– XXXV –

If I ever wrote an autobiography I would have to add: Fiction, as a subheading; because the possibility of what could have been, rather than the reality as is, is far more compelling. 

Tua Forsström Resigns from the Swedish Academy

Hello Gentle Reader,

During the Swedish Academy’s annual meeting and celebrations held on December 20^th, it was announced that the Finnish-Swedish language poet Tua Forsström of Chair No. 18 would forfeit her seat after previously been elected five years prior in 2019. There is no drama or ill tidings trailing Forsström’s resignation. Since 2018 the Swedish Academy’s members have had the freedom of choice to resign. Prior to that the bylaws stated that all terms of any academy seat were for life. However, during crisis it became necessary for the academy to update it governance protocols in order to allow members to resign and be replaced so the academy could still function. This flexibility according to Tua Forsström was the main contingency of why she accepted the invitation to join the academy, with the understanding that her term within the institution would be for a limited time. Now five years later, Tua Forsström has decided that the term has been met and has formally resigned from the Swedish Academy. The Swedish Academy was appreciative in their acceptance of the resignation with wonderful parting words which express the value that Forsström brought to the Swedish Academy and their deliberations.

While Tua Forsström’s resignation is the first since the Swedish Academy’s crisis six years ago, it is marvelous to see a member part on amicable grounds. As both Tua Forsström and the Swedish Academy maintain and repeated, the decision was made five years prior, and was a contingent point of Forsström accepting the invitation. Once again, the Swedish Academy is not at a full roster, as they will begin the work of finding a new member to fill Chair No. 18.

On a personal note, it is disappointing to see Tua Forsström depart from the Swedish Academy. It was always my own selfish wish that with her position on the academy, Tua Forsström would be able to put forward the candidacy of Finnish writers for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Sadly, that did not happen over the past five years – that I know of. Hopefully in the future though we will finally get a new Finnish laureate, as the language and literature is glaringly overlooked on the world stage, due to linguistic complexities.

While it is disappointing to hear the news of Tua Forsström resignation from the Swedish Academy, her insights within the awarding institution cannot be overlooked, and the Swedish Academy’s own appreciative farewell to the Finnish-Swedish language poet is poignant in its reluctant acceptance and appreciative well wishes.

Thank You for Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read

 

M. Mary

For Further Reference and Reading Please see the following hyperlink:

The Swedish Academy's festive gathering

Scene of the Crime

Hello Gentle Reader, 

In Patrick Modiano’s short novella, “Afterimage,” the elusive, fading, and willfully transparent photographer, Francis Jansen admits his favourite punctuation mark are ellipses. Those three elusive periods trailing off into nothing. They are the incomplete punctuation. The cliff hanger; the hang man. Ellipses lack the finality of the period; the engaged and curious nature of the question mark; the excitement and enthusiasm of the exclamation mark. Each of these previous punctuation marks strike the border, carving out a defined end of a sentence. They conclude with authority. Ellipses, however, lack an ending. Rather than strike down with gavel assurance they trail off. For ellipses its not a matter of the end of the line, rather the track was never installed. They fade into the incomplete and the unknown. Dissolving into nothingness. They are the evaporating transparent ending. Perfectly fitting for Francis Jansen who seeks to continually pursue a state of invisibility, an ambition and trait shared by so many of Modiano’s characters. Sublimation is a particular Patrick Modiano literary quality. Fixed nodal points and individuals inevitably vanish as if sublimated to a vaporous state. Despite their vapid departure they linger in shadow, cutting haunting figures as grey ghosts. They are spectral and phantasms existing in the unreliable recesses of memory; summoned forth by happenstance, chance, and circumstance. Existing in the vague recess between lamplight and shadow, incorporeal and incoherent.

