J.K. Rowling is a British author best known for her series of young adult books about a young man with magical powers and an implacable enemy. The Casual Vacancy is her first novel written for an adult audience.
In England, as Rowling's beginning headnote explains a casual vacancy is "deemed to occurred: (a) when a local councillor fails to make his declaration of acceptance of office within the proper time; or...on the day of his death...." The story begins when one of Pagford's councillor's drops dead. The main story is the struggle among some residents of this perfectly charming English village to hold back (as they see it) the forces of drugs, crime, and the chaos from the neighboring town and other residents to bring the village into the 21st century and actually deal with the effects of poverty, unemployment, and addiction.
The book has a huge cast of characters--eight families, most with spouses, some with children and there are relationships of one sort or another among almost all the characters. I did not find one of the adult characters sympathetic. The five children in the novel, four teen-agers and a three-year-old, are mostly put upon rather than unpleasant; the adults are mostly small-minded, addled, or vicious. I did finish the book even though I could not care about any of the characters because I wanted to see what finally happened.
Rowling does a couple of things that most writers cannot get away with: changing point of view within a chapter or on a page and inserting flashbacks set off by parentheses. She does this three times in the last 10 pages of the almost 500-page book. For example:
They arrived as the hearses appeared at the top of the road and hurried into the graveyard while the pallbearers were shuffling out onto the pavement.
("Get away from the window," Colin Wall commanded his son.
But Fats, who had to live henceforth with the knowledge of his own cowardice, moved forward, trying to prove that he could, at least, take this . . . )"
For another two paragraphs.
I wonder a couple things: Would Little, Brown have published the book if the author were not J.K. Rowling? And: Did the publisher try to edit the book and Rowling refuse the suggestions or did the editor accept it as is on the theory that Rowling's fans won't know or care how well or how poorly it is written or structured?
It's not a bad book. It does give a picture of contemporary small-town English life that seems to this outsider as deeply felt an accurate. It suggests that the lives of English children can be (are?) nasty, brutish, and (in some cases) short. Married couples, even those living comfortably in idyllic little villages, do not have satisfactory sex lives. I found it an unhappy book about unhappy people.
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Friday, November 16, 2012
Japanese coffee shops
In the novel I'm currently writing, a character finds his way into a Japanese coffee shop in the early 1950s. I may have caused an anachronism because I've place the character is in Japan before I was there, but the shop is based on one where I spent many happy off-duty hours in the year and a half I was stationed in Japan.
At the time, independent coffee shops (kissaten, 喫茶店) were a feature of Japanese city life. For the price of a single cup of coffee, one could sit all afternoon, read a book, chat with friends, smoke, and listen to the music. The coffee was expensive (240 yen a cup), but in my memory it was the best coffee I've ever had and the music was free. Different shops specialized in different genres: American jazz, country & western, classical, and there might have been more. (Japanese folk songs? American folk songs? Possibly.)
My favorite shop was L'Ambre, which featured classical music. Not only did the shop have a state-of-the-art high-fidelity sound system, a large collection of LPs, it held regular recorded concerts and printed up a program of the month's events. For some reason, I kept the program illustrated here. I was always interested that the shop's French name ("The Amber") was written in phonetic Japanese (らんぶる). The map on the back shows how to reach the shop from Shinjuku train station.
The three inside pages, the first of which is illustrated, alerts customers to the evening's concert. On Sunday, June 1, for example, the shop played Shostakovich's oratorio "Song of the Forests." On Monday, you could have heard Mascagni's "Cavalleria Rusticana."
In addition to the regular concerts, patrons could request works the owner played in the order received. Which meant that you might have to sit through a couple hours of other great music before your selection made it to the turntable. It was a tough life.
At the time, independent coffee shops (kissaten, 喫茶店) were a feature of Japanese city life. For the price of a single cup of coffee, one could sit all afternoon, read a book, chat with friends, smoke, and listen to the music. The coffee was expensive (240 yen a cup), but in my memory it was the best coffee I've ever had and the music was free. Different shops specialized in different genres: American jazz, country & western, classical, and there might have been more. (Japanese folk songs? American folk songs? Possibly.)
