UNESCO

Since my last post, I read two issues of The New Scientist and two issues of Eclectic Reading. I have also read the magical novel by Miguel Asturias, Men of Maize, which I didn't like but which did give me an idea of what it would have felt like to be a Guatemalan peasant in colonial times. I have also read Soseki's Kokoro, a novel about the platonic devotion of a student to a guilt-ridden professor. I thought it wonderfully written, with an unforgettably vivid opening scene. That scene has the student describe his first sight of his sensei, as he wraps a towel around his head and walks naked into the sea. Soseki also wrote The Three-Cornered World, which I thought was too esoteric for me after the beautiful simplicity of Kokoro. I read Edgardo Julia's Renunciation, which is a novel structured like a series of lectures. It is about a Porto Rican revolutionary, and it has excerpts of letters and fragments of plays. The structure is mildly interesting, even if the novel falls pretty flat. Finally, I read Osaragi's Homecoming, a novel about postwar Japan and the retributions and penances various characters go through after World War II. I liked it in general, but I thought the key female character was portrayed in both a sexist way (scheming, grasping, using her sexuality, resenting being aroused), but also in ways which were not psychologically believable. I assume this author has stayed away from portraying women since.

I have just realized that I need to return three books tomorrow or they will be late, so I'm off to read two volumes of Voltaire and one last book of South American literature.

UNESCO Representative Literature

After finishing The Deadbeats, I read Salih's Bandarshah, the story of a grandfather written in the epic style. I read the charming Silver Spoon, by Naka Kansuke, the story of his childhood. I then read Shimazaki Toson's The Family, an autobiographical naturalistic novel about a brother being bled financially by his brothers and other relatives. Not exactly an optimistic view of human nature, and it begins with the protagonist's feelings of betrayal after his marriage on finding out his wife once was engaged to another man. I also read a conventional resistance noel, although this is set in World War I Romania, called A Gamble With Death, by Stancu.

I also read a two-volume essay on the Taxonomy of Pedagogical Objectives, which despite its arcane title I found riveting.

UNESCO Representative Literature

I've read quite a bit of Japanese literature. Mon, about the consequences of two people engaging in pre-marital sex in Victorian Japan, is by Natsume. So is Botchan, about a boy's school schoolmaster. I simply devoured Kafu Nagai's Geisha in Rivalry. It is another Victorian novel about geisha in Tokyo, and its translator didn't capture any poetry in the title, bit I read it straight through, worried I'd be late if I kept reading. But still I kept reading. In the general category of agitprop, I read Koyabashi's Absentee Landlord, about the endless persecution or exploitation of the poor. Worst, or at least most vivid, of all, is Endo's The Sea and Poison, a novel about human vivisection by the Japanese during World War II. It was related so clearly, I had to skip the worst passages.

I also read an issue of The New Scientist and OK Magazine.

I'm reading Ward Ruyslinck's Deadbeats, a short novel about a daily laborer in Holland.

Week-end UNESCO Representative Literature

I've decided to read two books a day as a rule, so that I can keep abreast of all those loans I've received.

Since my last post I've read two issues of Eclectic Reading. I'm behind in my magazine reading, there are two Economists, one New Yorker and one New Scientist on my bedside table.

I read Haggard and Noland's Famine in North Korea. this is a meticulously researched and argued examination of the terrible famine of the 1990's, where about 4% of the population died. It was not an exciting read, and the technical discussion got a bit hard to follow, but it was very interesting. There is so little known about North Korea that they have to be careful what suppositions they propose to use. I also read Hitchings' The Secret Life of Words. I was a little disappointed. Hitchings identifies ten or twelve mechanisms by which words are imported into English, some mechanisms being more common in times of war or plague than others, and then gives endless lists of examples. It's a little lightweight, I guess, for my taste.

