Books for Getting Through That Last Stretch of 2018
One job hunt and a NaNoWriMo later, I am back. Cheers to good books and a looong year.
Radiant Terminus by Antoine Volodine
This was the last of my books that I was supposed to read in college but never did. What an interesting one. First of all, I’m very intrigued by Antoine Vollodine as an author, because apparently he writes under a bunch of homonyms (like an adult version of Lemony Snicket), and I want to read other stuff by him to get a better sense of this world he has created. But then the story itself. Very strange. Lots of incest. But so compelling. The reader wanders through a dreamscape with the characters, and the beautiful prose is enough to keep you going along with strange events. Lots of unexpected humor as well.
I’m not sure if I can succinctly summarize the novel, but I’ll at least try to give a general sketch. So after the world has begun to use more and more nuclear power, nuclear meltdowns begin to happen more and more, resulting in the destruction of most of the natural world. In a devastating Russian landscape, teams are sent out to try to clean up the waste; most die, but a few genetic mutants—those whose genes are actually bolstered by the nuclear radiation—find that they are now essentially immortal, including the Gramma Udgul and Solovyeir, former lovers who find each other again at Solovyei’s commune, or kolkhoz. Meanwhile, three separatist insurgents have departed from their militant group and are now dying in the wastelands. One of them, Elli Kronauer, goes to look for help, and he stumbles upon Radiant Terminus.
There’s a lot going on here, everything from politics to feminism to literary critique. I think you could probably go to grad school and write a thesis about his body of work. I’m honestly kind of thinking about it myself because I’m just so intrigued to hear someone smarter than me analyze this book and how it fits into the larger oeuvre. Also, kudos to the English translator for putting the original French into such lyrical English.
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal
This books blew my mind. I was randomly lying in bed one night thinking about how we can know whether, say, dogs have their own language and communicate with each other like we do. My thought at the time was doing brain scans to see if they had similar brain activity/lobes/whatever. After reading this book, I can say three things: 1) Brain scans on live animals are very difficult because the claustrophobia and loud noises scare animals; 2) people have actually trained their dogs to lie still in these machines so that they can do brain scans, which is pretty darn cool; and 3) the idea of comparing our language to dog “language” is part of the problem. We humans like to think we are the center of the universe, but really… we’re not.
Frans de Waal probably changed the way I see the world through this book. Humans are just animals, and we live and die like other animals. While I knew this fact, it had been a while since someone had so baldly pointed it out to me There are chimpanzees that have better memorization skills than humans do. We are limited by our experiments, which always come from our limited human experience. It was almost shocking to see on page our pride and arrogance called out; we do not want to learn that there are animal species that might have superior intelligence capabilities because that flies in the face of everything we teach ourselves, of how our technology or understanding of quantum physics makes us superior to every other living creature on the planet and is thus the reason that we can exploit them and the natural world. I would highly recommend reading this if you’ve ever had any curiosity towards animal intelligence.
The Last Days of California by Mary Miller
I have honestly never related so much to a narrator in a book. Jess is a fifteen-year-old girl from Alabama who is travelling across the country with her family so that they can experience an impending apocalypse in California—at least, there will be a day of reckoning according to the leader of the church they are a part of. None of these things describe my life—I am not fifteen, I am not from Alabama, I am not on a road trip, I am not part of a religion that regularly predicts the end of the world—but Jess’s first-person narration is so spot-on to how I felt as a teen, to how I still often feel now, that I was mesmerized by her thoughts for the entire book. I cannot recommend this book enough, and at about 200 pages in length, it’s a very quick read to get through. Mary Miller has captured something genius, beautiful, and real about being a teenage girl, especially when you feel like you are the one that is always slightly out of place and off of center..
Pachinko is an epic, and I loved it. It broke my heart, but I loved it. I think I loved it so much because of the fact that Min Jin Lee took twenty years to write it and poured so much of her life into it—you can’t help but be inspired by her story of dedication to this one idea that lit a creative fire in her.
The novel follows almost five generations of a family of Koreans who immigrate to Japan. Most of the story revolves around Sunja—her parents, her accidental pregnancy, her children—and I thought Lee did a brilliant job of following the adage to create characters that feel real. Sunja makes mistakes, loves a man she shouldn’t, desires things she shouldn’t, loves her children fiercely, doubts everything. I think it would be too complicated to go into a more detailed summary, as it is simply a huge book and worth discovering on your own, so I’ll leave it at that.
I can’t say I was always a huge fan of Lee’s prose style; it felt a bit stilted at times to me, but that almost seems to fit with this grand, mythic thing she has created. I was devastated by many of the events that happened near the end of the book, and I’m not sure I would really call it a hopeful ending, but it was a genuinely awe-inspiring experience to be able to read this book. If nothing else, read it to learn about the experience of immigrants who, as the narrator states in the first sentence, have been forgotten by history.