The three inside pages, the first of which is illustrated, alerts customers to the evening's concert. On Sunday, June 1, for example, the shop played Shostakovich's oratorio "Song of the Forests." On Monday, you could have heard Mascagni's "Cavalleria Rusticana."
In addition to the regular concerts, patrons could request works the owner played in the order received. Which meant that you might have to sit through a couple hours of other great music before your selection made it to the turntable. It was a tough life.
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Donald Keene, Japanese citizen
The New York Times has run an interesting article about Donald Keene. After last year's tsunami and nuclear disaster, Keene announced that he was moving to Japan permanently, publicly going against the tide of foreigners who couldn't wait to get out of the country. Not only was he moving to Japan, he was going to become a Japanese citizen, one of the least welcoming countries for immigrants in the world. He listed for the Times reporter "what he called the absurd requirements imposed upon him to
take Japanese citizenship, including documentation to prove his
completion of elementary school in New York City. Still...Dr. Keene’s application was quickly
approved. To become Japanese, Dr. Keene, who is unmarried, had to
relinquish his American citizenship."
Keene who is 90, taught for years at Columbia University and, because I studied Japanese at Columbia, I have been asked whether I knew him. I knew him, but I never took a course with him (I have heard him lecture on Japanese literature at New York's Japan Society, however). I only spoke to him once, and that was on the 116th Street downtown subway platform where we were both waiting for a train.
One of my Japanese teachers had told my class that Dr. Keene said that when he translates, he first does a word-for-word translation to make sure he's accounted for every little element in the sentence. Japanese can be a challenge because a one- or two-syllable grammatical unit can change the meaning entirely. I wondered if that were true. Keene's fluency seemed to me good enough he could simply read a sentence and convert it to correct. A word-for-word translation can leave you with utterly fractured English.
I recognized Dr. Keene on the platform, introduced myself, and said I was curious about something my Japanese professor had told me. Once Keene established that I was not one of his graduate students looking for a graded paper, he warmed up considerably. He said, yes, he did still go through every sentence word by word.
I told him how much I'd enjoyed his translations. (He has translated and written about Japanese fiction; his books fill more than one shelf of my library.) He told me he liked Japanese because it has such a rich literature. He would never exhaust the material to translate, unlike a friend of his who, I think, specialized in Burmese literature. Fifteen years later and he'd read everything written in the language.
“You cannot stop being an American after 89 years,” Keene told the Times reporter. “But I have become a Japanese in many ways. Not pretentiously, but naturally.”
Keene who is 90, taught for years at Columbia University and, because I studied Japanese at Columbia, I have been asked whether I knew him. I knew him, but I never took a course with him (I have heard him lecture on Japanese literature at New York's Japan Society, however). I only spoke to him once, and that was on the 116th Street downtown subway platform where we were both waiting for a train.
One of my Japanese teachers had told my class that Dr. Keene said that when he translates, he first does a word-for-word translation to make sure he's accounted for every little element in the sentence. Japanese can be a challenge because a one- or two-syllable grammatical unit can change the meaning entirely. I wondered if that were true. Keene's fluency seemed to me good enough he could simply read a sentence and convert it to correct. A word-for-word translation can leave you with utterly fractured English.
I recognized Dr. Keene on the platform, introduced myself, and said I was curious about something my Japanese professor had told me. Once Keene established that I was not one of his graduate students looking for a graded paper, he warmed up considerably. He said, yes, he did still go through every sentence word by word.
I told him how much I'd enjoyed his translations. (He has translated and written about Japanese fiction; his books fill more than one shelf of my library.) He told me he liked Japanese because it has such a rich literature. He would never exhaust the material to translate, unlike a friend of his who, I think, specialized in Burmese literature. Fifteen years later and he'd read everything written in the language.
