36-37: Kartography, Ash

[puritybrown.livejournal.com]

36: Kartography by Kamila Shamsie

If you've been following this comm for a while, you'll know that I love the novels of Kamila Shamsie. Now that I've read Kartography and tracked down In the City by the Sea, I should soon be in the rare position of having read all of a novelist's published works, which is kind of cool.

Kartography is similar to Shamsie's other novels: it's all about a privileged young Karachi woman who bumps up against the boundaries of the bubble she's been living in. It's most similar to Salt and Saffron, though the dazzling verbiage and the virtuoso tangents are slightly more subdued (and a good thing, too). In some ways it's less brave than Salt and Saffron, in that the love story at the heart of the novel is about two Karachiites with equal degrees of privilege; but in other ways it's a lot braver, because where Salt and Saffron could only gesture at the lives of the less-privileged with a "we don't hang out with boys from Liaquatabad and you know perfectly well why", Kartography shows us quite a few vividly-realised scenes of the lives of the people who live outside the bubble. They're all seen from the point of view of the privileged youngsters, but they're intense and detailed enough to feel real and shocking.

In short, if you like Shamsie's other novels, you'll like Kartography; if you don't, you won't. It has all of Shamsie's characteristic virtues (sparkling, witty prose, well-rounded characters, utterly convincing relationships, sharp insight on privilege, deep love for Karachi in particular and Pakistan in general) and flaws (main character is distinctly self-absorbed, ending is somewhat rushed, sometimes she seems to be having so much fun with her dazzling prose that she loses sight of the plot).

37: Ash by Malinda Lo

When I think about Ash, I find myself thinking as much about what it is not as what it is. It is not an epic; it is not the kind of fantasy that has dense, detailed world-building; it is not even a lesbian version of the Cinderella story (though it comes close, and that's as near you're going to get to a high-concept pitch version). It is a fairy tale; and it is about fairy tales, as well; and it is a love story, and a coming-of-age story. It is, at times, beautifully written -- evocative and emotionally intense.

I want to preface what I'm about to say with this: I very much enjoyed it, and will be looking forward to Malinda Lo's future works. But... I found myself a little frustrated by it at times. I read it in chunks, leaving it for days at a time, and I knew that part of the reason why I didn't read it in a more-or-less continuous flow was that I could anticipate that the resolution/climax/ending would be disappointing. And it was. I don't know how I could see that disappointment coming, when the beginning and the middle were so lovely -- sometimes positively exquisite. I suppose there was something about the way Lo had set up the world that made me suspect she hadn't planted enough seeds in the early stages to produce a satisfying fruit for the ending. Ash is not a straightforward retelling of the Cinderella story -- there are several variations played on the theme, and the fact that Ash's beloved is a woman is not the most important. The nature of the "fairy godmother" is more crucial to the plot, and to the resolution; and the way this gets played out is a little too simple, and not nearly surprising enough. It hits an unsatisfying middle ground of being neither simple enough to be mythic nor complex enough to be novelistic. And yet, I do rather like what Lo does with the fairy tales in her world, and the way Ash's story seems to be taking place in a world that wants a Cinderella story, and isn't (quite) going to get one.

Kiyama, Patel, Wang, Chang

[mizchalmers.livejournal.com]

41. Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama, The Four Immigrants Manga

This book is so freakin' awesome I can't even tell you. I love 20th-century memoir, I love San Francisco local history and I love graphic novels: The Four Immigrants Manga is a standout in all three categories. Even the tale of its rediscovery is freakin' awesome. Frederik L. Schodt was researching a book on Japanese manga in 1980 (how avant is THAT?) when he stumbled across this in a Berkeley library. It took another EIGHTEEN YEARS before his translation was published. Seriously, you should just go and read it right now. Schodt's translation is very clever and sensitive, with English and translated-Japanese rendered in different styles, so you always know where you are.

