July Reading Stack

Since school started, haven't really had much time left for personal reading. I got my copy of Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man around registration period, and I'm barely a third of the novel in. However, that scant reading lead me to a curiosity about the musician Leonard Cohen and how he's just goyish. The novel has this running commentary about which things/people/habits, etc are Jewish and which are goyish. Cohen stepping into a cafe placing a very green order of soy mocha latte is goyish. It's difficult to explain if you haven't read the book. The novel is also described as "postmodern." Now there's a term which people are always hardup to explain.

Last weekend, faced with the prospect of having no book to read, I ducked into a trusty Booksale branch and got a copy of Alex Garland's The Tesseract, which is set in Manila--lots of crime, dirty little hotels with naked bulbs and blood on the sheets, weather so hot that the lead guy opted to stay inside a McDonald's and watched rich little kids have their blasted kiddie parties. The first chapter reminds me so much of the opening chapter of The Beach. It also reminds me that I still have a cling-wrapped copy of The Coma somewhere in my shelves in Manila. Maybe Garland is a writer best appreciated when you're in your early 20s and with a good head trip.

Also still in its original plastic wrap is The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service by Eiji Otsuka and Housui Yamazaki. The cover is a nice brown craft paper and orange, and the back cover features a body with the parts cut into parts and meant to look like a paper doll that you can join together with staples or something. The series tag line is "Your body is their business!" According to the blurb, Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is about "five young students at a Buddhist university find there's little call for their job skills in today's Tokyo...among the living, that is! But their studies give them a direct line to the dead--the dead who are still trapped in their corpses, and can't move on to their next reincarnation! Whether you died from suicide, murder, sickness, or madness, they'll carry your body anywhere it needs to go to free your soul." Given the topic, the plastic is there to warn off those with weaker stomachs and those under 18 who can't properly appreciate this odd blend of Pushing Daisies, CSI, and maybe Conan the Kid Detective. (The undead also reminds me of Pizzeria Kamikaze, an Israeli comic book wherein all the suicides end up in a world similar to ours, except everyone there died by their own hands and given another chance at, uhm, living. First followed it in Bipolar and it's been turned to a movie: The Wristcutters. Anyway.) There are 5 stories in the volume, so the episodic nature allows you to jump and enjoy one of the adventures. The pullback is that this is just Volume 1 of 9 (as of last count) and it's not exactly as cheap as the other mangas, so following the adventures will be costly.

The last and newest one on my stack is Xiaolu Guo's 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth. I read part (or most?) of it by hanging out in MPH and Borders in Kuala Lumpur last year. It's about a farm girl who tries her luck in Beijing by being a film extra. It's funny and (a lot of people will stone me for this) quite different from all the other Chinese writers I've previously read who have written about Mao era China. The book cover is rather pretty. But of course, the other attraction is that Fenfang works in the film business and that has always been interesting to me. 20 Fragments was published in Chinese eleven years ago, and only recently translated into English. Since then, Guo has written one other novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, which was her first try at writing in English. Also read bits of that last year, but alas, I was too poor to buy it and now it's not available in the bookstores in KL anymore. But I'm looking forward to finishing not just 20 Fragments but all these books really, really soon.

Abandon the Old in Tokyo

Abandon the Old in Tokyo has eight stories: most of them about working class guys in postwar Japan. There's a factory worker, garbage collector, window washer. In the title story, a young man cooks and washes for his mother, who reminds him without fail that in her youth, she worked really hard to provide for him. There's a flashback that shows the boy accidentally stumbling into his mother and her "clients." And now, in her old age, she thinks she's worked too hard. But a young man can only take the stench of pee-soaked blankets for so long. The young woman she's dating is excited to visit and spend time with him in his apartment. Japan is known for having long life spans and for families taking care of their own elderly, but two decades after World War II, a young man decides to rent an apartment in the outskirts of the city and move his invalid mother there. He must choose: mother or his own woman? Is he doing the right thing? Will it be too late?

In the introduction, Adrian Tomine claims that Yoshihiro Tatsumi predated the naturalist style of recent (say since the '80s) North American comic book artists. I'm not really a big manga fan, but in reading this book, I'm more likely to agree with Tomine. Yoshihiro Tatsumi has more in common with Harvey Pekar or R. Crumb than most of the manga I've read. It has simple enough narratives which capture a day (or days) in the life of someone, and then fades away after an emotional moment. The moments are not big either. When the lonely manga artist was caught drawing graffitti in a public restroom, the look on his face reminded me of Julio Madiaga in the final scene in Maynila: Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag. It's desperation pushed against the walls. More Raymond Carver than Ranma or Fruits Basket.

I enjoyed reading the stories. Found this in the big Borders store. I finished it in one sitting, even with a headache. Also, I found out that this was the second in a series--the first being Push Man and Other Stories, which I'll be delighted to read someday. I wish we'd get these titles here in Manila.