Happy Gregorian New Year’s Eve!
I read a lot of great nonfiction this year. Here are some highlights, in chronological order of reading:
The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama – guys, he cooks…
The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm – I first encountered this years ago when I saw the Russian-language copy at my friend Kirill’s house and he glumly informed me that his girlfriend had assigned it to him to read. More than anything else what has stuck with me are Fromm’s musings on the nature of evil — its mystery and the continued problem its mysteriousness poses to us. This was published in 1956, when for obvious reasons the concept of evil was one that weighed heavily on many people’s minds, not least people like Fromm, a German Jew who fled to the US after the Nazis came to power (and who, early in life, was taken by Zionism, before abandoning it because it conflicted with his humanist principles).
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford – which I wrote about in my Mongolia dispatch earlier this year.
The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell – journalists need to start crawling around in coal tunnels again.
The House of Fragile Things by James McAuley – a beautiful and devastating work of microhistory, and wonderful to read alongside Proust, whose Charles Swann is a fictional version of some of the people in this book, and who experiences and represents many of the same pleasures and sadnesses of late-19th-century-to-WW1-Paris that appear here. I wanted to write a standalone post about this (and Proust, and art, and other stuff) and I may do so in 2024.
The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera – I do admire Milan Kundera’s insistence on omitting himself from the public consciousness so that his work can stand on its own, but it’s very funny how weird he was about giving interviews. The “conversations” included in this book appear as transcribed dialogues, suspiciously cogent. This is how the interviewer described the process: “We held several free and lengthy discussions in French; instead of a tape recorder, we used a typewriter, scissors, and glue. Gradually, amid discarded scraps of paper and after several revisions, this text emerged.”
Vertigo by W.G. Sebald – genre-nebulous but whatever, Sebald never misses. Great bit where he wakes up in Venice that reminded me of Proust’s narrator waking up in Venice in The Fugitive. But that’s for another future post…
Among the Braves by Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin – I am so happy this book exists. Historical narrative (of modern Chinese/Hong Kong history and of the 2019 Hong Kong protests and their aftermath, which although recent in objective time are so distant from today’s reality as to feel historical already), gripping journalism (the section on the teenagers who commandeered a boat to Taiwan to seek refuge and the part about Joshua Wong trying to seek asylum in the US, whew), but also, crucially, it lays out the (ongoing) implications of 2019 for the rest of the world. Listen to my interview with Shibani and Tim here (from 34:45)!
The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm – sad to say this was on the syllabus for a class back in college and I didn’t read it at the time because I was a wastrel, but now I have and it is great. The Didion girlies should organise themselves and give JM the same revival.
Underground Asia by Tim Harper – I’ve been telling everyone to read this for months. It has a solid place in my top three favourite history books of all time. READ IT!
Sparks by Ian Johnson – despite the preponderance of extremely bleak and harrowing events described here, I finished it feeling hopeful and inspired, which is a testament to the brilliance of the individuals profiled in it. One of those books whose title eludes you before reading, and is extremely moving after reading. Also prompted my mother, who read it after me, to feel very grateful to our ancestors for migrating from China a hundred years ago. I concurred with the sentiment.
The End of the Novel of Love by Vivian Gornick – someone posted a picture of the first page of this on twitter and it was so good that I immediately borrowed it from the library, and the rest of it was just as good as the opening. Twitter has actually led me to more than one great book this year, it’s not all doom and gloom over there!
Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami – I know it’s fashionable to drag Murakami these days because he’s a signifier for a certain type of misogynistic film bro but teenage me was obsessed with Fight Club, Scorsese, Camus and Murakami novels and you know what I still get it, which leads me to the terrifying conclusion that I am the misogynistic film bro? Anyway, my friend Michelle sent me this after I sold my own book, no note or warning, a complete surprise, but somehow I guessed it was her. Opening the package and seeing the title several months ago was the first time it really “hit” me that I am/will be technically a “novelist” too. A cool feeling. Love his frequent evocations of baseball (he’s a Yakult Swallows fan).
