The Life of an Amorous Woman, by Ihara Saikaku

 

0811201872

New Directions, 1963

translated by Ivan Morris

402 pp

paperback

There are several different works encompassed in this volume, and the main reason I picked up this book was because I had decided one day not too long ago that I wanted to watch a movie on the Criterion Channel called The Life of Oharu (1952), and as I started doing a bit of pre-viewing research, I discovered that it was adapted from one of the stories in this book. Next step: I bought a copy.  While I actually read all of the pieces included here, my main focus was the story that  Saikaku wrote as Kōshoku Ichidai Onna (1686), or as the title translates it, Life of an Amorous Woman.  

Just a bit about the writing itself: according to the introduction to this book, Saikaku Ihara was the "originator and greatest exponent" of a genre of writing called ukiyo-zōshi  or tales of the floating world.  We are told here that it was a "bourgeois literature written mainly for the amusement and instruction of townsmen in the large commercial cities," first written in the vernacular kana language, (kana-zōshi) meaning that it was more available to and more widely understood by the literate masses.  As Wikipedia notes, it emerged as a "distinctly plebian form of literature," with its readership consisting "mostly of non-aristocratic residents of Japan's growing cities."    The content of  ukiyo-zōshi, according to the book's introduction, was generally full of  descriptions of the "colourful life of the cities and accounts of the popular actors and courtesans who inhabited the Floating World."  It also, "on occasion" tended to include "highly erotic content" as well as describing what went on in the licensed pleasure quarters of the time and other things of audience interest. 

from my copy of the book; caption reads "A Street in the gay quarters of seventeenth-century Kyoto."

Kōshoku Ichidai Onna begins with the arrival of two men at a hermitage, not the home of any sort of priest but rather "an old lady of noble visage... bent double with age."  The narrator has followed them there, and he hears the woman ask why they've come.   It seems that both are "hard put to understand love in all its divers aspects," and after hearing of her "great repute," they have come to "learn these mysteries." They ask her to recall her life story, "with all its wanton doings" and she obliges. Her story begins with her having been born into a life of privilege and having a presence at court, and the love affair that got her banished and her low-ranking lover executed.  As she gets older she must somehow navigate through a life that lands her in a variety of different roles including courtesan, concubine, servant, hairdresser and others up through the present moment, each a step down from the last.   

Using her story, Saikaku examines the transient nature of fortune, the rigidity of social structures and a society that both profits from and punishes women's sexuality.  The narrator here also has to find some way to maintain her own survival not only while she is young and healthy, but even more so as her beauty begins to fade and she grows older.   The irony runs deep throughout this episodic tale, and while the author offers his readers humor and wit, there is a true sadness at its core that makes this woman's story even more poignant.  There are times, however, that it is entirely cringeworthy; for instance,  at the court, our narrator is only ten when she begins to discover her own sexual feelings and twelve when she loses her virginity, and there are other descriptions of the same sort of thing here and there that made for difficult reading.   When all is said and done however, I couldn't stop reading, although someone should do a newer translation because this one is incomplete, with only fourteen stories selected from Kōshoku Ichidai Onna presented here.  Evidently at the time, the reasoning was that the "translator's aim" was evidently to provide a sort of "wide view" of Saikaku's writing and to offer a "better idea of his scope than would the translation of a single work."  Aarrgh. 

**********

from Criterion 

Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, The Life of Oharu (1952) is described at the Criterion website as "an epic portrait of an inexorable fall from grace,"  with the main character an "imperial lady-in-waiting who gradually descends to street prostitution."   Needless to say, it's as bleak as the novel and the director lets you feel every bit of the pain this woman endures for the length of the film.   It opens a bit differently than the book, with the narrator (here known as Oharu) out in the cold night trying to ply her trade as prostitute with no takers.  She eventually makes her way to shelter at a small temple where there are hundreds of images of arhats on display all around; there is one in particular that catches her eye, transposing into her first love at the time she had served as a lady-in-waiting at the Imperial court and the banishment of Oharu and her family.     From there her story begins, taking her through the many twists in circumstance she will endure throughout her life before the action returns to the temple at the end.  While things do change from the book in the film,  what doesn't is that  she makes it to several points where she might actually be happy, only to have each  chance snatched away by fate or by someone else's interference.  As in the novel, she is both exploited and subjugated, heartbreakingly so, and yet somehow her inner strength continues.    I have to say, The Life of Oharu was a bit of a tear-jerker.  