Patrick Modiano is often compared to fellow countrymen and writers Marcel Proust and Alain-Fournier for his dedication to the theme of memory, loss, absence, incomplete romances – if one can call them that. Yet, Proust’s exploration of memory was gilded and luxurious. The famous madeleine scene showcases Proust’s extravagant and sensuous sensibilities cascading in an uncontrolled torrent of sensations as reminisces and memories stir from their hibernation and incarceration whereby, they are inspected like fine china or silver in need of a polish, but whose values are more then obvious to the beholder. Proust’s madeleine experience is the gateway to the essence of memory, the involuntary and unfiltered impressions invoked by unknown ritual and ceremony, whereby they bubble to the surface containing experiences and sensations. For Proust involuntary memory retained a sense of unembellished purity and naturalness; free from the adulterations and manipulations of willfully recalled or intellectual produced memories, and by being unburdened by any editorial contextualization, embody the essence of the past in all its wistful and ungraspable longing. For Proust memory was the process of rebuilding a gilded and golden chateau. Elaborate and luxurious, an otherwise romantic ideal, safe from the corrosive acid wash of reality. Inconsequential details or unsavoury veracities are left behind at the gates. Remembrance, regardless of how its produced, inevitably will align itself with convivences and personal narratives. For Modiano, memory is less a rebuild of times past, as it is the recovery of faded photographs and film scenes salvaged from the banks of the river oblivion. Incomplete registers, diaries, address books, newspaper articles and phonebooks, are the only souvenirs and evidence of a bygone era, cataloguing a now dissolved city and world lost within the inevitabilities of progress and time marching forward. A netherworld and purgatory that plunges Modiano’s characters, personas, and pseudo stand-ins into continually delving into an aimless and inarticulate search of the past.

Some writers are accused of covering the same ground within their work. Their literary themes and preoccupations developed and ingrained. In the case of Patrick Modiano, its not a matter of a writer returning to the same old haunts, it’s the writer writing the same novel in different variations. The entirety of Modiano’s bibliography is best described as a Yayoi Kusama infinity room, where the gleam and sparkle of light reflects and ripple over and over again in a mesmerizing designed illusion. So too are Modiano’s novels. While each one is independent in scope, they all inevitably cross and crisscross the same ground. Some critics have described Modiano’s novels as mere chapters within a larger tome. Each one a celestial body within the vague ether of space. Names and characteristics are recycled and reused throughout the bibliography adding to the delirium and continued sense of déjà vu. This explains why critics implore readers to sample a variety of Modiano’s novels in order to gain a robust understanding of the authors output, whereby readers are enveloped in the distinct gossamer prose, coming across familiar names, situations, and streets. Retrospect is yet another significant component of Modiano’s bibliography, as youth is described best in his novel, “Out of the Dark,” in all of its vagrant incompleteness:

“We had no real qualities, except the one that youth gives to everyone for a very brief time, like a vague promise that will never be kept.”

In this regard, Patrick Modiano’s characters are always silhouettes. Mere traces and impressions left behind. Outlines and shapes dissolving away. They exist in a translucent state of transience, whereby they slip further away. Their fates always unknown, but they leave an aftertaste of menace and melancholy, components of guilt and mystery.

“Scene of the Crime,” folds back—imperfectly, slanted, and angled of course—on an earlier Modiano novella, “Suspended Sentences.” “Scene of the Crime,” should not be described as a sibling, child, or offshoot of “Suspended Sentences.” Nor is it a spiritual successor. The notion of successorship is best abandoned. The events of “Suspended Sentences,” haunt and linger within “Scene of the Crime,” as details are salt and peppered throughout the narrative: a house on Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne (previously incarnated as Rue du Docteur-Dordaine in “Suspended Sentences,”), overgrown gardens, the house of the immortally famous Dr. Guillotine, a cast of characters concealing an incoherent darkness. Even the protagonist of “Scene of the Crime,” Jean Bosmans is yet another Modiano iteration, repurposed and remerging in a new independent light from his previous incarnations. Yet these facts and facets do not align. They’ve been altered and reconfigured. Patrick Modiano further pathologizes and questions the veracity and reliance on memory and recollection of events as ordained fact. What emerges from the stagnant bog of memory and the imperfect shores of oblivion, is the dread and menace that haunts, lingers, and quietly tortures Modiano’s characters. In the case of Jean Bosmans, it’s the vague events of his childhood. Virtually abandoned by his parents, his mother is referenced as an actress touring and his father merely absent, he is left in the custody of friends. While referenced as affectionate if albeit distant surrogates in “Suspended Sentences,” they’ve taken on a more menacing phosphorescent glow. In typical Modiano fashion, Bosman is reintroduced to this world once again by coincidence and chance, by both a song and spying a luxurious American watch. In turn, the enigmatic Camilie Lucas, a bookkeeper who is endearingly referred to as “Deathmask,” for her inscrutability:

“Right from their first meeting, he had noticed that Camille was very good at keeping quiet. Usually people talked way too much about themselves. But he had understood pretty quickly that she would always remain silent about her past, her relationships, her doings and perhaps her accounting work. He did not blame her. You like people the way they are. Even if you might not fully trust them.”

Re-introduces Bosman to a world of shifting shadows, whereby recollections and childhood memories are brought reawakened but brittle and incomplete:

“He only had to think about those two people to become all the more sensitive to the dust, or rather smell, of time.”

A certain Guy Vincent who maybe Roger Vincent from “Suspended Sentences,” haunts the “Scene of the Crime,” like a low hanging fog. The name Rose-Marie Krawell repeats through the novel like an incantation, leaving readers to wonder if she is Annie from “Suspended Sentences.” Modiano never clarifies or confirms. Just as Jean Bosman gropes and fumbles through his own memories, readers are equally left in the dark with a sense of mystery that never quite materializes or is solved. Of course one does not read Patrick Modiano for plot, narrative, or suspenseful attempt at solving the case. To read a Modiano novel is the pleasure of being engulfed within the elegiac atmosphere populated by shadows and devious ambiguous threats, whereby the verity of memory is always in a state of questioning. “Scene of the Crime,” is no different then any of the previous Patrick Modiano novels, another chapter within his repetitious bibliography of existential noir novels. What separates “Scene of the Crime,” from other Modiano novels is its apparent insinuations of kinship between itself and “Suspended Sentences,” without aligning in any coherent fashion reinforcing the questioning nature of memory. “Scene of the Crime,” in turn distances itself further, as Jean Bosman looks back at the events of his life in a spectrum of time, with each recollection casting more doubt over the preceding events. In turn as a protagonist, Jean Bosman is more antagonistic and bolder then Modiano’s usual characters who drift through the novels in a daze. Bosman gives the impression of delighting in his flirtations with the threats that stalk him, all the while resigning himself to pursuit of becoming silent. As in the case of Francis Jansen, Modiano’s novels fade into ellipses unresolved and the sense of being incomplete. “Scene of the Crime,” is no different. Jean Bosman reviews the dubious events of his childhood without coming to any clear understanding of the stakes at play. Bosman’s retrospective operates in that vague borderline between memory and fabrication, with Bosman showing neither interest or concern with clarifying dreamed events to that of fact.

 

Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read

M. Mary

– XXXIV –

Grow up, break free, let loose, achieve; but most importantly: Live.  

Breyten Breytenbach Dies Aged 85

Hello Gentle Reader,

Breyten Breytenbach was one of the greatest South African Afrikaans language writers of his generation, an icon of who defended human rights and revolted against the barbaric delineation of apartheid. A statement from Breytenbach’s family perfectly summarizes and defines the author shortly after his peaceful passing:

“an immense artist, militant against apartheid, he fought for a better world until the end.”

As a writer, Breyten Breytenbach literary themes were formed in relation to that of Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, and Antjie Krog, an unmistakable outrage and disgust over the National Party’s hyper racial segregation policies and oppression of the majority black population or any other ethnicity designated ‘non-white.’ During his time at university, Breytenbach founded the Sestigers literary group with fellow wrier Andre Brink. The Sestigers were a group of dissident writers who opposed and challenged the prevailing doctrine of apartheid; they also sought to elevate the Afrikaans language, transcending it above its two-dimensional political associations of being a language of an oppressive minority. The Sestigers is affectionally referred to as a literary movement of exile within its own country, and its continued legacy reverberates today, being the foundational lifeblood of the explosion of Afrikaans language and art. The notion of Afrikaans language and the idea of Afrikaner were complex subjects for Breyten Breytenbach remarking:

“I'd never reject Afrikaans as a language, but I reject it as part of the Afrikaner political identity. I no longer consider myself an Afrikaner.”

