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The Gardens of Kyoto
Exceeding the promise of her New York Times Notable Book debut, Kate Walbert brings her prizewinning "painter's eye and poet's voice" (The Hartford Courant) to a mesmerizing story of war, romance, and grief.
I had a cousin, Randall, killed on Iwo Jima. Have I told you?
So begins Kate Walbert's beautiful and heart-breaking novel about a young woman, Ellen, coming of age in the long shadow of World War II. Forty years later she relates the events of this period, beginning with the death of her favorite cousin, Randall, with whom she had shared Easter Sundays, secrets, and, perhaps, love. In an isolated, aging Maryland farmhouse that once was a stop on the Underground Railroad, Randall had grown up among ghosts: his father, Sterling, present only in body; his mother, dead at a young age; and the apparitions of a slave family. When Ellen receives a package after Randall's death, containing his diary and a book called The Gardens of Kyoto, her bond to him is cemented, and the mysteries of his short life start to unravel.
The narrative moves back and forth between Randall's death in 1945 and the autumn six years later, when Ellen meets Lieutenant Henry Rock at a college football game on the eve of his departure for Korea. But it soon becomes apparent that Ellen's memory may be distorting reality, altered as it is by a mix of imagination and disappointment, and that the truth about Randall and Henry -- and others -- may be hidden. With lyrical, seductive prose, Walbert spins several parallel stories of the emotional damage done by war. Like the mysterious arrangements of the intricate sand, rock, and gravel gardens of Kyoto, they gracefully assemble into a single, rich mosaic.
Based on a Pushcart and O. Henry Prize-winning story, this masterful first novel establishes Walbert as a writer of astonishing elegance and power.
I had a cousin, Randall, killed on Iwo Jima. Have I told you?
So begins Kate Walbert's beautiful and heart-breaking novel about a young woman, Ellen, coming of age in the long shadow of World War II. Forty years later she relates the events of this period, beginning with the death of her favorite cousin, Randall, with whom she had shared Easter Sundays, secrets, and, perhaps, love. In an isolated, aging Maryland farmhouse that once was a stop on the Underground Railroad, Randall had grown up among ghosts: his father, Sterling, present only in body; his mother, dead at a young age; and the apparitions of a slave family. When Ellen receives a package after Randall's death, containing his diary and a book called The Gardens of Kyoto, her bond to him is cemented, and the mysteries of his short life start to unravel.
The narrative moves back and forth between Randall's death in 1945 and the autumn six years later, when Ellen meets Lieutenant Henry Rock at a college football game on the eve of his departure for Korea. But it soon becomes apparent that Ellen's memory may be distorting reality, altered as it is by a mix of imagination and disappointment, and that the truth about Randall and Henry -- and others -- may be hidden. With lyrical, seductive prose, Walbert spins several parallel stories of the emotional damage done by war. Like the mysterious arrangements of the intricate sand, rock, and gravel gardens of Kyoto, they gracefully assemble into a single, rich mosaic.
Based on a Pushcart and O. Henry Prize-winning story, this masterful first novel establishes Walbert as a writer of astonishing elegance and power.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
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855 people want to read
About the author
Kate Walbert
11 books204 followersKate Walbert was born in New York City and raised in Georgia, Texas, Japan and Pennsylvania, among other places.
She is the author of A Short History of Women, chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2009 and a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize; Our Kind, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2004; The Gardens of Kyoto, winner of the 2002 Connecticut Book Award in Fiction in 2002; and Where She Went, a collection of linked stories and New York Times notable book.
She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fiction fellowship, a Connecticut Commission on the Arts fiction fellowship, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library.
Her short fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize stories.
From 1990 to 2005, she lectured in fiction writing at Yale University. She currently lives in New York City with her family.
She is the author of A Short History of Women, chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2009 and a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize; Our Kind, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2004; The Gardens of Kyoto, winner of the 2002 Connecticut Book Award in Fiction in 2002; and Where She Went, a collection of linked stories and New York Times notable book.
She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fiction fellowship, a Connecticut Commission on the Arts fiction fellowship, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library.
Her short fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize stories.
From 1990 to 2005, she lectured in fiction writing at Yale University. She currently lives in New York City with her family.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 203 reviews
July 10, 2007
So so bad. I had this book in my possession for over a year and was always so intrigued by it for some reason, then when I finally read it it was just supremely disappointing. I don't even remember what the story or point of the book was at all. My mind would wander after every paragraph and it was such a struggle to finish. Looking back, I'm surprised I actually made it all the way through.
May 26, 2011
One might think that a book titled The Gardens of Kyoto would be set in Japan, but such is not the case with Kate Walbert’s hauntingly beautiful debut novel. Instead, this lovely book wends its way from a brick mansion in Baltimore, Maryland to a hotel on Paris’ Rive Gauche, to a military hospital on Long Island, to a women’s college in suburban Philadelphia. Along the way, it makes stops to reveal “hidden” characters to the reader, fascinating people all, but people whose lives, at least in relation to the book’s narrator’s, are ephemeral, people whose lives blur through grief or tragedy or fantasy, people who may or may not be “real” to anyone but our narrator, people who may not be real even to themselves.
The Gardens of Kyoto begins with a deceptively simple sentence: “I had a cousin, Randall, killed on Iwo Jima. Have I told you?” The book, however, is complicated, structurally sophisticated, and ephemeral. The gardens in the title are a reference to Kyoto’s famous Ryoan-ji Zen gardens, probably constructed in the late 15th century, and consisting of an arrangement of fifteen rocks on raked, white pebbles, situated so that only fourteen are visible at any one time, from any vantage point. (In Buddhism, fifteen designates enlightenment, and presumably, one would have to be enlightened in order to see the fifteenth rock. Seeing it from the air does not count; in the 15th century, they could not conceive of such a thing as seeing from the air.) As Randall, the owner of the book, The Gardens of Kyoto, puts it, the gardens were meant to be viewed from a distance, “their fragments in relation.”
Walbert has chosen to tell her story within a frame, which leaves her free to roam the past as she chooses, and create a book in which all is never exactly what it seems. The book’s narrator, Ellen, the youngest of three sisters, is a middle-aged English teacher when she utters that simple opening line, though we don’t learn that fact until near the book’s end. As a young teenager, she was a shy, sensitive, dreamy girl who lived for her annual Easter visits to her cousin, Randall in Maryland.
Randall is a bookish and intellectually curious young man, a few years older than Ellen, and like Ellen, sensitive and quiet. He lives with his father, an elderly, retired judge, who spends his days closeted in his library, researching a biography of Jonathan Edwards. Randall is obsessed with memories of his deceased mother, and he enjoys showing Ellen secret rooms in his father’s house that were used to smuggle slaves to the North via the Underground Railroad. The young impressionable Ellen becomes totally infatuated with Randall, and according to her, their relationship is cemented by the fact that both of them have bright red hair. Ellen, in fact, becomes so taken with Randall that her brief association with her beloved cousin will color every relationship she has throughout the rest of her life.
