What do you call a pleasing read that’s about everything and nothing? And is that kind of book worthy of our attention?
Our Columbia University book club just wrestled with those questions, when we gathered to discuss The Makioka Sisters, by Junichiro Tanizaki. At 503 pages (translated by Edward G. Seidensticker) the book should add up to something, yes? We discussed it for two and a half hours, over cocktails, dinner and dessert — obviously lots to talk about, even though it’s hard to summarize, or even name the main character. At its core, this is the story of a family in a particular place (Osaka) and time (pre World War 2.) I’ve read it twice. I think of it as Japan’s answer to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Highly recommend.
I’m thinking of The Makioka Sisters as I ponder the everything and nothingness of Michelle Huneven’s Bug Hollow. This is a sweet and engaging read about the Samuelsons, a contemporary California family, and the people involved in their lives. Each chapter centers on a different character, creating an easily understood web of connections. Who’s the main character? I suppose it’s Sybil, wife of Phil, mother of Ellis, Katie, Sally. Sib is a celebrated grade-school teacher and a mean drunk. Phil is the ever steady architect and engineer. There’s a drowning, an unexpected pregnancy, a cancer death, a child born from a brief adulterous affair, two late in life weddings. As I said, it’s about everything and nothing. Worth a read.
I’ll read anything by Ian McEwan, even if I end up throwing the book across the room. (See: Atonement. There is no atoning…) I’ve loved so many of his books, including Nutshell (narrated by a fetus), Machines Like Me (robot gone mad), and Solar (a polar research project manned by a scientist who should not be in the wild).
These characters suffer from hubris; we see them get tripped up by their own self grandeur. (Not the fetus, who “witnesses” betrayal and murder.) Anyway, this is a long way of getting to my review of McEwan’s latest, What We Can Know, which is two stories in one. The first is set in the future, 2119, a time after nuclear disaster and epic floods, and concerns an academic in what’s left of England. Scholar Thomas Metcalfe risks all to find a lost poem from the 21st century. Instead, he discovers clues to the present day story we read, of the poet and his wife and the murderous secret they share. New York Times reviewer Dwight Garner called this “McEwan’s finest book in ages.”
If you need a fiercely feminist read, I’ve got one for you, found via my son Evan Dent’s Substack. A Ghost in the Throat, by Doireann Ni Ghriofa, is another story about a poem, this one written in the 18th century, by an Irish noblewoman grieving her warrior husband’s death.
Our narrator weaves her own story of motherhood in with her quest to discover what she can about the poet, and to translate The Keen for Art O Laoghaire from the Gaelic.
“This is a feminist text” is the first line of the book, and it’s sometimes repeated. Between school runs, breast feeding, cleaning up, a new baby, a cancer scare, a loving husband who draws a line, the narrator tells her contemporary story and that of the poet Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill, who “cups the blood” of her dead husband.
This prize-winning book is a stunning mosaic of scholarship, memoir, and translation. Read the book and the poem, which haunts me.