iPlot
January 08, 2010
When you are writing it becomes harder to find new things to read so I was pleased to discover novelist Shusaku Endo, a stranger to me despite being translated into twenty-eight languages (I read only one) and being nominated more than once for the Nobel Prize. Endo was one of Japan's post-war 'Third generation' authors, a group identified with the Japanese tradition of the autobiographical "I-novel". He was Catholic and as a student in 1950 spent several years studying in Paris. Foreign Studies is a collection of three associated stories about a Japanese student and a university lecturer finding their respective ways through Normandy and Paris.
In Haruku Murakami and the Music of Words, translator Jay Rubin writes much about the form of the "I-novel", describing Murakami as Japan's "first genuinely 'post-post-war writer', the first to cast off the "dank, heavy atmosphere' of the post-war period." If Rubin is correct, then Endo must be one of the authors to whom Murakami stands in contrast. Endo's tone reminded me of Graham Greene; only after I looked it up did I learn that the two authors were often compared. Greene was a fan or at least wrote as such on the blurb for Endo's novel Silence. Well, duh.
I'm enjoying the outsider tone and locale of Foreign Studies. The Catholic thing doesn't sit with me: after years of art study I find Christian imagery depressing. I can only enjoy Greene's The End of the Affair by mentally running a red pen through the "saint" sub-plot, a hasty add-on that kills an otherwise modern novel, and Foreign Studies' first section, 'Summer in Rouen' suffers from the same dry work. (Crucifixions and tea cakes, one thinks: he gave up Shinto imagery for this?) The second, 'Araki Thomas' is a non-fiction jolt and a very post-modern shift in tone but part three about the Professor in Paris, 'And You, Too' lifted off. It has many things in fiction that I like: a stranger in the city, a sense of helplessness and disconnection and an atmosphere that all is not what it seems. I've yet to finish but with a set-up like that I'm sold. It's simple and resonant with possibilities.
In Haruku Murakami and the Music of Words, translator Jay Rubin writes much about the form of the "I-novel", describing Murakami as Japan's "first genuinely 'post-post-war writer', the first to cast off the "dank, heavy atmosphere' of the post-war period." If Rubin is correct, then Endo must be one of the authors to whom Murakami stands in contrast. Endo's tone reminded me of Graham Greene; only after I looked it up did I learn that the two authors were often compared. Greene was a fan or at least wrote as such on the blurb for Endo's novel Silence. Well, duh.
I'm enjoying the outsider tone and locale of Foreign Studies. The Catholic thing doesn't sit with me: after years of art study I find Christian imagery depressing. I can only enjoy Greene's The End of the Affair by mentally running a red pen through the "saint" sub-plot, a hasty add-on that kills an otherwise modern novel, and Foreign Studies' first section, 'Summer in Rouen' suffers from the same dry work. (Crucifixions and tea cakes, one thinks: he gave up Shinto imagery for this?) The second, 'Araki Thomas' is a non-fiction jolt and a very post-modern shift in tone but part three about the Professor in Paris, 'And You, Too' lifted off. It has many things in fiction that I like: a stranger in the city, a sense of helplessness and disconnection and an atmosphere that all is not what it seems. I've yet to finish but with a set-up like that I'm sold. It's simple and resonant with possibilities.
