![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
june reads
Iphigenia in Forest Hills, Malcolm - I'm nearly at the end of Malcolm's oeuvre, with Iphigenia being her last "big" book. In the tradition of Malcolm works, it started as an article for the New Yorker and was later collected into a single volume. It is, on the face of it, a hyperlocal story: Forest Hills is a Jewish neighborhood in Queens, NYC, and all the parties in the murder trial are part of the Bukharan-Jewish community from central Asia. The older members speak Russian oddly, with a strange accent, so much so that the Russian-English translation becomes an issue during the trial. Malcolm, as always, likes to visit the neighborhoods and people she writes about, and her journey through Queens is I think an especially enjoyable one, one of the rare occasions where she takes time to describe the outside and city streets.
A quick summary: Daniel Malakov and Mazoltuv Borukhova, recently divorced, go to a park together with their daughter. A judge has recently awarded Malakov full custody to the shock of Borukhova and her lawyer. Borukhova's cousin comes up, shoots Daniel, flees, and is captured not long after. Borukhova comes under suspicion and is charged, then convicted, of his murder. The child remains with Malakov's family.
Reading through Iphigenia was ndjddkslsliujk harrowing. You’re, in effect, reading through a steady accumulation of legal and personal miscarriages and by the end of it, I basically hated the New York City judicial system. Thanks, Janet?? I guess??? omfg. If not for The Lover, this would have been my most stressful reading experience of the month.
Taiwan Travelogue , Yang tr. King - Taiwan Travelogue is a fictional travel book set in 1938-9 written by a female food writer. Let's establish some givens: Taiwan was colonized by the Japanese from 1895 to 1945. Han Chinese people have lived in Taiwan for hundreds of years, along with numerous indigenous Taiwanese people.
Okay let’s move onto the next point.
Liking or enjoying the food of "another" culture is often a stand-in for one's feelings about that culture: I like Chinese food has a generally positive association with "I know something about Chinese people" and "I like Chinese people;" on the other hand, strong dislikes of a specific culture's food feels like it has strong correlations to uhhhhhh boring ass bigotry. Food comes laden with the cultural values and associations of its origins--not just of nationality, but of specific locations, religions, and classes. The foods that are acceptable for eating and forbidden from being eaten are sites of intense debate. People "should" eat food that suits them; what you eat, therefore, is a marker of just about every piece of demographic information available.
Whew. Let's start the review!
Aoyama's in Taiwan to eat and to promote her book/the movie based off her book. She has rejected an assignment to travel through Taiwan to promote the Imperial project of Southern Expansion; her interests are almost entirely culinary, and her appetite is aptly self-described as "monstrous." She doesn't want to eat the standard Japanese banquet food that her hosts have prepared: she wants tropical flavors, unfamiliar bites, a sense of novelty. She rejects the guide her colonial hosts provide for her in favor of a young woman she meets while trying (and failing) to eat a package of sunflower seeds; this woman, Ong Tshian-hoh/Wang Chien-ho, has the Japanese name O Chizuru, and gradually becomes responsible for feeding and amusing Aoyama. Skimming through the chapter titles, readers familiar with contemporary Asian food and food trends will notice some fan favorites: sunflower seeds, winter melon tea, hot pot, vermicelli, and curry all make appearances.
In this respect, the book lays out all of its points efficiently and without too many errors, yet I read this knowing I'd enjoy it but would find something lacking. This sense of, "Hmm, what is it lacking?" started with the premise and persisted as I read the flap cover and opened the book. Reviewing the givens listed above, I think you can see the vectors most authors would take: Aoyama enjoys Taiwanese food and people and forms a genuine bond with Ong, but her blind spots are enormous--I found myself closing my eyes at some points and thinking, "please.... girl... you can't say this shit!" Aoyama's love for Ong is bound up with the services and access Ong provides for her--not just taking Aoyama to different parts of Taiwan, but also cooking for Aoyama (this is honestly the least realistic element of the novel--you're telling me Ong, all by herself, made seven noodle dishes in one day???) and caring for Aoyama when Aoyama's writing. Aoyama appreciates the fruits of Ong's labors but hardly sees the work itself. Ong is engaged to a man, and Aoyama repeatedly offers Ong a chance to move back to the mainland with Aoyama. Although she frames these offers as an escape from an unequal marriage that will waste Ong's talents, her own pursuit of Ong extends the colonial relationship under the guise of personal freedom.
