NYRB Classics: some of my favorites

For years, I've been wanting to do an event on NYRB Classics. The premise is simple: we ask three or four confirmed Festival authors to "champion" their favorite NYRB Classics book and defend it at a round-table event.

I've never been able to make it work for various reasons (though not giving up) but being a champion of NYRB and while reading Silvina Ocampo's Thus Were Their Faces in bed last night, I started wondering how many NYRB books I had in my library at home. A fair number it turns out. (I even have in my collection The Invention of Morel by her husband, Adolfo Bioy Casares.)

I think the first NYRB I bought was Mavis Gallant's collection Paris Stories. I may have even bought it in Paris now that I think about it. I've read and re-read this one many times and I love "The Moslem Wife" and several other stories in that collection which I could read and re-read every year and never grow tired of them.

I also love Natsume Soseki's The Gate which is one of those books whose images have stayed with me for years: a young couple who bitterly resign themselves to never being able to have kids and soon find themselves in a downward spiral.

Robert Walser's Berlin Stories is fascinating and when I was going through my Berlin literature phase a couple of years ago, I remember getting this one in the mail with the biggest smile on my face, knowing I would spend the entire next day on my sofa reading it. He's one of the most unique European writers...

And Eileen Chang's Love in a Fallen City is one of my most favorite books ever. Period. There are long passages of this collection that I practically know by heart.

The stroke of genius (or one of them) is that the editors ask really interesting writers to do the Simone Schwarz-Bart. Often these introductions or prologues or prefaces are just as interesting as the works themselves. So we have Helen Oyeyemi introducing Silvina Ocampo, Pico Iyer introducing Soseki, and Jamaica Kincaid introducing (the very under appreciated) Simon Schwarz-Bart. The main reason I bought George Simenon's Dirty Snow, in fact, is that I'm a huge fan of William T. Vollmann and I wanted to read what he thought about Simenon.

I don't love every NYRB (I find Stefan Zweig a bit thin though he's a fascinating character himself) but I love many of them and once something comes out in that familiar format, it rockets to the top of my list. (Really looking forward to Naked Earth by Chang and The Prank: the Best of Young Chekhov).

One could easily spend all one's time reading only NYRB collections and never have time to read anything else. Oh, in a perfect world...

The Gate by Natsume Soseki

This book has been one of the highlights of this holiday break. There is so much in it to talk about that I want to write a 4000 word post on it. Fortunately for my readers, I won't.

Suffice it to say that from Pico Iyer's introduction which praises Soseki's sparing use of plot points but ample use of details of early Meiji life in early 20th century Japan, I was off, revelling in the story and thrilled about reading the novel.

As Iyer suggests, not much happens that can be considered engaging: a man grown old before his time reflects back on his early life, his marriage and love for his wife, and is able to avoid conflict for much of his time on Earth, finally escaping into a Buddhist temple to try and find meaning and peace for his uneventful yet highly problematic life.

The book contains some of the most fascinating passages on meditation I've ever read, as well as a sweet love story that if not passionate in its waning years is the kind of love story that most people yearn for. But there are also lovely passages about Tokyo ("he walked on, puffing out cigarette smoke the autumn sunlight, the urge in him to wander afar, to someplace where he could etch vividly on his mind the sensation that the very essence of Tokyo was to be found here in this spot, then take it home as a souvenir of this day, his Sunday, before he lay down to sleep."), about Kyoto, about nature, about Oyone, his wife, and, of course, about his burgeoning interest in Zen Buddhism as the novel ends.

The bits about Tokyo made me miss that city. Though the book was written in the very early years of the 1900s, long before Tokyo was firebombed and largely destroyed by the Americans in WWII, there is something of the beauty and spirit of Tokyo still there today, 100 years later. Though I didn't live there long, I find Tokyo to be one of the most fascinating cities in the world: densely crowded but surprisingly quiet and bucolic, incredibly wealthy but terribly middle class, groomed, trimmed and controlling of nature within an inch of its life but surprisingly green with abundant trees, flowers, and green spaces.

And this book has whetted my appetite for more Soseki, an author who has influenced several generations of Japanese writers and continues to loom large on the Japanese psyche. Imagine a Canadian writer on our money (Margaret Atwood on the $20 bill? Hugh MacLennan on the $10?)...

Natsume Soseki on the back of the 1000 yen note