Very Different Books!

 

Everyone seems to be reading Claire Keegan. I read one of her stories a while back, and I’ve been reading this volume of three stories. When I bought it I expected it to be a little longer — it’s only 64 pages. But the stories are good, classic form short stories with a tight unity and clear character portait in each of them. Keegan is a very keen observer of people and both their strengths and their weaknesses. I especially liked the first story, “So Late in the Day,” because it’s about a writer transforming a somewhat unpleasant experience into a tightly written story.

In 2022 a reviewer in the New York Times summarized Keegan’s style: “Keegan’s stories often hinge on the unspoken tensions that fester between neighbors, parents and children, husbands and wives — even as they probe the bigger political and social fault lines in Irish society.” (source)

Thanks to all the recommenders who mentioned this neat Irish author!

Clara Reads Proust was an irresistible title to me — in fact, I pre-ordered it so that I could get it as soon as it became available in English in March. Sad to say, I was disappointed in the artificiality of this novel. I felt as if the author, Stéphane Carlier, had written a school paper about Proust, and then tried to write a novel around his observations. Since tens of thousands of scholarly articles about Proust have been published (in fact there are MANY indexes and collections to this enormous body of works, estimated to be more than 30,000 in number) I guess this was an easier way to have his insights get a bit of attention. Though of course this author is well-known and successful in France, having written many novels, this one is the first to be translated into English and the last one I’ll probably read in any language.

The title character, Clara, is a hairdresser working in an obscure salon at the back of an passageway in a provincial French city. She happens to find a copy of the first novel in Proust’s famous multi-volume series In Search of Lost Time (sometimes translated as Remembrance of Things Past, French title À la recherche du temps perdu). 

Clara reads the book. It totally speaks to her. She understands it all, especially the famous passage about Proust’s taste memory as he dips a madeleine into his tea (a scene about which I bet 10,000 scholarly and popular articles and books have been written, with more being written every year). She goes on reading the later books in the series.

I think there are several assumptions about the reader of Clara Reads Proust. This hypothetical reader is familiar with Proust’s work, at least the first volume, if for no other reason than having read bits of it in school. This reader thinks Proust is fabulous and terribly deep and hard to understand. And this reader will now be convinced that Proust’s accomplishment is marvelously simple though profound, because it’s all clear to Clara who intuitively grasps Proust’s meaning and greatness. The greatness of Proust’s book — which the reader now understands —  can and does change Clara’s life.

I don’t buy any of it. End of review.

As I often find when reading a novel by Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972), this novel is enchanting, and hard to describe. Originally published in Japan in 1950, The Rainbow was just translated into English for the first time last year. It features three daughters of a successful architect. Each of them had a different mothers, and only one of the three mothers was married to their father. In this story, set in the difficult years just after World War II, the daughters are just discovering themselves as women. Their father has complex feelings towards them and towards the memory of their mothers.

Each daughter is dealing with her feelings about her own mother, as well as about the relationships of their father with these three women, who have all died before the beginning of the novel. One of the daughters had a fiancé who died in the war; the others have fraught love relationships as well. The nuances of their feelings for each other, for their father, and for their love interests are all penetratingly described. 

The setting is mainly in the beautiful and historic city of Kyoto with its famous Buddhist temples, gardens, and monuments. One scene particularly seemed striking to me: a visit to the Imperial Palace and gardens at Katsura near Tokyo, which was then and continues to be a masterpiece of Japanese classical architecture. Every detail of the tour is described with incredible vividness and economic use of language. It’s beautiful but hard to explain what makes this book so brilliant.

Kawabata received the Nobel Prize in 1968. He wrote many novels and short stories, and is known as an innovative leader in Japanese twentieth century literature.

Evoking my Experiences

All three of these books are especially interesting to me because the locales where they take place are very significant, and as it happens, I’m familiar with at least some of the places and types of places that the authors describe. I have visited Kyoto, including several of the famous Temples and the Katsura Imperial Palace. I have visited Dublin: for example, I have seen the statue of Oscar Wilde in the park where a scene in one story takes place. And I’ve spent quite a bit of time in France so the local color is familiar to me. I didn’t choose these books for this familiarity — maybe they chose me.

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