I can certainly recommend both the book (although it is incomplete, there is enough there for coherence) and film, but bring a tissue for the latter. 

The Emperor, by Markenzy Orcel

9781803093666

Seagull Books, 2024

originally published as L'Empereur, 2021

translated by Nathan H. Dize

hardcover

read earlier

145 pp

I can't for the life of me remember where I first came across this book, but I'm definitely happy that I did.  I liked it so much that I recently  bought this author's The Immortals, also translated by Nathan Dize,  published in 2020. At this point I'd read anything else he's written or will write in the future.  Another excellent Seagull publication, for sure,  the sort of book that speaks to why I love translated fiction so very much.  

The main character of this story goes unnamed until closer to the end, and even then not actually afforded a name, only the initial P.  (as I will refer to him here).   The beginning of the book finds him sitting in his small room in Port-Au-Prince waiting for the police, with the evidence of his crime next to him.  He knows two things: one, he "asked for none of this" -- that he was just waiting for a bus --  and two,  that the knock on the door that just happened isn't the police, because "they don't open doors here," they just kick it down.  More importantly though (and somewhat cryptically for the reader, at least in this early section) he feels that 

"... even after the police arrive to beat me down, walk all over me, crush me and all the other things we alow only criminals to endure, before putting me in handcuffs and tossing me in their wagon on a one-way trip to hell," 

he will be able to find some kind of freedom.  

Very briefly, because as usual to tell too much is definitely to ruin the experience,  The Emperor is a novel whose beginning is also its ending, but the journey back to that small room and his search for freedom begins with the story of P.'s life before he gets to that point.  It starts with him  having been left on the side of the road as a small child, having only a vague recollection of 

"a hand caressing my cheeks, of a soft and broken voice that told me, 'Wait right there, sooner or later the bus will appear; get on board and let the bus take you far away',"

 and believing that his parents might have been among those who had given their children "up to nature" after a hurricane which had "ravaged the southern region of the island."  That particular story he will "never be able to tell," because he really has no idea of what actually happened. He does remember being taken to a lakou, where he acted as "restavèk, a slave, a sheep, an entertainer for the spirits, tasked with calling upon them" through his drumming, having to master the art at first but eventually developing a style as one which "awakened the dogs in me."  The so-called Emperor, who ended up taking control of the lakou, was the "only one to speak, the great pensive master at the centre of attention, at once the shepherd and the top dog, there, where time begins and the horizon ends."  In describing the Emperor as a shepherd,  P. continues the metaphor by labeling the people as sheep,  whose minds the Emperor had addled and crushed, while "diverting their gaze from reality."  Houses that were "planted around" the man's own dwelling were "not homes but narrow sheep pens, ajoupas, huts, used to corral an entire flock of absent souls, followers who are force-fed truths and falsehoods by the mystical master."   P. describes himself as "the imperfect sheep, the one who does not wait to be invited, to be told to go ahead and graze." The only person he trusts is the "very old sheep," whose ancestors had lived in the time of the Haitian Revolution,  who mainly stays silent but completely gets what's going on in the lakou.  It is a solitary life P. lives, and as he withdraws deeper into this solitude, his only true companion is his inner voice that he calls "The Other Within."  His years in the lakou are harrowing, but he does eventually manage to get away and find a life in Port-au Prince.  It is in this city where his crime occurs, with events in the capital taking us back to the beginning of the novel as he awaits the police.  By this time, the reader has a solid grip on why P. refers to his crime as having been "unavoidable."

