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Review and Blog for Half and Half by Lensey Namioka
Full Text of J. LeRoy Book Reviews
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I came home one day and my wife had been to the bookstore. She is a speech pathologist and is always entering our neighborhood children’s bookstore, Secret Garden, and leaving with armloads of books. They are good people there with a keen eye for books that Vivian likes to use in her practice. My wife has a very rigid set of criteria regarding the books she looks for. She uses them to get very little kids to open up and show how much they have or have not developed.
A few months ago she brought home the book Half and Half. This is more of a book for adolescents and clearly not in her usual buying binge categories. But it is relevant because my wife is about 25% white and about 75% Chinese and grew up in Hong Kong. Should we have kids, the percentages will be even more strange and we’ll probably have to have my statistician business partner figure it out.
Vivian really enjoyed the book, so I thought I’d spin through it. It turns out the author, Lensey Namioka is from Seattle and the book is set here. The main character, Fiona, is half Chinese and half Scottish. Her grandparents are split between San Francisco and Vancouver. And she has a bit of an identity / allegiance crisis at the start of the book. This crisis, or these crises, are exacerbated by the coming of Folk Fest. Folk Fest is based on Seattle’s annual Folklife Festival, a festival of ethnic proportions.
The book includes a dinner where the Chinese grandmother prepares jellyfish for the Scottish grandparents. Which leads to a rather amusing scene where everyone tries to outdo each other for least appetizing foods. But, at our rehearsal dinner, we had a similar set of events. First, my father was obviously wary about the whole rehearsal dinner event. My father was grousing on the way to the restaurant in Vancouver, BC, that he didn’t want to eat any shark’s fin soup. I told him we were going to eat shark’s fin soup and he was going to eat it all, even if he hated it. Then I added, “Just don’t embarrass me.” Which is what he told me the first day of my first job at Dreisbach’s Steak House in Grand Island Nebraska when I was 14.
So we all sat down to eat the (very expensive) shark’s fin soup, part of our 12 course meal, and my father couldn’t stop eating it. He must have had four bowls. After that, he nearly beat everyone to a helping of the next dish as it hit the table.
But we started out with the appetizer plate that had suckling pig, jellyfish, tsa siu (barbequed pork), smoked eel, vegetarian rolls, and Beijing smoked meat. Believe me there is a tremendous amount of English-ization going on here. Anyway, everyone just sort of stared at the jellyfish. My grandmother held some up in the air, examining its translucence. “What is it?” She asked. Vivian started to answer. I interrupted and said, “We’re not answering any questions until you try it.” What was funny was that most of the food left at the end of the 12 course meal was the “normal” type of food. The bok choy or the noodles. But all the more “bizarre” food was eaten and missed when it was gone.
The book is short, so anything I really add from there would be a spoiler. But the book is superbly crafted to put into words what some kids may be feeling but also give a little glimpse into this world for other kids. This is pretty important for American kids because our culture is so overwhelming that we don’t even know it is there.
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Read in Seattle on 13 Sept 2003
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The 13th of Sept was largely peaceful. We went to Seward Park and had a picnic, then we came home and I read this book.
Review and Blog for Love, etc. by Julian Barnes
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You know, I keep waiting for Julian Barnes to hit the wall. Since first reading Flaubert’s Parrot so many years ago, I have consistently been amazed by how Barnes can capture the essence of a moment from so many varied perspectives. He never disappoints.
In Love, etc. his phrase turning skills are in high gear. In this story, told in a series of dysfunctional narratives, we explore in a scant 227 pages how people’s motivations are often hidden from the outside world and from themselves. And that even as people explain to you their rationale for doing something, pathologies both diagnosable and not diagnosable can interfere with that description.
What was more frightening is that the characters in the book were ones I could identify with. Not insomuch as I’m in their situation, but it's their age and their regrets. How as we work our way through life we collect some ghosts, work our way through some ghosts, collect some more, and so on. And often, working through some ghosts cause us to collect still more. Then we either learn and grow or retreat and stagnate.
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Read between 6 and 12 September 2003, Seattle
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Over the last few days, John Ritter and Johnny Cash both died. It was strange that over the last year when such personalities as Katheryn Hepburn and Bob Hope passed away, that I should have heard so much more discussion for John Ritter and Johnny Cash. But it was certainly that way. Everyone, no matter how much they may have disliked American Country Music had good things to say about Johnny Cash. And everyone, no matter how much they may hate television in general, had good things to say about John Ritter. Somehow, it was all strangely reassuring.
In a time where the RIAA is suing 12 year old girls and scaring the hell out of people. It's refreshing for people to acknowledge artists as artists and not commodities.
Expos seem likely to remain international.
Recently I went to see some baseball in Montreal. I wanted to catch one of the last games to be played in French. I bemoaned their seemingly likely transition to Portland, Oregon, because I thought baseball would become even more "American" even though the players are becoming increasingly less so.
It seems now, though, that they will either remain in Montreal or move or Puerto Rico or Mexico. Which is pretty keen. We await Bud's decision.....
