The Book Project: capsule reviews part XIII

115. Gossamer Years: The Diary of a Noblewoman of Heian Japan (Mother of Michitsuna, trans. Seidensticker, 974)
Genre: nikki bungaku (Japanese diaries)
Rating: 5.5

The actual diary of a noblewoman of Heian Japan who lives painfully defined by her role as a second wife. She perpetually feels unloved and alone and spends year after year in deepening depression, sadly bemoaning her fate, being ignored by her husband while dragging herself on. It’s a strange era: everybody writes allusive poetry to each other all the time, people may only travel in certain directions each day, and they have to stay alone in their houses for days during periods of cleansing. It’s all social strictures, ceremony and surface. Nobody seems very happy.

Quote: The autumn cicadas took up their humming. “Noisy insects, singing in the grass”—I thought of the well-known verse—”what sorrow makes you cry out when so when I bear mine in silence?” This was a strange and sad time for me. The month before, I had had a sign that I was to die this month, and I wondered whether the time might be approaching.

 

116. As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams: Recollections of a Woman in 11th-Century Japan (Sarashina, trans. Morris, 1059)
Genre: nikki bungaku
Rating: 6.5

Another actual diary, this time that of a meek young girl in Heian Japan who loves to do nothing but read stories, but is sent by her father to live in a palace to improve her station in life. She feels alone and ill-equipped for the rigid social structures and ceremony of the nobility’s lifestyle. She and her father weep painfully at their parting. She weeps at her loneliness. She weeps at the memory of cold weather. Catastrophic weeping abounds. It’s told in much livelier, ingenuous style than Gossamer Years, though, with a sense of innocence and wonder.

Quote: Now I really began to regret having wasted so much time on my silly fancies, and I bitterly reproached myself for not having accompanied Mother and Father on their pilgrimages.

 

117. The Crocodile (Dostoevsky, 1865)
Genre: absurdist satire
Rating: 9.5

A man is swallowed by a crocodile and thinks it a perfect opportunity to better mankind and win fame with his genius. A scathing satire of egotism and Utopian thinking. Brilliantly absurd in its matter-of-fact tone and ridiculous, petty yet grandiose characters. Probably the funniest thing I’ve read.

Unfortunately the Constance Garnett translation seems to be the only one widely available, and her translations are always relatively stodgy, flattened and verveless.

Quote: I am constructing now a complete system of my own, and you wouldn’t believe how easy it is! You have only to creep into a secluded corner or into a crocodile, to shut your eyes, and you immediately devise a perfect millennium for mankind.

 

118. The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck, 1939)
Genre: propaganda of the poor
Rating: 3.5

600 pages preaching that all people are part of a common soul. But not rich people.

Quotes: “‘Maybe,’ I figgered, ‘maybe it’s all men an’ all women we love; maybe that’s the Holy Sperit—the human sperit—the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.’ Now I sat there thinkin’ it, an’ all of a suddent—I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it.”

The quality of owning freezes you forever into ‘I,’ and cuts you off forever from the ‘we.’

“If you’re in trouble, or hurt or need—go to the poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help—the only ones.”

 

119. The Soldier and Death (Arthur Ransome, 1920)
Genre: Russian folk tales
Rating: 8.5

A soldier puts death in a sack. This is how I like my folk tales: overturning the world, unbinding it by replacing order with bizarre happenstance.

Quote: “Do you know what this is?” says he to Death.
“A sack,” says Death.
“Well, if it is a sack, get into it!”

 

120. Braveheart (Randall Wallace, 1995)
Genre: historical fiction
Rating: 2.5

The author’s last name is Wallace, just like Braveheart himself. I’m descended from Robert the Bruce, which strikes me as a much cooler name. Anyway, the book is high cheese. Needed more Mad Mel.

 

121. Foe (J.M. Coetzee, 1986)
Genre: postmodern metafiction
Rating: 4

A woman is stranded on a desert island with an old man named Cruso. Later, she wants to write her story but lacks the requisite skills, so she tells it to Daniel Defoe for him to write. But he transforms it into the tale of Robinson Crusoe, and his power to communicate, to craft reality into a story, subtly and then completely destroys her actual reality—her history and sense of her own identity are subsumed by him taking control over her story and eventually removing her from it entirely.

The problem with this is that Coetzee makes Defoe’s story a lot more compelling than hers. So she’s marginalized into nonexistence not by her inability to communicate, but by a better story. In a way, that makes a stronger point: the idea could have been simply that women’s reality is subjugated to patriarchal control of the modes of discourse (or more generally, the marginalized person’s story is replaced by the dominant person’s); instead it becomes that the power of storytelling itself, the power of the person capable of controlling the story, overwhelms the reality of the metaphorically dumb person. But in another way, it just makes me wish I were reading Defoe’s book instead.

Quote: For readers reared on travelers’ tales, the words desert isle may conjure up a place of soft sands and shady trees where brooks run to quench the castaway’s thirst and ripe fruit falls into his hand, where no more is asked of him than to drowse the days away till a ship calls to fetch him home. But the island on which I was cast away was quite another place.