 A near-perfect short story set in Seoul in the 1920s.
The protagonist is a poor rickshaw driver who has not had a customer in 8 days. Today is his lucky day he thinks, as he gets two big customers, one after the other, followed by two more. He is happy that he can finally feed his wife and baby, and perhaps quench his thirst with some wine. While he takes on customers it rains, a freezing rain in winter. He is suspicious of his luck, and the thought of his sick, bedridden wife nags at him. Don't go out today, she had begged him, clinging to his arm. If you must go, at least come back early for me. However, the prospects of money keep him on his feet, and it is dark when he heads home. His reluctant feet move forward, and he feels saved when he meets his friend on a street corner, near the neighbourhood bar. In the bar he eats and drinks lavishly. He laughs buoyantly one moment, and cries like a baby the next. He returns home and it is dark. The baby is sucking on the barren teat of a loglike corpse. The commentary was excellent as well, I like how Kevin O'Rourke (the translator) distinguished naturalism in the West from naturalism in Korean literature. Naturalism in the West was driven by scientific methodology, while naturalism in Korean literature was based on a sense of determinism and fate (운명/命运).
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 Another good read in these excellent bilingual series. Kim creates a certain atmosphere in this story, an atmosphere that lingers uncomfortably.
Almost nothing happens in this story, plotwise; the protagonist's father-in-law goes on his evening walk, leaving his stand-in, the constantly cooking duck bone soup. The protagonist waits for her husband and her father-in-law to return home to eat dinner. They do not return at the expected time. She goes down to check to see whether her neighbour downstairs has returned home or not. This neighbour owes her father money, which her father says she can keep once collected. Meanwhile the duck bone soup continues to simmer, its stubborn stench perforating the whole apartment complex, a stench that worsens the pregnant protagonist's morning sicknesses. The collection of critical essays and critiques really helped my understanding of the story (another thing that is so good about these series), especially the comments calling her oeuvre a writing of the "grotesque" verbalized the feeling I had while reading this story.  I think I read this collection roughly 3 or 4 weeks ago (must have been around then because I was still in Shanghai). I was impressed with the power of Carver's stories. His writing may be sparse, but they do not lack in content. Each story left a powerful emotional impact that continued to resonate after his final, pithy words. He must have been influenced by Hemingway.
The stories in this collection mostly deal with relationships among American blue collar workers (maybe from a particular area in America, I am not sure), relationships that often end in failure and disappointment. Violence also ties these stories together, violence which is sometimes expressed, sometimes below the surface. I read afterwards that Carver's editor slashed major portions of his stories, cutting over 50% of his original writing at times. Next up my Carver for me is Cathedral, which I hear did not go through such procedures.  On the back cover, there is a review from The Times that reads: 'Tanizaki is a master of ambiguity and the subtle flavour of his work is skilfully preserved in this translation.'
When I read that review, I was expecting another work akin to that of Kawabata. However, Tanizaki's work is less subtle, less lyrical, but very well structured and focused on some larger issues that preoccupied Tanizaki at that time. I read this after I read In Praise of Shadows (see previous review), so I read this as an exploration of his culturally turbulent era, in which Western culture and lifestyle dominated a vanishing Japanese culture (he specifically focuses on the merchant culture), centering the story around his own experiences of his failed marriage. Tanizaki captures the fascination with both cultures as well as a certain feeling of ambivalence with this work  After reading Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata, I wanted to learn more about Japanese aesthetics and the inspiration for Kawabata's writing technique.
In Praise of Shadows by renowned Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki elaborates on Japanese aesthetic traditions using the West as a comparison point. The West seeks the brilliance of the Enlightenment, while the Japanese (and the Oriental) finds profundity in the ambiguities in the play between shades and depths. Tanizaki writes with detail and authority on this subject, passing through a variety of subjects like architecture, food, painting, theatre, and women (and many more in between). One of his most interesting insights was the role of tools in colonizing a culture. He laments the loss of the uniquely Japanese path due to the popularization of the Western gadgets and arts. Films and the radio are Western inventions and suit the aesthetic developments of the West, but leaves the Japanese unable to capture their unique tones with these new instruments. What if it was the Orient that invented such gadgets? he wonders. The whole essay is steeped in nostalgia and the acceptance of inevitable incoming of everything modern in Japanese daily life. Yet there is still a great power in his eulogy of the past, even when written in this tone of active resignation.  Reading these essays was being in momentary contact with a brilliant mind. Susan Sontag has a confident and authoritative voice, drawing references from her extensive cultural knowledge base of film, novels, drama, philosophy, and more, bringing all these together with her carefully crafted essay writing.