As in the case of many writers whose work is influenced by its criticism of political realities, language for Breyten Breytenbach became homeland. In the 1960’s Breytenbach entered exile, living abroad in Paris, but remained a cultural icon in South Africa and a vocal critic. In the 1970’s, Breytenbach returned to South Africa, but was promptly arrested for allegedly supporting resistance movements and was sentenced to seven years in prison. Unrepented and unhindered Breyten Breytenbach continued to write poetry during his incarceration. The then French president François Mitterrand worked to facilitate Breytenbach’s release in 1982, afterwards Breytenbach would be granted French citizenship. These years of imprisonment provided Breyten Breytenbach the necessary material to write the monumental novel “The Albino Terrorist,” an account of his in incarceration, including the first two years spent in solitary confinement. Ever politically motivated Breyten Breytenbach continued his political discourse even as apartheid ended, refuting Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress of becoming corrupt and corroded with power.

Rest in Peace Breyten Breytenbach.

Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
 
M. Mary

Tanikawa Shuntarō Dies Aged 92

Hello Gentle Reader,

The grandfather of modern Japanese poetry and the Japanese master of free verse, Tanikawa Shuntarō has died at 92 years old. Japanese literary sensibilities are deep as they are subtle and refined. Emphasising understand brilliance; capitalizing on the contrast between subject and the negative space. The haiku is the perfect example of the concentrated principles of this aesthetic, whereby the entirety of the world is both captured and reflected within a single morning dewdrop. Tanikawa Shuntarō described the postwar period of Japanese society as bleak, the intellectual and cultural environment a vacuum with writers and thinkers continually turning away from previous lodestone institutions to find a new place for themselves within a society that had been bombed, obliterated, and ravaged by war. Those of Tanikawa’s generation who pursued postsecondary education involved themselves in political movements. Thankfully, Tanikawa was spared these political orientations and indoctrinations which allowed the poet to formulate a poetic style all his own. A free verse unbridled from the literary traditions of its forebears and open to exploring new literary frontiers. In a sparse and conversational style, Tanikawa Shuntarō crafted poetry that surveyed emotional truths and reflected on profound ideas all the while being set within the intimate and shared reality. Tanikawa’s debut collection “Two Billion Light Years of Solitude,” was an immediate bestseller in Japan and remains one of the most popular and beloved collections of poetry. What followed was a legendary poetic career of one of Japan’s most important and brilliant poetic voices, whose work remained a chameleonic and cutting-edge presence exploring new modes and literary expressions within the Japanese poetic canon. The hallmark of Tanikawa Shuntarō’s poetry is the approachability of the poems founded in a deceptive simplicity all the while sparkling with sophistication. In addition to poetry, Tanikawa was also a prolific translator, specifically of children’s literature, which included the Mother Goose Rhymes, Maurice Sendak, and Schulz’s  Peanuts comics. Tanikawa Shuntarō’s poetry introduced the world to the possibilities of Japanese poetry, and helped the nation move beyond the dour bleakness of the postwar years to a startling and brilliant future, one of possibility not ruin and devastation. Tanikawa Shuntarō’s poetry will continue and endure, recited and enjoyed by readers and students not only in Japan but around the world. The poetry of Tanikawa encompasses that full spectrum of the human condition, the multitudes of wonder and amazement, the struggles and drudgery of life, and still the perseverance to continue. In reflecting on his own death, Tanikawa Shuntarō reflected on the comfort of curiosity of what comes afterwards and continued on to live until that time. Despite not winning the Nobel, there is no doubt that Tanikawa Shuntarō is and was a deserving laureate in his own right, as his poetry inspired, renewed, and rejoiced at all the ideals of humanity, its flaws, and the countless possibilities.  

 
Rest in Peace, Tanikawa Shuntarō.
 
Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
 
M. Mary

The Booker Prize Winner 2024

Hello Gentle Reader,
 
This years Booker Prize has been awarded to the English writer Samantha Harvey for her novel: “Orbital.”
 
“Orbital,” is the second shortest book to have received the Booker Prize, accounting for four pages longer than Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1979 Booker winning novel “Offshore.” Perhaps Samantha Harvey’s win with “Orbital,” proves that shorter novels are more then a match to larger novels. Even more so, considering shorter novels require a gardener’s hand for pruning and a jeweler’s eye detail. Where larger novels can juggle multiple balls, granting them permissible room to let some inconsequentially fall without ceremony or fault. Whereas a shorter novel juggles only a few jeweled eggs, but there is no allowance for mishaps.
 
To contrast this years Booker Prize from last years award, judging chair Edmund de Waal confirmed that this year’s winner was chosen unanimously by the judges and that the judges read all 156 nominated books to completion. The unanimity of the judge’s decision according to de Waal recognizes the intensity of Harvey’s literary ambition in recognizing not only the preciousness of our shared planet, but also its precariousness. The novel itself recounts the one day in the life of twelve astronauts as they orbit the earth. The novel recounts not only the routine of life on the space station, but also their lives back on earth which tether and anchor them home. Through sixteen sunrises and sunsets, they orbit the blue celestial marble of home. “Orbital,” is a breath of fresh air. The novel is the necessary injection of literary pleasure and craftsmanship the Booker Prize needed, after years of politically charged and statement like novels. “Orbital,” embraces the possibility of the writer’s capacity to imagine and reflect on the vastness of space and our own celestial provincial attitudes in comparison to the magnanimity of space.
 
A very well earned prized. Congratulations to Samantha Harvey.
 

Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read


M. Mary

Mina’s Matchbox

Hello Gentle Reader,

By the end of October, the north wind has rampaged through. The leaves routed from their trees. They've ruptured and burst forth into the roaring wind, scattering on the street. Winter looms over the horizon. A starved dog whose howls close in every night as the sun pulls away. Never content to remain ominous or threatening in the distance, a smattering of snow anointed the ground, and while it has since melted, snow marks the conclusion of autumn. Once dandy trees peacocking with their burning foliage are reduced to gnarled shadows. Etherized, they contort and frame the early dusks. Their scaffolding branches claw at the sky, creep along the streets, and lurk outside windows. Autumn recedes further away as October closes. Soon November will sail in on slate grey clouds imbued with cemetery light. Frost will thread and sew its way through the grass; while the filigree of hoarfrost engraves the windows. As October concludes on a brittle note, one can’t help but suspiciously eye the romantic attitudes and airs projected on the month. Of course, October reaps the splendors of its harvest regalia, it is also a month of closures and hollowing out. A time of preparation and harvest; taking stock and giving thanks. In turn, October is a month of transitions and shifting borders. Here at the end of October everyone slips into the forlorn mists, swept up and away, retreating just a little further into themselves. Night falls suddenly, leaving all to cozy up with their memories. Under the circumstances its best to quote the venerated October Poet, Louise Glück:

            “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.”

Childhood is a nebulous subject, shifting and shaping. Ranging from the coyly saccharine sugared imaginings of bewildering entertainment, to more serious literary explorations of individual development and the lodestone of the human condition. All individuals look back on this development period with their own imbued perspectives. Some recount homes that were more hovel than house, where ignorance and violence were the preeminent languages. A world acquainted with the predatorial philosophy and Darwin law of “survival of the fittest.” Others described autocratic and tyrannical fathers or claustrophobic communities, where power was unimpeachable, taking the form of violence and brutality, enforcing conformity and complacency. The vocabulary of these homes and of these families were each the same: overcrowded, meager, unwanted, unsustainable. Thumps in the night always foreshadowed further impoverishment. The term ‘unwanted pregnancy,’ was synonymous with further suffering. For a wife and already overwhelmed mother, another link in the chain to the iron ball dragging her to unknowable depths. For an unwed daughter or sister, it was the beginning of the fall. An expedited journey to ruin and the end. They were described as being filthy and dirty; branded as whores who bitched and catted around. The shame was palpable, coloured in contusions. All of them were excited to caste out anything that could be described as of an ill-reputed nature or cheapened or spoiled. One of the rarest of moments in which they can elevate themselves beyond their squalor and piss on another. Despite this, they were all in the same pit, vying and clawing for the edges. While others describe their childhood in pastoral shades. The closet version of Arcadia that earth could facilitate. Then there are others whose lives were full of the same, the otherwise grey mundane; not without but no splendor to spare. Childhood is where one is forged and oriented to the workings of life.

