How do we tell our stories to ourselves?

They say (whoever "they" are) that you can't judge a book by its cover. Add to that (and you can credit me for this) that you can't judge a book by its heft.

The Details by Ia Genberg and translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson is only 133 pages, but what it lacks in verbiage it makes up for in impact. The pages are black with long sentences that the translator says are sometimes longer in Swedish which has to be a translator's challenge. 

The story, such as it is, is narrated by a woman who lies bedridden with a high fever. Struck with an urge to revisit a novel from her past she finds an inscription inside the book: a get-well-soon message from Johanna, an ex-girlfriend who is now a famous television host. As she flips through the book, pages from the (unnamed) woman’s own past begin to come alive, scenes of events and people she cannot forget.

There are moments with Johanna, and Niki, the friend who disappeared years ago without a phone number or an address and with no online footprint. There is Alejandro, who appears like a storm in precisely the right moment. And Brigitte, whose elusive qualities mask a secret.

The Details is built around these four portraits; the small details that, pieced together, make up a life. Can a loved one really disappear? Who is a portrait's real subject, the person being painted or the person holding the brush? Do we fully become ourselves through our connections to others? The novel raises profound questions about the nature of relationships and how we tell our stories to ourselves and to others. 

Genberg says she "started over from the beginning of whatever chapter she was working on each time she sat down to write, rereading the entire cloth of the text countless times"—a literary Penelope. The result is dense, almost prose poetry, yet somehow still readable, accessible, which has to be an achievement by the translator. I believe that reading—and rereading—The Details will help make me a better writer. 

 

Watch out if she was born in 1966

With 2026 almost upon us a Japanese friend tells me she was born in 1966—a significant year in Japan. It was a 丙午 yeaa (pronounced hinoeuma) and which my dictionary defines as "Fire Horse (43rd term of the sexagenary cycle, e.g. 1906, 1966, 2026)​."

A moment's research on the web and I found this: "In 1966, Japan experienced a sudden drop in its fertility rate—for just that year. During the 1960s, the fertility rate was about 2.0 to 2.1 children per woman, but in 1966 it dropped dramatically to 1.6 children per woman. The number of births in 1966 was much lower than in surrounding years." How come?

"The superstition is that women born in this year of the 'Fire-Horse' have a bad personality and will kill their future husband. I presume the parents then were worried about their daughter’s huge disadvantage in the future marriage market, so they chose to avoid the risk of having a girl. Sex detection during pregnancy was not available then, so many families avoided having children altogether in 1966. This kind of superstition seems to have been more prevalent in rural areas than in urban areas, because the fertility drop in urban areas was less than in rural areas." (https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/opendata/curse-fire-horse-how-superstition-impacted-fertility-rates-japan)

I presume that the curse (misfortune) only works in Japan, but you can't be too careful. My friend for her part had less competition applying to college, is happily married, and has a delightful personality. 

You can visit the actual heartbeat library in Japan

Despite the standard disclaimer that "any similarity to . . . places . . . is purely coincidental" Les Archives du Coeur ("The Heart Archives") actually exists on Teshima, a small island in the Seto Inland Sea. Created by French artist Christian Boltanski, visitors can make recordings of their heartbeat and listen to the recorded heartbeats of other people from around the world.

Laura Imai Messina—or her translator Lucy Rand—calls it and her novel The Heartbeat Library. When at the end of the book her characters visit Teshima, it reads like a TripAdvisor entry, except that what has happened earlier makes the writing far more powerful, more moving than any such entry.

Shuichi is a successful children’s books illustrator. He was married with a young son who dies in a freak swimming pool accident. The marriage cannot survive the stress of the death (his wife blames herself) and they divorce. His mother dies and Shuichi moves from Tokyo to Kamakura to clean out the family home. He wants to "turn the house into something so unfamiliar that he could let it go." He discovers an eight year old boy, Kenta, is visiting the house when he is absent. He sets up a camera to see what he is doing and discovers Kenta is unsealing boxes and taking virtually worthless objects away.

Shuichi manages to connect with Kenta through his illustrations and helps the boy with his Japanese studies. Kenta begins spending time with Shuichi the way he had studied wit his mother. He liked to visit because his own parents fought constantly

Shuichi met Sayaka when the young woman prepared his mother’s body for her funeral and he mixes up "the emotions of saying goodbye to his mother with the hazy memory of this woman." As Shuichi gains the Kenta's friendship and Sayaka's affection (or love), a lightness returns to his life. He has survived.

