Please update your bookmarks. This blog is moving to a new address: Read, Ramble.

My reviews of the books under consideration for the Man Asian Literary Prize will still be posted here for the next month, until after the announcement of the winner in March.

Cheers,

Fay

With all due respect to Hemingway, he does seem to be laughing at Cather as a girly wannabe in the war novel genre. Since only about three battle scenes occur late in the novel, and the hero does not enlist until the story is over halfway told, Hemingway’s snide remark seems unfairly dismissive of the novel as a whole. He had not yet published his first novel in 1923; could jealousy have been a factor in his comment? I must admit that some soldiers’ behavior in the battle scenes appears unrealistic at times, but the overall choreography of these scenes, the representation of a village sniper attack or men going over the top of a trench, do not challenge credulity. Cather’s narrative voice, her evocation of youthful energy and aspirations and frustrations, her memoriam to the young soldiers who died in WWI–these qualities add up to a classic American novel.

Our hero grows up on a prosperous Nebraska farm and attends college for a few years before his father orders him back to the family farm. Today’s urban readers may think it a chore to take seriously the rural setting of the novel’s first half, but readers who appreciated Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, also set on the Great Plains, should give One of Ours a chance. The two writers are stylistically similar. James Wood includes both writers in comments about “Literary Calvinism” in American fiction, and before you roll your eyes and turn away, Dear Reader, consider the other writers Wood includes in this style: Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards, Ulysses S. Grant in his Memoirs, Mark Twain and, amusingly in this context, Hemingway. His simplicity of style–and perhaps attitude–marks him for inclusion on this list of writers, although his spare sentences are nothing like those of Robinson and Cather, who appear lush by comparison. Both are notable for the rhythm of their language, especially on the level of the paragraph or long passage.

Simon's Reading Challenge at Stuck in a Book

One of Ours pays tribute to the WWI generation in a coming-of-age story, a nuanced character study, and is not–as some of her contemporaries said–a pro-war novel. She has not a jingoistic bone in her body, and she takes care to remind readers of the cynicism of some soldiers who fought and returned home, also mentioning the men who could not adjust to their post-war civilian environment. The book celebrates the lives of all the young American men, including Cather’s cousin, who died in France during World War I, who they were, what they might have been, their sacrifice. With over four million U.S. soldiers having served in the costly war, it is no wonder American readers of literary fiction responded to the book about a young man who dies for what he believes in. The novel does not, however, appear on bestseller lists for 1922-23.

I’ll close with a paragraph from the novel. It shows both the quality of Cather’s prose and some typical content. She uses dialog to good effect throughout the book, but her representation of the young man’s inner life drives the novel.

Claude knew, and everybody else knew, seemingly, that there was something wrong with him. He had been unable to conceal his discontent. Mr. Wheeler was afraid he was one of those visionary fellows who make unnecessary difficulties for themselves and other people. Mrs. Wheeler thought the trouble with her son was that he had not yet found his Saviour. Bayliss was convinced that his brother was a moral rebel, that behind his reticence and his guarded manner he concealed the most dangerous opinions. The neighbours liked Claude, but they laughed at him, and said it was a good thing his father was well fixed. Claude was aware that his energy, instead of accomplishing something, was spent in resisting unalterable conditions, and in unavailing efforts to subdue his own nature. When he thought he had at last got himself in hand, a moment would undo the work of days; in a flash he would be transformed from a wooden post into a living boy. He would spring to his feet, turn over quickly in bed, or stop short in his walk, because the old belief flashed up in him with an intense kind of hope, an intense kind of pain,—the conviction that there was something splendid about life, if he could but find it!

“Love seeketh not Itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.”

So sung a little Clod of Clay,
Trodden with the cattle’s feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:

“Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to Its delight,
Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.”

Congratulations to the fabulous North African blues band Tinariwen on winning this year’s Grammy award for Best World Music Album. If you have a Spotify subscription, listen to the entire album there: Tassili.

Aside from his thought-provoking comments on that topic, a couple of other points stand out. While repressive governments are still the greatest threat to writers’ free expression in China, North Korea and Syria, Ghosh says, in the rest of the world governments do not pose the biggest problem.

Elsewhere threats to free speech today come mainly from private and sectional interests – fundamentalist groups, identity-based organizations, political extremists, corporations and so on. These may be ‘non-state actors’ but they can be very effective in limiting the freedom of speech. It might even be said that in India they have succeeded in shrinking the space for free expression to a point where it is not much broader than in China.

