John Walters's Blog, page 26

Book Review: First Person Singular: Stories by Haruki Murakami

I have read several of Murakami’s books, including the novels Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage and Kafka on the Shore and his short story collection Men Without Women. Murakami has a distinctively spare style, a sort of matter-of-fact approach that leads you along until you plummet into one of his unique surrealistic rabbit holes. So it is with several of the stories in this collection.

As the title indicates, all of the stories in First Person Singular are told by a narrator who seems to be none other than Murakami himself. Sometimes he even identifies himself by name. This reminds me of the approach of none other than Jorge Luis Borges; in many of his stories there is a narrator (often named Borges) who is more or less an observer to the character or characters and the story as it unfolds.

In this book of Murakami’s, at no time do any of the narrators of the stories deviate from the rather abstract voice of the observer. In several of them, the narrator is out doing something or other and comes across an individual who then tells him a story. In “Cream,” it is an old man sitting on a bench in a park who attempts to explain life as a circle with many centers. In “On a Stone Pillow,” it is a one-night-stand lover who sends him a volume of her self-published poetry. In “With the Beatles,” it is a girlfriend’s brother who experiences intermittent memory loss. In “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey,” it is an aged, intelligent, talking monkey who tells the narrator his life story. In “Carnaval,” it is an unattractive woman who shares the narrator’s taste in classical music. “The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection” seems to be a straightforward memoir about Murakami’s attraction to baseball, except that sprinkled throughout are poems that he wrote while sitting in the stands watching games. In the title story, “First Person Singular,” the narrator describes how he sometimes gets the urge to dress up in nice suits and take walks; by the end, though, he meets a strange woman in a bar and Murakami drops readers into one of those dimension-shattering rabbit holes.

This is a fairly short collection and a fairly easy read. It is as if you are relaxing with the narrator and he is telling you tales of interesting people and unusual events from his past. The voice does not change from one story to the next, but it is a pleasant voice, absorbing, enthralling, and easy to listen to. I mentioned Borges earlier, but though these stories sometimes dip into the surreal, they do not have the metaphysical complexity of Borges’s tales. Instead, they maintain a veneer of the mundane and simple aspects of everyday life and merely hint at the unsolvable conundrums and poetical significances that lie beneath. As for the constant voice of the narrator, he is every person – or any person – taking his journey through life. On the way, he often encounters that which is strange and fascinating, and when he does, he tells us about it – not only to clarify it in his own mind, but also so that we as readers can share in his sense of wonder.

Look for Me on Pinterest

Recently I have been studying and experimenting with various forms of social media with a view to more effectively promoting my books. One of the platforms I found interesting, fun, and easy to use is Pinterest. Like Instagram, Pinterest focuses on images and videos, but unlike Instagram, which offers a more immediate but ephemeral experience, Pinterest allows you to create boards with image pins on permanent display.

The learning curve for picking up skills on Pinterest was short. I had to putter around a bit to figure out how to post images, descriptions, and accompanying links. (Clicking on my pins will take you either to my website or to book pages on Amazon.com.) Once I got the hang of it, though, it was absorbing and enjoyable.

I created boards on which I could highlight my book covers, of course, including “Novels,” “Short Story Collections,” “Memoirs,” “The One Thousand Series,” and “Writing and Reading.” I also created a board with photos of some of the far-flung places in the world I have visited and set stories in, and a board with photos of the Mercedes-Benz camper van that my wife, three young sons, and I lived in full time while traveling in Italy and Greece.

Come by and have a look! To reach my Pinterest page, simply click on the Pinterest icon (the white P in the red circle) near the top of the right column of my website’s home page, or click here.

Book Review: Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad

When Suleika Jaouad was only twenty-two years old, she was diagnosed with leukemia, and she was told that she had only a thirty-five percent chance of survival. It began with a maddening itch on her legs shortly after she moved to Paris to take a job. She was flown back to New York, and spent the next few years in and out of hospitals, enduring multiple bouts of chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant. In the midst of this, she pitched a column to the New York Times about her struggles with her illness. The column, Life Interrupted (whose film version won an Emmy award), attracted a multitude of readers, many of whom wrote to her detailing their own life-and-death struggles with illness. After Jaouad survived against all odds, she decided to reconnect with life by making a cross-country road trip to visit some of the pen-friends who had supported her in her illness.