We know, of course, that Randall is eventually sent to fight in WWII and that he doesn’t survive the war. (This is not a spoiler; as mentioned above, it’s revealed in the first sentence of the book.) In fact, one of the book’s early set pieces takes place in a diner in which Ellen is waiting with Randall and several other soldiers for a train that will take many of them away from their loved ones forever.
As she waits, Ellen thinks:
Too soon the feel of leaving descended upon the place. Soldiers scraped back their chairs, stood in line to pay their checks. Everyone had the same train to catch.
After learning of Randall’s presumed death on Iwo Jima (his body is never found), his father sends Ellen a package of Randall’s “treasures” that contains his (Randall’s) diary as well as his book, The Gardens of Kyoto. It is through Randall’s diary and his beloved book about Japan’s famous gardens that Ellen and the reader are able to piece together the history of Randall’s short life, and in so doing, learn about Ellen’s. Slowly, Randall takes on another role in Ellen’s life – not cousin or friend, but lover – real or imagined – but without a doubt, the single most important relationship Ellen will ever have.
As Ellen details her relationship with Randall for her own daughter, the narrative is colored with both grief and loss. We know how much Randall meant to Ellen; we’ve already come to like him ourselves; and we know he is one of the soldiers who will not return. Ellen doesn’t deny this fact, even to herself:
Sometimes, when I think about it, I see the two of us there, Randall and me, from a different perspective, as if I were Mother walking through the door to call us for supper.... One will never grow old, never age. One will never plant tomatoes, drive automobiles, go to dances. One will never drink too much and sit alone, wishing, in the dark.
However, as she remembers her last conversation with Randall, it might have been his smile that affected Ellen most of all:
Have I told you his was a beautiful smile? Not the smile of a cynic, nor the easy, hungry smile of boys his age, whose smiles that aim to get them somewhere, are a commodity in exchange for God knows what. No. His was completely without intent; an accident of a smile. The kind of smile that would have surprised him if he could have seen it for himself. But he was too young to know his own extraordinariness.
As Ellen continues to relate her story, we learn how she and others like her felt about coming of age in the 1950s. Certain things, taken for granted (or not taken for granted, but acknowledged as not to be swept under the figurative rug) today, were simply not tolerated in the era immediately following WWII. One was rebellion, something one of Ellen’s sisters displays during an otherwise “normal” and “loving” Thanksgiving Day dinner. Domestic abuse was another, along with the other things one preferred not to deal with. Unwed pregnancies were taboo, as was suicide and the madness to which some of the soldiers in WWII and Korea were driven. The emotional devastation of war is a constant theme running through The Gardens of Kyoto, and it affects Randall’s father, Sterling, Ellen’s sister, Rita and her husband, Roger, Ellen, herself, and Lt. Henry Rock, a handsome young man who falls in love with the already “attached” Daphne, one of Ellen’s friends, and with whom Ellen, herself falls instantly in love. Of the emotionally damaged war veterans, Ellen says:
They pretended to be fine, but if you looked you’d see that they were not fine at all. We weren’t supposed to look. We were supposed to welcome them home, pretending, as they pretended.
These then – vanishing women, endangered children, and men permanently damaged by war – make up the novel’s recurring motifs, and one might assume that a book detailing so much tragedy and violence would become “weighty” and perhaps even melodramatic. Walberg, however, writes such restrained prose, with such a light touch that for the most part, the book remains delicate and lyrical, and because of its restraint, all the more chilling.
The Gardens of Kyoto is a rich, full book, with wonderfully developed, imperfect characters and beautifully developed themes. Is it perfect? No, it’s not. At times, Walbert relies too much on epistolary gimmicks to advance her plot than she does on her own considerable powers as a writer. Besides the diary and book that are given to Ellen by Sterling, Randall’s father, there’s the note from glamorous Aunt Ruby to Randall that reveals a long buried family secret; there’s the letter that Randall steals from a locked box in his father’s desk; there are the invented letters from his sweetheart the lieutenant reads out loud in the evening to try to boost the morale of his men; and then there are the bloodstained letters culled from the corpses in the trenches (only letters free from stains were sent on to the families of deceased soldiers to minimize the families’ pain). And in a book that’s remarkable for its lovely nuanced understatement, Ellen’s deliberate staining of Henry’s letters with her own blood is a bit too much. And given the fact that the title of the book is the name of a Japanese rock garden, it’s a little heavy handed that Henry’s surname just happens to be “Rock.” Fortunately, these minor jarring notes don’t harm the beauty or the power of this book. I’m going to guess that some readers will even like them, and even those who don’t will be willing to forgive.
In setting down her story, Ellen blurs the lines of fantasy and reality. She remembers the first time she kisses Randall, and that blurs into the first time she kisses Henry. Eventually, the reader has to question which events in the book really happened and which are only products of Ellen’s wishful thinking.
Eventually, the reader comes to question whether or not objective truth even exists with regard to human relationships, something Ellen seems to understand. Near the end of the book, Ellen admits her admiration for Shakespeare’s Iago, saying, “I am not what I am. We are none of us who we are.”
The writing in The Gardens of Kyoto is gorgeous. Except for the few instances of the overuse of epistolary devices mentioned above, this is a beautiful and beautifully understated book. The prose is poetic and lyrical; the sentences are, for the most part, long, detailed, and almost as multilayered as the book. It was a joy to read this book for the prose alone. And though the structure and themes are “heavy” and complicated, the book never feels overwrought. Instead, it has an airy, weightless quality that I very much admired.
In the end, The Gardens of Kyoto, while taking place primarily in the US and revolving around American characters, expresses a profoundly Japanese view that “truth,” like the gardens of Ryoan-ji, is subjective and depends solely on the viewer’s vantage point.
I thought this was an extraordinary book – extraordinary in its finely drawn characters, in the scope of its plot and theme, and in the understatement and beauty of its poetic prose.
It’s far too little known and read.
4.5/5
Recommended: Yes, to those who love highly literary fiction. Its themes are lofty and its structure is complicated. This isn’t a “feel good” book, nor is it a book to simply wile away the hours. It is, however, a book that will stay with the reader, not only long after the last page is turned, but probably forever.
Read my book reviews and tips for writers at literarycornercafe.blogspot.com
The Gardens of Kyoto begins with a deceptively simple sentence: “I had a cousin, Randall, killed on Iwo Jima. Have I told you?” The book, however, is complicated, structurally sophisticated, and ephemeral. The gardens in the title are a reference to Kyoto’s famous Ryoan-ji Zen gardens, probably constructed in the late 15th century, and consisting of an arrangement of fifteen rocks on raked, white pebbles, situated so that only fourteen are visible at any one time, from any vantage point. (In Buddhism, fifteen designates enlightenment, and presumably, one would have to be enlightened in order to see the fifteenth rock. Seeing it from the air does not count; in the 15th century, they could not conceive of such a thing as seeing from the air.) As Randall, the owner of the book, The Gardens of Kyoto, puts it, the gardens were meant to be viewed from a distance, “their fragments in relation.”
