A BOOK I READ FOR MY LONG-AGO BOOK CIRCLE: SNOW COUNTRY by Nobel-winner YASUNARI KAWABATA

SNOW COUNTRY
YASUNARI KAWABATA (tr. Edward G. Seidensticker)
Vintage Books
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Nobel Prize recipient Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country is widely considered to be the writer's masterpiece, a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan.

At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante meets Komako, a lowly geisha. She gives herself to him fully and without remorse, despite knowing that their passion cannot last and that the affair can have only one outcome. In chronicling the course of this doomed romance, Kawabata has created a story for the ages, a stunning novel dense in implication and exalting in its sadness.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THEIR SERVICES OFTEN, THEY NEED US!

My Review: Married, bored (but I repeat myself) aesthete, philanderer, and flâneur Shimamura, an aficionado of Western ballet (although he's never seen one), takes a solo trip into Japan's Snow Country. While there in the wildest of boondocks Japan possesses, he meets Komako, probably the world's worst geisha, but apparently a fascinating contrast to all other women for Shimamura. They meet a total of three times in two years. Another woman, Yoko, hovers purposelessly around the narrative until, for no apparent reason, Komako and Shimamura have a fight over his feelings (?) for Yoko, who for some reason nursed Komako's not-quite-fiance Yukio while he died, despite the fact that Komako indentured herself to the (apparently quite unsuitable) career of geisha to pay for his death expenses.

Then a fire breaks out and Komako runs into the burning building and saves Yoko while Shimamura stands there and looks up at the sky. Fin.

No, seriously.

I spent the entire month I was reading this book, all 175pp of it, alternately claustrophobic and bemused. WTF, I kept thinking, why am I still at this rock-pile, trying to winkle out some small purpose to the narrative; then along would come a gem, eg:

It was a stern night landscape. The sound of the freezing of snow over the land seemed to roar deep into the earth. There was no moon. The stars, almost too many of them to be true, came forward so brightly that it was as if they were falling with the swiftness of the void.

p44, 1996 Vintage ed.

Oh wow, I thought, and plowed on. And on. And on. Every damn time Komako exhibits what today we'd call a bipolar break exacerbated by alcohol abuse, I'd find myself thinking, "This damned book is Come Back, Little Sheba directed by Kurosawa." Seriously. Shirley Booth did the same bloody role in that movie, only Burt Lancaster (whose role as her husband bewitched by a younger woman was pretty much exactly like Shimamura) is the one who drank.

I drank a good bit myself, trudging ever onward, marching off to war with the cross of Jesus going on before; okay, I'm a piss-poor Christian soldier, but you get the sense of futility I was experiencing. Then, it happened.

He had stayed so long that one might wonder whether he had forgotten his wife and children. He stayed not because he could not leave Komako nor because he did not want to. He had simply fallen into the habit of waiting for those frequent visits. And the more continuous the assault became, the more he began to wonder what was lacking in him, what kept him from living as completely...All of Komako came to him, but it seemed that nothing went out from him to her. He heard in his chest, like snow piling up, the sound of Komako, an echo beating against empty walls. And he knew he could not go on pampering himself forever. pp154-155

So there *is* a point to this hike! And a profound one: The sudden awakening of human feeling in an otherwise dead heart. It was a payoff, and a major one. But did it have to be such a Bataan Death March of a journey to get here? And the stupid-ass last line of the book, which made me so bloody angry that I began raining curses on the lady whose idea it was our book circle read the book...! INFURIATINGLY SOPHOMORICALLY PORTENTOUS, I shrieked. The dog ran away from me. The same dog who, at an earlier moment in my tossing about of the book, expressed her opinion of it by fanging the corner. She calmed down after I did, but really...does one *want* to read this book? I won't do it again. But, on balance and after sleeping on it, I'm glad that I did.