I liked 'Against Interpretation,' and 'On Style' the most of all her essays. She refutes the reading of artworks as a text and content, which reduces style to pretty frivolous frills that unnecessarily hide content. This does not mean she supports purely formalistic approaches to art, but a going beyond the content/style dichotomy. "Real art has the capacity to make us nervous," she says, and "by reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art." Content focused approaches that take the metaphor of art as text hide the awesomeness of artwork. "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." I also enjoyed her 'Notes on Camp' (need another reading of this) and 'One Culture and the New Sensibility,' which also try to reconfigure dichotomies of high/low culture, literary-artistic/scientific culture. Her writings on different art works and artists were an unique and interesting. When I already knew the reference she added more depth to my understanding (she calls Camus "the ideal husband of contemporary letters"), when I did not know the reference the ideas she communicated through these essays were enlightening nonetheless.  Must be one of my favourite novels, this was my third or fourth time reading it.
This time I took more time with the words that Hemingway wrote, instead of being moved along with the plot. I was able to really see Paris, the Bayonne, dusty white Spain, the bull fights. Hemingway was influenced by the Impressionists and it shows; it's quite amazing how such an economical usage of words is able to paint such a vivid picture. This volume was particularly good thanks to the supplementary material. There were portions of Hemingway's first draft of the novel and the first chapter that he decided to cut out upon Fitzgerald's suggestion. The Sun Also Rises could have gone in completely different directions based on the content of these first drafts, including an experimental meta-narrative route (some fragments of this remained sparsely scattered in the final version of the novel). I heard so much about this first chapter that was removed and after finally reading it, I have to agree with Fitzgerald's advice as it made the narrative slow to start. There was far too much telling and not enough showing in this first chapter, although the content of this removed first chapter still made its way into the novel through dialogue. Telling is not ok, but telling through dialogue is ok. In the end, I was happy to read The Sun Also Rises again, but it did not hit me as hard as it did the first time. Hemingway's values surreptitiously made its way into mine once more, but the feelings of the novel felt not as fresh, and not as pure as it did the first time. Perhaps I am just getting old. The best time to read this novel is past.  This was the first book I read by Modiano (in the English version that time) and I finished it in one setting.
The whole premise of the novel was fascinating for me, that of a search for a forgotten self-identity, and the format of a detective novel made it a gripping read (I heard Modiano likes his romans policiers). I was looking forward to reading it for the second time and in French, but for whatever reason, it didn't have the same effect on me. It was still interesting, and my knowledge of Modiano now made me aware of some details, like the timing of the forgotten events during World War II. I paid more attention on Modiano's writing style this time around. Modiano writes in short, controlled sentences, never veering off into excess, but never lacking in his descriptions.  I read some of Luxun's stories in Outcry in Chinese over a year ago, and did not think his writing was anything special; I like him a lot more reading in English.
I read Outcry as the moment when a new subject in Chinese literature emerged (I don't have enough knowledge about Chinese lit. to go too far with this hypothesis). This I related with the work of Korean nationalist historian Sin Chae-Ho, who criticized Korean historiography as being that of Confucian histories of the state (국사), which obscured the 'eternal' history of the Korean national subject (민족사). Read, for example, the celebrated preface of "the Real Story of Ah-Q," where Luxun's ambivalent narrator searches for a new literary form through which the story of Ah-Q (Ah-Q's name is also in a form inexpressible to Chinese printers at the time) can be expressed: "My first quandary is a title... Lives are written in a myriad firms: as official biographies of the great and good, autobiographies, legends, unauthorized biographies, ... What place could the life of the miserable Ah-Q have next to the glorious, official biographies of the rich and famous installed in our hallowed court histories?" I also read "A Minor Incident" in this way, the scholar-class I protagonist experiences a moment of horizontal, popular nationalism (à la Anderson) as subjects of feudal, hierarchical, pre-modern China become Chinese. |
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