Istanbul: Memories and the City

Author: Orhan Pamuk
Year: 2004
Genre: Memoir

Orhan Pamuk is a lifelong resident of Istanbul, and in this book he tells both the city's history and his own. It's a terribly difficult book for me to write about because there's a lot going on: he doesn't just write a history of Istanbul, but also a history of Istanbul writers and painters (both Turkish and Western), of himself as an Istanbullu, of himself as an Istanbul writer and painter, of certain buildings or classes of building or times of day that he finds evocative, of the different moods that these buildings and times of day evoke. There's a lengthy discussion of hüzün, which is a peculiar sort of Turkish melancholy that the residents of a city can feel collectively because of the knowledge that they have been the capital of three empires but are now marginalized and impoverished.

And, there are the times when Pamuk addresses himself directly to the audience and hints at his deeper purpose in telling the story. That purpose, as I understood it, is to describe the artistic lives of Orhan Pamuk and of Istanbul, but through tangential stories that show their richness as well as their deep interconnections.

Reading this book is like listening to the ramblings of your favorite uncle, if your favorite uncle were Turkish, and a Nobel-winning novelist.

El beso de la mujer araña

Author: Manuel Puig
Year: 1976
Genre: Literary fiction

I read this years ago for a college seminar on voyeurism, and picked it up again, this time in the original, to practice my Spanish.

Other books have led me to write about how speech patterns and dialogue can be tools for characterization, but this book is nothing but dialogue and character. It's a story of two men in a prison cell in 1970s Argentina, the young political prisoner Valentin and the old homosexual Molina, and is written primarily as a record of their conversation. Aside from the talk about their lives in Buenos Aires and their hopes for when they are released, much of the novel is taken up with Molina's retelling the plots of films to pass the time.

Valentin does not talk like Molina. In fact, in developing his characters, Puig shows himself to be practically an applied sociolinguist. Their turn-taking and interrupting, politeness strategies, and discourse styles are distinct. For instance, it's my impression that Molina "talks like a woman," using more typically female conversational styles. (I wonder if Deborah Tannen would agree.) Not only is each character realized and developed through dialogue, but as their relationship grows, their speech patterns mirror those changes. They move away from the self-conscious stereotypes of the revolutionary (brusque, businesslike, analytical) and old queen (emotional, hypersensitive), and become more well-rounded personalities.

La grammaire est une chanson douce

Author: Erik Orsenna
Year: 2001
Genre: Kids' fantasy

What is the purpose of the Académie française in the 21st century? How can it rejuvenate its image to make it seem like a positive force for the French language, rather than a reactionary, prescriptivist, anti-American relic? This book, which has been translated into English as Grammar is a Sweet, Gentle Song, shows how one Académie member would answer the question: Language needs people to care for it, not in the way that museum curators preserve holy relics, but as nurses love and protect their delicate patients.

The plot is an airy fantasy: a brother and sister are shipwrecked on a desert island and lose their ability to speak, and must learn to "respeak" with the help of a kindly old man called Monsieur Henri. On their adventure, they meet an old woman who revives dying words in the dictionary; visit the village of words, where adjectives and nouns get married; and tour the sentence factory, whose machinery transforms meaning into grammar. There's also a villain whose laboratory takes the souls out of words through cold scientific analysis and brutal pedagogy (shades of The Golden Compass's "Gobblers"), but Orsenna cannot stand to look at such cruelty, so our heroine is promptly rescued.

It's clearly kid stuff; and when Monsieur Henri says, "If you don't love grammar by the end of the week, I'll smash my guitar," it's obviously Orsenna addressing his readers. Despite his saccharine Little Prince allegories, you can see that his heart is in the right place - and he speaks to an issue that is of clear professional importance and personal interest to me. (Just last week, I was complaining that I want language teaching to be treated as an art, while heartless bureaucrats are trying to make a science of it.)

As I was reading, I amused myself by considering the challenges of an English-language translation. Like any book on language, this book includes a few scenes that would really have to be re-envisioned to make the same impact on an English-speaking audience. In the village of words, for instance, the article's job is to announce the grammatical gender of the noun that employs it. In the evil lab, teachers are forced to read from publications of the French Ministry of Education (Orsenna's foray into politics). The secret back room in the factory hides the workshop where Saint-Exupery, Proust, and La Fontaine are secretly still writing. What would be the English and/or American equivalents? I'm curious to look at the existing translation; I suspect that the translator may have left it more or less French.

