Review: An Artist of the Floating World

An Artist of the Floating World, by Kazuo Ishiguro
8.5/10, a journey through the past and present of post-war Japan from the point of view of an elderly painter

Masuji Ono, a retired painter living in post-war Japan, is anxious for his younger daughter, Noriko, to be married. She is twenty-six, and one set of negotiations has already fallen through. Setsuko, his elder daughter, is happily married with a son, and the two of them visit Noriko and Ono frequently. Ono was a painter of high regard before the Second World War, but has not worked since the disastrous ending of the war.

We learn about this in flashback and memory, as Ono tries to understand the cause of his daughters' attitudes toward him through his memory of events. He frequents a local bar and has some friends there, but slowly they all disappear. He remembers his break from his own teacher, who wanted only to paint images of pleasurable areas in the entertainment district--the so-called "Floating World." Ono prefers to paint images of important things, things that will help Japan on the path to greatness, and in fact that path leads him to some recognition and prominence.

But the war has changed everything. We don't learn this in plain revelation; instead, we have to come to understand it in the way Ono does. We begin with his preconceptions and we see, perhaps somewhat before he does, that they are no longer valid. Ultimately, he finds, his own world was no more permanent than the "floating world" he derided.

As with most of Ishiguro's work, the journey is the real pleasure. There are many similarities between "Floating World" and his next novel, "The Remains Of The Day," both being reminisces of men after wartime whose certainty in their decisions slowly erodes. But where "Remains" has a powerful revelatory ending (one of my favorite things in any book ever), "Floating World" leaves the revelation up to the reader to parse.

It is, as always, a marvel that this narrative holds together as well as it does, given how much it rambles and wanders. Ishiguro never loses track of what's important, though, and he establishes his characters with swift, sure strokes, building up mystery around them. Does Ono's prize pupil hate him for his pre-war work, or is there another reason? Ono's wife and son were killed in the war, but who feels that more acutely, himself or his daughters? What is the reason the marriage negotiations broke down for Noriko, and will the current ones go well?

Some of the lesser questions go unanswered, but not in Ono's mind. He is a beautifully drawn character struggling to accept the changes in his world and to bear his responsibility for them. While this is not quite up to "Remains of the Day" or "Never Let Me Go," it is certainly a worthwhile and engaging read.

Online Book!

A college roommate of mine has written a book about the life of his cat. I've seen the whole thing, and I really enjoy its spare style, which manages to be humorous and emotional all at once. He's posting chapters online in an attempt to get it more exposure, so if you like cats, and stories about cats, go take a look and leave him a comment!

Are Workshops Valuable?

There's an interesting New Yorker article by Louis Menand that addresses a recent book on the topic. I love the writer's conclusion:

I just thought that this stuff mattered more than anything else, and being around other people who felt the same way, in a setting where all we were required to do was to talk about each other’s poems, seemed like a great place to be. I don’t think the workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that other people make.

(h/t Lance Mannion)

Review: Brooklyn

Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín
9/10, a beautiful story about a young Irish emigrant to New York

I saw Colm Tóibín read a passage from Brooklyn a year and a half ago, and promised then that I would buy it when it came out. I fulfilled my promise when I saw it on the shelf recently, and I'm pleased to say that the book lives up to the promise of the reading.

It's the story of Eilis, an Irish girl who emigrates to America in her late teens or early twenties. She builds a life there on her own, and then a tragedy calls her back to Ireland (it's very like The Dive From Clausen's Pier in that way).

Like William Trevor, Tóibín writes in what I can only describe as a very Irish way. He writes lyrically, in a narrative that has direction but not urgency, in which things happen in their own time and the pleasure is in the journey. We meet people and get to know them, and they're all important in Eilis's life in one way or another. But I don't get the sense that each incident is necessary to explain the progression of the story--it's not critical to show that she spends Christmas Day helping in the parish, or her attitude toward the African-American women who come in to the store. What each little incident does is build up the picture of her life in America, to contrast with her life in Ireland, and it's in these pictures that the story comes to life.

