A dual portrait of Anna and Tom, digital nomads

Writing teachers tell students they should show not tell. Writers should, my search tells me, "convey emotions and actions through descriptive details and sensory experiences rather than simply stating facts. This approach helps readers engage more deeply with the story by allowing them to infer feelings and situations from the characters' actions and surroundings." This is such a commonplace that I was intrigued by Perfection, Vincenzo Latronico's short novel, translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes (who is not credited on the cover), because he mostly tells the story rather than shows it.

Latronico is almost thumbing his nose at readers by starting the book with six pages of a careful, detailed description of a Berlin apartment. I.e., "Sunlight floods the room from the bay windows, reflects off the wide, honey-colored floorboards, and casts an emerald glow over the perforate leaves of a monstera shaped like a cloud. Its stems brush the back of a Scandinavian armchair, an open magazine left face down on the seat . . . ." No dialogue, no conflict, no story, just a lovely apartment.

We learn this is the apartment/workspace of Anna and Tom, a young couple from elsewhere—where exactly is not spelled out; they do not speak German and hang out with, party with other ex-pats. They are successful in the gig economy as graphic designers, website designers, menu and brochure designers. Money does not seem to be a problem, but Berlin after the Wall came down was an inexpensive place to live. Anna and Tom are lucky to find and occupy apparently permanently a spacious, desirable apartment while the getting was good. Before Berlin was overrun by affluent Germans.

Although their apartment is perfect, their relationship (and their sex) is rewarding, their friends are fun, their work satisfying (relative, say, to bartending or waiting tables), Anna and Tom and are dissatisfied for reasons they cannot identify. For one thing, "There was the tangible reality around them, and there were the images, also all around them." Images they cannot resist. Images on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, news feeds, social media. They appear to live in a constant state of distraction, helpless to do more than to skate on the surface of reality. Not even their intimate relations, pleasant as the sex is, leads to anything deeper.

I found Perfection ultimately engaging and remarkable, a dual portrait of Anna and Tom as they live as ex-pat, digital nomads in Berlin, Portugal, Sicily over about twenty years as Europe and society changes. Friends return to native countries, parties begin to pall, people grow older. Apartments endure. 

A fascinating biography of an interesting writer

As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish science fiction Octavia Butler (1947-2006) is a fascinating author. Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E Butler by Susana M. Morris is a fascinating biography and introduction to her work.

Butler was singular because she was the first Black woman to consistently write and publish science fiction. Why science fiction? Butler sounds like any writer on certain days when she writes: "Why should anyone pay attention to what I had to say? Did I have anything to say? I was writing science fiction and fantasy, for God’s sake. At that time [the 1970s] nearly all professional science-fiction writers were white men. As much as I loved science fiction and fantasy, what was I doing? Well, whatever it was, I couldn’t stop. Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.” 

After her father died, she was raised by a single mother in Pasadena, California. When she was 12 years old she watched a B-movie science fiction film that lit an unquenchable fire in the girl. She began writing her own science fiction stories on the typewriter her mother had given her. She was encouraged by a sympathetic school teacher and later won a writing competition at Pasadena City College, and a year later won fifth prize in a Writer's Digest short story contest.

In 1969 she met Harlan Ellison at a Screenwriters Guild workshop and he became a mentor and champion of her work. In 1970 she spent six weeks at the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in Pennsylvania (it's now at UC San Diego) where she met Samuel R. Delany. Despite the encouragement and support her mentors gave her, she was not able to publish. She worked at menial, backbreaking day jobs to pay her rent and buy food and Morris reports that "She stuck to a grueling writing schedule, often writing from 2 to 5 a.m. and then working a full-time job. She finally sold Patternmaster to Doubleday in 1975."

In 1979 she sold Kindred, a time-travel novel about a contemporary Black woman who travels back to the antebellum South. Gradually her life became somewhat easier. (Hard to imagine how it might have become harder.) She completed the five-book Patternist series. She was published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. She won a Hugo Award. She traveled internationally for research and as a representative American writer. In 1995 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant," acknowledging her talent and vision.

Butler recognized her calling. She wrote, "I am a fifty-three-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects one day to to be an eighty-year-old writer." She never made it, but she was still writing when she died.

