Breasts and Eggs, by Mieko Kawakami

A couple months ago my mom told me she was reading a Japanese novel called Breasts and Eggs. I couldn't remember where, but I had heard of it before and then – voilà! – it turned out it was the next selection for my Women in Translation book club. Maybe I should invite my mom to our meeting. I picked up my copy at Collected Works in Santa Fe. It was a much bigger book than I had imagined. I usually give myself a week to read book club books, but given the pace of my reading recently and the fact that it was over 400 pages, I decided I should allow some extra time. So now here I am, finished a week before my book club meeting. 

I didn't know a single thing about Breasts and Eggs before I started it. I believe my mom described it as a little strange but good, but gave me no clue to what it was about. When I opened it, I had no idea what I was getting into. The first thing that struck me was the narrator's voice or tone. It felt casual and familiar. It felt, to me, un-Japanese. Early on in the book, when the narrator is describing her impoverished childhood outside Osaka, I kept thinking of the movie Shoplifters – a fantastic film about a family of grifters living on the margin, which exploded the Japan of my imagination. 

Breasts and Eggs is divided into two parts. In the first part, which was evidently published independently as a novella, Natsuko – the narrator – describes a short visit her sister and niece make to her apartment in Tokyo. Natsuko's sister, who is significantly older and works as a hostess in Osaka, is considering breast enlargement. In Natsuko's struggle to understand her sister's motivation, she also tells their whole life story. The second part picks up the same characters' stories about ten years later, when Natsuko, who has been single for her whole adult life, is contemplating having a baby via sperm donation – something that's not legal in Japan for single women. Between the first and second parts, Natsuko's circumstances have changed dramatically. In the first part, she is working a low wage job while struggling to be a writer. In the second part, she has published her first book, which achieved some success and is able to support herself comfortably as a writer. What the two parts have in common, besides their narrator, is an ongoing meditation on the body and the sense of remove or alienation that a person can feel toward their own body. 

I was somewhat ambivalent about the first part of the book, but I found the second part totally compelling. Much of the story, inasmuch as there is one, is moved along through long conversations Natsuko has with other people in her life: an editor, a fellow author, and old work friend, a man her own age who was conceived with donated sperm but only learned the truth as an adult, and a woman with a similar story to the man but a very different personal experience. In her investigation into sperm donation, Natsuko and her interlocutors consider at length the ethics of birthing a child, what it means to create a new human who never asked to be created, the selfishness of parents. This is something I've thought about a lot, but rarely discussed with anyone. It's true that when I was younger I thought I wanted children, but these days mostly I'm relieved to have never had any. Even when I did still want kids, what I don't think I ever had was a specific need or longing to birth children or to raise children who were genetically my own. What I loved about this book is that it explored all these complexities. More than once, it addresses the violence of bringing a baby into the world. If you are a person who has contemplated children and decided not to have them, this book can provide the affirmation you may crave. I honestly found myself feeling thankful that someone had articulated these thoughts. And yet, at the same time, the book can also affirm entirely the opposite decision: the choice to have a child in spite of it all. 

The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie

I continue to struggle with my reading. I'm finding it hard to stick with books. Last week I started the next book for my Women in Translation book club, Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami. I am enjoying it, but when I got to the end of part one yesterday, I wanted to take a break and read something different. I had time: my book club meeting isn't for two weeks. I picked up this little edition of The Mysterious Affair at Styles with its beautiful cover art from a tiny free library in Poncha Springs, Colorado. My father and I pulled over there briefly and took a spin through town as a small break on our long drive from La Puebla, New Mexico to Manitou Springs, Colorado. 

I'm not sure I have an entire post's worth of things to say about The Mysterious Affair at Styles. It's Agatha Christie's first novel, but I don't know that I've read enough of her to compare it to her later works in any meaningful way. I've watched the entirety of the Poirot TV series, but I believe this is only the third Poirot book I've read (Murder on the Orient Express and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd being the others). Captain Hastings, a character familiar to me from the TV show, doesn't appear in either of the Poirot books I'd read, so this was my first introduction to him as the Poirot narrator. Christie is very clever in making the reader aware of Hastings' shortcomings as a detective even as he is the one telling us the story. I haven't read Arthur Conan Doyle, but I imagine Christie was inspired by his Dr. Watson's function as a narrator and the somewhat thick sidekick to a brilliant mind. 

