On Tanabata’s book blog, In Spring it is the Dawn, she challenges her readers every month to do something Japanese. Each mini-challenge has guidelines and January’s was “try something Japanese that you haven’t tried before”, which I did. And it was most certainly an experience.
For my birthday earlier this month I booked a karaoke booth at a local Japanese restaurant. I love Japanese food, I love karaoke, as do several of my friends – what could possibly go wrong? The only real question was why I had never done this before.
There were some setbacks. A few karaoke-friendly friends couldn’t make it so I ended up with a group heavy on the “I’ll come but I probably won’t sing” side. On arrival, as we squeezed ourselves into a tiny room that could only possibly have seated the advertised occupancy of 20 if they were all model-thin, was boiling hot and had the music volume so loud we couldn’t hear each other across the table, I began to worry this wouldn’t be all it was cracked up to be. The hostess didn’t explain the computer properly and we appeared to have a songlist composed solely of Madonna, Britney, Mariah and Japanese acts we’d never heard of.
Thankfully, while I knocked back my first flask of warm sake and caught up with my friends over the as-always immensely tasty food there, some of my more computer-savvy friends worked out not only how to adjust the volume to an acceptable level but also that there was a huge long list of songs to choose from hidden in a sub-sub-menu. And we were off!
And it was a brilliant night. Sure the computer crashed a few times, wiping our carefully crafted playlist. We suspected that the karaoke tracks and videos were largely cheap knock-offs, with hilariously wrong lyrics and videos either from some tourist agency or a sort-of Japanese Pop Idol show. But everyone had a good time, everyone sang (sometimes all at once with harmonies and everything) and I laughed so much I cried.
I loved that we had to take our shoes off and that we sat at a table at floor level, something I’d only seen in films before. I loved that the most resistant of my friends let inhibitions go and belted out tunes wholeheartedly. If they had let us we could have carried on all through the night and they would have made a fortune out of our sake and Asahi consumption, but sadly they closed at 10.30pm.
It was a great way to spend an evening with friends and I shall definitely accept any opportunity to try it again.
I first discovered de Lint years ago and quickly fell in love with his world where fantasy and real-life middle America meet in stories that are both scarily dark and almost frothily light. It’s an amazing creation that this collection of short stories opens up beautifully.
Short stories are a perfect fit for de Lint. All his tales are set in the “realistic” city of Newford and the magical realm that many of its inhabitants travel to – some at will, others involuntarily or only in their sleep. The short story format allows all these different experiences to be depicted without laborious explanation.
The characters are mostly people who are struggling with life in some way and need an escape, or did when they were children. Many are or have been homeless. There are also a lot of artists and writers, presumably because their creativity and social circles tend to make them open-minded and curious about the world.
Not everyone in these stories goes to the magical world. Some have strange experiences that as a reader you put down to magic. Others are fully immersed, even to the point of drifting through the “real” world while living in the magical one. This is roughly the progression of the book. We see more and more of the magical world in later stories. In early ones, it’s more hints and whispers.
The stories are narrated in the first person, or alternate between first and third person, and de Lint’s writing allows you to quickly get to know each character, so that when they pop up later in someone else’s story it feels familiar and friendly.
The dark element comes from the reasons people have for escaping to another place, or wanting magic on their side. From chronic shyness to psychiatric problems to child abuse and the many reasons why a person might be homeless, the possibilities of magic are anchored heavily down to earth. There’s a strong sense of living inbetween, of the magic being a metaphor for other coping mechanisms.
The stories stand alone if you want to read them that way, which is good as most of them had been previously published in magazines or anthologies. Each has a strong storyline, a journey for its main character, a start, middle and end. They gain further dimensions by being in a collection but they don’t depend on it.
I do love being able to revisit characters from books I read years ago. One of the main linking characters is Jilly Peppercorn, an artist and star of my favourite de Lint novel, The Onion Girl. I didn’t realise when reading that book that she had featured in several previous Newford books. In fact, de Lint said in an interview that she is the “warm beating heart of the city” (can’t find the link right now).
One criticism I have of this book is that it’s occasionally trite. For all of the dark pasts and presents, most characters end their story in a better place and they almost always learn a life lesson. I suppose when dealing with depressing subjects it helps to have a lighter side.