The novel opens up with a framing device: this is the English-language translation of the Mandarin translation of a Japanese novel. In addition to the main novel, we get a fictionalized forward, four afterwards (two of them fictional, one of them fictional-ish from the character of the author/translator, and one of them by the real life English language translator) that take us across thirty to seventy years in the future. In these fictional afterwards, we learn what happened to Aoyama and Ong after the war: Aoyama wrote the book but never got a copy of it into Ong's hands; Ong's husband moved to the United States, where they lived until Ong's death. Ong translates the novel and entrusts its publication to her daughter, a professor. I was pretty irked by the framing device at first, but I've accepted it now as a way of skipping forward through time; I do think it's a little defensive, and it does not stop me from being irked that Aoyama describes Taiwan as a palimpsest... we all know that the metaphor of the palimpsest was popularized by Derrida's famous essay on Freud's model of memory and that Aoyama has little to no interest in the preservation of Western texts. Does anyone else care about this? No?
Given the laborious wind up and the complexity outlined above, you might be going, well, good recognito, what on Earth could you possibly complain about?? And the answer is, "Not that much"--the novel delivered on its premises, but I think its premises lack uh interest... Taiwan Travelogue's complexity is in the setting; the characters have difficult backstories but transparent relationships. The relationships are transparent because, at heart, the novel believes that a relationship between these women, who stand in for the tourist and the "real," is impossible; as such, Aoyama's main crime is her hypocrisy and blindspot, her annoying persistence and obliviousness. She represents the annoying, rich tourist who can never understand the land they're visiting--but lmao I don't think this is the thing that makes Ong stay with Aoyama for so long. Aoyama must represent some kind of possibility or potential for Ong, too; otherwise, you can see Ong's r/AITA post where everyone's telling her to quit her job and go no contact with her weird boss. In that model, there's no romance, right--there can be no real friendship, either.
In an interview, the translator, Lin King, sums up the novel's themes in a way that made my eyes bug a bit:
HM: What was it like translating a novel about translation and its colonial impacts?
LK: The book doesn’t explicitly condemn or condone anything. Even though the characters end on the note of “colonialism=bad,” there is still a lot of genuine love and affection, and a good-faith interchange of ideas and cultures that aren’t portrayed in a negative light. Ultimately the “lesson” taken away is imperialism=bad, jingoism=bad, but there is still a lot that the book does to make the case that interpersonal relationships born of these times aren’t purely bad. Translating these dynamics was challenging but fun for me, because there’s a lot of nuance to convey what people are missing as they speak to each other.
I really think King should have come equipped with a better takeaway than this!!!
I'll put it in a better light: Can two people from different sides of the imperial divide truly know each other without destroying the relationship along the way? Is the promise of love enough? Can you uncouple love from the economic metaphor of transaction: love as a service that one renders to the other? The answer the novel gives is no, it is not enough; these things cannot be overcome; even if someone comes to know the part of you that you've tried to suppress out of existence, things cannot move forward.
Ong stays because there's an obvious truth: relationships between the subjugator and subjugated persist and happen despite rude statements, offensive behavior, and power differences. Love is not something reserved for two equals; knowing is not something that happens only between people who love in the right way. People stay in patently unequal relationships for years, against the advice and recommendation of their friends and families; some of them are even happy doing so. The real thing that kills the romantic potential between Aoyama and Ong isn't Aoyama's massive imperialist blind spots, as the novel suggests: it's that Aoyama wants Ong to spend ten hours a day cooking for her in Japan during a politically charged war, all for a relationship that offers none of the benefits of marriage and none of the recognition of the work that society knows a wife performs for her husband. And will there be any pussy??? None!
Both Aoyama and Ong have "monstrous" appetites that let them eat incredible amounts of food in a single sitting. What does that "monster" actually represent here? The obvious metaphor is imperialist expansion, but the fact that Ong shares it means that this is the wrong reading. Let's think back to food itself. The desire to eat is a basic one: to go hungry is to suffer, to starve is to die; there are, however, many ways of eating: to satisfaction, with taste, with no taste, eating well, eating badly, and so on.