To be honest, I picked up the book because I thought that it focused on her road journey, and I love memoirs about road trips. However, at least the first three-quarters of the book tell of her gradually worsening illness; her struggle to survive; her relationships with her parents, boyfriend, and other cancer patients; and her mental state as she wavered between hope and despair. I don’t know if I would have started the book if I had known how much of it is about sickness and hospitals, but once I got going, I found it very hard to put down. Somehow Jaouad manages to avoid allowing the story to become maudlin or disgusting, despite her frequent setbacks, brushes with death, and descriptions of debilitation. As the first-person narrator, she becomes such a sympathetic character that all you want to do is cheer her on and keep reading to find out what happens next.

In fact, it is the writing that saves her. It allows her to turn an objective and analytical eye on what she is going through, even in the midst of a rollercoaster of emotions. It truly is heartbreaking when doctors announce she has to do another months-long round of chemotherapy after she thought it was all over, when she breaks up with her boyfriend Will after he spends years as her primary caregiver just as it looks like she’s going to make it after all, and when she forms close friendships with other cancer victims and then one by one they die when they are still very young. I feel no shame in admitting that I wept frequently as I read this book, but I have to emphasize that despite its subject matter it is not a tearjerker in the negative sense of the term. The tears are tears of empathy. What Jaouad makes clear throughout her narrative is that there are no easy answers and no quick cures to many of the traumas of life. And even when she is pronounced cured and is able to make her cross-country odyssey, her past illness haunts her. She never knows when it might recur, and after spending several of her young adult years in hospitals and under threat of death, she has a difficult time coping with life and relationships in the outside world.

One of the last people she visits on her tour is a prisoner who has spent much of his adult life on death row in Texas. He was one of the first people to correspond with her when her column appeared in the New York Times. As they write to each other, Jaouad realizes that there is an eerie similarity between being in isolation in a prison cell and being trapped in a dysfunctional body within the four walls of a hospital room.

Don’t be put off by the subject matter of this book. As I mentioned, I had an aversion to reading a memoir set mainly in hospitals before I started it too. However, its spirit rises far above the sordid details of medications, needles, surgeries, bedpans, hair loss, open sores, and struggles to breathe. That’s there too, but despite all of that it is a heartfelt, heartbreaking, inspirational, and illuminating story; it shows us that even in the midst of suffering there are glimmers of beauty. This book is a good example; the author has transcended her pain to create a work of art.

Book Review: The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

This book is a fantasy that includes a ghost haunting a bookstore and a book that seems to bring death to those who read it. However, these elements are peripheral for much of the story, although they prove to be important as the main character achieves emotional resolution near the end. Despite its fantastical trappings, though, The Sentence is extremely relevant. At its heart are current events such as the COVID pandemic, the killing of George Floyd, and the riots that occurred in the aftermath of Floyd’s death.

The title of the book has multiple meanings. Its narrator, a Native American woman nicknamed Tookie, goes through a long prison sentence at the beginning of the book. A journal that she discovers has a sentence in it that seemed to have caused the death of Flora, the woman who haunts the bookshop. Additionally, Erdrich places a quote from Sun Yung Shin at the beginning of the book that says, “From the time of birth to the time of death, every word you utter is part of one long sentence.”

After he arrests Tookie, the tribal policeman who arrested her, a man named Pollax, quits his job. When she is released after several years in prison, he asks her to marry him and she accepts. Their devotion to each other no matter what is happening in the world around them is one of the poignant highlights of the novel.

Tookie loves books and works at a small independent bookstore that has a large selection of Native American literature. These aspects of Tookie’s character reflect the author’s own background. Erdrich owns an independent bookstore called Birchbark Books in Minnesota, where the story is set. We all went through the physical and social changes brought about by COVID, but Erdrich also saw firsthand the aftermath of the tragedy of George Floyd’s murder, as it happened in Minneapolis, where she lives and her bookstore is situated.

A great strength of this novel is Tookie’s complex character and strong narrative voice. She is flawed, vulnerable, but deeply heroic in her own way. When her husband Pollax gets COVID and has to spend a long time in the hospital, she is unable to visit or even directly communicate with him. In frustration, she sleeps in her car in a parking lot next to the hospital even though the weather is sub-freezing, just so that she can be near him. She and her family want to get involved in the protests that occur in the wake of Floyd’s murder, but they have to reckon with not only often-violent police suppression, but also the rapidly spreading pandemic. While all this is going on, Flora’s haunting of the bookstore begins to affect Tookie more personally and traumatically.

