If fascinating stories are your utopia, try these

Your Utopia by Bora Chung, skillfully translated from Korean by Anton Hur, is an original and engaging collection of eight stories. Because they are set in the future, the book is probably shelved with science fiction, but it could also fit under the horror and or the fantasy umbrella. 

On the basis of Your Utopia Chung sees a bleak future for humanity. In "The End of the Voyage" a single human remains after a mysterious plague has wiped out every other person. People infected by the plague show no symptoms until, uncontrollably, they start to eat another person. 

(I'm hardly spoiling the story by telling you this because Chung herself tells you this in the first two pages. We enjoy the story by seeing how Chung is able to reach those pages.)

In "The Center for Immorality Research" a low-level employee runs herself ragged planning a gala for donors only to be blamed for the chaos that results during the event in front of the mysterious celebrity benefactors who hope to live forever.

In "A Song for Sleep," an AI elevator in an apartment complex develops a tender, one-sided love for an elderly resident.

And in "Seed" Earth's now-sentient plants who narrate the story have a fraught meeting with some of Earth's corporate workers. As the plants say."The future of our world would depend on this single and first encounter."

A world-wide plague of cannibals . . . an AI elevator . . . sentient, mobile trees—where does Chung get these things? Okay, Tolkin has ambulatory trees, but still. . . .  Several of the stories have an O. Henry twist or revelation at the end, but this does not diminish the story's impact. Indeed, as in O. Henry, the final paragraph can throw the story into perspective. 

She's written three novels and three collections of short stories. Cursed Bunny, her earlier collection of short stories, also translated into English by Anton Hur, was a National Book Award finalist and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. 

She has an MA in Russian and East European area studies from Yale University and a PhD in Slavic literature from Indiana University. She has taught Russian language and literature and science fiction studies at Yonsei University and translates modern literary works from Russian and Polish into Korean. If you are interested in original ideas, Chung is someone to follow.

You don't have to be able-bodied to write porn

 “I wrote this novel [Hunchback] thinking that it is a problem that there were few authors with disabilities,” says Saou Ichikawa the author. “Why did the first winner not appear until 2023? I want everyone to think about that.”

Ichikawa, 45, was the 181st winner of the Akutagawa Prize, one of Japan’s oldest and most prestigious literary awards. She has congenital myopathy, a muscle disorder that requires her to use a wheelchair for mobility and a ventilator to breathe, and was the first author with a severe physical disability to win.

According to a NY Times article, she was removed from school after being put on the ventilator at age 13. She became an author in her twenties and in 20 years wrote more than 30 pulp romance and fantasy stories for young readers. But publishers rejected all of her manuscripts.

She enrolled in an online degree program at Waseda University, one of Japan’s top schools, in 2019 and began thinking about how people with disabilities are rarely represented in literature, and in my experience, mostly hidden in Japan. She decided to tell the story of a character like herself. The result is the slim novel Hunchback, wonderfully translated by Polly Barton, one of my favorite translators.

Shaka Isawa, who is severely disabled, tells her story which is by turns erotic, funny, horrifying, and poignant. She makes a living writing soft- and (apparently) hard-core porn for an erotic website. One day—as I copy shamelessly from the flap copy—a new male carer reveals that he has read it all: the sex, the provocation, the dirt. Isawa's response? An indecent proposal.

As I said, the book is short, a novella rather than a novel. You can read it in an evening. Nevertheless it is powerful and engaging, a convincing portrait of an original woman, the first-hand evocation of a life most of us—thankfully—have not personally experienced. Which is, of course, a good reason to read it.

A "Best Book" that deserves the title

I read Hernan Diaz's novel Trust because it was on a recent New York Times list of the best books of the 21st Century and if you can't trust the New York Times, who can you trust? It also won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, so there's that too.

Trust's publisher's describes the novel by writing, "Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read."

It's in four sections and I read the first 125-page section and wondered what was wrong with me. It purports to be a—granted—well-written and interesting short novel titled Bonds, but not so special that I thought it a best book of the year. Good, but not best.

The second section is an incomplete. fragmentary 1938 memoir of Andrew Bevel who is really, really pissed at the author and publisher of Bonds because the author fictionalized Bevel's life and marriage and portrayed it all wrong. Andrew wants to publish a memoir that sets the record straight. His wife was not instrumental in his phenomenal success. She died of natural causes not because Andrew allowed some Austrian quack attempt an experimental cure that killed her.

The third section is a contemporary memoir of a writer who, when she was a young woman in the late 1930s, Andrew hired to write the memoir we've just read.