DO WHAT THEY SAY OR ELSE, 2022's Nobel Laureate in Literature Annie Ernaux from 1977

DO WHAT THEY SAY OR ELSE
ANNIE ERNAUX (tr. Christopher Beach, Carrie Noland)
University of Nebraska Press
$17.95 tree-book or e-book editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Originally published in 1977, Do What They Say or Else is the second novel by French author Annie Ernaux. Set in a small town in Normandy, France, the novel tells the story of a fifteen-year-old girl named Anne, who lives with her working-class parents. The story, which takes place during the summer and fall of Anne’s transition from middle school to high school, is narrated in a stream-of-consciousness style from her point of view. Ernaux captures Anne’s adolescent voice, through which she expresses her keen observations in a highly colloquial style.

As the novel progresses, and Anne’s feelings about her parents, her education, and her sexual encounters evolve, she grows into a more mature but also more conflicted and unhappy character, leaving behind the innocence of her middle school years. Not only must she navigate the often-confusing signals she receives from boys, but she also finds herself moving further and further away from her parents as she surpasses their educational level and worldview.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: In this early and seemingly often overlooked entry into Nobel Laureate Ernaux's œuvre, I found a lot to wonder about. I think the entirety of an author's career is often set by the earliest works, either in action or reaction. In this case, Author Ernaux never moved her focus away from her Self, her essential project becoming refining and redacting and recalibrating the instrument of her creativity as she maintained a solid lock on what she knew best.

A woman writing in a cultural space wherein a man's wife is "sa femme"..."his woman"...is going to see her sex as a defining quality. Author Ernaux's fifteen-year-old protagonist, Anne, is...bewildered. She's reading The Stranger, and thinking of how she would create her own feminine take on the subject...teenagers and fanfiction go back a long, long way, but I am really hard-pressed to see how Meursault could be portrayed as female...she's trying to interpret her male cohort's weird, contradictory actions and words, she's trying to find some context into which her parents, the eternal enemies of our self-defining selves, fit recognizably. In short, she's fifteen.

Mme Ernaux delves into this maelstrom of bewildered and beleaguered self-ness with refreshing honesty, in that she doesn't overlay an adult's re-vision of the whole horrible mishegas of being fifteen. What happens as a result...keeping in mind the author was thirty-seven when the book came out...is what I'd call a sociology of adolescent femaleness in flux. Everything, necessarily, is related to Anne's Self in this book, since the project adolescents are engaged in is defining the Self in opposition to some Other, "I AM this" requiring "therefore I am NOT that," or it loses its solidity. It's Anne's frustratingly true-to-life Self-formation that makes me want to scream at the pages. I am not an adolescent and haven't been in a good long time. I do want to restate, though, that Anne is involved in the central project of adolescence and therefore gets her space to create only as and when afforded it. My adult(ish) male impatience is directed at my memories of the emotional devastation of the project on me, as called forth whole and entire from my own adolescence.

This is how one knows Author Ernaux was wise to stick to her focus, set so early in her writing career. A journeyman effort, decades old, brings an experienced reader into a powerfully emotional state by evoking uncertainty and angst and confusion.

The translators of this edition are to be lauded for their near-invisible work. The separate phrases are impressively wrought, the cumulative effect that Author Ernaux's writing is famous for is never out of their view:

Céline is going out with a guy from our high school, a junior. He's waiting to meet her at four o'clock on the corner next to the post office. At least it's clear what her secret is. If I was her I wouldn't even hide it. But the person who I am has no shape. Just thinking about it makes me feel heavy, like a real fatso. I'd like to sleep until a time when I could understand myself better—maybe when I'm eighteen or twenty-one. There must come a day when everything is clear, when everything falls into place.

The act of self-definition's agonies are limpidly clear. The course Anne will take is set. The problems are already present and the solutions are, to her, as yet unknowable. By the end of this under-150-page story, she's not clear but she knows clarity exists:

I have nothing to say about the topic the teacher gave us, just disordered thoughts. If I let myself go, I'd write about whatever I wanted, I would write about blood and cries, and there would be a red dress too, and jeans. People don't suspect the importance of clothes in what happens to us. And there would be meals in the kitchen. My father would say something he had heard somewhere, and my mother would stretch out a tired leg. I would write about anything, as long as it made a tight knot around me.