Walbert has chosen to tell her story within a frame, which leaves her free to roam the past as she chooses, and create a book in which all is never exactly what it seems. The book’s narrator, Ellen, the youngest of three sisters, is a middle-aged English teacher when she utters that simple opening line, though we don’t learn that fact until near the book’s end. As a young teenager, she was a shy, sensitive, dreamy girl who lived for her annual Easter visits to her cousin, Randall in Maryland.
Randall is a bookish and intellectually curious young man, a few years older than Ellen, and like Ellen, sensitive and quiet. He lives with his father, an elderly, retired judge, who spends his days closeted in his library, researching a biography of Jonathan Edwards. Randall is obsessed with memories of his deceased mother, and he enjoys showing Ellen secret rooms in his father’s house that were used to smuggle slaves to the North via the Underground Railroad. The young impressionable Ellen becomes totally infatuated with Randall, and according to her, their relationship is cemented by the fact that both of them have bright red hair. Ellen, in fact, becomes so taken with Randall that her brief association with her beloved cousin will color every relationship she has throughout the rest of her life.
We know, of course, that Randall is eventually sent to fight in WWII and that he doesn’t survive the war. (This is not a spoiler; as mentioned above, it’s revealed in the first sentence of the book.) In fact, one of the book’s early set pieces takes place in a diner in which Ellen is waiting with Randall and several other soldiers for a train that will take many of them away from their loved ones forever.
As she waits, Ellen thinks:
Too soon the feel of leaving descended upon the place. Soldiers scraped back their chairs, stood in line to pay their checks. Everyone had the same train to catch.
After learning of Randall’s presumed death on Iwo Jima (his body is never found), his father sends Ellen a package of Randall’s “treasures” that contains his (Randall’s) diary as well as his book, The Gardens of Kyoto. It is through Randall’s diary and his beloved book about Japan’s famous gardens that Ellen and the reader are able to piece together the history of Randall’s short life, and in so doing, learn about Ellen’s. Slowly, Randall takes on another role in Ellen’s life – not cousin or friend, but lover – real or imagined – but without a doubt, the single most important relationship Ellen will ever have.
As Ellen details her relationship with Randall for her own daughter, the narrative is colored with both grief and loss. We know how much Randall meant to Ellen; we’ve already come to like him ourselves; and we know he is one of the soldiers who will not return. Ellen doesn’t deny this fact, even to herself:
Sometimes, when I think about it, I see the two of us there, Randall and me, from a different perspective, as if I were Mother walking through the door to call us for supper.... One will never grow old, never age. One will never plant tomatoes, drive automobiles, go to dances. One will never drink too much and sit alone, wishing, in the dark.
However, as she remembers her last conversation with Randall, it might have been his smile that affected Ellen most of all:
Have I told you his was a beautiful smile? Not the smile of a cynic, nor the easy, hungry smile of boys his age, whose smiles that aim to get them somewhere, are a commodity in exchange for God knows what. No. His was completely without intent; an accident of a smile. The kind of smile that would have surprised him if he could have seen it for himself. But he was too young to know his own extraordinariness.
As Ellen continues to relate her story, we learn how she and others like her felt about coming of age in the 1950s. Certain things, taken for granted (or not taken for granted, but acknowledged as not to be swept under the figurative rug) today, were simply not tolerated in the era immediately following WWII. One was rebellion, something one of Ellen’s sisters displays during an otherwise “normal” and “loving” Thanksgiving Day dinner. Domestic abuse was another, along with the other things one preferred not to deal with. Unwed pregnancies were taboo, as was suicide and the madness to which some of the soldiers in WWII and Korea were driven. The emotional devastation of war is a constant theme running through The Gardens of Kyoto, and it affects Randall’s father, Sterling, Ellen’s sister, Rita and her husband, Roger, Ellen, herself, and Lt. Henry Rock, a handsome young man who falls in love with the already “attached” Daphne, one of Ellen’s friends, and with whom Ellen, herself falls instantly in love. Of the emotionally damaged war veterans, Ellen says:
They pretended to be fine, but if you looked you’d see that they were not fine at all. We weren’t supposed to look. We were supposed to welcome them home, pretending, as they pretended.
These then – vanishing women, endangered children, and men permanently damaged by war – make up the novel’s recurring motifs, and one might assume that a book detailing so much tragedy and violence would become “weighty” and perhaps even melodramatic. Walberg, however, writes such restrained prose, with such a light touch that for the most part, the book remains delicate and lyrical, and because of its restraint, all the more chilling.
The Gardens of Kyoto is a rich, full book, with wonderfully developed, imperfect characters and beautifully developed themes. Is it perfect? No, it’s not. At times, Walbert relies too much on epistolary gimmicks to advance her plot than she does on her own considerable powers as a writer. Besides the diary and book that are given to Ellen by Sterling, Randall’s father, there’s the note from glamorous Aunt Ruby to Randall that reveals a long buried family secret; there’s the letter that Randall steals from a locked box in his father’s desk; there are the invented letters from his sweetheart the lieutenant reads out loud in the evening to try to boost the morale of his men; and then there are the bloodstained letters culled from the corpses in the trenches (only letters free from stains were sent on to the families of deceased soldiers to minimize the families’ pain). And in a book that’s remarkable for its lovely nuanced understatement, Ellen’s deliberate staining of Henry’s letters with her own blood is a bit too much. And given the fact that the title of the book is the name of a Japanese rock garden, it’s a little heavy handed that Henry’s surname just happens to be “Rock.” Fortunately, these minor jarring notes don’t harm the beauty or the power of this book. I’m going to guess that some readers will even like them, and even those who don’t will be willing to forgive.
In setting down her story, Ellen blurs the lines of fantasy and reality. She remembers the first time she kisses Randall, and that blurs into the first time she kisses Henry. Eventually, the reader has to question which events in the book really happened and which are only products of Ellen’s wishful thinking.
Eventually, the reader comes to question whether or not objective truth even exists with regard to human relationships, something Ellen seems to understand. Near the end of the book, Ellen admits her admiration for Shakespeare’s Iago, saying, “I am not what I am. We are none of us who we are.”
The writing in The Gardens of Kyoto is gorgeous. Except for the few instances of the overuse of epistolary devices mentioned above, this is a beautiful and beautifully understated book. The prose is poetic and lyrical; the sentences are, for the most part, long, detailed, and almost as multilayered as the book. It was a joy to read this book for the prose alone. And though the structure and themes are “heavy” and complicated, the book never feels overwrought. Instead, it has an airy, weightless quality that I very much admired.
In the end, The Gardens of Kyoto, while taking place primarily in the US and revolving around American characters, expresses a profoundly Japanese view that “truth,” like the gardens of Ryoan-ji, is subjective and depends solely on the viewer’s vantage point.
I thought this was an extraordinary book – extraordinary in its finely drawn characters, in the scope of its plot and theme, and in the understatement and beauty of its poetic prose.
It’s far too little known and read.
4.5/5
Recommended: Yes, to those who love highly literary fiction. Its themes are lofty and its structure is complicated. This isn’t a “feel good” book, nor is it a book to simply wile away the hours. It is, however, a book that will stay with the reader, not only long after the last page is turned, but probably forever.
