Some Things I'm Reading

• I find it difficult to get into Kenzobure Oe's Somersault. There's a flatness in Oe's language that alienates me. Perhaps it's a matter of translation, or of Japanese literary styles--I've noticed similar flatness in other translated Japanese stories. I don't think I'll bother finishing it.


• I didn't have the same problem with Günter Grass' The Call of the Toad. I've been aware of Grass' reputation as an author devoted to his native Danzig. Danzig--since 1945 the Polish city of Gdansk--had an interesting history as a city located on the cutting edge of German/Polish relations, a bellwether of sorts and a place for interaction. His story of the German art historian Alexander, the Polish art restorer Alexandra, their love, and their efforts to build in Gdansk a cemetery where German dead can be reburied on their native soil works at numerous levels--the literary, the sociological, the historical. I recommend it.


• The same goes for Nadine Gordimer's Loot and Other Stories. I'm a fan of Gordimer's novels and short stories; her The Late Bourgeois World is one of the finest novels I've read. Her stories in this volume won't disappoint.


• Jason Lutes' graphic novel Berlin: City of Stones compares well with V FGor Vengeance. I read some comics in the early 1990s--Star Trek, issued under the DC label--but by the mid-1990s I stopped. I've begun again, thanks to Allan's association with the Comic Hunter and the library's recent purchase of some comics. Beautifully drawn in ink and well-written, Berlin: City of Stones traces a broad cast over ten months in Berlin's history, from September 1928 to May 1929. We know what will happen to Berlin soon enough, but that only heightens the effect.

Happy Canada Day!

From the Washington Post:

Whoa! Canada!

Legal marijuana. Gay marriage. Peace. What the heck's going on up north, eh? (Jon Krause - For The Washington Post)

By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 1, 2003; Page C01

Peaceniks, pot and people of the same sex exchanging wedding vows: It's a trinity from the church of high liberalism, or a right-wing trifecta of decline and doom.

Either way, it's a perfect storm of cultural weather patterns that you'd expect to be brewed only in, say, the East Village, Dupont Circle or the intersection of Haight and Ashbury.

But no!

Can you say Saskatoon?

Banff?

Nunavut?

Just when you had all but forgotten that carbon-based life exists above the 49th parallel, those sly Canadians have redefined their entire nation as Berkeley North.

"It's like we woke up and suddenly we're a European country," says Canadian television satirist Rick Mercer.

"We're supposedly the reactionary society," says Rudyard Griffiths, director of the Toronto-based Dominion Institute, which promotes Canadian citizenship and history. "We didn't have the revolution. You'd think we would be an inherently conservative society. There's the irony."

( Read more... )