Fragmentary Novels

You'll see these two books side by side on the Staff Recommends case next to the register. Submergence shelved in by my muted praise, Dept. of Speculation behind Jamie's more effusive recommendation. 

In this week's New Yorker James Wood reviews the Dept. of Speculation. This is a challenging book to review - even Wood admits that the Dept. of Speculation is "wonderfully hard to encapsulate, because it faces in many directions at the same time and glitters with different emotional colors." Jamie's recommendation does manage to encapsulate the effect of the novel - she, like I, re-read Dept. of Speculation multiple times and told everyone we could that we loved it, even if we couldn't adequately describe the novel.

But when thinking about Dept. of Speculation and Submergence side by side, I realized that part of why I loved them so much is for their form. Wood describes the form of Dept. of Speculation as "very short, double-spaced paragraph dispatches, as if we were rifling through the pages of [the narrator's] private diary." Over the past few months, and maybe, always, I've connected most with books that have a more fragmentary style.  The fragmentary style is like a diary and through it an intimacy is created with the reader; those double-spaces, between each fragment, beg to be scribbled in. The fragmentary novel is not going to give you characters that are so fleshed out that they walk off the page. There are many novels that will give you that - Goldfinch by Donna Tartt and Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi, to name two - and they are wonderful for it. But what the fragmentary novel does is invite you to take ownership of the story. The tangents wander off, the way our mind does, straying from what is in front but always connected. As a written form, these tangents stretch the novel beyond the confines of the world of the characters and invite you, as the reader, inside.

Wood mentions other books that follow a similar form: Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson, Speedboat by Renata Adler, Lydia Davis’ short stories. I’d add Submergence to that list. The story revolves around two characters, Danny, an oceanographer, and James, a British spy. They are their professions, and they meet while they are each on separate vacations. It is in this limbo that they meet and fall quickly in love, only to part and never see each other again. The novel has no chapters, but a single page will have two or three fragments, weaving in mythology, science, and philosophy along with their story. I've been revisiting the passages I've marked, the scribbles I've made, and I still find that Submergence moves me in a way no other novel has in a long time.  

As I return to my own novel after a long break from it, I realize that the fragmentary style is one that seems most true to me. I write in fragments, knowing that eventually I'll have to stitch the various pieces together. So it's exciting to see the fragmentary novel gaining some popularity. Or maybe, as the popularity of Speedboat (published in the 70s) and Wittgenstein's Mistress (published in the 80s) suggest, this type of novel has always existed and I've only just discovered it. I do know that when I jump back into my novel after a long time away, it is a little bit like falling in love - I am giddy, preoccupied, and everything I encounter is an echo or an affirmation of what I'm working on. And that's the beauty of these two books: they are unforgettable for their lean prose and for their spaces, the spaces where you can find yourself.

Bookstore Tourism: Tokyo Edition

Still recovering from massive jet lag accrued over my recent flight over the International Date Line, I was reading Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart as I tried to lull myself to sleep at something resembling a decent hour. It's still hard to get to bed on time, and harder still to wake up in the morning and feel alert during the day, but since the time change between Brookline and Tokyo is (only) 13 hours, according to Wikipedia I only have 5 more days to recover from the jet lag. I should be right as rain just in time for my birthday! Anyway, back to the Murakami. At the beginning of chapter 6, the narrator says: "The day the letter arrived, I'd gone out to Shinjuku for the first time in quite a while, picked up a couple of new books at the Kinokuniya bookstore, and taken in a Luc Besson movie." While in Tokyo, I stayed in Shinjuku, and visited this very Kinokuniya, with it's staggering 8 stories of books.

There were tons of bookstores in Tokyo, and even a neighborhood of used bookstores near the major universities. The reading culture in Tokyo is alive and well, with many of the passengers on the clean, efficient Tokyo subway lines reading paperback books carefully covered in leather, canvas, fabric and even tidy paper book covers. The displays in many of the stores were gorgeous and vibrant, twisted stacks to the ceilings, beautiful piles wrapped around the bookshelves, and book design is beautiful there, with many of the books in similar trim sizes, with a sewn in bookmark in the popular-sized paperbacks. There's even a magazine devoted to the art of book design and illustration!

Kinokuniya was a little special for me because even though it's technically a chain, the only others I've visited were in Seattle and New York, two cities near and dear to my heart. I bought a copy of Alice in Wonderland in Japanese at the Seattle location, with a cool slipcase, and in New York I bought Finn Family Moomintroll in Japanese complete with illustrations. In Shinjuku, I loaded up on cute magazines with bunnies and stunning Japanese architecture magazines, and even rode the elevator with a real live attendant decked out in lace gloves and hat. I was on the hunt for a particular book and having trouble with the organization at one point (it didn't seem entirely alphabetical, even knowing the Japanese alphabet), and when I asked for help, the very kind and gracious bookseller bowed, ran to the computer, looked at me, excused himself and apologized profusely, dashed past me and returned with a Japanese to English dictionary and pointed at a word. "Not in stock." They have a single word for that! I thanked him, bought my treasures, which the cashier placed elegantly in the bag, taped shut, bowed and thanked me.

All of this was a microcosm of my stay in Japan, orderly, elegant, everyone takes such care with details and politeness I felt so welcome and happy and impressed and overwhelmed and soothed all at the same time I had a hard time leaving. So how about it kids, who's coming with me to set up Booksmith Tokyo?

