Beauty and Sadness by Yasunari Kawabata (1964)

An aging man revisits his involvement at 30 with a teenage girl.

Book Review: Beauty and Sadness, beyond the impeccable title, is a deceptively simple story of wrong emotions and wrong actions. Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) subtly mixes emotions, memories, motives in this novel so that the reader is left unsure who is loving, who is hating, what is remembered, and what's been forgotten. Traditional views are crossed with the modern, and there are psychological issues, cruelty, revenge, and many shades of love, including jealousy and obsession. Innocence is here too: the innocence of an infatuated young girl, the innocence of a son who loves tradition. More than passion (though there is that), this is a novel of the mind, colder, more analytical. When one seeks revenge, is it revenge for another or for herself. A seduction many years before leads to another seduction many years later. In Beauty and Sadness, Kawabata looks at the variety of human connections, and uses descriptions of art as a vehicle for emotion, for love. Apparently simple, everything laid out, yet nothing is certain. An older man, an author, remembers and wishes to see his young lover from 20 years ago, which story he obliviously made into a novel. The once-young woman, now older, a successful traditional artist, still beautiful, still holds the memory of her young love. A beautiful young woman ("frighteningly pretty," "frighteningly beautiful"), an exponent of modern art, heedless of tradition, transforms all. Despite the two lovers' feelings, Kawabata explores whether love can be so wrong, so harmful, that it becomes poisonous decades later. A love, seemingly beautiful to the lovers, that causes so much sadness for everyone. "Beauty" and "sadness" are not opposites. Part of the sadness of external beauty is that it fades, is only a temporary trait, but inner beauty, for those who perceive it, may last forever. Beauty can be used to create sorrow here, but Beauty and Sadness is not a sad love story. There are moments of Mishima and Murakami. Typically I dislike May-December stories, such as older professors preying on female students. What aggravates the issue is when it's a 30 year-old man and a 15 year-old girl. With that caveat, there are Shakespearean levels of tragedy here.  [4★]

Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese (2012)

The story of Saul Indian Horse, an Ojibwe, from child to man.

Book Review: Indian Horse is a book that hurts. It hurts the head and hurts the heart. Richard Wagamese (1955-2017) wrote a book that the reader is compelled to read, wants to read despite the pain. The life of Saul Indian Horse is a mirror for First Nations people in Canada. He sees the casualties in the battle to survive the deep forest, the divide between the old religion and the new, the horrors of the government residential schools, the lure of drink. The injustice of being the "other" in your own country. The saving grace for Saul, his only means of escape, is his love for ice hockey. A love that could only be had by a Canadian or by someone who had nothing else left to love. It's a story that needs to be told, that needs to provide witness. The writing can be quite simple and quite beautiful: "My mother seemed almost weightless by now. I was always surprised that she left footprints." Indian Horse is not directly autobiographical, though it certainly reads that way. Wagamese was a member of the Ojibwe (also known as Ojibway (as here) or Chippewa (in the States). The descriptions of ice hockey are exhilarating initially, but later pale somewhat as it begins to seem like a teen sports novel in which our young hero will surely save the day. In fairness, this makes the gut punch of the ending that much more visceral. Wagamese makes this an important novel, tying the Indian role in the hockey world to their role in Canadian society, for playing hockey will surely make one Canadian just as for earlier waves of immigrants playing baseball made one American. Wagamese tells a story in Indian Horse that is just as real today in Utah or South Dakota, and the horrors Wagamese describes still occur in residential schools for students with disabilities. A compelling read written well about an important subject. No matter how much it hurts.  [4★]

All Systems Red by Martha Wells (2017)

Half human, half robot, cyborg, android, "construct," call it what you will but it calls itself Murderbot and seeks its own life while protecting those annoying and pesky humans.

SciFi Review: All Systems Red, the first in a series, is fun, light, and a quick read. It's SciFi, it's a mystery, it's a thriller. There's a whole lotta fun packed into this novella. Murderbot is a security unit protecting a human advance team exploring a newly discovered planet. All Systems Red won the Nebula Award (2017) and Hugo Award (2018) for best novella, but while wonderfully entertaining, it's not that amazing: it's what a good SciFi story should be. The key to All Systems Red is Murderbot's reclusive, idiosyncratic, half-robot personality. Will appeal to the misanthropic introvert in so many of us ("when I do manage to care, I'm a pessimist"). Like any good millennial, it just wants to binge on Netflix. My only quibbles are that the ending is too neat and tidy, and Murderbot's dialog with humans is too human. That's explained within the story, but it still felt jarring, like any two humans interacting. On the other hand, I found Murderbot's internal monologue to be charming and irresistible. Much like my own. Hmm, I hope I'm not identifying a little too much ... .  [3½★]

Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom by Sylvia Plath (2019)

A young woman leaving home for the first time takes a train ride to self-discovery.