 It doesn't take long for P. to realize that in moving to the capital he has traded life in one lakou for life in another,  with an employer who in his own way, is another corrupt Emperor figure, holding power over his employees,  and people choosing to read about what's happening in the newspaper ("the analgesic writings the watchdogs of the status quo use to brainwash us, to crush us, to jettison us all ...")  rather than to stick their noses outside "and attempt to change" things.   At one point he asks where people turn who are  "angry, who refuse to accept injustice and the sanctioned moral order," concluding that "We'd all leave if we could, every single one of us," to escape the "black hole" where they live. 

Orcel delivers with huge impact, building the story of not just one life, but that of a nation which has been plagued by corrupt leaders, failed institutions and violence, a world that "brings death to freedom."  I can't really do the novel the justice it deserves here, but it is both haunting, immediate and hugely relevant,  a story with writing that worms its way into your psyche and under your skin and makes you feel.  I can think of no higher praise.  Definitely and hugely recommended. 

Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case, by Elsa Drucaroff

 

9781739298937

Corylus Books, 2024

originally written as El último caso de Rodolfo Walsh, 2010

translated by Slava Faybysh

180 pp

paperback

 (read earlier this month)

Not all that long ago I got a news feed about the 2024  Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and immediately downloaded the entire list of 148 eligible titles in thirty-five languages.  Some of these I've read,   so I went through and picked out an unread title at random.  It was this book, Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case, about which I hesitated at first because the title sounds like one of those mystery novels where authors use "real historical figures as sleuths" (from an article in CrimeReads) which has never really worked for me and come across as sort of cheesy.  But the more I looked at the synopsis, the more I found myself attracted because of the setting -- the military dictatorship of Argentina in 1976.  

In the author's Afterword, she notes that the idea for this book came to her while having her students read various works by Rodolfo Walsh.  One of these, "Letter to my Friends" as she says,

"in which he recounts the death of his daughter, it struck me that concealed within this extraordinary text lay subtle elements from which a full history could be imagined." 

Rodolfo Walsh was a crime novelist/detective story writer who went on to become an investigative journalist, an activist and eventually the chief intelligence officer for the Montoneros, who were, in a nutshell (and for this novel's purposes) left-wing Peronist guerillas active in  their opposition to the right-wing military dictatorship in Argentina.  His book Operation Massacre (1957) had broken new ground in (as a back-cover blurb of my copy from Seven Stories Press notes) "personal investigative journalism."  Walsh had also founded the clandestine news agency ANCLA in 1976 as a response to government censorship as well as the "Information Chain,"  which produced pamphlets of information  meant for "hand-to-hand" distribution."  In this story, the author imagines Walsh as a "protagonist living in those times, a detective, an artist and a militant," saying that he was "all those things" ... 

"doing what he always did, intervening in events the only way he knew how: as a detective in search of the truth."

Here, that search for truth is paramount as Walsh sets out to investigate his daughter's death.  

Walsh and his wife Lila  are at home visiting with their activist friends Pablo and Mariana who have come to announce their pregnancy.  During the visit, they are all alerted to the radio by the "Radio Colonia jingle."  The "dispatch" comes "from across the river in Uruguay," which offers "all the news that's prohibited by the Argentine military goverrnment" and details an attack at a house in Buenos Aires by the Army.   In that house were five people,  members of the Montoneros, "apparently shot dead."  Of the five, the only woman in the house was known to be María Victoria Walsh,  Rodolfo's daughter.   However, one eyewitness on the scene reported that she had not been killed, but had instead been taken prisoner, alive.  The four are completely in shock at the news, but Walsh holds on to the hope offered by the observations of the eyewitness.  Doing what he can to pick up any information, he visits the scene in disguise (evidently something he did often in real life)  to try to picture what had happened there and to look for any sort of clues that may have been left behind.   Getting Vicky's mother involved, she learns nothing from official channels, but there may be someone who can help.    Not too long after the news of his daughter becomes known, Walsh is asked for a meeting by a retired military colonel who offers to try to find out what had happened to her. As it happens, although on opposite sides, some years earlier Walsh had written a story about  Colonel König who believes that Walsh had "vindicated" and "understood" him for doing "what was right." *  There is just one thing he wants in return: if ever Walsh hears that the Colonel's own wayward daughter might be in danger, he will let König know so that he can takes steps to keep her out of the hands of the military.   This may sound like an uneasy alliance, but Walsh's disagreements with his fellow Montoneros and his growing concern over their changing tactics have left him with very few people he can actually trust. 