I also read Knut Faldbakken's Sweetwater. This is a novel about a nameless war and a nameless occupied village, and its march towards liberation. Fabian Dobles' Years like Brief Days is a long reminiscence about the narrator's former days in a valley as a young man, a way of life that no longer exists. I read about half of Marga Minco's The Other Side, a collection of short stories. I liked best the stories about Jewish people after the war, in particular a short story about a gentile who robbed Jews by saying she would safeguard their most precious belongings. A Holocaust survivor calls on this woman and finds their Hanukkah candlestick used a a sconce. Egon Hostovsky The Arsonist is an interesting portrait of a village, with the search for an arsonist (who is never found) as the plot device to take us through the process. Annika Idstrom's My Brother Sebastian is a searing first-person novel of a youth and his mistreatment at the hands of a foster home under the pretext, no doubt, of protection. Finally, Autran Dourado's Pattern for a Tapestry made little impression on me.

UNESCO Representative Literature

I read another issue of The New Yorker, but also three books by Shusaku Endo: first, The Samurai, about Catholic converts in Japan in the 16th century; second, When I whistle, which didn't make much of an impression on me; and third, Wonderful Fool, a comic novel about a Frenchman in Japan. I did enjoy the latter, having been myself a foreigner in Japan. And I didn't really speak much more Japanese than Gaston Bonaparte, the protagonist.

I also read Yasushi Inoue's Roof Tile of Tempyo, about four monks going to China to bring back Buddhist materials. It didn't impress me that much, but the introduction by the translator, James Araki, was nothing short of a revelation. He discusses several characteristics of Japanese literature based on the taste of readers which don't exist in the West He discusses how the temple names are repeated often because a Japanese reader enjoys the aesthetics of an elegant hand writing those names. Japanese readers enjoy imagining rather than hearing the thoughts of the characters. Much as we like to see familiar landmarks in movies, Japanese readers like to catch glimpses of famous historical people in a novel. Well, who knew?

I read Yukio Mishima's Sound of Waves, a pastoral novel which thankfully didn't contain some of the more extreme sadomasochistic scenes I read in his other novels. I also read Salvador Garmendia's Memories of Altagracia, a fantastical novel I had trouble following, and finally Hwang Sun-Won's Descendants of Cain, about the communist takeover of a village in North Korea. I can readily believe it was a bestseller in South Korea, for political reasons. I found it unsubtle, frankly, although the translation may not render fully its literary merits. I also read Atheis by Achdiat Mihardja. This is the first Indonesian novel, and I found it conventional in itself, but of course it represents a great departure for Bahasa Indonesia. I found no sense of place in it, even though I've been to Jakarta, and the highlands of Indonesia.

UNESCO Representative Literature

So I read an issue of The New Yorker and an issue of OK Magazine and the latest Vanity Fair. I also just finished the Bengali novel Kalindi, which is an ordinary soap opera set in rural India; Kawabata's The Lake and A Thousand Cranes; the Turkish novel Gemmo; and the first Dutch fantasy/sci-fi novel, A Short Account of a Remarkable Aerial Voyage and Discovery of a New planet, by Willem Bilderdijk. Gemmo has a wonderful and eponymous central character, a woman who enters a tournament and fights men until one defeats her to choose a husband, instead of being sold off to the highest bidder by her father. Bilderdijk left me cold, and I thought about the unusual choices that are made by committees choosing the most representative untranslated novels for UNESCO. Kawabata, the first Japanese Nobel prize winner, has that element in his aesthetic that is common to contemporary Japanese literature: a sort of slightly off-center taste for pain and suffering, as if that was a proof of love. Perverse in its way, The Lake shows the seamier side of a petty criminal's emotional life. Equally perverse but admirably sparse and euphonious in its writing, A Thousand Cranes is the sordid story of two suicides caused by a spoiled but evidently desirable young man of callous predisposition.

