Blue Met's A Year in Reading: from Ferrante to Adelstein, Luiselli to Benedetti

Since everyone else seems to be doing it, I thought I'd weigh in on my personal favorites for 2014:

Best 2014 comfort reader: Eileen Chang's Half a Lifelong Romance: I've long been a fan of Eileen Chang, but this novel, which dates from the middle part of Eileen Chang's career, was a new one for me. It appeared in serial form in the 1950s but is set in 1930s Shanghai and tells the story of a doomed love affair in the tumultuous period leading up to the Chinese Civil War. It's a tale of a young woman trying hard to live life according to her own terms in a society where women are diminished and dismissed. It's not a perfect novel but it's engaging a fascinating tale of power, love and fate.

Best  2014 binge-read: Elena Ferrante's Neopolitan novels: in 2014 I read the first three books in a few months and was absolutely riveted by them. They tell the story of a friendship (sometimes enemy-ship) of two girls growing up in 1950s Naples (the first book starts then, the third book ends in the late 70s) while one girl manages to pull herself out of the neighborhood through study and hard work, the other relies on pluck and street smarts. It's the story of an Italy that's long gone, but also romantic & violent.

Best 2014 discovery: the work of Valeria Luiselli. One of Mexico's most promising up and coming Faces in the Crowd is still with me months after I read it. It is a fascinating novel that looks at time, art, writing and fate/choice. This is a writer who I will be watching for years to come because everything she's written so far is interesting.

Best 2014 shocker: A True Novel by Minae Mizumura: this novel is a retelling of Wuthering Heights set in post-war Japan. But that really diminishes the book in a certain way because it's only a tiny fraction of what's interesting about this book: it's fascinating formally and one keeps asking oneself throughout the book: is this the novel or the story on which the novel is based? Is this real? Then one wonders what real actually means: is anything real? But I'm making the book sound pedantic or possibly boring. It's anything but. It's an excellent novel that I highly recommend.

Best 2014 Guilty Pleasure (and best 2014 book by a man?!): The Rest of Jungle & Other Stories by Mario Benedetti: I loved this book. It's a collection of stories by a Uruguayan writer whose work is hard to pin down: it's about middle class love affairs, about jungle adventures in the bush, it's about office workers stuck in bureaucratic hell, it's about animals who are bitchy and judgmental.

Best 2014 non-fiction journalism: Tokyo Vice: an American Reporter on the Police Beat by Jake Adelstein: Adelstein is one of the only foreign reporters ever hired by a Japanese newspaper and he tells the tale of his work for one of Tokyo's biggest daily newspapers, including his involvement in writing stories about Yakuza and other sordid Japanese adventures.

Eileen Chang: Half a Lifelong Romance

For some reason, this edition of Eileen Chang's Half a Lifelong Romance isn't available in North America though it should be.

I'm a huge fan of Chinese writer, Eileen Chang, who was at her writing peak in the early 1940s in occupied Shanghai. I've read just about all of her fiction and non-fiction and when she has a new piece translated or re-issued, I am compelled to read it.

So I ordered this UK edition of this novel. It's really wonderful. Though Chang wrote in both Chinese and English, I prefer her work in English translated by a native English speaker (this book translated by Karen Kingsbury) where the language is more fluid and natural.

Plus, as was the custom of the day, Chang herself chose English-equivalent names for her Chinese characters and it's very difficult to read a novel with characters named "Good luck," "Gold Root," "Gold Flower," etc. Most contemporary translators just use the Chinese equivalent (which if one isn't familiar with Chinese can be a bit daunting at first but one gets acclimated to it quickly enough).

Half a Lifelong Romance is classic Eileen Chang: embedded in the deep emotion, pain and psychology of her characters, China and all its political upheavals linger in the background, never making up more than hints or flavours in the story. It's all about human affairs: love, duty, commitment, betrayal. I've written before about the fact that during her lifetime in China, Chang was severely criticized for writing non-politically (when being non-political itself was a terribly politically charged stance), and this novel, too, shows us Chang's deep interest in love and families.

Though it has to be ordered from Amazon.co.uk (possibly some aggregator site can find second-hand copies of it somewhere closer), it's well worth it. It's a really fascinating novel and I've enjoyed it immensely.