While it may be set up as a sort of detective story, Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case is a solid piece of historical fiction, set during one of Argentina's darkest times, and the author has captured the danger, the insecurities and the uncertainties of the period  as well as the fault lines that are developing among various sections of society, including Walsh's own Montoneros.  The green Ford Falcons slowly making their way through the streets of Buenos Aires are constant reminders of state surveillance, and anyone at any time could be in danger of being picked up, carted away and tortured,  killed or disappeared by government agents.   At the same time, the novel probes the psychological effects of people caught up in this maelstrom, as the author explores the internal contradictions of the main characters, which takes this book in a direction I did not expect.   Due to the subject matter it's a difficult story to read at times, but to her credit, Drucaroff never veers off into the sentimental, nor does she load the novel down with standard detective-story fare.

Considering I chose this book completely at random, it turned out to be powerful and compelling, a novel I couldn't stop reading, and one I can certainly recommend to readers who have an interest in this time period.   

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*You can read this story, "That Woman" at World Literature Today . 

The Owl Cries, by Hye-Young Pyun

 

9781956763508

Arcade Publishing, 2023

originally published 2012 as Seojjok supeuro gatda

translated by Sora Kim-Russell

299 pp

hardcover

(read in April)

I first came across the author when I read her novel The Hole a few years ago and I've been buying her books ever since.  That novel was absolutely chilling, not only in the telling but also in its implications once that last page had been turned.  Her latest novel, published last year is The Owl Cries, which like The Hole, involves a master of manipulation.  

It's the "off-season" for hiking in the forest where In-su Park is the current ranger, meaning that the forest is closed and no one is allowed in.   Used to turning people away, he is about to do the same to a stranger who arrives in a "nice jacket, with a dress shirt and tie," definitely "not an outfit for hiking in the woods." His boss had warned him that "radical environmentalists or ecologists" liked to show up at times, "to deliver canned sermons to the rangers."  But this man is not a hiker, nor does he fall into the environmentalist/ecologist category -- he is Ha-in Lee,  there to look for his older brother, Gyeong-in who had last spoken to him some six months earlier in a mysterious call in which Gyeong-in was sobbing instead of talking.   Their mother had heard from the brother as well, who could only say that "the owl was crying and the trees were attacking."  He is at the ranger station as a starting point,  because Gyeong-in had last been known to have worked there, prior to In-su taking the job.   Although Ha-in actually hates his abusive brother, their mother was "worried" and he felt it his "duty" to find him.   Questioning In-su Park, however, gets Ha-in nowhere, since In-su had only been in this job a short time and he knows nothing.   Ha-in makes his way to the small company town near the forest but no one there seems to know anything either, leaving him to question whether or not Gyeong-in had actually been there in the first place.    As the dustjacket notes, "when an accident and a death derail the investigation,"  the current forest ranger makes a discovery that helps him to decide that he really wants to know what happened to his predecessor, and sadly, he gets much more than he bargained for in the process.

Ha-in's search for his brother is what launches this story, which ultimately picks up the voices of the various people of this small village, each of whom for his or her own reasons have never left despite the severe bottoming out of  the economy there.  Very slowly, the truth of things begins to emerge as the reader begins to wonder what the hell is keeping all of these people stuck in this place, and what actually happened to Gyeong-in.  

