Scandal

This 1986 novel by Shusaku Endo is a departure from a lot of his previous work, mainly historical fiction. Protagonist Suguro, a modern-day novelist similar in many respects to real-life Endo, receives an award for his writing at age 65. Leaving the ceremony he’s accosted by a drunken woman who blurts out that the revered Catholic author frequents a brothel in Shinjuku’s infamous Kabukicho district. Suguro, now convinced a doppelganger is out there bent on sullying his reputation, will seek out this double. Or is he actually him? Complicating the matter and stirring Suguro’s turmoil is a young girl he hires as an assistant and also a Madame Naruse, who volunteers as a nurse at a hospital for children by day, but by night is driven by a predilection for sadomasochism.

Although some parts didn’t cohere for me, I liked the story for its setting (Tokyo) and for how Endo maybe reveals aspects of his own character through the prose. But certain descriptions or words had me questioning the accuracy of the translation—I can’t put my finger on why I felt this exactly; they just didn’t seem like Endo’s. All in all, though, it’s a compelling read, and I’ve always been a sucker for doppelganger tales told to cast light on persona and bad behavior.

Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town

Eat the Buddha by Barbara Demick, released in July of this year, is a compelling, heart-breaking report of the Tibetan struggle over the past several decades, beginning in 1958 with the royal family of Ngaba, most of whom have died under the rule of China's Communist Party.

I read Demick's Nothing to Envy (2009) earlier this year and found it very insightful and moving. In Eat the Buddha she applies the same journalistic formula by documenting a massive human rights disaster through the extraordinary accounts of individuals affected by the tragedy, with a keen focus on mostly everyday people in a particular city. In the former she centered the story around the destitute Chongjin, and in her latest book, Ngaba, “the undisputed world capital of self-immolations," as she describes it. Her storytelling, a sort of novelization of interviews with exiles and refugees, mixed in with history and pieces of the larger picture, is powerful in the way it brings people in these "obscure" places close to us, thereby evoking empathy and hopefully stimulating more action and ultimately change. At the very least, Demick has helped give a big voice to the silenced, and I hope she might one day put her time and talents toward reportage on the Uyghurs and Rohingya as well.

How Much of These Hills Is Gold

Bidisha, in her review of How Much of These Hills Is Gold for The Guardian, wrote: "The novel is thick with detail, metaphor and oblique allusion – so much so that the story has to fight through the language." I agree, and was surprised it's been longlisted for the Booker Prize 2020. C Pam Zhang builds her story around two girls of Chinese descent who must fend for themselves in the Wild West after losing their parents. The narrative can be divided into three parts: father dies and daughters flee town with his corpse; a jump back to the family's destitute days, of suffering and hope; and life later (following the first part) in the town of Sweetwater, where one sister has settled. It's a new take on the Western novel in a way, but it relies heavily on the ideas and images we already have of that time and place, and the myth, while adding a few fresh elements such as tigers. Two Chinese-American girls in that era is the new angle, I suppose.

I wanted to like this one because the idea intrigued me, but reading it I found myself too often trying to figure out what was going on. And Zhang's prose, although seemingly poetic, didn't pull me in or offer much depth. Worse, I came to the end of the novel and felt I hadn't gotten to know either sister below the surface. How do they feel? What's really making them tick? Who knows? On a positive note, there are parts of the story that don't come across as evasive somehow (intentionally or unintentionally) and which held my interest, particularly the middle of the book, when the family is still together and the narrative also coheres. Looking ahead, I'm curious to see how Zhang will develop her storytelling down the line.