It tells the story of a doomed romance and all the complexities of early 20th century Chinese families, the pressures that class and morality forced upon smart hard-working women.

Eileen Chang is a very interesting figure. One of the most popular contemporary writers in 1940s
Shanghai, she was forced to leave her beloved city in the early 1950s (the Communists disliked her for a whole host of reasons) where she moved to Hong Kong and then the US, never to return to her homeland. Yet for the rest of her life (she died in 1995), she set all her books there, longing, perhaps, for those streets and familiar smells that were lost to her forever. Towards the end of her life, she was revered, particularly in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and her career got back on track soon after her death. She continues to be one of the most famous writers in the Chinese-speaking world to this day.

Amy Tan and Eileen Chang

One of the first novels about China that I can remember reading is Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. I loved it. Then again, I was only  15 or 16 when it came out and I remember getting a hold of a copy of it at the public library. I had had no experience or thought of China and in the town where I am from, China is about as far away as one can be culturally.

So the book opened up a new world for me and at that impressionable age, attracted me to all things Chinese. Later I would live in Shanghai and Hong Kong for years, learning Mandarin and writing a good deal about contemporary Chinese literature.

I largely forgot about Amy Tan: I read A Kitchen God's Wife years after my first encounter with her but I hardly remember it. China was always portrayed rather tragically by Tan. When the film version of The Joy Luck Club was released, I saw it in the theater but was disappointed because it fell so far short of the book.

All of this to say that I picked up her latest book last week and have been reading it. I have to say that I have mixed feelings about it. And I'm not sure if it's just my critical abilities have developed a lot since I was 15 or if it's a flawed book though I'm reading it actively and will finish it. One problem I often have with "historical fiction" (a term I am using loosely), particularly told in the first person, is that the narrator is too often a modern figure, "translating" an older culture for us in the modern world. So the limitations of that modern point of view underline all the analysis and editorializing about the historical period. The narrator of Tan's new book (The Valley of Amazement) seems like a kid from the 1970s USA trapped in the world of 1920s Shanghai: her insights, her feelings. It's also clearly told from an adult's point of view since the insights are uneven: the things she understands are odd (the complex machinations of her dragon-like mother who runs a brothel are crystal clear for a 7 year old). Her voice is irritating. Maybe that's what Tan intends since she (Violet) is supposed to be a spoiled child but it's when we move out of her voice into another character's the the book gets interesting.

There are sections which are absolutely riveting. When Violet, the main American character, is "tutored" by an ageing courtesan, the story comes alive. It's fascinating all the rules and complex courting rituals that courtesans followed in order to be successful. And make no mistake, it was merely a matter of survival, no hedonistic impulses were part of the equation (for the woman, at any rate). The amount of research that must have gone into this is something I can't stop thinking about as I read these long sections about clothes, fashion, envy, increasing one's reputation, attracting men, sexual prowess.

What strikes me is how similar the rules of our "celebrity culture" are similar to the world of being a good courtesan.

It's the main character's voice that I find hard to bear. Why is she so obsessed with her mother's love? This seems like a modern invention, particularly given the fact that in traditional Chinese society, parents never tell their kids "I love you" (True, Violet is half-American and her mother is completely American but Violet has grown up in China with her mother as just about the only influence from American culture and not overly warm, etc.). This deep-seated insecurity seems very much like a modern invention to me (not that Chinese kids didn't want their parents' love but they didn't obsess over it). Tan thanks Lisa See in her acknowledgements, a mediocre writer whose work suffers from many of the same flaws as this one does.


I am a big believer that one can like popular fiction and still be a "good" reader but I am not really getting this book. Oddly though it has hooked me (often I won't even finish books I am enjoying). And it makes me wonder if I should re-read The Joy Luck Club to find out if it's as good as I remember. Or perhaps it's better if I leave it and let it remain in the past.

But where Tan shines is, oddly, when she reaches back and shows us this world from a Chinese point of view (not a Westerner's point of view). In these beautiful passages I am reminded of Han Bangqing's novel (translated by Eileen Chang), The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai. It's a much more interesting book (though perhaps less so to contemporary North Americans since the narration is not exactly what we are used to).