I do love William Trevor, but Tóibín might be a little ahead of him in my bookshelf now. Although they write with the same lyricism, Tóibín writes with a lighter touch. The scene with Eilis's first Atlantic crossing, which he read at Stanford, involves their neighbors locking the door to the shared bathroom, and poor Eilis not only forced to pee in a mop bucket, but becoming violently seasick later in the night. Fortunately, her feisty companion comes to the rescue, showing her how to pick the lock on the bathroom door and really lock the neighbors out, with the aid of a heavy steamer trunk.

Brooklyn is a joy to read, and it moves along quickly. Eilis is, surprisingly, not always a sympathetic protagonist. She does occasionally behave cruelly, and is unapologetic about it (rather than thanking her landlady for a nice gesture, she is suspicious of the motive behind it and remains cold, so that she won't be in the lady's debt). But if you don't always agree with her choices, Tóibín gives you enough of a wide window into her thoughts that you always understand them. It is particularly interesting to contrast the people in Ireland, whom he tinges with a sort of inborn hopelessness, with the people Eilis meets in America, who are some of them Irish, some Italian, and some simply American: open to possibilities and bright with energy. It's no accident that the Italian family she grows close to is planning to buy property on Long Island and set up a homebuilding business, while all her friends in Ireland see no further than continuing the family business, doing what their parents have done and their parents before them. And that, ultimately, is the choice Eilis must make.

Review: The Drawing Of The Dark

The Drawing of the Dark, by Tim Powers
8/10, a somewhat scattered supernatural adventure in medieval Europe

It is a fairly well-established fact that I am a huge Tim Powers fan. I haven't posted reviews of all his books--I read "Expiration Date," "Earthquake Weather," and "Last Call" before starting this blog--but I have reviewed The Anubis Gates, one of my favorite time-travel "Olde Worlde" stories.

So I was looking forward to "The Drawing of the Dark," another chapter in his Fisher King universe, which is just like ours except for the supernatural/occult world that underlies it, a world ruled by Kings, in the east and the west. In Vienna in the 1600s, the West is weak, and the King of the East, wielding the Turkish army like a sword, intends to strike at its heart.

None of this is known to Irish mercenary Brian Duffy. All he knows is that he's hungry and friendless in Venice, until a mysterious old man offers him the job of bouncer at a tavern in Vienna. He sees some strange things on the road to Vienna, but arrives there safely, to find that Epiphany, the girl he loved many years ago, is now a widow working in the kitchen. The tavern is a converted monastery, and also a brewery, whose famous Herzwesten Bock beer is due to be released in Easter.

Strange things continue to swirl around Duffy, from a ship of Vikings sailing down the Danau to hideous flying creatures attacking him. When the old man joins Duffy in the tavern, he reveals that the Herzwesten Dark beer, due to be drawn on All Hallow's Eve, is actually a source of power and renewal for the Western King, and that the Turkish army's attack has been planned to steal the Dark, or corrupt it if that is not possible.

Duffy himself is excellently drawn as the reluctant hero, though there is more hero in him than he knows. Powers paints a vivid picture of medieval Vienna, with his usual cast of eccentric and delightful characters, and the ins and outs of magic are as well thought-out as usual. But Duffy's reluctance to get involved and distance from the center of the action makes him a difficult vantage point to narrate the story from. In "Last Call," Powers has a similar hero, but his own story is more compelling in this case, and he is much more of a central figure. All Duffy wants is for things to quiet down so he can rest.

While the story is still engaging and tense, with several twists and turns, it isn't quite up to the rest of Powers' works. For a completist (like me), it's definitely worth reading, but if you're looking for an introduction to Powers, try The Anubis Gates, Last Call, or Declare.

Review: Black Swan Green

Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell
10/10, a coming-of-age story that is evocative and engaging

Life is tough when you're thirteen, and nobody knows that better than Jason Taylor. In the English parish of Black Swan Green, we are introduced to the ranks of Jason's class of schoolboys through an afternoon on a frozen lake, in a game of British Bulldogs, played thus: they split into two sides, and when the non-Bulldogs capture a Bulldog, he has to join their side on the next attack. Jason hates this game, not just because of the physical nature of the attacks, but because you're forced to turn and betray your friends.

