Koba English – Page 11 – Book reviews, when I feel like it

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Sometimes the books we read transcend their mere bookishness in the world and become something akin to life milestones, mementos of a particular point in our lives. Under the Net is a fantastic book on its own, made all the more fantastic for me because I bought it at the now-defunct “What The Book?” in Seoul and read the bulk of it in Gimpo airport, hoping against hope that a seat would open up after I missed my initial flight to Jeju. (One did. I had a great time.) Naturally that specific copy that I own, with the handwritten note to the previous owner and a What The Book? receipt still in it, immediately transports me to South Korea in July 2012. But any discussion of that book in general, or Iris Murdoch generally, will also bring along memories of that time of my life.

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow and Jerome K. Jerome is similarly of a specific time for me, though in a grimmer way. An acquaintance recommended it (another left field book) sometime in 2019 and close on to winter I was reading a free ebook version from Project Gutenberg on the subway to work. I remember closing the ereader app and pocketing my phone as I came up the stairs of Hötorget, dawn only just getting started, everything still half-dark. I remember pulling my phone out on my way home in the evening and dashing off a quick message to them to say, Thanks for the rec, this is hilarious! before opening the ereader app back up for the return trip.

And then I didn’t have many commutes for a long time after that, for some reason!

I also forgot about Idle Thoughts for a long while, though whether that’s because of Covid or because of my own distractability is hard to say. Here I am, three years later, and I finally finished it, and now the book has become emblematic of my journey through coronatider.

Well, that’s a bit melodramatic. I have a good memory for a lot of things, but I would be hard pressed to summarize the entire collection and tell you which essays I finished before Covid, which during, and which after (if you want to say that there’s an after, which is debatable). Another book that needs no review, no introduction, no hype; Jerome has earned his place in English literary history. But for all of that historicity, reading Idle Thoughts today feels surprisingly fresh and relevant. Plus ça change.

The Dwarf (and Alexandra Dick)

Revisited a book from last year in translation, purely for the fact that a work friend brought it up in conversation on two different occasions.

“It’s like…amazing. That translator found solutions that weren’t even there to be found.”

Dvärgen came out in 1944, and appeared in English in 1945 in a translation by Alexandra Dick. A year is not a long time to translate a whole novel, especially before the era of word processors and CAT tools and the Internet. Even more astonishing, then, that the translation is good. Or maybe not so astonishing? I suppose I don’t have the ideal frame of reference to make that call. Over seventy years later and this seems to be the only English translation in town. Why mess with perfection?

What struck my coworker was that Dick didn’t really have any other substantial translation career he could uncover beyond that one really good translation, leading him to wonder if it was “some genius on drugs.”

Fortunately, Steve Holland at Bear Alley Books did some fantastic detective work so I don’t have to! Turns out that Dick wasn’t entirely a flash in the pan. (I’d argue she was some kind of genius, and who knows about the drugs.) Her translation career was, indeed, fairly limited, with just Dvärgen and Birger Dahlerus’s autobiography, Sista försöket, to her name (the combination of which invites speculation on her personal anxieties about war and Nazism). Her literary career, on the other hand, was prolific. She put out some two dozen novels from 1937 to 1964—including three in 1944 and one in 1945, coinciding with when she would have presumably been working on Dvärgen. Then, for whatever reason, her writing career ended in 1964, maybe because she was living in Florence and why would you stay shut up indoors to write all day when you live in Florence?

Any review of this, like with the original, is superfluous. Good book, good translation, have at.

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

Another book club book, this time the Discord book club. Turns out if you let me show up once, I never leave. (Well, except that time I dropped in to discuss Solaris and then didn’t attend another meeting until Light From Uncommon Stars.)

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is a snappy little collection of short stories from Kim Fu. They all go pretty quick, making this book another member of the illustrious One-Sit Read Club for me. I’m struggling to remember any others except The Crying of Lot 49, but I know there’s at least one more besides. Possibly Kokoro? Honorable mention: The Seep.

