Tag: novels

No et moi

I’m unsure how Delphine de Vigan’s No et moi ended up on my TBR. The best I can surmise is that it was mentioned in an issue of Karavan, which is where I get most of my French language recommendations. But as luck would have it, someone in the neighborhood buy-nothing group was giving away a copy in French and I was the only one who wanted it.

No et moi is the story of what happens when Lou, a precocious 13-year-old, befriends a young homeless woman named Nolwenn, or just “No.”

Spoilers abound here, even though the book has been out for nearly twenty years, because I think the spoilers matter a lot in the experience and because the ending is what I want to talk about the most. Assume the spoilers apply for the 2010 movie, too, though I haven’t seen it.

I mentioned in my international WhatsApp book club that I was reading this book, now that I’d finished Varats olidliga lätthet, and another member asked me what I thought of it, since she’d read it too. I was at the halfway point of the book when I answered:

So far I’d say it’s only okay, it feels a little…saccharine? I like how she writes, Lou is a very charming narrator, but the Feel Good vibe makes me dubious.

Because at this point in the book, everything is going right. No helps Lou with her presentation on young homeless women, and despite her skyrocketing anxiety Lou aces it. Lou’s parents agree to let No move in with them and they love her. She’s able to help coax Lou’s mother out of the severe depression that she fell into after the loss of a younger daughter to SIDS. The process of helping No also brings Lou into closer contact with her crush and popular boy Lucas, who just so happens to have an entire apartment more or less to himself following an implausible series of events: a father who ran away to Brazil and a mother who decided to move in with another man but occasionally returns to the apartment to see her son. (This is the part of the review where I’m most likely to have stuck my foot in my mouth, because it’s always this kind of happenstance that actually happens in real life, even if it sounds absurd in a book.) Lou has skipped a couple of grades—and I think Lucas had to repeat a year or two?—so he’s old enough to quasi-responsibly live by himself, but still. The convenience is a bit much.

Then the shit hits the fan. No finds a not-entirely-legal job cleaning at a hotel, which often ends up with her working extra hours in the bar, and soon she’s back to drinking and (presumably) prostitution. Lou even catches her stealing some of her mother’s pills, but says nothing. No looks up her mother and tries to visit her, but the childhood trend of rejection continues and No’s mother refuses to open the door to her daughter. The bottom finally falls out when Lou and her parents go to visit a freshly divorced aunt. Without the structure of family life, without Lou, No tailspins. She fails to call and check in with them after a few days, the phone goes unanswered, and they come home to find No in such a state that Lou’s parents ask her to leave. From their perspective, No isn’t a safe person for their young daughter to be around.

Lucas to the rescue! They move No in with him, but it’s rough work keeping No’s presence hidden from the weekly cleaning lady. No’s condition isn’t improving, if anything it’s getting worse, and finally Lucas’s mother cottons on that something is happening and announces a visit. No calls Lou and begs her to help her with her plan to move to Ireland. By now, Lou’s relationship with her parents is at an all-time low. She’s been lying to them about where she’s been after school, and despite her mother’s return to relative normalcy, the relationship between mother and daughter is still frosty and stilted. From Lou’s perspective, her mother doesn’t love her, never treats her with warmth or affection or encouragement. Might as well go with No!

This trip to Ireland has long been in the making. No’s plan has always been to move there to find her crush? childhood sweetheart? Loïc, who she claims works in a bar and lives in a fantastic country manor and has been writing her piles and piles of letters about his life, encouraging her to come join him. Now, she tells Lou, she’s finally saved up enough money to go. They spend the day shopping (to Lou’s misgivings, as she expects No is overplaying how much money she actually has) and then finally take the subway to gare Saint-Lazare, where No tells Lou they’ll switch trains to continue their journey to Ireland. Instead, No ditches Lou, who has to walk all the way back home.

No completely drops off the face of the earth. Lou finally has the relationship she wants with her mother. Lucas and Lou find out from a friend of No’s that Loïc never sent her a single letter; she only found out where he was working by happenstance. The book ends with a kiss between Lucas and Lou.

The mood whiplash with the visit to Lou’s aunt was impossible for me to square with what came before. So much in the early story defied expectations, even reality, that you start to think you’re in for some light feel-good fare. Then I expected some friction when No moved in with Lou, and that the conflict would be learning to adjust to a new life and new routines, or maybe struggling with guilt, but no: everything is perfect. By the time No starts to struggle, your only thought is, ah hah, finally, here’s the conflict, but all of the other problems in the book so far have been solved so this one will be, too.