I liked this book, didn't love it. What I did enjoy very much is the author's beautiful descriptions of the landscape and her portrayal of the monstrous (albeit very human, not supernatural) presence who looms over this story,  extremely skilled in the art of manipulation and the exercising of power,  preying upon others for his own purposes.  I love when authors spend time on examining psychologies and she is so very good at that here.   On the other hand, The Owl Cries didn't get tiptop reviews on goodreads or at any of the usual places, and I can sort of understand why. For one thing, whoever was in charge of the dustjacket blurb overdid it with the comparisons to "Stephen King, David Lynch, and the nightmare dystopias of Franz Kafka."  I know from reading about the author that King and Kafka are two authors whose work has been an influence on her own, but really, what is written here is overhyping the novel's content, kind of setting up false expectations.  (I keep swearing to myself that I will stop reading these  blurbs, but I do it anyway, and in some instances it is to my own detriment as a reader.)  And while I normally don't mind bleak, this book has absolutely no breaks in the darkness, and it is more than a bit on the murky side heading into the reveals so that even though answers came, for some reason the experience was less than fulfilling.  I know it's unfair to compare books, but The Hole was so bloody good that I supposed I expected more of the same here, and it was a bit of a disappointment when The Owl Cries just didn't measure up. I feel bad about saying that, but, well, there it is.  It actually killed me not to love this novel, but I can't help it. 

That's not to say someone else may not enjoy it; I'm a bit on the demanding side as a reader.  I'll try again with her Law of Lines which I haven't yet read, although it will be a while.

Confession, by Martín Kohan

 

9781913867652

Charco Press, 2023

originally published as Confesión, 2020

translated by Daniel Hahn

162 pp

paperback

(read in March)

Confession is not a long novel, coming in at less than two hundred pages, but its short length disguises the complexity within. It also has a shocker of an ending that completely rattled me for days after finishing this book.  Related in three interconnected parts, the author sets this novel timewise over three periods: before, during and after Argentina's military dictatorship that existed between 1976 and 1983.

Briefly, since to tell any more would be to utterly ruin the reading experience, the narrator of parts one and three is the grandson of a certain Mirta López, and as the novel opens, he takes the reader back to a time in 1941 when his grandmother was a young girl first becoming aware of her sexuality.  It begins with Mirta confessing to her priest at the church of San Patricio in Mercedes.  Sometimes, she says, she experiences a "powerful tremor, a kind of whirpool, only hot, in her stomach, in her whole belly, a thing kind of like a fever and a perspiration ..." that was only calmed by "squeezing her thighs together."   All of this happens whenever she sees the oldest son of the Videla family walking by her dining room window, either going to or from the train station.  He would come home from his school, arriving on Satudays and going back on Sundays, and Mirta waited for him by her window faithfully every weekend.  As her feelings toward the Videla boy intensify and grow more sexual,  the number of trips she makes to the confessional increase, but  her disclosures grow less candid than previously.   Eventually she realizes that she's confessing with "omissions," realizing that if God is "all-knowing" then He must also be all-forgiving.   Mirta goes on to marry, but not to the Videla boy, who married a year later when a lieutenant in the army at the age of 23.  Interspersed throughout this section is another entire strand dealing with the Rio de la Plata, which makes up part of the border between Uruguay and Argentina and upon the shores of which sits the city of Buenos Aires.   The significance of this second narrative strand is highlighted in the second part of this novel, which describes the actions of a group of people, all of whom have "adopted a new name" to create a sort of anonymity as they plot to "strike at the regime, and in as extreme a way as possible." Their plan had been hatched in July of 1976, with the ultimate goal of   "killing the tyrant."  The group's members work both on the streets and below them, trying to conceal what they're doing from prying eyes and from state surveillance, which is everywhere.  In part three, we are reunited with an elderly Mirta López in the present day, during a visit from her grandson at the facility where she now lives.  The author sets up this section brilliantly, as the  two play a card game called truco, the main complexity of which, as noted here, "lies in the need to deceive the opponent and avoid being deceived."   Her short-term memory isn't what it used to be, but she hasn't lost the long-term memory which during this game her grandson tries to plumb to get answers about what she knows about his father who disappeared during the military dictatorship.  Little by little, in between plays of the game, he is able to elicit information that will ultimately tie all of the pieces of this novel together into a unified and extremely painful whole.  