As a short story collection, there’s not really any plot to recount. Around half of the stories flirt with science fiction, or speculative fiction, however you want to call it, whether by relying on technology beyond what’s currently available or by inventing scientifically plausible monsters, illnesses, or mutations. Regardless of genre, all of the stories share a deft, light touch that in the end is possibly a bit too light. Few of them have a closed or definitive ending; a bit like Weasels in the Attic, they all have the sensation of a kind of literary show and tell. “Here’s this weird idea I had. Sure is weird, isn’t it? Anyway…” Sometimes this works for the subject matter, but other times it feels a little bit like a cop-out, like Fu couldn’t figure out what the logical conclusion of their idea should be. This was maybe the most frustrating in “#ClimbingNation,” which has enough paydirt drama and conflict set up in just one post-funeral scene to fuel an entire novel (hidden stashes of gold bars! unresolved guilt! mysterious pasts!) but instead simply ends. On the other hand, it works well in “Doll,” where that kind of unresolved tension works because the story is classic, old-school horror straight out of Weird Tales. Then there’s a third class of story where the lack of conclusive ending renders the entire story forgettable. Like, very literally forgettable—in the hour between finishing the book and starting this post, I still had to look up reviews to remind myself of what I had just read.

My personal favorite out of the collection was “Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867,” the first story in the collection and which maybe doomed the other stories by setting expectations too high because it is really, really good. I might have even choked up a bit. And while I don’t know that “Twenty Hours” is necessarily a great story, it perfectly encapsulates a particular mood and dynamic that I recognize from being in a long-term relationship so I’ll credit Fu with that much.

Overall I’m not mad I read it, because Fu has a way with words and it’s a delight to reside in their world, even for those too-brief moments. I expect it’s a bit hard to track down at the moment due to new release hype, but if you come across it in the bookshelves in a year or two it’s worth the browse.

Axplock ur idéhistorien II

I guess the theme so far in 2023 is “reading other people’s books.” I closed out 2022 with The Power of the Dog and then ended up reading Stick (twice! for translation’s sake!) straightaway in 2023, both at the recommendation of a friend. In between those, Axplock ur idéhistorien II arrived on my doorstep—a book I’d promised to babysit for a digital nomad friend who wanted to order it off Adlibris but had no Swedish address to ship to.

And one does not ask me to babysit a book without expecting me to read it.

It’s a tidy little collection spanning just about two hundred years of Western thought, with a focus on the major social ideas that continue to leave their mark on politics today. (This is a polite way to say that a few of the selections are nothing less than noxious.) The selections are abridged when necessary, with context for each selection as well as a short biography of each author:

Kant, “Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”
Hegel, “Reason in History”
Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety
Marx & Engels, “The Communist Manifesto”
Gobineau, “An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races”
Bremer, Hertha
Darwin, On the Origin of Species
Mill, “The Subjection of Women”
Spencer, The Man Versus the State
Nietzsche, On the Geneaology of Morality
Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis
“Program of the NSDAP”
Mussolini, “The Doctrine of Fascism”
Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition

If you took the above table of contents as a reading list it would probably keep you busy for a year, so collections like these with just The Hits and the central theses are great to have on hand and are much cheaper than, say, a first-year philosophy survey course textbook. (Did I keep mine because I knew I would want to revisit it later? Yes. Have I done so? Actually, also yes.) I might buy my own copies of both volumes just to have around for reference, who knows.

Do I have a similar English recommendation? Not really. Passion of the Western Mind has a similar, if broader scope, but it’s entirely a secondary source. I had Ten Great Works of Philosophy in my library for years and kind of wish I still had it.

Stick (and Einar Heckscher)

Back in January I was having a few beers with the same friend who recommended The Power of the Dog and we got on to the topic of Elmore Leonard.

“Stick! There’s one for you. Classic Leonard.”