No et moi won the prix des Libraires, so it clearly has some cultural cachet. And I want to stress that it’s written beautifully. de Vigan captures the voice of a gifted, anxious child perfectly, striking that difficult balance between intellectual and emotional capacity without condescension on the one hand or making them into a tiny adult on the other. After all, no matter how bright a 13-year-old is, they’re still 13 years old. But the limits of Lou’s first-person perspective is maybe part of what makes the mood whiplash so strong. We learn, eventually, about No’s traumatic childhood, and so we can assume that her homelessness and her alcoholism are connected to those early years, but being told that isn’t the same as being in No’s head or living in No’s own feelings. Nor do we even see previews of that trauma in the beginning; there’s no foreshadowing of what’s to come. Instead No just drops in like a cursed fairy godmother to bring Lou everything she wants before disappearing into the ether.

Varats olidliga lätthet

I was particularly interested in the International WhatsApp Book Club selection for August, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (which I read in Swedish: Varats olidliga lätthet), because it’s a long-time favorite of my Bloomsday book buddy and in all the years I’ve known him he’s proven to have impeccable taste. Once again, he didn’t let me down!

Lätthet follows four interconnected people around the time of the Prague Spring and some years beyond: Tomas, his wife Tereza, his friend and lover Sabine, and Sabine’s lover Franz. The timeline is slightly disjointed: we learn about a character’s death in one section, and then the next section will circle back to the same character several years before and follow what happened to them up until their death. All of this is held together with the glue of intense philosophizing, either on the part of the perspective character or of a nameless and unconnected first-person narrator who we can only assume is the author and therefore Milan Kundera himself interjecting. (As opposed to the perspective-shifting in Lol V. Stein, where the first-person narrator is most decidedly not Duras or any otherworldly author.)

The story and the characters exist solely as case studies or tools for Kundera to engage in philosophizing, but he still manages to capture distinct and nuanced personalities rather than flat stereotypes. There’s nothing more exhausting in a book than a blowhard author using characters as puppets in little morality plays; perhaps the difference between Kundera and a blowhard is that Kundera raises and debates questions he doesn’t seem to have an answer to, while a blowhard almost by definition has decided they have all the answers.

The Swedish translation was from Ulla Bruncrona, and I have nothing to add about the translation itself. Mostly I want to remark that out of nowhere J. M. G. Le Clézio has decided to haunt me. I’d never heard of him until a book friend mentioned him last week and it’s been a bit of Baader-Meinhof phenomenon since. The day after that conversation, I finally got around to starting a French novel I had picked up weeks ago from our neighborhood buy-nothing group, only to be greeted with an epigraph from Le Clézio, and now in writing this up, I’ve learned that Ulla Bruncrona is his primary Swedish translator. Well then, universe. I’ll give Le Clézio priority in my TBR.

Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein

Marguerite Duras, my beloved weirdo! I can always count on you when I’m falling behind in my French reading.

On its face, a simple chain of events: Lol V. Stein, a bit of an aloof and withdrawn odd duck, falls madly in love with Michael Richardson, who abandons her at the town ball for an older woman. Lol is heartbroken and suffers a nervous breakdown, but eventually marries Jean Bedford and moves away. They have three daughters together, and while Lol has kept a very strictly regimented life throughout their entire marriage, Jean is always worried that Lol hasn’t fully recovered from the incident. Ten years later, they return to Lol’s childhood home for Jean’s job, and Lol manufactures a meeting with her schoolgirl friend Tatiana. The two of them fell out of touch after  Lol’s breakdown, largely due to the orchestrations of Lol’s mother, so they haven’t spoken in ten years. Tatiana is now married to a surgeon, and having an affair with one of his subordinates, Jacques. Lol and Tatiana have an awkward reunion, at turns warm and cruel, and things reach their peak when Lol and Jacques travel to the resort town where Lol had been jilted all those years ago. The two of them spend the night there, Jacques is in love with Lol, Lol wants him to continue seeing Tatiana, maybe he also loves Tatiana too, Lol kind of spies on them during their assignations, it’s a mess because that’s all Marguerite Duras writes and I’m here for it. And as usual the ending leaves nothing settled: Jacques is waiting for Tatiana at their usual no-tell motel, Lol is hiding in the rye field outside their window, that’s it, the end!

The fun part of this is how Duras plays with perspective. Much of the story is presented as a third-person omniscient narrator, even though the narrative never lets us forget that it’s actually a first-person account. Sometimes the narrator is involved in what’s happening in the story, sometimes they relay what other people have told them, sometimes they state flat-out that they’re imagining or hypothesizing. The “reveal,” such as it is, takes some time and gives everything a bit of extra tension.