The Vigil, Born Digital, Ancient Monuments, Cuore

I read an issue of Entertainment Weekly, an issue of Royalty, and the four books cited above. Cuore, by Edmondo de Amicis, is the required reading of all schoolchildren in Italy, and I liked it. It's a sweet look at 19th century school life, with stock characters like the handicapped child protected by the big lug, the spoiled rich kid, the hardworking poor kid, etc. The Vigil by Satinath Bhaduri is a striking novel about four family members imprisoned in India during the independence campaigns, and one of them is hanged. It's all about the reminiscence of lives past, but also about the reality of prison life in excruciating detail. I felt like I was there. I didn't like Ancient Monuments, a Swedish pastoral by Stig Claesson. From the essay Born Digital, by Palfary and Gasser, I mostly remember that the superficiality of research I notice in my students could well be a mechanism to protect them from information overload. This poses some particular problems in teaching, which I don't know how to resolve.

Voltaire, UNESCO, Mags

I finished Voltaire's plays and I was surprised not to read Candide, but this is probably the adaptation of a novel or short story. There were a few translations included in the complete works, so that made the whole thing a bit shorter. The histories now await me.

I read an issue of OK Magazine, of The Economist, and of The New Scientist.

I also read a biography of Marc Chagall, complete with color photographs. I was trying to verify the hypothesis of the latest biography, that he never regained the originality of the years in Russia, but I can't judge from what I read. I also read another extraordinary Japanese novel, called Twilight Years. It is the story of a working woman caring for her increasingly demented father-in-law, in a great deal of detail. The result is an extraordinary verisimilitude. I then read Claess' Swordfish, which didn't make much of an impression on me, and Orly Castel-Bloom's Dolly City. This translation from the Hebrew was too involved for me. It was clearly a satire of the Israeli state, but I didn't know enough details to appreciate. It had some pretty shocking content, like a surgeon operating on her own infant son and deciding to have an 'organ roll call' i.e. taking out and checking all organs in the body. Sounds painful. I also read Kindness of Strangers by Salka Viertel, which was a little more superficial than I had hoped from such a cultured and erudite actress and screenwriter.

I also read and was profoundly moved by Le livre de ma mere by Albert Cohen. It is a song to the author's late mother, beautifully written. I had to wonder at how much guilt figured in this song of loss, written several years after the death of the mother. She did die in occupied France, a Jew, while her son was safe in Geneva, so I am reminded of Life and Death.

UNESCO Representative Literature, Voltaire's Plays

I read Mariano Azuela's novel of the Mexican revolution, The Underdogs. It was a fairly typical novel of struggle with the unhappy ending of the death of the protagonist. I also read about 25 plays written by Arouet Le Jeune, known to history as Voltaire. The plays are not necessarily remarkable, but they are mostly inspired by classical tragedies. Reading them in quick succession means that I notice the author's fondness for springing a new relationship on characters (discovering variously a brother, a sister, a son, a daughter, a mother, a father, a childhood dear friend, etc.) Some of the plays set in, say, China, have not worn well. And interestingly, there is a play about the prophet Mohammed, entitled The Fanatics and and containing the revered figure of Islam urging a slave to murder her master, one of his enemies. I bet everyone has forgotten about this play.

I also read an issue of The New Scientist, an issue of Eclectic Reading, and an issue of The Economist.

Robinson, Barnes, Horowitz

I read Joseph Horowitz's Artists in Exile, and I found lots of entertaining tidbits in it, like Stokowski created his own persona (he was born and raised in London), and Charlie Chaplin's terrible early years.

But it is a rare pleasure to read two really good books in a row, and I just have. Marilynne Robinson's Gilead is an undiluted pleasure, and I can only add my compliments to its many plaudits. Julian Barnes' Nothing to be Afraid Of is a meditation on death, a topic I have had much reason to think over lately, and it is both literary and intelligent and informative. OK, so I found out that many writers in the 19th century France died of syphilis, and also that Barnes disliked his mother. But it was a wonderful read and I devoured it too.

I have also read an issue of The New Yorker and an issue of Eclectic Reading. I just started the complete works of Voltaire, starting with the theatre.