Jason peppers his narrative with observations like that, coming across as a thirteen-year-old making discoveries about life. He walks us through the life of a boy who not only has to navigate the perilous social strata of the schoolyard, but also a tumultuous family life and a personal issue, a stammer that comes up so subtly that he almost sneaks it up on us. He personifies the directions in which his teenaged pysche pulls him, assigning a personality to each of his impulses. One of the strongest is the Hangman, the one who seizes his tongue and makes him stammer. It's no coincidence that his biggest fear is his stammer being discovered.

Cloud Atlas proved Mitchell to be gifted at narrative voice. We see that gift here, not only in Jason, but in the personalities of his world in Black Swan Green parish. And although the story reads at first like a series of diary entries, it soon acquires a coherence thanks to the different plot threads that recur: his sister's boyfriends and transition to law school; his parents' struggle to maintain their marriage; his own personal trauma involving his grandfather's watch; the odd social stratification in the parish that is rarely brought to the surface but always lurks just beneath it.

But Black Swan Green is much more than simply an exercise in character. It's a full-fledged story, engaging enough to bring me back to it night after night, with (a rarity) a believable and satisfying (and beautiful) ending. You might find the slang difficult to follow at first, but Mitchell knows just how to use it with enough context to give you the meaning, and eventually you won't even ask what "poncy" or "sarky" mean.

If you thought Cloud Atlas was too esoteric, give this one a whirl. It's more accessible and just as good.

Being An Editor

I somehow seem to have slipped into this space where I am an editor. I look at TV shows now and ask why certain elements were introduced as thematic images. I read stories and see movies and get more annoyed at plot contrivances than I used to. And I appear to have unreasonably high standards for fiction now. I recognize all of this. I try to not subject people to it unnecessarily.

But here's the thing: if I'm editing your work, for a magazine or something, I am trying to help you. I am not picking at your work because I don't like you, or because I was in a bad mood, or because it's fun to tear people down. I'm picking at your work because I want to find out what your vision is, what's the best and clearest and most compelling way to convey that to your audience. You have the right to ignore my advice, of course you do. It's your work. But getting defensive and argumentative is not a helpful response, ever. All it does is make ME want to ignore YOU.

Review: 2666

2666, by Roberto Bolaño
A sprawling, epic, literary journey through Europe and Mexico.

I have gotten into the habit of assigning grades out of ten to the books I read, and I find that most of the ones I enjoy end up getting grades around 8. I have no idea how to grade 2666. I never got tired of it, as I did Europe Central, but I can't really say I would recommend it enthusiastically. I'm glad I read it, because and in spite of the fact that it doesn't conform to the style of books I usually read, but I can't think of anyone I know that I would highly recommend it to.

It begins with the story of four scholars of German literature, all devoted to a particular novelist by the name of Benno von Archimboldi. The man himself is a recluse, and so the search for him becomes as important to the scholars as the search for the meaning of his books. It leads them to a Mexican city, Santa Teresa, where Archimboldi may or may not have been found. There they meet a professor by the name of Amalfitano, and hear about a series of killings of women in the town that remains unsolved.

The second part tells the story of Amalfitano, and that is all we will hear of the scholars we have gotten to know in part I. Amalfitano, a professor whose strange obsessions with certain numbers and aspects of scientific theory drove him to Mexico from Spain, brings his daughter to Santa Teresa. In the third part, an American journalist named Oscar Fate travels to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match, becomes intrigued by the murders of women, and meets Amalfitano's daughter.

Part four is a recital of the various murders, 108 of them, almost as a police report. Interwoven with those reports are the stories of a young bodyguard-turned-cop, a seer, a detective who falls in love with the head of an insane asylum, and the owner of a computer repair store, a German-born naturalized American named Klaus Haas, who goes to prison under suspicion of having committed some of the crimes. Surprisingly, though I was most apprehensive about reading this part, it turned out to be the most engaging and offers at least a partial resolution.

And part five, finally, is about Archimboldi. It does not reveal much about him except to show us what has happened to him. It shows the writing of his books but not what they are about; why his publisher loves him, but only in the abstract ("he was restoring German literature to its rightful place"); the troubles he experienced but not, really, anything about him. He remains a remote and fairly mysterious figure in his own narrative. We do find out why he traveled to Santa Teresa, and the end of the book is, if not a resolution, at least a satisfying note, a very "Remains of the Day" sort of thing.