The parallel translation I had with me was Lol V. Steins hänförelse, by the controversial Katarina Frostenson. It’s hard to think of her anymore without also thinking about the Swedish Academy scandal, Jean-Claude Arnault and corruption. Is that entirely fair? Who’s to say? But speaking of, now seems like a good moment to recommend Matilda Voss Gustavsson’s The Club. It’s still commercially unavailable in English but a sample translation seems to be floating around in the literary circles, so maybe one day it’ll be picked up.

Grupp Krilon

Eyvind Johnson’s Group Krilon went on my TBR after I stumbled onto a panel about him at last year’s Stockholms Litteraturmässan. An anti-Nazi allegory and condemnation of Sweden’s policy of neutrality during WWII? Writing allegorical fiction to circumvent censorship in the press? Sign me up!

And yet, Grupp Krilon would have languished on my TBR for a good while longer if the Storygraph TBR challenge I signed up for in  January didn’t include a prompt about reading the first book in a series. Given the other prompts, and what seems to be fair assumptions to make about the reading habits of most of the people using Storygraph or Goodreads, this prompt seemed to be an acknowledgement of more recent popular fiction, seemingly endless series of novels as constant content. The total opposite of what I usually read, in other words—especially with the break up of the Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club, which had been one of the few tethers I had to new books. We read the first book in a few series that I either continued reading (A Memory Called Empire, Gideon the Ninth) or intend to continue reading (Ancillary Justice).

Did I have anything to fit the bill I had added to my TBR myself, though?

As I scrolled through, I saw in small text under the title that Grupp Krilon was labeled “Krilon #1”. Bingo! Not necessarily the kind of book the creator had in mind with the prompt, probably, but what did that matter for me?

On a plot level, Grupp Krilon circles around a group of friends in Stockholm during World War II. The original core of the group is the protagonist Krilon and Hovall, who meet on a streetcar and then strike up a friendship at the tobacco and newspaper stand. Other men are quickly drawn into their company: first Minning, a widowed carpenter who Hovall was on his way to meet when he crossed paths with Krilon; then the cousins Odenarp and Arpius, the builder Frid, and the surgeon Segel. They meet every Sunday to discuss heady and important topics, a rotating dinner club.

One Sunday evening, on the way home from such a meeting, Frid has a moment straight out of “Once in a Lifetime” (this is not my beautiful house! this is not my beautiful wife!) and decides to retreat to the summer cabin he’s been restoring to contemplate the anxieties of his ascendancy into the middle class. He sneaks out without telling his wife, she panics and calls Krilon. Not the police—she doesn’t want to involve them. Krilon calls the rest of the group and decides to organize a search effort.

The search effort is half-hearted at best. Things come up for some of the members: Arpius is out of town, Segel’s ex-wife Ann needs emergency surgery, Minning’s daughter has been kidnapped. Odenarp and Hovall make a search of different neighborhoods, while Krilon stays at home to call around, including (I assume) the private detective firm he’s hired. Frid, meanwhile, has two squatters living in his cabin. Even Odenarp and Hovall have such bizarre experiences on that first night of searching that their allegiance to Krilon is sorely tested.

Because Krilon, as it turns out, has enemies. And they’re not above trying to work through Krilon’s friends to get to him. (Remember the kidnapping?)

A few days go by, but Frid eventually sends a note to his wife explaining the situation, and the search is called off. Whether because of the rumors or personal crises, Krilon’s friends have just about decided they’re tired of this friendship, or at least his friendship. Even though Krilon can sense this, he tries to rally everyone again to intervene in the case of the wildly depressed Segel, who has just lost Ann. They refuse; Krilon tries on his own and is immediately rebuffed. A few days later Segel kills himself.

This news prompts Krilon to make a last ditch effort to get the gang back together. He writes Hovall, his first and oldest friend, to explain that the men should continue meeting, even if they vote Krilon out; but can’t they at least meet one last time to get this all straightened out? Hovall passes the message along to the other men, and they all agree for one more meeting at Krilon’s. One by one, the members of “grupp Krilon” turn up, telling Krilon not to expect anyone else. No one wants to admit to anyone else that they’re going to visit their old friend, it appears.

They hold a last meeting, where Hovall formally lays out their complaints and charges against Krilon. He’s been a busybody, he’s put them in uncomfortable or even dangerous situations, he’s refusing to change with the times, etc. Krilon responds to these charges and makes a plea for their friendship, and in the end the group resolves to meet without Krilon and take the matter of his membership to a vote. They promise to let him know by ten o’clock in the evening a following day (maybe the next day). In the very last scene of the book, Krilon is wandering around Stockholm in the early spring while he waits for the result of the vote, contemplating nature and noting topics for discussion “in case I am allowed back, otherwise I shall mention it to Hovall.”

What a cliffhanger!

