Mo Yan

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Book review, books, Chinese Literature, Literature, Mo Yan, Nobel Prize, Shifu You'll Do Anything For a Laugh, Short Stories

The contrast being Korean author O Chonghui’s “River of Fire” (just reviewed) and Chinese author Mo Yan’s short story collection “Shifu, You’ll Do Anything For a Laugh” is immense. Each deal with deprivation, survival and autuocracy, but the former tastes like bad medicine and the latter like sweetened bad medicine.

The preface to this short story collection should be read. It sheds life on Mo Yan’s life in China through its turbulent periods. You get the impression that as in the lead short story, Mo Yan, like Shifu will do anything for a laugh. Comedy is a very serious business.

Mo Yan has a good understanding of his craft. He is a story teller, not a writer of great “literary” talent. The same could be said of Dickens. It is a great talent to tell stories, particularly when the underlying theme needs to be masked. A 2012 Nobel Prize winner for Literature, his ability to meld folklore, fantasy, tradition, and political and social commentary into simple stories has not gone unnoticed.

“Shifu, You’ll Do Anything For a Laugh” is about a model worker’s effort to survive. The ending is weaker than then the body of the story which is fast paced.

“Man and Beast” is about post-war survival of an elderly Chinese soldier who remains in Japan not knowing the war has ended. It reflects on war, and the tortured relationship between the Japanese and the Chinese.

“Soaring” is a fanciful folktale about Chinese arranged marriage. It can be compared with a Garcia Marquez tale.

“Iron Child” is a brutal fable. It is a story about the Cultural Revolution and the disintegration of family. The deprivation is as deep if not deeper than that expressed in O Chonghui’s story, but its fanciful style is the honey that makes it easy to take.

“Love Story” is also from the Cultural Revolution. A love story of displacement, age, and class, it transforms negative circumstances into positive result. Whether it is love is another matter.

“Shen Garden” is also about relationships. It is a fractured one, as is the common theme in O Chonghui’s “River of Fire”. Here there is temporal integration, not disintegration.

“Abandoned Child” is the closest Mo Yan comes to explicit editorialism about Chinese culture and China’s one child policy. Like “Iron Child” it is a strong and at times brutal tale. It is hard to believe he would not have received a reprimmand from the government because of this story, unless it was written after China abandoned the policy.

Mo Yan is an author well worth seeking out. From a writer’s perspective it proves that “necessity is the mother of invention.” O Chonghui, although having the difficulty of being a female writer, writing from a woman’s perspective in a male dominant society, was not at risk of being prohibited from writing. Mo Yan having suffered personally from poverty and the constraints of the Cultural Revolution needed to be more inventive in his style. As a lawyer it reminded me of the North Carolinian Senator Sam Ervin, who throughout his clever questioning during the Watergate Hearings, just referred to himself as a simple country lawyer. Watch out for the simple and excessively humble.

River of Fire

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Book review, books, Fiction, Korean Literature, Literature, O Chonghui, River of Fire, Women's Literature

“River of Fire” is an anthology of some of O Chonghui’s short stories written over the course of her career. There is a feeling of displacement and futility in many of the stories, all of which are told through female narrators. It extends beyond gender in Korean culture. There is emotional deprivation and detachment in lives limited to survival. It is not the under-belly that is being revealed, it is the condition of the society in the post Korean War period. The short story for which this anthology is named, captures the edginess of the characters, who are one spark away from lighting up the condition of their lives.

The anthology begins with “The Toy Shop Woman”; the story which first got the author noticed. It is told from the perspective of an emotionally troubled teenager, who escapes from her dysfunctional family to a paraplegic doll shop store owner. Hers is a half-life, rapidly losing radiation.

Coke and cigarettes appear to be a daily diet in “One Spring Day”. They are addictions that can be relied upon when a housewife’s lonely existence can’t be pierced as age creeps in to deprive her of the allure that might cool her heat.

The beauty of childhood innocence is hard to kill, leaving an indelible mark that is later juxtaposed against a genealogy of cheating and failed husbands. ” A Portrait of Magnolias” tries to paint over the blossom of an unfulfilled marriage with the ecstasy of a mutually lonely one-night stand.

“Morning Star” is a story of a post-college evening drinking reunion. The narrator is a married woman whose life experience is separated from that of her friends who remain single and in careers.

