The Investigation, by J.M. Lee

9781447228257
Pan Books/Pan Macmillan, 2015
originally published 2012
translated from Korean by Chi-Young Kim
323 pp

paperback

"So language wasn't simply a tool to convey meaning. It was the charter of a human being that contained a nation's history..."
                                                         (164)

I don't know if anyone else is guilty of this, but I have this very bad tendency to buy a book because it looks interesting, then shelving it right away to come back to later, only to forget that I have it.  I did that with this book until someone in the publishing industry posted his/her  list of best crime novels of 2015, and this book was on it. I remember thinking that at the time I bought it, it didn't really seem like a crime novel, and I thought the reference on the best-of list was kind of weird, so I plowed through the translated fiction shelves (which are actually the entirety of a repurposed walk-in closet in my office) found it, and decided I needed to read it. This post may have been intended originally for the crime page of this online reading journal, but the more I read into it, the less it appealed to me as a crime novel and more as a novel of historical fiction.  This proves to me that it's highly likely that whoever it was that had it down on his/her idea of the best of crime list probably had no clue what he/she was reading (which is scary when I think about it)   -- while there is definitely a crime involved here, it is not at all the central focus of this story.

I will say right up front that I really liked this book. Some things detracted from my reading, such as too much in the way of repetition (yes, we know that one of the main characters loved and was highly influenced by Rilke but we don't need to constantly be reminded),  and some seriously-obvious contrivances (especially in terms of the crime that frames the story) prevented me from oozing love over the book. And I know this will sound sort of weird, but here and there while reading I kept saying to myself "this is way too obvious," but then again, that's a me thing.   I will also say that once I got used to all of the distractions, I found a really, really good story here.

Yun Dong-Ju, Korean poet

The novel begins at the end of World War II, as the narrator,  Yuichi Watanabe, tells us. At the age of twenty, he  is "behind bars" at Fukuoka Prison, having exchanged his "brown guard uniform" for "red prisoner's garb" since the Americans (who have occupied Japan, of course), have "classified" him as "a low-level war criminal," charging him with abusing prisoners.  He doesn't deny that he's guilty; au contraire, he knows that yes, he has "yelled at them and beaten them," but he also realizes that part of his guilt was in as he says, "doing nothing." He "didn't prevent the unnecessary deaths of innocent people," he "was silent in the face of the insanity, " and he'd "closed" his "ears to the screams of the innocent."  Before the actual story begins, though, Watanabe clues in his readers to the fact that what he's about to say isn't solely about him, but rather

"about the war's destruction of the human race. This story is about both the people who lacked humanity and the purest of men. And it's about a bright star that crossed our dark universe 10,000 years ago...My story is about two people who met at Fukuoka Prison."

And thus begins the novel in full, comprising  Watanabe's story, which begins with the horrific murder of a prison guard who was also in charge of censorship duties.  Watanabe is tasked with the investigation into Sugiyama's death, but this young man, whose mother repaired and sold books and who developed a deep and abiding love of literature while growing up, is also tasked with Sugiyama's censorship duties, which to him are abhorrent. It is an interesting setup, really, because while the investigation of the crime acts as a frame getting us into the workings of the prison, underneath all of that is the story of the last days of a Korean "resistance" poet named Yun Dong-Ju, (1917-1945)  who was arrested supposedly for political activities, but in my opinion ( at least via this book), his only major crime was being Korean.  It is also a story about the power of literature to transform even the hardest of souls, about the enduring legacy of literature, about freedom, about different forms of both resistance and oppression, and about the plight of the Koreans under Japanese colonial rule.  As Watanabe tells us regarding Yun (but really, speaking for all Koreans),

 "he was no longer free, but he hadn't ever known how it felt to be free; no Korean was free."  

One of the very best things I discovered  about this entire book is the author's focus on language.  As just one example, Koreans were not allowed to use their own names; instead they were required to take Japanese names and in the prison, at least, were punished if they tried to use their real ones. Some wonderful scenes occur in the novel around this terrible law, but there are many, many others as well  that combine language and the concept of resistance to produce some incredible moments here.