“You cannot stop being an American after 89 years,” Keene told the Times reporter. “But I have become a Japanese in many ways. Not pretentiously, but naturally.”
Sunday, November 4, 2012
NaNaWriMo (again)
NaNoWriMo, for those who don't know, is, they say, "a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing on November 1. The goal is to write a 50,000-word (approximately 175-page) novel by 11:59:59 PM on November 30. Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved. In 2011, we had 256,618 participants and 36,843 of them crossed the 50K finish line by the midnight deadline, entering into the annals of NaNoWriMo superstardom forever. They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists."
Although I've been writing most of my life, I never had a writing experience like last November's NaNoWriMo. I thought it was worse than a job because the only goad was myself. No one cares whether you finish your 50,000 words or not. (You do get to download a nice certificate if you finish). No one cares whether the quality stinks or not (like most first drafts, it tends to). No one cares whether you write every day during your lunch hour or in massive bursts on weekends (but you have to average 1,668 words a day). You do it for yourself, and I'm much tougher on myself than almost any boss (here I'm excluding a couple of sergeants in the Army).
The NaNoWriMo site gives you a place in which you can record your daily progress toward the 50,000, plus all kinds of forums and other aids. There are also local groups to encourage aspiring NaNoWriMos, and, still undecided whether to jump into this river again or note, I went to a local meeting in late October, talked to other writers, and collected a goodie bag, the contents of which is in the picture above. Cocoa and candy for a burst of energy, a tiny notebook in which to make notes, two small figures to sit and make you feel guilty when you're not writing, a post card, two pencils, and exhortations.
I was interested in what the other writers (two of them middle-school students with their teachers) planned to write: paranormal, fantasy, science fiction, romance, zombies, vampires, paranormal fantasy, paranormal vampire romance. I asked one writer why she was committed to writing fantasy. She said she didn't have to do any research; she could just make it all up. One of the writers has participated in ten November events. He did not make the 50,000-word goal four times, did make it six. He's done nothing about his manuscripts. "I hate to revise."
As I said at the beginning, NaNoWriMo is a wonderful event. Maybe next year.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
The People's Act of Love by James Meek
My friend Vinton McCabe gave James Meek's latest novel a rave review, and because I trust Vinton's opinions and because I could not immediately lay my hands on a copy of The Heart Broke In, I lay my hands on his earlier novel, The People's Act of Love.
Meek, 50, born in London, grew up in Dundee. He's worked as a newspaper reporter since 1985 and lived in the former Soviet Union from 1991 to 1999. At the time this novel was published, he wrote for The Guardian and contributed to the London Review of Books and Granta. His reporting from Iraq and about Guantánamo Bay have, according to the flap copy, won a number of British and international rewards.
Here's how The People's Act of Love begins: "When Kyrill Ivanovich Samarin was twelve, years before he would catch, among the scent of textbooks and cologne in a girl's satchel, the distinct odour of dynamite, he demanded that his uncle let him change his second name. He didn't want to be 'Ivanovich' any more. The Ivan from whom the patronymic came, his father, had died when he was two, soon after his mother, and he had lived with his uncle ever since...."
We're in pre-revolutionary Russia, a time of revolutionaries and acts of terror and exile to Siberia. By Chapter 2, we're in revolutionary Siberia, where the Czechoslovak Legion has washed up after WWI. The Legion is led by a monomaniacal captain who dreams of establishing a Czech republic in the vast, empty landscape. Meanwhile, the Czech soldiers—essentially stateless because the Austrian-Hungarian Empire from which they started no longer exists—are living in town populated mainly by a sect of castrates. So Meek writes (sympathetically) about two forms of fanaticism: political and religious.