“Fireworks” could have been a sequel to “One Spring Day”, but to me it is a disjointed story that meanders too far afield.

“Lake P’aro” is a later work. It is a woman’s search for identity during the course of an archaeological excursion. The woman takes the trip with a friend of her husband, who remains in the U.S. with their child. The woman was maritally and culturally displaced in the U.S.. Despite the fact that a dam had displaced more recent villages, the land reveals life from earlier periods when it was dry. The story is not as dark as the rest of the anthology and reflects change in South Korea and its culture.

“The Old Well” plows age and marital relationships. Part folktale in form, like “Fireworks” its subsidiary paths do not add to the story in my view.

I may have failed this book, as I was somewhat distracted while reading it. Like other works which are dark and sometimes disturbing, it did not generate much enthusiasm in me. This is not a failure of the work as it is likely honest writing. The translators have won awards for their translations, but I wonder if the stories read better in Korean. O Chonghui has won awards for a number of her short stories, but none of them were included in this anthology. I would have liked to have read one of them as a point of comparison.

Of Trust and Time

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Central Bankers, economy, Federal Reserve Board, Fiscal Crisis, Floyd Norris, Global Crisis, Monetary Policy, New York Times

Floyd Norris is a business journalist who writes for the New York Times. His articles are interesting and insightful. His article in the April 26, 2013 Business Section of the Times was no less. In fact, it was rather chilling.

The article was about a proposed change in Federal Reserve policy the intent of which is to better insulate the U.S. banking system from other systems, particularly Europe. His point being that Central Bankers, and in particular, the Federal Reserve, no longer trusted other Central Bankers to effectively regulate their monetary system, and banks subject to it. In effect, the Fed would require higher standards. The European’s have objected and the Fed has not formally put the policy in place, but the message is clear. There is a lack of trust.

In a crisis there are two important assets. Capital requirements, liquidity requirements all are in important, but when they cannot stem a tide, when rules need to be bent or broken, it is trust and time that are critical. These are off balance sheet assets. There is no IFRS, GAAP, or STAT accounting policy for them. You only see them in legal documents when they have failed: default clauses; offsets; collateral; bankruptcy.

When there is less trust, you need more time. This was evident in the 2008 crisis, as first trust evaporated and contagion let time cascade away. The connectedness and speed of transactions became a nightmare. The game of quick trades and derivatives could not be unwound as the notional amounts were devoid of relative value. Regulation subsequent to the crisis was supposedly going to address institutions that were too big to fail, but they have only gotten bigger, and then our government leveraged themselves. Tier 1 capital- sovereign capital for the most part- which was supposed to be the most secure capital supporting these institutions (which by regulation banks and insurance companies must hold certain percentages of) became weak capital. Despite excessive debt, which temporarily can be managed, the U.S. has once again become the currency of choice. The Fed is now playing on this for competitive reasons and other countries have been compelled to play along.

The problem now is that economies are unraveling, because too many people are unemployed or under-employed. On a micro-economic basis corporations have temporarily protected themselves. This is not a long term solution for them. The finance ministers in Europe have belatedly realized the macro-economic effect of austerity is destablizing their continent, with spill-over effect. China, still a derivative economy, will not be a white knight, as they are leveraged and cannot withstand internal upheavel.

We are increasingly captivated by models, program trades and financial engineering in the hope that we can earn that little extra margin. It is time we forgot about momemtum, moved away from dark pools, and recognized once again that value is long term rather than immediate. We have a lot more time, and with more time, mistakes can be corrected; trust can be restored. In the end, what Germany practiced in 2008 must be absorbed globally. Corporations need to take a micro hit and retain and hire full time workers in there own country. This is particularly true for the U.S., because its consumer economy still drives the world, particularly when Europe has pulled off the road. China’s rising middle class will get there, but it is not there yet.

The truth is that most large businesses do not need tax breaks to do this. Their effective rates are not substantial and they have sat on piles of cash. For those who redomesticated to more tax efficient havens, they should start to bring the funds back to the U.S. regardless of the tax implications. They will ultimately recapture it in revenue as the world economy revives. The equities markets are a fiction of current unsustainable monetary policy. Trust and time is running out.

