Recently in Non-African novels and stories Category

Just finished Lois Lowry's wonderful, but perhaps not quite interesting enough for ten-year olds, book Messenger. There's a very nice plot summary available here. We had been listening to The Giver, the Newbury-award book that precedes, by perhaps 40 year, the events this book. It was a pleasant surprise as I was reading to gradually realize the books were connected. The genre is hard to pin down- it is very small-scale fantasy, I guess, more heavy on the awe than the fantasy. The awe, in fact, is constructed by the reader knowing that the fantasy is metaphor, and not meant to be literal. The two books complement beautifully Alan Garner's Stone Quartet, which focuses all on the awe, with the fantasy only hinted at.

We try to be good, but we can't, and occasionally we indulge in the trashiest sort of fiction... I couldn't resist buying Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. For a simple reason: my mother's nickname is Dodie. Written in 1948, it is a very self-conscious and deliberate heir to Jane Austen. Very trashy, pretty decent writing. By the end it becomes tedious. But her descriptions of the "mad" father's attempt to follow up with a sequel to his literary bestseller Jacob Wrestling is really interested and quite modernists.

Anyway, they made the novel into a movie a couple years ago, which I have no interest in watching. But if you want something a little different for night-time reading, this book is it.

I read it last night to see if appropriate for my 10 year old. I'm not a big fan of superhero stuff, but this was pretty good. Very cheeky, and very up to date. Very very far from Africa though. But, the blog rules say it's OK to indulge every now and then.

I just finished Alan Garner’s “Tom Fobbles Day”, the third of his Stone Book quartet. Yesterday I had read "The Stone Book." These tiny novellas- about 60 pages each, are beautifully written masterworks. Even though their main characters are children, and in child-like mysterious situations, filled with portents of destiny, they are not really for children, except those who will truly appreciate exceptional writing.

Got up early this morning to give a talk about FAVL at the Sunnyvale-Sunrise Rotary Club. I like breakfast, so not problem! A warm and gracious audience, asking good questions about our efforts to produce local books and the summer reading program. After, as I was driving out of the parking lot of the Sunken Gardens golf club, where the Rotary meets, I saw through the mist a group of six Japanese women golfing (well, I presumed, given the location, time of day, etc.) Just the previous night I finally finished a wonderful novel, The Sound of the Mountain,by Yasunari Kawabata. It is a delightfully slow meditation on aging and family, and the the main character, the elderly (for the time) Shingo, notices the natural world in a way that I only aspire to. There is nothing "particularly" Japanese about the novel; it is a universal story, though there is plenty of Japanese culture in it. So the profound reflection? I love getting older (I'm in my forties). I know I'm going to regret saying that in thirty years. But the ability to make ever more connections in my head, with my past life as a person, is a really nice feeling. "Sweet," as the kids say.

I've never been a big BD reader, but at the Martin Luther King, Jr. library (San Jose's main library) I picked up a copy of Godard-Ribera's Le Grand Scandale: San Francisco. It was pretty good. Nice illustrations, some humor. Took about an hour to read. Meanwhile, Elliot read five Yu-gi-oh illustrated comic books (graphic novelties, he called them) in a single evening. So I have some friendly reading competition.

Always Sunset - 2, a lovely if traditional Japanese move set in the late 1950s, that I saw on the plane back from Burkina Faso.

Spring, 1959… four months after the events of the first film. The Olympics in Tokyo has officially been announced, and Japan is about to take its first step into a period of high economic growth. Chagawa has been living with Junnosuke but is still unable to forget Hiromi, the love of his life who had left Third Street without a word. One day, Kawabuchi returns to take Junnosuke away. Chagawa is given permission to take care of Junnosuke on the condition that the child enjoys an ordinary standard of living. To prove himself to Kawabuchi and to show Hiromi that he has become a better man, Chagawa begins to write a literary piece to win the Akutagawa Prize, a dream that he had given up long ago.

Isn't that weird? One of the main characters in this ordinary working class neighborhood wants to win the Akutagawa Prize, and everybody knows what the prize is and wants him to win (they help him etc.). This is 40 years ago when Japan was very poor, though obviously wealthy compared with much of present day Africa. But hard to imagine any ordinary person in Lagos, Nairobi or any urban center in Africa knowing or caring about a literary prize. And even more bizarre, his story (of course he wins, what, did I spoil it for you?) sounds like the most trite, ordinary story (well, on the basis of them reading aloud the final closing line... and admittedly I'm going by the subtitles ;-). Why, even the most ordinary writer in Central African Republic could write a story like that! So we need a major donor to come up with prize money and publicity please!

On the plane back from Burkina read Appointment in Samarra, published in 1934, by John O'Hara. Interesting technique employed, of not ever quite knowing what the novel is about, and then even at the end not really sure. There are multiple plots, and different characters take center stage at different points. You think the novel is about one person, and then that person never appears again. The sociological commentary on the well-to-do just as the Depression hits is very interesting.

Over the last couple days I read On Chesil Beach, a remarkable exploration of a wedding night gone horribly awry. This one should not be made into a movie, please don't do it. Don't sell the rights. Don't even think about it. It's all the interior monologue of the two protagonists. While somewhat lacking in verisimilitude (could they really have talked so little both being so intelligent?) I found however that it easily reverberated with my own experiences (nothing like the novel, but analogous). And in Burkina and Ghana, even simple interactions are so ripe for mutual misunderstanding.... not just with "westerners", but amongst people living in the same village for years. I love it when we're in the middle of a FAVL discussion and one of the librarians gives a quizzical look to one of the others, like, "I can't figure you out..."

Read in in a five hour sitting on the flight from New York to San Jose last week. Curious that no airlines advertise on-board libraries. Jetblue makes a big deal out of their 64 channels. But practically any book is more entertaining and customer-satisfying than the pabulum available. There can be no greater demonstration of what the Jesuits mean when they aspire to the "highest humanism" than to be reading Atonement, take a break, accidentally flip to Fox News, and watch "not highest humanism".

That said, there is something a bit too precious about the book. I enjoyed the self-conscious asides about crafting a novel, a somewhat welcome contrast to the over-serious Crow Lake. But at the same time, important elements of that self-consciousness are left out. Why are the characters in Atonement impossibly rich? Important for the story? Can only rich people be "minds" that need to be understood? Or does McEwan understand the market for fiction, where rich people are going to sell more movie rights than poor people? But a wonderful book, I thought.