To have friends was a sign of degeneracy

Loving SabotageLoving 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

Misaeng poster
Jang Geu-rae (pictured with armful of folders) learns what it means to be a salaryman in this drama.

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

DoppelgangerDoppelgänger
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 fundamentalistThe 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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Who would put Jane Austen to an evil purpose?

The jane austen book clubThe Jane Austen Book Club
by Karen Joy Fowler

I picked this book from my TBR because I suspected it would be light and fluffy and that was all I felt capable of reading this past week. It was exactly right.

I should say upfront that I am not a big Jane Austen fan, and have not read all her works, and that didn’t impede my enjoyment of this book. In fact, it gently mocks those characters who are major Austen fans – then again, it gently mocks all its characters. I have read four of Austen’s six novels, but if you were to come to this as a complete Austen newbie, Fowler includes synopses and select quotes from literary critics at the end of the book.

The format is that each chapter is based around a meeting of the book club – so it’s a new month, a new book and a new setting (the club’s six members take it in turn to host). As is perhaps predictable, the earlier chapters contain more earnest dissections of Austen’s work, while later on it is the club members’ lives that are being analysed, for the most part.

They’re a disparate group to begin with. The club is started by Jocelyn, a middle-aged dog breeder who is worried about how her childhood friend Sylvia is handling the break-up of her marriage, so she decides this will be a useful distraction. I’m not sure that Austen’s concentration on love and marriage is actually the best distraction for Sylvia, which of course tells us something about Jocelyn.

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March 2020 reading round-up

My current office space.

Well, the world sure changed over the course of this month. I cannot believe just over two weeks ago we were going to work, to the pub, hanging out with friends. The Great Isolation has barely started and looks set to last for months, so we’re going to have to figure out new ways to be sociable.

Tim and I are luckier than most right now – we’re healthy, still working, safe at home – but it’s hard not to be a ball of anxiety. Which is taking a toll on my reading. For most of the month I’ve only read comics, plus the news. I’m putting what spare energy I do have into trying to make sure I get enough exercise. But reading is still the best means I know to get to sleep. And my work-from-home set-up is in our dining room/library so I’m surrounded by my books all day, and that’s comforting.

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A language that hasn’t learned to depict reality

The Ministry of PainThe Ministry of Pain
by Dubravka Ugresic
translated from Croatian by Michael Henry Heim

This book started really strong for me and then tailed off. It has a lot of interesting things to say about language, story and identity, but two unfortunate decisions toward the end undermined my pleasure. This is my Netherlands read for the EU Reading Challenge.

Tanja Ludic left her home in Zagreb during the 1990s Yugoslav civil war. A few years later she is teaching Servo-Kroat at the University of Amsterdam, a temporary contract and almost certainly a temporary subject. She quickly realises that all her students are floundering, most of them like her are refugees from a forever-changed homeland. So she expands her course to cover “Yugo” culture, in fact any memories that her students will share with her and each other.

Initially, the novel flits between these recollections and Tanja’s musings on language, on life in Amsterdam, on being a migrant. As she gets to know her students, they become a larger part of her life and the story. But events conspire to prevent this from becoming the cosy situation she craves.

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Book blogging, 10 years on

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When books are opened, you discover you have wings

It was 10 years (and 2 weeks) ago, after a few months of deliberation and speed-learning WordPress, that I published this website and my first book review. A lot has changed since then, not least the amount of time I dedicate to blogging, but some things thankfully remain.

Books are still a source of comfort both to read and to discuss. I find online book communities are still a kind, gentle place to be, even if very few interactions happen on the blogs themselves now. I still buy books faster than I read them and I still want to know about all the latest releases even though I can’t possibly keep up with them all.

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Cooks are a dysfunctional, mercenary lot, fringe-dwellers

Kitchen ConfidentialKitchen Confidential
by Anthony Bourdain

Just as it pleased me that my Dad gave me copies of this book and Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto in the same parcel, it also pleased me to read them one after the other. Aside from the titles, I’d say they have zero in common, but I very much enjoyed both books.

The book that made Bourdain famous is a highly entertaining memoir about his career in the restaurant business, from washing up as a summer job, to being a head chef far too young to maintain his success, to having drug problems and clawing his way back up to the top job.

This isn’t a straightforward memoir. Essays on various aspects of working in a busy kitchen are interspersed between recollections of specific periods in Bourdain’s life. He starts with his childhood discovery of really good food on a summer trip to France. After recounting his training and career, he skips to an essay titled “Who cooks?”, which describes general and specific traits of kitchen staff. And it’s not a pretty portrait.

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