April Books

Quality, not quantity

Another book picked up in Hawaii, Ryka Aoki’s Light from Uncommon Stars is simply fantastic. The story of a trans runaway violinist, her teacher’s contract with a demon, and intergalactic refugees who make donuts is, on paper, batshit crazy, but my god it all works so well. I had to keep resetting my expectations at the start of every chapter as Aoki took the story in a new direction, (Ah, so this is traumatic realism, no it’s supernatural, no, wait, it’s science fiction, no…) but once I accepted that and just sat back to enjoy the ride… Damn. I’ll be getting the rest of Aoki’s books as soon as I can.

This month started great, 200 pages of Ryka Aoki in one sitting, a real urge to devour books, and a full tbr shelf to choose from, and then… real life got in the way. The academic year started in Japan, which slowed me down, and then I got three editing commissions which took up the remaining out of office time, and a piece for the Japan Times on Fuminori Nakamura which took up the rest of my heads space not reserved for a paper on Haruki Murakami that’s an ongoing project. When I finally got a moment to read purely for pleasure (the others are also pleasurable, but not purely so, nothing can be purely pleasurable when you are doing it for money and to a deadline) I wanted to be transported to another time and place. Cormac McCarthy’s All the Prerry Horses answered that call perfectly. Following young John Grady Cole across the border into Mexico, into love and into trouble, this is as good as hyped and so I will continue my deep dive into McCarthy’s work (look back at February for what I said about my experience of McCarthy to date). This is writing I could never do, a voice I could never have, and I love reading that because there’s no sense of jealousy or thwarted ambition that I sometimes get with writers working in a similar style or with similar themes as me, just joy in an artist doing his own thing in his own way.

At the end of the month I went to South Korea for a conference and took this novel with me for company. While I tend to only review Japanese literature (not through choice, but because those are the ones I can get published), publishers often send me advance copies of other books and this is one, courtesy of the lovely people at New Directions. It’s a short, impressionistic novel about Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. I devoured it in on the flight to Seoul (which was fine because I was intending on buying some recent Korean translations anyway) and loved Voetmann’s prose and humour in Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen’s translation, but when one of my friends who was also attending the festival asked what it was about I didn’t really know how to answer. It’s about the politics that surrounded Brahe, the competition between scholars and the intrigues that took place around the science, but that flat description doesn’t do it justice. Impressionistic is, I think, an apt description. To say Monet painted a lily pond is entirely miss the point of everything Monet did; likewise here. This is impressionistic prose that you lose yourself in; the plot is simply the thing the language grows from.