That evergreen of young life, the "come-here-go-away" approach avoidance dance! It's never more than that, though. This is an early work, and as such lacks some of the whole-brain fineness of resolution that would, eg I Remain in Darkness (an account of her mother's descent into Alzheimer's), Getting Lost (the diary of a passionate love affair she had with a married man), characterize the more recent work from her pen. None of it is ever less than personal. None of it is ever less than brutal, honestly, in it effects on the unsuspecting. But it all became more deft, less observational and intellectual, as her métier became her mind.

Starting here, with a teenaged girl's life still inchoate but sensed and sought within her mind and life, will ground you in the enormous pleasures to come. I think anyone who reads an Ernaux story and doesn't want more is simply and sadly missing out.

IMPERIAL WOMAN, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Pearl S. Buck's 1956 take on events of her own childhood

IMPERIAL WOMAN
PEARL S. BUCK
Open Road Media
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Imperial Woman is the fictionalized biography of the last Empress in China, Ci-xi, who began as a concubine of the Xianfeng Emperor and on his death became the de facto head of the Qing Dynasty until her death in 1908. Buck recreates the life of one of the most intriguing rulers during a time of intense turbulence. Tzu Hsi was born into one of the lowly ranks of the Imperial dynasty. According to custom, she moved to the Forbidden City at the age of seventeen to become one of hundreds of concubines. But her singular beauty and powers of manipulation quickly moved her into the position of Second Consort. Tzu Hsi was feared and hated by many in the court, but adored by the people. The Empress's rise to power (even during her husband's life) parallels the story of China's transition from the ancient to the modern way.

My Review: Few women in China's very long history have been as well-documented as rulers as Cixi. I suspect that Mrs. Buck, daughter of missionaries to China and a reluctant missionary herself, wrote of this larger-than-life figure because she felt great kinship with her. Cixi was an outsider in a closed world, the Imperial Court, but whose sterling native qualities gave her tremendous influence over that closed world. Buck was in much the same situation vis-a-vis the Chinese culture she was native to for the first forty years of her life. Her parents raised her to be bilingual in Chinese and English, gave her no model for a racist view of the Chinese, and allowed her to mingle with the children of their Chinese converts to Presbyterianism mostly without interference. This made her a fish out of water everywhere, but also gifted her with an amazing insight into the cross-cultural communication disasters that have plagued China's relations with the world forever.

Cixi was an intelligent young woman of relatively modest, though not humble, birth, gifted with great personal grace and beauty. Her enormous elevation to the relatively modest in Imperial Court terms position of Imperial Concubine afforded Cixi the opening to become a powerful woman; her excellent fortune in giving birth to the Emperor's only son allowed her to move well beyond the considerable but constrained power of a favored concubine/consort into a full governing partnership as a Regent for her son, with a council appointed by her late Imperial master.

Buck portrays Cixi as a schemer, but not a wastrel as she is often portrayed. Her intrigues had at their heart a sincere and abiding belief that dynastic continuity was the sole means by which the Chinese body politic could be served by their government as foils against the colonial depredations of the Western powers. All the pomp and the excess Cixi loved was put on for the demonstration of her dynasty's power and dominance. All the machinations she undertook were meant to keep her position—but so that she might continue to fight against China's diminution and beggarment.

Fundamentally, Cixi behaved no differently than the Communist Party has since Chairman Mao's death in 1976. She was a strong leader, and a flawed person; she was also too late to do much about the long, slow fall of her for of government. History's tides catch up with all governments eventually; the Party's current grandees know this, and are behaving in their stewardship of China as Cixi herself did 125 years ago.

As all Pearl S. Buck novels are, this gracefully told tale is a pleasure to read and a treasure house of outside/insider information and opinions now irreplaceable with the death of the author. It is an exciting story, a well-told tale, and a still-invaluable look into a difficult life lived in service to a misunderstood ideal. A must-read for all Sinophiles.