And the story itself, holy cow! It's the tale of the author, who came to San Francisco to study, and three friends he met on the boat. They land in 1904 and the book follows their lives for twenty years, so yes, there's a huge earthquake right up front, but in fact what happens after that is often even awesomer and stranger. (Hint: farm work is much harder than you think.) And it's funnier than hell. Can you tell that I liked it? The Four Immigrants Manga is one of those texts that reaches across a language barrier and a hundred years and shakes the teeth out of your head. It brings my beloved San Francisco to life in new ways. It should be required reading in California schools, and if it were, the kids would love it. BECAUSE IT'S GREAT.

42-3. Sanjay Patel, The Little Book of Hindu Deities and Ramayana: Divine Loophole

Actually all five of the books I'm reviewing today have strong links to the Bay Area, and that's because San Francisco is my adopted home and I love it like food. Go Giants! Patel is an animator at Pixar, across the Bay. I first encountered his Hindu-deity-art at his Web site, Ghee Happy, and I was one of many nagging him to just go publish a book already. Little Book is a useful reference, if you're like me and can't always keep your Gods straight, but Ramayana is an honest-to-God masterpiece. My husband read it to my daughters, aged 7 and 4, and they were spellbound by it every night. The illustrations are really beyond beautiful, and Chronicle Books has done a nice job with the binding: it's an object with heft and sheen, a desirable thing. Highly recommended, if only as a counterbalance to the Greek revival of the Percy Jackson series.

44. Jen Wang, Koko Be Good

Wang is another local graphic artist and Koko is not only set in San Francisco, like the great Wyatt Cenac film Medicine for Melancholy it's set in my San Francisco, south of Market Street, the San Francisco of beer at Zeitgeist and Al's Comics and the fog rolling in under Sutro Tower. It's intensely evocative and very good on random encounters and the strength of the relationships they can drag in their wake, especially for people in transition. If I found the ending both telegraphed and a bit unsatisfying, it's because I'm an extremely fussy old lady with brutally high standards in graphic novels. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it, and if you like it you will love Paul Madonna's sublime All Over Coffee.

45. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking

I've only just started reading this and it's going to take a while, because I will only read it during daylight, not while I am trying to go to sleep. Not since Truman Capote's In Cold Blood have I read anything that is quite so high-octane nightmare fuel, and for very much the same reasons: the killings it describes are real, random and purposeless, and the prose itself is beautiful, clear, organized and relentless.

One of the oldest cities of China, [Suchow] was prized for its delicate silk embroidery, palaces, and temples. Its canals and ancient bridges had earned the city its Western nickname as "the Venice of China." On November 19, on a morning of pouring rain, a Japanese advance guard marched through the gates of Suchow, wearing hoods that prevented the Chinese sentries from recognizing them. Once inside, the Japanese murdered and plundered the city for days, burning down ancient landmarks and abducting thousands of Chinese women for sexual slavery. The invasion, according to the China Weekly Review, caused the population of the city to drop from 350,000 to less than 500.

It's a controversial book - Wikipedia has some useful starting-points for a discussion of factual inaccuracies and disputed interpretations - and on the whole you'd probably rather not have it be the famous plagiarist Stephen Ambrose who declares you "one of the best of our young historians." But it is an important book, that helped revive the memory of Nanking in the West.

Chang took her own life in 2004, and I am sorry for the books of hers we will not get to read.

(no subject)

[seekingferret.livejournal.com]

48. Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead

Like The Intuitionist, it's full of dazzlingly imagistic storytelling, dense metaphors, and intriguing characters held at a little bit of a distance from the reader. This is strangely impersonal storytelling, beautiful and moving but at a careful remove.

The novel's protagonist is a nomenclature consultant, working at a marketing company to give new names to products to help reinvent them for the modern marketplace. Naturally, he is never given a name in the novel. It's that kind of book. As nomenclature consultant, he is given decisionmaking power to decide a deadlock over the choice between three names for a town: The name of the longtime industrialist it's carried for a century, the name its free black founders originally gave it, or the name the town's new billionaire hired a marketing firm to dream up. The names represent three American dreams that occupy different places on the aspirational/established axis, different places that different members of the community want to believe they occupy.

The protagonist finds a fourth way, unexpectedly in the novel's last pages. It's a strange journey to get there, there are lulls in the action that take some getting used to, but I think it's worth getting to the end and learning what hurt Whitehead thinks we're hiding.



a: whitehead colson, african-american, modernism