Ramblings again

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Beth Bosworth, Book, Bpok Review, Brooklyn Authors, Drue Heinz Prize, Literature, Short Stories, The Source of Life and Other Stories

I must confess that I could not get all the way through Beth Bosworth’s book of short stories “The Source of Life and Other Stories”. I picked it up because she is a writer from my neighborhood. I know the private school she taught at, the locations of some of her stories, and she looks like someone I may have seen-although it is the look of a number of private school teachers in the area. The book is a winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. The individual who selected this book for the prize writes “there are leaps of faith here, nonetheless, as the collection dispenses a kind of narrative psychotropic for survival and redemption, with a chaser of humor mixed in.” I could have done with a straight bottle of vodka. This said E.L. Doctorow had positive comments about her first book of short stories “Praise For a Burden of Earth and Other Stories.”
Perhaps she ran out of things to say.

The book has two versions of the same story. Much of it revolves around the angst of a divorcee Jewish teacher and mother of two rebounding. Perhaps the book was cathartic. The editor should know better; unless this book was intended to be used in a writing class.

The writing style is stream of consciousness. To me at times it is like the ramblings of a child. Writing thoughts in your head, parenthetically or disassociated, does not make for an easy or enjoyable read.

There is one story that is definitely worth reading. It was the only reason I continued reading subsequent stories. “Conspiracy” is a powerful story of family and old age. I would borrow the book from a library to read this story.

Ramblings

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Book review, books, Fiction, La Casa de Carton, Latin American literature, Martin Adan, Peruvian literature, Poetry, The Cardboard House

A disclaimer: I am not a reader of poetry. Too much work.

Martin Adan (accents over the “i” and second “a”), pseudonym for Rafael de la Fuente Benavides, is a known Peruvian poet. Contrary to his real name, his life was not a good life. He was an alcoholic and spent many years in sanitariums. The “Cardboard House” (La casa de carton- accent over the “o”) was his first and only novel, written when he was 20. It takes place in Barranco, a seaside resort area of Lima, which was on the decline. The novel has no plot. It is best described as vignettes, although this too overstates the narrative. It is more poetic than prose. He was asked about this work and he said he wrote it to practice grammatical rules his professor gave to him. This too is seems inaccurate. The work is best read as a resource for descriptive expression. This is particularly true for landscapes and cityscapes. In his metaphorical way his writing can be imaginative and beautiful. His work is described by some as transcendental, but it can be overdone, particularly in volume. Best read as if poetry.

“Between one pole and the next there is a distance of eighty feet that never decreases or increases– the poles neither love nor hate one another… misanthropy, misogyny, at the most a grumble of irritation or a greeting from one to the other, and this only because they can’t not do so… At night the poles go for walks. On a street quite far away. I recognized a pole that spends the whole day at the door of my house with hat in hand, stiff and thoughtful, as if suffering quietly from a pain in the kidneys or doing arithmetic in its head. The poles never gather. During these strange walks the distance between them remains constant; they tie ropes around their waists: mountain climbers on the mountain of their lives at twenty-five degrees below zero. We attribute to them the reckless daring of men without families or trite pleasures– a Count Godeneau-Platana, pederast and Egyptologist; another Prince Giustati, Castilian and aesthete; a Mexican millionaire suddenly impoverished by a revolution…The following morning (mornings always follow) the poles return to their assigned places. And there they are while fourteen gyrating hours mutate the color of the air– long, skinny, erect, rigid, wondering whether or not it will rain. One pole is called Julian, because he lets his beard grow… the beard: paper streaming from the carnival of 1912. Another pole is called Matias, because that is his name. A poor asthmatic pole on Mott Street dreams of buying an overcoat made of French fabric. There are poles that cater to dogs. There are poles that are friends of beggars. There are European poles with green eyes of crystal insurlators. There are streetlight poles. There are telephone poles.”

A description of an ice cream vendors cart being pulled done the streets of Barranco are similiar.

“How does this cart sound! The poor thing tears its soul out on the stones. Yet it would not alter its course for anything in the world– its straight course past the walls of the dead-end street, straight into imbecillity. O little cart, cross over this lawn kept smooth for you by water of the fountain. Between these things there exist bonds of mutual aid hampered by man. The rumble of the cart’s wheels on the paving stones gladdens the sad waters of the fountain.”

Harvest

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book reviews, Booker Prize, books, english literature, Fiction, Harvest, Jim Crace, Tudor period, Whitbread Prize

If there is a book in need of an award, Jim Crace’s Harvest is it.