The Interpreter’s Daughter by Teresa Lim – my mother recommended this to me, so we are 2 for 2 on recommending each other distressing histories of 20th century China and its diaspora. Don’t read much memoir but this was illuminating, and very sad. Some similarities with the McAuley book — close-up multigenerational portraits of brilliant families (of intellectuals, artists, political activists, precociously rebellious women) who flourish in the late 19th and early 20th centuries but are (unbeknownst to themselves, horribly and inescapably known to the reader) rocketing towards the catastrophic events of the Second World War — the Holocaust for Jewish families, the Japanese occupation for Chinese families. A haunting line: “But history forms in secret spaces, unknowable till it has emerged. Your future may be its captive.”
This is already getting too long to also list fiction, movies and plays (I have a new year’s eve party to get ready for…) so I will stop here, or rather, immediately after the inclusion of the below, because I’ve already written most of it and I think there is thematic continuity with some of the books and ideas described above.
When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro – this was the last book of Ishiguro’s that I hadn’t read, I suppose because I’ve never heard people talk about it, except to say that it’s not as good as his other books, a sentiment with which he himself agreed. I read it a couple months after reading his divisive novel The Unconsoled, and found them to be wonderful companions. Reading The Unconsoled is like skating on the surface of a frozen lake: you can see the murky shapes below, but you can’t quite make out what they are, and you can never break through the ice to find out. To a certain extent all his books have this veiled feeling, it’s part of what makes them so compelling, but The Unconsoled really subverts the normal “set-up and narrative reward” structure of most novels, which can be frustrating, until you submit yourself to its internal logic, which resembles that of a dream. When We Were Orphans felt almost opposite — I think it’s the most “plotty” of his books, it’s presented as a detective story, and there are shocking twists and reveals, compared to the complete lack of traditional resolution in The Unconsoled or the sort of slow-moving, gradually disclosed revelations of his other books. To take up the metaphor again, WWWO smashes through the ice with an axe.
Maybe that’s why people didn’t like it — it differs in that sense from his more beloved books — but I found it intense and heartbreaking, and hard to put down. Many of KI’s books wrestle with this growing phantom presence of a great evil (in several the evil is explicitly fascism, other times it’s more implicit) and people’s struggles to fight against or even acknowledge something so gargantuan and frightening. I’ve always loved the description of KI’s work from the Nobel committee — “in novels of great emotional force, [he] has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” Under the ice … it’s the abyss!
In WWWO, the protagonist, Christopher, believes that through his work as a detective he can combat the dark forces of evil that seem to be enveloping the world, and in this book, which builds to the Battle of Shanghai in 1937, the evil is manifest in fascism. Like many a KI protagonist, Christopher is polite, repressed and deluded, and sometimes has random outbursts of rage. His is also one of the most poignant and upsetting depictions of — sorry to resort to therapy speak — the pain of the “inner child” that I’ve read in a while. Reader, I sobbed.
There’s a really eerie scene with a Japanese general who tells Christopher, who is English, about his love of classical music, Dickens, etc., and Christopher is like, how can you love these things and be okay with what the Japanese are doing (at this point we are in Shanghai in 1937 and Japan is full-scale invading China) and the general denies that there’s a contradiction, or if there is it doesn’t bother him. This scene is especially creepy not just because of the questions it raises about the uselessness of art in the face of evil, etc., but because it immediately follows on from a lengthy and tormenting description of an active war zone in a modern city, a total shift in setting from the preceding and succeeding pages (wherein Christopher has been hobnobbing at fancy parties, then [horror of war interlude] then suddenly we’re chatting to the suave general about literature and opera), told in the same tone (which apparently some critics found issue with but which I actually think was a huge strength). Experientially, I would compare reading this section of the novel to the movie Children of Men, specifically the relentless single-shot take starting from when they board the bus into the refugee camp.
I guess it’s silly to say anything by KI is underrated given that he is a Nobel laureate now but seriously this book is so underrated. And this post is too long…
Thanks so much for reading and please share this newsletter with anyone you think might get a kick out of it. See you in 2024!
Excellent post
Yep, I loved When We Were Orphans. I thought it was a bit like Lolita in the way it drew you into the world of the narrator, and then forced you into complicity as the narrator... does things you don't want to be a part of. With Lolita, it's the evil of his exploitation of a young girl. With Christopher, he's just mad in the head, by the end in a tremendously uncomfortable way.
So yes, I'm with you, I like Unconsoled and WWWO much more than the critics seemed to. I still have the last couple of books of Ishiguro's to read, so perhaps this will prompt me to go and load up Klara. Or maybe just go back and read Orphans again.