Erdrich is a writer of elegant simplicity. Her word choices, the cadence of her sentences, and her style are always spot-on. The story never drags, even when it focuses on Tookie’s reactions to the weather, the landscape, or the feeling of holding and observing her stepdaughter’s baby. This is a wonderful novel: a fantasy that also focuses intensely on the reality of our times. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America’s Forgotten Border by Porter Fox

I love a good travel book, and I am grateful for the serendipitous discovery of this one on the library shelves. In it, the author writes of his journeys from east to west along the northern border of the United States. He does not do it on a single trip but in five separate sections over the course of three years. He describes the landscapes and people he encounters and also delves into the history of each region.

In the first section, called “The Dawnland,” he journeys mainly by canoe along rivers and lakes in northern Maine, following the U.S.-Canadian border as closely as he can. He tells of the situation of commercial fishermen in Maine and of Champlain and other early French explorers and their attempts to explore, claim, colonize, and exploit the northland, especially in relation to the fur trade.

The second section is called “The Sweet-Water Seas.” It concerns the Great Lakes, which straddle the U.S.-Canadian border. For this leg of the journey, Fox books a cruise on a freighter traversing the Great Lakes. He boards in Montreal; the freighter travels up the St. Lawrence River and crosses Lake Ontario, Lake Erie, Lake Huron, and Lake Superior. The author finally disembarks at Thunder Bay on the northwest shore of Lake Superior. As he journeys, Fox regales readers with stories about the exploration of the lakes and early shipping history.

Next, in the section called “Boundary Waters,” Fox writes about the trackless wilderness of forests and a thousand lakes in northern Minnesota. To explore this wild country, he hires a professional guide and goes on a three-day canoeing and camping expedition. He writes of the Indians who first arrived in the area and explorers and trappers called voyageurs who traversed this wilderness in search of furs as early as the seventeenth century.

The section called “Seven Fires” takes place in North Dakota. Here the author mainly travels by car, and his focus is on Native American protests of oil pipelines fouling the waters that their reservations depend on. He follows the history of the tribes of the northlands, particularly the Sioux.

Section five is called “The Medicine Line.” This is in reference to a phrase Indians used when they were being pursued by troops. When they reached the U.S.-Canadian border, the U.S. troops would stop chasing them and the Indians would be safe, at least for a time. The western stretch of U.S.-Canadian border that runs along the forty-ninth parallel is the longest straight stretch of border in the world. Although it runs through rugged wilderness, much of it is delineated by a physical line in which the trees and other foliage have been clear-cut and markers have been laid. Here Fox writes about the politics of establishing the border and the rigors expeditions went through while surveying and marking it.

The combination of history and travelogue balances very well in Northlands, making it an entertaining read. The author is highly observant and has a simple but intensely descriptive style. If you like travel, history, and adventure, you are sure to enjoy this book.

“The Dead Shall Rise” in Spirit Machine

My short story “The Dead Shall Rise” has just been published in Spirit Machine: Tales of Séance Fiction. It is a limited edition anthology with a gorgeous cover. According to the publisher, the anthology “merges science fiction with spiritualism and a dash of steampunk.” There are twenty-eight stories in all, half steampunk and half science fiction. My story falls into the science fiction category. It involves an investigation into the inexplicable sightings of fully intelligent and coherent ghosts, first in a specific location in Seattle and then throughout the world.

Copies of the anthology are available on the publisher’s website here.

Book Review: We Are Satellites by Sarah Pinkster

In We Are Satellites, the sole science fictional element is a device called a Pilot, which has a blue glowing light and is implanted in a person’s head to supposedly optimize their awareness and productivity. The story is told in the alternating viewpoints of a four-member family: two mothers, a son, and a daughter. One of the mothers gets a Pilot and one doesn’t. The son gets one and then joins the military and later becomes a poster boy for the Pilot manufacturer. The daughter, due to her epilepsy, is unable to get one and joins an anti-Pilot movement. What we as readers learn about the public’s reactions to the Pilot program is all through the thoughts and activities of these four people.

At first I thought that Pinkster was going to get into the generic evil corporation trying to take over the world story, but her focus is more subdued – which strengthens the narrative. The corporation is doing evil things to make a profit, yes, but not much more than many corporations nowadays that create a pseudo-need and then convince consumers that they have got to have the new device. When I first started reading I supposed that it would turn out that the Pilots were only a prelude to government mind control. I had recently been reading the Book of Revelation in the Bible as research for a novelette I was writing. In chapter thirteen it talks about the mark of the beast on the forehead that the Antichrist would force on everyone. I thought that’s the direction that Pinkster’s story was going to take. When it didn’t, I was relieved; there are too many stories like that out there already.

