The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu by Augusto Higa Oshiro is a novel about an older Japanese man living in Lima where he feels suspicious of the world around him. Thus begins his tumble into insanity where he believes people are watching him, he hears birds but they’re not there, and he sees his father’s friend, Etsuko Untén, appear before him as a ghost. Katzuo loses his job at the university he works for because he’s become too old, and so he spends most of his time ambling around the streets, lost in thought, and trying to embody Etsuko Untén. Then one day, as he is on his walk and his condition has worsened, he sees a boy. Katzuo goes up to the boy, and exclaims the boy’s beauty while undressing. This causes Katzuo to be institutionalized, and a medium is brought in to diagnose his problems. It’s revealed that many of Katzuo’s hallucinations (the birds and Etsuko), are manifestations of the terribleness of the war and Etsuko’s continual desire for Japan to win.
The novel is full of descriptions, moments, and intriguing sentence structures that create a sense of Katzuo’s insanity. I enjoyed how there came to be a reason for what happened to Katzuo and it felt like I could understand the character fully. Final Rating: 4.5/5
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The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara provides a strikingly deep look at Frank O’Hara’s work and his life. Most of the poems provide an almost diary-like feel to them which creates an intimate view of O’Hara’s thoughts. It seems he was consciously trying to push back on the conventional idea of what poetry was at the time, as can be seen through the continual iteration of titling many of his poems ‘Poem’. There is a wide breadth of poems that I enjoyed, though found ‘Poem [Let’s take a walk, you]’, ‘1951’, ‘Steven’, ‘Lebanon’, ‘Poem [Pawing the mound with his hairy legs]’, ‘Two Dreams of Waking’, ‘The Anthology of Lonely Days’, ‘Three Poems’, and ‘Rogers in Italy’ all to be particularly interesting. And I really enjoyed the lines in ‘Rogers in Italy’ that goes, “And now at last I am/alone again and night, at last, has come.” Throughout the poems, there are thoughts about paintings, other poets, his mood, and his sexual encounters both with men and women. Also, the essay, ‘Personism: A Manifesto’ was interesting.
Final Rating: 3.5/5 A Quiet Life by Kenzaburō Ōe is a novel about a woman and her older brother who is handicapped. Their father and mother travel to California where the father is trying to get out of writer’s block, and believes being a writer-in-residence will help him. All the while, the woman, Ma-chan, the older brother, Eeyore, and younger brother, O-chan, continue to live in Japan. Ma-chan has taken up the responsibility of caring for Eeyore, taking him to music practice at Mr. Shigeto’s, taking him to his job at a handicap workshop, and eventually to swim practices with Mr. Arai. Throughout the novel, Ma-chan worries that Eeyore will either have his fits out in public, will be hurt by other people, or will act out his sexual urges. None of this comes to pass, but her worries become real when it’s alluded to that Mr. Arai was involved in two deaths on a cruise. They continue to get swimming lessons with Mr. Arai, until one day when Mr. Shigeto approaches him about an incident and then gets beat up. Finally, as Ma-chan talks about her dreams of marrying a Mr. Arai, Eeyore discusses this with Mr. Arai. Mr. Arai then decides to take them to his place, where he attempts to have sex with Ma-chan, but is beat up by Eeyore. The novel ends with their mother returning home and the father still toiling away in America.
Ōe creates such an interesting narrative through his use of Ma-chan’s voice, the discussions of movies, music, and of Ma-chan’s worry. It’s a novel that highly contemplates what it means to care for a disabled family member, and shows in some instances, the reverse (i.e. the care giver needs to be the one who is cared for) is true. This occurs while Eeyore protects Ma-chan from an oncoming crowd at a train station even while he is having a fit and in the last moment where Eeyore beats up Mr. Arai to save Ma-chan from being raped. It’s a compelling novel that shows the breadth of the care siblings have for each other. Final Rating: 5/5 The Resurrection Appearances: Fragments of a Daybook by Jay Aquinas Thompson is a nonfiction chapbook detailing the days, weeks, and months after the death of their mother. It recounts the moment they encountered her body, her life, as well as ruminations on Christianity. I particularly liked the lines, “When people asked me how grief felt, I’d say it didn’t feel like anything, it wasn’t a feeling; it was a metabolism.” and, “God is a fire victim on bedrest: from each burn point an angel is born;” It’s a deeply moving chapbook on how Thomson views their mother’s death, how their child, Finn, deals with these emotions, and what it all means within the context of religion. Thomson finishes off by writing, “There’s no and then I realized…moment in grief…”
Final Rating: 5/5 Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut is a novel about a journalist who is on a search to interview and write about one of the fathers of the nuclear bomb. He finds out that one of the children is a General of an island nation called San Lorenzo. There, the narrator takes a trip to the island where a confounding religion has taken hold of the population, but the rulers try to snuff it out. The narrator then finds out that the man who created the nuclear bomb also created something called ice-nine, which is a crystalized form of water with a melting temperature of 114 degrees Fahrenheit. Thus, would be cataclysmic if it ever touched the ocean. The narrator then is asked to be the next ruler of San Lorenzo, the ruler dies by ice-nine, and at a ceremony celebrating the death of people that were shipped out for World War II, one of the planes in the ceremony crashes into the ruler’s palace. The dead body of the ruler falls into the sea where everything then freezes over. The narrator survives in a bunker, writes his novel about the end of the world, and finally meets the person who started the religion, Bokonon.