Tattoos, Denny's and other Japanese literary symbols

Last week I wrote ad nauseum of my forthcoming trip to Japan. In order to prepare for said trip (and also because I'm super excited) I've been reading all kinds of Japanese literature to get my head in the game as it were. Here are some of my favorites thus far:

Kenneth Roxroth's 100 Poems from the Japanese and One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese, in addition to Ono No Komachi and Izumi Shikibu's poetry compiled in The Ink Dark Moon are some of the most beautifully selected words placed in a deliberate arrangement ever. I wish I could describe to you how beautiful enigmatic it is all at the same time, reading these are like feeling you're made of glass and slowing filling with curls of smoke. I can't do them justice, just read them all.

If we're going to talk about epic literature from Japan I'd be remiss in not including Tale of Genji. One of the first novels in the world, written by a LADY, it really is the coolest thing ever. But I've never finished it. I'm SORRY! Gosh.

What I have finished are some of the best modernist novels ever. Natsume Soseki could teach Raymond Carver a thing or two about deeply psychological interiority belied by understated language. The Gate is an amazing, slim novel in which the main character and his wife live childless in an idyllic picket fence house. But that's about as peaceful as it gets. The main character hates his job. The couple are spurned by their families as they married without consent, and suddenly his wife's reckless little brother squeezes the strained couple for help on top of it all. So taught, so beautiful, suuuch a good book.

Kobo Abe's Woman in the Dunes is unmissable, and Yukio Mishima's short stories in the collected Death in Midsummer are among my favorite reads of all time. His characters have amazing strength and fatal flaws and you'll need to read each story several times for the feeling that there's a detail in one word (or absence of one) that casts everything in a new light. I also recently finished Junichiro Tanizaki's Seven Japanese Tales ... one story in particular, "The Tattooer" has left quite the indelible mark on me (pun fully intended). This man is an expert tattooer and only tattoos on people when he's inspired, and he finds ultimate inspiration in a beautiful maiden walking down the street. Convinced she is a demonic scroll come incarnate he is gripped with the need to tattoo her, and as she consents the art embellishing her back begins to imbue her with magnificent power. KAPOW!

For a more contemporary Japan (the one I'll actually be in) there is the incomparable Murakami. Thus far I've only read After Dark, to be honest it's a little daunting to decide where to go from there. After Dark is amazing. It's set in Tokyo around midnight and follows all the different sorts of people that only come out at night, in addition to a young runaway who may or may not be related to a rebooted magical Sleeping Beauty dozing in the literal center of the novel. But as I said, Murakami's got sprawling epics and copious short stories. I know I'll love them all but how to decide?! Maybe I'll take 1Q84 on my 16 hour plane flight? I might be able to bang it out...

Big Books, Small Presses

As an avid reader and lover of all things books, I get really excited by small scrappy upstart presses that publish really bold, beautiful books that are a little bit grainier, hard-edged, strange or literally foreign for the big guys to pay much attention to. Small presses print translations you can't find anywhere else, raw, gutsy memoirs, poetry that burns bright with cleverness and an experimental air. They're small enough to take risks on books they believe in and while I LOVE me some books that the big guys print, I think a book club dedicated to small presses would A) give some recognition to books without big promotional budgets that might get overlooked, and B) encourage all you smarty Booksmith shoppers to go to a book club where it isn't necessarily a novel we read, but maybe a collection of poetry, or a book of literary non-fiction. I'm not a  poet but sometimes Wave Books prints a book of poetry so beautiful I have to read it and when I do I want to talk about it because I DON'T UNDERSTAND POETRY BUT I THINK I LIKE IT A LOT ANYWAY. What does this meeeean? Let's talk about it together!

If the prospect of the Small Press Book Club appeals to you, drop me an e-mail and I'll contact you before September when we'll (hopefully) start to meet. Meetings would be once a month for about an hour, and there would be SNACKS. E-mail me if you're interested! The more people I know are interested the more likely this will work out. And that means MORE snacks to you, the consumer. E-mail me at natasha -at- brooklinebooksmith -dot- com.

Super Cheesy Love Story

Maybe it's the advent of spring, maybe it's string of boring non-fiction I've just plowed through but for some reason I got it in my head last week that I really wanted to read an engrossing novel that is just a basic love story. Something cheesy. Something simple. But something well-written. It's a hard balance to strike but here are some recommendations if you're in the mood for love, too:

Old Favorites

A Room With a View. Genteel girl, social outcast boy. Will they, won't they, love triangle, Italy. This book has it all!

The Sky is Everywhere. A heartbreaker of a novel where a girl's sister dies and in the wake while dealing with the grief, the protagonist deals with the seemingly ill-timed first blushes of love.

The Marriage Plot. A love triangle set in the 1980s, with international travel, being in love with someone with bipolar disorder, and unrequited pining. All the good stuff with beautiful writing and super-real characters as only Eugenides can pull off.

And the pile of To-Reads on my nightstand after all my searching:

Delicacy. A French love story in which a young widow finds an unlikely mate in a geeky guy at work.

The Lover. The modernist novella in which a young French teen in Indochina has a saucy affair with a Chinese man.

Justine. Basically a book set in bedrooms. Sold.