The main characters include Samarin, the revolutionary; Lieutenant Josef Mutz of the Czechoslovak Legion; Anna Petrovna Lutova, a middle-class photographer and widow; and Gleb Alexeyevich Balashov, a former hussar in the Imperial Russian Army, now a castrate. Minor characters include the Legion's captain, a native Siberian shaman and his albino apprentice, and Nekovar, a Czech soldier/mechanic. Nekovar, who has no luck with women, considers them mechanically: "What if the female erotic machinery was wound tight by the pressure of the man's muscles, so tight that her soft outer hide began to palpitate and heat up with the tension as it strained against the unreleased mechanism, causing the nipples to harden and lubrication to be released into the mouth of her lower valve, which the rigid male member would then slide easily into, triggering the release of her coiled sexual spring and causing her body and limbs to shake and move with violent energy...."
I found the book riveting. Meek shifts point of view seamlessly, and writes one vivid scene after another. He convinced me these people would have acted the way they do at this time in this place—and the place is exactly as he describes. The best I can do is quote Jim Harrison's blurb from the back jacket: "This is a novel of the first order, and perhaps that is an understatement. It quickly becomes unimaginable that this story didn't happen exactly as Meek tells it, which is the grand and steadfast illusion of art without which we fail to understand life." I now have to get my hands on the Heart Broke In.
Meek, 50, born in London, grew up in Dundee. He's worked as a newspaper reporter since 1985 and lived in the former Soviet Union from 1991 to 1999. At the time this novel was published, he wrote for The Guardian and contributed to the London Review of Books and Granta. His reporting from Iraq and about Guantánamo Bay have, according to the flap copy, won a number of British and international rewards.
Here's how The People's Act of Love begins: "When Kyrill Ivanovich Samarin was twelve, years before he would catch, among the scent of textbooks and cologne in a girl's satchel, the distinct odour of dynamite, he demanded that his uncle let him change his second name. He didn't want to be 'Ivanovich' any more. The Ivan from whom the patronymic came, his father, had died when he was two, soon after his mother, and he had lived with his uncle ever since...."
We're in pre-revolutionary Russia, a time of revolutionaries and acts of terror and exile to Siberia. By Chapter 2, we're in revolutionary Siberia, where the Czechoslovak Legion has washed up after WWI. The Legion is led by a monomaniacal captain who dreams of establishing a Czech republic in the vast, empty landscape. Meanwhile, the Czech soldiers—essentially stateless because the Austrian-Hungarian Empire from which they started no longer exists—are living in town populated mainly by a sect of castrates. So Meek writes (sympathetically) about two forms of fanaticism: political and religious.
The main characters include Samarin, the revolutionary; Lieutenant Josef Mutz of the Czechoslovak Legion; Anna Petrovna Lutova, a middle-class photographer and widow; and Gleb Alexeyevich Balashov, a former hussar in the Imperial Russian Army, now a castrate. Minor characters include the Legion's captain, a native Siberian shaman and his albino apprentice, and Nekovar, a Czech soldier/mechanic. Nekovar, who has no luck with women, considers them mechanically: "What if the female erotic machinery was wound tight by the pressure of the man's muscles, so tight that her soft outer hide began to palpitate and heat up with the tension as it strained against the unreleased mechanism, causing the nipples to harden and lubrication to be released into the mouth of her lower valve, which the rigid male member would then slide easily into, triggering the release of her coiled sexual spring and causing her body and limbs to shake and move with violent energy...."
I found the book riveting. Meek shifts point of view seamlessly, and writes one vivid scene after another. He convinced me these people would have acted the way they do at this time in this place—and the place is exactly as he describes. The best I can do is quote Jim Harrison's blurb from the back jacket: "This is a novel of the first order, and perhaps that is an understatement. It quickly becomes unimaginable that this story didn't happen exactly as Meek tells it, which is the grand and steadfast illusion of art without which we fail to understand life." I now have to get my hands on the Heart Broke In.
