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Mar. 21st, 2003 03:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckI'm still working my way through the books I got at the library last week. I've given up on two of them (in addition to the Newcomb), and one of them turned out to be something I'd read before but didn't recognize (that's what I get for skimming the blurb!).
Of the two I gave up on, one just simply didn't catch my attention. That was Elizabeth Lowell's Moving Target. Her books are fairly hit or miss for me, but I'd thought the blurb sounded interesting. Sadly, from the parts I read (including the ending, I'll confess. I'm like that), the things that interested me were more incidental to the story than I'd hoped. I'm a sucker for mysterious medieval manuscripts, but this one doesn't get found until the end of the book, so although it's a presence throughout, it wasn't there in any way that mattered to me.
The other book I abandoned turned out not to be what I'd hoped it would be. As I went through the paperback section, I grabbed everything that I recognized as a translation of a Japanese novel. I found three of them, all from the first half of the last century, and two were pretty much what I was looking for. I wanted to read something to get a feel for Japanese culture. Often, even in translation, one can get a certain... texture of a culture from reading its literature. I like to do that, figuring out what's idiosyncratic to the author and what's more generally applicable.
Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson, the folks who translated this book, Soseki Natsume's I Am a Cat II, specifically decided to omit the sort of thing I was looking for. In their forward, they state that they consider an annotated novel an abomination and that they feel that the truest translations require no explanations to the reader because they transform the ideas and themes into a form that fits the new language and culture. This may be a good approach from a literary point of view, but... The book reads like the characters are British or, perhaps, New Englanders. The social satire still works fairly well because what's been translated is what applies generally to bourgeois culture, but... It's not very Japanese. (I only managed to read about 30 pages, so it's possible that this changes later, but... I wasn't willing to search for it.)
The other two translations were Fumiko Enchi's The Waiting Years (translated by John Bester) and Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's A Cat, a Man, and Two Women (translated by Paul McCarthy). The latter book also included two other short stories in addition to the story (novella?) from which the volume draws its title. I found both books interesting though they're probably neither of them things I'd read for any other reason than to learn about Japan.
The Waiting Years was very much a women's book. The male characters mattered for the very simple reason that there was no way for the female characters to build lives that weren't dependent on the presence of men. In fact, that difficulty more or less drove the plot. The novel's fairly short and covers decades, so there's no great depth at any point, except depth by implication. There is a sense that each episode is a snapshot, a glimpse of a much larger whole.
A Cat, a Man, and Two Women was in a different style because at least some humor was intended. None of the characters involved in the main story came across as particularly admirable, and there was a lot of looking at the little ways in which people sabotage themselves and at the weaknesses that individuals overlook in themselves.
I can't say that I drew any particular conclusions about Japanese culture from the books. Some may percolate up eventually, but I suspect I'd need to do a lot more reading to get any sort of synthesis. Also, most of what I get from this sort of exercise is not intellectual. It's more of a sense of how things feel, right or wrong.
The remaining two books were both Rosamunde Pilcher novels (as was the one I'd already read and got by mistake), Snow in April and Sleeping Tiger. Both were pleasant without being spectacular, and I think they had too many common qualities for me to properly appreciate them when read right on top of each other. Pilcher's novels tend to be rather dated now, and, as I've remarked before, it's often hard to pin down exactly what's happening in them because it's nothing dreadfully active. Her heroines are mostly ingénues which can get wearing (I really liked The Shell Seekers because the main character was older and had more understanding of the world), but she doesn't tend to pair up couples who really couldn't ever stand living together.
I'm still working on Sarah Zettel's Sorcerer's Treason. I hope I'll manage to finish it, but my track record with her books isn't very good. I've also got Like Water for Chocolate waiting for me. Whether I get to that one will depend on whether or not I can get my head into the proper sort of mindset, a sort of lyrical and mystical mundanity.
Of the two I gave up on, one just simply didn't catch my attention. That was Elizabeth Lowell's Moving Target. Her books are fairly hit or miss for me, but I'd thought the blurb sounded interesting. Sadly, from the parts I read (including the ending, I'll confess. I'm like that), the things that interested me were more incidental to the story than I'd hoped. I'm a sucker for mysterious medieval manuscripts, but this one doesn't get found until the end of the book, so although it's a presence throughout, it wasn't there in any way that mattered to me.
The other book I abandoned turned out not to be what I'd hoped it would be. As I went through the paperback section, I grabbed everything that I recognized as a translation of a Japanese novel. I found three of them, all from the first half of the last century, and two were pretty much what I was looking for. I wanted to read something to get a feel for Japanese culture. Often, even in translation, one can get a certain... texture of a culture from reading its literature. I like to do that, figuring out what's idiosyncratic to the author and what's more generally applicable.
Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson, the folks who translated this book, Soseki Natsume's I Am a Cat II, specifically decided to omit the sort of thing I was looking for. In their forward, they state that they consider an annotated novel an abomination and that they feel that the truest translations require no explanations to the reader because they transform the ideas and themes into a form that fits the new language and culture. This may be a good approach from a literary point of view, but... The book reads like the characters are British or, perhaps, New Englanders. The social satire still works fairly well because what's been translated is what applies generally to bourgeois culture, but... It's not very Japanese. (I only managed to read about 30 pages, so it's possible that this changes later, but... I wasn't willing to search for it.)
The other two translations were Fumiko Enchi's The Waiting Years (translated by John Bester) and Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's A Cat, a Man, and Two Women (translated by Paul McCarthy). The latter book also included two other short stories in addition to the story (novella?) from which the volume draws its title. I found both books interesting though they're probably neither of them things I'd read for any other reason than to learn about Japan.
The Waiting Years was very much a women's book. The male characters mattered for the very simple reason that there was no way for the female characters to build lives that weren't dependent on the presence of men. In fact, that difficulty more or less drove the plot. The novel's fairly short and covers decades, so there's no great depth at any point, except depth by implication. There is a sense that each episode is a snapshot, a glimpse of a much larger whole.
A Cat, a Man, and Two Women was in a different style because at least some humor was intended. None of the characters involved in the main story came across as particularly admirable, and there was a lot of looking at the little ways in which people sabotage themselves and at the weaknesses that individuals overlook in themselves.
I can't say that I drew any particular conclusions about Japanese culture from the books. Some may percolate up eventually, but I suspect I'd need to do a lot more reading to get any sort of synthesis. Also, most of what I get from this sort of exercise is not intellectual. It's more of a sense of how things feel, right or wrong.
The remaining two books were both Rosamunde Pilcher novels (as was the one I'd already read and got by mistake), Snow in April and Sleeping Tiger. Both were pleasant without being spectacular, and I think they had too many common qualities for me to properly appreciate them when read right on top of each other. Pilcher's novels tend to be rather dated now, and, as I've remarked before, it's often hard to pin down exactly what's happening in them because it's nothing dreadfully active. Her heroines are mostly ingénues which can get wearing (I really liked The Shell Seekers because the main character was older and had more understanding of the world), but she doesn't tend to pair up couples who really couldn't ever stand living together.
I'm still working on Sarah Zettel's Sorcerer's Treason. I hope I'll manage to finish it, but my track record with her books isn't very good. I've also got Like Water for Chocolate waiting for me. Whether I get to that one will depend on whether or not I can get my head into the proper sort of mindset, a sort of lyrical and mystical mundanity.
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Date: 2003-03-21 01:01 pm (UTC)I can't remember if I loaned it to you already or not. ; )
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Date: 2003-03-21 01:36 pm (UTC)