Mario Menti
I loved this (I read his later book The Stolen Bicycle first, which made me pick up this one).
It might be one of the saddest, and yet most beautiful books I've read. A mixture of magical realism, environmental concerns, and Taiwanese indigenous culture, it was written over 10 years ago, and the environmental issues it predicts have only gotten worse and more hopeless since. In the end it's down to a small black and white rescue cat to give the main protagonist a reason to keep living, which seems apt.
Recommended by my daughter who moved to the Lake District earlier this year, I absolutely loved this book. It talks about issues that I believe most of us are more or less aware of, but makes them a lot more tangible and personal.
It's a book in three parts - in the first part, Rebanks talks about his childhood helping out on his grandfather's fell farm in the Lake District, which his grandfather is farming in the old, “traditional” way.
The second part, and perhaps the most powerful one to me, describes the modernisation of farming over the last few decades, with the availability of new technology, pesticides and chemical fertilisers, and the pressure for efficiency and productivity forcing farmers into ever more intensive farming practices in order to survive. Rebanks becomes increasingly disillusioned with this trend, seeing the impact it has both on nature and on the farmers themselves.
The final part is all about Rebanks inheriting his grandfather's farm after his father's death, and trying to farm it in a as-sustainable-as-possible way. This is the most hopeful and almost romantic part, although he is at pains to point out that this type of farming barely pays the bills and he has to work off the farm to make ends meet.
Unless our food system, with its emphasis on cheap prices (especially for meat) and the major supermarkets driving a race to the bottom, is completely changed, then sustainable farming will forever be an unrealistic option for the vast majority of farmers.
This is one of my favourite books I've read this year.
It's a kind of meta-fiction centered around the history of bicycles in Taiwan, and covers the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, the Second World War in British Malaya, and especially the role of bicycles (and, more upsettingly, elephants) in the war.
Wu Ming-yi himself seems a bit of a renaissance man (writer, artist, environmental activist and more) and a fascinating person. Sadly only two of his books have so far been translated into English.
If you're interested in Taiwan, its history, WWII in SE Asia, bicycles (of course), the nature of Taiwan (especially butterflies), and love elephants, then you'll probably love this.
I absolutely loved this collection of short stories (her first book written in English). The stories and their settings are incredibly varied - my two favourite stories were one about meeting someone in the cinema, adding them on Facebook, only for them to kill themselves the same day, leading to a rumination on whether you could fall in love with someone simply through their online presence, and the other a tour de force on the politics of succession in Confucian times.
Really enjoyed this. A sharp political satire, in the form of a series of interconnected stories set in Beanstalk, a 674-story skyscraper and sovereign nation. It mostly concerns itself with matters of (visible and invisible) power, mass media and information and hype, but is both touching (the elephant Buddha story) and funny (the dog as important power broker) as well as smart.
And the Appendix is fantastic: consisting of the full length versions of some of the stories and pieces of writing that were mentioned in the plot of a number of the stories in the “main” part of the book.
I really liked the first collection of Izumi Suzuki's short stories that came out in English a couple of years ago (Terminal Boredom). Hit Parade of Tears, the second collection, is just as good.
Suzuki, who died in 1986 at the age of just 37, was a pioneer of Japanese “punky” science fiction. Most of these stories are simultaneously quite sad and very funny, and despite being steeped in Seventies Japanese counterculture, somehow still feel very fresh today.
I couldn't stop reading this. A brilliant, totally captivating story set mostly in 1940s Malaya. It's a mix of fact and fiction (even though I've been to Malaysia and the Batu Caves outside KL, I never knew about the Batu Caves Massacre, where most of the leaders of the communist Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army (MPSJA) were betrayed and killed). But more than anything, it's a story of love and a more personal kind of betrayal - the story of one man told from three very different perspectives.
This is probably one of the strangest books I've ever read, in a good way - but not for the faint-hearted.
Poetic, highly surreal, visceral, violent, explicit about everything bodily, shocking, but also very funny at the same time. I think (but could be wrong) a lot of the often gruesome violence has its origins in the Tayan (Taiwan's indigenous people) myths that pervade the storytelling.
I don't think I've read a David Mitchell book yet that I didn't love. This is in many ways a much more straightforward book than you might be used to from him, but the combination of vivid writing, humour, an incredible amount of historical research (it's set on a Dutch trading outpost in the bay of Nagasaki in 1799) makes it if anything an ever stronger read.
How he straddles the different sensibilities of the Dutch, Japanese and English through language is amazing, but of course this wouldn't count for much if it wasn't also a very emotionally captivating novel.
This is one of these books that pulls you in and gets better and more compelling as it progresses. It deals with some very serious issues (all the protagonists are Japanese teenagers who for one reason or another do not go to school), and is part fairy tale, part YA fiction, part magic realism, part fantasy, but really quite hard to categorise.
It's very cleverly plotted, with a number of plot twists that come thick and fast towards the end, and involves a truly moving denouement.
Much like everything I have read so far by David Mitchell, I loved this.
The last part of the book, “Sheep's Head, 2043”, is one of the darkest, bleakest, and yet most plausible descriptions of a post-oil post-civilization near-future I have ever read, and its ending is surprisingly emotional - I suppose because by then we have spent over 600 pages and 60 years with Holly Sykes, from teenage runaway in Kent in 1982 to grandmother in a dystopian Ireland in 2043, via many other parts of the world (or should I say “worlds” - this is a fantasy novel in many parts).
Kyoko Nakajima's The Little House (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori) is wonderful. Similar to what she does in many of her short stories, she leaves the really impactful bits right to the end.
