Tag: literature

Reading by Night: The Makioka Sisters

If you are an avid follower of all my online doings, you may have seen that I have a relatively new Instagram account, Reading by Night. I also read by day, but it is so named because I am a devotee of The Hour of the Wolf–the wee hours, as they’re sometimes called, the interstice between Two Sleeps. Also reading by night is better! Romantic and mysterious, interruptionless.

I have just read The Makioka Sisters, by Junichiro Tanizaki, written in 1957. Kindle and many newspapers and blogs will tell you how long it takes to read something. I don’t think that’s a great way to decide what to read, I wish such estimates didn’t exist. But you can tell when you hold this book in your hand: it’s going to take a while. You flip to the end: 600 pages. I had heard it would be worth it. It is. It was.

The Makioka Sisters is a masterpiece of post war Japanese literature. A perfect portrayal of the pretension, snobbery and sufferings of a declining aristocratic family from Osaka, four sisters, trying to get one of them married, and trying to keep the youngest, most modern one from destroying what little remains of the respectability the family once enjoyed.

As WWII encroaches inexorably and illness and scandal descend, you feel their losses: the grace and beauty of the firefly hunting parties, the repose and solitude of the lost country estates, occasions for elaborate kimonos, traditional songs and dances, the cherry blossoms of Kyoto, the temples and rituals. The sacred trampled by the profane, like sakura.

But much was gained: women freed from subordination to make their own way in life, release from the straitjackets of class and hierarchy; and much that was exciting and new: train travel, television, a sense of freedom, Europeans coming to Japan, new food, expansion—and Western dress.

This is the Japanese women’s version of the Radezsky March by Joseph Roth, another masterpiece, in which gaudily uniformed men in fanciful dress and plumed helmets rattled their sabres and sat stiffly erect on prancing horses—while the Austro-Hungarian empire collapsed around them.

I had forgotten how much I’d liked Japanese literature! I went to the shelf to look: Kobo Abe, Kenzaburo Oe, Murakami, Yoko Ogawa, and the first Japanese novel I’d loved: Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata. More recently, Yoko Tawada. I think I’ll go back and read them again.

P.S. Why were four Chinese women put on the cover of this book? Maybe the art department didn’t have the equivalent of fact checking. The women’s faces are quite Chinese; one of them is even wearing a Cheong Sam! So I put a Japanese doll, one of the themes of the book, next to it (reposing against a Chinese pillow)

September Reading

My September reading was not quite as strenuous as last month, given that I read Middlemarch in August, from which I am still feeling the glow of accomplishment, a loathing of Casaubon and a sense of infinite depths.

Here you’ll see just one masterpiece–Austerlitz–and two books I didn’t quite finish, that I skimmed and eventually put down. Those are How to Disappear and Torpor. I had enjoyed the quirky, downbeat, pathetic style of Kraus’s other books, I Love Dick and Aliens and Anorexia, but the grimness of the times we’re living through made it impossible for me to make it through this one, which included a tour through Romania to adopt an orphan, and an accounting of the horrific abuse and neglect babies and children suffered under the Ceausescu regime, the failed and failing relationship, the struggle and the struggling. But A Girl Returned was also the story of an abandoned child–in this case an adopted child “returned” to her birth family. The book also had its horrific moments but was redeemed by the love she found with her birth sister Adriana, a childhood friend, Patrizia, and the reconciliation of sorts with her adoptive mother. And the girl’s insistence on taking her own life back after she had been thrown among strangers. It was purer-hearted and the pure-hearted is what we need right now.

Sometimes I linger in bookstores, browsing the “S” section, hoping a new Sebald book would appear. Since it won’t, I read the existing ones over and over and over and each time they seem as if I had never read them before. Except The Emigrants which I almost have memorized. Austerlitz is a book I read often.

Weather, much lauded, much recommended, had been partly derived from other people’s work. I recognized some of the (unattributed) podcasts and articles she’d gotten the material from. As such, I couldn’t ally myself with the book; I was already allied with the original material. But I liked the paragraph – paragraph – paragraph style.

And the rest of September’s reading? art criticism and Jungian psychology. Now, I am reading myths.

August Reading

The stand out here, was of course, Middlemarch. I had read it in college and remember thinking to myself, “am I really going to expend my youth reading about agricultural practices in 19th century rural England?” But of course, it is so much more. Many people have called it the greatest English novel, and, to disprove this opinion, I would have to read a whole lot more English novels. So I provisionally agree. 

Last month’s reading of Faulkner required the antidote of Morrison, and I read her essays, and her first novel The Bluest Eye.  Also of undisputed greatness–though censors the world over have been trying to suppress it for years. I doubt they’ve read it. 

The book that left me straddling the fence, wavering in opinion, and wondering about its suitability for prize-winning, was the International Booker Prize winner, The Discomfort of Evening–which announcement and ceremony I accidentally happened upon as it was taking place live online. Prizes invite dispute, which enlivens book reading in general, so I welcome them. The book was great, but green. I was amazed to learn that the distinguished judges read all the contenders, starting with 128 books. 

And if you haven’t already read Signs Preceding the End of the World, run don’t walk to your local bookstore, and pick it up curbside. 

 

Proust on Newspapers

What I fault newspapers for is that day after day they draw our attention to insignificant things whereas only three or four times in our lives do we read a book in which there is something really essential. Since we tear the band off the newspaper so feverishly every morning, they ought to change things and put into the paper, oh, I don’t know, perhaps…Pascal’s Pensees! …and then, in a gilt-edged volume that we open only once in ten years…we would read that the Queen if Greece has gone to Cannes or that the Princesses de Leon has given a costume ball. This way the proper proportions would be te established.

– Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time