I read The Mysterious Affair at Styles in the space of an afternoon and now I must decide if I go right back to Breasts and Eggs or start something new. Maybe short stories are the answer for this moment in my life.

The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett

I didn't know anything about The Dutch House when I decided to read it. A friend gave me her copy after she finished it several months ago. I was leaving for a weeklong trip to New Mexico and Colorado and looked at my shelves for something that I thought would make for good travel reading and somehow settled on this. I've read two other books by Ann Patchett: State of Wonder, which I enjoyed, and Truth and Beauty, which I didn't. I finished it yesterday afternoon, but I'm not entirely sure how I feel about The Dutch House. On one level, it satisfied what I was looking for: it was the kind of book I could read on the plane and on the back porch of our house in Angel Fire, New Mexico. I was about halfway through it when I got home on Monday and I read the second half before work, at lunch, after work, and after dinner yesterday. It captured my attention. But I also felt it was missing something. It seemed to hover on the brink of profundity but never quite get there. 

The book centers on a brother and sister whose mother abandons them as children. Their father remarries and their step-mother wants to be rid of them. Eventually she succeeds. They go from being rich to getting by. And then the son manages to get rich again. There's more to it than that, of course, but I honestly couldn't believe this book was asking me to feel sympathy for a young man (the brother, who is the narrator) who despite a troubled home life for a few years of his adolescence, goes on to make a killing in New York real estate while he's completing med school. Or perhaps I wasn't meant to feel too much sympathy for him; perhaps the book is about something else. 

Rattlebone, by Maxine Clair

I've kept up my subscription to McNally Editions, so now I have nine of the books but I've only just gotten around to reading a second one. Rattlebone arrived, along with two other books, in late June just before I was heading to Arizona for my first work trip since March of 2020. After reading the first paragraph, I chose it from among the three to take with me on my trip. Of course, I didn't read at all while I was away, but I started it a few days after I got home and finished it this afternoon. 

Rattlebone is an interconnected set of stories set in a Black neighborhood of mid-20th-century Kansas City, Kansas. The setting was part of the attraction for me: my mother grew up in the Kansas suburbs of Kansas City at around this time (she's a bit more than a decade younger than Maxine Clair), and it's a place I made regular visits to in my childhood. However, the Black history of Kansas City is largely unknown to me. It was not until 2011, on a road trip to Kansas I took with my dad, that I first visited the part of Kansas City, Missouri that's home to the Negro League Hall of Fame, the Jazz Museum, and Arthur Bryant's BBQ. Kansas City, Kansas was a place I was familiar with only as a distinction from the other Kansas City and a couple exits off the highway. And yet Rattlebone was full of familiar place names. 

The way Rattlebone is organized is a little confusing. At first I thought it was a novel – the first couple stories have the same narrator (Irene Wilson, who is definitely the central character of the book, though there are a few stories in which she doesn't feature at all) and seemed to continue one into the next. And then suddenly there was a different voice for one story, and things seemed to jump around in time bit. The final product takes the form of sort of excerpts from lives in the neighborhood. In the main, the book documents Irene's coming of age in a segregated school in a segregated city, but hovering around that center are the changes underway in the wider world. The book captures this very precise moment in time as we know it is about to end.

Tremor of Intent, by Anthony Burgess

Sometimes I underestimate my younger self. I think back to myself at age 23 and all I can think is how little I knew, how young I was, how underdeveloped as an adult. When I was 23, on the other hand, I believe I thought myself mature for my age. Maybe both things can be true. I first read Tremor of Intent at age 23 – in the fall of 1999, a window of time that has always, in retrospect, felt specific and significant to my early adulthood. 