Bolaño writes in a variety of styles; he is just as likely to use a two-word sentence as he is a two-page one (you think I'm joking, but I'm not). He will wander off course to tell you the story of a minor character, he will embed narratives within narratives (the young Archimboldi at one point begins reading a journal he finds, in which the author begins to recount other stories), he will be poetically lyrical or brutally terse. I am certain that there is a point, a unifying theme, but I only know this because some of the reviews have told me so. This is the sort of book I would have to read over again in order to pick out these things; it is the kind of book one would have to study, and at 900 pages, I would rather register my admiration for the scope of the work and move on.

There are passages I loved, and very few passages I felt the urge to skip over. This is an unusual, unique book. If that sort of thing interests you, then I highly recommend it. If you are looking for something with a cohesive story arc, with characters who change according to what happens to them, to narratives that don't stray for more than a paragraph or two from their central story, then this is probably not the book for you.

New Book!!

Okay, screw "Wolverine" and "Star Trek." Kazuo Ishiguro has a new book out. The interview is kind of cool--though it's depressing to hear him say that great writers often write their masterpieces in their thirties. It also dwells on "The Unconsoled," which apparently is getting more love as time goes on.

But heck--new book!! 9/22/09 should be a holiday. :)

(Also, apparently "Never Let Me Go" is being made into a movie!)

2666 Update

I'm finished with 4 of the 5 parts of 2666. A large part of the book was centered around the Mexican town of Santa Teresa, where a large number of women were killed over the span of four (I think) years. Part 4 is called "The Part About The Crimes" and gives a description of the discovery of each one of the bodies of women found in that timeframe. Woven into the descriptions are some of the stories of a kid who works his way up from drug-lord bodyguard to cop; a detective who falls in love with the director of an insane asylum; an American of German descent who becomes a naturalized Mexican and is accused of one, then all, then none of the murders; and a reporter who becomes interested in the cases and eventually finds the lead that shows us the truth behind them.

That's the interesting part: at the end of this (very long) section, we are actually given some insight into the cause of the crimes, although none of the characters actually has his story conclude. From what I've read about the book, I expected it to be much more open-ended.

It would be a bit of a stretch to say I'm enjoying the book. But I am admiring it, and appreciating it, and definitely enjoying parts of it. The writing is quite good, even in translation, the characters interesting and the world engaging. I'm not sure I needed to read a hundred or so descriptions of murdered women, but then, Bolano doesn't seem particularly concerned with the conventions of what you should and should not include in a narrative.

And now, on to part 5. Only 250 of 900 pages left to go. I need another plane trip.

What Makes Good Science Fiction?

Still forging through 2666, so even though I have a Bill Bryson book to review, I will hold off for the moment on reviews and give you this Roger Ebert blog post. Since his cancer and therapy have prevented him from speaking, Ebert has been writing a long and thoughtful blog. He's met a lot of interesting people and has some great stories to tell.

This entry made me think, not about the subject per se, though that's interesting too, but about the one line he writes, that Arthur C. Clarke was often prescient in his science fiction. And I thought about Clarke and Bradbury, extraordinary storytellers who turned their gifts to science fiction, and I thought that the key to understanding science fiction is to understand, not science, but people. The yearning for communication that Ebert describes is at the heart of many good science fiction stories about merged minds and telepathy; the curiosity about what is Outside is the foundation of a library of excellent SF; the need for companionship and our social nature informs much of the "softer" SF of the sixties.

These are parts of people that remain constant through the years. Good science fiction imagines how they might react to new technologies like cell phones, like the Internet, like flying rocket cars. And because people bend technology to their desires, rather than the other way around, the really good science fiction becomes, eventually, truth.

> You are in a maze of twisty little paragraphs, all alike

Sometimes you just have to point out brilliance.

Writers You Should Read

I'm making March my unofficial Promote Writing month. So to start with (and perhaps end with, depending on how motivated I get), here are three blogs you should read by writers you may not know, all in the SF/Fantasy vein:

http://ursulav.livejournal.com/ - Ursula Vernon, fellow Sofawolf author and also published children's book author. She's funny, quirky, and lays bare her soul. Always entertaining.

http://matociquala.livejournal.com/ - Elizabeth Bear, many-times-published author and Hugo award-winner. Funny and quirky as well, but talks more about writing.

http://whatever.scalzi.com/ - John Scalzi. Smart things about writing, and he writes a lot. Hugo winner as well, has published many fiction and non-fiction books.