These comments do not do Positive Obsession justice. Morris, an associate professor of literature, media, and communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has, in fewer than 250 pages, conveyed the texture of Butler's life and its events and introduced the reader unfamiliar with Butler to her works. One can hope that the biography sends new readers, even those who say they do not read science fiction, to Butler's novels. 

A young interpreter adrift in The Hague

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura is her second novel narrated by an unnamed woman.  The first was A Separation and that narrator was a married translator. Intimacies' narrator is single and an interpreter at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. (She has native fluency in English and Japanese "from my parents" and French "from a childhood in Paris," plus professional proficiency in Spanish and German. A polyglot.) Both novels have interesting things to say about language and the difficulties in moving from one to another. 

The narrator in Intimacies has come to the Netherlands to escape New York and work at the Court. Her father is dead, her mother lives in Singapore, she has no siblings, no friends, no lover. She is looking for a place to finally call home.

She meets and becomes the lover of Adriaan who is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. She makes friends with Jana who witnesses a seemingly random act of violence virtually on her doorstep. The interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with with the crime as by chance she befriends the victim's sister (The Hague is not a big city.). And she's pulled into an explosive political controversy when she’s required to interpret in a trial in which the former president of an African country is accused of war crimes.

The publisher says, "A woman of quiet passion, she confronts power, love, and violence, both in her personal intimacies and in her work at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her, forcing her to decide what she wants from her life."

I had a sense of a woman adrift. She is good at what she does, indeed the Court offers her a permanent position. Interpreting the words of an accused mass murderer, however, is too much for her. Adriaan goes to Lisbon to meet with his estranged wife, leaving the narrator with the keys to his apartment and a promise to call. He doesn't, and I found it difficult to understand why she does not do something to resolve the situation until a resolution is forced on her.

Kitamura's descriptions of the former president's arrival in The Hague, the preparations for trial, and the trial itself are brilliant. I had a clear sense of the narrator's involvement with and attitude toward the former president and the man's feelings about his arrest and trial. For me, however, this was not enough to endear Intimacies to me.

A writer more interesting than her writing

Vera Wong goes down to her San Francisco tea shop one morning to find the door broken open and a body on the floor holding a flash drive. Vera doesn’t know what comes over her, but after calling the cops like any good citizen would, she sort of . . . swipes the flash drive from the body and tucks it safely into the pocket of her apron. Why? 

Because Vera is sure she would do a better job than the police possibly could, because nobody sniffs out a wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands. Vera knows the killer will be back for the flash drive; all she has to do is watch the increasing number of customers at her shop and figure out which one among them is the killer. So begins Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto.

As the book evolves the reader meets four characters any one of whom could have been the murderer, assuming a certain suspension of disbelief, but all of whom have good reasons not to have been responsible. I am afraid that by the process of elimination, I identified the murderer—although not the means or motivation—two thirds of the way through the book.

In fact I found Sutanto more interesting than feisty Vera Wong. Sutanto grew up shuttling back and forth between Indonesia, Singapore, and Oxford and considers all three places her home. She has a Masters from Oxford University, but it took her nine years after graduating from her creative writing course to get her first publishing deal. She now writes YA rom-coms, YA suspenseful thrillers, adult contemporary fiction, and adult suspense novels.

She told a Writer’s Digest interviewer in 2024 that she usually creates the plot first because “I outline my books before I start writing. But I never know what the character is going to be like until I actually start writing. Then their voice kind of comes out onto the page. When I first started writing, my first ever book was totally pantsed. I didn’t know how to outline and so I think the first three books I wrote, I pantsed them. I remember my husband being like, ‘I was just reading an interview with this author, and he says that he outlines his books before he writes them.’ And I was immediately like, ‘How dare you. I’m an artiste. Every author has their own process. Don’t tell me to outline.’ And then I realized, this isn’t working because I was getting stuck all the time. Even after I finished the draft, it would be a hot mess. I would have to rewrite a lot of it. So, when I first started outlining, I only outlined about half of the book, and things would surprise me. There was a lot more flexibility.”

By her eighteenth book her outlines had become meticulous. “I like to say I’m a Chinese mother: My outlines listen to me because my characters are scared of me. They know not to surprise me. My outlines, they have no chill, you know? They’re chapter by chapter. They tend to be 12 pages long, and they’re quite detailed.”

