Labfs39's Laureate Literature List

I love lists, so I began tracking which Nobel Prize winners I had read in 2014 with the vague aim of reading them all. I am picking away at the list, mostly the novelists, but still have a long way to go. Note that I did not write reviews for all of the books I've read.

37/119

2023 Jon Fosse (Norwegian)
2022 Annie Ernaux (French)
✔ 2021 Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzanian)
  READ/OWN: Paradise
  OWN: Afterlives
2020 Louise Glück (American poet)

2019 Peter Handke (Austrian)
2018 (given in 2019) - Olga Tokarczuk (Polish)
✔ 2017 - Kazuo Ishiguro (British)
  READ: Klara and the Sun
  READ/OWN: Never Let Me Go
  READ/OWN: When We Were Orphans
  READ/OWN: A Pale View of Hills
2016 - Bob Dylan (US, songwriter)
2015 - Svetlana Alexievich (Ukrainian/Belarussian)
✔ 2014 - Patrick Modiano (French)
  READ/OWN: Suspended Sentences
  READ/OWN: Dora Bruder
2013 - Alice Munro (Canadian, short stories)
✔ 2012 - Mo Yan (Chinese)
  READ/OWN: Red Sorghum
  READ/OWN: The Garlic Ballads
✔ 2011 - Tomas Transtromer (Swedish poet)
  READ/OWN: Memories Look at Me: A Memoir
✔ 2010 - Mario Vargas Llosa (Peruvian)
  READ/OWN: Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
  OWN: The Feast of the Goat
  OWN: War of the End of the World

✔ 2009 - Herta Müller (German Romanian)
  READ/OWN: Hunger Angel
  READ/OWN: Land of Green Plums
✔ 2008 - J. M. G. Le Clézio (French)
  READ/OWN: Wandering Star
  OWN: Desert
2007 - Doris Lessing (English, born in Persia, educated in Zimbabwe)
✔ 2006 - Orhan Pamuk (Turkish)
  READ/OWN: My Name is Red
  READ/OWN: Snow
2005 - Harold Pinter (English playwright)
2004 - Elfriede Jelinek (Austrian)
2003 - J. M. Coetzee (South African)
  OWN: The childhood of Jesus
  OWN: The schooldays of Jesus
"Nietverloren" (short story)
✔ 2002 - Imre Kertész (Hungarian)
  READ/OWN: Fatelessness
  READ/OWN: The Pathseeker
  OWN: Fiasco
  OWN: Kaddish for an Unborn Child
✔ 2001 - V. S. Naipaul (British, born in Trinidad)
  READ/OWN: A House for Mr. Biswas
  OWN: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples
✔ 2000 - Gao Xingjian (Chinese)
  OWN: Soul Mountain
  READ: Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather

1999 - Günter Grass (German)
✔ 1998 - José Saramago (Portuguese)
  READ/OWN: Blindness
  READ/OWN: The Cave
  READ/OWN: The Double
  READ/OWN: The Elephant's Journey
  OWN: Seeing - bookmark stuck, tried twice
  OWN: All the Names
  OWN: Cain
  OWN: The Stone Raft
1997 - Dario Fo (Italian playwright)
1996 - Wislawa Szymborska (Polish poet)
1995 - Seamus Heaney (Irish poet)
✔ 1994 - Kenzaburo Oe (Japanese)
  READ/OWN: A Personal Matter
✔ 1993 - Toni Morrison (American)
  READ/OWN: Beloved
  READ/OWN: The Bluest Eye
  OWN: Song of Solomon
  OWN: Mercy
1992 - Derek Walcott (St. Lucian poet and playwright)
1991 - Nadine Gordimer (South African)
"The Ultimate Safari" (short story)
1990 - Octavio Paz (Mexican poet)

1989 - Camilo José Cela (Spanish)
✔ 1988 - Naguib Mahfouz (Egyptian)
  READ/OWN: Palace Walk
  READ/OWN: Palace of Desire
  READ/OWN: Sugar Street
  OWN: Autumn Quail
  OWN: Akhenaten, dweller in truth
✔ 1987 - Joseph Brodsky (Russian)
  READ/OWN: Nativity Poems
1986 - Wole Soyinka (Nigerian)
1985 - Claude Simon (French, b. Madagascar)
1984 - Jaroslav Seifert (Czech poet)
✔ 1983 - William Golding (English)
  READ: The Lord of the Flies
✔ 1982 - Gabriel García Márquez (Columbian)
  READ/OWN: One Hundred Years of Solitude
  READ/OWN: The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
  READ/OWN: Love in the Time of Cholera
  READ/OWN: Memoirs of My Melancholy Whores
  OWN: The General in His Labyrinth
1981 - Elias Canetti (German)
✔ 1980 - Czeslaw Milosz (Polish)
  READ/OWN: The Issa Valley
  READ/OWN: The Collected Poems, 1931-1987
  READ/OWN: The History of Polish Literature
  OWN: The Captive Mind
  OWN: Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland, 1942-1943

1979 - Odysseus Elytis (Greek poet)
✔ 1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer (Polish)
  READ/OWN: Love and Exile
  READ/OWN: Naftali the Storyteller and His Horse, Sus: And Other Stories
  READ/OWN: When Shlemiel Went to Warsaw, and Other Stories
  OWN: The Collected Stories
  OWN: The Penitent
  OWN: The Image and Other Stories
1977 - Vicente Aleixandre (Spanish poet)
1976 - Saul Bellow (American)
1975 - Eugenio Montale (Italian poet)
1974 - Eyvind Johnson (Swedish)
1974 - Harry Martinson (Swedish)
1973 - Patrick White (Australian)
1972 - Heinrich Böll (German)
  OWN: The Casualty
  OWN: A Soldier's Legacy
1971 - Pablo Neruda (Chilean poet)
✔ 1970 - Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Russian)
  READ/OWN: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
  READ/OWN: The Gulag Archipelago
  READ: Cancer Ward
  READ/OWN: The First Circle
  OWN: In the First Circle

✔ 1969 - Samuel Beckett (Irish playwright)
  READ/OWN: Waiting for Godot
✔ 1968 - Yasunari Kawabata (Japanese)
  READ/OWN: The Old Capital
  READ/OWN: Snow Country
  OWN: Palm-of-the-Hand Stories
1967 - Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemalan)
1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon (Israeli)
1966 - Nelly Sachs (German poet)
1965 - Mikhail Sholokhov (Russian)
1964 - Jean-Paul Sartre (French)
  OWN: Existentialism and Human Emotions
1963 - Giorgos Seferis (Greek poet)
✔ 1962 - John Steinbeck (American)
  READ/OWN: The Grapes of Wrath
  READ/OWN: The Winter of Our Discontent
  READ/OWN: Of Mice and Men
  READ/OWN: Cannery Row
  READ/OWN: The Red Pony
  READ/OWN: Tortilla Flat
  READ/OWN: The Pearl
✔ 1961 - Ivo Andric (Bosnian)
  READ/OWN: The Bridge on the Drina
1960 - Saint-John Perse (French poet)

1959 - Salvatore Quasimodo (Italian poet)
✔ 1958 - Boris Pasternak (Russian)
  READ/OWN: Doctor Zhivago
✔ 1957 - Albert Camus (French Algerian)
  READ/OWN: The Plague
  OWN: The Stranger
1956 - Juan Ramón Jiménez (Spanish poet)
✔ 1955 - Halldór Laxness (Icelandic)
  READ/OWN: Independent People
✔ 1954 - Ernest Hemingway (American)
  READ/OWN: The Old Man and the Sea
  READ/OWN: The Sun Also Rises
  READ/OWN: A Farewell to Arms
  READ/OWN: For Whom the Bell Tolls
  READ/OWN: The Snows of Kilimanjaro
1953 - Winston Churchill (British)
1952 - François Mauriac (French)
1951 - Pär Lagerkvist (Swedish)
  OWN: The Sibyl
1950 - Bertrand Russell (Welch philosopher)