According to the book, Laura Imai Messina was born in Rome, moved to Japan when she was twenty-three and has lived in Japan for fifteen years. She is the author of an earlier novel The Phone Box at the End of the Word.  The Heartbeat Library, written in Italian, is interesting if only because all the characters are Japanese, and with one insignificant exception the perceptions and feelings and words of the characters all ring true. I regret only that I myself will never been able to visit the Heartbeat Library, and the publisher should be ashamed of itself for not including the translator's name on the book's cover.

It may not be real, but it could be

How do novelists convince readers that their lies are true?

This important it seems to me when they want readers to believe their characters could be real people and the book's events could actually have happened.

One way to add verisimilitude ("the appearance of being true or real") is to set the action in a real place at a certain time and include historic events and figures. For example I set a novel in a low-income housing project at the corner if 125th and Amsterdam in the early 1960s and includes Malcolm X.

James McBride's wonderful The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is set in the fictional Pottstown, but which could be one of a number of small towns in western Pennsylvania not far from Reading. (Interestingly, there is a Pottsville, PA, in the area.) The time is identified as 1936. The Klu Klux Klan is active. The news from Europe is worrisome for Pottstown's handful of Jewish residents—handful because after a dozen Jewish families had immigrated the city fathers decided that was plenty and actively discouraged any more.

As the jacket describes, in 1972, when workers in Pottstown were digging the foundations for a new development, they found a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows—not exactly true (a common jacket copy failing). The residents did not know how it got there although we readers do.

Chicken Hill was the unpaved, unsewered area where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater in town and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Chicken Hill Black community worked together to keep the boy safe. That does not go well however, and raises the book's tension.

McBride is brilliantly able to overlap and deepen these characters’ stories. He evokes the ways the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they do to survive. I found it interesting that a theme running under the obvious story and events is the prejudice that Blacks and Jews must live with in America. Although a major and endearing character dies in the novel, which surprised me, the book concludes satisfactorily and plausibly. As the publisher says, "McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us."

An interesting way to structure a mystery

Clare Mackintosh says one New Year's morning a few years ago she was about to participate in a holiday group swim in the peaceful, mist-shrouded North Wales lake on which she lives when she had a thought: What if a body came floating by? That was the genesis of The Last Party, the first (of three) murder mysteries starring Ffion Morgan.

The border between Wales and England divides the book's invented Mirror Lake (a symbolic name) in half. The village of Com Coed is in Wales; a new, high-end, luxury resort/second-home community The Shore is in England, not more than a mile away and heartily resented by the village residents.

The body is that of Rhys Lloyd, a Com Coed native son who's had a successful musical career and who, with a business partner, developed the first five units of The Shore, one of which in which he lives with his wife and twin teen-age daughters.

The detectives charged with solving the murder are DC Ffion Morgan, who, separated, lives with her mother and sister in Com Coed, and DC Leo Brady, divorced, works out of the Cheshire Major Crimes Unit. I mention their marital status because it plays a minor role in both lives.

The two meet officially at the coroner's office to inspect the body at the beginning of the book and realize they have just spent New Year's night together in bed, both having given fake names and phone numbers—one of the most delightful and enjoyable introductions to a mystery I've read. 

The book has two timelines: everything that happened before the murder of Rhys—a thoroughly despicable person—and everything that happens after. What sets The Last Party apart from many mysteries is that events in the first timeline happen in reverse chronological order and involve the points of view of several different characters. Macintosh says that after writing it in a conventional chronological sequence she structured the book this way to make it more interesting and to give her an opportunity to drop in clues and revelations at the most opportune and effective spots.

Some readers I know find The Last Party's structure and number of characters difficult or irritating or both. I thought it was one of the most stimulating and interesting mysteries I've read recently. 

What makes an author? Here's one story

Clare Mackintosh, the author of The Last Party which I will be discussing in another post, was born in 1976 near Oxford, England. She went to Royal Holloway University in Surrey for a degree in French and Management and spent a year in Paris as part of the course, working as a bilingual secretary. After graduation she joined the police, and was soon promoted to Chipping Norton as town sergeant before becoming Thames Valley Police's operations inspector for Oxfordshire. She married Rob Mackintosh in 2004, and in 2006 she gave birth to identical twin boys, Josh and Alex, three months prematurely. While in neonatal intensive care, Alex contracted bacterial meningitis and suffered significant brain damage.