Most of the book is set between 1930 and the war and told by Taki, a housemaid in Tokyo, until the very last chapter, which is set in the near present and took my breath away - it somehow amplifies the story, and takes it way beyond everything you've read up to that point.
Kaoru Takamura's Lady Joker (volume 1) took me a while to finish, but it's not because it's not good, it's just very long and very detailed. It's definitely a psychological thriller in the sense that almost everything you read happens in people's heads, rather than any outright action. It's pretty scathing about capitalism, the Japanese corporate culture and the “keiretsu” system, with corporations in bed with organized crime.
But it ended on a cliffhanger, so even after 600 pages, I have no idea how it will end. Volume 2 will have all the answers i guess
I'm not sure if there is such a thing as reading a book pre-emptively, but that's what I did with this, when I heard that there is a big budget film adaption coming in August (starring Brad Pitt and Sandra Bullock, amongst others).
It's probably not the kind of book I usually read, but it turned out to be absolutely glorious, violent fun. In reviews, I've often seen comparisons to Pulp Fiction, and it's easy to see why - a Shinkansen full of a collection of professional hit men of various levels of competence, and other assorted criminals and psychopaths with conflicting aims, all having random discussions covering a whole range of bizarre random philosophical questions and - more than anything else - Thomas the Tank Engine, while attempting to kill each other, or at least avoid being killed.
It's full of clever twists and turns, and towards the end there is one final particular twist that is so unbelievably delicious, if I told you I would have to kill you. But it's not really a spoiler to note that by the time the Shinkansen reaches its final destination, the number of dead bodies on the train vastly outnumbers those still alive.
One thing I love is going to charity shops and look through their fiction books, just to see if there's something there that looks like I'd enjoy it. Very often this is the way I come across an author I've not heard before, and often it's books that were up for an award a few years ago, but that I've missed.
Yiyun Li's collection of short stories “A Thousand Years Of Good Prayers” is one such book I absolutely loved. Beautifully spare, it tells the story (and history) of modern China through the protagonists' “insignificant” (to history) lives. At times wickedly humorous, but more than anything utterly heartbreaking in their honesty, these are stories that will stay with me. And it feels like it shines a light onto the complex history of modern China more than any other fiction book I've read recently.
An extremely moving novella - meditative. opaque, and yet full of very precise and beautiful observations; of nature, of everyday objects and scenes, of people, and of art. On the face of it a tale of a young woman and her mother visiting Japan together, it gets less and less clear how much of this story is actually real and how much is imagined.
There's a sentence towards the end almost explicitly warning you not to believe what you're reading, comparing writing to a painter painting over what was previously there:
“It was only in this way that one could go back and change the past, to make things not as they were, but as we wished they had been, or rather as we saw it. I said, for this reason, it was better for her not to trust anything she read.”
Au also manages some wonderful descriptions of Japan, that almost physically took me back there:
“The streets were so small that there were often no footpaths but rather white lines drawn on the asphalt to indicate where you could walk. Occasionally, we'd pass a cluster of convenience stores and small shops and coffee houses, which you could always spot at a distance by their brightly coloured vertical signs.”
And about learning Japanese:
“I thought of learning Japanese, how childlike I still felt in the language, how I was capable only of asking for the simplest things. And yet, I persisted, because I dreamed one day of being able to say more. I thought of the instances when I had been able to converse in a string of sentences, like with the woman at the bookshop, and how good this had felt, how electric.”
This collection of short stories really deserves its nomination for the International Booker.
Absurd, often frankly horrific and very dark, these stories draw on phantasy, horror and twisted folk tales, but are firmly rooted in the concerns of our modern, capitalist and patriarchal world and its very real horrors.
And Anton Hur's translation from Korean is nothing short of masterful.
Enjoyed this a great deal. A Taiwanese horror/ghost story, centered around a down-on-his-luck Taipei taxi driver and his wider family. While at times quite creepy and scary, it's far more than just a horror or ghost story, and Chang Yu-Ko manages to weave in a lot of history - especially the Japanese occupation -, folk tales and customs of the indigenous people of Taiwan (in this case mostly the Bunun), and some of the abuse these people suffer to this day.
I loved this book, and I think anyone interested in language in general, and Japanese in particular, would too. Tawada is from Japan, lives in Berlin, and writes books in both German and Japanese (this one was written in Japanese). I loved her take on languages, their influence on identity, and in particular national identity, when the nation in question no longer exists (here, Japan has ceased to exist and is now simply known as the “country of sushi”).
Apparently this is the first book in a trilogy, which I am very happy about - can't wait for the other two books to be written/published!
A few quotes that I found particularly memorable, or just loved enough to take note of:
“No, I'm not a Buddhist. I'm a linguist.” “Is that a religion?” “Not really, but languages can make people happy, and show them what's beyond death.”
“Yes, the idea of getting an extra identity just by learning a new language was exciting. I wasn't ashamed of being an Eskimo, but a whole life with just one identity seemed kind of dull.”
“But most native speakers are too busy to think much about language, and tend to use the same words and phrases all the time, whereas non-natives, who move back and forth between two languages, are always looking for new words and expressions — so who's more likely to have a bigger vocabulary?”
“This word natsukashii seemed to be made of mist, a mist I was wandering through with unsteady steps. In Panska, I might have said something like “memories of the past are so delicious I want to eat them” instead.”
And finally, probably the nerdiest way of saying you want to visit Japan
Loved this book. Looking at Taiwan through its nature and natural history, as well as the personal history of Lee's family, especially through a letter of her grandfather, this is a fantastic read for anyone interested in Taiwan.
Gorgeously written, and equally good at describing mountains, geography, plants, natural history, language, politics and family.