Eating fully captures a cycle: desire -> procure -> prepare -> consume -> satiety -> desire (etc.) The hunger cycle follows the same path as the economic and sexual ones, with the key difference being that the economic one ends with acquisition/possession, food ends with consumption, and the sexual ends with something more ambiguous: A mutual possession? A mutual consumption? An exchange--but of what? What has been acquired or lost? Has anything?
People talk about sexuality through the metaphor of eating often, but I think that overlooks the difficulty of actually quantifying what people get out of sex. You may say, recog, heterosexual marriage means the husband takes possession over the wife! And that's part of it, right? In the novel's configuration, Aoyama and Ong are "monstrously" hungry because their queer appetites can never be satisfied under the terms of the standard heterosexual model. And honestly, I wish the novel had extended beyond its single point. I mean, why not have them fuck? It'd center a different problem, the problem of appetite and satiation, admittedly, but I think it'd be... better that way...
Personally, my thoughts on the novel's question is maybe it is impossible!! maybe really knowing someone else is impossible. Why not! But the illusion/delusion of its possibility is necessary for a baseline level of human happiness. Without it, you'll always be hungry.
Secondary to this is the fact that I cannot help but read Taiwan Travelogue as a riff off Utena. The author, Yang, is a huge yuri anime fan–it’s listed on her Ministry of Culture page, even!--and the two works share similar beats around Ong’s servitude and “exotic” otherness (Anthy) and Aoyama’s obliviousness (Utena). Once you see the Anthy of it all, it is really hard to unsee, dfkhnnn. The parallels are, hmm. Fine? Nothing wrong with having influences. But it does make it more apparent to me that novels about regrets are almost always boring. Regret is boring! “Oh, my life could have turned out so differently if only I were a different person–” shut up! Become interesting!!!!!!! The enduring power of RGU comes from its ability to both show how a system works and convince the viewer that Utena and Anthy have genuinely changed their lives. Taiwan Travelogue thinks of itself as a tragedy, and I’m kind of like… sure! sure! You’re overstating your case…
The Lover, Duras - While we're talking about difficult relationships between colonizer and colonized, here's Marguerite with an autobiographical novel about growing up in Vietnam in the 1920s/1930s (?) and how she had an affair with a twenty-seven year old Chinese man when she was fifteen.
I was totally entranced by this novel. Duras apparently returned to the themes in this novel over the course of her career: Vietnam ("French Indochina"), wretched family life, sexuality, alcoholism. It opens with this paragraph:
Another line from the first few pages: Very early in my life it was too late. It was already too late when I was eighteen. And I think those lines are incredible, truly. I have a real fondness for writers who are able to project this image of hard-won wisdom and deploy this wisdom in the form of these declarative statements. They remind me of a Freakwater song that I for some reason committed to memory when I was twenty-two: All your beauty will be stolen by young girls in the night/A thief as quiet as a dark cloud that stole away the moonlight. Years later, I read an indignant reviewer going, "These women weren't even FORTY!" and it meant basically nothing to me then because I found forty plenty old, but now I'm like, wait a second...
I mentioned I was reading this novel to some people and the reaction both times was “oh, and are you doing all right?” The Lover does not seem to enjoy the reputation Lolita does, and I think it is in part driven by the often sexist reception of works by female writers who draw on autobiographical elements; furthermore, while Nabokov fervently argued for the literary merits of his own works, Duras famously hated this book, which she wrote late in her life, in 1984, between rehab trips. People make a lot out of this hatred, as though to call its literary strengths into question, but I think it's not surprising for Duras to hate that so many accolades came out of this fictional, autobiographical novel she wrote as an old woman, one that many people read as being purely autobiography instead of fiction, especially in regards to the love affair.
I read a few reviews and retrospectives of The Lover immediately after reading, and I think the the Public Books round table is a good way to speedrun some readings and commentaries that range from good to like... fine...., including Wells pointing out how Duras chose to depict the love affair in the novel very differently from how it "actually" occurred. In the novel, they approach each other after a chance encounter on the ferry. In real life, Duras' mother "essentially offered" Duras to the wealthy son of the local landlord. The experience Duras has in real life is appalling: he threatens her, she feels violated. What "enjoyment" she gets out of it is the enjoyment of his desire of her flesh.
