Tag: fiction

Book review: The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong

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The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong is a poetic rendering. It is also a bleak story, both beautiful and sad.

The hardest thing in the world is to live only once. But it’s beautiful here, even the ghosts agree.

The Emperor of Gladness is set in the fictional town of East Gladness, Connecticut. Nineteen year old Hai stands on a bridge looking down at the river and contemplating jumping. He is interrupted by an old woman who threatens to call the police if he doesn’t climb down.

Words cast spells. You should know this as a writer. That’s why it’s called spelling, Labas.

The woman is eighty-two year old Grazina from Lithuania with mid-stage dementia. She demands that Hai come to her when he climbs down, and she adopts him. 

You see, carrots become bright orange because it’s so dark in the ground. They make their own light because the sun never reaches that far—like those fish in the ocean who glow from nothing? So when you eat it, you take in the carrot’s will to go upward. To heaven.

Hai moves in with Grazina and becomes her carer and friend. He also rifles through her medicine cabinet looking for medications to feed his addiction. 

The prisons and madhouses have locked them up, so you think you’re the only one out there losing your mind when in fact there are many like you, trapped in this supposedly free world of work and sleep and endless fucking cakes.

Meanwhile, Hai’s Vietnamese mother thinks he has gone to medical school in Boston. Hai continues this charade, calling his mother to give her updates on his studies, for much of the novel. As Grazina’s mental state worsens, Hai uses various role plays to assist her. Her delusional episodes make her relive distressing scenes from her escape from Nazi-occupied Europe.

It was one of those friendships that came on quick, like the heat on a July day, and long after midnight you could still feel its sticky film on your skin as you lie awake in your room, the fan blowing in what remained of the scorched hours, and realize for the first time in your peep of a life that no one is ever truly alone.

The Emperor of Gladness is about grief, addiction, despair, poverty, sadness and trauma. There is also an enduring hope in the friendship that develops between Hai and Grazina.

Book review: The Windup Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

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I am a fan of magical realism done well. And I loved the oddness of The Windup Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin.

I’m not so weird to me.

Toru Okada quit his legal job in Tokyo, making his wife the primary breadwinner. After they lost their cat, Okada seeks help from a psychic. Then his wife Kumiko goes to work one day and does not return. Okada is overwhelmed by the loss, but the psychics take an interest in helping him. They even start appearing in his dreams. The psychics also have a connection to Kumiko’s brother, a rising politician, whom Okada doesn’t like. After Okada’s wife disappears, he is forced to meet her brother several times. He does this in an attempt to find her and win her back. 

I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.

Okada becomes fascinated by an old soldier’s story. The tale is about being thrown into a Mongolian desert well by his captors at the start of WWII. Okada decides to drop down into a dry well in the yard of a deserted house next door to think.

The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you’re supposed to go up and down when you’re supposed to go down. When you’re supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you’re supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there’s no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is darkness.

Okada’s teenage neighbour, May, calls Okada Mr Windup Bird after the call of a bird he describes to her. They share a fascination in death, and this almost kills him when the teenager traps him in the well. While in the well, he has an out of body experience. This leaves him with a bluish mark on his cheek, a representation of the transformation he then undertakes.

I’d be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string.

Dislocation, alienation and nameless fears abound in The Windup Bird Chronicle. The story is an examination of both the challenges of modern life and the shadow side of Japan. 

Book review: If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura

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If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura is a short quirky novel translated from Japanese by Eric Selland.

 I wonder why people always expect from others things that they themselves can’t or won’t do.

After a visit to the doctor, a thirty year old postman discovers he has a terminal brain tumour. He’s a pretty pedestrian guy. He has few friends and is estranged from his father. He is out of touch with his ex girlfriend and lives with his cat, Cabbage. Cabbage gains the power of speech during the novel. 