Given that ending, and that the whole trilogy was published in a single volume in 1948, one wonders if there was a Lord of the Rings style publishing decision there. “No one’s going to read this huge tome in one sitting, Johnson. Let’s split it up.” Even Grupp Krilon, the first book, is 500 pages.

The above 600 word summary still only skates over the absolute surreal weirdness the story takes, the sheer paranoia. Krilon, it seems, has crossed paths with everyone in the book. Random strangers that Krilon’s friends meet during Frid’s disappearance have dramatic stories about this or that man they remember, who did this fantastic or horrible thing, and of course the big reveal is that this man’s name was…Krilon. In another book it might be too much to take, but because other things get so weird, it makes sense. Especially considering the extremely clearly allegorical nature of the book as well.

A screenshot from "Garth Marenghi's Dark Place," with Matthew Holness in yellow-tinted aviators and a leather jacket with slicked-back hair as his Garth Marenghi character. At the bottom is the closed caption text, "I know writers who use subtext, and they're all cowards"

The book definitely starts off slow, with a deliberate attention to details in Krilon’s appearance and landscape that I initially found to be a hard slog. Not because of the writing itself, since it has a rhythm and a lyricism to it; rather it was because books today (or at least books I’ve read recently) move at a snappy, breakneck pace. Where are the careful, lingering descriptions of yesteryear? But Krilon is the central figure, and it’s important for the reader to have clear idea of how moral, thoughtful, considered (even how lagom) Krilon is, so Johnson takes his time. While the urgency of the book picks up soon afterwards, I think my focus also reset early on and I was able to get lost in a slower, more thoughtful pace.

Grupp Krilon  was the “Stockholm Reads” pick in 2018 and came out in an appropriate paperback edition for the occasion, the cover you see in the image at the top with dark purple Stockholm landscape and the author and title in bright yellow. It also has this quote underneath that perfectly encapsulates what the book is driving at, what Johnson wants to say:

“The world is so dark now,” said Krilon. “It is of the utmost importance that people gather together in groups and speak openly with each other, without lying; that they seek the truth without giving any thought to the threat of punishment, or the tempting promise of rewards of gold and honor.”

It hits harder when you actually get to the quote. Krilon is begging Segel to see him, if not to talk about anything then at least attend a concert or otherwise spend some time together. But Segel can only think of Ann’s upcoming surgery, and Krilon’s plea goes unanswered:

“What’s everyone else doing, do you know? Do you know why they’re drifting away now, when the world needs them?”

“No,” Segel replied tersely, “I don’t know.”

Heartbreaking in 1941, heartbreaking in 2018, heartbreaking in 2026.

To my absolute astonishment, Grupp Krilon has yet to be translated into English. For that you’ll have to be content with Return to Ithaca (maybe timely now with Nolan’s version of The Odyssey in theaters?) and The Days of His Grace.

Vacation Reading List: Kiruna

By the time this post goes live, I’ll be sitting on a train to? from? Boden, en route to Kiruna for an eleven-day break from the grind. My plan is to visit the big hole in the ground, maybe take in a couple museums, and catch up on my reading backlog. To that end, my list!

Resan till Armenien, Osip Mandelstam

This was a recommendation from a book friend. I started it back in February but quickly realized I would want the time to really focus on it, in part due to lots of new vocabulary. That time has come.

Livet måste ha mening, Victor Frankl

A democratically chosen book for the philosophy reading group I’m in. Unfortunately I find that as the group grows larger,  the suggestions devolve into academically dubious pseudo-intellectual New Age claptrap. But I’ll still read this to see for myself! And to remind the group members who suggested this that Frankl was out there trepanning suicidal Jewish people from 1940 to 1942.

Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Marguerite Duras

I am far, far behind on my French reading goal for the year. Duras to the rescue! I’ll also be reading the Swedish translation.

Bastarden från Istanbul, Elif Shafak

The July pick for my international WhatsApp book club. It’s the longest book on this list, so we’ll see if I finish it or even get around to it.

Kyra Kyralina

This was an international WhatsApp book club pick because Panait Istrati seems like an interesting guy, and Kyra Kyralina specifically occupies a niche as the first Romanian novel with a gay protagonist and the first novel in Istrati’s Adrian Zografi cycle. A landmark novel in many respects.

Landmarks aren’t necessarily a fun read, however, and it was a struggle to grasp what Istrati was trying to do. It’s a bildungsroman of sorts, but with a rather disjointed chronology and a lack of interiority. Despite the book’s inclusion in the Adrian Zografi cycle, here Adrian is only a side character. Kyra Kyralina is really the story of Stavro, né Dragomir, as told to Adrian on different occasions over the stretch of several years. The first section focuses on Stavro’s most recent past: the story of his unhappy marriage. The second section then goes all the way back to Stavro’s earliest childhood, and the third and final section fills in the gap between that childhood and the unhappy marriage. The first two sections are narrated rather close in time to each other, with only a few days in between. Adrian doesn’t hear the last section until several years later when he happens to meet Stavro in Egypt.