Throughout The Lover, Duras insists on the affair as a self-chosen "ruination,” and I think if you were dedicated to taking her at face value, you might say that the narrator does gain some degree of power through her relationship with the Chinese man: on the first night, the narrator demands that the man do with her what he does with all his women after he brings her to his apartment–that's to say, she understands he has brought her into his car and then his apartment for sex. As the novel presents it, the affair becomes a source of strength and personal revelation for her: she ruminates on the year-ish long affair for decades and decades after, glowing with pride when the Chinese man calls her after the war, after her mother and brothers are dead, and tells her that he still thinks of her and still loves her. The social and sexual ruination she chose is rewarded with the indelible images (preserved in text through the metaphor of photographs) and the transformation of her violation into strength--so it's all okaaaay.......???
It sits badly, right, in the mind to imagine it as the narrator insists on it, and this is because we can sense the difficulty the narrator has with squaring all the pieces of this time together. If she’s “choosing,” for example, to have the affair, we can look to the outfit she wears when she first meets the Chinese man. The narrator ruminates on each item of clothing as a way of establishing her character and circumstance: a man's hat, her mother’s worn down silk dress, gold lame shoes. But you can’t help seeing the dark echo of Duras’ diary entry when the narrator shows her mother the completed outfit and the mother approves of it:
The narrator's family life is full of sexual intimation. Though the narrator continues to assert that no one knew, her mother never knew, that she was sleeping with the Chinese man, there are scenes where the mother makes sly allusions to the narrator's “ruin” and, in a devastating scene, forces the narrator to strip naked and beats her while the narrator's older brother, practically salivating on the other side of the door, tells their mother to beat her harder and that the narrator is ruined. In that context, the "choice" is more of a choice between her mother giving her to her older brother or, after dressing up "like a child prostitute," taking the initiative on her sexual transgression and escape. This affair gives her the money she needs to help her family leave Indochina for France once more, but it leads to “ruin” and “waste.”
Hold on, let’s go back to the Very early in my life paragraph:
Some memory/obsession novels fail on a plausibility level, but this particular novel succeeds in showing how this year created a fatal entanglement of sexuality, youth, family, race, and money. Her sexual awakening and freedom from the insults, beatings, and punishment of her home life are intertwined with her youth, the lover's wealth and age, and the danger she puts herself in at the hands of her family and her lover. Even if no one knows she’s had sex with the Chinese man, everyone knows. Her sexual “ruin” means she can no longer be part of her family or the colony again–yet this ruin, with all the seedy implications, is the source of her art. This year changed her beyond what language can describe. The exact event cannot be recreated for us faithfully because the person who experienced it is dead. The transformation of the self has been so complete that the only thing remaining is the “ruin” and the knowledge that comes with it.
So, I think maybe you're thinking. These are all expected pairings of image and metaphor. Is that enough? Can you really be excited by this, you picky bitch? There are quotes by Akhil Sharma, who also wrote a super autobiographical novel, Family Life , insisting that he does NOT get it, he is NOT Duras-pilled, he thinks people are pranking him. Nothing but a bunch of big, puffed-up statements pretending at profundity!
Family Life is a very different mode of autobiographical novel: day-to-day, blow-by-blow, a novel project that attempts to reconstruct the hours leading up to his brother's dive and the aftermath. Duras, however, has a different project: trying to reconstruct a timeline of the novel's event would be full of question marks, the structure loops and doubles back on itself; it's pretty much a pure "memory" novel that goes back and back. And on the face of it, it sounds both devastating and annoying as shit. What keeps this novel from totally sucking? I think it's that the lack of regret: I’m really entranced by this start of “I was ruined” but there also not being a time of “innocence” either, and the way the narrator regards the “ruin” as something to “read” instead of something to regret or mourn. It has already come to pass, it has always been this way, it could have only ever been like this.
While reading The Lover, I found myself thinking back to Renee Gladman’s My Lesbian Novel , specifically to the passage I discussed in my January review. My thoughts are pretty much the same: what makes Duras worth reading is that she’s totally psychologically fucked in the head and she can put that fucked in the head right on the page. I don’t know, I think it’s a little crazy to expect an author to be “healed” or can give you some therapeutic insight… I think it’s fine to do a depression novel if it’s really good. Don’t show it to me if it’s not, though.
I read two other books this month, one that I really liked (Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee) with the exception of the middle essay, which nearly killed me, and one which I found kind of uneven (Doppelganger by Naomi Klein)... however, this post is already. So long. That I think I may need to save those two posts for some other time. Good reading month for me, hope for more of the same but better!!! next month.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject