Musical interlude: Hell You Talmbout
This protest song written by Janelle Monáe, performed by members of the Wondaland collective, is incredibly powerful, and this seems like the right time to be resurfacing it. Say her name: Breonna Taylor.
K-drama review: Let’s Eat
I’m not entirely sure, but I have a hunch that this TV show was cooked up (boom boom) to promote Korean food to the rest of the world. Let’s Eat (tvN 2013-2014) hits all the beats of a typical K-drama, but with cheesily shoehorned-in glamour shots of food and descriptions thereof. It’s a little like Kantaro the Sweet Tooth Salaryman but less wacky. And it actually made me want to eat most of the foods depicted.
Our hero, happily divorced paralegal Lee Soo-kyung (played by Lee Soo-kyung), is very comfortable with living alone. Her only frustration is that she loves to eat at restaurants, but dining out in her neighbourhood of Seoul is not designed for groups of one. (Most restaurants serve big sharing platters designed for 3 or 4 people.) Her best friend Kyung-mi (Jung Soo-young) is busy with her young children and Soo-kyung doesn’t really like her colleagues at the small law firm.
However, she discovers that both her next-door neighbours are also in need of company at mealtimes. Handsome but mysterious Goo Dae-young (Yoon Doo-joon, or Doojoon, a Hallyu star who has sung with Beast and Highlight) is a gourmand with a habit of lecturing his companions on the proper way to eat certain items. He works in insurance and has a tendency to put off new acquaintances by constantly trying to sell them a policy. It says a lot for Yoon that he manages to make this character charming.
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May 2020 reading round-up
Oh dear. I read a decent amount this month but only managed to write one review. And with all those bank holidays too! I really do want to write more about all of this month’s books, but I am in danger of forgetting any interesting critical thoughts I had about them. Ah well. There have been things on my mind.
Speaking of things on my mind, racism is – rightly – a major point of discussion right now. As a white woman, I need to educate myself as well as call it out when I see it. My school education was sorely lacking in this department. In history (which I studied up to A-level) the coverage of slavery was limited to the trade triangle and maybe one or two accounts of slave ships. Colonialism was an even briefer footnote, limited to a few maps of the world showing the extent of different empires, but no examination of how they came to be, how they operated, the long-lasting effect they had on all countries involved. Even when studying Othello at university, we didn’t really look at historical race issues, which I now see as a shocking omission.
So I have switched up my June reading plans from finishing my EU list to some titles that address race and racism head-on. I’m starting with Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, and I plan to follow it up with Superior: the Return of Race Science by Angela Saini. After that, I’m thinking maybe The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, perhaps Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.
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Invisible boundaries kept me boxed in from the real life of other people going on all around
Hons and Rebels
by Jessica Mitford
I am not the first person to be fascinated by the Mitfords. For a few years now, I have felt that I need to read something by Jessica to better understand the family. She was the outlier, the one who left. And y’know, not a Nazi.
This is Jessica, or Decca’s, memoir of the first portion of her life. She recounts her childhood, her political awakening and her relationship with Esmond Romilly. I laughed, I cried, I shook my head often in disbelief.
As she admits, her childhood was unconventional. They were old-fashioned upper-class toffs, distantly related to royalty and less distantly to Winston Churchill. Jessica and her five sisters received no formal education (though their brother was sent away to school). They instead enjoyed a series of private tutors whom they teased and tortured. This meant they reached adulthood in a state that was both worldly and hugely naive and sheltered. Perhaps this explains the extreme political allegiances of at least three Mitford sisters.
April 2020 reading round-up
How do I summarise this month? Aside from the garden, I left the house four times – for two walks and two bike rides. I’m a home body anyway, so most of the time I don’t mind that. But every so often I feel a massive urge to get out and I have so much sympathy for people who can’t go outside easily or even at all right now. It’s hard.
The four-day Easter weekend gave me the chance to kick-start my reading again. I haven’t maintained that intensity of reading, but I am still reading actual books, which is an improvement on most of March.
If you’re not already aware, the National Theatre has been putting some recordings of its shows on YouTube, a different one each week. I’ve so far watched the Sally Cookson production of Jane Eyre and the Simon Godwin production of Twelfth Night, and I fully plan to catch Frankenstein before it disappears next Thursday. I am also really grateful that the BBC and Channel 4 have made a bunch of old TV shows available on their streaming services. We’ve watched a lot of Scrubs. I’ve watched even more films than usual as well. I highly recommend the Ghibli film Nausicaa (Netflix) and the Taika Waititi film Boy (Amazon Prime).