What writing blogs do you like to read?

Getting an Agent

Because I'm too lazy to type something on my own, a very interesting link about getting an agent for your book.

Short version: if you have a good book, it's much much less trouble.

Changing Horses

I almost never do this, but there will be no review of William Vollman's "Europe Central" forthcoming anytime soon. I have reached the 100-page mark and this is what I know:

* He refers to Hitler as "the sleepwalker" and Stalin as "the realist." This was mildly interesting at first but grows increasingly more irritating as he uses real names for EVERYONE ELSE.

* A German woman who likes to paint peasant women holding dead children went on a trip to Russia where she was honored for her art. Sort of. And listened to a symphony by a composer.

* That composer was married but left his wife for another woman, for whom he wrote an impassioned symphony(? it's just called Opus 40) through which you can hear his love.

That's it. There's like seven hundred more pages of this. I have a great deal of respect for the "beautiful sentence" crowd, but I don't consider plot an acceptable casualty of the doctrine, and I don't have a lot of time to read. If I want long, rambling description, I'll at least read Proust, who may take forever to get somewhere but provides a much more interesting ride. On to the next book on the stack.

Wisdom from the late DFW

Looking through Consider the Lobster to get a quotation for a friend this evening, I happened upon this little bit of wisdom for writers, from DFW, distilled down for brevity:

The two most important rules for writers are:

(1) The reader cannot know or perceive anything other than what you put down on the page;
(2) You cannot expect the reader to feel the same way you do about any given thing.

These rules, he says, are so plain and obvious that it is astounding how difficult it is to get college-level students to put them into practice. They are truisms that we wave our pens at and say, "of course, of course," and then they totally fly out of our heads while writing. To simplify, of course, one could boil those down to one thing:

* The reader is a separate human being living in a separate world from you, whose only intersection with your world is the words you put down on the page.

Just something to remember.

Review: Declare

Declare, by Tim Powers
9/10, a seamless blend of spy novel and supernatural thriller

O Fish, are you constant to the old covenant?
Return, and we return. Keep faith, and so will we.

The Afterword to "Declare" is every bit as fascinating as the story itself. Intrigued by a book about Soviet double agent Kim Philby, Tim Powers began reading more about the man and his life. He found that the more he read, the more it felt as though Philby's life revolved around a central mystery that nobody had yet written about. Being, as we know, one of the masters of the contemporary supernatural, Powers took it upon himself to write that mystery, and Declare was born.

Powers created Andrew Hale, a British Secret Service agent whose birth in Palestine and baptism in the River Jordan make him perfectly suited for assignment to the supernatural division of the Service, which goes by various acronyms over the course of his association with it. He isn't always told the full truth; in fact, part of the joy of the book is the reader's journey along with Hale as he travels from ordinary espionage to something larger and more frightening.

But his journey is not only a journey of knowledge. Hale's journey is intertwined with that of Philby and Elena Ceniza-Bendiga, the latter a creation of Powers like him. The three of them perform a dizzying dance between the secret services of the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France that is occasionally hard to follow, but never so much that it impedes the reader's understanding of the story. Each of them is faced with the question of what is most important in life several times along the course of the book, and Powers brings that question to a satisfying answer with the end.

As always, Powers exhibits a dazzling imagination in the intricate details of his supernatural world. It meshes perfectly with our contemporary world, and its rules have the internal consistency and detail one might expect from a watchmaker. I have a particular affection for magic, especially in a contemporary context (as in urban fantasy), where magical phrases like the one above have layers of meaning and power. Powers expertly doles out just enough information about his world to draw the reader in.

In Declare, Powers adds some terrific characters. Beyond his main three, a host of supporting characters fill the book out and give it life. He moves them through London, Paris, Beirut, and Moscow, each one lovingly described. Sometimes the action is a bit hard to follow, and if there's one flaw in the book, that would be it. But this is a thrilling, satisfying read, and it immerses you in his world so much that you want to go up to someone on the street and say, "O Fish, are you constant to the old covenant?" just to see what they might say in return.