The fourth section, thankfully, does not tie up all the loose ends or answer all the reader's questions. 

Trust "puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation." Both "an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, Trust engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts"—quotes from the publisher with which I agree.

It took me a while to see what Diaz was doing, but once I did my admiration and fascinating grew. Tryst can be read as a "Rashomon" story—four characters describing the same events and their meanings differently. Which one is "true"? I suspect that how you answer when you've finished Trust is how you view wealth, financiers, women, memoir, fiction, and more. 

I don't know if I would call Trust the best novel of the year (I haven't read all the year's novels), but it is right up there with the best I've read.

Zero Days can be read as Nancy Drew on steroids

If you have any intention of reading Ruth Ware's thriller Zero Days stop reading. The following is filled with spoilers. Ordinarily, I avoid spoilers, but Ware is such a popular writer, and Zero Days has been out since June 2023, I do not believe that this will do any damage. On Amazon, the book has 10,890 global ratings, and 77 percent of those are 4- or 5-star. And Universal International Studios has acquired the rights for series development.

Clearly the book has a lot going for it. The protagonist, Jacinthia "Jack" Cross and her husband Gabe are the best security penetration specialists in the UK. Companies hire them to test their physical and digital security systems. Jack does the physical breaking-in; Gabe manages the electronics. It's an engaging setup, watching legal burglars at work.

It's so engaging that reportedly Ware is working on a sequel, the first of her eight books to have one. The first chapter is a corker. Jack is breaking into ("penetrating") a company's headquarters building. She is in constant contact with her husband who is back at their house where he has hacked the company's computer system. We follow Jack step by step as she penetrates deeper and deeper into the building, avoiding the patrolling security guards, crawling between the false and real ceiling of the computer center.

Mission accomplished, she's on her way out when she's spotted by security, captured, and taken to the local police station where it takes time for their firm's client to assure the cops that Jack has just been doing what she and her husband had been hired to do. We meet Jack's former boyfriend, a bent and unpleasant officer who still has feelings for her. By the time she's released, the adrenalin has worn off. She gets lost on the London streets, and takes longer than it should to reach home.

Where she finds her husband with his throat cut in their home office. Shattered and absolutely drained Jack takes a half-hour nap and then calls the police.

Because there is no sign of a break-in, because there's a suspicious length of time between her leaving the police station and calling in the murder, and because the wife is always suspect, the police are skeptical of her account. Someone is doing a professional job of framing her. Before they can arrest her and hold her, however, she slips away from the police station and becomes a fugitive.

The rest of the book describe's Jack's adventures as she avoids the police, evades the bad people who killed her husband and want her dead or locked well away, and solves the mystery of just who killed Gabe and is framing her.

Unfortunately, we're not very deep into Zero Days before it's obvious the villain has to be one of two men, and the bent cop, although nasty, is unlikely. Also, Jack has hurt herself in one of her narrow escapes and the wound becomes infected so that by the final confrontation between Jack and the villain (there has to be a final confrontation) she is almost dead . . . and she and we learn she is pregnant. How did she do everything with a growing sepsis infection in her side? 

Nevertheless, Zero Days is a page-turner. It's only when you finish and think about it that the warts and blemishes are obvious. Until then, enjoy.

A chase through Minnesota's Boundary Waters

William Kent Krueger says that writing Fox Creek, the nineteenth of twemty Cork O'Conner novels, was a different experience for him because he wrote the opening scene without knowing the story or where it would go. In earlier O’Conner books, he had a clear idea of the plot, the characters, and the key incidents in the mystery before he began writing. Not only did he not know what was going to happen in Fox Creek, he discovered he was writing a thriller rather than a mystery.

He says that in a mystery the readers and the protagonist are on the same page in terms of what they know about the crime and the clues. Ideally the reader solves the crime along with the protagonist. Sometimes the reader knows long before the detective who killed Roger Ackroyd. Sometimes the detective has to explain everything in the last chapter. 

In a thriller, readers typically know what the villain or villains are trying to do ahead of the protagonist who is trying to stop them. It’s not a question of who done it or why done it but will the protagonists, the people the reader cares about, understand what’s going on in time to prevent it from happening. “What drives a thriller,” he says, “is the suspense.”

In Chapter 1, a stranger hires O'Conner to find his missing wife, Dolores Morriseau, only reasonable because Cork is a licensed private investigator in Tamarack County in northern Minnesota. This is the fictional gateway to the pristine Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a million acres of deep forest, a thousand lakes, and a few quiet towns. 