Memory is a perennial preoccupation in the works of Ogawa Yōko. In the dystopian parable “The Memory Police,” Ogawa observed an island in a continual state of loss and redaction. Throughout the novel the inhabitants of the island lose their memories and their gradual connection to the world, all the while their entire reality reduces in size and scope. When calendars are deemed obsolete, the island nation finds itself transfixed in permanent winter. The entire world is lost in a whiteout, redacted further into the reductionist of nothing. In the still untranslated novel, “The Ring Finger,” a woman works at a laboratory, where clients bring in specimens (a bird bone, a melody, a scar, mushrooms) to be preserved by the memorial taxidermist, who preserves not only the specimens but also the associated and corresponding memory. Another untranslated novel “The Museum of Silence,” a woman collects and curates a macabre collection of mundane miscellaneous objects pilfered from people’s homes just after they have died. While in “The Housekeeper and the Professor,” the 88-minute-long memory of the professor, becomes more an eccentric plot point of the novel, rather than abstract theme, but allocates the novel the ability to float temporally in weightlessness while engaging in the abstract beauty of mathematics. In “Mina’s Matchbox,” Ogawa Yōko returns to the theme of memory, as the narrator looks back on a year of her childhood where she begins to transition from the dreaming and imaginative world of childhood and enter the more actualized reality of young adulthood.

As a novel “Mina’s Matchbox,” is more akin to “The Housekeeper and the Professor,” then “The Memory Police,” or “Revenge.” Where “The Memory Police,” a parabolic in its dystopian vision, contemplating the responsibility of remembrance and the corrosion of obsoletion and forced amnesia having the reductionist power to redact the world, but also discombobulate and alienate individuals’ relation to reality, and slowly releasing them into nothing. Whereas “Revenge,” showcased Ogawa as a master of the macabre. A consummate curator, Ogawa assembled, organized, and crafted scenes and landscapes transfixed and static in their clinical ordinariness, and then began to autopsy these otherwise starched and ironed scenes, revealing the absurd, deranged, and visceral undercurrent coursing beneath the otherwise unexceptionally ordinary. What is best described as the macabre or the madness of the mundane. Instead “Mina’s Matchbox,” bubbles and floats on the gentle effervescence of Ogawa’s observational and unadorned prose, explicitly in alignment with that of “The Housekeeper and the Professor,” while providing Ogawa the space to indulge in detours, details, and the shadows shifting in the periphery. Of course, as in “The Housekeeper and the Professor,” the quotidian is relayed on the slant. Whereas the titular professor’s 88-minute memory injects a sense of eccentricity into the narrative; in “Mina’s Matchbox,” the unconventionality comes not only in the niche habits and quirks of its characters, but also in the form of a pygmy hippopotamus, the sole survivor of a private family zoo, now a pet and mode of transportation. Ogawa’s straight forward prose hits the necessary punches in order to evade sentimentality and kitsch. Regardless, from 1972 to 1973 prove to be a formative year for Tomoko, who looks back on her stay with her distant and affluent relatives in Ashiya, who provide her a new world of discovery and knowledge. Counterbalancing the whimsy and the unconventionality of the relatives, Ogawa Yōko laces time specific details within the text, not only grounding it but enlivening the narrative into a greater context, enriching the narrative with a necessary palpability. Specifically, the 1972 Summer Olympics are by and large a defining feature of the year, with both Tomoko and Mina transfixed by the Japanese Olympic Volleyball Team’s journey to Munich and the aspirations the team would win gold. The two girls’ devotion to the team became borderline fanatical; but their rationale regarding their admiration towards individual team members delineated how the girls viewed the team. Mina logically evaluated the statistics and abilities; while Tomoko frivolously admired the beauty and appearance of another.