To say that India is not much better off than China in terms of free speech is a shocking claim. Amitav Ghosh’s novel River of Smoke , the second novel in his Ibis Trilogy, has been shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize to be announced on March 15th, and I am hoping to get my review posted in the next week or so. Meanwhile, see my post on Sea of Poppies, the first book of the Ibis Trilogy.

Find a portrait or photograph that closely embodies how you imagine them.

What phrases has the author used to introduce this character? In the first paragraph, these words set the tone: happy, “memory of past sorrow,” torment, passion, suffering. Werther runs on high feeling.

What are your first impressions of them? The first paragraph establishes Werther as a shallow young man prone to self-justification and exaggeration. Goethe announces his ironic view of the character in the opening passage, although the irony has escaped the notice of many readers who accept the young man’s self-evaluation as reported in his letters. W carries on about trifling with the affections of a girl for his amusement and then vows not to dwell on “every petty vexation which fortune may disperse.” So coping with the unhappiness he has created is a “petty vexation.” His extreme emotionalism leads him into a quagmire of suffering until he can face his self-inflicted troubles no longer.

How has the character changed? Werther’s youthful restlessness becomes morbid. He expresses intense feeling from the beginning, but frustration over a married woman who will never be more than his friend magnifies into life-or-death significance for him.

Has your opinion of them altered? Some of the early passages genuinely convey the earnestness of a sensitive youth and have a certain charm, but he seems full of himself, in a not very appealing way, on page one and that never changes. It gets worse when his hypocrisy and self-deception become more pronounced.

Are there aspects of their character you aspire to? No.

What are their strengths and faults? Readers who were touched by Werther responded to his emotional intensity and what they saw as his deep longing for meaning through romantic love. His hyper-sensitivity was admired, and he aspired to live on a higher spiritual plain than the average run of men. Although the reader must pity him, I thought his pretensions were a lot of bosh. There are indications that Goethe also took a somewhat jaundiced view of his character’s mental life, even though the novel is partly autobiographical. Of course, a whole generation of youth did not see him that way. They responded to his individualism and passion.

Do you find them believable? Yes, unfortunately.

Would you want to meet them? No, thank you.

Despite the powerful writing, I cannot recommend it except as a kind of freak show of literary history. I am delighted to have finally read it, because the stereotyping of Romantic literature as something ridiculous is probably based on a too-easy association of all Romantics with the over-the-top sentiment of the Sturm und Drang writers.

The story follows a young man on his sojourn away from home, where he appears to be fleeing a romantic adventure that got out of hand when he was caught between two sisters who both adored him, by his own account. He falls hard for a woman who is engaged to another man and tries for the remainder of the novel to recover from his passionate, impossible love. At several points in the story he appears to forget Charlotte completely, as his fancy turns to some other attractive maidens, but he reports his devotion to Lotte as if these other attractions were not distracting him.

Werther, a dabbler of a painter and reader of mawkish poetry, takes a position with an ambassador whom he finds overly punctilious in demanding well-written reports. Poor, poor Werther! Life is so unfair! The novel’s epistolary structure serves the purpose of displaying Werther’s innermost thoughts and feelings, as he writes to his friend Wilhelm back home. Werther muses on the sunsets, flowers, his love for Charlotte, the meaning of life and himself. He dallies with attractive young women and pursues aristocrats, while claiming a spiritual affinity with the peasantry.

In these contrasts of intention and action lie Goethe’s ironic portrait of his young hero, although legions of readers have read the book as an unambiguous manifesto of sensibility. I do not see how anyone, now or then, could take the character at his own face value. You would think no reader could miss the irony Goethe embeds in all that sincerity and despair, but clearly many readers took their Werther straight up. Young people of the late 18th C. emulated Werther’s dress, associating the high-strung young man with a break from convention, and seeing the novel as a statement of personal independence and freedom for their generation. Many young European men of the day adopted Werther’s blue jacket and yellow pants, as shown below.

The novella lives up to its reputation for wretched excess. This is the most emotionally overwrought character I’ve come across in literary fiction, and his literary progeny are fairly easy to identify. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is said to be influenced by Werther, not in repeating the character so much as inhaling the atmosphere of suffering that brings Werther to its bloody conclusion. Up until this book, the highest pitch of unbridled feeling I had come across in fiction had been in the sensation novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins and to a lesser extent Dickens. I wonder if a direct line of influence could be traced from Sturm und Drang to those Victorian authors. Braddon wrote delicious trash, whereas Goethe presumed a seriousness of purpose even when satirizing his own lead character.