Within a few pages we learn that the stranger is not who he says he is; the woman he wants is on the run; Dolores, Cork's wife, and Henry Meloux, an elderly Ojibwa healer and woodsman have escaped into the wilderness; and three very bad men are chasing them and very bad things will happen to them if they're caught.

There are a couple mysteries: where is Dolores's husband? Why are the thugs willing to kill Cork's wife and Henry to capture Dolores? What's going on aside from Henry trying to keep the two women and himself alive? Henry knows the wilderness, but one of the three bad guys is a renegade tracker who also can read the wilderness—and is much younger than Henry.

To write much more risks spoiling Fox Creek for other readers, and I don't want to do that. I agree with Krueger that the book is more thriller than mystery. Yes, we don't know why the bad men want Dolores and her husband, but it almost doesn't matter. How will the villains be brought to justice? Read Fox Creek and find out.

Engaging fiction from 100 words to 20 pages

Grant Faulkner's 2021 collection of short stories, All the Comfort Sin Can Provide, has only 130 pages but 28 titled stories. They therefore range in length from twenty pages to a paragraph which might in some works be considered prose poems. He says in an Author's Note that he wrote the first in 1991, the last just before the manuscript was due to the publisher.

Faulkner is the former executive director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), the co-founder of the online literary journal 100 Word Story,  the co-host of the podcast Write-minded, and an executive producer of the TV show, America's Next Great Author.

100 Word Story publishes stories that are exactly 100 words long. Stories published in 100 Word Story have been included on Wigleaf’s Top (Very) Short Fictions list and anthologized in the annual Best Small Fictions series and W.W Norton's New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction. Here is an example Faulkner titled Life Knowledge:

"She searched for the perfect place to live. She changed her name from Clara to Claire She drank one too many cups of coffee and then one too few. She painted porcelain dolls, then learned how to play the banjo. She made a promise in her diary never to get Botox. She asked, "Why do people hate the French?" She carried a pistol in her purse for protection, shampooed with anti-lice shampoo just in case. She tossed bread crumbs to golden carp and watched them mouth silent O's in the water. Poor things were too dumb to know anything about life."

So what is it? A story? An anecdote? A fragment? A poem without line breaks? Does it matter as long as it touches the reader—the reason I chose it. It may look easy. A hundred words? Ha! Until you try to write one. It's like trying to write a decent sonnet

Given the varying lengths and worlds of these 28 stories it is inevitable that readers (this reader) will respond more positively to some than others. I especially enjoyed Faulkner's longer stories in which he has more room to develop characters and situations. I found something to respond to in almost every one 28 and, personally more valuable, something that provoked an idea, a character, a situation.

Thank you Black Lawrence Press for sending me a copy.

The summer house is not only a seasonal retreat

Masashi Matsuie's debut novel The Summer House, skillfully translated by Margaret Mitsutani, is interesting on several levels. Readers learn a great deal about architecture and how an architect thinks about a building, about life in a small Japanese firm, about Japanese attitudes toward change, about changing Japanese society and more.

Although from the information in the book one would think that Matsuie's background is architecture, he was a fiction editor for Shinchosha Publishing, where he launched Shincho Crest Books, an imprint specializing in translations of foreign works. The Summer House received the Yomiuri Prize for Literature, an award that normally goes to seasoned authors who are well along in their careers. 

Tōru Sakanishi narrates the story as a middle-aged man recalling the past. When the book opens, he is a recent university graduate joining the prestigious Murai Office, a nine-person architecture firm founded by Shunsuke Murai, a former student of Frank Lloyd Wright. Although the firm does not ordinarily enter architectural competitions, Murai decides to compete for the design of a National Library of Modern Literature. It  competes against a larger firm that obtains one government project after the next, and the library design thread runs through the novel.

As the sweltering summer months approach, the Murai Office migrates from Tokyo to Kita-Asama, a mountain village and artists’ colony whose heyday has passed. With tighter homes and air conditioning there is less reason to escape the rainy season in the mountains. The village faces Mt. Asama, an active volcano that regularly threatens to cover the landscape with cinders and ash, another thread running through the book. (The Japanese title of the novel can be translated At the Foot of the Volcano.) Despite living beside a volcano, the character seem blasé.

Years earlier Murai had built and then expanded a house in the village, the firm's summer home, making it large enough to shelter the staff and where the architects––including two women Sakanishi is attracted to––begin working on a library design. Murai charges the firm's two senior architects each to come up with a design; he will select and modify the one he thinks is best. So while there is competition within the firm, the loser does not appear to have any ill feelings.