Story Review: "Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom" is a story Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) wrote in 1952 while a student at Smith College and submitted to Mademoiselle magazine for publication, but was rejected. This thin volume would be a well-placed incentive for a new edition of Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. The edition seems  be a bit of a rush job since there's a font error, Ted Hughes is listed as "Tim" Hughes (or is that an intentional jab?), and the wonderful Ariel: the Restored Edition is called the "Restores" Edition (hopefully these have been corrected). Written when Plath was 20, Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom gives hints of her future genius. In her apprenticeship, Plath seems to be working intently with colors and description, sometimes clumsily: "the wheels clocked away like cogs of a gigantic clock" (?). The story does, however, relate well to the autobiography that she made a significant part of her work. I hate to dwell on that since I believe Plath is underrated as a poet because too much attention is paid to her tragic life instead of the poems, but the relationship to her history is an interesting part of this "new" story. As we've read in her journals and letters, Plath assiduously tried to be a dutiful daughter while at the same time was consumed with vaulting ambition, a massive capacity for hard work, and a certain instability that was both daring and uncontrollable. In this allegorical, symbolic, other worldly story, a young woman (the Maiden) is pressured to take a train ride: "It's not my fault I took this train. It was my parents. They wanted me to go." An older woman (the Crone, source of wisdom) on the train counters: "You let them put you on the train ... and did not rebel." The train apparently takes its riders inevitably to some unpleasant end of the line, unless one acts (makes an "assertion of the will). The Ninth Kingdom is "the kingdom of negation, of the frozen will." The people on the train are (figuratively) blind that they're heading to some horrid destination. It's not difficult to see the train as the average life that leads to boring mundanity unless one makes the effort to slip the surly bonds of conformity. Plath did not  want to be limited by her mother's (very real) need for security. Interesting that the father character is described as "anonymous" and "incognito," a far cry from a "man in black with a Meinkampf look." The story seems to be written for herself more than anyone else. Plath is giving herself permission to be daring, to buck the rules, to "jump the track." She's trying to find a way to justify becoming the writer she would be, rather than sticking to the script provided for women in Fifties, while not bringing unhappiness to her mother. It's striking how much Mary needs the Crone's approval. Early on "the woman's eyes were upon her, level after blue level of reproach, and Mary felt herself sinking, drowned in shame." She feels a doom of guilt for not resisting her parents. On the next page, after Mary decides to take action: "The woman flashed Mary a sudden radiant smile, and her eyes lit with admiration." Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom is an enjoyable and compulsive read, apart from biography. While much is suggested, much is left undeveloped; it even has a little echo of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" about it. The older woman's statement that "I could not tell you. I could not help you until you made the first positive decision" reminds me of Glinda the Good Witch telling Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz that she had the power to return home all along. But for all the good moments in Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom, it didn't take the author of Ariel and The Bell Jar to write this. As much we love Plath and her work, she deserves our clear-eyed honesty. I'm still glad to have read it, to have a glimpse of the younger Sylvia Plath, as I'll read anything and everything she ever wrote.  [3★]

Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliott Chaze (1953)

An escaped convict and a call girl on the run try to build a future based on a mutual lack of trust.

Mystery Review: Black Wings Has My Angel is more crime novel than mystery, with more than enough hard-boiled suspense. Elliott Chaze (1915-1990) follows the James Cain and Jim Thompson anti-hero school of writing, and if you enjoyed books such as Double Indemnity or The Grifters you'll enjoy this one as well. Our leads are Virginia and Tim, both tough as calculus and as unpredictable as Colorado weather (much of the story takes place in the Centennial State). An early pulp cover of Black Wings Has My Angel warns: "She had the face of a madonna and a heart made of dollar bills!" Although Virginia is described as your typical ravishing noir dame, moll, femme fatale, don't let the heavy-breathing descriptions of her startling legs blind you to what's really going on behind those lavender eyes to die for. She's more than a match for her untrustworthy lover in every way. The two main characters are equal in their unholy character, with Tim consistently underestimating his capricious partner (although he describes her as "a tough, elegant adventuress with plenty of guts and imagination"). The dueling love between the two paired with a clockwork plot makes it a noir classic. Although Black Wings Has My Angel includes some graphic violence ("Alive he was nothing but trouble") that may approach torture porn for some readers, most should be able to make it through unscathed. Well written, quick reading, the whole package.  [4½★]

Stoner by John Williams (1965)

William Stoner, the child of farmers, becomes a university literature professor and lives life the best he can.