To put it chronologically: Stavro was born in Braila, Romania, and spent his earliest days with his mother and sister, the titular Kyra. They were wealthy largely due to his mother’s inheritance, though his father and older brother ran a very successful wagon business. The latter two eventually move to the other side of the city to be closer to the wagon workshop, but they periodically make visits to the other home. In their absence, Stavro’s mother and Kyra live the good life, dressing up and hosting parties full of dance and music, attended by young suitors. Young Stavro’s job is to keep a lookout for his father and brother, so the suitors have time to escape out a back window. During these visits home, and just about every day before relocating to the other side of the city, Stavro’s father beats his mother.

The turning point comes when Stavro’s mother decides to throw the party to end all parties, perhaps because she can sense that things are about to take a turn for the worse, or perhaps because she has some kind of death wish. Either way, it turns out as she expects and Stavro’s father beats her within an inch of her life, blinding her in one eye. Kyra is locked in a wardrobe and Stavro taken back to the other house by the workshop. He manages to escape and to rescue Kyra and his mother, and they flee Braila.

Stavro is around twelve years old at this point.

Stavro’s mother leaves him and his sister in the care of her brothers while she seeks medical treatment for her eye and disfigurement. That’s the last we see of her, and given her declaration that she was determined to kill herself if she ever lost her beauty or ability to enjoy life, it’s safe to assume that she takes her life at some point off screen.

Kyra, meanwhile, immediately spurs their uncles into avenging the violence enacted on the family, and the uncles agree. Their older brother is killed in the ambush, but their father escapes and Stavro and his sister are sent to a safehouse. It doesn’t take long for them (or for Kyra, at least) to get bored with their new life, and they are soon kidnapped. Their kidnapper sells Kyra to a harem (which is only mentioned in an aside), while Stavro remains with him as, it is heavily implied, a sex slave.

(So ends section two.)

He manages to escape after a few years and immediately sets about Istanbul looking for his mother and his sister, to no avail. It doesn’t take long for another creepy old man to abduct Stavro, luring him in with false promises of helping to find his family only to once again keep him as a sex slave. More years pass and Stavro once again manages to escape, get some papers (this is the point where he becomes Stavro rather than Dragomir), and then get robbed. One day he ends up in Damascus, and sees a cart pass with a woman who looks rather like Kyra. Stavro tries to get her attention, following the cart all the way to a villa. He’s denied entry, of course, and that’s where an elderly salep vendor finds him and takes him in. They spend many happy years together, even after Stavro serves a stint in prison and is exiled from the city, until the older man’s death.

(So ends section three.)

Stavro ends up in Bucharest, a sort of itinerant merchant and maybe still selling salep. He boards with a family for a while and becomes infatuated with their daughter, telling her stories of his travels. This escalates until they are engaged to be married, but tradition dictates that newlyweds are obligated to prove that the marriage has been consummated (by means of some bloodied sheets). Stavro cracks under the pressure to perform, and under the pressure of his own presumed homosexuality, and promptly faints and then falls ill. His wife is understanding and compassionate about it, and the community at first see him as an invalid, potentially the subject of a curse. But days, weeks, months go by without any sex, and their patience runs thin. Stavro is once again a prisoner of sorts. Neither he nor his wife are permitted to leave the house, and Stavro in particular has become persona non grata in their quarter of Bucharest. The couple makes plans to leave the city, since they’re still otherwise happy and fond of each other and can imagine a life together. Then, mere days before their escape, his brothers in law find an old traveling companion of Stavros, presumably also a lover, who immediately outs Stavro. (Every translation in the WhatsApp book club seemed to use an interrupted slur for a gay man in this reveal. In Swedish it was rendered as “b—”, presumably short for “bög.”) The escape plans come to nothing, Stavro is driven out of the house, and his bride drowns herself in the river.

(So ends section one.)

The framing device is Stavro’s invitation to Adrian to come help him and another man, Mikhail (I think) sell watered-down citric acid as lemonade in another distant town. Adrian has encountered Stavro somewhere out in town, and we get our first impression of the man: a tragic figure, a bit of a buffoon but intentionally so, someone who is hiding something. His scheme requires some kind of go-between and he thinks Adrian is right for the job. On their first night on the road, the three men spend the night in a hayloft and Stavro makes an attempt to seduce, or at least fondle, Adrian. Adrian is a bit naive, while the worldly Mikhail knows immediately what Stavro is trying to do and berates him for it. By way of apology, Stavro then begins his tale of woe, as if to explain why he has become such a creature so burdened with vice. (“Vice” is the specific word used in the Swedish translation, at least, and is used again and again by Stavro to describe himself and by others to describe him.)