I lived in Philadelphia for roughly the calendar year of 1999 and I always say I can remember the things that happened in 1999 with more specificity because if they happened while I lived in Philly, it must have been 1999. I remember the movies of 1999 because I saw them in Philly theaters: Eyes Wide Shut, The Thin Red Line, Magnolia, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Cruel Intentions, American Beauty, Go, Shakespeare in Love (which I have actually never seen, but my father and boyfriend went to see it in Philly while I was at work one evening).

Most of the books I read in 1999 were for school, and I remember some of those well too. I took my first college English class – a course called "The Twentieth Century" (a course name that seemed more profound in the final year of that century), in which I read a mix of poetry, short and long fiction, and theory. T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Alfred Jarry, Samuel Beckett, Zora Neale Hurston, Norman Mailer, David Foster Wallace, and Salman Rushdie. That was in the spring semester. In the fall semester my course load was in German and Linguistics. Also in the fall semester, things changed a lot for me, personally: my boyfriend who had been living with me in Philly moved to Boston to go back to school himself. I found myself alone in a city I didn't know very well. I also found myself taking frequent trips to Boston or to meet my boyfriend (who soon became my fiancé) halfway in New York. And so, even though I was still in school and also working, I had some time to read for pleasure. 

I think Tremor of Intent must have been the second Anthony Burgess book I read. A few years earlier, I had read his first book, The Long Day Wanes, which took me forever to finish, but I liked in the long run. I have no idea why I decided to start with that one. I think I may have started Napoleon Symphony sometime after that, but I'm pretty sure I never finished it, and I'm almost sure I started The Doctor is Sick in 1998, but also didn't finish that. After Tremor of Intent I read The Right to An Answer and perhaps Honey for the Bees, but I never liked anything as well as Tremor of Intent or The Long Day Wanes. I was very determined to read Anthony Burgess it seems (but not A Clockwork Orange, which I still haven't read). In any case, in the fall of 1999 I read – and loved – Tremor of Intent. Over the years, I've continued to remember it fondly, while the plot faded to the barest outline in my memory. I've given it as a gift at least once, I believe more than once.  

The decision to reread Tremor of Intent was partly to see if it held up, and partly to see if my 23-year-old self did. I'd say both of us came out mostly okay. What I remembered about Tremor of Intent was that it was a hilarious and suspenseful spy novel set on a cruise. I think I found it less funny this time. There were some troubling bits I didn't remember being troubled by before: the general condoning of a sexual relationship between a teen girl and the middle-aged protagonist, the perhaps too light treatment of actual pedophilia in another character, some uncomfortable stereotypes. It also had some wonderful bits that I didn't remember from before: mainly the incredible descriptions of the food served on the cruise (which was a gastronomic trip, a fact I hadn't remembered). Then there was the pleasure of reading again what I did remember in a general sense, but not in the specific – what must have made me love the book the first time around: Anthony Burgess' incredible facility with language, the wordplay, the double (and more, I'm sure) meanings. And this is where I get back to where I started this post. Reading Tremor of Intent now I found myself wondering, Did I really get this when I was 23? How much of it went over my head? Does it matter if it did, when I still loved it? I don't have answers for any of these questions. Myself at 23 – half my life ago – is hardly a person I remember anymore. 

The Trees, by Percival Everett

It is a rare writer who could write a comic novel about the history of lynching in America, but Percival Everett has done it. 

To be fair, some parts of The Trees are not comic. The underlying message of the book is that we should remember those who were killed by white supremacy. That we should remember that the history of lynching is American history, and that it represents a massacre spread out over years. This book is an act of remembering. 

About two thirds of the way in there is a chapter that goes on for several pages and consists almost entirely of a list of names. Early on, I found myself wondering, Were these actual people? They can't be. They must be. Emmet Till's name shows up on the 7th page, but even then I wasn't really sure. The first name I recognized after that was Matthew Shepard, and I can't even say that's when I was sure. It was on the page after that where suddenly there were so many names I recognized, starting with Ramarley Graham. I assume the list is chronological or approximately so, but even in the last couple pages there will still many names I'd never heard. It's powerful. (Incredibly, I didn't notice until after finishing the book that this list of names is right there on the cover.)