Book Review: Stoner reads like a biography, it's a literary portrait. A life to read and watch and learn what life is about. Here everyone is distant from others, there are emotions, but hidden and controlled and masked by distances. No one wholly bad or wholly good. While reading I thought of The Secret History and felt that Stoner was somehow the opposite of that book. The humble man of the earth discovers literature at college, and becomes what he has to be, even at pain and cost to others. "He wondered at the foolishness that drove men to do the things they did." This is a simple life, not much different really than the lives that many people live. Not much success, not much failure, a lot of making the best of it and learning in between, dealing with the obstacles. "He felt at times that he was a kind of vegetable, and he longed for something -- even pain -- to pierce him, to bring him alive."  John Williams (1922-1994) tries to create a real and credible life story. In any life, we mostly try to do the best we can, there are moments of happiness, sorrow, terror, disappointment, and of what might have been. There's confusion and events that don't make much sense. We try to do what we want to do, and sometimes we find value in what we do. We don't achieve as much as we want, and we're not always as good as we imagine ourselves. Williams catches all of that in Stoner. Although written from a man's point of view, the novel is full of women, and the reader will puzzle over the wife, pity the daughter, and hope for the lover. "They had been brought up ... that the life of the mind and the life of the senses were separate." We're left with the story of a long enough life that wasn't easy, wasn't meant to be. But it was the life he had, interwoven with the lives of others. The salt of the earth from one family to another, reading his literature, teaching his students. Life and life only.  [5★]

The White Book by Han Kang (2016)

A meditation on and exploration of life and loss.

Book Review: The White Book is an indescribable mix of memoir, fiction, poetry, nonfiction -- it probably shouldn't even exist. It's much more postmodern and meta than all those postmodern writers you hear about, without even trying. Divided into three sections: "I," "She," "All Whiteness," it's the opened tap of a creative mind, imagination as tangible power, splashed across 157 short pages: "the ruins of seventy years ago might be startled into revealing themselves." Described as a meditation on the color white, that's not quite right. The White Book is meditative, but on life and loss, fragility. Han Kang uses "white" as a mantra to focus her thoughts, part of the semiotics of life, a stimulus to goad her imagination, a totem, a talisman, a conscious breath, a reminder: "The warm white candle wax creeps ever downward ... eventually out of existence." In secular language Kang creates her own religious interpretations. Even the loss of an older sister in infancy which led to Kang's birth, ostensibly the thread of the book, is used to interview a host of issues: "a white butterfly stuttering forward might snatch at her gaze." The White Book is an observation, a memory, memory transformed into possibilities, creating the now, imagination changing reality. Kang uses an isolated time in Warsaw ("I think of her coming here instead of me") much as Federico Garcia Lorca used his visit to New York City (Poeta en Nueva York), to employ the strangeness, the foreign world to free the imagination, unmoored by the familiar. A quiet book, contemplative, virtually plotless, philosophical ("the only things that the mind cannot examine are memories of the future"), sinking deep into the underground streams of life, in lines such as "at some point you will inevitably cast me aside ... and I cannot now return to the time before that knowledge."  [5★]

V. by Thomas Pynchon (1963)

A mad dreamscape of nightmarish visions imprisoned in the waking world.

Book Review: V. is complex enough for fans of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, yet modern enough for followers of David Foster Wallace. Thomas Pynchon seems to know everything, been everywhere, and is able to write about it in infinite detail. Such a novel needs to and can be read on two levels. First, just go with the flow, enjoy the energetic descriptions on every page, the many manic characters, and hold on tight. Second, explore every page, Googling like mad, following up on every thread that Pynchon has frayed and left behind, as if reading Ulysses or Infinite Jest. V. cries out for an annotated version, needing copious footnotes, end notes, or notes of any kind. I may question how much knowing about the "Trumpeter of Krakow" adds to the story, but I most certainly and firmly can't say it doesn't. At it's core it's the story of a schlemiel, the animate against the inanimate, and an inifinite number of characters that manage to be both impossibly bizarre but also (one eventually realizes) human. There are so many sidelines, tangents, digressions and detours that there's no way the reader will remember, much less connect, the infinite literary molecules that comprise this novel, without reading it at least three times and taking the proverbially copious notes. Pynchon threw everything he had into this first novel, as if he might never get another chance. Most definitely not for everyone. My suggestion is to just take it as it comes and read it for the first take only, live in the present, read it as the words are before you, understand the paragraph you're reading, and then move on without too many glances backward. I've already re-read this book, since I had to read almost every paragraph twice to grasp it. I think this is only appropriate for a writer who's content to have his brilliant first novel known as "the book with the nose job" (here Pynchon ventures into horror). As weighty and serious as this book is, Pynchon doesn't take it too seriously himself and neither should you, as seen in lines such as this mention of Benny venturing into a bar called "The Sailor's Grave": "realizing he had one foot in the Grave anyway ...", or this conversation: "Don't you know that life is the most precious possession you have?" "Why?" "Because without it, you'd be dead." And there is the always elusive and endlessly mysterious V., wondering "what is she?", as we encounter Victoria, Veronica, Vheissu, Vesuvius, the V-1 and V-2, Valletta, Vaugirard, Viola, and other red herrings. There are many things incredible about V. It's unbelievable that this is a first novel, and that it was published in 1963 before American history such as Kennedy's death, Watergate, or 9/11. This seems more like a book that could only have been written after those events. I'm not too proud to admit that this book has levels I missed, depths I couldn't reach, etc. This is one of those books like Finnegan's Wake or House of Leaves, that it's fair to ask about reading it: Why would you do that to yourself? But having read it, I'm glad I did and would again.  [4★]