The novel is satirical in its nature, commenting both on the creation of religion and its false persecution, the cold war in which both the US and Russia have shards of ice-nine, and the absurdity of the characters. Throughout, the narrator discusses his feelings related to Bokononism and uses it to deepen his understanding of the world that exists in that final moment. It’s a quippy, dark, and funny read. Final Rating: 4.5/5 Pop Culture Poetry: The Definitive Collection by Michael B. Tager is a collection of poems contemplating the nostalgia, cultural effects, and personal connections to important people such as Justin Bieber to Patrick Swayze. I enjoyed the poems, ‘All Neon Like’, ‘Justin Bieber, as Dalmatian’, ‘Justin Bieber, as Capitalism’, ‘Genghis Sees a Michael Bay Movie’, and ‘Human fighter jet’. The poems are playful, humorous, and provide interesting scenarios.
Final Rating: 3.5/5 Incest by Christine Angot is a novel about a woman who had an incestuous relationship with her father as a teenager and is in the throes of breaking up with another woman. The speaker, Christine, is married to Claude and has a daughter, Léonore, though has an affair with another woman, Marie-Christine. Christine then recounts the encounters and trips with Marie-Christine, while also describing the rockiness of their relationship. It leads into Christmas where Marie-Christine is supposed to go to Rome with Christine, but they decide to not go the first day. They eventually do go, but it displays the fervor and intense emotions of them, paradoxically, wanting to be together and be separate. Near the latter half of the novel, Christine begins to hint and describe her encounters with her father when she was a teenager. They hadn’t known each other until she was fourteen, where her father has another life with another family. There are encounters at a theater, on her vacation, at a church, in her father’s car, and on walks. The character sees herself as feeling both debased and also an intense desire to continue the relationship with her father.
Angot provides a deeply personal look into the narrator’s head, in which it reads more like a stream-of-consciousness account rather than one that is thoroughly recounted. However, I think it works to show the character’s frazzled and disorganized nature. It’s also interesting how the character continually brings up the fact that she had a relationship with a woman, but she is not gay. It’s brought up in mantras, in the repeated phone calls, and in the way plans are created then cancelled and then replanned. The novel’s subject matter and discussion provides insight into taboo things, though not only is Christine, the character, is aware of this fact, but decides to defy it. I also found it interesting in how the lines blur between the author, Christine Angot, and the character, Christine Angot. Both are writers, though not necessarily autobiographical, it provides a mystery to the reader as to what is truly fact and what is fiction. Final Rating: 4/5 Temporal Anomalies by Matt Broaddus is a collection of poems split into three parts tackling the past, present, and future. It approaches the experience of being black, as well as providing a surrealist approach to its final section. I particularly enjoyed the poems, ‘Lalibela’, ‘Aboretum’, and the whole final section, ‘Space Station’.
Final Rating: 4/5 The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka is a novel about a group of people who are religiously committed to a swimming pool underground. One day, a crack appears on the bottom of the pool and it becomes a mysterious subject either avoided or talked about incessantly. Eventually, the crack causes some people to leave, while the pool decides to shut down due to maintenance and the crack. The novel then begins to focus on one specific character, Alice, who lived through the Japanese American Internment camps and mental state slowly deteriorates, leading her to be put in hospice. The end of the novel resides with Alice’s daughter who contemplates the memories of her mother, and the state of her mother before and after Alice’s death.
The novel takes interesting directions with its approach to voice, with the first part in the voice of a collective “we”, believed to be one of the swimmers at the pool. Another part is from the voice of Alice’s daughter, and another part is from the voice of the care facility. It’s an interesting route to go, making the text and narrative feel that the characters are being directed either by the pool officials or the narration of the care facility (rather than from their own free will). I was also intrigued by the seriousness (and humor) with which the swimmers approached the crack and its appearance. Overall, it was a powerful though sad novel. Final Rating: 4.5/5 The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa is about a housekeeper tasked with taking care of a professor whose memory lasts eighty minutes. The memory loss had been caused by a car accident and now he lives in a tiny dilapidated house where he toils away at math prizes. A beautiful relationship emerges once the son of the housekeeper, nicknamed Root, comes into the equation. The professor cares for Root and is highly protective of him, trying to stop the bleeding from a cut on Roots hand to protecting him from a baseball. Both Root and the professor are enamored with baseball, but in two different ways through math and though the athleticism of the game. Throughout the novel, the housekeeper takes the professor and Root to a baseball game, she learns the tragic nature of the professor’s past, and in the end throws a birthday party for Root as well as for the professor winning a huge math prize. However, as the novel progresses, the professor’s memory shortens. In the end, the professor’s sister-in-law admits him to a living facility where he eventually dies.
Ogawa is a master at creating strikingly quiet and profound moments whether in the discussion of math or in the small details of the professor. I was charmed by the relationship between the professor and Root, implying that love and friendship go beyond time and memory. It’s a heartwarming and tender novel that I am glad I revisited. Final Rating: 5/5 |
AuthorMaxwell Suzuki is a writer, poet, and photographer based in Los Angeles. Archives
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