Letter from Peking (1957), by Pearl S Buck

 

This book is a bit of a find... a hardback first edition of a Nobel Prize winner, still in its original dust-jacket. And the Nobel Prize winner is none other than Pearl S. Buck.  This is her Wikipedia entry (links removed):

Pearl Sydenstricker Buck (June 26, 1892 – March 6, 1973; also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu; Chinese: 賽珍珠) was an American writer and novelist. As the daughter of missionaries, Buck spent most of her life before 1934 in Zhenjiang, China. Her novel The Good Earth was the best-selling fiction book in the United States in 1931 and 1932 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces". She was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

And also one of only fourteen women to win the prize.

My copy of The Good Earth is an old 1970s paperback so it was nice to see Letter from Peking with its quaint illustration.  The artist, CWB, whoever he/she was, has captured not only the lovely autumn trees on a Vermont farm, but also the body language of a woman who can't quite believe what she is reading in her letter.  But, prompted by the blurb's statement that the book is wholly without propagandist aim I think there may have also been another purpose to this illustration, and that may have been to reassure potential readers with the book's American setting.  It was 1957, during the Cold War, and the Communist Revolution in China had consolidated its grip on power.  As we see in the book, amongst ordinary people there was a real fear of China and suspicion of anyone favourable to it.  Even a writer as well-loved as Pearl Buck may have needed to be careful.

The contents of the letter are not fully revealed until the end of the book, but Gerald's words haunt the story.  This couple has been separated for five years now, Gerald staying in China after the Communists took power, while sending Elizabeth and their son Rennie back to safety in America.  Letters have been intermittent, and always sent via clandestine means.  This one has been mailed from Hong Kong, and it is inside an envelope addressed by a strange hand.

I read the letter, over and over again.  In the silent autumn air, no wind stirring, the bright leaves floated down.  I could hear Gerald's voice speaking the words he had written.

My dear wife:

First, before I say what must be said, let me tell you that I love you. Whatever I do now, remember that it is you I love. If you never receive a letter from me again, know that in my heart I write you every day. (p.10) 

The rest of the letter affects her so profoundly that she puts it away in a drawer, determined never to read it again.  But she is not angry.  Because Gerald is bi-racial and she had to stand up to her racist mother to marry him, she believes that there is something very special about their love and is determined not to relinquish it.  This faith in her husband's love and fidelity sustains her over the difficult days ahead.

Born in China to a Chinese woman and his American father known as 'Baba', Gerald met Elizabeth when he came to America to study at Harvard.  She went with him when he returned to his homeland, and they lived very happily there, their contentment marred only by the death of a baby daughter.  Americans were not welcome after the Revolution, but it was always intended that the separation would be temporary and that they would be reunited. They did not expect suspicion to fall on Gerald because he had always been accepted in China as one of their own.

Rennie, as he comes of age in Vermont, however, is uncomfortable about his Chinese heritage.  He is not obviously bi-racial in appearance and he conceals his parentage from his first girlfriend.  Elizabeth is uneasy about this fledgling relationship, and meddles, using his Chinese antecedents to expose the racism of the girl and her family.  Like any all-American boy, Rennie takes a dim view of this.

The story is told entirely from Elizabeth's point-of-view, written as if the text is a diary.  She is reflective, but not entirely self-aware.  When they travel to Kansas to rescue Baba in his old age, she doesn't respond to the neighbour's accusation that they were folks who let an old man wander around alone.  Yet she admits to herself that they were selfish and wrong to believe that anyone who reached America had reached heaven. 