Of course the list brought me back to two books I've talked about together before: 2666 with its list of murdered women in Mexico and The Gospel According to Jesus Christ with its list of martyrs. I felt sure I had seen this done somewhere else more recently, but I'm not sure where. Perhaps I'm thinking of EEG, which I described when I read it as "a catalogue of under-reported atrocities," and which, like The Trees, is very much a command to remember.

To return to the comic part of the novel: maybe we need humor in the face of trauma. This book certainly offers it. There is a dark comedy to the whole story, but there are also individual lines that are laugh-out-loud funny. (Maybe you had to be there, but the appearance for one page of a "Detective Wesley Snipes, no relation and White" had me screaming laughing. He could have had any name. He's never mentioned again.) To quote Lynn Steger Strong, the judge who selected The Trees as the winner in the first round of the 2022 Tournament of Books, "There’s so much sad and shitty in the world; so many books are so earnestly enmeshed in their own certainty and self-seriousness. The winner is The Trees, because in addition to all its many other accomplishments, it also made me laugh."

The Kiss Quotient, by Helen Hoang, and Lucky Breaks, by Yevgenia Belorusets

I've been in a reading slump for a couple months now. I've started some books I really wanted to read but have found it hard to stick with them. May was a really busy month for me at work and outside of it, and I just didn't feel like reading much. To close out the month, I added a couple days to my Memorial Day weekend and planned a trip to Montreal. I packed two books to take with me: Hamnet, which falls into the above mentioned category of books I really wanted to read but haven't stuck with; and Lucky Breaks, the next selection for my Women in Translation book club, which I had to finish by today.

Events took an unexpected turn last Saturday: my early morning flight was overbooked and I decided to volunteer (in exchange for rather a lot of money) to delay my departure by 12 hours. I could have gone home. I could have gone out and done something in Queens. Instead, exhausted, I checked into the Delta Sky Club and spent the entire day there. I read a few chapters of Hamnet, did some crosswords on my phone, ate the free snacks, and then somewhere in the early afternoon a friend texted me to say he was tearing through The Trees by Percival Everett and to remind me of the existence of e-books that can be checked out of the library. I promptly downloaded the SimplyE app and after first checking out Trust by Hernan Diaz, I realized I would need a different kind of book if my intention was to read on my phone for several hours at the Delta Sky Club. I remembered having heard good things about Helen Hoang's The Kiss Quotient when it came out a couple years ago and found it was available. I read two-thirds of it there at the airport, until the news came in that my replacement flight was delayed until the following morning. Then I went back home, set my alarm for 5am, and did it all over again. I read some more on my flight – though not much, since it's only an hour – and I finished reading  about an hour after checking into my B&B not quite 24 hours after I had expected to arrive there. I wouldn't say I loved The Kiss Quotient, a romance novel about a professionally successful and very rich woman with autism who hires a male escort to learn about sex and relationships, but it was exactly the right book for the circumstances. 

Unsurprisingly, I got no reading done during my actual vacation but on my flight home, I knew I had to start Lucky Breaks if I was going to finish it in time for my book club. It's a very short book – just about 100 pages – made up of several very short chapters/stories. The book seems to sit somewhere on the edge of fiction and non. Most of the stories recount the almost invisible narrator's encounters with women in various parts of Ukraine. Our book club decided to read a Ukrainian book because of current events, but I must say reading it with everything that's in the news was a strange sensation. Much of the book deals with the aftermath of the 2014 Russian incursion into Crimea and the Donbas region, including stories of women who live in those regions and those who have been displaced from them. Obviously, the book predates the current war, but it came out just as it was starting and reading it one feels the war was really no surprise at all. 