Elmore Leonard is a legend and there’s nothing interesting I can add to the conversation about him. What’s noteworthy is that I read Stick in English (available from the good people at archive.org) and then, immediately thereafter, the Swedish translation by Einar Heckscher. Unlike the last time I became fixated on a translation (Gösta Berlings saga), there’s only one translation (so far as I’m aware?) and thus no comparisons are possible.

My drinking companion was adamant that no Swedish translation of Elmore Leonard could possibly work. I didn’t really have an opinion one way or another, maintaining neutrality as a professional courtesy to a fellow translator. Nonetheless, I’m a hyperactive golden retriever when it comes to talking about books, and once I cracked open the Swedish version he was subject to a slew of random WhatsApp messages, complete with screenshots and photos, whenever I thought a particular translation choice was interesting. Which, despite heroic efforts on my end to practice at least a modicum of restraint, was still pretty often. Sorry, Richie!

This translation of Stick came out in 1987, essentially contemporaneously with the 1985 original, as I guess is usually the case with popular commercial fiction. My biggest takeaway from the book, just viz a viz translation, was, “The internet is a life-saver.” How many times a day do I dump a term into Ecosia, Linguee, Folkets, Google ngrams, whatever else, just to wrap my head around it? How do you handle running up against the brick wall of foreign slang when you don’t have instant answers at your fingertips? If you can knock that one down, how do you dig through the slang of your own language beyond the scope of your personal usage? This is how I ended up asking my sambo and coworkers and bilingual friends how they would translate the recreational drug term “mainline” into Swedish.

My second thought was to wonder what a new translation would look like if it came out today. I think a lot more of the English would remain as calques, or be only moderately “Swedefied,” and I think there’d be a fair amount of förortssvenska. (Förortssvenska was already a thing when the book came out, but I don’t think the nearly-50-year-old Heckscher was spending a lot of time with teenagers in Rinkeby.)

My third thought was to go down a rabbit hole on the topic of Einar Heckscher himself, just because there’s actually information about him online. There’s a whole back catalogue of Swedish culture that I can’t ever hope to catch up with, and Heckscher is one of many, many items in there. I only learned about him, and by association the rest of his highly accomplished family, because I was curious about who translated this Elmore Leonard novel—judging by at least a couple Flashback posts,* though, I should have already been acquainted with Heckscher as a 70s prog rock figure from bands like Sogmusobil and Levande livet. A couple of interviews in Svenska Dagbladet and Socialpolitik got me up to speed, as did a couple of obituaries. Son Björn is hard to track down anywhere online, but his daughter at least followed in her father’s footsteps and translated? contributed to? a Swedish collection of Bukowski. Hard to say, since her father was also celebrated for his Swedish translations of Bukowski and that appears to be her only published work to date.

Incidentally, the Swedes on Flashback seem largely to share my drinking companion’s spitting rage at Heckscher’s translations, which can roughly be summed up as:

Han förvandlar allt till buskis och pilsnerfilm och förvränger allt han kommer över.

*Apologies for linking to The Bad Place, but as Flashback threads go it’s pretty innocuous.

Another point in favor for those left-field, organic and algorithm-free random book recommendations. Without the prompting and social context, would I have bothered to dip back into Elmore Leonard after a twenty years’ absence? Would I have gone down this weird little rabbit hole of Swedish prog rockers, politicians, and pundits? Absolutely not. But now I have, and so have you, and knowing is half the battle. G. I. Joe!

Weasels in the Attic

All told I’m in three different book clubs, to whom I have varying levels of allegiance. At one end of the spectrum there’s the Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club, to which I am more or less firmly committed and which accounts for around 25% of my annual book consumption. One step below that is the neighborhood dinner and book club, which I abstain from attending during The Season at work, but whose selections I often read on my own because I’m otherwise not plugged in to new, or at least recent, Swedish releases. At the other end of the spectrum is the ultra casual “buddy read” group in one of my Discord servers, which I usually ignore unless I’ve already read the book. Such was the case with Light From Uncommon Stars, which was an Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club pick for November and then a Discord buddy read for December, meaning this was the rare occasion I was part of the Discord book chat and witness to the process of selecting the next buddy ready book.

