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.

A True Novel by Minae Mizumura

Once in a while I read a book which knocks my socks off. Lately, it's been A True Novel by Minae Mizumura. The novel is a "re-telling" of Wuthering Heights but set in Japan in the 1950s just after the war. It's absolutely fantastic.

First off, it's highly readable. The characters are complex and intriguing, particularly the main character (the "Heathcliff" of the novel), Taro Azuma. But more than this, what Mizumura does with the novel form is fascinating: the book has a very long (150 pages +) preface where she tells the "real" story of how she came to write the novel and which people she met in her life helped her see a way in to approaching this story. She writes about inspiration and creativity, about growing up in New York with echoes from the original novel (as though life itself were a kind of novel but only in the retelling of life itself). But the preface is, in many ways, as important as the novel itself. It sets up so many expectations and helps us navigate certain plot points in the retelling part. I kept returning to the original Wuthering Heights while reading it, wondering how Emily Bronte's novel would have opened up if she had added this long "true" part before the novel.

The book has layers of tellings: the author tells us about her telling before she even tells it. Then some young man she meets in her real life becomes the basis of the main character who starts telling the story of the novel (Is he real? Is he fictional? Is he both?) but the bulk of the novel, as in Bronte's version, is told from the point of view of a housekeeper who witnesses the doomed love affair as an insider.

What I love about books that are retellings is when they open up the original and change it in a certain way for me, when I view that earlier work differently because of the retelling. The novel, like the original, looks at class but in very different ways that Bronte's novel. Mizumura is also interested in gender, in the war, in how the different generations approached love and violence. She explores the vastly different Japanese economy, what Japan was like when it was still a poor country.

At any rate, the book is nearly 1,000 pages long (but packaged beautifully in two separate volumes so they are easy to lug around) but I zipped through it in two weeks (a long time for me) and was enthralled in the novel from beginning to end. I highly recommend this book.

Murakami & Murakami

Back in the fall, I joined Audible.com after being bombarded with advertisements from various podcasts and online. It was a good deal. I took advantage of their one book per month deal and listened to a few books. I managed to get through a few without any having made much of a major impression on me.

But then I listened to Haruki Murakami's book The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. What an odd book. But I found it very entertaining, followed by very irritating, and the book ended with me almost equally loving it and hating it. I have to say, one of the odd things is when male performers read female dialogue. This particular performance reminded me of The Kids in the Hall: you know when they are in drag and speaking as women, that high unnatural voice they affect? You get used to it, though.

I've never been a huge fan of Murakami to be honest. I find his universes too staged and it's like he's trying too hard to be metaphysical. But the threads don't always seem to fit together. His characters are all rather flat.

I liked IQ84 better than some of his earlier works. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle started out well: it tells the story of a missing cat, a runaway wife and a universe that opens up at the bottom of a dry well. Meh, even thinking back about it, I just feel perplexed about the journey I took with him (the book is like 20 hours long). It was worth the read but no one meets that many odd, strange or kooky people in their life (the main protagonist, a regular sort of guy, meets the strangest women. No one is ever normal in a Murakami book).

I like the experience of listening to a book, though. It doesn't replace sitting quietly in a room with a book in-hand, but it's nice to be able to listen on the metro, in taxis, while walking to my office. It would be hard to do more than one or two books a month maximum but it's definitely a good way to squeeze in another book each month.

They don't have a massive selection but there are quite a number of titles of popular books or writers in the buzz. They have a lot of shitty books, that's for sure! If the NYT best-seller is your cup of tea, you'll be in heaven. A severe lack of translated works which kind of sucks but they have the obvious suspects: Murakami, Pamuk, Marquez (some, at least).

I have to say one thing: the other Murakami is definitely a writer whose work is more appealing: Ryu Murakami writes all kinds of stuff. His books are shorter and deal with macabre subjects often (murder, prostitution, etc.) but he has such a sense of human nature and he does tricky things as a narrator. He lulls you into a false sense of security and has this way of pulling the rug out from under you as you read along. His book Piercing is a great example. It's not a masterpiece but it's a great read: mysterious, spooky, creepy and also a lot going on in terms of power and destruction.

I've been reading another VERY interesting work: Minae Mizumura's A True Novel which I am really finding fascinating. I will write about it later, though. Just to say: this book is what all books aspire to: complex, entertaining, funny, moving and thoughtful.

My Japanese phase is coming to an end. Not sure what's next on my list: Eleanor Catton? Jim Harrison? Joseph Boyden? Hmmmm.