Love has to end. That’s all. And even though everyone knows it they still fall in love. I guess it’s the same with life. We all know it has to end someday, but even so we act as if we’re going to live forever. Like love, life is beautiful because it has to end. 

The postman decides to make a bucket list. He arrives home to find the devil in a Hawaiian shirt sitting on his sofa. The devil is called Aloha and he has a proposition. He will grant the postman an extra day of life for each item he agrees that the devil can remove entirely from the world.

In order to gain something, you have to lose something.

The first object the postman selects is phones. No big drama. The absence of phones just seems to make people more engaged with the world. Clocks and movies are next. The postman uses his extra days to connect with people that have had meaning in his life. The agreement works swimmingly until Aloha suggests that cats should disappear from the world. Then the postman has to start weighing up the real value of his own life.

I don’t know whether I’m happy or unhappy. But there’s one thing I do know. You can convince yourself to be happy or unhappy. It just depends on how you choose to see things.

If Cats Disappeared from the World delves into themes such as grief and love. It explores what makes life worth living and the importance of human connection.  

Book review: Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa

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Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa is a historical fiction work about trauma (trigger warning). It is a tense, emotional and absorbing read. The story is narrated by a Palestine woman, Nahr, from solitary confinement. She has spent years in a small cement prison cell as a political prisoner. After a sympathetic guard provides her with pencils and a notebook Nahr begins to fill the pages with an account of her life.

I colonized the colonizer’s space of authority. I made myself free in chains and held that courtroom captive to my freedom.

Nahr and her family had been displaced many times. From Kuwait, her country of birth, Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine, her ancestral homeland. Nahr was subject to an arranged marriage at a young age to a Palestinian man who subsequently abandoned her. She was then tricked and blackmailed into becoming a sex worker by a women called Um Buraq. The exploitation gave her financial independence, but she also lost faith in love and men.

This was what it meant to be exiled and disinherited—to straddle closed borders, never whole anywhere.

Eventually Nahr traveled to Palestine to seek a divorce. Through her husbands brother she got involved with a group of young resistance fighters. This is how she ended up being locked in the concrete cube accused of being a terrorist. 

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

Against the Loveless World is much more than a story about personal trauma and the violence of conflict and war. It is a novel about politics, displacement, the desire for belonging, gender, survival and love. A very powerful read.

Book review: The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe

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The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe is primarily a cosy crime mystery. There is also an element of political auto-fiction. Part of the story is set as Queen Elizabeth II dies. It also incorporates Liz Truss’s 45-day reign as British Prime Minister and explores why things fell apart. 

Any act of writing must also, by definition, be an act of selection; therefore distortion; and therefore invention.

After university Phyl finds herself back living with her parents and working in a Japanese food cafe at Heathrow, Terminal 5. Her ambitions to become a writer are not taking shape. That is until Chris, a political blogger and old university friend of her mother’s, comes to stay. Chris sparks an interest in cosy mysteries and auto-fiction for Phyl. 

How is someone like me supposed to survive in a world like this? Everything that defines me is unsuited for it. My passivity. My idealism. My innocence. I just don’t have what it takes

Chris is planning to attend a far-right conference as he is looking into a think tank hellbent on privatising the National Health Service. He is concerned about his personal safety. And has reason to be.

See it. Say it. Sorted

The conference is being held in a country house in the Cotswolds. It is complete with secret passages and a cast of extreme and eccentric characters who become murder suspects. Chris is murdered, leaving behind a cryptic note.

The presumption of innocence is now the presumption of guilt. The burden of proof is a travesty because the proof is often lies

Detective Inspector Pru Freeborne, on the cusp of retirement, investigates. Meanwhile Phyl is convinced that Chris’s death is linked to dead author Peter Cockerill. Phyl and Chris’s adopted daughter, Rashida, start their own investigation into his death.

You murdered a man to get what you wanted. You murdered another man in order to keep your secret safe. And yet the good fortune that it’s brought you still isn’t enough. You remind me of the people at that conference. Remaking the world in their own image and still not liking what they see.