In general, if one wants to get a real insight into China, read Eileen Chang. Her narrators are truly complex and fascinating. Lust, Caution is at once suspenseful, erotic, and complex. Love in a Fallen City is painful, beautiful and gives us Shanghai of the 1920s in a much more believable, less individualistic way that reflects a truer reality of the city. (even the reality of today though the book was written in the 1930s and 40s).

I've written about Eileen Chang before but I come back to her writing again and again, always finding something new, always enjoying my time in the worlds she creates.

I've often heard people say to me that they're not interested in China. I guess on one hand, I can understand that since all we hear in the media is negative stories about it: how dirty it is, how corrupt, how chaotic and crowded, etc. All of this is true. But China is an incredibly complex, amazing, and yes beautiful place with thousands of years of history. I find it endlessly fascinating (and yes also frustrating, nationalistic, self-centered), particularly these visions of Shanghai in the early part of the 20th century.

Midnight in Peking by Paul French

Been reading Paul French's Midnight in Peking over the holiday break and finding it an interesting if odd little story.

French chronicles the real-life murder of Pamela Werner in 1937 in Beijing. The adopted daughter of a well-connected (if not well-liked) former consular official, China scholar, and old "China-hand," Pamela Werner is found mutilated one morning on the streets of the capital and the mystery of who killed her and why is the card that French keeps close to his chest throughout. The book straddles the razor thin line separating fiction and non-fiction.

It's written in a novel format with imagined thoughts and feelings of individual characters, with scenes that contain details French could not possibly know with any certainty. But that's where a story like this has its limitations: if one wants to engage the reader, it's vital to suck them into the story with these details that he has to invent which means that it's no longer an historical document.

The danger, of course, is that the story "becomes" history when it is very clearly not history.   I'm not able to articulate in this limited space what exactly bothers me about this distinction but it does bother me and I kind of wish French had fictionalized more of the story, changed names, etc., and only told us in the introduction that it was based on a real case. As it is, it's imagined, fictional details that may or may not be important in between facts that are clearly historical and true-to-life.

Also, though there are some unrelated historical details noted that are not necessarily related to the case, I feel that the book could have done more with this: more about the political situation going on (which French only slightly touches on), about the uncomfortable role that the British and other foreigners held in China as it descended into civil war, about the social conditions and the very recent collapse of the Qing dynasty (again, which French notes but hardly delves into). French mentions some historical details but the fact that it's written more like a novel means that those details are presented awkwardly with 21st century hindsight.

Eileen Chang's excellent collection, Love in a Fallen City

It's readable and engaging though I don't necessarily find it to be that memorable or complex. Made me nostalgic for China, though, which I didn't mind. Still if one wants to read a story of early to mid-century China, there are many other books which I'd recommend before this one, books like The Master of Rain, Shanghai '37, The Rouge of the North, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, Love in a Fallen City, or even some of French's other books (I loved his book on Carl Crow). Read French's excellent blog for more on China.

Nobel Prize for Literature: 2012 Mo Yan

So Chinese writer Mo Yan has won the Nobel Prize for literature. A good thing. I'm not terribly familiar with his work though I have read Red Sorghum and enjoyed it (many years ago, it was....) There are definitely other Chinese writers whose work I like better, but Mo Yan probably has the widest appeal (Wang Anyi is too Shanghai-centric, Wang Shuo is too weird, Yan Lianke is still a bit obscure, Yu Hua is too...meh). Mo Yan is definitely a comfortable choice.

I do wish I could be in China and hear the reaction of the Chinese people about the win. When Gao Xingjian won in 2000 (I was living in China at the time), it was treated with a shrug ("He's not really Chinese" I heard which is absolutely idiotic) and the government didn't report on it widely at all (except to say that it was some anti-China statement on the part of the reactionary Nobel Prize Committee or some such nonsense). Also, he was slightly on the obscure side perhaps when he won (living in France, better known in most circles as a playwright than a novelist). Though he is often criticized for being on the misogynistic side, I really admire the work of Gao. It's mystical, dreamlike, dense, and really moving in parts. Soul Mountain is beautiful.