Aside from my grievances about the detractors I've  listed (which obviously are personal to me and may not bother anyone else), I was actually very impressed with The Investigation and it really is one of those books that's stuck with me. I read it over the course of two long plane rides and a two-hour layover (I had my nose stuck in it even while eating normally-forbidden Tex-Mex in Dallas) and couldn't put it down.  It's one I can definitely recommend -- it is a lovely yet horrific  portrait of a bygone era, one that is not forgotten and which still resonates I would think, especially among Koreans.

first post of the year -- The Dead Letter and the Figure Eight, by Metta Fuller Victor (aka Seeley Register)

0822331659
Duke University Press, 2003
388 pp

paperback

Two very obscure American novels are to be found here together in one volume: The Dead Letter (1866) and The Figure Eight (1869).  What's culturally and historically significant about this volume is that The Dead Letter is actually, according to Catherine Ross Nickerson in her work The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women, "the first American detective novel." (29).  Both books are also, as she notes,

"documents of a moment in cultural history when the young professional seemed to hold the promise of mediating between the cloudy-minded nostalgia of the landed class and the unprincipled greed of the merchant and capitalist classes."  (31)

While there's definitely a LOT going on between the lines and a lot going on here that is discussion worthy,  these books are also fun reads for anyone interested in American literature of this period that won't likely be found on any general American Lit course syllabus.  For someone like myself who loves these old books and who tries to read between the lines as to the cultural climate (especially in terms of women and the relationships between the main characters and other ethnic groups) , the politics, and the historical significance of the time in which they were written, it is a goldmine.   On the other hand, they're definitely not for everyone, but if for no other reason, the fact that Metta Fuller Victor made an appearance before Anna Katherine Green (who I've always believed was the first American detective novelist) makes her extremely readworthy. 

 I've posted about these two books at my crime page; more about the author herself can be found at my newest project, Forgotten Females Found.   

(from LibraryThing) 

... paved with good intentions: 2016 plans

What does a person do when she is too fond of reading and books have addled her brain? In my case the love of the written word spurs me on to buy more, even though I have so many now that I'll never get them all read.  That definitely defines the word addled in my case. A smart person would read what she has, and then buy more, but no one's ever accused me of being smart. So I have great intentions for my reading life this year, but as they say about the road...

I'm kind of thinking along these lines:

1.   I am planning to read more 19th century American fiction, then make the move into the early  20th century, discovering those novels that rarely make it on to become the stuff of literature classes. I didn't mean for that to happen in 2015, but I had such fun with them last year (for the most part) that I want to do it again, while
   
2.  rotating in some translated fiction since there is really a lot of great stuff out there just waiting to be read; and then there are the crime reads, which this year will focus on
   
3. books that have been made into movies -- with some exceptions, mostly older novels and older movies (I discovered the Criterion collection on Hulu this year so the choices are pretty much huge)  while still focusing on
   
4. obscure women writers of crime novels, and then finally there is the
   
5. darker fiction that I love reading, where I'm thinking about reading out of the mainstream, focusing on work from smaller presses or from the past.  

Then again my plans could all go belly up as new fiction is released, so committing myself might be folly. 

To everyone: a happy reading year, filled with great books, great health, and inner peace. 

Don't read these books if you suffer from insomnia. They'll keep you awake.

Pretty much since December 24th I've been going to bed at a decent time only to discover that when I turn off my reading light, I'm actually wider awake than I was just a minute before.  Life's good so I'm not stressing, so it must be latent zombie genes or something keeping me up.  I've been up until around 4:30  a.m. pretty much for the last four or five nights.  If I lay there and think "I have to sleep" I'm even more awake so I just say screw this and pick up a book.   It's amazing how much a person can read when it's dead quiet and there are no interruptions.

My insomniac reading list for the last four days:

Winter's Bone, by Daniel Woodrell -- bad book to read when you want to sleep.  It's so bloody bleak that the predicament of this young girl and her two little brothers would keep you awake at any normal time, so reading it during a bout of insomnia was just folly.  Good book, though.

The Blood of the Vampire, by Florence Marryat -- older, first published in 1897, but so well written that it was unputdownable. That's bad news when you feel your eyes frying from lack of rest. I couldn't  help but feel sorry for the titular vampire whose only crime was to be an independent woman of means but of questionable birth at the turn of the century, and I had to read read read to find out what happened to her.  Oy. 

The Restraint of Beasts, by Magnus Mills -- it was 12:45  a.m. when I started this one, thinking that "hey, a comedy might be a good brain relaxer," but little did I know that the ending of this book was going to result in staying awake all night trying to figure out what the author was saying here. Sheesh! Awesome novel, but definitely one not to read if you're hoping to sleep. 