I am drawn to books set during the time of the military dictatorship in Argentina, and Confession left me absolutely stunned. It continued to haunt me for some time, and reflecting on it now brings back all of the feelings it produced the first time around.    Each section of this novel focuses on some aspect of secrets that are held, thoughts or deeds that are left unspoken, things that are both known and unknown -- and what happens when those make their way to the surface.   The author explores the continuing impact of the past on the present, most especially in the ways in which ordinary lives are often randomly caught up in or bound to history.    It is one of the best books I've read this year, and without hesitation I can definitely recommend it.   

The Birthday Party, by Laurent Mauvignier

9781945492655

Transit Books, 2023

originally published 2020 as Histoires de la nuit 

translated by  Daniel Levin Becker

439 pp

I've described this book to friends as a demanding novel due to its style, but once you get used to the way it is written, it becomes unputdownable. It's also a story that eventually began to  fry my nerves until the last page, and I have to admit that more than once I was beyond tempted to just take a peek to make sure everything came out okay.  I didn't, of course, but I really, REALLY wanted to.  

There are three houses in the small hamlet of La Bassée, two of which are occupied and one of which is empty and on the market waiting to be sold.  In one of these houses is the family Bergogne, consisting of Patrice, Marion and their daughter Ida; in the other is their older neighbor, Christine, who lives alone with her dog.  Patrice has carried on the same life he grew up with and had kept the family farm  "in the hands of Bergogne, as his father had wanted."  Marion works in a print shop in the nearby town and Christine is an artist, having left behind "the Parisian life" to able to "do some real work."   

The relationship between Marion and Patrice is somewhat strained; he is overweight, a meek and mild sort of man,  holding in check the violence that he knows is inside of him, the same that he witnessed in his father.  She is younger and more energetic, impulsive; she likes to go out dancing often with her friends,  which makes him feel as though she "prefers their company to his." He never asks about her outings, while she never volunteers anything about them or much else, really.   He does "everything in his power to be pleasant" with her, always worrying about things, especially that she could "leave on a whim" if he did say something.  It's a lonely existence for the two, relieved mainly by the presence of Ida, whom they both love very much and who stays at Christine's house after school while her parents are working.   Marion and Christine don't get along very well, with Christine making sarcastic digs at Marion which Marion answers with silence.   But it's Marion's 40th birthday, and Christine, Ida, and Patrice are preparing for a party he's giving her. While Patrice's invitation to her two work friends is a surprise that Marion knows nothing about, what transpires that evening will be completely unexpected by everyone.

The story covers two days in the lives of these people; in the first, the author allows his characters to go about their business of every day life while allowing the reader a glimpse into the tensions that exist among them,  while in the second he moves them into full-on crisis mode.    The action is slow and very controlled, with the narrative moving from character to character without wrecking the reading flow as the pressure intensifies from moment to moment.  The back blurb notes that the story is a "deft unraveling of the stories we hide from others and from ourselves," which it is in part, but I see it more as an intense character study examining lives that are already on the edge as they become pushed into a situation well beyond their control.  

Labeled as a "gripping tale of the violent irruptions of the past into the present,"  it's easy to understand why this book has been described by so many readers as a thriller -- it is definitely a nailbiter, and I have to say that the author does a fine job of leaving the answer to the key question of "why" all of this is happening until almost the very end, a factor that keeps the pages turning.  The Birthday Party may be frustrating for some people who like swift action, or who don't particularly care for long, streaming paragraphs, but as I noted earlier, once I got the reading rhythm under my belt I did not want to put it down.  I do think though, for reasons I won't get into here, that whoever decided on the title should have used the translated original, as it makes so much more sense and adds another layer of depth to the story as a whole. 

Recommended, for sure. 

the book group read, January 2024: The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro

 

9780307961440

Knopf/Everyman's Library, 2012

originally published 1989

230 pp

hardcover

The Remains of the Day was the reading choice for my IRL book group for January 2024.  We'd read a couple of Ishiguro's novels prior to this one, starting with Never Let Me Go and more recently, Klara and the Sun, but of the three, The Remains of the Day is one that that most fully captured my heart, although  a couple of our members found it to be on the level of snoozefest or not interesting because they couldn't relate to any of the characters.  To each his/her own and all of that, but I loved this book.  