We thought of Baba as safe merely because he had left the troubled provinces of China.  We had a few letters from him, placid letters, saying that he was comfortable and we were not to worry about him, that he had found friends.  And beset with our own worries, in wars and dangers, we simply forgot him.  (p.56) 

Most of what I see at Goodreads focusses on the race and cultural issues that arise in the book, and although it's not great literature in terms of style or form, Letter from Peking is a milestone because of the way that it tackles the prejudice both implicit and explicit in the experiences of Elizabeth's son.  But IMO there's more to it than that:

When I look at my reading record, I don't seem to have come across another book from this era that features a sole parent.  The book shows the loneliness, the doubts about how to raise her son and his growing urge towards independence, and having to fend off unwanted attentions from men (nice though they are).  It shows her managing the farm, making decisions alone, putting in long hours of hard outdoor work and having to negotiate with a patronising man over the purchase of some sheep.  Though the culture of filial piety and duty is very strong in China, it shows that it is she who takes on responsibility for Gerald's elderly father, and it is she who tends him as his body and mind fail.

For a book that's over 60 years old now, its message still reverberates today.

Author: Pearl S. Buck
Title: Letter from Peking
Publisher: Methuen, London, 1957,
ISBN: none.  First edition, hardback.
Source: Personal library, OpShopFind, $5.00. 

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

Klara and the Sun (2021), by Kazuo Ishiguro

 

It's not often that we get to read a new novel by a living winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.  This is partly because most laureates, by the time they win, are getting on a bit; partly because the judges have a fondness for poetry; and partly because we often have to wait for translations of novels written in other languages.   At the time of writing this, the living Nobel laureates who write novels are Patrick Modiano, who won in 2014; Mario Vargas Llosa (2010); J. M. G. Le Clézio (2008); Orhan Pamuk (2006); J M Coetzee (2003); and Kenzaburō Ōe (1994).

So Klara and the Sun, the first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017, is cause for some excitement, and it's well-deserved.  It's a remarkable book.

BEWARE: SPOILERS ABOUT NEVER LET ME GO and KLARA AND THE SUN (but nothing about The Big One!)

Ishiguro's preoccupation with a future that is already with us continues.  Never Let Me Go (2005) explored the idea of creating clones to use for their body parts, when already we know that some parents conceive children so that they can harvest bone marrow or 'spare parts' such as kidneys for a child already born.  (Jodi Picoult wrote about this in her novel My Sister's Keeper in 2004).  There are also reports that body parts are harvested unethically in some countries: China reportedly takes body parts from convicted criminals, and people living in extreme poverty in India are reduced to selling theirs.

In Never Let Me Go, the clones were not fully human, but seemed so.  They were kept together until their body parts were needed and they formed asexual relationships with each other.  The narrator spoke in a curiously flat, detached tone, but she became real to the reader and so her inevitable ending was distressing.  Klara and the Sun OTOH envisages a world where the genetic enhancement of children is widespread, and where privileged adolescents with no real friends of their own, can have an AF, a 'friend' created with AI, artificial intelligence. These AFs are very sophisticated creations: they have the ability to 'learn' their human friend and while they are programmed always to put the interests of the human first, they also have the ability to weigh alternatives and to make judgments.  Once purchased, they become part of the household... though to what extent depends a great deal.

As it turns out Josie does have a human friend—Rick, who lives next door—but he is socially disadvantaged. Ishiguro reveals this carefully, at first letting his readers wonder why Rick is ostracised by teenagers and parents alike.  He's different in some way that arouses prejudice, and the reader can only guess why that is, until it's revealed that it's because he has not been 'lifted'.  His mother's choice not to have him genetically modified affects all his life chances.  He will struggle to get into a university unless he can convince one of them to offer him one of the scarce places for un-lifted children because he's exceptionally clever.

The story begins in the shop where Klara and Rosa wait for someone to buy them.  The manager soon realises that Klara has exceptional powers of observation, even though she is so limited in what she can see in her environment.  However, as the novel progresses we see that her vision is distorted, showing us, accurately, how complex vision is—how the human eye assembles what it is before it into coherent images because the human mind makes that possible.  Even these sophisticated AFs can't replicate all the functions of the human body and mind.  What Klara 'sees' is an assemblage of boxes, messing up her near and distance vision.  As it turns out, it is not merely her vision that is distorted.

Josie, when she finally persuades her mother to investigate the purchase of an AF, is at pains to reassure Klara that she will be happy with them even though she is not always well.  Gradually the reader comes to understand the reason why there are few children available for real friendships...