The RIAA sues 12 year old girls.
I guess no one told the little girl she could get amnesty if she only owned up and said she was sorry for hurting Vivendi Universal.
Review and Blog for The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin
Full Text of J. LeRoy Book Reviews
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It seems impossible that I would get to my 38th year of being a manic reader and not have read The Dispossessed. But, nonetheless, there I was buying it so that Ursula LeGuin could sign it and doodle an OurFounder on it.
The Dispossessed was a good read for a variety of reasons. One, it showed me that the writers for Star Trek are major LeGuin fans. Just about every name, place or person, was utilized in a Star Trek episode somewhere. This is interesting because the politics of Star Trek and of LeGuin seem so dissimilar.
The tale is called “an ambiguous utopia”. The main character is caught in a moral dilemma where he knows deep down that his culture’s xenophobia is ultimately damaging to the people in that culture. But it is there nonetheless. He is compelled by both circumstance and logical progression of events to seek out communications with other societies. He is successful at doing this and ends up leaving his society, which lives on the moon of a planet (but could just as easily be on another continent), to travel to the main planet (the first in over a hundred years to do so) and begin a dialogue to hopefully unite everyone and … then something will happen.
The hero has no grand plan for what will come next, indeed his upbringing in an anarcho-syndicalist society has made him shy away from such things. He merely has the conviction that this is the right thing to do.
In the telling of the book, the intricacies of societies are revealed. How all societies do very well at certain things, do less well at others and outright suck at doing still other things. People in those societies tend to downplay the parts that suck and praise their own things that don’t. Since no society is perfect, all societies have the dubious honor, if not function, of being able to acknowledge and lie at the same time.
This book was published in 1974 and the taste of the Viet Nam War and the Cold War is strong. What might be less obvious is the effects of many of the African conflicts of that era, which have largely been forgotten. The book describes views of power and individual freedoms and the form that both may take, so gender issues are strangely mentioned in sidebars.
Strangely, for a book that delt with such issues, it didn’t leave much in my mind to discuss.
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Read between 28 October and 5 September 2003, Seattle
Review and Blog for All She Was Worth by Miyuki Miyabe
Full Text of J. LeRoy Book Reviews
One of my many endeavors is to host web sites for people I know. When I do this, rather than taking their money directly I ask them to buy me books from my wish list on Amazon. This keeps me reading and means that they don’t have to spend too much for a web site and e-mail. You want this arrangement? Drop me a line.
This book was purchased for me by Karen Woodward, whose website is www.woodwardstudio.com. Go buy her art now.
All She Was Worth traces the movements of a Tokyo detective (on leave due to an injury) as he tracks what starts out to be a strange missing persons cases and end up being a bizarre case of identity theft.
The thing that most stuck with me about this book is that it, like the Tanizaki book reviewed below, deals with changing ideals within Japanese society. This book was written seventy years after the Tanizaki book. The act of identity theft was a bit harder for the characters in the book because the Japanese deal with a “family record” which is a written document that traces the movements of your family throughout time. They are supposed to be private, and therefore your identity is secure. But, in this case, that was not the case.
The book gets a bit preachy in the middle about the mechanics and evils of excessive borrowing, but the book reads fast and well. The characters are consistent. The desperation of debt in the Japanese psyche comes through very clearly. The Americans reading this would likely be “so what, you’re in debt, stop buying things, make your payments and get out.”
There are a lot of questions this book leaves unanswered and it makes a point of doing so. Indeed, the book ends at what could be a pivotal part. Partially to be provocative, I’m sure. But also to drive home the point that solving the case wasn’t necessarily the most important point of the book.
A nice twist is that the people at the end of the book all have a different motivation for seeing the case solved and the person who initiated the case no longer cares. A very nice easy read and a good glimpse into the post-economic boom world of Tokyo.
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Read between 20 August and 27 August 2003 in Seattle.
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Saw Blue / Orange at the Intiman Theatre.
This was a play about the various power struggles that we invent for ourselves and that others invent for us. Interestingly enough, a modern day play to invoke R.D. Laing. Always happy to see Laing pop up somewhere. Also happy to see that the play both credits and discredits his theories. I’m sure he’d be happy too. Blue / Orange was quite popular in London, where it is set. The Intiman did a wonderful job with it.
Review of Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
Full Text of J. LeRoy Book Reviews
A few months ago I was sitting at my desk. My business partner asked me, “What is Marxist Science Fiction like?” That was an unexpected question.
He asked because he had found a write-up for an upcoming reading by China Mieville at the University of Washington. Recently we’ve started going to more reading. Generally at these readings I get the author to sign my books with an OurFounder. They are usually more amused than anything else and seem grateful that someone asked for something out of the ordinary.
So we went to see China who ended up being a nice young man who resembled a soccer hooligan or a gay bartender and had just completed his PhD in economics. He was magnetic and personable and, judging by his reading, was fond of writing in long winding sentences that gave detail both necessary and unnecessary in a style that was identifiably British but not self-consciously so.
