Dana Shem-Ur: Where I Am, transl. Yardenne Greenspan, New Vessel Press, 2023.
On paper, this is the perfect book for me: a translator and expat spouse living in France, who is trying to find her identity among cultural and societal norms that are not her own, who feels some simmering discontent with married life, who is seeking for a place to call home. The main protagonist, Reut, is closer to my own biography, she is more ambitious, highly-educated, ironical than Natsumi – and yet I often felt like telling her to ‘stop whining’ in a way that I didn’t with the Japanese housewife.
Perhaps it is because, although both books are written in third person, the Japanese novel is a stream-of-consciousness style which takes us right into Natsumi’s mind, while with Reut we feel we are observing her from outside. We see her actions and even her feelings and thoughts are told to us in a way that invites little empathy – the sentences are short, staccato, they do not sound genuine to me, but like the author telling us what the protagonist is thinking. The reviewers talk about a stirring and beautifully written novel or mention its unfailingly elegant prose, but I didn’t see any of that. The prose felt flat and some of the scenes were awkward and seemed to be unnecessarily graphic – not just in terms of content (marital sex after a fight, what felt like lots of scenes of her in the bathroom), but the way they were written. I’m not sure I understood what they were meant to add to the story, what they conveyed about the protagonist or her life or her confused identity.
Both the books describe the minutiae of women’s lives, but in this one it felt like the author didn’t pick the most relevant details of her main character’s life, so it was just tedious instead of illuminating, yuck instead of ‘brave’. Verdict: Castaway.
18. Luke Brown: Theft, And Other Stories, 2020.
The narrator Paul in this novel is a well-educated white man from a relatively humble background leading a somewhat precarious existence in London, and so presents a bit of a contrast to the relatively comfortable lifestyles of the two women narrators in the books above. Nevertheless, he too is somewhat at odds with his life, without fully admitting it to himself, or seeking inspiration and aspiration somewhere beyond what is truly available to him. When he meets the popular author Emily Nardini, her wealthy and arrogant partner Andrew and his privileged daughter Sophie, and their social set, he tries to fit in with them, even though he despises much of what he sees – and lets them know that is the case. At the same time, he has very little in common with the people he left behind in the Lancashire town he grew up in.
Set around the time of the Brexit referendum, this book shows a country divided by class and wealth, envy and fear. While I am sometimes bemused by the British obsession with class, especially in literature, it’s undeniably a force to be reckoned with in politics, housing, the labour market. Paul gets his revenge on the loathsome privileged people… but in doing so becomes as despicable as they are. Even saying this much probably counts as spoilers, although the very first sentence of the novel is ‘What I did to them was terrible, but you have to understand the context. This was London, 2016.’ And at first, I completely understood and sympathised with Paul’s predicament. London is a city that chews up young people and then spits them out when they cannot afford to rent or buy or find a decent job anymore.
Paul’s descriptions of the hipster magazine he reviews for (books too, but mainly haircuts) and the London parties he attends are very funny, although the constant drug use and mutual insults did become a bit wearisome after a while. The observations about social differences were spot on but what I relished was that this was not superficial satire. It is easy to mock stereotypes, but almost every character that the author introduced showed some depth, some positives to counterbalance the obvious negatives. Here is Paul, for instance, talking about a temporary girlfriend of his, who comes from a wealthy Indian family and went to private girls’ schools:
Rochi had taken all the good things from her good school, she was so confident and curious, kind and unembarrassed, When I was next to her I believed that the rich were better than the poor. They hadn’t been deformed by envy and bitterness. They had been free to think and express themselves, to study under the guidance of the world’s best teachers. They were so good-looking and healthy. They had experienced the best of British cultural life. When they married each other it was more than wealth marrying wealthy – it was beauty and intelligence marrying beauty and intelligence. You couldn’t blame them for it.
I liked the fact that nothing was black and white in this book, that no one escapes the irony, but there is also much tenderness in some of the portraits. In a few years’ time, I think many of the cultural references may feel obsolete, that is always the danger with books that are so ‘of their time’. As a snapshot of a certain time and place, it feels honest and accurate, although it left me feeling slightly soiled and worried about my children’s future.
Verdict: I appreciated the book, but I don’t think I’d want to reread it, so it’s a Castaway.
findingtimetowrite 