The Sorrows of Young Werther was an important novel and had a significant impact on literary history. I’m just not sure today’s readers would find it all that engaging either as literary fiction or as a pleasure read. The pattern for the self-indulgent young man of high sensibility, Werther has become something of a jokey image of manhood. Goethe himself, I am convinced, did not view his creation as an admirable character at the time he wrote the book. As an older writer, he did not look approvingly at the novel he wrote as a young man, and he had nothing good to say about the rising generation of Romantics.

The Sorrows of Young Werther (German, 1774).
I read the Thomas Carlyle and R.D. Boylan translation in the Dover Thrift Editions (2002), which includes an 1827 introduction by Carlyle.
88 pages.
ISBN: 0-486-424553

See the Juno Awards site for all nominees in all music categories, and if you click on their names you will see a biography and a hear a short clip for each artist.

A few weeks ago when my son was home for the holidays he wrote a guest blog post about Rona, a friend from Montana Fiddle Camp. Today I am reblogging that post below.
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The Celtic Connections Festival begins in Glasgow, Scotland in a couple of weeks, and Montana traditional fiddlers will be eagerly awaiting the results of the BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician competition. Scottish fiddler Rona Wilkie, a finalist in this year’s competition, is well-known among traditional fiddlers here. The finals will be held at Celtic Connections on February 5th. My son Jack is home from college, and I asked him to write a guest post about his friend Rona.

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Rona came to teach Scottish fiddle at Montana Fiddle Camp a few years ago, where she made fast friends with many of the staff and students there. I wasn’t in her class, but by all accounts she was an excellent and patient teacher, and it was clear to anyone who heard her play that she was among the most proficient musicians there. She definitely exhibits her own unmistakable personal stamp in her playing: her fiddling style has a wonderful crispness and powerful forward momentum, and she’s not afraid to put a little “grit” in her sound from time to time, mixing it up with a clear and brilliant tone.

Not only does Rona have an encyclopedic knowledge of Scottish tunes and musicians (especially impressive for someone as young as she is), but she is also insatiably curious about other styles. She started picking up elements of old-time, swing, and bluegrass from the other musicians while she was at camp and was never afraid to experiment. More recently, she’s been combining Scottish music with Scandinavian music and producing some very cosmopolitan-sounding stuff. Rona is also simply a delightful human being, with boundless wit and enthusiasm, and I’m really excited that she’s been nominated for such a prestigious and visible award. She absolutely deserves it.

No other novel in recent memory has generated such wrong-headed reviews in parts of the American mainstream press. Professional women who would probably be incapable of empathizing with a stay-at-home mom down the street were assigned to review a novel about an ignorant farmer on the other side of the world. Like many other readers who commented at the National Public Radio website, I was offended by the NPR review. Not only does the reviewer insult Koreans and Korean culture, she manages to sneer at American women readers as well.

If there’s a literary genre in Korean that translates into ‘manipulative sob sister melodrama,’ Please Look After Mom is surely its reigning queen. I’m mystified as to why this guilt-laden morality tale has become such a sensation in Korea and why a literary house like Knopf would embrace it. (Although, as women are the biggest audience for literary fiction, Please Look After Mom must be anticipated to be a book club hit in this country.) But, why wallow in cross-cultural self-pity, ladies?

This reviewer was untouched by the human dignity of Park-So-nyo and by the vividly Korean identity she communicates. Just because the main character has a sometimes melodramatic point of view and attempts, unsuccessfully, to manipulate her children’s behavior through guilt does not make the novel itself melodramatic or appreciative readers self-pitying. This narcissistic reviewer entirely missed the cautionary tale of a woman who devoted much of her life to her family and now faces old age ignored, emotionally abandoned, and disrespected by her adult children. At least two of the “children” in this story are past fifty and are infantile in their relation to their parent, as self-absorbed as any adolescents. They have misjudged their mother in many ways, or as the older son says late in the day, “Maybe it was only her children who thought of Mom’s life as being filled with pain and sacrifice, because of our guilt. We might actually be diminishing her life as something useless.” Undoubtedly her life was filled with pain and sacrifice, but the children learn another story, at least part of the story, as they conduct their search and reflect on her life.

Yes, their mother can be unreasonable in her expectations. The oldest daughter is a novelist and Mom is not well pleased that she flies around the world to promote her books. She wants her daughter to stay closer to home and is worried about the safety of air travel. On the other hand, she is also disappointed that her younger daughter, who trained as a pharmacist, decided to stay at home to raise her three children instead of putting her education to good use. Park-So-nyo is no Western-style feminist, but she has trouble understanding why any educated woman would give up her career to stay at home.

