UNESCO Part V

The effect of reading so much in so many languages of origin is like a kaleidoscope. There are many really interesting experiments in structure, and generally they work better than the ones I've read in English. So I read the first novel in Creole, Atipa, by Alfred Parepou. I don't have a strong opinion about it, I didn't find it gripping, but I'm glad I read such a landmark book. My edition came with the original Creole, which was interesting. I also read Pham Quat Xa's Le reve du papillon, which is a fantastical romance dram, I assume from Vietnamese mythology. It was written originally in French. I also read Muniz-Huberman's Dulcinee, which I didn't like. I spent the whole book trying to figure out what the author was thinking when she was writing this book, which has an autobiographical basis but is fantastical. Prevelakis' Chronique d'une cite was more interesting, a novel where the protagonist is a city. Moricz's Sois bon jusqu'a la mort gave me a real feelinh of what it is like to be at a boy's boarding school in turn of the century Hungary. I liked it for its emotional truth, but then that is usually what I like all novels for. Matsumoto's Tokyo Express was a great detective novel, and I relieved happily the punctuality of the entire Japanese train system, around which the plot turned. Obianim's Amegbetoa is another one of those books that is usually important to the Ewe speakers of this world, but is conventional in every respect for a Western reader. Nosaka's Tombe des lucioles is not an up-with-people kind of book. It tells the story of a street child in occupied Japan, dying of dysentery in a train station while remembering the mother who died in the bombings and the sister who died of malnutrition during the war. It comes complete with comments from passers-by ("Really, someone shouldn't let that corpse sit there, when the Americans might come by any time") and a description of the urchin weakly trying to cover the yellow stain of his diarrhea by covering it up with the dirt of the station. His body is cremated and dumped in a common grave, along with 30 or 40 other unknown children. The author survived the war, obviously, but his mother and sister died as described in this short little novel. Boy. It was hard to take. Nguyen Du's Kim Van Kieu is a familiar story of a young woman forced to redeem her family by her prostitution, and her pure love for a pure youth. Another novel of great psychological truth is Musique d'un puits bleu, a novel about the end of childhood in World War I Norway. It's all here, the birthday party to which one isn't invited, the scraped knee the cost of a hidden disobedience, the discovery of parents' flaws. The Brazilian novel Angoisse reminded me of nothing so much as Hamsen's Hunger, enough to make me wonder whether one author had read the other. Finally, I read an interesting Swedish novel, Le voleur de bible. What was interesting here, apart from the fact that the ending is a stomach-churning description of a death in a house fire of one of the main characters, with descriptions not unlike those of the Madrid air catastrophe this week, is that religion and the Bible figure in the narrative in the same famously neutral way the Swedes use nudity and sex in their cinema. It was striking in its difference, its lack of either judgment or glamorization of religion.

And yes, if you're counting, it's twelve books I've read today, but I did a lot of other things too.