It is with good reason that people are criticized for writing about global events in a way that makes them "about me," but I think to do so is also the most natural thing in the world. So, I hope you will indulge me for a moment. For most of my young life, Ukraine wasn't a place I was independently aware of. I knew it as a region of the Soviet Union, I'd heard of Kyiv (though spelled Kiev and mostly just its eponymous preparation of chicken). When the Soviet Union broke apart, I can't say I was ever particularly aware of Ukraine as an independent nation. (The Baltic states are the ones I really remember becoming independent, and while I was certainly more aware of Ukraine as a place than, say, the Central Asian SSRs, it wasn't a place I knew much about at all.) I can place the moment when Ukraine gained some sort of distinction in my mind. Around 2002, I took a literature class with Svetlana Boym. One of the readings for the class was Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog, which takes place in Yalta. Professor Boym had a home in Yalta and the way she talked about it—well, I've wanted to go there ever since. When Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, I'll admit I was selfishly disappointed as well as being appalled generally. Something similar happened with the war this year. While Yalta still seemed out of bounds, I had started thinking about visiting Ukraine in the last couple years – inspired by some combination of things: some friends I made from Kamianets-Podilskyi several years back; Olia Hercules' cookbook, Summer Kitchens; reading about Joseph Roth's childhood outside Lviv; and most immediately this article by Rosa Lyster from the September 2021 NY Times Magazine "Voyages" issue. How could I know that war was right around the corner? And yet now, as I read Lucky Breaks, I realize I could have known. Maybe not specifically, but it wouldn't have come as such a shock of dissonance.

Persuasion, by Jane Austen

I know I've mentioned this before, but aside from Pride & Prejudice, which I first read in 2004, I read all of Jane Austen's novels back to back in the space of a few weeks in the winter of 2005-2006. I enjoyed each one so much that I always wanted to keep going, but in retrospect, this was not a good way to go about it. The books blended together and didn't get the individual attention they deserved. I read Persuasion at the end of this streak and as the years passed I found it to be the one I least remembered, except maybe Lady Susan (which I read second from last). It may be that my memory fails most of them, because I have in the years between 2006 and today watched and rewatched several adaptations – mainly Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility. Those stories and characters are all so intimately familiar to me now from the movies and miniseries, and eventually from having reread the first two more recently. I don't believe I've ever seen an adaptation of Northanger Abbey, but I think it's the book I remember most distinctly from that spree. I have bits of memories of Mansfield Park too. But Persuasion was a total blank. Apparently when I went back in 2009 and retroactively added and rated every book I'd read in Goodreads, I either didn't remember Persuasion at all, or remembered not liking it, because I gave it only 2 stars. I think by the time I got to it, I was done with Jane Austen.* I should have taken a breather. 

I've been intending to get back to Persuasion for years after seeing some people whose tastes I trust rank is as a favorite by Austen. I would see it mentioned admiringly, or see references to its characters, and strain and fail to remember a single thing about it. Clearly it deserved a reread. I won't list it as my new favorite Jane Austen book or anything, but I'm prepared to say I was very unfair to it the first time around. Perhaps I found Anne dull on my earlier reading? I still did; being about the only reasonable, level-headed character in the story makes her sympathetic, but not very interesting. But this time I enjoyed the story; I enjoyed portrayals of the unreasonable non-level-headed characters; I enjoyed the scenery. 

And while the story itself felt novel (because I remembered nothing of it), the book felt familiar because I'm so much more familiar with Jane Austen now than I was when I first read it. A few weeks ago I watched the recent Andrew Davies adaptation of Sanditon on Masterpiece. Davies is also responsible for the 1996 BBC Pride and Prejudice, and watching Sanditon I noticed him borrowing from himself. (I've seen that Pride and Prejudice enough times that every line is familiar.) What I noticed in reading Persuasion was that Jane Austen also borrows from herself. I saw reflections of so many of her other works in this one. 

* I used to have a rule, which I clearly broke for Jane Austen, about not reading books by the same author back to back. I created this rule some 25 years ago when, immediately after reading Beloved I started Sula and found it unreadable. A couple years later I went back and read Sula and loved it. I decided it was a mistake to immediately pick up another book by the author of a book you read and loved, because what you would really be looking for was a continuation of the earlier book. (Obviously, this rule didn't apply to sequels and series that were in fact continuations of the earlier books.)