That was a long preamble to say, “I read Hiroko Oyamada’s Weasels in the Attic because it was a book club read for a book club I don’t normally attend.”

I also read it because it was short, because as a translator I appreciate reading works in translation, and because it sounded intriguing. It’s hard, even, to decide between classing it as a novella or as a short story collection. We have the same characters throughout, all riffing on the theme of indifference, or even antipathy, towards parenthood, but their only common thread is the same narrator. Each story? chapter? on its own feels a bit unearthly: deliberately flat and almost imagist, where the point isn’t a clever plot or character development but just the mood of the scene.

The word “sinister” comes up in different reviews of the book, but maybe a better word would be “uneasy.” You get that horror movie knot in your stomach, but the other shoe never drops. The narrator’s friends, Urabe and Saiki don’t come across as great husbands, or even decent men, but the narrative doesn’t stick around long enough to confirm or deny those allegations. It’s possible that the young, vulnerable girl Urabe caught eating his stock of fish food is now his wife, but then again, maybe she isn’t. We don’t find out either way. Both of them boss their (significantly) younger wives around and do very little to help in entertaining their guests, but things fail to rise about the level of the inconsiderate to demeaning or abusive. Likewise, the infants in the story are not particularly cuddly or even robust creatures, and in the stories where they appear you have the sense that they’re not going to survive until the end of the chapter (but they do).

If great art, according to Aristotle, is supposed to elicit some sense of catharsis in its audience, then he would have hated this book. (We’ll pretend for a minute that he would have understood the context of modern suburban Japan.) Oyamada shows you a few uncomfortable scenes and then leaves. The result is unsettling.

Did I like it? Hard to say. But it’s so short and goes so quickly—I read it cover to cover before I rolled out of bed one Saturday morning—that I’m not mad I read it, either.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years

Here’s the rare “book off the TBR” win! Of course, Debt: The First 5,000 Years was a relevantly recent TBR addition that has not undergone the shameful, years-long limbo that other titles have, but any progress is progress.

If you look back at the non-fiction I read in 2022 (especially the non-fiction I read and enjoyed in 2022), you can see something of a common denominator:

Caliban and the Witch, Jakartametoden and Handels: Maktelitens Skola all go a very long way towards explaining how capitalism as we know it came to be and how its current norms and structure are maintained. Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2022 is reportage often aimed at critiquing those norms and structure and, if you want to stretch the conceit, ancient Rome is where we like to start the story of Europe, and it is Europe from which springs everything else the other selections touch on. (Temples of the Sky is the odd one out, a niche hobby read.)

Whether this trend is due to the natural progression of my interests, the years I’ve now spent absorbed in financial reports, the turbulent times we live in, or some other constellation of factors, who can say. Regardless, it continued straight away into 2022 with Debt.

I’m not lucid enough a thinker to provide a pat nutshell summary of my own, so I’ll lift the one on the book’s Archive.org page:

[Debt] explores the historical relationship of debt with social institutions such as barter, marriage, friendship, slavery, law, religion, war and government; in short, much of the fabric of human life in society. It draws on the history and anthropology of a number of civilizations, large and small, from the first known records of debt from Sumer, in 3500 BC until the present.

And then the one from the back of the book itself:

Before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors—which lives on in full force to this day.

So says anthropologist David Graeber in a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Renaissance Italy to Imperial China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong.

We are still fighting these battles today.

This is the best kind of nonfiction: written by a knowledgeable academic for a lay audience without insulting their intelligence or devolving into jargon and obscure terminology, with a heaping helping of works cited at the end.

In many ways, this is the less crackpot-y, more grounded and more academic answer to Sacred Economics, which I read a few years ago and which helped keep me oriented in Debt. A lot of what Eisenstein describes as “gifts” seems to overlap with what Graeber describes as the favors that, with the advent of currency, turn into debt. Neither of them mention each other, however. Both books came out in 2011*, so I’m not sure whether it’s Graeber or Eisenstein who should be referring to the other. (Graeber might have felt that Eisenstein wasn’t nearly academically rigorous enough to cite and too out-there to be worth engaging with otherwise, and I can’t say I would have blamed him.) They definitely draw from at least a few of the same sources, such as Marcel Mauss.