Read my book reviews and tips for writers at literarycornercafe.blogspot.com
January 15, 2015
How did I not know about this little gem? The Gardens of Kyoto is an eloquent book and in important ways, a ghost story of those who have touched the lives of those who are left behind.
The title alludes to a book, gifted to a young Ellen by her cousin and presumed love interest Randall, who, we quickly learn, was killed in the war. (The first sentences: I had a cousin, Randall, killed in Iwo Jima. Have I told you?”) The gardens are unlike anything that Ellen can imagine: “There is a garden in Kyoto meant to be viewed at night in shadows…The point is, the entire thing- the pathways, the fountains, the lakes, the cherry trees—is an illusion: colorless shadows without scent cast by large paper cutouts.”
In truth, though, illusions and reality merge. Kyoto, once on the short list in place of Hiroshima, survives and so does Ellen. But in the meantime, its magic looms large in the imagination – the look, the shape, the story of the gardens varying, depending on who is doing the viewing.
The ghosts that inhabit Ellen’s life are Randall, Ellen’s first love and mentor…his mother, who died early in his life, leaving him with his elderly father, and the house they inhabited, once an important depot for the Underground Railroad. There’s Ellen’s adult lover, Henry Rock, driven mad by the war and his role in it as an understated hero.
And then there are the ghosts that are banished from conversation in the 1950s: unwed pregnancies, illicit liaisons, emotionally and mentally damaged veterans, domestic abuse, lack of empowerment experienced by women. “We are not used to display,” Ellen explains, “this bare truth.” Indeed, as the underbelly of the 1950s are slowly revealed, the effect becomes jarring.
To add to the merging of illusion and reality, key plot points rely on letters: the letters sent by Henry to Daphne, Ellen’s friend, that wind up in Ellen’s hands…the false letters that Henry himself writes when Daphne doesn’t answer him…the letter from Randall’s aunt that is the key to a dark family secret…the bloodstained letters used by a professor/horticulturist who advocates for the salvation of Kyoto. And, of course, the Gardens of Kyoto itself, the book that illuminates a way of thinking for an impressionable young girl.
The Gardens of Kyoto is a luminous book, somewhat elusive, enormously powerful, and filled with beauty and truths. There is real power in these words.
The title alludes to a book, gifted to a young Ellen by her cousin and presumed love interest Randall, who, we quickly learn, was killed in the war. (The first sentences: I had a cousin, Randall, killed in Iwo Jima. Have I told you?”) The gardens are unlike anything that Ellen can imagine: “There is a garden in Kyoto meant to be viewed at night in shadows…The point is, the entire thing- the pathways, the fountains, the lakes, the cherry trees—is an illusion: colorless shadows without scent cast by large paper cutouts.”
In truth, though, illusions and reality merge. Kyoto, once on the short list in place of Hiroshima, survives and so does Ellen. But in the meantime, its magic looms large in the imagination – the look, the shape, the story of the gardens varying, depending on who is doing the viewing.
The ghosts that inhabit Ellen’s life are Randall, Ellen’s first love and mentor…his mother, who died early in his life, leaving him with his elderly father, and the house they inhabited, once an important depot for the Underground Railroad. There’s Ellen’s adult lover, Henry Rock, driven mad by the war and his role in it as an understated hero.
And then there are the ghosts that are banished from conversation in the 1950s: unwed pregnancies, illicit liaisons, emotionally and mentally damaged veterans, domestic abuse, lack of empowerment experienced by women. “We are not used to display,” Ellen explains, “this bare truth.” Indeed, as the underbelly of the 1950s are slowly revealed, the effect becomes jarring.
To add to the merging of illusion and reality, key plot points rely on letters: the letters sent by Henry to Daphne, Ellen’s friend, that wind up in Ellen’s hands…the false letters that Henry himself writes when Daphne doesn’t answer him…the letter from Randall’s aunt that is the key to a dark family secret…the bloodstained letters used by a professor/horticulturist who advocates for the salvation of Kyoto. And, of course, the Gardens of Kyoto itself, the book that illuminates a way of thinking for an impressionable young girl.
The Gardens of Kyoto is a luminous book, somewhat elusive, enormously powerful, and filled with beauty and truths. There is real power in these words.
August 3, 2007
I really did not understand this one at all. Large portions of the plot are left hanging and never resolved. Characters do not ring true, whole thing seemed very phony.
July 8, 2009
Gauzy and aimless, a young woman's ill-fated love told in fragments that reassemble into what I don't know. The story is shaped by unexpected pairings: the romantic love of two awkward cousins, the back story of Japanese gardens and slave escapes, the untold truths of war wounded and unwed mothers. Here it all seems a mash. And yet the prose is mesmerizing.
January 9, 2009
I'm really surprised at how many reviewers thought this book was boring. I thought it was engrossing and beautifully written. I'll keep the imagery in my head for a long time.
July 4, 2016
Trust
This is one of those extraordinary novels where, from the very first page, you find yourself just trusting the author. Never for a moment did I doubt I was reading anything less than a five-star book, but its quality was whispered rather than shouted. It has no obviously heroic characters or striking locations; it barely has a story; if it deals in great themes, they are left for the reader to discover, without fanfare. Even the Kyoto gardens of the title are invoked only as an image; the main action barely leaves the Philadelphia area and the rural Eastern Shore of Maryland. I could not even say how the various parts of the novel fit together, yet fit they do. You read as an act of discovery, simply trusting that the pattern will be revealed. Meanwhile, though, the characters are nuanced and real, the emotion touching in its understatement, and the evocation of period is perfect—and that is all that matters.
"I had a cousin, Randall, killed on Iwo Jima. Have I told you?" Ellen, the narrator, opens the book with these words. She would see Randall whenever her family visited their Maryland farm, a former stop on the Underground Railroad. To his poetic soul, the former fugitives are still a vital presence and their ghosts occupy the house. He and Ellen become teenage soulmates, more than half in love by the time he is shipped off to war. His loss affects her more than she knows. Many years later, when she is in college, Ellen meets another soldier about to go to war, this time to Korea. Although he originally had eyes only for another girl, when he reenters Ellen's life, everything will have changed. Death in battle is not the only tragedy of war.
At one point, Ellen makes a cryptic reference to Rupert Brooke's elegiac 1915 sonnet, "The Soldier":
Trust implies truth, but not necessarily at every stage along the way. Ellen is not a simple narrator, and only in sum is she a reliable one. The novel has two main time periods, the mid-forties and mid-fifties; Ellen keeps going back and forth between them, throwing in little surprises at each turn, often contradicting what she had implied before. The first of the five parts, for example, ends with what appears to be a bombshell, but Ellen will later reveal that she and Randall both knew about this much earlier. In another section, the death of another family member will be reported as established fact, and you thumb back wondering if you have missed something. But no, she will tell you the details in her own good time.