✔ 1949 - William Faulkner (American)
  READ/OWN: The Sound and the Fury
  OWN: As I Lay Dying
✔ 1948 - T.S. Eliot (American/British)
  READ/OWN: Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
  READ: The Waste Land
1947 - André Gide (French)
✔ 1946 - Hermann Hesse (German)
  READ/OWN: Siddhartha
  READ/OWN: Steppenwolf
1945 - Gabriela Mistral (Chilean poet)
1944 - Johannes V. Jensen (Danish)
1939 - Frans Eemil Sillanpää (Finnish)
1938 - Pearl Buck (American)
  OWN: The Good Earth
1937 - Roger Martin du Gard (French)
1936 - Eugene O’Neill (American playwright)
1934 - Luigi Pirandello (Italian)
1933 - Ivan Bunin (Russian)
1932 - John Galsworthy (British)
1931 - Erik Axel Karlfeldt (Swedish poet)
1930 - Sinclair Lewis (American)

1929 - Thomas Mann (German)
  OWN: The Magic Mountain
  OWN: Joseph in Egypt
✔ 1928 - Sigrid Undset (Norwegian)
  READ/OWN: Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy
  READ/OWN: Gunnar's Daughter
1927 - Henri Bergson (French philosopher)
1926 - Grazia Deledda (Italian)
✔ 1925 - George Bernard Shaw (Irish playwright)
  READ/OWN: Pygmalion
1924 - Wladyslaw Reymont (Polish)
1923 - William Butler Yeats (Irish poet)
1922 - Jacinto Benavente (Spanish playwright)
1921 - Anatole France (French)
✔ 1920 - Knut Hamsun (Norwegian)
  READ/OWN: Hunger

1919 - Carl Spitteler (German)
1917 - Karl Gjellerup (Danish)
1917 - Henrik Pontoppidan (Danish)
1916 - Verner von Heidenstam (Swedish)
1915 - Romain Rolland (French)
1913 - Rabindranath Tagore (Indian)
1912 - Gerhart Hauptmann (German)
1911 - Maurice Maeterlinck (Belgian)
1910 - Paul Heyse (German)
✔ 1909 - Selma Lagerlöf (Swedish)
  READ/OWN: The Wonderful Adventures of Nils
1908 - Rudolf Eucken (German philosopher)
✔ 1907 - Rudyard Kipling (English)
  READ/OWN: Just-So Stories
  READ/OWN: The Jungle Book
1906 - Giosuè Carducci (Italian poet)
✔ 1905 - Henryk Sienkiewicz (Polish)
  READ/OWN: Quo Vadis
1904 - Frédéric Mistral (French, Occitan)
1904 - José Echegaray (Spanish dramatist)
1903 - Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (Norwegian)
1902 - Theodor Mommsen (German)
1901 - Sully Prudhomme (French poet)

Gunnar's Daughter by Sigrid Undset, translator not in credits (!)
Originally published 1909

Although much shorter than Kristin Lavransdatter, only 213 pages, the two books are quite similar. Both reveal the harsh lives of women in Norway and the pain caused by bearing children out of wedlock. Neither woman is destined to love easily or appropriately. Gunnar's Daughter is less historically concerned than Kristin Lavransdatter and is set roughly three hundred years earlier (11th century). Undset's heroines live bitter and unhappy lives; very stoic and unbending. This last being, perhaps, the most characteristic feature of her stories. Although bleak, the stories are not melancholy in the least. Rather, one has the impression of real life as it was lived. Kristin and Vigdis are too strong of character to allow the reader to pity them. They accept, and that, perhaps, is the moral that Undset wishes to impart upon the reader.

-Review written June 5, 1994

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata, translated from the Japanese by Edward Seidensticker
Originally published as a serial from 1935-1937, as a book in 1947, English translation 1957

Yasunari Kawabata's early life was marked by loss. He was born in 1899 and orphaned as a toddler. He was taken in by his grandparents, but his grandmother died when he was seven and his grandfather when he was fifteen. His only sister died when he was ten. These early losses were compounded by rejection by his first love after she was raped by a monk. Kawabata became well-respected for his short stories while still in college and with other young writers started a literary movement called "Shinkankakuha," with the meaning of "new impressions or sensations." Snow Country was written in installments between 1934 and 1937 and is considered one of his best works. In 1968 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first Japanese person to do so. Four years later, he died by gassing, probably suicide, in the wake of his friend and fellow writer Mishima's own suicide.

Snow Country refers to the area west of the central mountains where there is heavy snowfall, in excess of fifteen feet at times. The area is also known for it's hot springs and hot spring geishas. In his informative introduction, the translator, Seidensticker, writes that at the time men would travel to the snow country to ski or see the leaves or cherry blossoms, but without their wives and families. The hot spring geishas were provincial and little better than prostitutes, as opposed to their urban counterparts. In this short novel, the emotionally stunted dilettante, Shimamura, seduces a young girl without family, then returns two more times over the course of three years. The girl, Komako, is initially described as clean and pure, but inevitably becomes a geisha and begins to decay. Unable to love, Shimamura, can only admire women then move on, both literally and figuratively. Komako, meanwhile, is rooted to the place by her obligations and burdens.

Shimamura is not devoid of self-awareness and the descriptions of him are both beautiful and ugly. He is wealthy enough not to need to work, but amuses himself by publishing articles about western ballet, despite never having seen one himself.

He pampered himself with the somewhat whimsical pleasure of sneering at himself through his work, and it may well have been from such a pleasure that his sad little dream world sprang. Off on a trip, he saw no need to hurry himself.

He spent much of his time watching insects in their death agonies.

The moths that litter his room on his last visit are symbolic of the decay that surrounds him and his own degenerate state.

As he picked up a dead insect to throw it out, he sometimes thought for an instant of the children he had left in Tokyo.

Yet he is also moved by their dead beauty and loneliness.

Although short, this novel needs reflective reading. Much like poetry, it's the images that drive the story forward, not necessarily the plot. On the train, Shimamura spends hours looking at the reflections created by the light from inside the carriage on the window. Although the nature outside is still visible, another surreal world is superimposed, and creates the sort of hazy reality that appeals to him. He falls in love with a woman's face he can barely make out.

Another similarity with poetry, particularly haiku, is Kawabata's use of opposing images in juxtaposition to reflect beauty. For instance,

Black though the mountains were, they seemed at that moment brilliant with the color of snow.

The brightness of the snow was more intense, it seemed to be burning icily.

Black but brilliant with color and snow burning icily are but two of the many such descriptions that I savored.

Quiet, understated, gem-like, all words I could use to describe Kawabata's writing. I have a collection of his short stories, Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, and I look forward to more of the same.

-Review written August 7, 2022

Love and exile : an autobiographical trilogy by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Published 1984

Isaac Bashevis Singer was a prolific writers of short stories in Yiddish and helped to keep the Yiddish language vibrant and alive in the 20th century. He sought to free Yiddish from being a provincial, old-fashioned language and make it relevant to modern audiences. Some of his favorite themes, the relationships between men and women, science, and modern social ills, were not normally written about in Yiddish. His contributions in this area were recognized when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. When I was young, I read and enjoyed his tales for children, especially the traditional stories related to him by his mother, but I was unfamiliar with his works for adults, so his autobiography was quite eye-opening.