Stavro is a tragic figure. Any joy, any pleasure, any human connection he’s ever had is almost immediately tainted with tragedy. That much is clear. But it’s hard to situate Stavro in a narrative. We don’t see a progression from naive to embittered, or ignorant to more worldly. The inside-out chronology means that the book ends in the middle of Stavro’s life, a very deliberate narrative choice that immediately invites speculation. Why does this episode have such an ultimate ring of finality to it?

Putting aside the larger question of the disjointed timeline, it’s hard to like Stavro. It’s hard to like any of the people we’re supposed to feel sorry for. Yes, Stavro’s father is a petty, violent tyrant, but his mother and sister come across as party girls with no interest in taking care of themselves. Of course I’m reading Kyra Kyralina through a different lens than the original audience, in a different social context, but the way that Stavro’s mother insists that she is a creature made to enjoy luxury, love, pleasure, and that she cannot be other than what she is hits a sour note for me. I managed to find an English translation of exactly the passage I’m thinking of:

I was made by the Lord for the pleasures of the flesh, just as he made the mole to live underground without light. And just as that creature has everything it needs to live in the earth, I was lacking nothing to enjoy my life of pleasure. I made a vow to kill myself if I were forced by men to knuckle under and live a life other than what my body and soul dictated. Today, I am thinking about that vow.

From the blog seraillon, who seemed to like Kyra Kyralina a lot more than I did.

Other places describe the story as a picaresque, but it’s hard to read consistently getting kidnapped and imprisoned by different abusers as a picaresque, since much of the time Stavro is confined and not meeting that many people or having that many adventures. Stavro himself isn’t particularly interesting, either. Things happen to him, but we only get surface level emotions in response.

There is also a question of version and translation: Istrati wrote the original in French, but then rewrote it and completely reworked it in Romanian. The Swedish translation, judging by the translator (Barbro Andersson), was from the Romanian version rather than the French. One wonders how much was different between the two versions.

Yellowface

R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface was big and splashy in my circles when it debuted. It was one of the few new releases that I actually noticed, though it appears I didn’t take the step of adding it to my TBR. Alas, it won’t count for that goal!

Someone in my Swedish book club floated the idea of R. F. Kuang, though torn between this one and Babel. I’m a bit ashamed to say that I pushed for Yellowface out of the two, based purely on the opinions of other bookish friends whose taste I trust implicitly. I say “ashamed” because I’m not sure I liked Yellowface all that much and wonder if Babel would have been more interesting.

Juniper “June” Hayward is a struggling White author with one flop of a novel under her belt; her Chinese-American Yale classmate Athena Liu is a literary rockstar. When Athena chokes to death on a pancake after the women go out for drinks, June takes the opportunity to steal her latest novel about Chinese laborers in Europe during World War I. June revises the manuscript and sends it off to her agent, passing it off as entirely her own work. The final product, The Last Front, is a runaway bestseller—maybe in part because June capitalizes on her connection to Athena, blowing their ambiguous frienemyship entirely out of proportion. Her publisher, meanwhile, decides to publish under the name Juniper Song and shoots some new, racially ambiguous author photos. June becomes a darling of the literati and the online AAPI community, setting up scholarships, mentoring aspiring writers, getting retweeted on Twitter and liked on Instagram.

The facade doesn’t last, of course, and accusations of plagiarism eventually make the rounds, but rather than come clean June doubles down. She rides out the scandal in the short term, but after she publishes a follow-up novella called Mother Witch that opens with a line she gleaned from Athena’s old notebooks, there’s no way out. While she struggles to revise and rewrite the novel without the plagiarized lines, spooky messages on social media convince June that she’s being haunted by Athena’s ghost. The campaign continues until June spirals out into a mental breakdown that ends with her recorded confession being released to the public. Her reputation now in tatters, June ends the book by plotting her literary revenge: a tell-all confessional memoir where she frames the publication of The Last Front as an elaborate hoax to expose how misogynistic and racist the publishing industry is.

Yellowface feels like a punching bag of a story for the sake of a few moments. By that I mean, it feels like Kuang had some points she wanted to make, and built the premise of the novel and the entirety of June’s character around creating the opportunity to make those points. The result is that when Kuang gets to have those moments in the story, the criticism is sharp, on point, and biting, such as her account of June and her editor—two White women—revising a story by a Chinese-American woman to include more (good) White people, or the fickle nature of the Twitterati. But the only reason those moments can happen is because, after the initial (understandable if morally icky) theft, June continues to make incredibly poor choices that defy all logic or sense of self-preservation. She flatly refuses to send The Last Front to a sensitivity reader for no other reason than it might delay publication; she keeps the plagiarized opening line in Mother Witch. Maybe this speaks to my own risk-averse nature, but if I knew I was already skating on thin moral and artistic ice, I would do everything I could to cover my ass.