Meanwhile, there are a number of quite short chapters that appear to have nothing directly to do with Ellen, Randall, or Henry. Scenes, for instance, involving a horticulturist who kept himself sane in WW1 by drawing the flora of Northern France. A teacher on Iwo Jima who kept his class safe by hiding in a cave filled with blue butterflies. Or the gardens of Kyoto, sacred spaces with a healing purpose. If I was briefly disappointed that Walbert never takes us there in person, I began to yearn for these oases of calm as the gentle force that holds the story together. One of these, Koto-In, is a garden that you approach down a long avenue of trees shaped so that their shadows spell poems on the path. Poems that are incomplete by the time the traveler reaches the single arch through which the garden may be seen...
This is one of those extraordinary novels where, from the very first page, you find yourself just trusting the author. Never for a moment did I doubt I was reading anything less than a five-star book, but its quality was whispered rather than shouted. It has no obviously heroic characters or striking locations; it barely has a story; if it deals in great themes, they are left for the reader to discover, without fanfare. Even the Kyoto gardens of the title are invoked only as an image; the main action barely leaves the Philadelphia area and the rural Eastern Shore of Maryland. I could not even say how the various parts of the novel fit together, yet fit they do. You read as an act of discovery, simply trusting that the pattern will be revealed. Meanwhile, though, the characters are nuanced and real, the emotion touching in its understatement, and the evocation of period is perfect—and that is all that matters.
"I had a cousin, Randall, killed on Iwo Jima. Have I told you?" Ellen, the narrator, opens the book with these words. She would see Randall whenever her family visited their Maryland farm, a former stop on the Underground Railroad. To his poetic soul, the former fugitives are still a vital presence and their ghosts occupy the house. He and Ellen become teenage soulmates, more than half in love by the time he is shipped off to war. His loss affects her more than she knows. Many years later, when she is in college, Ellen meets another soldier about to go to war, this time to Korea. Although he originally had eyes only for another girl, when he reenters Ellen's life, everything will have changed. Death in battle is not the only tragedy of war.
At one point, Ellen makes a cryptic reference to Rupert Brooke's elegiac 1915 sonnet, "The Soldier":
If I should die, think only this of meWalbert's whole novel is a kind of elegy, set not on the battlefields but in ordinary corners back home. It is no less poignant that these are simple losses felt by people who are young and about to embark on their lives. Indeed, at a time when the whole country was making a fresh start on life.
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England, England's own.
Trust implies truth, but not necessarily at every stage along the way. Ellen is not a simple narrator, and only in sum is she a reliable one. The novel has two main time periods, the mid-forties and mid-fifties; Ellen keeps going back and forth between them, throwing in little surprises at each turn, often contradicting what she had implied before. The first of the five parts, for example, ends with what appears to be a bombshell, but Ellen will later reveal that she and Randall both knew about this much earlier. In another section, the death of another family member will be reported as established fact, and you thumb back wondering if you have missed something. But no, she will tell you the details in her own good time.
Meanwhile, there are a number of quite short chapters that appear to have nothing directly to do with Ellen, Randall, or Henry. Scenes, for instance, involving a horticulturist who kept himself sane in WW1 by drawing the flora of Northern France. A teacher on Iwo Jima who kept his class safe by hiding in a cave filled with blue butterflies. Or the gardens of Kyoto, sacred spaces with a healing purpose. If I was briefly disappointed that Walbert never takes us there in person, I began to yearn for these oases of calm as the gentle force that holds the story together. One of these, Koto-In, is a garden that you approach down a long avenue of trees shaped so that their shadows spell poems on the path. Poems that are incomplete by the time the traveler reaches the single arch through which the garden may be seen...
But this window is impossible to pry open, the gardens [left] as much to the imagination as the endings of the Koto-In poems that are left unfinished, the ones interrupted by a sudden change of weather.Oblique; enigmatic; wonderful.
November 7, 2013
This was a hauntingly beautiful book that dealt with many issues related to war and the devastating effect it had on the life of the main character as well as those within her family circle. Confusing at times, however, the writing was elegant. This was not a book one could read quickly for there is a need in its telling to savor and read between lines and prose.
The main character, Ellen, falls in love with her cousin a young man who is destined to die on Iwo Jima. Her love for Randell colors everything that Ellen does and how she views the men in her life. The family relationships and friends that Ellen has seem so vulnerable especially when seen in the light of the effects that World War 2 had on this generation. It is a sad book, one that you know from the beginning when the author immediately tells of Randell's death, will not turn into a story of happiness and joy. More to the point, this is a story of survival sometimes minimally, but one that awakens a mind to the concept that war and its aftermath is a hell here on earth that often times the survivors can't escape from. It also made me view, as I have gotten older, what my father went through and how his behavior towards us, his family, was certainly colored and overshadowed by his experience in that war.
I am quite glad I read this novel even if truthfully, at times, I felt a bit in the dark as to the veracity of some of Ellen's experiences.
The main character, Ellen, falls in love with her cousin a young man who is destined to die on Iwo Jima. Her love for Randell colors everything that Ellen does and how she views the men in her life. The family relationships and friends that Ellen has seem so vulnerable especially when seen in the light of the effects that World War 2 had on this generation. It is a sad book, one that you know from the beginning when the author immediately tells of Randell's death, will not turn into a story of happiness and joy. More to the point, this is a story of survival sometimes minimally, but one that awakens a mind to the concept that war and its aftermath is a hell here on earth that often times the survivors can't escape from. It also made me view, as I have gotten older, what my father went through and how his behavior towards us, his family, was certainly colored and overshadowed by his experience in that war.
I am quite glad I read this novel even if truthfully, at times, I felt a bit in the dark as to the veracity of some of Ellen's experiences.
September 22, 2007
meh. this was just fine. I had the sense that the author was trying too hard to incorporate clever storytelling techniques. I prefer to get so caught up in a story that I don't think about the author.
May 13, 2021
Journalistic training involves the instruction to tell a story as you would to a friend or words to that effect. I was thinking of that often when reading this book. Would a mother tell her life story to her daughter in this way? The trouble is that the mother never becomes real, she remains like a ghost, and of the daughter I know even less: she does not even acquire a name. And yet the first 75 pages of the novel are beautiful, I liked them very much, looked forward to reading the rest. Later into the book, too, there were occasional absorbing passages. Overall I should have really given it 2.5 stars.
It is a debut novel, so the author has crammed an awful lot into it. There are descriptions of buildings and clothing and so on, a section about the slave trade, gardens of Kyoto and war trauma, but mostly it is about relationships. A review that made me buy the book said "This is an intensely moving love story" but I failed to see it thus. The narrator and her feelings seem tentative to me. She was about thirteen when she fell in love with a cousin a few years older - this is beautifully described. But I got gradually irritated with the author's choice to call the man in her life "your father", even after he was named as Henry Rock. The device of "your father" alienated me.
The author has published other novels since. She certainly has a way with words, may be talented, but I am not rushing out to read anything else by her, not quite yet.