At any rate, the Chinese don't have a great relationship with the Nobel committee: not only because of Gao Xingjian; Lu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace prize in 2010 which caused a minor tantrum in those sacred halls of Chinese government and is still reverberating as we speak.

The movie's good, too

There is no denying that Mo Yan is Chinese. But it'll be interesting to see how his win is treated in the Chinese press (i.e., how the government wants the story to be shaped). He has a tenuous relationship with the government and (sorry to say) in China as a general rule, people tend to go along with whatever way the government shapes an international news story like this one, particularly when it has to do with China. Of course, intellectuals and artists can see through the haze of government subterfuge but the average Chinese can't or won't (with almost no access to other points of view, it's no wonder).

(It's fascinating to me that you can ask almost all Chinese people and they will say the government lies about everything, that one shouldn't believe the government, etc., but then they buy all the spoon fed propaganda they're given about so much. All that said, North Americans are only slightly more aware of the world and if it's not the government shaping every opinion here, it's whatever news channel one watches).

It also can't be denied that this is a bit of mud in your eye on the part of the Nobel Committee: if the Chinese government criticizes them, they have it in just as much for the Chinese government. In that sense, Mo Yan is a very political choice. But politics shouldn't detract from the fact that he is, essentially, a very good writer that the world should know better.

And I am glad that a non-Western writer has won, the Nobel doesn't often do well on this score (though generally I like the writers they select). To me it's the best thing about the Nobel prize: a slew of works will suddenly be translated into English and available in book stores (consider Herta Mueller, for example, and how accessible she has become since her win), and the diversity of writers (despite the fact that they are generally Westerners) is very appealing.

What I started reading in 2012....and what I will read soon...

So it's been awhile since I last wrote anything here. The holidays wore me out! And we're back now after closing up shop for a couple of weeks. I couldn't stand the thought of another "best of 2011" reading/book list, so I decided instead to start 2012 with a list of books I am reading or soon to read. Always better to look forward!

The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai: This novel, set in Shanghai in 1999, tells the story of a high-powered Shanghai business man who is injured in an explosion and loses his ability to speak Mandarin. Having spent his very early years in the US, he returned to China at age 10 and managed to forget his English, only to have it return after he is severely injured. Screaming allegory aside, the book is an interesting exploration of the frustration that is a part of losing the ability to speak, not only for the victim but for all those around the victim. The US doctor sent to work with the patient, Lijing, complicates the frustration and Lijing's recovery. The setting captures the mood of late 90s China and Shanghai in particular.For me personally, since I lived in Shanghai at this time, the references to some of the sights and sounds and places of the city in 1999 really made me nostalgic!

The Beggar's Opera by Peggy Blair is the story of a crumbling marriage, a murder in Havana and a Cuban detective who is losing his grip on reality. The flavor of Havana figures solidly in this interesting tale and the Canadian suspect is the ultimate innocent abroad. This one makes me crave Cuba in January...

Some other books:

Dirty Feet by Edem Awumey. From the mRb review: The short but dense novel recounts the story of an unlikely and undefined relationship between two migrants in Paris, both haunted by memories of their respective homes. The protagonist Askia suffers the somewhat typical fate of many immigrants: though he is well educated, he drives a cab and lives in squalor. He is also on a mission to find his lost father, who is believed to be living in Paris. One day, he meets the mysterious Olia (who happens to be his fare) – a Bulgarian fashion photographer who claims that she has photographed Askia’s father and offers to help locate the missing man.


Mister Blue by Jacques Polin. From the press release: This tender and perceptive tale explores the textures of solitude, compassion, language, fear, and the imagination. Meet Jim: a writer suffering from vivid dreams and bouts of writer's block. Meet Mister Blue, a dignified and prophetic cat and Jim's sole companion that spring on the Ile of d'Orléans...until the day they discover a copy of The Arabian Nights in a cave along the beach.

These are just the tip of the iceberg, of course, but the books I'm either halfway through or have on my nightstand to read in the next couple of weeks. I did surprisingly little reading over the break: mainly I watched movies, Japanese anime (which I'm kind of obsessed with lately), walked the dog and hung out with friends...man, time off is just what I needed before our final push to Festival time!