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To have friends was a sign of degeneracy
Loving Sabotage
by Amélie Nothomb
translated from French by Andrew Wilson
I really love Amélie Nothomb. Which meant she was a no-brainer as my Belgium choice for the EU Reading Challenge. Not that this book is set in Belgium. Like many of her novels, this is a semi-fictionalised account of Nothomb’s childhood moving around the world thanks to her father being a Belgian diplomat.
In this case, Nothomb is recalling the time she spent living in China in 1972–1975. She was just five when they moved from Japan to a tightly controlled compound in Beijing (or Peking, as it was then known). They shared this large residence with many other diplomats’ families, and the perceived safety of having armed guards on the gate meant that all the children were largely left to play in the yard with each other whenever they weren’t eating, sleeping or at school. It could have been idyllic, were it not for children’s tendency to be vicious to one another.
But you would be forgiven if it took you half of this novella to figure out that is what is going on. While she occasionally acknowledges that the compound’s adults were dealing with complex politics at work and between each other, this story is entirely about the children and what Nothomb personally experienced. And she was largely playing pretend.
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K-drama review: Misaeng
This TV show is a little hard to categorise, but I guess I’d plump for…office drama? It’s quite serious and low-key, and apparently won lots of awards when it first aired (tvN 2014). Misaeng is sometimes listed with its subtitle (and translation) “An incomplete life”, which gives quite a good indication of its overall tone.
As we learn early on, Misaeng is a term from the board game Go (or Baduk in Korean), which is relevant because the show’s main character Jang Geu-rae (played by Im Si-wan) is a former professional Go player. He wasn’t able to earn enough money to live on from playing Go, so he has given it up and is now taking any job he can get without a degree. When a rare opportunity for a proper office job comes along he takes it, even if it is an internship for something he has never particularly wanted to do: sales.
At this company – One International – rumours run rife, which means that everyone immediately knows that Geu-rae didn’t go to university and was recommended for the position by someone senior. He also has no office experience and doesn’t speak any foreign languages. This does not go down well with his fellow interns or with his new manager, Oh Sang-sik (Lee Sung-min). Manager Oh is brusque and loud, but turns out to be honest to the point of pissing off many people around him, which means he is actually a good match for eager, innocent Geu-rae.
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Quivering, like jelly, quivering like a small bird
Doppelgänger
by Daša Drndić
translated from Croatian by SD Curtis and Celia Hawkesworth
This was my Croatia choice for the EU Reading Challenge. It’s a novella formed of two stories linked by major themes and minor details. There were nice moments but overall I didn’t love this.
In the first story “Artur and Isabella” the eponymous heroes are old and think their days of romance are behind them, until they meet. Drndić doesn’t skimp on the grotesque aspects of ageing, to the point of making me quite uncomfortable. The third person narrative alternates with brief police reports on the two lead characters, the reason for which becomes clear at the end. There’s also a tendency to include lists, which in a longer story can provide nice change of pace, but in something so short it was disruptive. I’m pretty sure this is meant to be a sad tale but I wasn’t at all emotionally involved.
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Do not be frightened by my beard
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
by Mohsin Hamid
This was the first book I read for my Easter weekend readathon and it was an excellent start. It’s gripping, beautifully written and warmly inviting. In fact literally so, as it directly addresses a second person – a listener to the tale, inviting you right into the heart of the story.
The setting is Lahore, a cafe in one of the city’s squares, where a local man, Changez (the narrator) has approached an American visitor and offered to act as his guide. Over tea and then dinner, Changez tells his story – one that is surprising and seems to be building up to something.
We learn that Changez spent a few years living in the USA, thanks to an Ivy League scholarship and an excellent job on the back of that. But then everything changed – in his words, the city he loved (New York) and the woman he loved there both betrayed him, though it becomes clear that the reality is more complicated.
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Easter weekend readathon
Every Easter for more than a decade now (16 years?) Tim has got together with a group of friends to play computer games for the bank holiday weekend. Usually they come to our house and I either go to visit my family or I hole up in the bedroom reading books. This year we of course could not have several house guests, but they still gamed together remotely while I enjoyed the freedom to read all over the house!
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