The Proof of My Innocence is a complex story. Political plotting, a complicated whodunnit, gender and intergenerational issues. Even the title is constructed from homonyms.  Proof as in an early copy of a publication and evidence. And innocence as both naivety and a lack of guilt. 

Book review: Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

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Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami is a story about friendship, unrequited love and loneliness. The story revolves around three characters.

Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?

The narrator, K, is in love with his best friend Sumire. The protagonist, Sumire is in love with Mia, a woman 17 years her senior who is also her boss.

We’re both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We’re connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me.

K and Sumire spend hours on the phones in deep conversation about life, desire, sexuality and writing. Sumire is an unconventional aspiring novelist. K is a solitary intelligent primary school teacher. K’s unrequited love roots a deep longing and loneliness in him.

Don’t pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world?

The exotic Mui employs Sumire in her wine company despite her limited skills or qualifications.  Mui has no idea Sumire is infatuated with her. 

In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.

Sumire and Mui go on a business trip. They end up on a Greek Island for a holiday after a house is offered to them over the summer by a couple of gay men they meet.

A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.

One night K receives a distressing call from Mui imploring him to get on a plane immediately and go to the island. It is something to do with Sumire so he goes without question.

Who can really distinguish between the sea and what’s reflected in it? Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness?

This is where the novel turns into a mystery. Sumire has disappeared without a trace from the island. It seems impossible without anyone noticing anything. Enter magical realism.

Understanding is but the sum of misunderstandings.

Sputnik Sweetheart is a short, cleanly crafted, story about existence, identity, what is real and what is hidden. As is common in Japanese literature Sputnik Sweetheart is a simple story with plenty of depth.

Book review: Hard boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

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Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami has two narratives. The hard-boiled narrative involves an unnamed Tokyo data processor who works for an entity called the System. He becomes involved with a scientist and his granddaughter after the scientist hires the narrator to launder and shuffle his research data. 

I never trust people with no appetite. It’s like they’re always holding something back on you.

The parallel end of the world narrative is set in a walled city where people are separated from their shadows and lose their minds. In this world the narrator is hired as a Dreamreader. The two narrators are linked by the Tokyo protagonists mind being shuffled into the end of the world.

I wasn’t particularly afraid of death itself. As Shakespeare said, die this year and you don’t have to die the next.

The story is as weird and layered as the title, but also totally engaging (despite a little sexism and cringe worthy fatphobic language at times, though it was first published in 1985). Speculative fiction and magical realism meets hard-boiled detective story. There’s even unicorns.

Huge organizations and me don’t get along. They’re too inflexible, waste too much time, and have too many stupid people.

Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World explores subconsciousness and consciousness, how identity and memory are formed by the stories we tell ourselves, and fate and free will. There’s a whiff of Kafkaesque and Orwellian existential meditations…

Book review: The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

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The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa is a dystopian novel set on a remote island off the coast of Japan where objects – hats, roses, birds, boats – disappear at the hand of an unknown power. The disappearances are reinforced by the Memory Police, and the island population’s memories of the objects fade until they can’t remember their existence at all. Disappearances escalate, and one morning people wake up and their left legs have disappeared – their very essence is thinning. Even nature submits and seasons disappears. The world of the island inhabitants gradually shrinks and loses meaning, but there are a small number of people who retain memories. The Memory Police seek them out, round them up, and take them away. 

People—and I’m no exception—seem capable of forgetting almost anything, much as if our island were unable to float in anything but an expanse of totally empty sea.

The characters are unnamed. The narrator is an author, and she and an old man who is a family friend decide to hide the author’s friend and editor, R, beneath her floorboards in a hidden room when they realise he has memories and is at risk. The room also accumulates what can be salvaged of the things that are disappearing.

I suppose memories live here and there in the body. But they’re invisible, aren’t they? And no matter how wonderful the memory, it vanishes if you leave it alone. If no one pays attention to it. They leave no trace, no evidence that they ever existed.