It occurred to me more than once to write about myself as I really was, but I was convinced that the readers, the publishers, and the critics (especially the Yiddish ones) would consider me a pornographer, a contriver, mad.

Well, he did write about himself as he really was in Love and Exile, and I can't say that I was particularly impressed with Singer as a person or the trilogy itself.

In my opinion, the first book in the trilogy, A Little Boy in Search of God, was the best. Although the book describes his childhood growing up in Warsaw, a child of a Chassidic rabbi, the action centers around his religious development. From a precocious child listening to his father preside over rabbinic courts to his older brother's belief in nature, not God, as the overarching force in the universe, Singer was dissatisfied with all the answers.

Because of my deep curiosity about science, I should have grown up a scientist, but I wasn't satisfied with mere facts--I wanted to solve the mystery of being. I sought answers to questions which tormented me then and still do to the present day.

Although he maintained an interest in science, Singer began looking for answers elsewhere. At a very young age, he began studying the cabala, Jewish mysticism, which fueled his morbid imagination and dreams. Then he began devouring philosophy, psychology, and especially the occult, in an effort to solve certain questions to his satisfaction, such as the existence of evil. He developed an ethic of protest in which every compassionate act done by a human is a thumbed nose at a God who doesn't deserve our love because of the existence of evil.

This ethic of protest, I told myself, existed in all people, in all animals, and in everything that lived and suffered. Even the evildoers protested when things started going badly for them and other malefactors did to them what they had done to others... The moral person protests not only when he is personally wronged but also when he witnesses or thinks about the suffering of others. If God wants or feels compelled to torture His creatures, that is His affair. The true protester expresses his protest by avoiding doing evil to the best of his ability.

By the time the first book in the trilogy ends, Singer is living on his own and has started an affair with a much older woman who communes with the dead and is obsessed with her own death.

The next two books, A Young Man in Search of Love and Lost in America, focus not on intellectual and spiritual development, but on Singer's many affairs (often simultaneously) and his attempts to find work and support his writing. Although the first book was often repetitive, especially as regards how precocious and intellectual daring he was, at least it was peppered with some interesting philosophical questioning. Now, Singer simply revels in his erotic victories and his lazy attempts to find and keep a job. With an air of intellectual distain for everyone around him, Singer wallows in self-absorption and hypochondria. Although I understand the 1970s bohemian times in which Singer wrote his book, I wanted to shake him and say Get a life.

-Review written July 30, 2012

Naftali the Storyteller and His Horse, Sus, and other stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Published 1979

The stories in this collection are a mix of retellings of folk stories from his childhood, along with a couple of autobiographical pieces. The title story is about Naftali, who gives up a potential career in commerce in order to bring storybooks to children in remote villages. He delivers his books in a wagon pulled by his faithful horse, Sus, until the two of them are too old to continue and retire on the estate of a wealthy and educated man. These stories reflect a bit of the author's personal interests (kindness to animals, science, and the cabal), but are not as surreal as the stories which he created in other collections. Six of the eight stories were translated to English by his nephew, Joseph Singer.

-Review written July 30, 2012

When Shlemiel Went to Warsaw and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, translated by Elizabeth Shub
Published 1968

In this collection of short stories, there is a mix of retellings of tales his mother told him as a child and ones that Singer created. The retellings are benign tales of tricksters, the foolish elders of the Polish village of Chelm, and the gullibility of poor Shlemiel. The stories that Singer made up are more reflective of his character and interests. There is the imposition of fate on imps, the complicated relationship between a rabbi and the local witch, vegetarianism, miracle workers, and fantastic dreams of other realities. The book was named a Newbery Honor Book.

-Review written July 30, 2012

Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman
Originally published 2004, English translation 2005

With a title like this, who could resist purchasing it? Weighing in at just over 100 pages, Memoirs is about a man turning 90 and his decision to make his birthday a memorable one by sleeping with a teenage virgin. Fortunately, things don't turn out as either the protagonist or the reader expect.

A commentary on growing old, it reminded me of Bohumil Hrabal's Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age. But Garcia Marquez writes with affection for his characters about the ecstasy of first love. An enjoyable read.

-Review written January 8, 2018

The Elephant's Journey by José Saramago, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa
Originally published 2008, English translation 2010

While dining with a colleague in Salzburg, Saramago noticed several small wooden sculptures lined up in a row. He learned that they were representations of stops made by an elephant, on a long journey from Portugal to Vienna in 1551. Intrigued, Saramago did more research and then imagined the journey for us through this short and witty novel.

The story begins with Portuguese King João III and his wife, Catarina, in bed one night trying to decide what to give Archduke Maximilian of Austria as a wedding gift. The queen suggests the elephant, Solomon, who came to them from India two years previously, but has "done nothing but eat and sleep" since then. They decide that Solomon and his mahout, Subhro, will travel first to Valladolid, Spain, where the archduke is residing as Regent of Spain. From there, it will be the responsibility of the Archduke and his wife, Maria, daughter of Charles V, to get the elephant to Vienna.

Much has already been written about the adventures of the fascinating characters of Solomon, Subhro, and the Portuguese master of horse who is responsible for safely delivering the elephant to the Archduke. Instead of trying to add to that discussion, I thought I would focus on Saramago's frequent references to the act of writing peppered throughout the book. The author and the narrator of the book appear to be the same, and I believe that the comments about writing shed light on Saramago the author.

I find the self-references to himself as a writer to be particularly interesting. When the boat carrying Solomon reaches the Italian port of Genoa, Saramago writes about the orderly and efficient manner of arriving, then he says:

We hereby recognize that the somewhat disdainful, ironic tone that has slipped into these pages whenever we have had cause of speak of austria and its people was not only aggressive, but patently unfair. Not that this was our intention, but you know how it is with writing, one word often brings along another in its train simply because they sound good together, even if this means sacrificing respect for levity and ethics for aesthetics, if such solemn concepts are not out of place in a discourse such as this, and often to no one's advantage either. It is in this and other ways, almost without our realizing it, that we make so many enemies in life.

News of the miracle had reached the doge's palace, but in somewhat garbled form, the result of the successive transmissions of facts, true or assumed, real or purely imaginary, based on everything from partial, more or less eyewitness accounts to reports from those who simply liked the sound of their own voice, for, as we know all too well, no one telling a story can resist adding a period, and sometimes even a comma.

The idea of placing levity and aesthetics ahead of respect for tradition and truth is evident in Saramago's disregard for the usual rules of punctuation and paragraph formation and in his creative stories which bear little resemblance to the real world. And yet there is a different kind of truth at work, that of the nature of humanity and society. Besides, Saramago seems to be saying, what is the truth anyway?

It must be said that history is always selective, and discriminatory too, selecting from life only what society deems to be historical and scorning the rest, which is precisely where we might find the true explanation of facts, of things, of wretched reality itself. In truth, I say to you, it is better to be a novelist, a fiction writer, a liar.

But Saramago also finds that novelists are inept at depicting the reality they do try to illuminate. In trying to describe the landscape of the snowy, cold, and windy Brenner Pass, Saramago inserts this aside:

The greatest disrespect we can show for reality, whatever that reality might be, when attempting the pointless task of describing a landscape, is to do so with words that are not our own and never were, by which we mean words that have already appeared on millions of pages and in millions of mouths before our turn to use them finally comes, weary words, exhausted from being passed from hand to hand, leaving in each one a part of their vital substance.

These "weary words" are "merely humble recognition of how much truth is contained in that well-known phrase, Words fail me. Because words really do fail us." Yet new words are created all the time "doubtless going around knocking on doors, with the absent-minded air affected by all new words, asking to be let in." If we substitute "work" for "word", an interesting image arises of authors with new ways of writing and new truths to tell peddling their ideas to publishers, "asking to be let in."

