"A Moveable Feast" by Ernest Hemingway

I decided to read A Moveable Feast after reading and enjoying Enrique Vila-Matas’ novel Never Any End to Paris which was inspired in part by this Hemingway favorite . In some ways, it was about time. I had known about the attraction of this book and the idea of a young artist run off to the Left Bank to find his self. Julio Cortazar had done just that in the 1950s; his reminiscents are recorded in Hopscotch. Roberto Bolaño leaves his impression of being in Paris in The Savage Detectives. A descendent of Hemingway used the title in a similarly-titled cookbook filled with recipes for picnic foods. When you consider how poor and hungry Hemmingway was during his time in Paris, the appropriation of the memoir’s title might be considered facetious.
The book was written at the end of the author’s life and published after his death. It’s about the beginnings of his literary career when he was working on his first great novel The Sun Also Rises. With him in Paris were other members of the Lost Generation (so named by his mentor Gertrude Stein) including James Joyce, Ford Maddox Ford, Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Besides recounting his adventures and impressions with them and others, the memoir is a testimony to his love for his first wife Hadley and the time they spent together in the City of Light.
This was a good book; I recommend it to all Hemingway fans.

"Never Any End to Paris" by Enrique Vila-Matas

 

 

Like Ernest Hemmingway in the 1920s and Julio Cortazar in the 1950s, well-known and award-winning Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas spent two years in the 1970s finding himself by losing himself in the City of Lights. The author recounts his adventures and misadventures in the 2003 novel Paris no se acaba nunca which was translated by Anne McLean in 2011 as Never Any End to Paris. The book is supposed to be a tale about a modern day writer who is giving a seminar workshop on irony. By the end of the book, however, that façade has faded away, and the author is talking directly to his readers about his experiences.

What a strange and wonderful time this young man had living in the Left Bank during the 1970s in a garret at the house of Marguerite Duras as he wrote his first novel. He crossed paths with people like playwright Samuel Beckett, author Jorge Luis Borges, actress Jean Seberg, costumer designer Paloma Picasso and other well-known people who were drawn to Paris as a center of culture and celebrity. He also knew many other young artists who would later become famous, but at that time they were just getting started in their respective careers. In fact, I encourage you to have your computer or tablet handy to google the different people that you’ll encounter in this book. I did, and now I have a new list of books I want to read.

This is a wonderful book that runs the gamut of reminiscences from laugh-out-loud funny to quite quite sad. It is also in its own way a very good study of irony and an interesting meditation on the craft of writing.

"Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell

I became interested in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell after seeing the preview of the movie starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry and others. While reading the book, I got to see the movie, and while both were good, they however were quite different. But let me come back to that.

Mitchell describes what the Cloud Atlas is the book as a "sextet for overlapping soloists . . . each in its own language of key, scale and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finish, and by then it'll be too late."

What results is a set of six novellas one nested inside another that extend from the 19th Century to somewhere in the future. Each story is linked to the story that occurs before it in time. Each story has its own distinct language and style. And each story is linked together by having one its characters have in a birthmark in the shape of a comet that represents the universal theme of all six stories. Here is where the book differs from the movie.

In the movie, the uniting theme is union of a love between two souls. That theme is better expressed, though, in Laura Esquivel's La Ley del Amor [The Law of Love], a great book that's also cleverly presented. This book’s uniting theme, however, centers around the idea that there are two types in this world: those that exploit and those that are exploited be it by bullies, murderers, cultural institutions, corporate greed, genetic engineering or whatever. The comet birthmark represents the resistance to being exploited unjustly, or as Dylan Thomas wrote:

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

"Snakes and Earrings" by Hitomi Kanehara

This is an odd disturbing little book. In fact, I had to read it twice. Hitomi Kanehara’s 2005 novel Hebi ni piasu, which was translated by David James Karashima also in 2005 as Snakes and Earrings, is set in the dark side of Tokyo’s youth culture. The narrator is a young woman named Lui who recounts her relationship with Ama, a boy friend who she met at a strange bar. He was the scariest-looking guy there.

Besides having a face full of earrings, Ama has an unique body modification: his tongue is forked at the end like a snake’s; he also has a large distinctive-looking dragon tattoo. Lui becomes fascinated and follows Ama home. The next day they go to meet Shiba-san who is the artist that gave Ama both his split tongue and large tattoo.

So it is, that Lui who up this point been a Barbie girl type-complete with blonde hair-is drawn into the punk/goth world of Japanese counterculture and into the lives of two very dangerous men. What disturbed me about this book after the first reading was Lui’s seeming ennui and nihilism. Like Meursault in Camus’ The Stranger, Lui simply reports what happens to herself and the world around her in a matter-of-fact way. She also reminded me of what NPR commenter Andrei Codrescu once said that one reason why goths and punks like tattoos and body piercings was that the pain of receiving them was the only thing that broke through the ennui.

On the second reading, however, I decided that Lui was no Meursault. She tries to shape the world around her so she can live the way she wants to live. And while she wants to be different, she knows that there are boundaries. When Ama tries to give her an inappropriate token of his affection, for example, she responds “That’s no symbol of love. At least not in Japan.” So there are limits to her rebellion.