*****

I've decided that if I'm still awake tonight, I'm going to pull out an old science text that bored me to tears as a student. If that doesn't do it, well, nothing will. 

my last novel of 2015, and it's just effing jaw dropping: The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen

9780802123459

Grove Press, 2015

371 pp

hardcover

"The majority of Americans regarded us with ambivalence if not outright distaste, we being living reminders of their stinging defeat. We threatened the sanctity and symmetry of a white and black America whose yin and yang racial politics left no room for any other color, particularly that of pathetic little yellow-skinned people pickpocketing the American purse."

Just briefly as to plot (and very much oversimplified):   "I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces," are the words that open this novel, which for the most part, is a confession to someone known only as "the Commandant." The story is related by a nameless narrator who is a spy for the North Vietnamese communists and has managed to infiltrate the South Vietnamese Army as an aide to "the General" and a member of intelligence under the tutelage of a CIA agent.   The novel begins with the evacuation of South Vietnam and the last flights out, on one of which our narrator finds himself along with his boss, his best friend/blood brother, and a number of other people fleeing as the North Vietnamese Army is crashing the gates of Saigon.  His job, once they reach America, is to watch and to report to a comrade back in Vietnam, which he does in coded letters to his "aunt," his other best friend and blood brother who did not follow him in his escape. Our narrator  keeps a careful eye on the General and his cohorts while the refugees are busily reinventing themselves in order to adjust to life in an unglamorous Hollywood neighborhood.  As the narrator's handler thought would happen, the General has decided to organize several of his former army cohorts in an effort to retake Vietnam from the Communists, and in order to maintain his facade, the narrator must follow along with the general's plan. 

The narrator, the titular "sympathizer," is definitely a "man of two faces," and faces a number of contradictions. In fact, this thought-provoking novel is so filled with contradictions that this "two faces" idea runs throughout the book.  In the narrator's case, he is a man of mixed parentage, a fact that has helped to define his identity throughout his life, since in Vietnam, he grew up being reminded that he is a bastard, with a French father and Vietnamese mother. Metaphorically speaking then, he already understands what is implied in belonging in two different places, but the truth is that he is also not in a position to claim either as his own. This idea is repeated again and again throughout the novel, and is one of the main thematic issues explored here, as is the reinvention of the self under less-than-perfect circumstances, capturing  what I would consider the immigrant experience in any country.   This is not our hero's first visit to America; he had first come in the 1960s as an exchange student, when he first started his fondness for things American, but now he finds himself faced with a very different take on the American dream, with different and often-conflicting loyalties, and above all, haunted by ghosts.  It is truly a masterpiece of a novel that also examines not only American perceptions of the Vietnam War, but America's perception of its own role in the war and those of the Vietnamese people as well.

I read a reader response of The Sympathizer that said it should be required reading for every US politician, a sentiment I heartily endorse, especially considering what's going on in the world regarding refugees right now.  But there's so much more here, and as I noted earlier, it's a novel just filled with contradictions, which make for a great satirical look at the promises of the American dream, at America's place on the world stage, etc.; however, it also points out among other things that unlike most historical accounts, the history of the Vietnam war has been the provenance of the losers rather than the victors. It also examines the realities behind revolutions and the effects of the postwar diaspora (aka the "boat people")  from the point of view of the people who were given promises that were never intended to be kept. 

A couple of things: first, when I finished it, I sat in my chair absolutely stunned for probably about half an hour.   I noted somewhere that even after it was over my jaw was still pinned to the floor; it took me a day or two to get over that feeling. Second, I want to throttle the dustjacket blurber who says this is a "gripping spy novel" -- people who decide to read this book based on that phrase are bound to be somewhat disappointed since this book goes well beyond the boundaries of a mere spy novel. Third, The Sympathizer is one of the most original books I've read this year, well deserving of any award its author receives.    I have been very frustrated lately and at the point of despairing over  "same old, same old" in recent novels. There are exceptions, of course, including but not necessarily limited to three of my favorite books this year -- A Brief History of Seven Killings, The Buried Giant, and a book published by Pushkin by Peter Froberg Idling called Song For An Approaching Storm about Pol Pot in his pre-genocide days --  but The Sympathizer offers hope that the mental wells of writers haven't yet run dry.

Very highly recommended, one of my few favorite novels of the year. Read it slowly. Take your time with it. Savor it. It's that kind of book.