Klara is so lifelike that the reader can't help but empathise, but occasionally feels foolish for doing so.  (It is, after all, not unlike caring about a Siri or an Alexia.) Klara's observations are both naïve and incisive, as when she 'learns' that Rick shows his other selves in certain situations.  He can be offhand, honest, sincere and guarded with her; he's kind, confused and irritated when he's with Josie; he's scornful and defensive when he's invited to an 'interaction meeting' designed to teach adolescents how to be with each other before they go to university; and he's anxious, caring and angry with his mother Helen.  Klara is very clever at negotiating these different selves.

However, what Ishiguro shows so clearly is that AI is very intelligent but it only 'learns' what is presented to it, so its perceptions are distorted.  We all know how AI is used to track us as consumers: a Google search for a brand of car shows up in advertising on Facebook and Twitter; a search for a book at Goodreads shows up as adverts in online newspapers.  We can trick it by searching for something we would never buy, and until recently we tended not to think it was harmful because it's only tracking just one of our selves, i.e. our selves as consumers.  Now in a post-Trump world we know that AI manipulates political choices as well, so we are not as sanguine as we were...

Klara, however, can also get things horribly wrong.  Knowing that she is solar-powered, she has translated her own dependence on the sun into a 'belief' that the Sun is an omnipotent, benign being.  She thinks the Sun intervenes to do good in the world, and that he can be persuaded to help in certain situations.  Ultimately, this leads to a situation where Klara recognises that self-sacrifice is required, and thus the novel asks us to consider what it is that makes us human.  Is it love?

Highly recommended.

Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
Title: Klara and the Sun
Cover design by Faber
Publisher: Faber, 2021
ISBN: 9780571364886
Review copy courtesy of Faber via Allen & Unwin Australia

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

Hunger (1890), by Knut Hamsun, translated by George Egerton

 

Hunger (Sult) (1890) by Norwegian author Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) is, as Wikipedia and 1001 Books tells us, a very significant book in the history of the novel.

Hamsun's reputation has suffered from his Nazi sympathies, but his early, semi-autobiographical portrait of the writer as a hungry young man is a seminal modernist classic.  Influenced by Dostoevsky, Hamsun here develops a kind of Nietzschean individualism that rebelled against both naturalism and the progressive literary politics associated with Ibsen.  The urban angst of Hunger prefigures the alienated cityscapes of Kafka, but with an insistence on tensions between everyday economics and colloquial reverie worthy of James Kelman.

(1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, Edited by Peter Boxall, ABC Books, 2006 Edition, ISBN: 9780733321214, p.206)

Wikipedia tells us Hamsun pioneered techniques of stream of consciousness and interior monologue and Isaac Bashevis Singer called Hamsun "the father of the modern school of literature in his every aspect—his subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, his use of flashbacks, his lyricism. The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun."  He influenced numerous authors including Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Herman Hesse and Ernest Hemingway, and he won the Nobel Prize in 1920 "for his monumental work, Growth of the Soil."

But all of this is forgotten as you read the book.  Reading this portrait of a distressed young man at the end of his physical and psychological tether is an intensely emotional experience.  It's only 134 pages but it took four days to read it, because it is so overwhelming.  It was written in the late 19th century but when we read it today it is with a consciousness of how serious poverty was before the Russian Revolution propelled capitalist economies into developing welfare reforms.  In extremis, the unnamed narrator has nothing to turn to but judgemental charity and the spasmodic kindness of friends, and today in the 21st century that is still how it is in many countries around the world.  His vivid depictions of the state he is in, are brutal.

Although there are comic episodes to relieve the tension, it is the poignant moments that will stay with me.  Wandering about in a market where he has (literally) no money to buy anything, and indeed he has pawned his waistcoat to give some money to a beggar, he comes across the woman who had potted plants for sale.