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck (1931)

The life story of a simple farmer and his love of the land as he confronts innumerable adversities.

Classics Review: The Good Earth is one of those books I've often heard about, but the comments always seemed a trifle condescending. Even in our ironic times, I don't believe this book ever needs to take a back seat. This is the honest voice of someone who grew up in China, went to school there, speaks the language, and was part of Chinese culture in the early 20th Century. All of the characters in The Good Earth are flawed, with varying amounts of decency; there are no cloying model or ideal examples of the folk. Pearl Buck (1892-1973) was ahead of her time in describing the difficulties of (endlessly repressive) women's roles, disability, foreign incursion, communication, war, dislocation, and economic inequality in that time and place. She shows instead of tells, all without making cultural judgments or trying to impose Western views on Chinese society. Rather, she lays out vital descriptions so that readers can then evaluate custom, tradition, and heritage for themselves. Even what might seem to modern readers as horrors told by a Toni Morrison, are laid out dispassionately, seen through the eyes of the people. The description of revolutionary looting are stunning. A minor complaint is that it's written in a somewhat stilted "translationese" or bygone style ("men do not take good iron to make a nail nor a good man to make a soldier"). It's a minor hiccup that I grew used to in my reading. Despite the seismic issues that Buck addresses in The Good Earth, it also remains the simple story of a hard working man of the earth, whose desires fail to please him, and finds that life has no happily ever after.  [4★]

Evening in Paradise: More Stories by Lucia Berlin (2018)

A sequel of sorts to the remarkable collection A Manual for Cleaning Women.

Book Review: Evening in Paradise contains 22 more stories by the recently rediscovered Lucia Berlin (1936-2004). This is both a blessing and a curse (though I won't lie: more Lucia Berlin can only be a good thing). The biographical note states that Berlin wrote 76 stories. Her recent previous collection, the beyond brilliant A Manual for Cleaning Women, contained 43 stories (claiming that they were her "best work"). So of her 76 stories, we now have 65 of them in these two collections. I do not subscribe to the lazy myth that everything a brilliant writer creates is brilliant -- just because we love their writing doesn't make them perfect. No one hits the bulls-eye every time. Not everything that Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Toni Morrison did was her best work. Not everything James Joyce, James Baldwin, and David Foster Wallace wrote was incapable of criticism. Some say 90% of everything is crud (Sturgeon's Law). Which leads to the small issue revealed here. Several of the stories in Evening in Paradise are excellent, easily the equal of the stories in the previous collection -- I would've hated to miss the gutting "La Barca de la Ilusión." Some of the stories, however, being collected from a much smaller pool, are not as relentlessly brilliant and this collection isn't up to the previous one. But Lucia Berlin at 75% is better than many writers at their best. Still enjoyable, still worth reading (hell's bells, I'd read her shopping lists), there is more average here, however, there is also more variety in plots and viewpoints and plenty of her stunningly evocative writing. If read in conjunction with the simultaneous publication of Berlin's draft autobiography, Welcome Home, however, many of the stories become revelatory. Evening in Paradise shows how beautifully and intelligently she transformed biography into fiction. There is so much overlap here, word for word, with the stories of her life. In fact, there is even overlap within the stories of Evening in Paradise (the tale of stealing a woman's false teeth makes a couple of appearances). If you loved Manual (as I did) you'll certainly like this; if you liked it you won't regret reading this; and if you only tolerated Manual (can't imagine a lower level of enjoyment) you might not need to read this. Having said that, I'm kinda curious about the uncollected 11 stories ... what am I missing? Could FSG be daring and publish The Worst of Lucia Berlin? I'd read it.  [3½★]