I expect I will end up re-reading it later in the year, as it’s so dense with information and argumentation that there’s no way you can absorb it all at once. (Maybe you can. I can’t.) For now, time to give my brain a bit of a break.

*I think. It’s hard to tell, precisely, with Sacred Economics beyond “before 2012.”

Orlando

As established in my StoryGraph Wrap-Up post, the Austin Feminist Science Fiction Book Club is responsible for just about 25% or so of my reading every year. Here’s me getting a head start on the first meeting of 2023, finishing Virginia Woolf’s Orlando right at the end of 2022.

As this selection might imply, the Austin Feminist Science Fiction Book Club applies a very generous definition of “science fiction.” This is only a good thing, in my opinion, because it keeps things fresh and varied. I have no complaints about Orlando being included and I think I even voted for it in our poll.

I just wish I could like Virginia Woolf.

I don’t understand what my problem is. I love Mrs Dalloway, enough that it’s one of the few books I’ve re-read in my life, but anything else I’ve ever attempted just leaves me cold. “Why aren’t you Mrs Dalloway?” I lament as I read, until I either finish the book (Orlando) or give up on it entirely (To the Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own). Is it a disconnect of time? Culture? Class? I’m reminded of my colleague’s complaint about Thomas Savage: “You love yourself too much, book.”

I won’t dispute Woolf’s place in the English canon, her role in feminist literature, or the esteemed reputation she enjoys today. My point isn’t that she’s Objectively Bad, Actually or Extremely Overrated (I save that hot take for Jane Austen!). I think she is, on balance, very well deserving of her posthumous success and reputation. I just lack the necessary receptors in my reading brain to actually enjoy her writing.

2022 Reading Wrap-Up

Last year I deleted my GoodReads account and signed up for StoryGraph. Between the awful GoodReads experience on mobile and sharing unnecessary amounts of reading data with Amazon, I decided enough was enough.

I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t have an alternative, though, because I like having an easy way to track my books. No laborious spreadsheets for me, thanks! And that alternative was StoryGraph, which proved not only to be an adequate GoodReads replacement but an actual improvement. In addition to a much smoother and functional interface on mobile (though there is a web version as well!), it tracks a greater variety of data and uses it to help you better understand your reader rather than to feed the Bezos beast. It also lets you play with that data in better detail. What better way to show that off than by sharing my 2022 Reading Wrap-Up from StoryGraph!

It’s unclear how they are categorizing “light” and “dark” books on the site, precisely. StoryGraph gives you the option of selecting “moods” for books as you add them, which I assume this graph is referring to. (“This would be good for someone in the mood for something…”) My guess is that moods like “tense” or “sad” count as dark, and that ones like “hopeful” or “adventurous” count as light, but that’s just hypothesizing. Apparently I was in a real bummer reading mood for the entire spring!

No surprise that science fiction tops the list. Austin Feminist Sci Fi Book Club keeping me on my toes!

Ones that I discussed here were:

Sometimes numbers surprise you. Despite the 3.75 star average, I wasn’t expecting to see quite so many 4 star ratings in my stats (I promise I know how math works). My philosophy is that if your average rating over a whole year reaches or exceeds 4 out of 5 stars, you are either being overly generous with your opinions or insufficiently adventurous with your choices. Or you are possibly DNF-ing every single mediocre book you pick up, which is a choice I respect.

Another great thing about StoryGraph: it lets you give 0 star reviews, which is exactly what I gave Into the Drowning Deep.

StoryGraph also provides the “least shelved” book you read—the book you read that the fewest number of users have added to their own lists, whether they’ve read it or only intend to—and the “highest rated” book you read—the book you read that has the highest rating on the site. My “least shelved” book was a self-published novel that I panned (seems pointlessly cruel to share that) and my “highest rated” is niche and of no interest here, so I’m omitting those two.