By October 2024 Sutanto had published 11 books in four years. How had she managed? “Because it took me so long to get my first ever publishing deal—during those 10 years I was writing and then I would get really sad when the books ended up getting rejected by everybody—I learned the healthiest thing for me to do was, once I finished a book, once it was ready to query or go on submission, the best thing for me to do was to immediately move on to a new project. To fall in love with a new project so I could let go of the last book. So, I got into that habit where as soon as I finish a draft and I edit it, I send it off to my agent.

“Now I actually do take a break, but I emotionally detach myself from it. Then I’m actively thinking of my next project. I’m actively asking myself, What do I want to work on next? So that’s number one, the mental health part of the answer.

“And then the logistics part. I’ve trained myself to write super-fast because it’s the only way I can outrun this really mean little voice in my head. I call it my ‘editor,’ and as I write, this inner editor is saying things like, ‘Oh wow, that sentence is awful. That’s so awkward. Does that even make sense? The character is so boring. This plot makes no sense.’” To silence the voice, she writes in 15-minute sprints and stops after 2,000 words. “I don’t do anything with that manuscript for the rest of the day. It gives me a break, and I’ve written 2,000 words.” Do it every day and you soon have a book.

You can find the interview at https://www.writersdigest.com/be-inspired/the-wd-interview-jesse-q-sutanto

Sutanto has also posted instructions on how to outline, write, and preserve your mental health while doing it at https://jesseqsutantoauthor.com/for-writers  Good stuff.

Not much happens but the book is very funny

Barbara Pym (1913-1980) is one of those authors—their names are legion—one thinks one ought to have read but never have, or that's what I think. In a moment of hopeful self-improvement recently, I checked out A Glass of Blessings. I chose it because it was convenient and Philip Larkin, a poet I admire, blurbed: "“The most underrated novelist of the century . . . The subtlest of her books—the sparkle on first acquaintance has been succeeded by the deeper brilliance of established art.”

Wilmet Forsyth is a 33-year-old, childless, middle-class woman married to a boring, if devoted, British civil servant. She fills her days with shopping, lunching, good works (the Anglo-Catholic Church and three priests play key roles), and tea. Her most exciting experience was serving as a Wren in Italy during WWII where she made friends with Mary and met her husband.

Although not a lot "happens" in A Glass of Blessings, the book is filled with incident and is more than redeemed by Pym's writing. "Harry [a friend's husband] was one of those non-intellectual men who are often more comforting to women that the exciting but tortured intellectuals. He might not have any very interesting conversation for his wife at the end of the day, might indeed quite easily drop off to sleep after dinner, but he was strong and reliable, assuming that he would be the breadwinner and that his wife would of course vote the same way as he did." Of course. 

In other words, Pym can be very funny. Not laugh-out-loud funny, but knowing-smile funny. 

Another example: "He was one of those preachers who, in coming to the end of what they have to say, find it impossible to stop. Sentence after sentence seemed as if it must be the last but still he went on. I felt as if I had been wrapped round and round in a cocoon of wordiness like a great suffocating eiderdown."

'There is one complication in Wilmet's cosseted life: she has never had a lover and she becomes infatuated with the exceptionally handsome brother of her friend Mary. Unfortunately for Wilmet, the young man is gay at a time when homosexuality was a sin that "dare not speak its name" and was illegal. It is possible that Wilmet never realizes why her feelings for the guy are not returned, and Pym's writing is subtle enough that, I suspect many readers at the time—1958—did not realize either.

I have a sense that the society and life Pym evokes no longer exists, even making allowances for the fact that the book is fiction. Which makes reading A Glass of Blessings even more rewarding than many novels. 

A character who is looking for connection

Katie Kitamura's first two novels were told from male points of view. She told an interviewer from The New Yorker that "I didn’t want to [write about women] until I was sure I was really good enough. You know, writing male characters is not very difficult because there is a vast canon of male characters written by men, for men, for any writer starting out to draw from. Finding the voice of a male character is in so many ways what a Ph.D. in American literature trains you to do."

She's now published three novels with three somewhat different, unnamed female voices. The first was A Separation, published in 2017. At the beginning of the book the narrator's husband has left their five-year marriage and, when the novel begins, has gone to Greece to research professional mourners for a book he's writing.

The narrator, a translator, who appears to be in her late 20s, early 30s, travels from her London home to the Greek hotel where her husband has been staying. He's not there, although he has not checked out and she spends much of the book waiting for him to return so she can tell him, finally, she wants a divorce.

