Half World
Jun. 14th, 2010 13:29![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyGoto, Hiromi. Half World. New York: Viking, 2010. Illustrated by Jillian Tamaki.
Another book I read because I liked the sound of it according tocoffeeandink. And then the author very kindly signed my copy for me at the Sign Out at WisCon 34.
This is a short book, but it packs quite a lot of punch. Teenage Melanie Tamaki is fat, poor, Japanese and generally out of place in her presumably-eastern-Canada city; she and her mother, who is continually ill, just barely manage to scrape by in their lives, and when Melanie comes home from school one day to find her mother missing, she is forced to confront the fact that she is doubly an immigrant: her parents came from Half World, the realm in which people who have left the Realm of Flesh are supposed to do penance in order to enter the Realm of Spirit. But the balance between the Realms has been shattered for millennia, and as a girl who was conceived in Half World but born in Life, who has Life, it falls to Melanie, unwilling and unprepared, to save her mother from the venomous Mr. Glueskin and to perhaps redress the wrongs of the cosmos itself. Along the way, she has a lot of help from a jade pendant-turned-rat, flocks of crows, a magic 8 ball with upgrades, and two old Chinese women, both scholars and one grocery store owner.
I liked this book a lot; at some point in the middle I found myself thinking that it would make a really great movie, and then I started trying to calculate the odds of a movie about a poor, fat Japanese-Canadian girl saving the worlds getting made in the studio system and depressed myself. But the point stands; Goto has a gift for odd, vivid turns of phrase. Her prose is weird and off-kilter, rhythmically, but the effect works well with the story she tells.
I said 'weird' deliberately in the paragraph above, because I have to think that Goto is writing within the umbrella of New Weird: urban setting, lots of grotesque creatures and things (vomit, glue, people getting devoured, rancid food everywhere, creatures who in New Crobuzon would be fRree and Remade), etc. Melanie herself, whose weight and stringy, greasy hair get a lot of mention, is anything but a conventional protagonist. I like the idea that a poor, fat Japanese-Canadian girl can and must save the cosmos; I also think that a book that explicitly cites the works of Hieronymus Bosch has to be trading in the grotesque.
I've said other places that I find the grotesque to be a very deliberate political stance and effect on the part of those artists who deploy it, and I think Goto very explicitly situating Half World as a grotesquerie links back to her choice of settings and protagonists. The idea that a poor, fat Japanese-Canadian girl can and must save the cosmos is pretty radical in the context of mainstream North American society; Goto uses the grotesque to force her readers to confront and to realize the absurdity of the default assumption that such a girl couldn't, as well as to tell her vivid, fascinating story.
Another book I read because I liked the sound of it according to
coffeeandink. And then the author very kindly signed my copy for me at the Sign Out at WisCon 34. This is a short book, but it packs quite a lot of punch. Teenage Melanie Tamaki is fat, poor, Japanese and generally out of place in her presumably-eastern-Canada city; she and her mother, who is continually ill, just barely manage to scrape by in their lives, and when Melanie comes home from school one day to find her mother missing, she is forced to confront the fact that she is doubly an immigrant: her parents came from Half World, the realm in which people who have left the Realm of Flesh are supposed to do penance in order to enter the Realm of Spirit. But the balance between the Realms has been shattered for millennia, and as a girl who was conceived in Half World but born in Life, who has Life, it falls to Melanie, unwilling and unprepared, to save her mother from the venomous Mr. Glueskin and to perhaps redress the wrongs of the cosmos itself. Along the way, she has a lot of help from a jade pendant-turned-rat, flocks of crows, a magic 8 ball with upgrades, and two old Chinese women, both scholars and one grocery store owner.
I liked this book a lot; at some point in the middle I found myself thinking that it would make a really great movie, and then I started trying to calculate the odds of a movie about a poor, fat Japanese-Canadian girl saving the worlds getting made in the studio system and depressed myself. But the point stands; Goto has a gift for odd, vivid turns of phrase. Her prose is weird and off-kilter, rhythmically, but the effect works well with the story she tells.
I said 'weird' deliberately in the paragraph above, because I have to think that Goto is writing within the umbrella of New Weird: urban setting, lots of grotesque creatures and things (vomit, glue, people getting devoured, rancid food everywhere, creatures who in New Crobuzon would be fRree and Remade), etc. Melanie herself, whose weight and stringy, greasy hair get a lot of mention, is anything but a conventional protagonist. I like the idea that a poor, fat Japanese-Canadian girl can and must save the cosmos; I also think that a book that explicitly cites the works of Hieronymus Bosch has to be trading in the grotesque.
I've said other places that I find the grotesque to be a very deliberate political stance and effect on the part of those artists who deploy it, and I think Goto very explicitly situating Half World as a grotesquerie links back to her choice of settings and protagonists. The idea that a poor, fat Japanese-Canadian girl can and must save the cosmos is pretty radical in the context of mainstream North American society; Goto uses the grotesque to force her readers to confront and to realize the absurdity of the default assumption that such a girl couldn't, as well as to tell her vivid, fascinating story.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-14 18:53 (UTC)I also really appreciate that Melanie isn't a typical Special Destiny teen--she doesn't actually have any magic powers or special skills--it's really just her compassion and the power of choice that make her heroic.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-14 19:00 (UTC)And a lot of times the "she has no special powers" thing is a cover for a protagonist actually having unrecognized special powers, but not for Melanie, and I liked that too.