The power of this novel is in the fragility and vulnerability of its characters. Sometimes the blatant mistakes they make are annoying: for instance, one of the mothers starts shouting at a military recruiter during a school event and as a result loses her teaching job; the daughter steals something important from her brother; the other mother lies to her family to cover up some mistakes. But then, even the best of families are sometimes dysfunctional; it is not perfection that unites them but acknowledgment of mistakes, repentance, and forgiveness.

This novel is a welcome relief from louder, brasher science fictional fare by writers who feel there have to be battles and explosions every few pages or readers might lose interest. Despite the technological gimmick at its core, it is a story about humans and their relationships with one another. Something like the Pilots posited in this tale could be introduced anytime in our real world, and even now there is technology we have to cope with that is every bit as intrusive. We are confronted with innovation every day, and we are continually forced to make decisions as to how we will react to it all. This novel reminds us that our relationships with those we love are what give us strength and meaning, not the profusion of gadgets by which we are surrounded.

Book Review: The Library Book by Susan Orlean

Libraries have been some of my favorite places on Earth ever since I was a child. When our family lived on lower Capital Hill in Seattle, my mother would drive me and my siblings to the Henry Branch Library on top of Capital Hill so we could explore the shelves and check out books. I would usually come home with a significant heap of literary treasures. Later, in my teen years, after I had come to the realization that I was a writer, I discovered the science fiction shelves at the Henry Branch and in particular the Nebula Awards volumes.

While raising our young family in Greece, it was sometimes difficult to find enough English language books to fuel the fires of my reading addiction, as I recount in my essay called “Treasure Hunt: Searching for Books in Thessaloniki,” although we had access to some of the best libraries in the city.

Nowadays, I mainly go to the Northeast Branch of the Seattle Public Library. I am more dependent on it than ever because my tight budget does not permit me to buy many books. It still thrills me to explore the shelves. Last year I received a devastating shock when the entire Seattle Public Library system shut down due to the COVID pandemic. I had to compensate by purchasing a few books but mainly rereading books I had on hand.

In The Library Book, author Susan Orleans uses her lifelong love of libraries to tell a fascinating tale based on the devastating fire that destroyed much of the Los Angeles Central Library in 1986. She uses that incident to weave multiple story threads about the fire itself, the investigation of the fire, the man who was suspected of starting it, how the building was repaired and the books salvaged, the history of the Los Angeles Library system, profiles of some of its main librarians, the history of book burning, the writing of Fahrenheit 451, the treatment of the homeless and other questionable library patrons, and other equally intriguing topics.

How could a book about libraries be such a page-turner? And yet it is. One reason is its focus on the library fire and the investigation of how it started and whether the crime of arson was involved. However, another reason is Orlean’s obvious love of libraries, which was instilled in her by her mother, who brought her to libraries and encouraged her to freely explore all the treasures within. That love comes through loud and clear. It is a love that I share and many other people do as well. Libraries are special civic institutions that welcome all visitors, poor or rich, simple or highly educated. They are available to everyone for education, enlightenment, research, entertainment – and yes, sometimes just because people need a quiet place to use the bathroom and escape from the turmoil outside.

This book was a wonderful discovery for me. Although it was published fairly recently, I had never heard of it until I found it by chance while – you guessed it – perusing the shelves at my local library. It’s a lively and fun read, and it effectively conveys the inestimable value of public libraries. Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Best American Short Stories 2021 Edited by Jesmyn Ward and Heidi Pitlor

This collection is comprised of what is considered by the two editors to be the best “literary” short stories of the year, as opposed to the best genre short stories, which appear in different collections. As usual, though, two of the most interesting stories are, in fact, science fiction and fantasy respectively, showing that there is considerable overlap and subjective assessments when it comes to which stories are selected for the various volumes.

The science fiction story is “Love Letter” by George Saunders, which takes the form of a deceptively sweet missive from a grandfather to his grandson in a United States that has become authoritarian in the manner of George Orwell’s 1984. It is even more frightening because of its subtle references to current political realities. The fantasy story is “Portrait of Two Young Ladies in White and Green Robes (Unidentified Artist, circa Sixteenth Century)” by Jane Pek, which concerns two immortal women who wander the world, one of whom decides to forsake her immortality for a chance to get married and have children.

