Tag Archives: kawabata

Ten books I read this year which are exactly as good as you think they are

count-of-monte-cristoNormally, I divide my year-end book list into two categories: books that are as good as you think they are and books that are surprisingly good. I do this just because it'd feel weird if I stood up and was like, "Hey, I read this amazing book. It's called Anna Karenina! Have you heard of it?!?!" However, I do think there's value in noting which classics / much-hyped books are actually worthwhile.

Anyway, the nine predictably-good books I chose to highlight for 2014 are as follows. All links are links to my original blog posts about those books.

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas - One of the best books I've ever read in my life. Some people on Twitter said they thought it started to drag somewhere in the middle, but not for me, I was on tenterhooks the whole time. The Count Of Monte Cristo is driven by a very simple engine. Basically, you get introduced to the families of the main villains, and then you see the count begin to ingratiate himself with them. But all the villains' relatives turn out to be relatively cool kids, and you're like "Oh no, is the Count actually going to revenge himself on them?" And you just don't know. Because the Count is, maybe, just crazy enough to destroy the lives of innocent people in order to get back at their fathers. The book is incredibly long, but it's one of the few books that I wished was longer. (Here are my original blog posts about it)

Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos de Laclos - My other favorite novel of 2014. I can't get over the fact that this book was actually written in the 18th century. Its heroes are so unspeakably villainous (they're French aristocrats who plot to despoil a virtuous woman) that they're shocking even by today's standards. However, the real fun of the novel comes from its incredibly intricate construction. It's an epistolary novel where each letter is, itself, a plot point. The receipt of one letter triggers the sending of another letter. And when letters get intercepted or forwarded or stolen, things get even knottier. It really puts you in scene: you realize that each letter is not only being written by someone; it's also being read by someone.

Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov - Ivan Oblomov is a 19th-century Russian nobleman who's completely useless. He doesn't even get out of bed for the first 200 pages. In the end, I think Oblomov ends up being a character who almost escapes his author's control. I think he's meant to be a pitiful figure: an object of satire; or perhaps an allegory for the schlerotic condition of the Russian state. But he ends up being much more than that. There's something very sympathetic about a man who refuses to undertake distasteful activities.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman - Can't believe it's only been a year since I read the first book in this series. Since then, I've read both the sequel and the final book, so I can state, for the first time in a long time, that I've read a series to completion. None of the books, though, are more worthwhile than the first book. There's something very dreamy and beautiful about it. It's one of the few books that manages to interrogate the unsavory parts of fantasy wish-fulfilment novels…while simultaneously being a fantasy wish fulfillment novel that evokes all those escapist feelings in the reader. The main character, Quentin Coldwater, has drawn a lot of flak for being arrogant and self-absorbed, but I found him very sympathetic. Maybe because I saw a lot of myself in him.

Beauty and Sadness by Yasunari Kawabata - I don't think I wrote about this book when I first read it, though I can't think why. It's an extremely simple novel: a writer goes into the city to see a woman with whom he engaged in an adulterous affair when she was just a schoolgirl. Afterwards, he wrote a novel about her which became something of a success. Nothing much happens in the book. He just wanders around, looks at cherry blossoms, and talks to her. But you feel the, err, well, the beauty and the, like, the sadness and stuff.

The Privileges by Jonathan Dee - Another book about terrible people: a Wall Street banker and his wife. I think the book is meant to be more sociological in nature: there's lavish detail of how they live; their social set; how they spend their time. You keep expecting something to go dreadfully wrong, but it never quite does. The ending does go off the rails a little bit, but whatever. I enjoyed this book so much that I can't even quantify it. First of all, these people had a passionate, but mature, love for each other: the kind of thing you rarely see in literature. Second of all, they're just so brilliantly alive. Even at their worst, they never succumb to ennui and inertia. Also, in my opinion, the first chapter (their wedding) is beautiful and subtle and touching in a way that I've rarely seen done: you see all of the young couples' petty rivalries and spites and disappointments…and then you see how their marriage manages to transcend those things.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (second post) - This book actually explains how they made the atomic bomb. It explains it on every level, from the theoretical to the technical to the organizational. I've never seen anything like it. The most amazing thing is that the first third (of this very long book) has all of this detail on theoretical physics that seems like it's a bit too much…but then all of that stuff becomes very relevant in the rest of the book. After reading it, I finally understood how and why building the bomb was such a massive operation.

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding - This book was written in 1742. Aside from the work of Defoe, this is the oldest English-language novel I've ever read. And it made me laugh. Laugh out loud. Multiple times. Sometimes multiple times per chapter. Just think about that. The humor of this book is not just translatable across more than 270 years…but it also comes across so clearly and instantaneously that it can make a modern person laugh. The middle, where Tom is traveling, does kind of drag a bit. But the end, where he becomes part of London society, is really good. I also think the characterization of Tom is very subtle. He's not exactly the steadfast and constant Romantic hero that he thinks he is. He's a bit of a knave. But his heart is in the right place.

The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf - I'm sure we all kind of know that our beauty standards are socially-constructed, but we're so much in the grip of them that it's hard to really understand that the things we see when we look at another person are the things we're being made to see. The most valuable thing Wolf does is put our beauty standards in their historical context. According to her, it was not as important, before the 1970s, for women to be beautiful. She argues, somewhat convincingly, that the depth of our modern anxiety over beauty is something new.

 

Started reading THE SOUND OF THE MOUNTAIN, by Yasunari Kawabata

n273757A few days ago, I posted on Twitter lamenting about how I'd never managed to get into anything by Kawabata other than Beauty and Sadness (an amazing book that you should all read). And a day later, I picked up his book The Sound of the Mountain and found myself really responding to it. The book is about 62 year old old man with a failing memory whose household includes his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law, his daughter, and his two grand-daughters.

The plot has that aimless quality that I've noticed in many Japanese novels. Much of it is about contemplating the mountain and the gardens. He attends the funerals of a few of his friends and meditates on their absence. He slowly befriends his daughter-in-law. He thinks about the distance that's grown up between him and his wife.

A lot of Japanese novels include some attempt, by the characters, to enjoy traditional Japanese art forms. In this case, the narrator buys several No masks (i.e. the masks that actors would wear in a No drama) and spends some time contemplating them. This is pretty interesting to me, because there's nothing similar in English literature. You don't often see characters in our novels seriously think about the ballet or the opera or classical music or even poetry. We Americans are extremely disconnected from our traditional art forms, but we don't seem to miss the absence.

I don't know enough about Japanese culture to be able to speculate accurately about the reason for this difference. Whenever I read a Japanese novel, I'm struck by the weight of history. All of these places have been inhabited, more or less continuously, and more or less peacefully (i.e. without major interruption by invasion or collapse of civilization) for thousands of years. To live in a town in Japan means being connected to the people who've come before you in a way that I don't think anyone in the West can really understand. Every Western civilization has suffered major upheavals--changes in government and in ethnic makeup--that far exceed anything Japan has seen.

But, at the same time, Japan (at least the Japan in these novels) doesn't feel exhausted or tired or decadent. In the west, we've been programmed, because of the fall of successive waves of empire (the Roman, the Holy Roman, the British, etc) to think of civilization as either expanding or being in decline. Whereas Japan's situation seems so different. Kawabata's novels are about a Japan that's suffered a major setback…but is still expanding. A Japan that's economically vibrant without being politically powerful. And even though the business and economic and political backdrop is submerged in these novels, you can see the tension there in the way that these characters try to reconcile their current way of life with their traditional cultural forms.