Mightier than the Sword: "My Hero" by Tom Holt

Mightier than the Sword: "My Hero"
Tom Holt
(Orbit, London: 2002)

Mightier than the Sword is Tom Holt's Omnibus 2 which consists of the novels "Who's Afraid of Beowulf?" and "My Hero". "My Hero" first published by Orbit in 1996.

READ: April 2007

I read the other half of Tom Holt's Omnibus 2, Mightier than the Sword, "Who's Afraid of Beowulf?", in March.

Of the three books by Tom Holt that I have now read (the third is Falling Sideways, which I read back in January 2006), I think this one is the weakest. It is funny and entertaining, but it suffered from the same thing Falling Sideways did to some degree: too many characters and too many parallel storylines. Figuring out who everyone is and what their purpose is in the story, is all a bit unnecessarily exhausting. Even when they all come together at the end, it isn't all clear. I think what made "Who's Afraid of Beowulf?" so successful, in my opinion at least, is that it avoided this almost entirely, by having just two sets of characters (Good v. Evil, essentially), rather than a bunch who come together at the climax only. That can be done well, but in this case, it was just a bit too scattered.

That being said, I did enjoy the book. It was an interesting premise: Jane is an author whose fictional characters start to need her help, and then when she tries to help them, it turns out she needs theirs. Fiction becomes reality, and vice-versa.

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

Memoirs of a Geisha
Arthur Golden
(Alfred A. Knopf, New York: 1997)

This edition published by Vintage Contemporaries, New York, 2000.

READ: March-April 2007

I haven't seen the movie, but have wanted to read the book for a while. Initially, I was confused. I had always thought that Memoirs of a Geisha was a novel, but it began with a word from a translator who claimed to have translated Sayuri's words faithfully from the Japanese. I then realized that, of course, this was part of the novel, meant to give it an added aura of authenticity.

It's a wonderful book. Nitta Sayuri, a 9-year-old girl with unusual blue-grey eyes, is not born into the world of geishas, as most are, but is taken from her small village, after her mother dies and her father can no longer care for her, and sold to a geisha house in Kyoto. This is, effectively, akin to being sold into slavery. Many girls who trained to be geisha did not succeed, managing to incur substantial debts along the way, indebting them indefinitely to the geisha house to which they belong. For Sayuri, the story is, at least at first, much the same, but as she becomes more committed to the idea of becoming a geisha, things change.

A compelling read, I hated putting the book down at the end of a chapter, always wanting to read "just one more chapter". Though sometimes I lacked sympathy for Sayuri, I could not doubt that her story was a fairly common one in Gion, the famous geisha district of Kyoto. The book also spans a key point in modern Japanese history, from the late 1920s through the 1930s, to WWII and the post-war Occupation years. Arthur Golden apparently did a fair bit of research for the book, and as far as I know, his account of what it meant to be a geisha in those days is fairly accurate. I might see the movie now, to see how it compares.

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
(Alfred A. Knopf, New York: 1988)

Translated from Spanish by Edith Grossman, 1988.

READ: March 2007

I'd read One Hundred Years of Solitude many, many years ago (back in high school, in fact), and really enjoyed it. This book was one of the few left to me by my predecessor, but I hadn't gotten around to reading it yet.

Now, I was feeling a bit down about Japan at the time I read it, so I think it was a bit of a relief to be so suddenly transported to Colombia. It is the story of Florentino Ariza and his lifelong wait for Fermina Daza, a beautiful, haughty woman who once told him she would marry him but then did not.

It was a compelling read. It was supposed to be the book I brought with me on my trip to Hokkaido, but I handily finished it in the 3 days before leaving. That being said, I started to be filled with dread sometime during the last 100 pages. The characters were starting to do and say things that I thought were leading to a dumb, Disneyfied, happy ending. While that's a bit harsh, I was disappointed in the end. I guess I just don't have any sympathy for Ariza, who spends his life in a weird fantasy world where everything is done with the intention that one day Fermina Diaz will come back to him, and when she does, everything must be just so. I see that as being a bit compulsive, in a creepy way rather than a cute, or devoted, way. Maybe I'm just too unromantic to appreciate it.

Vintage Murakami by Haruki Murakami

Vintage Murakami
Haruki Murakami
(Vintage Books, USA: 2004)

Includes the opening chapter of his novel Norwegian Woods; "Lieutenant Mamiya's Long Story: Parts I and II" from his novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; "Shizuko Akashi" from his non-fiction book on the 1995 Tokyo subway attacks, Underground; and the short stories, "Barn Burning", "honey pie", and "ice man".

READ: March 2007

Reading this collection of works from Murakami, who is apparently one of Japan's top contemporary authors, was a bit of a tease. I'd just start getting into a story when it would end, leaving me wanting more. Luckily, many of these stories are, of course, parts of longer novels, and so someday, more I can get!