Tomoko’s reminisces of her time in Ashiya prove to be crystalline, but also express a gap in memory or a child’s lacking maturity to fully realize the depth of the situation. Through all their eccentricities, their indulgences in intellectual pursuits, and their lavish surprises, the family is dogged by secrets and familiar tensions. Mina is asthmatic, but her conditions severity gyrates between crisis and projected exaggeration by those around her. Despite this, Mina’s medical remand has nurtured an imaginative and creative mind, as the novel is spiced with a few of her matchbox stories. Tomoko’s uncle is charming dazzling, but beyond his smooth and shiny veneer lurks an ungraspable tension. His absences fill the house and while his returns are celebratory, Tomoko perceives a tension between her uncle and her maternal aunt. While her aunt in turn spends her days drinking and smoking, reading texts and books scanning for typographical errors. When Mina’s beautiful brother Ryuchi returns from Switzerland, Tomoko once again reflects on a concealed strain between father and son. From Grandmother Rosa, Tomoko comes to learn about the Holocaust, and the survivor’s guilt that plaques her grandmother, all the while the horrible massacre and terrorist act of the Munich Olympics, becomes a shattering reminder of the human capability for terror, marking one of the unadulterated moments when the idyll of childhood is infiltrated with the violence of the external world. The novel in turn traces first loves and there fated disappointments. All the milestones in the march to growing up. Ogawa’s prose is casual and laconic as it languishes over the details, which is also the novels weakness. Details effervescently emerge and while their intentions are ominous or foreshadow conflict, they instead burst or drift off course, never quite actualizing. Just who is the uncle’s mistress? While Tomoko circles the issue and approaches it, the subject is never explored further. Ogawa’s tasteful desire to refuse to linger on overtly dramatic events, be it a home invasion or a fire, allow her to bob and weave the entrapments  and indulgences of melodramatic histrionics, but the lack of completion or conclusion or at the very least hard lined definition can be considered underwhelming. Yet, in Ogawa’s defense, children are minuscules in comparison to the machinations of the adults around them and as such as scaled to their environment. The hypersensitivity and overprotectiveness of Mina is in turn leveraged against Tomoko, and while she exercises some agency in her movements, she is otherwise tethered to the house. In addition, as a child Tomoko may be reluctant to explore or investigate an issue of an extra marital affair further. The revelation of the holocaust was enlightening to the human capacity for horror and cruelty.

“Mina’s Matchbox,” was originally written in a serialized format, which explains the short chapters and the episodic feel of the narrative skipping along, in addition to the abrupt endings. The novel is a marvelous exploration of the domestic, and while many readers have praised Ogawa’s foray into the realism and domestic novel, it still retains a slanted perspective betraying the signature flirtation with the macabre. The overgrown Fressy Zoological Garden remains a haunted landscape. Mina’s matchbox stories integrated themselves into the narrative naturally. I found this time the transition between novel and independent fable more symphonic; whereas with “The Memory Police,” chapters from the narrators’ novels did not blend within the narrative as organically. Ogawa Yōko’s continued exploration of the finer nuances of memory are on perfect display with her novel “Mina’s Matchbox.” While it eschews Ogawa’s usual underpinnings of the grotesque and ghoulish, it succeeds in being a charming domestic novel. Ogawa’s prose shone in the crisp gracefulness, a lightness of touch continually feathering out and insinuating each detail. While others are quick to categorize “Mina’s Matchbox,” as a coming-of-age story, Ogawa Yōko has skillfully skirted the mechanical form of such novels and stories. This ‘year in the life,’ novel layers events and details naturally form, never fixating or magnifying on any particular event as having a significant contribution to the development of either girl. All the while through the course of the novel they inevitably do change and grow. Time marches forward, yet as Tomoko reminisces, it was a transformative year. Ogawa succeeds at encapsulating those moments of youth. The awkwardness of self-awareness. The frustrations of infatuations. Those insignificant moments which haunt us throughout our lifetimes; much like the little girl catching falling stars in a bottle, on one matchbox cover. This is Ogawa’s strength, the ability to effortlessly examine the subtle shifts and changes in her characters psychology and relation to the world.