To Chase The Sublime

Via Maud Newton, whose blog I've only recently started to read: a hysterical satire of literary criticism.

Wow, Fiction Works!


I had to bite my hand to keep from laughing out loud in the office at the following excerpt:

We could all do worse than to write like Saul Bellow. And when I say write like Saul Bellow, I mean be Saul Bellow. And when I say be Saul Bellow, I mean unzip the skin from his body and wear it as a sort of Saul Bellow suit so that we can get cozy in it and truly inhabit it and understand the Old Macher.

What's On Your Stack?

Books on my shelf this year:

Declare, Tim Powers - I love his work. 1940s-to-1960s war drama with the requisite supernatural element.

Europe Central, William Vollmann - "Through interwoven narratives that paint a composite portrait of [Germany and the USSR] and the monstrous age they defined, /Europe Central/ captures a chorus of voices both real and fictional--a young German who joins the SS to fight its crimes, two generals who collaborate with the enemy for different reasons, the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich and the Stalinist assaults upon his work and life. With these and other unforgettable stories, Vollmann breathes life into a haunting chapter from the past and gives us a daring literary masterpiece."

2666, Roberto Bolaño - An epic story, a Christmas present from Mark, whose last such venture was "The Shadow of the Wind," which turned out pretty darn good too.

The Drawing of the Dark, Tim Powers  - More Tim Powers, but medieval.

Shakespeare: The World As Stage, Bill Bryson - A tour through Shakespeare's world to understand the context of his plays.

Strange Itineraries, Tim Powers - Short stories. Yes, someone went through my Amazon list and got me all the Tim Powers books.

Mothers and Sons, Colm Toibin - Saw him speak at Stanford and loved his talk and the excerpt.

The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton - 1920s social drama, Pulitzer-winner. I'd heard of it but never read it.

The United States of Arugula, David Kamp - A history of food snobbery in America.

Seven Ages of Paris, Alistair Horne - A history of my favorite city.

Out of the Kitchen, Jeanette Ferrary - A book by our food writing teacher from last year's class.

The View From The Upper Deck, D.J. Gallo - Sports humor from one of my favorite sports humorists.

Can I Keep My Jersey, Paul Shirley - The story of an NBA journeyman. Paul Shirley blogged on ESPN.com for a while and is always entertaining.

Jane Goodall, Dale Peterson - A biography by an author. I met him during his research at the U of M's Center and read the book he co-authored with Jane, "Visions of Caliban." Haven't gotten to this imposing volume yet.

Hopefully I can get through all of these in 2009! I'm looking forward to them.

Review: Bellwether

Bellwether, by Connie Willis
8/10, an enjoyable contemporary story of science research

In Passage, Connie Willis tells a story whose stakes are literally life and death. In Bellwether, the stakes aren't as high, but the story is still enjoyable.

Dr. Foster studies fads, and one of the enjoyable touches in the book is the beginning of each chapter, which lists a (sometimes relevant) trend, its birth and its demise. Willis does her research for these books, and it shows. Dr. Foster works for a high tech company (amusingly called HiTek) that sponsors scientific research with one hand, while the other seems to do everything possible to impede it. There isn't the urgency of "Passage" here, but the plot is similar: female scientist struggling against bureaucracy and her peers to accomplish a breakthrough, who meets a like-minded scientist whose help becomes essential.

"Bellwether" is a light, enjoyable read. Like all Willis's books, the characters are a delight to get to know, and you will put down the book knowing more about the subject than you did when you picked it up. The subject matter more or less forces her to root the book firmly in the mid-nineties, which is a good thing in this case. I remember the anti-smoking fad, the various beverage fads (still going on today), although for good measure, Willis throws in several other fads of her own invention that don't seem too outrageous. You'll also learn a little bit about chaos theory, something about libraries, and just a pinch about fairy godmothers.

Though you can see where everything is going before it gets there, that doesn't make the book any less fun to read. Like her earlier work, "To Say Nothing Of The Dog," "Bellwether" plays for comedy more than drama, and she proves equally adept at both.