Clare Mackintosh

In a 2019 article for The Guardian she wrote: “Alex had suffered a hemorrhage so extensive that no part of his brain was untouched. In time, the doctor said, he might be able to breathe independently, but it was doubtful he would ever walk or talk. ‘He’s unlikely to be able to swallow,’ she said. Strangely, of all the terrible news delivered in the quiet room, it was this that had the biggest impact on me.” 

The couple was told they needed to make a decision about Alex’s future. Mackintosh felt she and her husband were good at talking things through and at finding compromises when they disagreed. But in this case, there could be no compromise. She asked the doctor, “What if we don’t agree?”

“The doctor replied: ‘You have to, because the alternative is unthinkable.’” She could visualize two paths: “One: a life without Alex. Our future on this path was unarguably clear, and unarguably painful. When I tried to visualize it, I was overwhelmed by the pain in my heart, so intense I could hardly breathe. The second road was less certain, but no less painful.”

Ultimately, they made the very difficult decision to allow Alex to die naturally. Weeks afterward, they brought their surviving son home. Then, just 15 months after giving birth to identical twins, Mackintosh gave birth to a set of fraternal twins, Evie and George.

In all, Mackintosh spent 12 years in the police force. In 2011, she was about to be promoted to Chief Inspector when she decided to leave and become a full-time writer and social media consultant. She says her police background was extremely helpful as she began her writing career. “What I learned was storytelling. As a police officer you’re dealing with unreliable narrators or talking to crime victims and trying to find out what happened. It was a good training ground for a writer.”

Mackintosh sees writing as a way to make sense of the world and of the painful choices she faced with Alex. “I found I had a burning need to write about what had happened. What if we’d made a different choice? What if Rob and I had disagreed? What if the doctors had been wrong? What if, what if, what if . . .”

Her 2014 debut novel, I Let You Go, was a bestseller and the year’s fastest selling title by a new crime writer. Today, the Mackintosh family lives in Bala, in north Wales, the setting an inspiration for The Last Party and two more mysteries featuring DC Ffion Morgan.

Sources: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jul/20/my-new-novel-allowed-me-to-grieve-years-after-losing-my-baby-boy; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clare_Mackintosh; https://www.fantasticfiction.com/m/clare-mackintosh/

Why review books at all?

I'm having second (and third . . . and fourth) thoughts about my recent comments on Time of the Flies. I rarely write a negative review. Why not? It raises a number of additional questions. Why review at all? What is the point?

I regularly read reviews in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. Most of these are generally positive although authors and readers of The New York Review essay reviews will reject a reviewer's argument. It can lead to a lively debate, but rarely does a reviewer advise avoiding a book entirely.

Neither the Book Review nor The New Yorker have the space (or. I guess, inclination) to publish an extensive back and forth between reviewer and author. Nor do they publish many negative reviews and when they do I always wonder why. With space so precious, why use it to tell readers what they shouldn't read? Tell us what's good.

Given the number of books published—more than 250,000 in the US annually—it would be impossible to note even a tiny fraction. The New Yorker's "Briefly Noted" column touches only 200 fiction and non-fiction books in a year, four an issue. 

I don't know why others review, probably for standard reasons: for money, for academic recognition, because it's a job. I review to discover what I think about the book, what I learned from it, to explore why it gave me pleasure, to share my enthusiasm. It's certainly not a job; it won't give me academic recognition; and, alas, it's not for money.

I regret what I wrote Time of the Flies. I should not have written anything at all. Read it. It has interesting things to say about women and women's lives in Argentina. I'll do better with experience.

日本語を勉強は楽しいです*

Why study a foreign language?

An impossible question, although I just asked Google AI which told me that such study "improved cognitive skills like memory and multitasking, enhanced career opportunities in a global economy, and deeper cultural understanding and appreciation. It can also lead to increased confidence, better decision-making, and a more enriching travel experience." Who knew?

I took Latin in high school. In my memory the teacher is elderly, the class tedious, the time entirely wasted. When would I ever have occasion to say "Puellas amo ego" or "Britannia insulla est"? Never.