The story is revealed via Mr. Stevens, butler at Darlington Hall where he has served faithfully for decades.  It's the 1950s and the house has had a change of ownership from the original Lord Darlington to an American millionaire by the name of Farraday, who offers Stevens time off and the use of his car while Farraday is off to America.  Stevens decides to accept the offer, having in mind a visit to the former housekeeper, a Miss Kenton (who is now Mrs. Benn), whose recent letter implies a failing marriage. Stevens, who notes that there is a problem with the staff plan, believes that if he can convince Miss Kenton to return to service at Darlington Hall, her presence will fix the problem and everything will be righted again.  At least that's what he tells himself. 

Each day of his road trip is spent recollecting his career while revealing things about himself in the process.  At the forefront of his mind are the concepts of  "dignity" and "greatness" :

"The great butlers are by great virtue of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost; they will not be shaken out by external events, however surprising, alarming or vexing. They wear their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit: he will not let ruffians or circumstances tear it off him in the public gaze; he will discard it when and only when, he wills to do so, and this will invariably be when he is entirely alone.  It is, as I say, a matter of 'dignity'." 

As the trip progresses, he also spends time reflecting on his former employer, who believed that "fair play had not been done at Versailles and that it was immoral to go on punishing a nation for a war that was now over."  In 1923 Darlington had hosted an "unofficial international conference," examining ways in which "the harshest terms of the Versailles treaty could be revised."  He brought together  "a broad alliance of figures" who shared his beliefs as well as those who were concerned about the possibility of the "economic chaos" in Germany spreading worldwide. He continued his work on Germany's behalf throughout the interwar years, bringing Nazis to Darlington Hall, and at one point even ordering Stevens to dismiss two housemaids because they were Jewish, a "duty" which according to Stevens, "demanded to be carried out with dignity."  As he at some later time notes, "A butler's duty is to provide good service. It is not to meddle in the great affairs of the nation."  Through it all, Stevens believed that "Whatever complications arose in his lordship's course over subsequent years," he had acted out of a "desire to see justice in this world."  In the postwar present, of course, Darlington had been outed as a dupe and a Nazi sympathizer, a fact reiterated to Stevens over the course of his travels; his reaction is that is is not his fault if "his lordship's life and work have turned out today to look, at best, a sad waste..."  and that it is "quite illogical" for Stevens to "feel any regret or shame" on his own account.  However, he makes a number of shifts in this thinking while on his journey.   He has always taken great pride in, as noted above,  conquering his feelings when "shaken" by "external events, however surprising, alarming or vexing," but as the book comes to its conclusion,  he will end his journey with some painful realizations about his own life and exactly what price he has paid for his dutiful and faithful service over the decades. 

I love the butler metaphor, and The Remains of the Day is one of those rare books that will stay with me always, largely due to Ishiguro's ability to make Stevens so incredibly human to the point where it's impossible not to find some measure of grief for the man.    It reminds me more than a bit of his Artist of the Floating World, which is also set in a time frame of values shifts in which the main character takes a step back for reflection,  a novel of both memory and tragedy.   Both are beautifully written, but Remains of the Day edges out on top, although very slightly.    Very highly, highly recommended.

February's book group read: Pyre, by Perumal Murugan.

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I followed up my reading with the film from 1993.   As always, it was a bit different from the novel (which I liked better) but so very nicely done, fleshing out much of Stevens' character and offering Miss Kenton more of a presence than the novel afforded her.  When I asked my fellow book group members if they'd seen the movie, some of them had, years ago, and when I mentioned that I'd rented it for $4.00 on Amazon, I got the feeling from some of them that they felt maybe the $4.00 was not worth revisiting the novel as a film. Invisible, inner eyeroll -- their loss, not mine. I couldn't move away from my television while it was playing because it was so very, very good.   I highly recommend it as well, but read the novel first, for sure.