His style is sparser than I normally like (sometimes I wonder if that's more of a translation thing, though I guess the trick to being a good translator is to use a style consistent with the author's style in their original language), but they are interesting and insightful. The excerpts from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in particular still leave me shuddering while thinking about them late at night (almost a month after I finished reading the book!), and I may definitely have to read that entire book someday, if none other, in order to exorcise those memories.

The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham

The Moon and Sixpence
W. Somerset Maugham
(Penguin Books, London: 1944)

First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann Ltd. in 1919.

READ: March 2007

I hadn't read this kind of book in a while (you know, "real" literature) and wasn't sure what to expect, but it had an interesting premise as being loosely based on Paul Gauguin's life.

Well, once I picked it up, I almost couldn't put it down, and finished it in a compulsive burst of reading. I think it took me three days, and only then because I had to stop reading for sleeping and working. The narrator, a writer (go figure), is likeable enough, but the main subject, Charles Strickland, is a thoroughly disagreeable, unlikeable man. Yet somehow it didn't matter. The book is cleverly written in such a way that I spent my time not wondering what is going to happen to Strickland, which would have held much less interest for me (we know the outcome from page one anyway), but in a way that compelled me to see how the narrator learned more about Strickland. It's really quite good. Disappointing lack of anybody resembling Vincent van Gogh, however. ;)

Wild Grass: China's Revolution from Below by Ian Johnson

Wild Grass: China's Revolution from Below
Ian Johnson
(Penguin Group, London: 2004)

Some of the material previously appeared in a slightly different form in the Wall Street Journal .

READ: March 2007

Here's an excellent example of how a well-respected journalist should write a book based on his columns and expertise in a particular area.

Ian Johnson is a roving correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, and lived in Beijing for seven years. In his book, Wild Grass, he tells the stories of three people in China, three stories of people who tried in little ways to resist the corruption and oppression of the Communist Party. The first is a paralegal who is jailed for having helped peasants mount a legal battle against illegal taxes. Second is an architect fighting to save Beijing's historic buildings, which are being destroyed at an alarming rate. The last is a daughter who has been jailed and running into difficulties with authorities because she tried to find out answers about her mother's death in prison (where she was jailed as a Falun Gong practitioner).

I know shamefully little about China and its politics, and understand even less. I was depressed for at least two days straight after finishing this book. That being said, it was an excellent read and I strongly encourage anyone with any interest in the outside world (esp politics) to read it. Johnson knows his subject, he knows how to make a story interesting, and he knows how to make things resonate on a personal level. There were a few "of course Communism is bad and of course it is failing" moments, but overall, he does a good job of exposing the Chinese government's current weaknesses in policy and strategy without devolving too far into the land of democracy-and-market-freedom-is-great. It is well-written, and the endnotes put Thomas Friedman to shame.*

* Not that that is very hard to do.

Mightier than the Sword: "Who's Afraid of Beowulf?" by Tom Holt

Mightier than the Sword: "Who's Afraid of Beowulf?"
Tom Holt
(Orbit, London: 2002)

Mightier than the Sword is Tom Holt's Omnibus 2 which consists of the novels "Who's Afraid of Beowulf?" and "My Hero". "Who's Afraid of Beowulf?" first published by McMillan (London) Limited in 1988.

READ: March 2007

Hildy Frederiksen is just your average archaeologist until the day she accidentally awakens King Hrolf Earthstar and his twelve companions from their centuries-old sleep. King Hrolf is determined to carry on, and finish once and for all, his war against the Sorceror King.

This is only the second book of Tom Holt's that I have read. I quite enjoy his style so far, and plan on reading more (including, of course, the second novel that is included in this book, "My Hero"). He's a bit of an oddball, an interesting mix of scifi-meets-fantasy-meets-humour. Anyway, this book was quite enjoyable; a quick, easy, entertaining read (just over 200 pages), and made me laugh out loud at a number of points.

Looking for the Lost: Journeys Through a Vanishing Japan by Alan Booth

Looking for the Lost: Journeys Through a Vanishing Japan
Alan Booth
(Kodansha America, New York: 1995)

READ: February 2007

I've mentioned this before: Alan Booth is often mentioned as the quintessential travel writer of Japan. Like in The Roads to Sata, Booth takes us deep into the heart and soul of Japan and ordinary Japanese. Published a few years after his premature death from cancer in 1993, Looking for the Lost, is actually three shorter novellas detailing three different walks he took in Japan.

First, Tsugaru. This is the peninsula at the very northern end of Honshu, the central Japanese island, in Aomori Prefecture. Booth sets out in May 1988 to walk the same route taken by a Japanese author 44 years previously.

Second, Saigo's Last March, wherein Booth recreates the route taken by Saigo Takamori in August 1877, when Saigo, a previous government minister and one of the leaders of the loyalist army that defeated the shogun, led a final, ill-fated protest again the new government.

Third, Looking for the Lost itself, which, I was slightly thrilled to learn, was Booth's recounting of his walk along the length of the Nagara River through Gifu Prefecture (!). He is following what might be the path taken by the survivors of the ruling Heike clan after they were run out of the imperial capital of Kyoto and forced to flee in the late 12th century, one of the seminal points in Japanese history.