It's late in the season and the hotel is almost empty. The narrator interacts with the driver who takes her sightseeing notwithstanding the landscape has been blackened by fires. She talks to a young woman on the hotel staff and realizes (concludes) that her husband has slept with the girl and discarded her, not the first time such a thing has happened. The husband's appearance two thirds of the way through the book is a shock, but it follows naturally from the place and the situation.

I especially enjoy Kitamura's apt observations about people and life, perhaps because I can't do it. "People were capable of living their lives in a state of permanent disappointment, there were plenty of people who did not marry the person they hoped to marry, much less live the life they hoped to live, other people invented new dreams to replace the old ones, finding fresh reasons for discontent."

One more example as the narrator muses about differences in age between a man and a woman: "Of course, at twenty girls do not care so much about age, a woman of thirty would think twice before embarking on an affair with a man more than two decades older, should the affair develop into something more serious—and the odds of a woman wishing for it to become something serious grew exponentially as she aged—then a gap of two decades would become critical, nobody wanted to marry a man who would soon be at death's door."

Obviously, these are the thoughts of A Separation's narrator. They are not necessarily those of the author. They add to the character's personality and character, and are yet another reason to relish the book. Which I did.

When is a translation "faithful" to the original?

The unnamed narrator/protagonist of Katie Kitamura's 2017 novel A Separation is a translator. Her profession is irrelevant to the main story, but at one point she muses about translating Balzac's story Colonel Chabert, "although not with particular success."

Katie Kitamura

She writes, "I had not been able to find the correct register for capturing the particular density of Balzac's prose, I generally translate contemporary fiction, which is an entirely different affair—the colonel of the title is presumed dead in the Napoleonic Wars."

Because Balzac was born in 1799 and his first book published in 1823 even he may have had difficulty finding the appropriate French register for his story written years after Napoleon. 

In any case, Kitamura observes that "translators are always worried about being faithful to the original, an impossible task because there are multiple and often contradictory ways of being faithful, there is a literal fidelity and there is in the spirit of, a phrase without concrete meaning."

Being faithful to the original is something I worry about when I translate Japanese. Because I'm translating popular, contemporary fiction—not "literature"—I believe most of the meaning is on the surface and I can do okay. But because I have to work so hard to understand many sentences, I'm sure I have not done some justice. 

The English I produce is interesting, reads well, and makes sense. Is it faithful to the original? I can only do my best and hope.

Three of the pleasures Audition offers

Karie Kitamura's slim novel Audition affected me so strongly, so positively I have obtained two of her earlier novels, A Separation and Intimacies, something I never do. (Probably because there are so many books I want to read. I do read the new book of an author I've enjoyed on the theory that the writer tends to grow more skillful with experience, an obviously false assumption).

Audition's narrator is a middle age actress in the last week or so of rehearsing a new play in which she plays the lead. She lives with her husband Tomas who sounds like an academic who writes articles about art.

The novel has two parts, preparing for opening night and after the production's phenomenal success. I am not going to say more because the novel's structure is one of its pleasures.

Another delight is the (unnamed) narrator's thoughts about life, acting, and art. Is she an unreliable narrator, unable to distinguish between life in the world (real life) and life on stage (playing a role). Until I finished the book and thought about it I had not considered that the narrator may not be the most objective, disinterested reporter of events. I had taken everything she said as verifiable, if fictional, truth.

(Indeed, is any novel's first-person narrator ever a reliable source? Can you—should you—ever entirely trust a narrator's account of events? Something to think about when I'm reading. And writing.)

Another pleasure of Audition is Kitamura's writing. The book is a joy at the sentence level. She is not afraid of long sentences: "And although the actor was only in his sixties, as soon as I heard the story of the notes on the counter, the forgotten lines—not even forgotten, because they had not been retained and then lost again, they evaded his mind's grasp altogether—as soon as I heard this, I was able to envision his death, I was able to imagine the parabolic arc of his decline, I understood that eventually his mind would disintegrate to the point that his memory of the world and of himself, would be lost, and with it everything that formed his being."

I hope that picking out one 99-word sentence does not discourage readers from trying Audition; this one is unusually long, chosen to make my point. If I have deterred a literature loving reader. I apologize. And I apologize to Ms. Kitamura whose work I enthusiastically admire.