[The Roof Rat Review.]
Makoto Ueda (editor/translator), Yosano Tekkan, Okamoto Kanoko, Kenji Miyazawa, Okuma Nobuyuki, Maekawa Samio, Saito Fumi, Miya Shuji, Kondo Yoshimi, Tsukamoto Kunio, Nakajo Fumiko, Sasaki Yukitsuna, Shiki Masaoka, Tawara Machi, Ōgai Mori, Akiko Yosano, Takuboku Ishikawa, Mokichi Saito, Kitahara Hakushu, Shaku Choku, Toki Zenmaro. Modern Japanese Tanka: An Anthology. Columbia University Press, 1996 (Modern Japanese Tanka, 1996). Broad and well-framed: a good way to get oriented.
The Warm South
The Roof Rat Review
- Christine Wunnicke. Der Fuchs und Dr. Shimamura. Berenberg, Heinrich von, 2015. The best German book about fox spirits in Shimane Prefecture that I can imagine.
- Walter Kempowski, Mario Rubino (trans). Alles umsonst. Verlag Albrecht Knaus (Random House Verlagsgr.), 2007 (2006). It starts like Alice Munro and ends like Yiyun Li's The Vagrants. The rock-hard texture of 1945 is worked right through.
- Herman Melville, John Bryant (introduction, commentary). Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. Penguin Classics, 1996 (Typee, 1846). So much wild implausibility next to passages just strange enough to have the ring of reality; it's a minor agony to guess how much of it really happened.
- Gerald Murnane. The Plains. New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2003 (1982). The, well, flatness comes off just as intended, but I'm not sure I'm credulous enough for a society in which everybody is a different version of Wallace Stevens.
- Guadalupe Nettel, J.T. Lichtenstein (trans). The Body Where I Was Born. Seven Stories Press, 2015 (El cuerpo en que nací, 2011). I didn't know how to read it as fiction rather than memoir, nor what that reading would mean.
- Virgil, Janet Lembke (trans). Virgil's Georgics. Yale University Press, 2006 (Georgica, -29). Advice for all seasons, and very rich, even if his wasn't a century when you would actually expect to meet a god on a farm.
- Alex Danchev. Cezanne: A Life. Pantheon, 2012. It's often loose and can feel like a collection of anecdotes, but then there's something appropriate about letting incidents hang free as disconnected brushstrokes rather than plaster it all with narrative contour.
- Dimitris Lyacos. The First Death. Shoestring Press, 2005 (Ο πρώτος θάνατος, 1996). Harder to hook into than Z213: Exit; when your hero starts out dead there's less plain world under the mythopoeia. The difference between poetry and prose, at least in translation. I'm impressed even so.
- Dimitris Lyacos, Shorsha Sullivan (trans). Z213: EXIT. Shoestring Press, 2010 (Ζ213: ΕΞΟΔΟΣ, 2010). Late Beckett is the obvious reference point; incredibly, I think it survives the comparison. The translation reads very well, but note this narrative of ambiguous exile and pursuit could also be titled Exodus.
- Valeria Luiselli. Lost Children Archive. Knopf Publishing Group, 2019. Intelligent, and only intelligent. The writer's transition to a New York author seems complete, and the children characters (though it must have been the last thing intended) are baldly used.
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