In a similar vein, all of the narrators are such…good people. I know a lot of people struggle to read about a main character who’s bad or unpredictable, and it’s a nice idea that most people are good at heart, but I think there’s room in de Lint’s universe for a few more, if not evil, at least selfish or mischievous characters.
But they’re minor quibbles. I loved these stories. I think my favourites were “Bird bones and wood ash”, about a woman who is imbued with supernatural abilities by animal spirits and uses them to fight evil, literally donning a black bodysuit, gloves and hood, but it drains her and joining forces with a social worker almost ruins everything; and “Mr Truepenny’s Book Emporium and Gallery”, about a dreaming place invented by a child that is falling to rack and ruin because she never visits anymore.
I have been reminded how much I enjoy this blend of myth and reality – de Lint calls on all sorts of mythologies, from Native American to the Brothers Grimm to Shakespeare – and I will definitely have to look out for the Newford titles that are missing from my collection.
This was another book club pick, in fact this one was my choice, so I was pretty nervous before the meeting. I’d chosen it based on Némirovsky’s brilliant final work Suite Française but this was a much earlier novel of her’s, with no guarantee of the same brilliance. What if everyone hated it? Or was bored by it? What if it failed to generate any discussion?
I needn’t have worried. While this is a slim volume and not as good as Suite Française, in my opinion, it did have plenty for us to talk about.
David Golder is a Russian Jew who works endlessly on obscure international financial deals to maintain the fabulously wealthy lifestyle to which his wife and daughter are accustomed. However, while he lives in a Paris apartment, they live in a multimillion franc estate in Biarritz, accompanied by an endless stream of hangers-on.
Golder isn’t the most likeable character, but we meet him near the end of his life and the impression is given that it was a difficult life and that he worked incredibly hard for himself and his family. His wife and daughter seem to only care about money, only showing Golder affection immediately before asking for a handout and getting very aggressive when he honestly tells them that business is rough and he can’t afford it right now. Add to that his failing health and you have a very sad, lonely picture of a man.
Némirovsky toys with the reader a little regarding characters’ true selves. At first Golder’s daughter seems much nicer than her mother because that’s what Golder sees. Only later is her selfishness fully exposed. And with Golder it’s the reverse – at first all you see is obsessiveness about money and his scheming seems horrible but it becomes clear, as we discover more about him and especially when we learn about his past, that he has his reasons, that his family and business associates encourage him, maybe even force him, to be this person.
I was glad to discover I wasn’t the only one at book club weirded out by the way the narrative labels everyone as a Jew, in an insulting sounding way, even though the author herself was Jewish and indeed died because of it. It could be part of the characterisation of Golder, that he has an odd skewed view of Jewishness. Or it could just be the vernacular of the time.
There was a general feeling that the book is very bleak, there is no ray of hope, no good person to contrast everything else against. But despite that Némirovsky has an easy, fluid writing style that keeps you reading even though there’s no-one to like and a fairly uneventful story.
I can’t recommend this as highly as I had hoped but I will still be interested to read Némirovsky’s other novels if they continue to be translated into English.
It turns out that it’s a good idea to check back-ups have actually worked before relying on them. Somehow the result of my last site back-up is a directory full of empty folders. Not so helpful. So I had to reinstall an old version of my doctored-to-suit-me theme (which thankfully Tim had held onto long after I thought I had any need for it). At some point I’ll go back in and tweak it to how I like it.
Also, I hadn’t realised that the WordPress export file contains only posts and pages. It doesn’t include anything else that you’ve personalised like images, links, site name and description, user name…stuff like that. No doubt I’ll continue finding things I need to update for weeks to come. I also wouldn’t be surprised if there’s very clear instructions on all this on WordPress.org somewhere.
Life is still hectic and I’m getting very little reading done but if you ask nicely I might just blog about the fun and pains of my new discovery: hulaerobics. Yes, it is what it sounds like.
I now have a lot of new books, except I only physically have half of them so the photo doesn’t look as impressive as it might do. Stupid rubbish postal service. Not that I read fast enough to get through these before the end of the month.
…and if anything I have less reading time than last year, so this should be an interesting exercise in time management. Please don’t judge me if it takes months for my reviews of these titles to appear!