I had purchased a copy of Perdido Street Station, a 710 page monster that I knew was going to exemplify verbosity and word play. Which it did.
Perdido Street Station … I will not waste my time giving you a plot synopsis. There are many plots initially that wind into one main plot. But, more to the point, I will tell you about Mr. Mieville’s writing style.
Basically it surprised the hell out of me. The quote on the front of the book from the Times Literary Supplement says “An astonishing novel, guaranteed to … enthrall.” What the hell went into the ellipses? I may never know. But truly, it does … enthrall. That dot dot dot is very … important. Indeed it is more of a pregnant, thoughtful pause. More like a “What the hell am I supposed to say?” type of ellipsistic event. Where your brain is having a total word retrieval breakdown. Your personal thesaurus is woefully inadequate.
At the reading he said that he thought the role of a good book was to take someone to another place. This other place could be the same place you are at with a different skin – or it could really be another place. An alien place. So, much like an American from the Midwest (like me) feels when he steps off the plane at Narita and, in an instant, needs to negotiate new cultural norms, mores and bizarre artifacts … so does the reader of a book. And in real life there are seldom more than clues to help you get along. Mieville goes out of his way to just give you the clues.
Mieville also isn’t afraid to have bizarre characters that no one in the book even understands. These characters have their own internal reasons for doing things, but they are nearly chaotic (sometimes frightening) to everyone else.
I am predisposed to like this approach, as it is often my approach to making music. Someone listening to a song of mine will often have a visceral negative reaction to it initially, but then begin to see where it is going after a few exposures. Admittedly, this makes building an audience difficult. But that’s not the issue at the moment.
I strongly urge people (and I assume you are one) to buy and read this book. I’ll give you some keywords so you can get a better feel for it. The book involves, sentient garbage, open sewers, academics, walking cacti, soul eating bats, railways, interspecies dating, printing presses and a drug dealer so bizarre that he’s usually only described by his extra appendages. That was much easier to describe than the plot. Oh and an interdimensional spider with a nasty scissor fetish.
Read between 25 July and 19 August 2003 - Seattle, Vancouver, Montreal, Quebec City.
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Lots of travel while reading this. Vancouver, Montreal, Quebec City. Also saw one of the last Expos baseball games in Montreal. Vivian was presented with her first in-the-park home run. We were able to see a game in French. Next year the Expos will likely be in Portland, Oregon. I think five or six people speak french there.
Review of Some Prefer Nettles by Junichiro Tanizaki
Full Text of J. LeRoy Reviews
Tanizaki wrote primarily about the cultural and individual stresses of what the Japanese would refer to as westernization. Some Prefer Nettles (Tade Kuu Mushi, in Japanese) is perhaps the prime example of this. In the book, the main character, Kaname, considers himself a “modern man” which means in this context having adopted at least some of the then-popular western ideals. These ideals include dress, more freedom in relationships, and perhaps more than a bit of animosity towards tradition.
As the book progresses, Kaname’s initial indifference towards his father-in-law changes to what appears to be respect. I see it as more of a yearning, however. You see, Kaname and his wife, Misako, are still married, but she is seeing another man and they are “getting a divorce.” However the divorce has been slow in coming and, in fact, shows no sign of arriving.
This isn’t due to love or a desire to avoid the divorce. It’s due to inertia. Inertia from old Japanese culture, inertia in their relationship, inertia in their child. Neither Kaname or Misako are the type to take initiative, therefore inertia is their only guide.
It struck me that this was true of several of several people I know. They are very inertia driven and will remain in relationships, jobs or other situations long after it is apparent that leaving would be far preferable. What seems to be lacking here is faith that what comes next will be better than what is happening right now. Even if what is happening right now is horrendous.
Convention has it that Tanizaki retreated from Tokyo in the 1920s and wrote mainly books critical of the westernization of Japan. This book, written in 1928-29, is held up as an example of this. But I don’t see this as a critique of westernization in general, I see it as indicating how people can become existentially lost when the conventions they have grown up with are in a fairly radical flux. Kaname’s father in law may represent older Japanese values, but what he really signifies is someone who knows who and what he is. He represents self-control.
To treat this book as merely a railing against Westernization in Japan is to cheapen and marginalize what I feel is its real message: that a person has many elements to their identity, but if they do not have a clear picture over who or what they are then all that will drive us is inertia and we will have no self control.
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Read between 15 and 24 July 2003, in Seattle.
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Went to the 2003 Street of Dreams in Issaquah, Washington, while reading Some Prefer Nettles. It was very surprising.
The houses were quite expensive, and very large ... but it seemed their largeness merely allowed them to take up space. When I left, I asked Vivian, how could a three bedroom house take up 8,000 square feet? None of the rooms seemed very large, and each of the houses seemed to have a nasty fatal flaw or two or three. One of these houses that was 8,000 sf had a living room smaller than in my 2,400 sf house. There just seemed to be major invitations for wasted space in these homes, some of which apparently covered more than an acre of realestate.
Very bizarre, I felt.
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