The heavy crimson roses—the leaves of which glowed blood-like and moist in the damp morning—made me envious, and tempted me sinfully to snatch one, and I inquired the price of them merely as an excuse to approach as near to them as possible.

If I had any money I would buy one, no matter how things went; indeed I might well save a little now and then out of my way of living to balance things again. (p.22) 

This yearning for roses despite his acute poverty, and his fantasy that he might save up for some from his non-existent earnings is quite heart-breaking.

The reader, invested in his survival almost from the first page, segues from moments of anxiety, alarm, hope, exasperation and despair as the young man sabotages himself repeatedly.  He is very confident in his ability to earn a living from his writing; he thinks that he just needs the right conditions to get his stories down on paper and editors will accept them for publication.  But he does not have the right conditions: he hasn't paid his rent and has been asked to leave, he spends a night sleeping rough and he is reduced to scribbling his stories on a park bench.  When one of his stories is accepted and he is able to rent a windswept loft, he loses his keys in a bizarre sequence of events and spends a night in a pitch-dark police cell for the homeless.  And when he is offered a bed for the night with a family, he behaves in such a peculiar way that he is asked to leave there too.  A last gasp attempt to sell his tie and his shaving tickets to a friend fails because he abandons the attempt, overcome with embarrassment, leaving the packet behind.

(Apparently at this time, men did not shave at home, they bought books of tickets to be shaved at a barber.)

He is always so acutely aware of what others might think of him that he tries desperately to conceal his straitened circumstances.  A friend lent him a blanket but he doesn't want to be seen carrying it when he's homeless, so he gets it wrapped up to look as if he's carrying a parcel.  He lies all the time to save face, giving false names, refusing help, rejecting a small loan from an editor and pretending to be employed.  It's a way of preserving his fragile self-esteem, and pride is all you've got when you've got nothing, but it's self-destructive too.

His interior monologues range from fantasies to hallucinations to dialogues with God, who he thinks is orchestrating his miseries as a test while Demons are grinding their teeth in frustration because he hasn't yet committed an unpardonable sin.

The cumulative effects of hunger are wearing him down, but he's not bitter.  When he finally stoops to begging, he gets nothing for it.  His last desperate attempt at the pawnshop sees him cutting the buttons off his coat, but they're worthless.  It is a relief when there is a reprieve: he he meets a friend, similarly penniless, but able to helps him out a little.

However, he becomes aware that he's talking to himself and having freakish thoughts, and the reader can't always differentiate between his deluded state and what is actually happening.  As a portrait of a man on the edge of an abyss, Hunger is unforgettable.

Author: Knut Hamsun
Title: Hunger (Sult)
Translated from the Norwegian by George Egerton
Publisher: Dover Publications, 2003 (first published 1890)
ISBN: 9780486431680, pbk., 134 pages
Source: Personal library 

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

Herzog (2015), by Saul Bellow

 

Within a page or two of opening Saul Bellow's masterpiece Herzog, I began to wonder how I might write about it.  It has an authoritative introduction by Phillip Roth, it's a classic of American literature, it's by a famous Nobel Laureate (i.e. distinct from the obscure ones we've never heard of) and it's listed in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.  What could I possibly say about it that hasn't been said before?

So I've decided not to write in my usual format.  If you want to know what the book is about, visit Goodreads or Wikipedia.  And here is an excerpt from 1001 Books as well:

The novel that made Saul Bellow's name as a literary best-seller is a comedy of manners and ideas, loss and partial redemption.  The cuckolded academic Moses Herzog is neurotically restless, a pathological condition that notably manifests itself in his habit of composing unsent letters to the great and good of past and present times.

[...]

We follow Herzog's musings on the events that have brought him to this state, most notably his amatory betrayal at the hands of his former friend Valentine Gersbach, and we follow him physically as he heads into Chicago for an abortive attempt at bloody revenge.  (p.565)

On the back of this centenary edition, there's a quotation from Dave Eggars, and what he says there is true: there is something to make a reader stop and think on almost every page.  So I'm just going to share my thoughts about pages 102-3, which stopped me in my tracks...