***

links to professional reviewers who say things in a way I never could:

from Bookforum, by Lisa Locascio (beware of spoilers)
from The New York Times, by Philip Caputo
from The Washington Post, by Ron Charles

The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty, by Vendela Vida

9780062110916
Ecco/HarperCollins, 2015
213 pp

hardcover

I'll be very frank here. The first time through this novel all I could think of was just how preposterous this story is -- the main character makes a series of choices that no sane person would ever find herself making given the circumstances.  So thinking I must have missed something here,  I went through it again,  and came out with an entirely different perspective on things. The second time through, I started to realize just how clever a book this actually is, to the point where I'm going to add it to my real-world book group's reading list next fall.  Had I read it when I received it from Indiespensable,  it would have gone on this year's lineup, but later is better than never, I suppose.

The first clue that this is not your average novel is that the entire book is written in the second person ("you").  The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty  begins on an airplane going from Miami to Morocco, and right at the outset, the reader is presented with a puzzle.  What exactly does the narrator mean when she refers to "the horror of the last two months?" And why is she trying to avoid being recognized by a fellow passenger, whom she remembers from the last time they met? And on arriving in Morocco, why is tipping the taxi driver twenty dollars her "initial mistake?"  As the novel progresses, you, the reader, come to discover that these questions are just the foundation for what's to come.

Very briefly (I'll post professional reviews that give more away than I will when I'm done here), my take on this  novel is that what follows is  a major examination into the questions of identity, role-playing, and reinvention of self. And it all begins with the theft of the narrator's passport.  She reports the theft to the police, making a huge error when asked what she does for a living.  When she says that she is a reporter for The New York Times (which she isn't), writing a travel story, and hopes she doesn't have to "include this" in her report, it isn't too long afterwards that she learns her backpack complete with contents has been found. The police chief hands her a bag that she knows is not hers, saying that she can now write "How good the police are here in Casablanca." It's a sort of unspoken game they play here, as well as a critical moment in the book, leading to the narrator becoming a sort of "stand-in" for the woman whose identity she now holds, playing a role, so to speak, as that person.  And while I won't explain why, the narrator is offered a job as a stand-in for an actress, to be used during scene blocking during the filming of a movie there.  This role of "stand-in" brings up yet another idea in this book, that of performing/performance, and  will repeat itself throughout the novel in various ways, until the initial questions the author presents are finally answered and the reader "you" comes to understand a) how identity and performance mesh here  and b) just what is at stake for the narrator in terms of reinventing herself.  There are other things here as well -- the intrusion of American culture just one more thing to watch for.   The novel's title comes from a poem by Rumi of the same name, which is reproduced within the book; the use of the second person here, as I sort of impatiently reminded the naysayers on Goodreads, reflects the style used in the poem.

As I noted earlier, I liked this book much more after the second time through, but one thing I didn't particularly care for either time was just how much the ending of this book (as I see it) depended on a huge coincidence -- and while I understand why, I'm someone who doesn't particularly like when things hinge on coincidence.   I can also understand reader reservations about this novel -- chances are that  the "you" who is reading this book would not make the same preposterous choices as the narrator did  at any juncture in this novel.  However, you are not in "your" head at any given time, but inside that of the narrator's; once you give over to that fact, it's a far less-stressful way to get through the novel.

A few professional reviews of this book are at

• The New York Times
• The Guardian
• NPR

*and you thought she only wrote battle hymns: Julia Ward Howe -- The Hermaphrodite

9780803218871
University of Nebraska Press, 2004
(note: original is an unpublished manuscript, 1840s)
208 pp

paperback


Writing about this novel is not an easy thing to do, but I'll start by saying this: story very good, writing felt sloggy past the midpoint, difficult to understand sometimes but overall, very much worth the effort.  As a casual sort of reader, it was really all I could do to stay focused on this book at times, and toward the end it became even more difficult for me, even as it gained in intensity.  Now, having said that, I do think that it's an important book on many levels, considering when it was written and what was going on in the life of the author at the time.

The very basic story is this: Laurence, scion of a wealthy and important family of the time,  is sent away to school for his childhood and teen years, so that he "might become robust and manly, and haply learn to seem that which I could never be."  He had been born an intersexed person (hence the title), then  "baptized...with a masculine name" since his parents had decided to "invest" him with "the dignity and insignia of manhood..."  Throughout his school years, he rarely saw his parents; when he did, they were "cold and reserved" so that unlike most kids, he would rather have been at school than at home.  Laurence was a model student, well respected and "scrutinized" with interest by both sexes. As he notes, though,

"For man or woman, as such, I felt an entire indifference -- when I wished to trifle, I preferred the latter, when I wished to reason gravely, I chose the former. I sought sympathy from women, advice from men, but love from neither." 