It is a debut novel, so the author has crammed an awful lot into it. There are descriptions of buildings and clothing and so on, a section about the slave trade, gardens of Kyoto and war trauma, but mostly it is about relationships. A review that made me buy the book said "This is an intensely moving love story" but I failed to see it thus. The narrator and her feelings seem tentative to me. She was about thirteen when she fell in love with a cousin a few years older - this is beautifully described. But I got gradually irritated with the author's choice to call the man in her life "your father", even after he was named as Henry Rock. The device of "your father" alienated me.
The author has published other novels since. She certainly has a way with words, may be talented, but I am not rushing out to read anything else by her, not quite yet.
July 17, 2020
«باغ های کیوتو» نام کتابی است از کیت والبرت که نسخه اصلی اش در سال ۲۰۰۱ منتشر شد و علی قانع نسخه ترجمه آن را در سال ۹۱ به انتشارات ققنوس سپرد. البته انتشار آن تا سال ۹۴ به طول انجامید. این رمان داستانی عاشقانه دارد و در حاشیه وقایع جنگ جهانی دوم رخ می دهد.
کتاب از پنج بخش تشکیل شده است یا بهتر بگوییم پنج کتاب کوچک تر در دل خود جا داده است که هر کدام واگویه ای از زمان های متفاوت و خاص زندگی شخصیت زن است. دوره زمانی کتاب به سال های جنگ جهانی و حواشی بعد از آن برمی گردد و نویسنده بخوبی توانسته در هنگام پرداخت به حس و حال قهرمان داستانش اوضاع حاکم در آن زمان و پیامدهای جنگ را در آن بگنجاند.
نکته جالب تر در طول داستان نوع روایت راوی یا همان قهرمان داستان است. راوی آنچنان با واژه ها بازی می کند و آنقدر ما را در بین برش های زمانی و گاه رویاهای خودش پیچ و تاب می دهد که گاهی به گفته های خود او هم شک می کنیم و به جایی می رسیم که از خود می پرسیم: آیا من تمام واقعیت را می شنوم یا تنها بخشی از آن را که زن داستان می خواهد؟ اینجاست که خلاقیت نویسنده به اوج رسیده است و شخصیت داستان دیگر تنها یک زن ساده درون داستان نیست بلکه در ذهن مخاطب جان گرفته و به همراه او نفس می کشد تا شک کند که آن زن به تمام با او صادق است یا نه و آیا چیزی از قلم افتاده است؟
باغ های کیوتو کتابی است از واقعیت تا خیال... همپای دختری نوجوان که رفته رفته بزرگ می شود، جوان می شود، پیر می شود و در دوران ذهنی خاطراتش می چرخد و می چرخد و باز انگار می رسد به نقطه اول، به عشق پاک جوانی؛ درست مثل افسانه های ژاپنی اما فقط در ذهن...
کتاب از پنج بخش تشکیل شده است یا بهتر بگوییم پنج کتاب کوچک تر در دل خود جا داده است که هر کدام واگویه ای از زمان های متفاوت و خاص زندگی شخصیت زن است. دوره زمانی کتاب به سال های جنگ جهانی و حواشی بعد از آن برمی گردد و نویسنده بخوبی توانسته در هنگام پرداخت به حس و حال قهرمان داستانش اوضاع حاکم در آن زمان و پیامدهای جنگ را در آن بگنجاند.
نکته جالب تر در طول داستان نوع روایت راوی یا همان قهرمان داستان است. راوی آنچنان با واژه ها بازی می کند و آنقدر ما را در بین برش های زمانی و گاه رویاهای خودش پیچ و تاب می دهد که گاهی به گفته های خود او هم شک می کنیم و به جایی می رسیم که از خود می پرسیم: آیا من تمام واقعیت را می شنوم یا تنها بخشی از آن را که زن داستان می خواهد؟ اینجاست که خلاقیت نویسنده به اوج رسیده است و شخصیت داستان دیگر تنها یک زن ساده درون داستان نیست بلکه در ذهن مخاطب جان گرفته و به همراه او نفس می کشد تا شک کند که آن زن به تمام با او صادق است یا نه و آیا چیزی از قلم افتاده است؟
باغ های کیوتو کتابی است از واقعیت تا خیال... همپای دختری نوجوان که رفته رفته بزرگ می شود، جوان می شود، پیر می شود و در دوران ذهنی خاطراتش می چرخد و می چرخد و باز انگار می رسد به نقطه اول، به عشق پاک جوانی؛ درست مثل افسانه های ژاپنی اما فقط در ذهن...
May 21, 2019
This is a little puzzle box of a book. At first we don't even know who's narrating, but we gradually begin to understand that this is a mother telling the story of her life to her daughter. As often happens with these long monologues we hear from older relatives, the narrative isn't linear at all, and the stories that seem so normal and placid on the surface eventually reveal their true emotion and gravity. Besides admiring the crystalline nature of the prose, I was especially intrigued when I realized that the narrator, Ellen, is exactly the same age as my mother. Just like my mother, a fellow member of the "silent generation," Ellen struggles with expressing herself and seems to feel she must hold her emotions at arm’s length. This book is exactly like the kinds of stories my mother used to tell me, and only now after her death have I come to learn some of the deep truths behind the stories. Walbert has gotten it exactly right.
March 9, 2008
Okay, I'm on spring break. Enough with the academic texts!
Ach.... second day, and I think I'm hitting a wall, similar to one that I faced when I was reading _The Great Fire_, which I *did* think was a great book, but also had a hard time (at certain points) maintaining concentration? engagement?
Finished last night. It is beautifully written, and the themes of love, loss and women's restricted roles were beautifully paralleled in the writing style. But still, for some reason, while I liked this book, I am somewhat underwhelmed by it. Perhaps this a more personal reaction, as I guess one might say I wouldn't react in such a way to such events.... with the continued toying with/longing for idealization....
Ach.... second day, and I think I'm hitting a wall, similar to one that I faced when I was reading _The Great Fire_, which I *did* think was a great book, but also had a hard time (at certain points) maintaining concentration? engagement?
Finished last night. It is beautifully written, and the themes of love, loss and women's restricted roles were beautifully paralleled in the writing style. But still, for some reason, while I liked this book, I am somewhat underwhelmed by it. Perhaps this a more personal reaction, as I guess one might say I wouldn't react in such a way to such events.... with the continued toying with/longing for idealization....
January 5, 2015
I really wanted to like this novel, but it was just so ridged and painful to read.
The long winded descriptions of every detail took me out of the story and let my mind wonder on many pages. Even the main character didn't seem like a real human being, just a description of a person. Boring.
The long winded descriptions of every detail took me out of the story and let my mind wonder on many pages. Even the main character didn't seem like a real human being, just a description of a person. Boring.
February 28, 2008
I COULD NOT GET THROUGH THIS BOOK- SO BORING AND STRANGE
December 6, 2017
Onvan : The Gardens Of Kyoto - Nevisande : Kate Walbert - ISBN : 1860499333 - ISBN13 : 9781860499333 - Dar 288 Safhe - Saal e Chap : 2001
June 4, 2025
For a good chunk of my reading, this book just wasn't very gripping, so I had sort of dismissed it in my mind. But, this is a book that rewards a careful, thoughtful, patient reader, and I regret to say that I only became that reader for only about the final third of it. (I would like to read it again and then talk about it with others!)