A simple story well told may be the hardest to write as it is overly dependent upon prose. As descriptive of the vicissitude of land and human nature, the language of Harvest is more Elizabethan in cadence, than the likely Tudor period of the plot. It is a time of displacemnt, not unlike our present time and the industrial revolution. Here man is foreclosed by animal rather than machine. Economy of scale is still a measure of poverty. The tale is told in a pocket of English countryside, the province of a minor master of a manor almost indistinguishable from its subsistence tenant farmers. Historically, but not evident in the novel, the displacement results in England’s poor laws, as vagabonds in numbers can be socially upsetting. As Mr. Crace writes “Dissent is not measured it is weighed”.

The book cover was a curiousity to me and nearly had me ignore it. It boldly, in large font, displayed the author’s name. Secondarily, in lower case at the bottom of the cover, the title of the book appears. It seemed a bit promotional to me. I wondered if his publisher was trying to live off Mr. Crace’s substantial literary heroics over a decade earlier. In 1997 his novel “Quarantine” was named Whitbread Novel of the Year and short listed for the Booker Prize. Testimonials on the back cover from John Updike for “Quarantine” and from John Banville for “Being Dead” were very positive. There were none for Harvest. As the book was just published I have no doubt they will come. I would not be surprised to see it at least short listed for the Booker Prize. I will be adding “Quarantine” to my reading list.

Needless to say, read Harvest.

Little Sinners

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Book review, books, Female Literature, Fiction, Karen Brown, Little Sinners, Prarie Schooner Book Prize, Suburban Noir, Women's Literature

There are incomplete women in this compendium of Karen Brown’s short stories. They desperately reside or have fallen from upper scale suburbia, products of missing parents, divorce, sex toy boyfriends, or the entrapment of an era that feels like the 1950s and early 60s. You feel their emptiness, their need, their indifference.

“Little Sinners” is the mildest to me, a story of the meanness of two young girls. “Swimming” is an affair in a pool magnified by imaginative gossip of the neighborhood. Do parents pass on their traits genetically or environmentally?

“Stillborn” is darker. Neighborly transgressions, with salvation delivered.”Homing” is a story about a fatalist who makes a choice to have life continue to decide for her. The choices are limited as are the stunted male companions.

“Philter” is either a love or a magic potion. The former is more sex than love willingly participated in with a dysfunctional or sinister family by another empty female vessel.

“An Heiress Walks Into a Bar” should have a Catskill punchline, but explores the whole left in daughters when fathers disappear unexpectantly. Fathers gone missing, plays out in a number of Ms. Brown’s stories. “Passing” and “Leaf House” share this trait, although the latter reflects an ill-fated, breakage of a relationship in Victorian Connecticut. Like “An Heiress Walks Into a Bar”, “The Fountain” is an orchestrated larcenous affair, following a well settled divorce.

“Mistresses” like “Housewifery” has that desperate housewife feel to it, but each is distinctive in having a female character that is finding a way to complete herself, rather than being completed by others. The “Mistresses” is the better of the two, in my view.

For those who track awards, this book received the Prairie Schooner book prize in fiction. Ms. Brown writes well, but the stories tread the same ground. I believe her first novel, “The Longing of Wayward Girls”, will be published this July. From the title it seems as it will plow this genre a little deeper.

“Little Sinners” is a book worth reading. It would be interesting to see Ms. Brown stretched beyond this theme in her next publication as she is a capable writer.

The black Liz Taylor

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Black Liz Taylor, Dan Barry, New York Times, News, Short Stories

There are 133 cemeteries in Delawre that you can view online. There is one outside Seaford, Delaware. It is remote and has been described as a poor person’s cemetery; all sand and weeds, many with metal grave markers. Access to it is only through a dirt path off the main road. It does not appear online.

Seaford is about 30 mile away from Slaughter Neck, Delaware, an African-American community, southwest of the somewhat more upscale Delaware Bay town of Slaughter Beach. Slaughter Beach, which like many towns in the area dates back to the 1700s or earlier, houses the Mispillion Lighthouse, the only wooden lighthouse still standing in Delaware.

There is nothing to visit in Slaughter Neck, but Margaret E. Smith, the self-described black Liz Tayor without money, grew up and remained in the farming community. Her dad was an ice man, farmer and factory wqrker and her mom a domestic. Margaret ran a beauty shop in Slaughter Beach until she retired. At 89 she had some heart problems and took medication for it.