The Summer House is engaging and believable because the characters are affecting and plausible. They act in ways that are understandable even as the environment, technology, and society change in time around them. 

"I found myself in a dark wood, the direct way lost . . . "

 I'm not sure what to make of Jon Fosse's short novel A Shining.

Fosse is a Norwegian author, translator, and playwright. He was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in 1959, he has written over seventy novels, poems, children's books, essays, and theatre plays which have been translated into over fifty languages. 

Several of his novels have been described as post-modernist and avant-garde literature due to their minimalism, lyricism and unorthodox use of syntax. The Bergens Tidende reported in 2005, "Few and often nameless characters, little external action and a great deal of linguistic repetition, Jon Fosse writes in all literary genres, but his drama in particular has enjoyed fabulous international success." A Shining is a relatively painless introduction to his work if only because it's short.

We spend all 74 pages in the head of a nameless character who, bored, drives aimlessly until his car becomes stuck on a narrow forest road. He does not know where he is. He does not know where to find help. He has no cellphone. It's cold. It grows dark. He leaves the car but does not follow the road but wanders aimlessly in the forest until he's lost. It snows. He sees a shining . . . something. He sees his dead parents and talks to them. He sees a figure in a black suit, white shirt, black tie and barefoot. He somehow becomes barefoot himself. The book stops.

The language, a translation by one of my favorite translators Damion Searls, is relatively bland. Here is a sample taken at random: "For the shining presence's arm, if that's the right thing to call it, now felt something inseparable from my body, and to find out whether it was or not, to be able to find out, I would have to move, and that's exactly what I had no desire to do, or what it felt like I wasn't allowed to do. And this prohibition was binding and unalterable, that's how it felt." 

Because Fosse tells us so little about the narrator—his age, background, character, hopes, fears—the reader has none of the usual markers we use to understand the story. Because Fosse gives us so little and the narrator questions what he does think, we have to make up or own story (or throw the book against the wall). And perhaps that's the point. Rather than the author leading the reader, the point is offer conflicting, inexplicable clues and force readers to make of A Shining what they will.

It reminded me of, "In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost . . . ." Among the difference between Dante and Fosse is that Fosse's narrator has no guide—which I take as a comment on modern society—and no hope of redemption. He mentions God, but does not seem to believe that God (or a Virgil) can help him find his way.

A Shining provoked more thoughts and questions than most books. It is probably worth rereading and more thought, but there are so many other books I want to read, so many other things I want to learn, that once through was enough for me. Others will feel differently.

Strangers on a Russian train

The paperback novel Eastbound is deceptively modest. It's thin, only about 130 pages, and small, roughly 5 by 6 inches. It's more like a long short story or a novella than a free-standing novel. I'm impressed that the editor at Archipelago Books had the wit to acquire it and that The New York Times realized that it was worth reviewing as they did in 2023:

"When this brief lyrical novel was first published in France, in 2012, Russia’s war against Ukraine was no more than a psychotic gleam in Vladimir Putin’s eye. Today, Eastbound is a story of our time. In a book whose only battlefield is a cross-continental train, [the author] Maylis de Kerangal vividly evokes the Russian military’s disorder and brutality and the desperation of the men who have been forced to serve in it."

Virtually all of the action takes place on an eastbound Trans-Siberian train. There are two central characters,  Aliocha, a 20-year-old conscript who decides to desert rather than serve in Siberia, and Hélène, a French woman who decides to leave her Russian lover rather than live with him at a hydroelectric station in central Russia. Aliocha speaks no French; Hélène knows only a few words of Russian. Nevertheless, they connect under plausible circumstances and she decides to help him evade his vicious sergeant on the train.

Because Aliocha and Hélène cannot speak the novel has virtually no dialogue. We learn almost everything we know about the people and their situation by what they do and what de Kerangal tells us in Jessica Moore's smooth translation: "These guys come from Moscow and don't know where they're going. There's a crowd of them, more than a hundred, young, white—pallid, even—wan and shorn, their arms veiny and eyes pacing the train car, camouflage pants and briefs, torsos caged in khaki undershirts, thin chains with crosses bouncing against their chests, guys lining the walls in the passageways and corridors, sitting, standing, stretched out on the berths, letting their arms dangle, their feet dangle, letting their bored resignation dangle in the void."

While those sentences, the first two in the book, engaged my interest initially, I did not expect to become so invested in Aliocha and Hélène, to care about them as much as I did. The details of the train, the characters, the passing landscape all ring true. I believe that a young Russian conscript and an older French woman would, in a similar situation, act the way Aliocha and Hélène did.  An extraordinary book.