What Bellow is on about on these two pages is the burden of selfhood and self-development. 

Herzog was first published in 1964, and it was not long after Hannah Arendt had published her ground-breaking book The Human Condition (1958) and even more relevant to the preoccupations of this novel, her report called Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). The website Brain Pickings summarises her point that while acts of evil can mushroom into monumental tragedies, the individual human perpetrators of those acts are often marked not with the grandiosity of the demonic but with absolute mundanity.  And whether or not Arendt's thinking is misunderstood, it seems to have triggered a great deal of post-Holocaust soul-searching about the possibilities of evil in all of us.  In Herzog, Herzog the character is constantly reflecting on his own nature and moral qualities - and in this part of the novel the reader finds him not only exhausted by the struggle to interrogate his own being but also resentful of the quest.

He knows himself a failure in need of a cure:

But this was becoming the up-to-date and almost conventional way of looking at any single life.  In this view, the body itself, with its two arms and vertical length, was compared to the Cross, on which you knew the agony of consciousness and separate being.

He interprets what has happened to him (his wife Madeleine's betrayal) and his lawyer Sandor's advice as...

a collective project, himself participating, to destroy his vanity and his pretensions to a personal life so that he might disintegrate and suffer and hate, like so many others, not on anything so distinguished as a cross, but down in the mire of post-Renaissance, post-humanistic, post-Cartesian dissolution, next door to the Void. 

One modern idea that excites his terrible little heart is that

you must sacrifice your poor, squawking, niggardly individuality - which may be nothing anyway (from an analytic viewpoint) but a persistent infantile megalomania, or (from a Marxian point of view) a stinking little bourgeois property - to historical necessity.  And to truth.  And truth is true only as it brings down more disgrace and dreariness upon human beings, so that if it shows anything except evil it is illusion and not truth.

 Well, #musing what do I think about this?  If we interrogate ourselves - our moral values, our actions, our beliefs about ourselves and our loved ones and the world - and we don't come to the conclusion that any and all of us have a capacity for evil, is that illusion?  Is it self-delusion?  Must that be the wrong conclusion to come to?

Herzog goes on to castigate himself:

But of course he, Herzog, predictably bucking such trends, had characteristically, obstinately, defiantly, blindly but without sufficient courage or intelligence tried to be a marvellous Herzog, a Herzog who perhaps clumsily, tried to live out marvellous qualities vaguely comprehended.  Granted he had gone too far, beyond his talents and his powers, but this was the cruel difficulty of a man who had strong impulses, even faith, but lacked clear ideas.  What if he failed? Did that really mean there was no faithfulness, no generosity, no sacred quality? Should he have been a plain, unambitious Herzog? No. And Madeleine would never have married such a type.

Because he's in such emotional pain, he goes on to say with bitterness that she only wanted an 'ambitious' Herzog in order to trip him, bring him low, knock him sprawling and kick out his brains.  But his question lingers.

Did that really mean there was no faithfulness, no generosity, no sacred quality?

Reading this in the 21st century, post 9/11 and when there are people - mostly men so shockingly young - who are perpetrating evil even on innocent children and people of their own faith, it's easy to lose faith in the fundamental goodness of human beings.  In the middle of the 20th century when Hannah Arendt was writing her books and intellectuals like Bellow were trying to make sense of a world that had changed irrevocably, the world had been shocked by the Holocaust and the crimes of Stalin (denounced by Khrushchev in 1956).  Yet Bellow, a Jew himself, is in Herzog asserting that at the personal level there could be 'faithfulness',  'generosity', and a 'sacred quality' to human interaction, and that there must be 'obstinate', 'defiant' people who - with or without 'sufficient courage or intelligence' try to be marvellous. 

It's a fundamentally optimistic view of the world, expressed in an exuberant characterisation and an often amusing plot.

Author: Saul Bellow
Title: Herzog
Introduction by Philip Roth
Publisher: Penguin, 2015
ISBN: 9780143107675
Source: Kingston Library 

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.