Saramago was a genius at creating new ideas and new works from the weary words we have inherited. Without being disingenuous or ostentatious, he was able to present the weary reader with a fresh and unique way of seeing the world. If Destiny, when it chooses, is as good or even better than god at writing straight on crooked lines,"* then Saramago was best at writing crooked, convoluted, and symbolic stories that gave us the straight truth as he saw it.

*The idea of God being able to write the truth even when faced with imperfect humans is an interesting one. According to an article in the journal Folklore, the proverb is widely known as a Portuguese proverb, but some scholars link the phrase to the writings of St. Augustine.

-Review written November 27, 2011

Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather by Gao Xingjian, translated from the Chinese by Mabel Lee
Stories originally published 1983-1990, English translation 2004

This collection of six short stories by Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian were tied together by their sense of impending doom and loss.

"The Temple" is the story of a couple on their honeymoon who impulsively get off the train in a village and hike up to an old temple. There, a man approaches them while ominous music played in my head. Although nothing untoward happened, the story ends with a loose tile hanging overhead about to fall.

"In the Park" is a conversation between a man and a woman who are meeting after a long separation. There is attraction between them, but the woman is married. Before long the repressed emotions come out as frustrated anger. In the background a woman has clearly been waiting for someone, but when he fails to appear, she bursts into tears.

"Cramp" begins with a man swimming in the ocean at night. He gets a cramp and worries that he won't make it to shore. Does anyone see him out there? The story ends with a woman on crutches watching two friends swimming.

"The Accident" begins almost in slow motion, with a man on a bicycle pulling a child in an attached carrier passing in front of a bus. As a crowd gathers around the accident, the language speeds up until all we hear are snippets of conversation. The story ends with the narrator (author?) saying,

I have been discussing philosophy again, but life is not philosophy, even if philosophy can derive from knowledge of life. And there is no need to turn life's traffic accidents into statistics, because that's a job for the traffic department or the public security department. Of course, a traffic accident can serve as an item for a newspaper. And it can serve as the raw material for literature when it is supplemented by the imagination and written up as a moving narrative: this would then be creation. However, what is related here is simply the process of this traffic accident itself, a traffic accident that occurred at five o'clock, in the central section of Desheng Avenue in front of the radio repair shop.

The title story, although it sounds prosaic, is actually a confused narrative that mixes memories with a dream state while a soccer game plays on tv in the background. It's about lost childhoods, lost family, and the drastic changes brought to a village by modernization.

"In an Instant" begins with a man in a deck chair looking out at the ocean. But this narrative is broken, with paragraphs about a woman and her sexual proclivities interspersed. Each time the story reverts to the man in the chair, the water is higher, until only the chair is floating. Then it gets weird.

-Review written July 24, 2022

A house for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul
Published 1961

Mr. Biswas is "born the wrong way" and in his superstitious village, that makes him unlucky, dangerous, and a person who must avoid natural water (ponds, streams, etc.) at all costs. But as a child, Mr. Biswas gets distracted one day and plays in the pond, bringing calamity on his family and himself. The rest of his childhood is spent being shuttled among various extended family members and creates a lifelong yearning for a home of his own.

Mr. Biswas has ambitions, but no plans for achieving them; intelligence, but no common sense; and a decided lack of gumption. His entire life, recorded in detail in the novel, is a long series of misadventures, brow-beatings, and failures. He ends up married to the first girl he sees, and her domineering family railroads him into things for the rest of his life. Whenever he does attempt to break out of their grip, he is either squashed or fails so spectacularly that he must crawl back to them.

The first few pages tell the reader of his fate, so there is no suspense, simply a long explication of how he ended up there. Although there are humorous bits, mainly it's a rather depressing tale of a weak man. I found it a bit of a slog and wanted to shake Mr. Biswas frequently. Given the lack of plot, I was disappointed not to learn more about Trinidad's history or culture at least. Altogether a book I wanted to enjoy, much more than I did.

-Review written October 1, 2013

Fatelessness : a novel by Imre Kertész, translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson
Originally published 1975, English translation 2004

This has been a hard book to digest and even harder to review. It is about the Holocaust, which is a delicate topic to discuss in itself, and problematic because it provides an intellectually alternative view of how to perceive the horrors and the ultimate meaning of fate and freedom. I have read many books about the Holocaust, and I have come to expect not only a certain plot line (denial, ghetto, camps, horrors, survival or not, with occasional attempts at escape or resistance), but also a certain communal mindset about the entire event: inhumane to the point of vowing "Never again" (rather futile words given the continued perpetuation of genocides). We have a collective understanding of what the Holocaust was and even a general sense of how survivor's felt: horror, grief, suppression of emotional response in some cases, and then moving on, many not wanting to speak of their experiences. When a book comes along that challenges this set of collective beliefs, it is very hard not to simply deny or negate what the author says. I found this to be the case for me when I read Scheisshaus luck and I'm No Hero, both memoirs of young men who found the war and their internment to be no reason to stop chasing women, taking advantage of opportunities for self-benefit, or struggling with the adolescent angst of moving from child to man. At first I was horrified: poking fun, bawdy, irreverent - the Holocaust?

In a different way, Fatelessness provoked a similar response in me. Georg Koves is a fictional character that observes and accepts without question or malice what happens to him. Constantly throughout the book, Georg uses phrases like "naturally", "purely in my eyes, of course", "it goes without saying", "in my case at least", "for me at any rate", and others that convey the sense that what he experiences in the Holocaust and the camps is natural, although the author acknowledges that this may not be the same view others take.

At the very beginning, I still considered myself to be what I might call a sort of guest in captivity—very pardonably and , when it comes down to it, in full accordance with the propensity to delusion that we all share and which is thus, I suppose, ultimately part of human nature.

In addition, Georg, sees the beauty of nature and the joy possible in the camps. Even when he is so ill and emaciated that he doesn't expect to live, he thinks

Thus, when I, along with all the others on whom it was clear not too much further hope can have been pinned of being set to work again here, in Zeitz (a subcamp), was returned to sender as it were—back to Buchenwald—I naturally shared the others' joy with every faculty that was left me, since I was promptly reminded of the good times there, most especially the morning soups.

Joy at returning to Buchenwald, where good times were had? This is only one of several instances where some readers might be incredulous and even angry at the perceived belittlement of the true horrors of the place.

One could assume that the character Georg is delusional or that he was emotionally stunted from the beginning. His lack of emotional response as his family prepares first to send his father off to forced labor, and then himself to Auschwitz, seems inappropriate even to a fourteen year old child. And indeed there are passages at the end of the book when he truly does not seem to understand human emotion. Or is it that he understands it too well?

In the end, I found that people on all sides were looking at me, heads shaking, and with a most singular emotion on their faces, which was a little embarrassing because, as best I could tell, they were feeling sorry for me. I felt a strong urge to tell them there was no need for that after all, at least not right at that moment, but I ended up saying nothing, something held me back, somehow I couldn't find it in my heart to do so, because I noticed that the emotion gratified them, gave them some sort of pleasure, the way I saw it. Indeed—and I could have been mistaken of course, though I don't think so—but later on (for there were one or two other occasions on which Ii was similarly questioned and interrogated) I gained the impression that they expressly sought out, almost hunted for, an opportunity, a means or pretext for this emotion for some reason, out of some need, as a testimony to something as it were, to their method of dealing with things perhaps, or possibly, who knows, to their still being capable of it at all...

"The emotion (of pity) gratified them." Although Georg is referring to fellow prisoners, can the idea of seeking an opportunity to feel pity for the innocent victims of the Holocaust refer to us as well? Personally, I believe there are many reasons why people read Holocaust memoirs, visit memorials, and educate themselves about the history of the Holocaust. But could there also exist this desire to feel pity, to seek opportunities to be horrified and sorry for others? It's a loaded question. When people speak to or read the words of survivors, what do they want to hear?

For even there, next to the chimneys, in the intervals between the torments, there was something that resembled happiness. Everyone asks only about the hardships and the "atrocities", whereas for me perhaps it is that experience which will remain most memorable. Yes, the next time I am asked, I ought to speak about that, the happiness of the concentration camps.

If indeed I am asked. And provided I myself don't forget.

-Review written November 15, 2012

The pathseeker by Imre Kertész, translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson
Originally published 1977

This short novella by Nobel Prize winning author, Imre Kertesz, is a different approach to the question of responsibility and guilt in the 20th century. The story begins with "the commissioner", the only name by which we are to know him, interviewing the owner of a hotel about an incident that happened nearby. The hotel owner has lived in the town since boyhood and volunteers information rather feverishly. In fact, he seems relieved to be able to confess his "small part in universal evil", and furthermore to explain his inaction since then. But the commissioner has not come to absolve the hotel owner, rather his intent is to visit the nearby site of the incident, and then continue on his way to a seaside resort with his wife.

The visit to the unnamed site turns out to be a disappointment, however. Nothing remains as it was, and the

Tourists were like ants, diligently carrying off the significance of things, crumb by crumb, wearing away a bit of the unspoken importance investing them with every word they spoke and every single snapshot they took. He should have realized that this was precisely the sort of opportunity they would not leave unexploited.

The commissioner does not find the evidence he is seeking here.

He does, however, spot a veiled woman in the distance with whom he is later to have an unexpected conversation. The woman is mysterious and accusatory. When the commissioner protests that he was only at the site by chance, the woman replies, "There's no such thing as chance. Only injustice." Now it is the commissioner's turn to protest his innocence; but the veiled woman is as uninterested in his excuses as the commissioner was in the hotel owner's.

Finally, spurning his confused but supportive wife, the commissioner seeks to complete his mission by visiting the factory. Finding the factory still working, he feels a brief moment of hope, but then realizes that he has still failed, because all that remains are objects. What is the truth he seeks?

These objects here were holding their peace; like uncommunicative strangers, they were complete and sufficient unto themselves, they were not going to verify his existence. Let him find it in chance or seek it within himself, accept it or reject it-that was now, as ever, a matter of utter indifference to this pitiless landscape and to these obtusely different objects here.

As he waits for the train back to town, he picks up a paper and reads an article about a recent suicide. With that, the commissioner has a moment of panic, but "surely he couldn't be looking for his accusers?" His mission, however, appears complete, and he continues forward, in seeming indifference to all that he has experienced in the last few days.

Kertesz is masterful at exploring the themes of responsibility and guilt without ever becoming specific. By doing so, the unnamed places and people can stand for everyone, for each of us. We all have a role in the story be it spectator, victim, survivor, or tourist. Vague, confusing, and surreal, the story prods the reader to identify with the scenario and ask hard questions of ourselves. Although I can't say I enjoyed this novella, it did make me uncomfortable, and that, I think, is the point.

-Review written July 2, 2011

My name is Red by Orhan Pamuk, translated from the Turkish by Erdağ M. Göknar
Originally published 1998, English translation 2001

I've had this novel on my shelves for some time, acquired more because I wanted to read something by this Nobel laureate than knowing the story itself.

The basic premise is that a man named Black returns to Istanbul from self-imposed exile. He had left the home of his uncle, Enishte, when his uncle refused to permit Black to marry his daughter, Shekure. Upon return Black learns that his Enishte has been commissioned by the Sultan to create an illustrated book glorifying the empire. The work is highly controversial, because the Sultan wishes the book to be illustrated in the European style. Enishte has hired other local miniaturists to help, but keeps each one's work secret from the others. Now one of them has been murdered, and Enishte wishes Black to discover who the murderer is.

Aside from the murder mystery, the book is about the conflict in the sixteenth-century between Eastern and Western art. As depicted in the book, an Eastern artist's prestige is based on how well he can mimic a historical style. Individual style is discouraged and signing a work is practically sacrilegious. New works are created by putting different elements together, each element a replica of the ideal form first iconized generations ago. Thus a horse in one painting will look identical to a horse in another painting. Even people are drawn as ideals, not as reflections of reality. In the West, however, and particularly Italy, painting is highly individualized, and portraits are very popular. In addition, Western art uses perspective, whereas Eastern art is still using a horizontal line. Other differences, such as the placement of a person in the center of the canvas, is seen not just as a stylistic choice, but as a religious one. Enishte, who visited Italy as an envoy, is eager to fulfill the Sultan's desire for a Western-style chronicle, whereas the local leader of the miniaturists sees such a commission as dangerous and possibly an affront to Islam.

Another interesting aspect of the novel is that each chapter is told from the first-person point of view of a different character, including the subjects of paintings, such as a tree or a dog, and Death itself. The first chapter, for instance, is entitled, "I am a Corpse." This technique heightens the tension of the search for the murderer, who narrates his own chapters. It also allows for the author to play with who has a voice and contrast their internal dialogue with their outward actions.

Although not a mystery reader, I found this one to be highly literary, historically interesting, and clever. In addition it was fun, and I read it quite quickly. Recommended for those who like art history or The Name of the Rose.

-Review written October 28, 2019

Snow by Orhan Pamuk, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely
Published 2002

I read My Name is Red a few years ago and thought it amazing, so I began Snow with anticipation and high hopes. Unfortunately, I struggled to like this book, or even finish it. I think it would have made a good novella.

Ka is a self-absorbed poet who lives in political exile in Frankfurt, Germany. Returning home for his mother's funeral, Ka learns that a woman he formerly had a crush on, İpek, is now divorced and living in a town in the far northeast of Turkey called Kars. When he hears news of a rash of suicides there by girls forbidden to wear headscarves to school, Ka boards a bus for Kars with the intent to write about it for a Frankfurt newspaper. En route it begins snowing heavily, and he barely makes it to Kar before the roads are closed. For the next three days, Ka investigates the headscarf girls, gets involved in a coup, and woos İpek.

The novel is riddled with literary wannabes who seem to have a hand in creating the plot. It is a story within a story with two plays in the middle and peppered with poems which are never revealed to the reader. From page one, the reader is aware that someone is narrating Kars story, and, although he claims omniscience by dint of having read Ka's diaries, the narrator (a novelist) also mimics Ka and seems jealous of him. Is he relating Ka's story or writing it? Ka, who had been in a creative drought prior to his return to Turkey, is flooded with fully composed poems as soon as he arrives in Kars. Is he creating them or simply recording them? Journalists fabricate stories which then come true, actors stage plays with live action consequences, and everyone wants to pass along a message to the West.

The love stories in the book are facile, with little sincerity but lots of angst on the part of our protagonist. I failed to connect with the characters and had little sympathy for their machinations. The only characters I found truly sympathetic are a couple of religious school students and the headscarf suicides whom we never meet.

Pamuk touches upon many issues in his novel—secularism vs Islamist politics, militant nationalism, Kurdish guerilla fighters, the wearing of headscarves, the role of art in Turkish politics—about which I know little. Perhaps if I were more conversant with Turkish history and politics, I would have gotten more out of these sections. As it was I either appealed to Wikipedia or muddled my way through.

Snow was Pamuk's first novel after the wildly successful My Name is Red, and I felt as though he were trying to be as clever and innovative as he had been in that book, but missing the mark.

-Review written January 9, 2022

Wandering star : a novel by J.-M. G. Le Clézio, translated from the French by C. Dickson
Originally published 1992, English translation 2004

Dedicated to "the captured children", Wandering Star is the story of two young girls, each driven from her home, whose paths cross briefly on a dusty road outside Jerusalem. Esther is thirteen years old and living in exile in a remote corner of southeastern France in 1943. Her father is a member of the Resistance and is often in whispered conversations with strangers at their kitchen table or out guiding people through the mountains to Italy. Her mother insists on calling her Hélène, despite everyone in the village knowing they are Jewish because they must register with the Italian soldiers every morning. Helene grows up running wild in the village, with a couple of young admirers at her heels. Her exposure to the war is limited to little incidences: Mr. Ferne's piano, his one solace, is taken away for the amusement of the Italian soldiers; Rachel is ostracized in the village for having an affair with an officer. But everything changes when Italy surrenders and the town is turned over to the Germans. Esther and her mother flee, along with most of the other Jews in town, trying to cross the mountains into Italy. From there they hope to catch a boat to Palestine.

Nejma is introduced over half way through the book. She is a Palestinian girl who has been removed to the Nour Chams Camp in the summer of 1948 to make room for the new nation of Israel. Her life in the camp is lonely: her father is away fighting, her mother died when Nejma was young, and she was sent from the only home she knew to this barren stretch of desert. People in the camp are desperate. There is little water and the only food comes in on irregular United Nations trucks. Capable and mature for her age, Nejma takes in a newly arrived woman whom she calls aunt. Together they try to eke out an existence. She falls in love with a nomad, who is also at the camp, but theirs is a difficult relationship. Life and death balance on a knife's edge in the camp, and eventually Nejma flees, in an attempt to survive despite the threat of Israeli soldiers.

The reader is caught in a conundrum by the juxtaposition of the two girls. It is easy to sympathize with Esther, as the reader knows what awaits her if she is caught, better than she knows herself. Her flight creates tension that can only be eased by sanctuary in the land of light and Jerusalem. Yet, halfway through the story, the author introduces an equally sympathetic character, whose harsh fate is caused by the arrival of thousands of Jews like Esther. Nejma is forced into a concentration camp that one cannot help but compare to those that Esther escaped. Lacking the systematic slaughter of the Nazis for sure, but a camp ruled by neglect, starvation, and disease, nonetheless.

This moral comparison makes for an interesting premise, but something about the story falls flat. Perhaps it is the fault of the translation, but the writing is very bland. Short, bald narrative seems more appropriate for a young adult novel perhaps.

At dawn, the rain woke them. It was a fine drizzle rustling softly in the pine needles over their heads, mingling with the crashing of the torrent. Drops started coming through the roof of their shelter, ice-cold drops that spattered on their faces. Elizabeth tried to arrange the branches better, but she only succeeded in making it rain more. So they took their suitcases and, wrapped in their shawls, huddled up at the foot of a larch tree, shivering. The shapes of the trees stood out starkly in the dawn light. A white fog was creeping down the valley. It was so cold that Esther and Elizabeth just sat there hugging each other at the foot of the larch, not wanting to move.

In addition, the point of view changes frequently in the Esther plot line: sometimes the story is told in the third person, sometimes from Esther's point of view, occasionally from someone else's. It's not a major point, but makes the book feel hurried or like a rough draft.

While I wouldn't necessarily recommend Wandering Star, I am interested in reading another work by Le Clézio to see if this one is an anomaly for the Nobel Prize winning author. The preponderance of his other works seem to be set in Africa and deal with colonialism. Perhaps a more usual topic for the author and a different translator will change my first impression of his writing.

-Review written October 13, 2013

The hunger angel : a novel by Herta Müller, translated from the German by Philip Boehm
Originally published 2009, English translation 2012

I was particularly eager to read this novel because I've never read anything by Herta Müller, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. The author was born and raised in Romania, but left for Germany to escape the harassment and threats of Ceauşescu's secret police. Although Müller never experienced the Soviet labor camps to which many ethnic German Romanians were sent after World War II, her mother did. In addition to family history, Müller extensively interviewed the poet Oskar Pastior, a former deportee, in what was to be a collaboration. Unfortunately, Pastior passed away, and Müller ended up writing the book alone. This intimate knowledge about the camps lends an authenticity to the novel, which to me is essential when writing survivor literature and this type of fictitious, but personal narrative.

Leo Ausberg is seventeen, bored with small town life, and exploring his first sexual encounters when he receives an order that he is to be deported to a Soviet labor camp for five years to help with the rebuilding of Russia after Stalingrad. Others from his town have been "called up" as well, and Leo is secretly excited at the thought of traveling and leaving his provincial town and family for a while. With a gramophone case as a suitcase, Leo boards a cattle car for the East with a light heart.

The next five years in the coke-processing plant disabuse Leo of his foolish optimism and teach him many things: 1 shovel load=1 gram of bread, to let slip any hint of his homosexuality would mean death, and the cruel intimacy of the hunger angel. The long hours, the cold and heat, the abuse, and the lice are nothing to the tortures of the hunger angel. He encompasses the mind and subsumes the will. He promises to come back, but never leaves. Everyone in the camps has a hunger angel, and they dictate everything in the camps, from hunger-fur to morality. Müller focuses on this image as compulsively as the camp inmate thinks of food, and the reader is drawn into the mood claustrophobic obsession.

Although the beginning and end of the story are plot focused, many of the middle chapters most closely resemble essays. As Leo (and Müller) reflect on the ways in which camp life impact the way the mind functions, the plot falls to the side. These short pieces each deal with an element of camp life: shoveling, chemicals, boredom, a cuckoo clock, retribution of a bread thief. Although they are all tied together through Leo, I found that my reading slowed as I read one or two chapter essays and then stopped, with little need to carry on for plot's sake. As I neared the end of the book and the narrative became more plot focused, and I finished quite quickly.

The Hunger Angel opened my eyes to the post-war plight of the Romanian ethnic Germans, about whom I knew little. I thought it was mostly German POWs who were sent to the camps. In addition, I enjoyed the language of the text , which is poetic, full of imagery, and poignant without being pitying. I look forward to reading more of Müller's work and have added The Land of Green Plums to my list.

-Review written June 20, 2012

The Land of Green Plums by Herta Müller, translated from the Hungarian by Michael Hofmann
Originally published 1994, English translation

Four university students get together regularly to discuss poetry, literature, and even songs. The students share, not only a love for literature, but also a common background. All four are from small towns and are trying to create a new, intellectual identity away from their parents' provincial ways. Sounds innocuous and age appropriate, unless you live in a totalitarian regime where dissenting minds are taken as serious threats to the state.

The narrator of the story is one of the members, and the only female in the group. When one of her roommates, Lola, is found dead in the closet, the narrator takes and hides Lola's diary so that it won't be found by the political police. Shaken by guilt at not being a better friend and frightened by the subsequent searches of her room, the narrator tells her cohort members, and they work out a system to warn each other when they have been searched, followed, or taken in for questioning by the enigmatic Captain Pjele.

The pressure and tension does not relent once the four are out of school and working in unfulfilling jobs. The political police threaten their families, deny them their vocations, and increase the physical threats. The only way to live seems to be to flee the country, although few hold out any hope at all of escaping and have seen the evidence of failed escapes, or to commit suicide. In a world where neither the countryside nor the city provides safety and relationships are overshadowed by the constant fear of betrayal, people live shadow lives. In the end, each of the four must decide how they are going to continue and face the consequences of their choices.

Herta Müller, like her characters, suffered a double persecution in communist Romania under Ceausescu. First, as an intellectual, a young person who left her provincial village to seek education and a modicum of freedom in the city; and second, as a member of the Banat Swabians, a German-speaking minority group. The characters and plot of the novel are based on these two tensions: life in a totalitarian state and life as a minority. But the characters are not well-developed, and the plot is confusing at times. Instead of focusing on the concrete (such as setting in story in time and place), the author focuses on the sensations and appetites of the characters, their distrust yet dependence on one another, and the bleak numbness of spirit which corrodes and corrupts insidiously. Müller is a poet, and the hopeless landscape of the mind when faced with such a regime is the focus of her word pictures and metaphors. The result is less a story of individuals, despite at least one of the characters being a person from Müller's own youth, than a collage of flat emotions and colorless landscapes.

This is the second of Müller's books which I've read, the first being Hunger Angel. Although I can appreciate both the author's experiences which are reflected in the pages and the fictitious stories, the emotional emptiness of the books carries over into my connection with them. I'm glad I delved into this Nobel Laureate's world for a time, but I'm not sure I will return.

-Review written July 24, 2012

The garlic ballads by Yan Mo, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt
Originally published 1988, English translation 2012

I felt I should have liked this novel more, if only because it is a well-structured and important work by a Nobel laureate. Perhaps I shouldn't have let the nonstop violence effected my appreciation. But there you have it. I couldn't get past the intentional and random violence that is the basis of the book.

The farmers of Paradise County now live under the harsh rule of the Communist Government. New "modern" ideas attempt to debride generations of tradition with mixed results. Some of the reforms, such as protections for women, are laudable, if loosely enforced; others, such as land reform, are mismanaged disasters. The locals resist both types of change, either behind closed doors or in a doomed attempt at collective protest. Pretentious locals, newly uplifted by the government, lord it over their former neighbors, and the threat of higher-up communist bureaucrats looms over all.

The structure of the novel is nonlinear, with stutter-steps forward and back in the chronological plot. Sometimes it was confusing, but for the most part, it worked. Instead of building suspense, this method of storytelling emphasizes inevitable outcomes. One thread holding the story together is the lamentations of the blind street singer, which begin each chapter, and eventually enter the plot itself. Two other threads running throughout the story are a ghostly white horse and the presence of certain birds. To be honest, I never solved the riddle of the meaning of these symbols.

Although I can appreciate the importance of this novel as a protest against the Chinese government and enforced communism, it is not a celebration of the traditions and rural life of the Chinese peasants. The only positive takeaway is an intermittent appreciation of the ties that bind people in adversity, but even this idea is strained and fraught with violence. The reader is left with only a sense of the hopeless struggle of life that is born and ends in violence.

-Review written August 22, 2018

Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano, translated from the French by Joanna Kilmartin
Originally published 1997, English translation 1999

Five years after publishing Dora Bruder, Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is renowned for his atmospheric writing, especially of the streets and neighborhoods of Paris, and for exploring issues related to WWII and the German occupation of France. His writing often blends memoir, archival material, and fiction. Dora Bruder is an exemplar of all that makes Modiano distinctive.

In 1988 Modiano read a small missing persons ad in a 1941 Paris newspaper and became obsessed with finding out what happened to the girl. Dora Bruder was fifteen years old when she ran away from her Catholic boarding school. Her parents placed the ad after going to the police, a dangerous thing to do in 1941 Paris when you are Jewish and non-French. Piecing together the fragments of her story from police reports, maps, old photographs, and the dossiers kept on Jews, Modiano recreates a time and place that is both specific and universal. Interwoven with her story is his own. He grew up walking the same streets she did, he too was taken to the police station in a Black Maria, and his father was nearly deported for not wearing the mandated Star of David in 1942, the same year Dora′s father was. The result is a metafiction where the author is as much a part of the story as the protagonist.

I find the experience of reading Modiano to be like reading with cotton balls in your head. Everything is slightly blurry with a muffled quality that makes me want to whisper. It′s a singular experience that leaves me unsure as to whether I liked the book or if that′s even the point. Others are much less vague in their reviews, and I would invite you to read Basswood′s for a much more eloquent one.

-Review written April 26, 2021

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Published 2021

Klara is an AF (artificial friend), designed to be a companion for a teenage child. She's not the newest model, but she has unusual powers of observation and a keen desire to learn. She is chosen by Josie, a kind, but frail girl, and after some unusual questions from the Mother, is purchased and sent to their home. There she settles into her role as Josie's friend, and all seems quietly domestic, despite Josie's illness, until halfway through the book when Klara learns why she was really chosen.

Klara and the Sun reminds me of another Ishiguro novel, Never Let Me Go. In both, the author explores the definition of what it means to be human. In an age of artificial emotional intelligence, the line becomes less clear. What does it look like when the AI character is more loyal, forgiving, and understanding than the human one? Is one of the defining characteristics of being human the ability and desire to represent oneself differently to different people at different times? What would faith mean to an AI? If it is a soul which makes humans unique, can we say that an AI with a distinct personality has one?

I like the kinds of questions that Ishiguro poses, and in Klara we are presented with the most current societal dilemmas: genetic manipulation, success-oriented parenting, climate change, and even the social isolation of teens learning from home rather than school. Seeing these issues through the eyes of an AI removes the veneer of politics and presents them more as existential problems for the human race, not personal ones.

My favorite parts of the book were in the beginning when Klara is still in the store waiting to be bought. Her observations of the world through the display window were well-written. Things slowed a bit for me when she first arrives at Josie's home, but then at the halfway point, things picked up, and I read the second half in a single sitting. Ishiguro does a wonderful job creating a voice for Klara that is intelligent and innocent, yet inciteful in ways that I could imagine an AI being. If you liked Never Let Me Go, I highly recommend this one as well.

-Review written November 25, 2021

Some great reviews here. I was interested in >20 labfs39: Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather. I used to own and tried to read several times the massive tome Soul Mountain , which I found incomprehensible, so I gave it away when we moved. He was one of the Nobelists I was just going to write off. So I'm glad to see he wrote something shorter, and better yet, it is reasonably priced for Kindle ($6.99), so I purchased it.

2022 Annie Ernaux (French)
2021 Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzanian)
READ: Klara and the Sun
READ/OWN: Never Let Me Go
2007 - Doris Lessing (English, born in Persia, educated in Zimbabwe)
2006 - Orhan Pamuk (Turkish)
READ/OWN: My Name is Red
1998 - José Saramago (Portuguese)
Quarrantine
The Cave
1991 - Nadine Gordimer (South African)
1982 - Gabriel García Márquez (Columbian)
READ/OWN: One Hundred Years of Solitude
READ/OWN: Love in the Time of Cholera
1980 - Czeslaw Milosz (Polish)
READ/OWN: The Issa Valley
1983 - William Golding (English)
READ: The Lord of the Flies
1988 - Naguib Mahfouz (Egyptian)
READ/OWN: Palace Walk
I978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer (Polish)
1971 - Pablo Neruda (Chilean poet)
1970 - Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Russian)
READ/OWN: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
READ/OWN: The Gulag Archipelago
1962 - John Steinbeck (American)
READ/OWN: The Grapes of Wrath
READ/OWN: The Winter of Our Discontent
READ/OWN: Of Mice and Men
READ/OWN: Cannery Row
READ/OWN: The Red Pony
READ/OWN: Tortilla Flat
READ/OWN: The Pearl
1954 - Ernest Hemingway (American)
READ/OWN: The Old Man and the Sea
READ/OWN: The Sun Also Rises
READ/OWN: A Farewell to Arms
READ/OWN: For Whom the Bell Tolls
READ/OWN: The Snows of Kilimanjaro
1953 - Winston Churchill (British)
1950 - Bertrand Russell (Welsh philosopher)
1938 - Pearl Buck (American)
OWN: The Good Earth
1936 - Eugene O’Neill (American playwright)
1930 - Sinclair Lewis (American)
1925 - George Bernard Shaw (Irish playwright)
1907 - Rudyard Kipling (English)
READ/OWN: Just-So Stories
READ/OWN: The Jungle Book
1905 - Henryk Sienkiewicz (Polish)
QUO VADIS

23/119Looks like I have more reading to do! Ill have to come back and rate them

>32 arubabookwoman: I would say that the comprehensibility of the Gao short stories ranges, but they are short and do give one a sense of his writing, I think. I'm happy to have tried him and moved on.

>33 cindydavid4: Fun, Cindy! Feel free to start a thread here too.

Joseph Brodsky



Nativity Poems by Joseph Brodsky, translated from the Russian by various poets
Collection published 2001 (poems written between 1962-1995), 113 p. 3*
Note: this was a bilingual edition with the Russian and English on facing pages

Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad in 1940, survived the Siege of Leningrad as a small child and suffered some medical issues as a result of famine. At the age of fifteen, he quit school and held a number of odd jobs, from working in a morgue to being a geologist assistant. He also began writing poetry, and by age eighteen was starting to be known. In 1960 he became the protégé of Anna Akhmatova. He taught himself Polish so that he could translate Czeslaw Milosz and English so he could translate John Donne.

Brodsky fell in love with a young painter named Marina Basmanova and their relationship continued even after his exile. Unfortunately Basmanova had another suitor, who is probably the one who denounced Brodsky. In 1963 Brodsky was harassed, interrogated, put in a mental institution twice (a common practice with Soviet dissidents), and then arrested. At his trial he was sentenced for "social parasitism" for not having a proper job, but having delusions of being a poet. He was sentenced to five years hard labor in the subarctic. The eighteen months he spent there were actually fairly good ones for him, as he was able to live alone in a tiny cottage—privacy being a luxury in Soviet Russia. His sentence was commuted in 1965, thanks in part to becoming a bit of a cause célèbre in the West.

In 1967 Brodsky and Basmanova had a son, Andrei. In 1971 Israel twice invited Brodsky to emigrate, but he wished to stay in Russia. Finally in 1972 Soviet agents physically put Brodsky on a plane to Austria with orders not to return. W.H. Auden helped Brodsky get asylum in the US, where he eventually became a US citizen. He worked as a professor at many prominent colleges, was awarded the Nobel in 1987, and became Poet Laureate of the US in 1991. After the collapse of the USSR, his son, Andrei, visited and they resumed their relationship. Brodsky died in 1996 of a heart attack at the age of 56.

Although born into a historic Russian Jewish rabbinic family, Brodsky always felt himself to be Christian. In an interview included in Nativity Poems, he says he would probably be Calvinist, because of the focus on judging oneself. Every Christmas season, he tried to write a poem. This book is a linear collection of these poems from 1962-1995. They were translated by a variety of poets, including Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney. In them, Brodsky explores themes of time (starting at a fixed point—the birth of Christ) and space (moving in until you are in a "cave"). I thought that the poems became more sophisticated over the years, reflecting his growth as a poet. The collection as a whole did not hold a lot of interest for me, however, as the poems deal exclusively with Christian Gospel images.

-Review written January 8, 2023

Selma Lagerlöf



The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf, translated from the Swedish by Velma Swanston Howard
Original publication 1906 and 1907 (two parts), later combined. English translation 1907, Project Gutenberg 2004, 4*

In 1902 the National Teachers Association of Sweden commissioned Selma Lagerlöf to write a geography book for students. She spent several years studying bird and animal life before writing her internationally famous book about the boy who travels across Sweden with a flock of wild geese.

Nils is a naughty child, and his parents despair over his cruelty, caprice, and laziness. One day, when his parents are at church, Nils captures a tomten (an elf-like creature that looks after the welfare of the farm) and threatens it. As punishment, the tomten turns Nils into one as well. Nils runs outside and discovers he can understand the speech of the birds and animals. When a flock of wild geese fly overhead, a tame gander flies after them, carrying Nils with him.

Thus begins the adventures of Nils as he flies north to Lappland with the geese on their summer migration. His adventures are accompanied by descriptions of the Swedish countryside, often interlaced with legend and tales that make it easy, even for a non-Swede such as myself, to remember. In addition to the topography, Lagerlöf includes information about the habits of animals, the types of plants that grow in each habitat, and information about the types of industry common to each area. The result is a wonderful mix of fact and fiction that reads like adventure but imparts a tremendous amount of information. And Nils returns home a wiser and much nicer little boy.

Originally published as two books, I read them back to back, as the English translation was published as one volume.

>36 labfs39: That sounds delightful.

>37 SassyLassy: It was very fun to read, and I learned a lot about Sweden. I look forward to reading one of Lagerlöf's adult works at some point. I've downloaded The Saga of Gösta Berling for a rainy day.

Memories Look at Me: A Memoir by Tomas Tranströmer, translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton
Originally published 1983, English translation 2011, New Directions, 60 p.

Tomas Tranströmer was born in Stockholm and raised by his mother after his parents divorced when he was very young. He loved nature, especially entomology, as a child, although his interests were varied. His grandfather indulged his passion for trains, and he filled sketchpads with drawings of things that interested him. He attended Södra Latin Grammar School, made famous in Ingmar Bergman's first film Hets/Torment. This small book of sketches from his childhood gives a glimpse both of a child's life in Stockholm in the 1930s and 40s, but also a sense of the poet's beginnings.

What we live through in school is projected as an image of society. My total experience of school was mixed, with more darkness than light—just as my image of society has become.

We always feel younger than we are. I carry inside myself my earlier faces, as a tree contains it's rings. The sum of them is "me."

This poem, with the same title as the book, was at the end of the book:

A June morning, too soon to wake,
too late to fall asleep again.

I must go out—the greenery is dense
with memories, they follow me with their gaze.

They can't be seen, they merge completely into
the background, true chameleons.

They are so close that I can hear them breathe
Though the birdsong is deafening.

The Old Capital by Yasunari Kawabata, translated from the Japanese by J. Martin Holman
Published 1962, revised English translation 2006, e-book

Chieko is a demure young woman who was abandoned as a baby, but raised in a loving home by an upscale fabric wholesaler and his wife in the kimono district of Kyoto. She meets a childhood friend to view the cherry blossoms, she discovers a woman who looks exactly like her while viewing the cedar forest of Kitayama, and she has a beautiful obi woven for her by a young man. Everything that happens is elegant, quiet, and slow.

But Chieko's story is almost a sidebar to the city of Kyoto itself. The author lovingly depicts the natural beauties of the former capital in each season, as well as the shrine festivals which mark the passing of the seasons. Someone more familiar with Japanese culture than I would understand the references better, but even I had a sense of the understated love of tradition and nature that Kawabata expresses. Although I did not find the writing as inspired as in his earlier novel Snow Country, I found it relaxing to spend a couple of hours immersed in this world.

>40 labfs39: I've just finished Snow Country, and have added The Old Capital to my wish list. The Kyoto setting is an attraction. From your review, this book sounds less bleak than Snow Country?

>41 pamelad: Definitely less bleak. Rather open ended, more a pastiche than a story.

Nice. I started reading Kawabata in 2020 and have read two of his novels so far, with another five on my TBR pile.

>43 edwinbcn: I still have Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, very short stories, most one page, on my shelves to read.