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Black Dahlia & White Rose by Joyce Carol Oates
This 2012 publication, Black Dahlia & White Rose, is Joyce Carol Oates's twenty-fourth published collection of short stories. It contains eleven stories, all but one told from a female point of view, and several narrated by a woman. Bad things either happen or the characters dread them happening. The Black Dahlia, Elizabeth Short, is the victim of the unsolved kidnapping-torture-rape-murder-dissection in Los Angeles in 1947. Post mortem she narrates the story of her life and her roommate's, Norma Jean Baker. (Oates has no qualms dramatizing the impossible. In another story a woman and her lover turn into spotted hyenas.) A young girl has to ID a body suspected to be her murdered mother's. A good Samaritan finds a woman's wallet on a train, returns it to the woman's house, and meets her husband who is certainly distraught that his wife is missing, but who may also have killed her; we never learn what happened.
I very much liked the last story in the book, "Anniversary," because it echos my experience. An older woman—widow, professor, former college president—has volunteered to teach English in a New York State maximum security prison, working with another, much younger impetuous male volunteer. The story covers their first class with flashbacks to the orientation that the system gives to volunteers: Never touch a prisoner, even lightly on the wrist...never engage in flirtatious banter with a prisoner...never give a prisoner any gift however small, and never any money...never deliver any message even a verbal message from one prisoner to another, this is a felony. The prison (perhaps like most) has a no-hostage policy: if prisoners take hostages, there is no negotiating for their release. (Everyone get gassed and someone probably gets hurt.)
All of this rings so true and Oates's description of the prison so accurate I wondered briefly if she were writing about the facility in which I teach creative writing. It's not, but I'd like to talk to her about her experience. The point-of-view character, emotionally fragile anyway, is not reassured by the orientation nor by the behavior of her young colleague who has apparently (not uncommonly, if unfortunately) identified with the student inmates. At class end and the narrator's near-collapse from anxiety, it's not clear she will be returning. One hopes she does.
I very much liked the last story in the book, "Anniversary," because it echos my experience. An older woman—widow, professor, former college president—has volunteered to teach English in a New York State maximum security prison, working with another, much younger impetuous male volunteer. The story covers their first class with flashbacks to the orientation that the system gives to volunteers: Never touch a prisoner, even lightly on the wrist...never engage in flirtatious banter with a prisoner...never give a prisoner any gift however small, and never any money...never deliver any message even a verbal message from one prisoner to another, this is a felony. The prison (perhaps like most) has a no-hostage policy: if prisoners take hostages, there is no negotiating for their release. (Everyone get gassed and someone probably gets hurt.)
All of this rings so true and Oates's description of the prison so accurate I wondered briefly if she were writing about the facility in which I teach creative writing. It's not, but I'd like to talk to her about her experience. The point-of-view character, emotionally fragile anyway, is not reassured by the orientation nor by the behavior of her young colleague who has apparently (not uncommonly, if unfortunately) identified with the student inmates. At class end and the narrator's near-collapse from anxiety, it's not clear she will be returning. One hopes she does.
Monday, October 8, 2012
A Taste of Japan in the Berkshires
For my birthday, my wife and I drove to the Berkshires and stayed two nights in a Japanese-theme bed-and-breakfast, Shirakaba Guest House (白樺旅館-it means “White Birch Inn”). We'd learned about it from an enthusiastic article in the Sunday New York Times travel section. It's at the top of a hill, and was designed by a Japanese architect to be a B&B. It has two, two-bedroom suites with a bath between the two bedrooms. These first floor bedrooms have large closets, giant, soft, luxurious beds, flat-screen TV sets with DVD players attached, mini-refrigerators, microwave ovens, alarm clock/radios that will also play an iPod, and more. There is also a lap pool, hot tub, and sauna on the ground floor level.
The weather was so nasty, we did not go out to Shirakaba’s gazebo
until the morning we checked out. Too bad, because it is on a clearing on a
hill overlooking the valley and the hills in the distance. It would have been an enjoyable spot to sit and read or to have our edamame first course. When we had to leave, Louise gave us a plastic container of freshly made oatmeal cookies. I want to go back.
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