Japanese is something else. I was gobsmacked when I got off a troopship for ten hours in Yokohama harbor in 1955. I was illiterate and speechless. Japanese was both humbling and challenging.

I studied Japanese when I was in the Army in Japan. I studied Japanese in college. Because I did not finish the collage's language requirement, I resumed Japanese study in my mid-50s. I took two weeks in an immersion Japanese course in Japan in my mid-60s. For 1,150 days straight I've been reviewing Japanese on the Duolingo website (a site I heartily recommend for beginners and for review).

All this has meant I have not needed to speak English on visits to Japan. It meant I could lead two tours in Japan. I speak enough that I am able, as a friend said, "exchange ideas in Japanese." I am certainly not—and will never be—fluent. Nor am I able to read a Japanese text without help, which is why I continue to plug away at Duolingo lessons and short story translating.

I do it because, as the headline on this post says, studying Japanese is fun*. So that's why I study a foreign language.

Don't make time for "Time of the Flies"

If you intend to read Time of the Flies by Claudia Piñeiro and translated by Frances Riddle stop reading this blog. There will be spoilers.

Here's is how the publisher describeds the novel, which was shortlisted for the Mario Vargas Llosa Prize for Novels (and one reason why I bought the paperback. "Fifteen years after killing her husband’s lover, Inés is fresh out of prison and trying to put together a new life. Her old friend Manca is out now too, and they’ve started a business – FFF, or Females, Fumigation, and Flies – dedicated to pest control and private investigation, by women, for women. But Señora Bonar, an affluent TV producer, one of her clients, wants Inés to do more than kill bugs – she wants her expertise, and her criminal past, to help her kill her husband’s lover." 

It's an interesting setup and the prose is smoothly translated (and there's a lot of it). I was interested that a woman found guilty of homicide in Argentine can serve just fifteen years. 

Bonar wants Inêz to buy a poison that only she as a licensed pest control company can buy. Complicating the situation is Manca's cancerous breast. With Bonar's money Inés can pay for a life-saving operation. Inéz and Manca discuss the situation at length and Inéz decides to buy the poison (but couldn't the cops trace such a purchase?), charging Bonar $10,000 for the service which she agrees to pay. But Bonar is apparently single so who is she planning to kill? Herself? 

Not with her bags packed, her bridges burned, and a ticket for Singapore in hand.

Another complication: Bonar had a son who was transitioning to female, something Bonar could not accept, and who killed himself. Another complication: Inéz has an estranged daughter Laura who is married and who works as Bonar's housecleaner. 

Just as Inéz and Manca are finally coming down to the story's thrilling conclusion, Piñeiro interrupts the forward movement once again for a little essay, one of several, this one on transphobic people. "Feminism has to be committed to gender freedom, to radical equality, and to alliances with other minoritarian positions, sexual dissidents. Transphobic feminism is no feminism, that cannot happen." Okay, but is this the best place for the discussion? I almost threw the book against the wall.

Maybe the way to enjoy Time of the Flies is by skipping these little didactic essays. I couldn't and didn't and regret the time I spent reading it.

About the garden in "Kanazawa in the Rain"

Story Sanctum's illustration for my story Kanazawa in the Rain

Last summer an online publication, Story Sanctum (storysancturm.com), published my short story Kanazawa in the Rain.

Kanazawa is a small city on the west coast of Japan. It was not important enough to be bombed during WWII, so a lot of pre-war and older charm remains. During the Tokugawa Era (1603-1868) it was the Maeda family's capital, and the Maeda family was one of the richest in the country.

Rated (by the Japanese) as one of Japan’s three most beautiful gardens, Kenrokuen is next to the reconstructed Kanazawa Castle. The name means “having six factors”: spaciousness, tranquility, artifice, antiquity, water sources and magnificent views. The garden has an area just over 28 ares and is located in central Kanazawa. The Maeda family, who ruled the Kaga Fief (the present Ishikawa and Toyama prefectures) in feudal times, established and maintained the garden.

My characters, an older, solitary American man and a middle-aged Japanese waitress, visit Kenrokuen and the villa on the grounds that the lord built for his mother. Late in the story the man compares the villa to the waitress's apartment. They're different.

Story Sanctum asked AI to create an illustration for the story, which it did. Here however is a picture of the real garden, from the Visit Kanazawa website (https://visitkanazawa.jp/en/attractions/detail_10106.html). 

Kenrokuen in the spring.