Speaking of re-reads, I’ll take the opportunity to point out that adding re-reads of books in different languages (which was both of those re-reads) is much easier to do on StoryGraph than on GoodReads.

So there you have it! Maybe that enticed you to give StoryGraph a shot? Nothing about this post is paid or sponsored, I just think the service is that cool and I want it to succeed wildly.

The Big Balloon (A Love Story)

I decided to get an early start on some classic New Year’s resolutions like decluttering and ending long-term toxic relationships by having an emergency gallbladder removal two days after Christmas!

Medical drawing of a gallbladder — This one does not spark joy!

It also left me with three and a half days of nothing to do but chip away at my ebook collection; I didn’t take my purse and its ever-present paperback with me to the ER, as I fully expected to return home the same day. Well, well, well. Fortunately my phone is a miniature library of obscure and half-forgotten ebooks and I could keep myself distracted in the long waits between ultrasounds and discussions with surgeons. Most of that time was spent with the back half of Rick Berlin’s The Big Balloon (A Love Story), which up to that point I’d been reading on my morning commute.

I’m not hip to the Boston art scene, I didn’t know who Rick Berlin was before I bought the book, I’d never heard of any of his musical projects. But he put out an ad for the book on one of my go-to podcasts and since the premise sounded unique, or at least interesting, I decided to give it a try. I feel that’s only worth mentioning because someone who’s either a fan of Berlin, or familiar with his artistic milieu, will probably have a different response to it than I did.

Out of every possible Pandemic Project or Pandemic Novel, The Big Balloon is maybe the only one I can imagine that will be at all tolerable to revisit in more normal times (if we ever have more normal times). Even though the book is the direct result of COVID-19, it’s never about COVID-19. The conceit is simply this: The Big Balloon is a collection photos of items around Berlin’s home and reflections, stories and reminisces related to each item. Each little essay is entirely self-contained, with no attempt to impose chronological or thematic order on the collection (aside from organizing it into chapters based on rooms). The result is like a literary version of a Cubist portrait, where different years of Berlin’s life and different aspects of himself are presented simultaneously—or as close to simultaneously as you can get in something you read. Something about using the limitations of lockdowns to open up a vast interior world, etc. etc.

The Big Balloon worked well for commute and hospital reading because each essay was never especially long, so I could dip in and out according to subway arrivals or morphine-addled focus. And that was precisely the intended effect:

There is no linear structure to this book. No over-arching narrative. Each entry is self-contained. One piece can relate to another, but it isn’t necessary to make that connection. The reader can pick it up, crack it open anywhere, read a section and put it down. The ‘chapters’ are just the rooms in my house.

It could be said that I chose this odd-ball format for bathroom reading. For those with short attention spans. On the other hand, much as I love the twists and turns of a full blown story, the Haiku simplicity of disparate entries exposes Berlin as if opening the paper window flaps of a Twelve Days Of Christmas holiday card in no particular order.

The highly personal nature of the material also, in a way, made up for the fact that I wasn’t allowed to have any visitors. I wasn’t exactly starved for social contact generally, between the two other patients sharing my room and chatting with the nurses doing their rounds, but that’s not the same as time with your nearest and dearest in the darkest, coldest days of the year. The next best thing was Berlin plunging right to the depths of his own psyche to share with me, and the rest of his readership:

The Big Balloon is super personal. Most art, at least the art I love best, is personal. From another’s truth one extrapolates one’s own echo, wisdom, embarrassment and laughter. That’s what I’d hope for you, dear reader. That you’d laugh or at least find something self-relevant in these independent passages of my peculiar life.

A creative not-so-little undertaking that makes me want to ask the same of my friends, or save up for a dry spell on the ol’ bloggo. “Choose ten things around your house and write an essay about each one of them.” Maybe make that an additional step in the KonMari method.

Happy New Year!