One of the strengths of this collection is the diversity of cultures and backgrounds in the stories. There are tales set in China, Japan, Nigeria, and other locales, and these settings are not just backdrops but are integral aspects of the plots and themes of the various stories. One of the weaknesses of the collection is that so many of the selections are more like descriptions or character studies instead of actual stories. This causes readers to sort of view them objectively from a distance for the artistic construction of their components rather than become immersed and involved in what is taking place with the characters. I read for quite a while before finding a story that felt like an actual story, that drew me in and made me care deeply about what was happening. This was “Paradise” by Yxta Maya Murray. This story features as first-person protagonist a black woman whose white husband has died. She and her daughter live with the blatantly conservative and intolerant father of her late husband in a town called Paradise in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California. When a wildfire threatens the town, the protagonist wants to evacuate to save her daughter, while the father-in-law/grandfather wants to try and stay and protect his home and possessions. This story is based on the historical wildfire that swept through and all but destroyed Paradise in 2018. Another story that is intensely absorbing in terms of plot, character, and setting is “You Are My Dear Friend” by Madhuri Vijay, about an Indian woman who cannot have children and decides to adopt a child from a poor background who turns out to be disrespectful, disobedient, and almost feral. “Palaver” by Bryan Washington and “Biology” by Kevin Wilson, two of the shorter entries in the book that appear near the end, also work well in terms of highlighting mother-son and teacher-student relationships.

Another aspect of this collection I see as a weakness is that the editors have chosen to present the stories alphabetically by the names of the authors rather than arranging them balanced according to themes, characters, setting, length, and so on. A different arrangement would have made for an easier read. That aside, as usual, I would sum up by saying that there are stories I enjoyed, stories about which I was indifferent, and stories I had a hard time getting through – which is usual for this type of collection.

Book Review: The Greeks: A Global History by Roderick Beaton

This book is relatively new, having been published in 2021. It was recommended to me by one of my sons; soon afterwards I found out that another of my sons was also reading it. In short, it is a superb book, well-written and fascinating through and through. It begins in 1500 BC and follows the story of Greek-speaking peoples all the way through to the present, concluding with the effect of the COVID pandemic in Greece.

There’s a lot to tell. Greece only began to become an independent nation in 1821, and it didn’t assimilate all of its present geographical territory until 1947. However, when Beaton refers to the Greeks, he is not speaking merely of those who have inhabited the land mass of present-day Greece, but rather the people who preserved the Greek language and culture wherever they lived. For centuries Constantinople was the center of the Greek world, first under the Roman Empire, then under the Byzantine Empire, and then under the Ottoman Empire. Throughout most of Greek history, the Greeks were subjugated by one foreign state or another. Yet despite their troubled past, they managed to introduce the alphabet, the epic poetry of the Iliad and the Odyssey, drama, written history, and the concepts of the independent city state, politics, and democracy. Christianity was spread throughout the western world through Greek speakers and the New Testament, which was originally written in Greek. To attempt to summarize all the intriguing bits of information on Greek history and achievements that this book imparts in this brief review would be an overwhelming task. There’s no option but to read it for yourself; you won’t be disappointed.

This book was particularly enjoyable for me because so much of my past life is caught up with Greece and Greek people. I hitchhiked around Greece and visited some of the islands as a hippie traveler in the mid-1970s. Later, I married a Greek woman and we raised our five sons in Greece as bilingual Greek-Americans. I lived in Greece for almost twenty years. We spent a few years in Athens, but most of the time we were in Thessaloniki. For fifteen years I taught English as a second language in private language schools. I learned to read Greek, and I could speak it if I needed to shop or ask for directions, but it’s a tough language to learn. My wife and kids always had a good laugh if I would try to say something complex. My sons, though, spoke English at home but went to Greek-language elementary schools and high schools. They all live in the States now, but as dual nationals they have the elite privilege of getting the best of both cultures.

As for my own adventures in Greece, you can read all about them in my book After the Rosy-Fingered Dawn: A Memoir of Greece.

But back to Beaton’s book. If you are American or from any country in Europe or the Middle East, a lot of what you have been taught about philosophy, history, politics, logic, drama, art, and other subjects can be traced back to the ideas of Greek thinkers. There are large Greek communities in many parts of the world, including the United States, Australia, Great Britain, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, and many parts of the former Soviet Union. And even if you are one of the few people in the world who have never been touched by Greek influence, you will find this a stirring, intriguing, entertaining, and illuminating read.