Lone Wolf and Cub #1: The Assassin's Road

Author: Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima
Year: 2000
Genre: Historical fiction

Reading Understanding Comics alerted me to some of the differences between Japanese and American styles of comic-book storytelling. This, in turn, inspired me (months later) to read a little manga. I've never been into it in the past; before Lone Wolf and Cub, all I'd read was Akira and a few issues of Crying Freeman. A serious gap in my comic book literacy, I decided.

I don't remember a lot of the peculiarities of manga that Scott McCloud identified, but as I was reading this book, I did have the feeling that something not quite "normal" was going on, as if I was watching a foreign movie. The structuring of the plot never seemed quite logical to me, and the conclusions were never fully satisfying. After seven or eight episodes, though, I started to get the feel of it.

The stories themselves are pretty formulaic, which helped. Itto the assassin and his son Daigoro show up somewhere, looking innocent; it turns out that someone is involved in illicit dealings involving land ownership or feudal succession; there's a big fight in which Itto's unbeatable samurai technique and/or the unexpected involvement of Daigoro carry the day; and we finally learn that Itto was hired by someone and on the job all along.

It's an enjoyable formula, though, and the strangeness helps to keep you engaged. The book is also interesting as a piece of historical fiction. It turns out (according to the last story in the book) that certain aspects of the decline of Japanese feudalism, particularly the disappearance of the shogun's assassin and executioner clans, remain unexplained; Lone Wolf and Cub, says Koike, "is one answer to this mystery."

Night Watch

Author: Sergei Lukyanenko
Year: 1998
Genre: Fantasy

On the question of good versus evil, most science fiction takes the line of Spider-Man: with great power comes great responsibility ... and it's not hard to figure out where that responsibility lies. Night Watch presents a different point of view. In between fast-paced magical action scenes and suspenseful vampire-stalking, its hero frets over exactly what it means to be an agent of the Light.

This question is particularly difficult in a world where Good and Evil coexist under an uneasy truce. Their Treaty allows every good action by an agent of the Light to be countered by an evil action by the Dark, so there is no real gain. Besides, helping one person could cause unintended harm to others down the line. For that reason, the forces of Light attempt to maintain the status quo while their bosses quietly engineer social revolutions in the background. Only by such drastic means, they believe, can they gain a decisive advantage over Evil. The only problem is that it's never worked before ...

Something about this combination seems characteristically Russian to me. Of course, we associate Russia with fat novels full of implacable moral obscurity; I guess Lukyanenko is like a cross between Dostoyevsky and Joss Whedon.

I can't imagine how well that comes out in the movie, though (not to mention the video game). I've heard the movie compared to The Matrix, which, for all its supposed philosophical symbolism, looked to me like just another action flick.

Battle Royale

Author:Koushun Takami
Year:1999
Genre:Thriller

It's not often I read a book that's billed as a "high-octane thriller," but when I do, I guess I usually enjoy it. This was no exception - it's a gritty, ultraviolent story of 42 junior-high classmates who are forced by a totalitarian government to fight each other to the death. It could easily have turned into a one-dimensional hack-and-slashfest, but the author decided instead to give some little bit of personality to each character. It sort of felt like being in a big public school class - some people only appear briefly and you only know them as "track and field girl," "pop idol-crazy girl," or "baseball jock." The others - the ones you spend more time with - you get to know well, especially who they have a crush on. Yes, in between machine gun rounds, jungle tracking, and survivalist techniques, these 14-year-olds are realistically boy- and girl-crazy.

While I was along for the ride, I enjoyed Battle Royale, but it didn't quite live up to my expectations in the end. For one thing, it invited comparisons to Lord of the Flies, but I remember Golding's book as having much more to say about tribalism, mysticism, and brutality, while Takami falls short. The first few deaths did seem to symbolize the vicissitudes of life under a totalitarian regime - the student killed on a whim of a government agent, the couple whose love is so perfect that they commit suicide together rather than risk being murdered apart - but in the end, the story just hammers away on the idea that people will do anything if circumstances are extreme enough. I didn't really need "Sweet Valley Death Match" to tell me that.

My other complaint was that the ending was too easy to figure out. If you take it as a given that the end of the "game" can't go as the government intended, you're only left with so many possibilities. Really, most of the suspense comes from wondering which supporting character will die next, and how.

Most of the deaths are pretty gruesome and graphic. Seems like this guy hated junior high school even more than I did.