It explores war and loss and grief. Also love and memory and storytelling. It has many layers that don't seem to fit together, until they do. Both satisfying and heartbreaking.
Reminded me of A Pale View of Hills by Ishiguro (war plus shifting, complex narrative) and Day by Michael Cunningham (beautiful sentences and a book that is more than the sum of its parts).
It explores war and loss and grief. Also love and memory and storytelling. It has many layers that don't seem to fit together, until they do. Both satisfying and heartbreaking.
Reminded me of A Pale View of Hills by Ishiguro (war plus shifting, complex narrative) and Day by Michael Cunningham (beautiful sentences and a book that is more than the sum of its parts).
September 18, 2023
I read this book’s review in The New Yorker in 1994, bought it, and somehow 29 years had passed before I finally read it. My paperback copy has moved house with me 9 times, and I’m glad I never let it go so I could finally sink into its bittersweet treasures.
February 10, 2019
A lot of ambiguity with this book. To begin with, the title is a serious disappointment, in some places I have even read that it's 'misleading.' Whichever way you look it, it has very little effect to the book. It's supposed to reflect how the book, The Gardens of Kyoto, that Randall leaves for Ellen affects her whole life's perspective and how she perceives the world after learning about it. Contrary to that, the novel revolves so much around Ellen's life, and very little around the actual Gardens of Kyoto' effect on her or how she sees the world. So much so, that I lost interest in the book very quickly.
The prose is definitely elegant. If it wasn't for the way in which the book was written, I think I would have probably given up on reading the book. The writing guides your patience for the book, actually. Kate Walbert is truly a great writer, absolutely. For me, it was the topic and the structure of the book that left me half empty and half fulfilled. I was hoping for more chunks about Japanese culture as Randall had experienced during the war, and how The Gardens of Kyoto had a deeper meaning to the relationship between the Western Culture (ie. US) and Japan. I would have liked to see more interplay between 'the other' and the US in a time of War. Instead, I learned a LOT about Ellen's family in relation to Randal and much about her life as well, but few things about the influence of Japan on the US, her life, or even her vision of Randall as he left her The Gardens of Kyoto.
In any case, here are some thing worth remembering from the book. Ellen describes certain moments when she comes face to face with the Japanese culture, and the Japanese Gardens of Kyoto. The first moment that made an impression on me is at the beginning of the book when she talks about how America had done a fairly good job at establishing the vision of 'the other' by describing "the failings of the Japanese character," "crucifixions and tortures," "spoke a language no one could decipher," and "engaged in acts of moral deprivation." In all of this, they had forgot or purposely meant to keep the Gardens of Kyoto a secret.
Here are three things to know about the Gardens of Kyoto if you never read this book, yourself:
"Japanese garden was derived from the Shinto shrine and centers on the worship of kami, or spirits."
"There is a garden in Kyoto meant to be viewed at night in shadows. An emperor willed it so; he could only tour his gardens after dark, or perhaps it was that he could only tour his gardens with his mistresses after dark. I can't remember. The point is, the entire thing - the pathways, the fountains, the lakes, the cherry trees - is an illusion: colorless shadows without scent cast by large paper cutouts. A scene set from a drama created by the emperor's gardeners specifically to his wishes, changed for the seasons, rearrranged - bare trees for trees in full bloom, lakes with frothy waves, lakes still, blossoms far too large to grow in that climate."
"Tucked within one of the gardens of Kyoto is a shrine to unborn children, to lost children, to children too soon dead; a hidden alter, really, a stone on which women place azalea blossoms, or chrysanthemums; whole oranges, springs of cherry, offerings left in groups of seven, or five, or three: harmony, they believe, in odd numbers. The garden is in the northern end of Kyoto, within a heavily wooded area rarely visited by men; its temple, long ago carved from a stone hillside, is reached only by the ascension of a series of a small, narrow steps worn into the hillside, according to legend, by the knee of worshipers. Above the temple, Mount Hiei can be seen; the perspective is strange, the mount appearing close enough to touch, its snow so fresh and white as to be mistaken for new snow, though the snow has been frozen there for centuries."
And on a side note, here is something I stumbled on reading another review. The Literary Corner Cafe says it really well, so I thought I'd quote her here and also let people know of this review as well. A wonderfully written review about this book, much more than I could do with this book. "The gardens in the title are a reference to Kyoto's famous Ryoan-ji Zen gardens, probably constructed in the late 15th century, and consisting of an arrangement of fifteen rocks on raked, white pebbles, situated so that only fourteen are visible at any one time, from any vantage point. (In Buddhism, fifteen designates enlightenment, and presumably, one would have to be enlightened in order to see the fifteenth rock. Seeing it from the air does not count; in the 15th century, they could no conceive of such a thing as seeing from the air.) As Randall, the owner of the book, The Gardens of Kyoto, puts it, the gardens are meant to be viewed from a distance, "their fragments in relation."
The prose is definitely elegant. If it wasn't for the way in which the book was written, I think I would have probably given up on reading the book. The writing guides your patience for the book, actually. Kate Walbert is truly a great writer, absolutely. For me, it was the topic and the structure of the book that left me half empty and half fulfilled. I was hoping for more chunks about Japanese culture as Randall had experienced during the war, and how The Gardens of Kyoto had a deeper meaning to the relationship between the Western Culture (ie. US) and Japan. I would have liked to see more interplay between 'the other' and the US in a time of War. Instead, I learned a LOT about Ellen's family in relation to Randal and much about her life as well, but few things about the influence of Japan on the US, her life, or even her vision of Randall as he left her The Gardens of Kyoto.
In any case, here are some thing worth remembering from the book. Ellen describes certain moments when she comes face to face with the Japanese culture, and the Japanese Gardens of Kyoto. The first moment that made an impression on me is at the beginning of the book when she talks about how America had done a fairly good job at establishing the vision of 'the other' by describing "the failings of the Japanese character," "crucifixions and tortures," "spoke a language no one could decipher," and "engaged in acts of moral deprivation." In all of this, they had forgot or purposely meant to keep the Gardens of Kyoto a secret.
Here are three things to know about the Gardens of Kyoto if you never read this book, yourself:
"Japanese garden was derived from the Shinto shrine and centers on the worship of kami, or spirits."
"There is a garden in Kyoto meant to be viewed at night in shadows. An emperor willed it so; he could only tour his gardens after dark, or perhaps it was that he could only tour his gardens with his mistresses after dark. I can't remember. The point is, the entire thing - the pathways, the fountains, the lakes, the cherry trees - is an illusion: colorless shadows without scent cast by large paper cutouts. A scene set from a drama created by the emperor's gardeners specifically to his wishes, changed for the seasons, rearrranged - bare trees for trees in full bloom, lakes with frothy waves, lakes still, blossoms far too large to grow in that climate."
