Summer Reading: Part Two
Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima
This is a book to read in the soft glow of a summer evening, preferably in a room that gets a lot of sunlight. Newly translated to English, Territory of Light was originally published as a twelve part series in the Japanese literary magazine Gunzo in 1978 and 1979. Tsushima has been a critically acclaimed writer in Japan for decades, and she was prolific before passing away in 2016. It's only right that English-language readers are now able to appreciate the talents of this literary icon - thanks in large part to the brilliant work of translator Geraldine Harcourt.
Territory of Light follows the story of a twenty-something woman in 1970s Tokyo as she leaves her husband and grapples with raising their young daughter on her own. Tsushima is neither kind nor unkind to her narrator, preferring instead to lay bare her struggle to find her way in a world that appears wholly indifferent. In many ways a mediation on the ambivalence of parenthood, Territory of Light bathes its central mother-daughter relationship in a light that drifts from glowing and warm to fiery and glaring within the space of sentences. Tsushima skillfully conjures settings which both mirror and contrast the book's plot: the streaming sunlight of the narrator's apartment, the serene and lonely atmosphere of a busy commuter train, the sun-dappled paths of the local park. Territory of Light is a beautiful book with an honest narrator stumbling to right herself with dignity after a major life upheaval.
Things I Don't Want to Know and The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy
The second part of writer Deborah Levy's "living memoir" was published early this year and has been getting a lot of hype, so I figured I should read parts one and two. I haven't actually read any of Levy's fiction yet (though I do own both Swimming Home and Hot Milk so I probably should), but I can say she's a brilliantly accomplished memoirist. Things I Don't Want to Know and The Cost of Living are both slim books, and I read each in a day, yet it doesn't feel as if Levy has cut or condensed her life for the sake of a shorter book. Things I Don't Want to Know centers predominantly on Levy's childhood and her father's imprisonment in apartheid South Africa, and The Cost of Living on the end of Levy's marriage and the death of her mother.
The Cost of Living is also a great book to read in conjunction with Tsushima's Territory of Light. Both books are about women with daughters making a new home in the aftermath of a dissolving marriage. Levy's memoir stands out in that her story of marital collapse is coupled with meteoric success in her career, and where Tsushima's narrator is all but consumed by motherhood and partnership, Levy is her own person outside of those roles.
The Power by Naomi Alderman
Naomi Alderman's science fiction book The Power won the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and Barack Obama has said he loves it, so I had high hopes for it. The book's takes place in an alternate world where young girls suddenly develop electromagnetic powers. The girls are able to transfer the power to other women, and anyone with it is able to inflict excruciating pain on whomever they would like. The book is told through the perspective of multiple characters and plays out over the course of a number of years. It's also written as a fictional history of the period, in a way that is reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's epilogue to The Handmaid's Tale. Fans of Atwood would probably like The Power.
To be honest, I'm not sure how I feel about this book. I read it quickly and it was very engrossing, but when I finished the book I wanted to forget about it. I usually enjoy the way a book's characters linger with me for days after it ends, but for some reason it was unwelcome with this one. CW: there's violence (including sexual violence) in the book, and because I read so much about violence for my PhD (I study the history of US slavery), I don't really like to read about violence in fiction. The violence in the book isn't gratuitous, and it's part of Alderman's larger arguments about the gendered nature of power, but it graphic and did make my skin crawl, which is not what I'm personally looking for in fiction.
Against Everything: On Dishonest Times by Mark Greif
Against Everything is a book of essays unlike any other. Mark Greif is a cultural critic and academic with a distinctive voice, and this collection of essays makes you see the quotidian features of contemporary life in an entirely new light. An essay titled "Octomom and the Market in Babies" situates the 2007/2008 media coverage surrounding Octomom in the context of the financial crisis and the Great Recession. Another chapter, titled "Against Exercise," dissects the mechanization of human bodies in factory-like exercise gyms. Many of Greif's essays may inspire vehement protest - particularly from the ranks of exercise enthusiasts, for example - but I don't get the sense Greif would care. The essays are designed to be a bit polemical, and I think there's definitely a place for unhesitant and unabashed criticism of modern society.
I found some of the essays less interesting than others, but I think that's a matter of taste more than anything (to be honest I skimmed most of the music ones). My main criticism of the book is its timeliness. Most of the essays were written in the mid-2000s to early-2010s for n+1 (a magazine founded by Greif and a bunch of other men), and as a result the book feels ever so slightly dated. An essay on YouTube, for example, doesn't take into account the vast developments in the platform since the time of writing. Overall, reading a book of essays that is this deeply intertwined with the cultural particularities of the present moment requires the reader to constantly adjust their framework to account for the vast differences between popular culture in 2004 or 2015. I think the essays would have felt less disjointed if Greif had updated the older ones - either inserting a more retrospective point of view or updating them altogether. As is, I felt that I would have been way more interested in reading them when they first came out - when, for example, the spectacle of Octomom was particularly salient, as opposed to now, when people have all but forgotten about her. Maybe hardcore devotees of n+1 would have objected to altering what have become cult favorite essays, but to some extent I think publishing a book out of already published pieces requires more knitting together than Against Everything does. (Ta-Nehisi Coates's We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy is a good example of a book that reproduces older material while simultaneously incorporating new commentary and a fresh context).
Motherhood by Sheila Heti
I loved this book. It's a self-proclaimed novel, yet much of the criticism of the book suggests Heti herself may be the narrator (see this New Yorker piece for example). In Motherhood, the narrator wrestles with the decision of whether or not to become a mother, a decision which is deeply intertwined with the art of writing and the narrator's career as an author. A deep mediation on the personal decisions an individual woman must make, the book also comments incisively on society's demanding and impossible ideas about what a mother should be. Heti('s narrator) considers not only whether she wants to be a mother, but also what it means to be a woman who doesn't have children in a world that all but demands them.
Motherhood is a book about living with uncertainty and learning to know oneself. Heti relies on a somewhat gimmick-y flip-of-a-coin which readers will either love or hate (I personally struggled to not skim those sections), but the narrator's use of the coin develops over the course of the book as she learns, partially through the act of writing, what it is she really wants. Motherhood made me want to read more in the genre of books about being a mother - next up is Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty by Jacqueline Rose so look out for a future review.