It is during his later school years that an older woman, Emma P., decides that Laurence will be her conquest, but when she discovers the truth about him, she  succumbs to apoplexy (I love that word)  and becomes, in Laurence's words, "a maniac" who "lay foaming and writhing on the floor" at his feet. This only increases Laurence's own alienation and his fears of intimacy, and things get even worse for the poor guy when he returns home at the close of his school career. There, his father makes him sign over his birthright to Laurence's younger brother, who would most likely produce an heir and continue the family line.  Fleeing from home, he comes across a hermitage where he takes up residence until he's at the point of both madness and death; he is then taken to live with adolescent Ronald (who discovers him in this condition) at Ronald's family home for a while. There, he serves as Ronald's tutor.  Ronald falls in love with Laurence; then after an encounter between the two, Laurence takes off for Rome, where he comes under the tutelage of Berto.  After some trouble arises, his friend Berto convinces him that he should disguise himself as a woman and stay with Berto's sisters at the family estate. I'm not giving away either the ending or any of the high points of this story here;  anyone interested should really read it without already knowing everything.

Now, very briefly, as to its importance, there is so much going on in this book that I can't begin to cover it all.   I'll start with Gary Williams and Renee Bergland, who  note in their introduction to Philosophies of Sex: Critical Essays on The Hermaphrodite (Ohio State Press, 2012) that Howe's book

"contributes to a seismic shift in how we understand nineteenth-century gender awareness and sexuality in antebellum America."  

If I went into detail as to how this is so, I'd be writing for days, but Bethany Schneider in her contribution to this work briefly notes that Howe uses

"her ambiguously sexed character to interrogate desire and the acts that constitute sex,"

and asks

"how gender informs acts of sex and how gender is transformed through sex." (139)

In short, here Howe envisions gender as something constructed -- nowadays this isn't such an unusual idea and is covered widely in literature,  but in 1840s America, it was something very rare. The reverse was true in Europe: as noted in the novel's introduction, Gautier was writing along these lines in his Mademoiselle de Maupin (definitely NOT an American favorite of the time, an outrage to the "common sentiment of the American mind")  as was George Sand, whose Gabriel featured an intersexed character, and whose work Howe admired.

In the introduction to The Hermaphrodite, Gary Williams, who has painstakingly reconstructed the fragments of this work from Howe's originals,  notes that "Howe saved herself with this history of a strange being," which he claims is a "projection of both her husband and herself;" he also notes that "the narrative...is solidly rooted in the psychological terrain" of Howe's life at the time.  Her marriage to Samuel Gridley Howe was problematic from the beginning.  According to Michael Bronski,

"When Howe was on his honeymoon with Julia Ward Howe, he received word that Charles Sumner was very upset and wrote him a passionate note saying that he wished that he was there with them. Interestingly, Sumner himself married later. They have complicated relationships. Julia Ward Howe ... wrote a novel about a hermaphrodite--a man/woman who loves both men and women--that most critics now think was her own meditation on her husband's bisexuality."

Williams notes that "the trope of the hermaphrodite seems to have offered a scaffold for trying to understand in corporeal terms why a man (or an apparent man) might wish to deflect the attentions of a beautiful and devoted woman."  (xxv)  Later he notes that

"the hermaphrodite was arguably as useful as a screen on which to project certain other aspects of her situation. Laurence may be Samuel Howe, yes, but "he" is also Julia, a being fusing culturally ascribed impulses of both genders and thereby consigned, according to the logic of American domestic ideology, to a loveless and sexless ambition."  (xxvii)

She also, according to Williams in his Hungry Heart, The Literary Emergence of Julia Ward Howe, felt constrained by "claustrophobic conditions" (marriage, motherhood, male society's expectations of women in those roles)  that hindered her desire to fulfill her intellectual ambitions. her frustrations are also explored in The Hermaphrodite, most notably in the scenes where Laurence, now Cecilia, engages with Berto's sisters, watching them move freely in their relationships and in their own intellectual pursuits.

There is so much more to talk about -- art, the spirit of true and nonsexual friendship between men and women, alienation and so on. However, there have been a large number of scholarly treatises on this book which anyone interested can find online, so there's no way I can give The Hermaphrodite its due. Suffice it to say that if you can get through the often boggy prose, it is well worth exploring, and I'm extremely happy to have read it.  Truthfully, though, it was one of the most difficult books I've ever read.

**********

And thus ends 2015's little mini-project of looking for the Great American Novel. For the rest of this year, I'll be reading more contemporary novels, but I will pick up the Great American Novel project (post-Civil War) once the new year starts. I'm really enjoying finding these really off-the-beaten-path books and I've had a great time with them.