[The Roof Rat Review.]
Donald Keene. World Within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Premodern Era - 1600-1867 (A History of Japanese Literature - Volume 2). Columbia University Press, 1999 (World Within Walls, 1976). Literary history through a reflecting telescope: genres cohere and then hollow out, what moves are possible when.
The Warm South
The Roof Rat Review
- 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.
- Jean Rhys. Tigers are Better-Looking: With a selection from The Left Bank. Penguin Classics, 1996 (Tigers Are Better Looking, 1968). I love her drawing, the economy with which she touches up her interior scenes.
- 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.
- Helen DeWitt. Some Trick: Thirteen Stories. New Directions, 2018. Some bagatelles from Oxford in the eighties, and more recent exemplary stories about art and markets, the best of which cut very sharp.
- Natsume Sōseki, Jay Rubin (trans), Haruki Murakami (introduction). The Miner. Aardvark Bureau, 2015 (坑夫 [Kōfu], 1908). He's insistent it shouldn't turn into a story, and so it doesn't, but it makes a great anecdote.
- Yōko Tawada, Margaret Mitsutani (trans). The Emissary. New Directions, 2018 (献灯使 [Kentōshi], 2014). I started out skeptical, but despair this quiet is hard to gainsay.
- Qiu Miaojin, Bonnie Huie (trans). Notes of a Crocodile. NYRB Classics, 2017 (鱷魚手記, 1994). I haven't read anything this punk in a while.
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