This is author Hitomi Kanehara first novel. It won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize. She is the youngest writer to win this important Japanese literary award. Interestingly one of the judges was Ryu Murakami. His first novel Almost Transparent Blue also won the Akutagawa Price back in 1976. His book, not surprisingly, was as disturbing as Snakes and Earrings.

This book was a good read; I look forward to reading more by Hitomi Kanehara.

Review of "Basho: The Complete Haiku"

reading Basho’s poems

learning on a summer’s day

I ‘m a poor haijin

The 2008 collection Basho: The Complete Haiku by Matsuo Basho is translated by Jane Reichhold with an introduction, biography and notes. This is an excellent introduction to traditional Japanese haiku. Basho (1644-1694), after all, was an early practitioner and developer of this unique poetic art form; he set many of the standards for this type of poetry that are still practiced today.

Reichhold, a honored haijin (i.e. haiku writer) in her own right, has gathered all of Basho’s haiku under one cover. Surprisingly there are only 1012. After an interesting introduction, the haiku are presented in chapters that describe seven different stages or passages of the poet’s life.

Then the verses are examined again in Notes where each haiku is shown in Japanese, Romanized Japanese for the sound counters, and in English. Each poem has the year it was written and to which season it belongs along with expository notes to explain the subtlety of the verse in terms of history, symbols and the Japanese language. Reichhold also provides a descriptive list of 33 haiku techniques to help the reader to better appreciate the art form as well as other useful back matter. This is an excellent book that I would add to my personal library.

first monsoon passes

first monsoon passes
glorious sunset follows
cool breeze promises
half moon hidden overhead
more storms journey in the dark

Modern Japanese Tanka by Makoto Ueda

First you have to understand that all “tanka” is “waka,” but not all waka is tanka. Both forms are 31 syllable verses that generally follow a 5-7-5-7-7 format, but waka is an ancient type of poetry that has been a Japanese literary tradition for centuries. Waka poetry can be found in the “Kojiki,” Japan’s oldest book.   Tanka, however, is a new literary genre that came out of the late 19^th Century by a restless generation of poets that found traditional waka to be stale and repetitive.

In his excellent book, “Modern Japanese Tanka” Japanese scholar and Stanford professor Makoto Ueda discusses the development of tanka from the late 19^th Century to modern times. He shows how it differs from “haiku,” and more importantly how tanka is a more liberating and versatile art form. He does this with 400 samples by twenty different poets. In each chapter, Ueda introduces and describes the contribution of a different tanka master.

Tanka can be very haiku-like with the use seasonal references and cutting words, like Yosano Akiko’s:

evanescent

like the faint white

of cherry blossoms

blooming among the trees

my life on this spring day

Tanka, more importantly can also be about anything else-especially about the emotional reactions to the events and environment around the poet. When military veteran Mori Ogai ironically recalls his military service, he writes:

some medals

compensate for the terror

of the moment

while others pay for many

humdrum days spent in the service

A tanka writer can also poke fun at his own foibles. The reader can almost see Maekawa Samio slap his forehead as he recounts and complains:

monumental

idiot that I am

I’ve sent an umbrella

to a bicycle shop

for repairs

Tanka can also capture Life’s poignant moments. Yosano Tekkan writes of the loss his six-week old daughter in “To our baby that died:”

in the dark woods

lying ahead on your road

whom will you call?

you don’t know yet the names

of your parents or your own

It should be pointed out that translated tanka can look like free verse, and some tanka are. Editor Ueda helps those readers concerned with the 31 syllable constancy of the verses by presenting each poem in English and in Romanized Japanese at the bottom of the page.

 

Facebook friends know that I have been captioning with verse some of the photos I make of a ten kilometer walk along the canals between my home and the local library. It’s a therapy of sorts. The photos remind me to keep searching for beauty during this terrible time of being unemployed. The captions/lyrics/verse/poems were, at first, in the style of seventeen syllable “haiku,” but recently I’ve been offering some poor samples tanka as well. It’s a more suitable form sometimes. I know that from reading this book.

The Breath of God by Jeffrey Small

While religious studies are important, fiction based on religion is also a useful meditation. “The Breath of God” by Jeffrey Small is a novel about a religious studies grad student who finds ancient documents in a remote Himalayas monastery suggesting that Jesus of Nazareth studied with Brahmin and Buddhist masters before starting his own ministry in Palestine. The idea that the “Son of God” was not divinely inspired or worse inspired by pagan religions infuriates a bible thumping minister from Alabama and some of his followers. They attempt to undermine and sabotage the student’s efforts to bring the proof to the West.  So basically this is a fictionalized account of the Religious Right meets the Jesus Seminar on a smaller scale.

The book is well researched; it draws off the works of Marcus Borg, Thich Nhat Hanh, John Shelby Spong, Paul Tillich and others. Besides being action-packed and having a romantic interest throughout, the book is also a discussion of the commonality of all modern religions. This commonality is based on a commonality of experience shared by the founders of various religions. There is also the suggestion that every person has the ability to know the godhead through prayer and meditation. So, if you’ve already read the latest Dan Brown and you’re interested in religion, I encourage you to read this book.

For another novel that deals with the unknown years in Jesus’ life, let me suggest the light-hearted “Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal” by Christopher Moore. It also is an action-packed well-researched meditation on what Jesus might have experienced before starting his ministry. For a more macabre telling by an atheist, see “The Gospel According to Jesus” by José Saramago. These books are good thought-provoking summer reads.