"Tucked within one of the gardens of Kyoto is a shrine to unborn children, to lost children, to children too soon dead; a hidden alter, really, a stone on which women place azalea blossoms, or chrysanthemums; whole oranges, springs of cherry, offerings left in groups of seven, or five, or three: harmony, they believe, in odd numbers. The garden is in the northern end of Kyoto, within a heavily wooded area rarely visited by men; its temple, long ago carved from a stone hillside, is reached only by the ascension of a series of a small, narrow steps worn into the hillside, according to legend, by the knee of worshipers. Above the temple, Mount Hiei can be seen; the perspective is strange, the mount appearing close enough to touch, its snow so fresh and white as to be mistaken for new snow, though the snow has been frozen there for centuries."
And on a side note, here is something I stumbled on reading another review. The Literary Corner Cafe says it really well, so I thought I'd quote her here and also let people know of this review as well. A wonderfully written review about this book, much more than I could do with this book. "The gardens in the title are a reference to Kyoto's famous Ryoan-ji Zen gardens, probably constructed in the late 15th century, and consisting of an arrangement of fifteen rocks on raked, white pebbles, situated so that only fourteen are visible at any one time, from any vantage point. (In Buddhism, fifteen designates enlightenment, and presumably, one would have to be enlightened in order to see the fifteenth rock. Seeing it from the air does not count; in the 15th century, they could no conceive of such a thing as seeing from the air.) As Randall, the owner of the book, The Gardens of Kyoto, puts it, the gardens are meant to be viewed from a distance, "their fragments in relation."
March 6, 2017
Another book with lovely prose, meandering timelines, and dispassionate characters who never fully come to life. Glad to have this one off the TBR stack and on its way to a new home.
September 18, 2012
Kate Walbert is an extraordinary author. She has a way with words, both lyrical and seductive. If she wrote the telephone book, I know that it would be one of the most beautiful books ever written. This is my third novel by Walbert, and each time she amazes me again with the poetry and imagery with which she imbues every story.
Like her other novels I've read, A Short History of Women and Where She Went, The Gardens of Kyoto weaves stories within stories. It is ostensibly a coming-of-age tale during and following the second world war. Ellen is a young girl, growing up in eastern Pennsylvania, in love with her cousin Randall, whom we learn in the first sentence was killed on Iwo Jima. The rest of the book moves back and forth in time, mingling their tragic story with that of Ruby and Sterling, Daphne and Gideon, Ellen and John.
The narrative is written in stream of consciousness, jumping from one memory to another as she narrates her history to a person identified only at the the end of the novel. The whole novel moves at a slow pace, there is no rush of action or emotion, no crescendo, and yet it is perfect in this. It is not a story that would lend itself well to a huge reveal or adventure. And this is exactly what I love about it. It is a novel that you read simply for the joy of a beautifully written word.
Like her other novels I've read, A Short History of Women and Where She Went, The Gardens of Kyoto weaves stories within stories. It is ostensibly a coming-of-age tale during and following the second world war. Ellen is a young girl, growing up in eastern Pennsylvania, in love with her cousin Randall, whom we learn in the first sentence was killed on Iwo Jima. The rest of the book moves back and forth in time, mingling their tragic story with that of Ruby and Sterling, Daphne and Gideon, Ellen and John.
The narrative is written in stream of consciousness, jumping from one memory to another as she narrates her history to a person identified only at the the end of the novel. The whole novel moves at a slow pace, there is no rush of action or emotion, no crescendo, and yet it is perfect in this. It is not a story that would lend itself well to a huge reveal or adventure. And this is exactly what I love about it. It is a novel that you read simply for the joy of a beautifully written word.
July 3, 2009
This is a beautifully written, poignant book filled with frank, but excruciating, sadness and all the pain and misery of war: lost possibilities, dead loved ones, damaged boys, mourning fathers, a society which, at the time, hid it all behind a smiling demeanor but kidded no one - at least not this girl. It is the story of a girl whose life is completely framed by the death of her cousin at Iwo Jima. It is only loosely about Kyoto, but the part that is is... well, unexplainably gratifying, particularly perhaps, because I've been to Kyoto. This is a beautiful, rich, tender and exquisite novel which I highly recommend.
August 20, 2018
A prose style both lush and spare, a rare talent. A story that combines the heartbreak of a certain place and time, with the timelessness of heartbreak itself. A story of the spaces in a garden, and the spaces between people. The one person we cannot see at any given time, the 15th rock. As in the missing Mr. Rock, the lost child Rock, the never Mrs. Rock. The view through the shuttered window is the child Ellen will never see. Ruby, Daphne, and Rita as alternative lives, other outcomes, other fates. Fascinating circular construction of a book, delicate as origami.
March 14, 2021
Extremely well written and beautiful at times and some interesting characters in this one. That being said, I feel the story, or stories, don't really end up going anywhere. It's about a woman Ellen, who as a girl falls in love for the first time with her cousin Randall, who ends up dying in World War II. Ellen tells many stories during different periods of her life that have to do with Randall, but in the end I think the story just never really advances enough. In the end I wondered, what was the point of this entire book?
May 12, 2015
I do not like to put down other people's hard work but this book was so boring. I was so uninterested in the writing and the story itself was not fascinating at all. The parts I did like were the small (so so small) snippets about the actual gardens in Kyoto (where the book is totally NOT set). I must admit I skipped chunks to find something interesting to grasp onto. Sooner than I realised I was at the epilogue and disappointed.
August 7, 2017
4.5 stars! This is a fabulous little book which I purchased in 2010 and recently discovered on one of my many bookshelves. It's a beautifully written story of a young woman, Ellen, the youngest of three sisters growing up in PA and her cousin, Randall who does not survive WWII. There's much more to this but then I will ruin it for the reader. I'm glad this book got found again. It was perfect for a rainy day.
Highly recommended!
Highly recommended!
April 10, 2020
Oh goodness this is one of the worst books I have read in a while. The story plodded along and had no substance, much like the protagonist. She is pathetic, in love with her cousin and then in love with a man that cares nothing for her and doesn't even know she exists. Every female in this story, written by a female is just sad.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 1, 2020
I'm not really sure what to say about this one. I liked it just fine. But when I finished I just said, "huh." It does some interesting things with the narration and the themes are good, but it's such a quiet book. Most of the book I had no idea where the story was going or if it was going anywhere. And it got there eventually, but I dunno. I'll have to think about this book more.
December 24, 2023
من مدتها برای خوندن این کتاب هیجان داشتم چون از عنوانش خوشم اوم��ه بود. ولی خیلی... عادی بود. متوسط.
نمیتونم بگم هیچجاش بد بود. ولی شگفت انگیز هم نبود.
"داشت به طرف قطار میدوید. پایانش خیلی قابل پیشبینی است. پسر میرود به جنگ، پسر میمیرد."
نمیتونم بگم هیچجاش بد بود. ولی شگفت انگیز هم نبود.
"داشت به طرف قطار میدوید. پایانش خیلی قابل پیشبینی است. پسر میرود به جنگ، پسر میمیرد."
May 3, 2012
Eh, the inside cover delivered more promises than the book turned out to be.
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