The portrait of motherhood is historical, not idealized, and represents the sacrifices older generations of mothers made to build South Korea into its current position of strength. It is astounding that anyone could view as “ideal” a pattern of motherhood that involves bringing up children on a subsistence income, without the emotional support of her husband, in a context of loneliness and backbreaking labor. Yet another writer flings that accusation at the book, that it holds up an outmoded “ideal” of motherhood under patriarchy. Nonsense.

The figure of the self-sacrificing mother may be a throwback because the level of self-abnegation mandated by economic conditions of late 20th Century South Korea no longer pertain. The novel is a love letter to the women who built today’s world, a homage to the nobodies who gave their all. To the reviewer who attacks not only the book but readers of the book, I say right back at you that I sincerely believe contempt for the poor informs much of the snarky commentary on the novel, that and a profound inability to identify with someone, especially a woman, unlike yourself.

One source of cultural insensitivity may be the distance in time of American urbanites from our rural past when most people lived on farms. My children would have to reach back five generations to find an ancestor who lived on a farm. Our country’s urbanization began in the 19th C. and by the 1920s it was in full swing. By the ’40s, our population was mostly living in cities. Although four million refugees from North Korea poured into the country at the end of the Korean War, the urbanization of South Korea occurred primarily in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. The author Kyung-sook Shin, born in 1963, is herself the daughter of farmers; she grew up in a rural village and did not migrate to the city until she was sixteen. When her parents could not afford to send her to high school, she joined her older brother in Seoul, where she eventually earned a degree in creative writing.

The experiences associated with moving from a rural to an urban environment, and lifting from poverty to affluence, from ignorance to education, from restraint to personal freedom, from military dictatorship to democracy (in 1987) reside in the living memory of many adult South Koreans. Please Look After Mom captures all of those threads in South Korean culture and frames it in a context of motherhood. No wonder it was a runaway bestseller in South Korea. One blog specializing in South Korean literature says it has sold 1,600,000 copies there.

The reader gains a fuller perspective on the character than does any one of her family members. Park-So-nyo’s idea of freedom is to be so far beyond material want that you can devote your life to the service of mankind. When the character finds herself in a position of relative plenty, she does exactly that, only to be ridiculed as “saintly” by some reviewers. The overt comparison at the end of the book of the longsuffering mother with the Virgin Mary may strike some readers as a tiresome turn, but we should not be surprised that a religious story about a mother honored for her sacrifice should pique the curiosity and appeal to the imagination of the woman who gave so much of herself to her children. We see no evidence that Park-So-nyo has adopted Catholicism, only that she admires a religion that respects mothers, as her children apparently do not.

Some readers have called the novel genre fiction, a designation that puzzles me. Do they mean women’s fiction? I see it as a splendid work of literary fiction, neatly crafted and lovingly told. The book is divided into sections that focus on the oldest daughter, the oldest son, the husband, and the mother herself. Then an epilogue focuses again on the oldest daughter’s perspective. Narration alternates between second person, third person and first person, reflecting something of the nature of the relationships between characters. Setting moves from urban present to rural past and present and back again to the city. As a historical novel about a typical family confronting urbanization and cultural change, it is unsurpassed in my reading experience. As a biography of a nobody who turns out to be an Everywoman of a Korea that is fading into memory, Please Look After Mom presents a respectful portrait of Every Mom worldwide who guided her family from rural poverty to a vibrant urban present.

Please Look After Mom, published in other English editions overseas as Please Look After Mother, has been shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. The winner will be announced March 15th. My review is the last by the Man Asian Literary Prize shadow jurors. We have all read the book now and our responses have varied. See other Man Asian Shadow Jury reviews by Matt, Lisa, Mark, Stu, and Sue.

Please Look After Mom (2008) by Kyung-sook Shin, Changbi Publishers, South Korea.
I read the American edition: Borzoi Books, Alfred A. Knopf (2011). Ninth printing.
237 pages.
ISBN: 978-0-307-59391-7

Translation rights: USA, UK, France, The Netherlands, Spain, Japan, Vietnam, Germany, China, Taiwan, Israel, Portugal, Brazil, Italy, Turkey, Poland, Norway, Arabic (Which country? Egypt?). This information came from Korean Modern Literature in Translation, an interesting blog that followed the reception of the novel in the US and elsewhere. Publication now set for 23 countries, says the dust jacket.