As I expected, Looking for the Lost was a tremendously enjoyable book, though, I must admit, there was something almost disquieting about reading about Japan in such a personal way, but one that was so different from my own (and my own could never hope to be similar). We all view countries in our own ways, and while I don't know if Booth loved Japan, he certainly was fascinated by it. And that, I think, is what makes his two books so good. He is not vaunting Japan, nor, à la Will Ferguson, poking fun at its idiosyncracies. He just tells the story as it is, as it happens.

I think I may have enjoyed Looking for the Lost even more than The Roads to Sata. The fact that there were three stories of three very different parts of Japan, each meticulously described with great personal anecdotes that really brought the regions to life, was excellent. It also probably helps that I am now in Japan and can better relate to some of his experiences. Also, the Japan he describes here feels different from the Japan in Sata, which was a Japan of the late 1970s and vastly more inward-thinking than it is now (as difficult as it is to imagine; Japan still being largely fixated on itself and often unaware of the larger world outside its borders).

And yes, most importantly, Booth does find the lost Japan he'd been looking for for the past 20-some years. He finds it, most poignantly for me, in Gujo-Hachiman, a small castle town about an hour's drive north of Gifu City. Having been there myself last October, some 15 years after Booth's visit, though I wasn't yet aware of Booth's opinion on the town, I felt at the time that it was a relatively untouched corner of Japan. Sure, the town has some industry and modernized facilities, and there are convenience stores like everywhere else, but there's also a certain charm, a certain Japanese-ness, some kind of magical / traditional quality to Gujo-Hachiman's streets and buildings that is hard to find in the rest of Japan, if at all.

So, my only problems with Booth's books are that there's only two of them and that I cannot help but compulsively read both of them entirely too fast.

Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

Howl's Moving Castle
Diana Wynne Jones
(Harpertrophy, New York: 2001)

READ: February 2007

So, um, I first read this about two months ago, and after writing a review for it here in the stacks, I got a hankering to read it again. So I did. It's quite a compelling book, and I finished it in four hours flat.

I'm not reviewing it again - you can read the original review here.

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

The English Patient
Michael Ondaatje
(Bloomsbury Publishing, London: 1992)

This edition published 2004.

READ: February 2007

In my last year of high school, I was expressing my discontent about what I had read recently (I don't remember what it was now) to one of my English teachers (I was taking 3 different English classes that year), and he recommended I read some poetry by a Canadian poet and author called Michael Ondaatje, as well as Ondaatje's novel In the Skin of a Lion. Well, there's been no turning back. Michael Ondaatje, without a doubt, has been my favourite author, bar none, ever since then.

I'm never quite sure which I like better, The English Patient or In the Skin of a Lion. I think The English Patient edges out ahead, but then I re-read the other and remember how excellent it is.*

The English Patient has some of the same characters as the other book, but you don't need to have read In the Skin of a Lion to appreciate this one. Hana is a young Canadian girl who is in Italy working as a nurse in the last days of World War Two. She has stayed behind in an old Italian villa to nurse a dying patient who suffered extensive burns to most of his body a few years earlier, does not remember who he is (or so he claims), and is not expected to recover. The story unfolds parts of the English patient's past in a wonderful, sometimes dream-like, narrative. There is also a romance between Hana and a young Indian sapper who has come to defuse mines in the area, as well as the reintroduction of Caravaggio into Hana's life, an old friend of her father's (who was killed in the war) who worked as a spy for the Allies through the war and has now come to join Hana in her isolation. But the focus of the story is the English patient and the strange circumstances that led him to the villa where he now lays dying.

I was so excited, though trepidatious, when plans for a movie were announced. Well, the movie was awful. Elements of the story were changed, apparently at random, that made the story lose so much of its powerful magic for me. If you've only seen the movie, don't hold it against the book. Please.

People seem to either really like Ondaatje or really don't. I personally am addicted to his fluid prose, so poetic and often dreamy. Others find him wordy and inaccessible. While I generally tend to agree with the posit "why say in 25 words what you could say in 10", I don't think that always works so well in fiction. I remember, in university, in 4th-year poetry class, being irritated by Elizabeth Bishop who, as I told my dismayed teacher, needed a serious editor to cut out the superfluous words she was tossing in. I switched my project to P.K. Page who was much better at being concise. Salman Rushdie is a prime example of a writer in love with the sound of his (boring, pedantic, unnecessary) words. But there is very little I would cut out of Ondaatje's work. His words are precise and appropriate to generate the extremely vivid images that I get when I read his books and his poetry (his poetry tends to be a lot more sparse in words). I see faces, I hear voices, I can even smell the place he is describing.

So, yeah. I like this book. Everyone should read it.

* If you still can't make yourself like The English Patient, at least try In the Skin of a Lion. It's written in a more concrete style. I know a number of people who have liked that one but couldn't get into The English Patient. And for those of you who are history buffs, it's about Toronto in the 1930's.