Margaret went out shopping in Milford, Delaware for presents for the kids of her siblings who were coming for Easter. She was approached by two girls, 14 and 15, as she stopped for ice cream at a convenience store. They offered to pay her for a ride in her Buick LaSabre so that they could get to the other side of town. Margaret offered them a ride for free. The route became increasingly circuitous, before they forcibly took the car keys from her. They dumped her in the trunk and took a joy ride. It was mid-March and the weather was still cold, but Margaret sustained it and the jossling as they drove the car to West Rehoboth, Delaware. There they opened the trunk, took the $500 that Margaret had for presents, and locked her in again. The girls checked into a Days Inn and spent the night there with their friends.

The next day they drove to the cemetery outside of Seaford and dumped Margaret there. Without shoes, she started crawling through the cemetary. She had no idea where she was. Her hands were worn and her knees bloodied when she was found two days after she offered the girls a ride. There was no paparazzi to take the black Liz’s picture.

This could be the basis for a short story, but it is fact. The story by New York Times reporter Dan Barry made the front page of Saturday’s paper and was picked up by other media.

I can’t help but wonder from where these vile children came. They have been arrested. There may be a short story in their background. There usually is.

The Absolutist

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Book review, books, english literature, gay literature, John Boyne, lost generation literature, pacifism, The Absolutist, war literature, World War I

Writing a page turner is an art. Like art it is in the eye of the beholder. For me, it is generally mass market literature.

When reading John Boyne’s “The Absolutist” I thought about Herman Wouk’s “The Winds of War”. The books are disimiliar but each are a quick read. I usually read multiple books at one time, a chapter at a time. Here I ignored the four other books I had and read this straight through.

“The Absolutist” is set in World War I. It is a lost generation novel with self-loathing heightened by closeted feelings. It traces Tristan Sadler’s relationships from childhood, through basic training and trench warfare and briefly as an octogenarian. It delves into levels of pacifism, cowardice, passive aggression, and prejudice. While these themes are handled consistent with the period, the implications are not time sensitive. It leaves unanswered the question of what is a war crime, when the war is criminal? Where is self-preservation on the moral scale?

The description of trench warfare, although not unique, is compelling and lends depth to the characters and the emotive pitch of the novel. For the squeamish, you best not eat and read some portions of the novel.

The author wrote the popular “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas”, which was turned into a film. It was a thematic view of a concentration camp, that some found offensive because of its unrealistic humanisim.

“The Absolutist” is not great literature. Nonetheless, if you find this genre attractive, you will soon be done with the book.

THIRD REICH

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board game literature, Book review, books, Chilean literature, Fiction, Roberto Bolano, Third Reich

The posthumous publication of reknown Chilean author Roberto Bolano’s (tilda on the n) works are legion. They are discovered like dead sea scrolls. “The Third Reich”, a novel he wrote in 1989, was published in 2011. It is not a bad novel; but neither is it a find at an estate sale.

While the story is absorbing, I did not have any feeling about the characters, nor find a purpose for the story. The prose, at least in translation, is no more distinguished than the plot.

Udo Berger and his German girlfriend Ingeborg vacation at a Costa Brava hotel where Udo’s family went when he was a child. Udo is the German champion in the board game “Third Reich”, which re-imagines the military strategies of the Allies and Axis countries on the Western Front during WWII. His part-time job is to develop and write about new strategies for the game, and much to the chagrin of Ingeborg, he is spends most of the time in the hotel room, save for clubbing with a more wild German couple and some locals, Wolf and Lamb, that they met. He also is fascinated by Quemado, a burn victim vendor of pedal boats, who lives under his boats on the beach. He engages Quemado in the game. With surreptious coaching from the hotel matron’s dying German husband Quemado becomes successful. Udo has an unfulfilled relationship with the matron, who warns him to leave after after the unexplained death of their windsurfing German friend, Ingeborg completes her holiday and returns home. There is slight sexual tension and physical tension, perhaps mostly in Udo’s mind, as he begins to mentally disintegrate while he remains on the Costa Brava to ostensibly to resolve the friend’s death, or to consummate the affair with the matron.

The novel could have used more editing to develop a rationale, other than maturation of Udo. It is a decent beach read, but no more.