There is also a story with the story – excerpts from a manuscript that the narrator has been writing about a typist who can only communicate through typing as she has lost her voice. She’s held hostage by her typing teacher and lover in a tower. When novels disappear, R encourages the author to keep writing as a means of preservation. 

Men who start by burning books end by burning other men

Beautifully written in quiet poetic prose with the slow creep of tension, the novel explores memory and its role in identity, connection, loss and isolation, as well as the perils of authoritarianism and the power of art and storytelling as a vehicle for resistance. The story asks us to consider our identity and our relationship to the world around us. It also made me consider mortality as the novel reminded me a little of what happens when we start to die and parts of our bodies succumb to illness or old age, memories fade and friends disappear.

Book review: China Rich Girlfriend by Kevin Kwan

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China Rich Girlfriend is Kevin Kwan’s sequel to Crazy Rich Asians where old money meets new in the jet setting, excessive consumerist wild lives of Hong Kong and Shanghai’s elite.

People are messy. Life gets messy. Things are not always going to work out perfectly just because you want them to.

Just when you start to tire of the tantrums and shopping trips to buy clothing worth more than the average persons house, there’s a plot twist and a mystery, intrigue, drama and romance.

I’m so glad I can always count on you to have some sort of ulterior motive that involves money.

Nick Young and Rachel Chu are on the cusp of getting married when Rachel discovers her unknown father is Bao Shaoyen, a wealthy and influential politician from mainland China. The couple fly to Shanghai to meet her family including her half brother Carlton and his socialite girlfriend Colette Bing and find themselves caught up in the highlife.

I don’t understand. How can a credit card ever be rejected? It’s not like it’s a kidney!

Other characters include Kitty Pony, former sex-tape star trying to break into A list, tech entrepreneur and social climbing, mean spirited Michael Teo, his wife, Astrid, and Charlie who is keen on Astrid, all of whom crave a spot in the social pages while being careful to appear as if they don’t care.

Beauty fades, but wit will keep you on the invitation lists to all the most exclusive parties.

China Rich Girlfriend is like an over the top Chinese soap opera. A silly fun quick read.

Note: I am off on holidays to Japan tomorrow for five weeks – yeah! I will do my best to continue my weekly posts, but it may turn into a travel blog for a few weeks.

Book review: The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

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The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein was a totally random pick for me. I did not expect reading it to leave me in tears! The story is written from the view point a dog called Enzo. 

I’ve always felt almost human. I’ve always known that there’s something about me that’s different than other dogs.

Enzo is sensitive, introspective and funny and takes his role of looking after his humans very seriously. He learns a lot by watching the television when his humans are at work, but his lack of thumbs is frustrating and he plans to come back in his next life as a human.

People are always worried about what’s happening next. They often find it difficult to stand still, to occupy the now without worrying about the future. People are generally not satisfied with what they have; they are very concerned with what they are going to have.

Enzo was picked out from a litter of puppies by his human, Denny. Denny is a race car driver who works in a Seattle car-repair shop to fund his racing. Enzo soon discovers he loves car racing as well. The tale takes us Enzo and Denny’s single life together through to the adjustment to a human woman called Eve who comes into Denny’s life. Enzo isn’t sure about Eve to begin with but they do bond. Then the humans have a baby called Zoe and Enzo is smitten.

Somewhere, the zebra is dancing.

Things take a turn when Eve becomes unwell and Denny’s life spirals through a sequence of bad luck, well meaning but misplaced intentions, and nastiness. Enzo sticks by his man as his life unravels, but has to contend with a demon zebra. 

He died that day because his body had served its purpose. His soul had done what it came to do, learned what it came to learn, and then was free to leave.

The Art of Racing in the Rain is a tale about family, love, loyalty and hope. It’s a bit cheesy at times, but I’m a total sucker for a dog story.