Justine, by Iben Mondrup

I grabbed Justine out of the Little Free Library on my way to the airport a week ago Friday, even though I already had two books with me for the 3 night trip ahead. I'd never heard of it or its author; it was the publisher that caught my eye: Open Letter. They publish only books in translation, including some by authors I love (Mercè Rodoreda, most notably). I started reading it poolside at my hotel in Austin, but didn't get very far. It's not exactly poolside material, plus I didn't get enough sleep any of the nights I was away, so my reading energy was limited. When I took my seat for my flight home, I pulled it out to and put it in the seat pocked in front of me to potentially read en route, although I was still overtired. I was seated next to a flight attendant who must have recognized Iben Mondrup as a Danish name because she asked me about it. It turned out she was married to a Dane and spoke Danish. I told her what I wrote above: that I didn't know anything about the book or author, but had chosen it because of the publisher. This was a novel concept to her and she went on to look for other Open Letter books in her library app and asked me about other publishers I would recommend. In the moment, I could only think of New Directions, but I also recommended The Copenhagen Trilogy to her, which she immediately went and put on hold at the library. (I did warn her that it was a bit dark. Not as dark, it turns out, as Justine.)

Justine centers on a young woman artist (the eponymous Justine) who, as the book opens, has just lost her home – and with it all her work – to a fire. The home had belonged to her grandfather, a painter, and his work was also destroyed. For Justine, the fire represents the loss of her whole past – and then some. The story unfolds disjointedly, jumping in time to before the fire and back to the present. When the fire occurred, Justine was a short time away from staging an exhibit of her work at the National Gallery, and she has lost everything she prepared for it. So she must create a body of work to show (backing out isn't an option she's willing to consider), with no home, no studio, and no materials. She proceeds to get very drunk, frequently. She crashes at friends' houses, in a factory, in studios, borrows materials, charms and alienates the people around her who want to help. Even as Justine puts together a body of photographs and videos that will be her triumph, the reader is slowly made aware of a horrible, dark secret, the full effect of which is never seen in this book. (There is, evidently, a sequel.) 

I subscribe to Matt Bell's Writing Exercises (which I highly recommend to anyone who is at all interested in writing). This month's newsletter (The Novel-Shaped Story II) has stayed very much on my mind for some reason. Since reading it, I've found myself mentally applying the three-act framework retroactively to all kinds of books I've read, and it's been an eye-opening exercise. In Justine the inciting incident – the fire – is the first thing we know. It's happens before any exposition, and description of the characters, anything else in the book. And yet, even in that moment, there are clues to what we will later learn, and deceptions as well. The unclarity around time in the narrative slows the reader's comprehension of the central event of the book, even as it's there for us right on the first page. I didn't totally love this book, but its exposition is brilliant.

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, Balli Kaur Jaswal

The last month has been a lot. Work has been busy and I haven't had much mental energy outside of it. After finishing Loving Day, I started a long book I'd been intending to read for quite a while, but reading it was rarely what I wanted to do at the end of the day or in the morning. Instead, I watched Sanditon and Bridgerton and played Spelling Bee on my phone. And then I had some weekends away, so I did less reading then than I might have. Last Wednesday, after finishing a full rewatch of both seasons of Bridgerton, I decided maybe I should just start a new book. I mention Bridgerton only because I think it influenced my selection – I wanted to read something romantic. I didn't know much about Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows but the title at least suggested it might fit the bill. I picked it up a few years ago thinking it might represent Singapore in my world books project, because the author lives there, however the book is entirely about the Sikh community in London so I'm not sure that's fair. (Then again, my New Zealand book was entirely about a winemaker in nineteenth century France, so maybe it's ok? Or maybe I have to read a new book from New Zealand too.) In any case, I started Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows on Wednesday and finished it on a plane on Friday.  

At the center of the book is Nikki, a second generation Punjabi Londoner in her early 20s who signs up to teach what she believes will be a creative writing class for Sikh women. It turns out what was expected was a literacy class, but what the class in fact turns into is an erotic story-telling class filled with mostly older, widowed women, who most of society treats as invisible. Expected antics ensue, the women gain mutual respect, an unsolved murder is solved, and of course there is a love story for Nikki. This was a fun read that turned out to be just what I was looking for at the moment.