All the while, since this is from a first-person perspective, we’re getting June’s unfiltered inner monologue, and it really seems like the point of the perspective is to make it clear to the reader how entitled and clueless she is, even as a White woman with “good” politics. (“I even voted for Biden!” she assures us early on.) I won’t say these people don’t exist, because they do, but June feels more like a low-effort caricature of them than anything else, which she has to be for the story to work. Without giving away too much of a plot twist, refusing the sensitivity reader is a plot-essential event that contributes to her downfall. But then there are other scenes where Kuang really, really nails what it’s like to struggle with a passion, an art that used to bring you joy but is now just DOA. She also makes it clear that June has some real mental health issues, with a past that includes sexual assault and (it sounds like) childhood bullying. If these scenes are meant to humanize June and provide some depth to the caricature, they feel weird next to the scenes where Kuang’s disdain for people like her just radiates off the page. June doesn’t feel like a more complex character for it; she just feels inconsistent.

I have to admit, for a minute I was hoping that the third act twist would be the slow reveal that Yellowface itself, the book you’re reading, is the tell-all confessional that June was planning to write. A meta ending like that would have done a lot to gloss over the failings of the filler. But Kuang doesn’t go there (I don’t think? maybe I missed some subtext) so I was left disappointed.

Obviously, a lot of the plot rides on June skirting the moral line of presenting as AAPI, or at least AAPI-adjacent. The title alone makes that clear. But I’m racking my brain to think of any equivalent scandal in recent literary news, of a White author passing as some flavor of AAPI to sell their novel because of its connections to AAPI culture. Expanding the field a bit, you get noteworthy racefaking cases like Rachel Dolezal, CV Vitolo-Haddad, and the “Gay in Damascus” blogger, but none of them are masquerading specifically as AAPI or to sell a novel. If you start from the published author angle instead of the racefaking one,  James Frey made up a whole bunch of stuff for A Million Little Pieces, but he never pretended to be anyone other than James Frey. There was the big plagiarism brouhaha over Jumi Bello’s The Leaving in 2022, but again no racefaking. The only case I can think of that resembles June’s literary yellowface is from over a hundred years ago: Winnifred Eaton writing as Onoto Watanna, producing books like A Japanese Nightingale. Still, her writing was her own work, even if it she was still a British-Chinese woman writing about Japan, a country she had no personal connection to or had ever visited. Am I just out of the loop?

A Brief History of Seven Killings

There is a lot of discussion about A Brief History of Seven Killings in the translation world because the first and biggest decision to make when translating it is: how do you render Jamaican Patois in other languages? It isn’t used incidentally, like in other Caribbean literature I’ve read before, for snippets of dialogue or occasional idiomatic expressions; Marlon James employs the dialect for the overwhelming majority of this 600+ page book. Putting aside the question of sheer weighty wordcount majority, the shifts between Patois and standard English are important pieces of characterization. Each perspective character has their own voice, of course, but even a single character will slip from one to the other depending on who they’re talking to and how they’re feeling. An educated middle-class character sometimes switches to Patois for her inner monologue under extreme emotional duress; others play it up as a racial performance in order to appeal to powerful white Americans and get what they want. These are deliberate choices by the author to convey…something…that falls flat if you were to make it literal or textual.

I don’t know to do it! I won’t pretend to know! But that makes A Brief History one of the rare books published since 2000 that I’m actually vaguely aware of, and so I was excited to see this book proposed for my international WhatsApp book club. I fell behind, however, and only finished this sometime in mid-June even though it was May’s book—probably because I was still making a heroic effort to finish Jag heter inte Miriam.

A Brief History of Seven Killings is a fictionalized account of the assassination attempt on Bob Marley, or maybe to put it more precisely, Marlon uses the assassination attempt on Bob Marley as a framing device for a story about Jamaica, Jamaicans, and their relationship to the United States that spans the course of fifteen years. Getting into any more plot than that would miss the point, because it’s less what happens and more how characters develop and inadvertently shape their destinies over the course of the book. In a way, plot is only incidental and is an excuse to bring together a particular ensemble cast that would otherwise have nothing to do with each other.

Djinns

Fatma Aydemir’s Djinns was another selection for my international WhatsApp book club. We have a lot of Turkish and German (and expats in Turkey and Germany) representation, so a German novel about a Turkish family in Germany was a logical choice.

