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starladyI finished two books today, and it must be a blue moon or something, because both of them were rereads of long standing. Despite the huge amount of books that I own (and I do cull the herds! I swear!), I rarely do full-dress rereads anymore, simply because I tend to have the relevant parts of the usual suspects mostly memorized, and merely have to pull out the book in question to flip to the relevant part, read the bit I want, and be satisfied.
But I was reading the first of these books, Liza Dalby's The Tale of Murasaki, partly as a spur to my own inspiration vis-a-vis a vague novella idea I've had brewing in my mind for a while, and I read it originally in freshman year of high school (paired with Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha, about which the less said, the merrier), which was nearly ten years ago now. So, especially since I got a pretty hardcover with the purple ribbon and endpapers in Michigan, I felt justified reading the whole thing through again.
Ah, what a difference ten years makes. I totally, utterly and completely missed the lesbianism the first time around...which is quite something, since I'd say that the sex in the book skews lesbian by about 2/3 to 1/3. In part this is a testament to Dalby's subtle writing style, which perfectly suits the subjectivity of the period, but also, yeah, more proof that I was not as smart as I thought in high school. But as usual I'm going about these things wrong way round: let me say that, overall, Dalby does an excellent and commendable job evoking a period that is as distant to just about everyone in the modern world as, say, the moon. I would recommend the book wholeheartedly to anyone thinking about reading The Tale of Genji, or interested in classical Japan, since Dalby blends enough modernity into her fiction to make classical Japan palatable to us moderns, and vice versa. In fact, despite several significant theoretical reservations, of which more in a moment, I would teach this novel in a historical survey course, since I think it perfectly fills the gap between The Tale of Genji, Ivan Morris' The World of the Shining Prince, and Murasaki's diary and The Tale of Flowering Fortunes. It would certainly be a lot easier to get undergrads to wade through this than through any of the above, especially in combination.
That said, the so-called "lost final chapter" of Genji that Dalby appends to the end of the novel is simply egregious and hubristic. For the record, I have no problem with the fact that Dalby is a Westerner, because she remains the only Westerner to have become a licensed geisha (on a Fulbright grant, no less), and because, as I said above, classical Japan is unimaginably distant from the contemporary world. That said, though, while Dalby clearly did her homework, she adheres far too close to the standard interpretation of the Heian period, namely us vs. them, Japan vs. China (these aren't even the terms they used!), prose vs. poetry, kana vs. kanji, for my taste. Granted, I've been influenced by the iconoclastic views of Thomas LaMarre (Uncovering Heian Japan) on this point, and I don't think it really detracts from the book for any but the small minority of specialists who agree with LaMarre, and in any case it's a teachable moment. But the political subjectivity of classical polities really was different, and I think reading this book illuminates, in a photonegative fashion, some of the ways how.
By contrast, John Bellairs' The House with a Clock in Its Walls is pure enjoyment. I think I read this book in second or third grade (most likely third), and I remember that it creeped me the hell out. I was probably too creeped out to notice its utter charm, wonderful characters, and no-nonsense, headlong plot. The book's Michigan setting rings perfectly true (seriously, that state is uncanny), and I think Mrs. Zimmerman had to flee the Reich for being too cool.
Well, I am 20K words into the novel, which is approximately 20% of my projected total (because I've written this thing huge before, and it just got annoying after 100K), and there has been no action to speak of, aside from some scheming, some rooting around in subterannean crypts, and a funeral. Oh, and a past assassination is discussed implicitly. What gives? In my other efforts, the body count was in the dozens before the end of the first chapter. Bleh. More things to address in rewrites.
But I was reading the first of these books, Liza Dalby's The Tale of Murasaki, partly as a spur to my own inspiration vis-a-vis a vague novella idea I've had brewing in my mind for a while, and I read it originally in freshman year of high school (paired with Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha, about which the less said, the merrier), which was nearly ten years ago now. So, especially since I got a pretty hardcover with the purple ribbon and endpapers in Michigan, I felt justified reading the whole thing through again.
Ah, what a difference ten years makes. I totally, utterly and completely missed the lesbianism the first time around...which is quite something, since I'd say that the sex in the book skews lesbian by about 2/3 to 1/3. In part this is a testament to Dalby's subtle writing style, which perfectly suits the subjectivity of the period, but also, yeah, more proof that I was not as smart as I thought in high school. But as usual I'm going about these things wrong way round: let me say that, overall, Dalby does an excellent and commendable job evoking a period that is as distant to just about everyone in the modern world as, say, the moon. I would recommend the book wholeheartedly to anyone thinking about reading The Tale of Genji, or interested in classical Japan, since Dalby blends enough modernity into her fiction to make classical Japan palatable to us moderns, and vice versa. In fact, despite several significant theoretical reservations, of which more in a moment, I would teach this novel in a historical survey course, since I think it perfectly fills the gap between The Tale of Genji, Ivan Morris' The World of the Shining Prince, and Murasaki's diary and The Tale of Flowering Fortunes. It would certainly be a lot easier to get undergrads to wade through this than through any of the above, especially in combination.
That said, the so-called "lost final chapter" of Genji that Dalby appends to the end of the novel is simply egregious and hubristic. For the record, I have no problem with the fact that Dalby is a Westerner, because she remains the only Westerner to have become a licensed geisha (on a Fulbright grant, no less), and because, as I said above, classical Japan is unimaginably distant from the contemporary world. That said, though, while Dalby clearly did her homework, she adheres far too close to the standard interpretation of the Heian period, namely us vs. them, Japan vs. China (these aren't even the terms they used!), prose vs. poetry, kana vs. kanji, for my taste. Granted, I've been influenced by the iconoclastic views of Thomas LaMarre (Uncovering Heian Japan) on this point, and I don't think it really detracts from the book for any but the small minority of specialists who agree with LaMarre, and in any case it's a teachable moment. But the political subjectivity of classical polities really was different, and I think reading this book illuminates, in a photonegative fashion, some of the ways how.
By contrast, John Bellairs' The House with a Clock in Its Walls is pure enjoyment. I think I read this book in second or third grade (most likely third), and I remember that it creeped me the hell out. I was probably too creeped out to notice its utter charm, wonderful characters, and no-nonsense, headlong plot. The book's Michigan setting rings perfectly true (seriously, that state is uncanny), and I think Mrs. Zimmerman had to flee the Reich for being too cool.
Well, I am 20K words into the novel, which is approximately 20% of my projected total (because I've written this thing huge before, and it just got annoying after 100K), and there has been no action to speak of, aside from some scheming, some rooting around in subterannean crypts, and a funeral. Oh, and a past assassination is discussed implicitly. What gives? In my other efforts, the body count was in the dozens before the end of the first chapter. Bleh. More things to address in rewrites.
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20,826 / 100,000 (20.8%) |