“Mina’s Matchbox,” is a welcome – like all future Ogawa Yoko publications – and overdue entry into the English language. “Mina’s Matchbox,” showcases Ogawa’s range as writer, her ability to move beyond the visceral or mundane violence of her other works, and instead explore a quieter and intimate family narrative. Ogawa’s prose remains natural and unadorned, never burned by ostentatious formatting and achieving at their crests a wistful lyricism, much like the radium-fortified drink Fressy which appears throughout the novel. “Mina’s March,” provides a holistic portrait of one’s memory and one’s relationship to it, but also the complicated relationships and how they’ve adapted and changed through the ages, and how they too are remembered. In a manner similar to Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun,” Ogawa Yoko moves through time deftly and with ease covering a period of thirty years through highlights and applying a short epistolary format. As in “Klara and the Sun,” which fixated on only a short pinnacle period of a character’s life, Ogawa ended "Mina's Matchbox," without cheapening the prose, but coming to a rounded conclusion. 

 

Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
 
M. Mary                                                                                                         

– XXXIII –

People who are health conscious are quite monkish. I admire their discipline and pray for their failure.

Gary Indiana Dies Aged 74

Hello Gentle Reader,

Gary Indiana was a legendary figure of that otherwise that late mid-century modern bohemianism which followed on the coat tails of Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation, a gritty sustained and experimental counter-culture movement. The very same counter-culture movement that is now only replicated in spirit with nostalgic forms, lacking the teeth and grit of the former which gave it substantial character through its ability to shock, offend, and dazzle readers and viewers with equal curiosity and outrage. Gary Indiana dabbled in a variety of mediums, exploring the creative limitations of each, be it photography, performing and acting, and film, but Indiana will always be remembered as a savvy writer and cultural critic, who captured in essence a culture careening towards the abyss, and the chaos and ravages of the AID’s pandemic. “Horse Crazy,” is one such novel, recounting the torturous discourse between pining loving obsession of a reasonably successful writer for that of a handsome former addict and aspiring photographer. It follows the usual tropes of the older vying for the love of the younger and beautiful, but Indiana turned the trope towards dissecting the same-sex perspective of the matter against the backdrop of AIDs. It’s a fever dream novel capturing the narcotic nature of desire and its corrosive capabilities, in tandem with the asphyxiating realities of obsession. “Horse Crazy,” employed Gary Indiana’s signature style, a mixture of the sardonic and erudite, and delighted in the air of scandal the novel provoked as it was framed as a roman à clef. Indiana’s ‘crime trilogy,’ (“Resentment: A Comedy,” “Three Month-Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story,” “Depraved Indifference,”) never quite took on the necrophiliac nature of true crime, but captured the media’s ability to curate a celebrity culture and turn a private horror and heinous crimes into a sensationalist form of entertainment and market it as such. Gary Indiana is most endeared and remembered for his work as the art critic for the legendary Village Voice in the early 1980’s and his subsequent essays. The essay is where Gary Indiana thrived. The essay is a form untethered from the structure and rules of poetry and novels, and provided Indiana the space and platform to reach a new audience and gain acclaim. Ironically, Indiana disparagingly hated art criticism and the art world, which he viewed as nihilistically capitalistic. Throughout it all, Gary Indiana remained a singular voice, who captured with wit and humour a bygone era which has been recycled to a new generation, but is gilded with so much nostalgia it’s now plasticine and soulless. Readers should not view Gary Indiana as a time capsule writer of a fleeting cocaine fueled fever dream, but a sardonic critic, who caustically critiqued American values and the octane push of a culture towards the void, all with a sense of humour and a sense of style, which understands not only the uniquely American condition, but the human condition in an increasingly ‘post,’ prefix-oriented world.

 
Rest in Peace, Gary Indiana.
 
Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read

M. Mary