Djinns is a quasi-multigenerational story, where each member of a Turkish nuclear family living in Germany stars in their own sections. The book starts with the father, Hüseyin, who has finally retired and moved to Istanbul, to the new apartment he’s managed to purchase through years of hard work and meticulous savings and where he imagines his family’s future happiness. From there we spend a section with each of the children (Umit, Peri, Hakan, and Sevda) and end with the mother (Emine). That’s a very dry description of a very involved, serious, sensitive book, but any more details than that and I would spoil the whole thing. It’s a masterpiece, and the English translation by Jon Cho-Polizzi is very thoughtfully done, with a foreword on various racialized terms and slang as well as a glossary of untranslated Turkish (and possibly also Kurdish?) terms in the back.

The Turkish-Kurdish owner and bartender at my local watering hole is probably around the same age as Hüseyin. He’s hospitable and very chatty, and if you show up with any regularity, you get to know him pretty quickly. His wife and kids are a recurring topic, and they must be about the same age as their counterparts in Djinns. They’re also a recurring topic between myself and my Njals saga book buddy and fellow patron: what’s it like to grow up as a secular Swede with a father like Ali, we wonder. What’s it like to be married to be married to him?

So I wonder if the secrets and relationships in Djinns are something Ali and his family would recognize. From my perspective, Aydemir captures how the tension between two cultures exacerbates the normal stresses and conflicts that arise in any family. No-No Boy is a comparison that comes to mind. But without that lived experience, of course, it’s hard for me to say for sure.

Jag heter inte Miriam

“The story is fiction, but it is true.” YuanTsung Chen’s remark in her introduction to The Dragon’s Village is also a perfect description of Majgull Axelsson’s Jag heter inte Miriam.

Looking back at my year of reading at the age of 39, there was great deal of history, especially World War II. Using the strictest possible definition of history or historical fiction, the list is:

*Still only currently reading, so I might not finish before I turn 40, or even at all.

Some of it was intentional, some of it (for example, book club picks or recommendations from friends) was pure happenstance. A year of reflection.

Jag heter inte Miriam is a kind of bildungsroman, following the titular Miriam (née Malika) from her childhood in Germany through the Holocaust and finally to land in Sweden. The name change arises when Malika takes on the uniform and identity of a dead Jewish girl, Miriam Goldberg, during her transport from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück. Malika is Romani and has already experienced life at the bottom rung of the prisoners’ self-determined hierarchy. The Nazis might have the most animosity for the Jews, but most of Miriam’s day is spent among prisoners, not Nazis. There was more foresight in this decision than Miriam could have realized, as she ends up on one of the white buses out of the camps and into Sweden—whose immigration policy at the time denied entry to Romani people. As a result, Miriam spends more of her life passing as Jewish than being authentically Romani.

Her entire life story is presented across 450 pages, through the narrative framing device of celebrating her 85th birthday with her stepson and his family: wife, daughter, grandson. The gift of a silver bracelet, engraved with her name and of what looks to be Romani craftsmanship, prompts her to remark “Jag heter inte Miriam” (“My name is not Miriam”), which naturally sends the family into a small uproar. Is this dementia? Alzheimer’s? A strange joke?

Granddaughter Camilla is the one to ask Miriam about it directly, and about her experience in the camps, which sets up the framing device for the rest of the story. In between long episodes of Miriam’s past, we come back to the present day setting and her lakeside walk with her granddaughter, where Camilla tries to come to grips with this history lesson.

There’s obviously a lot in here, and Axelsson includes a long list of references and books for further reading at the end, as well as a lengthy thank-you to fact checkers, historians, and interviewees. (I recognized Hans Caldaras‘ name among them, whose biography continues to live rent-free in my head even though I read it six years ago.) However, even if many of the events of the book actually happened—including the “tattarkravallerna” in Jönköping in 1948 or the Roma uprising in Auschwitz in May 1944—the character of Miriam Goldberg is still just that: a fictional character. There’s advantages and disadvantages to this approach to presenting history, and I don’t think there will ever be a conclusive answer to the question “Historical fiction: good or bad?”. It’s just something to be aware of.

Jag heter inte Miriam was another one for my annual reading goals, one that I’ve owned for more than a year. It took a painfully long time to read, not only because it’s 450 pages but also because it’s a goddamn Holocaust novel. Still, I’m glad I read it. By all accounts it seems like Axelsson tried to be as respectful and thoughtful as possible, and like she genuinely wanted to tackle history through the lens of fiction rather than crank out some tragedy porn.

It doesn’t seem like the book is out in English, but the fantastic Asymptote has an excerpt available, an excellent translation by Kathy Saranpa.