Final Things

What more perfect occupation for a dreary November day with snow in the offing than updating our folder of Important Information for our survivors?

I put this compilation together about seven years ago and, unsurprisingly, a good bit of the important info has changed or is no longer important. 

All this in hopes that it won't be needed for a good while and that I'll need to update it at some time down the road.

The relevance was driven home by an email to let me know that an old and dear friend on the other side of the country is nearing her end, gracefully and gallantly as was always her wont. 

Compounding the somber mood is that I'm currently listening to Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go--beautifully written and read but not exactly cheerful.

We're none of us getting out of this alive. 

 

Reading in Hot Weather

Josie is attending day camp all this week, thanks to her other grandmother, and my schedule is suddenly quite open. The heat, hovering around 90, leaves me little inclination for much more than reading. So I plunged into the Big Bag o' Books my friend left for me and came up with Nick.

Nick is the story of the narrator of The Great Gatsby. In Gatsby, Nick is a bonds salesman, renting a small place near the wealthy and mysterious Jay Gatsby. Nick's role is mainly that of an observer and we know little of his past--Yale and from the mid-west.

With no more than that to adhere to, Michael Farris Smith has given Nick a rich backstory, replete with the horrors of trench warfare in WWI, the ache of lost love in Paris, and a wander through the brothels and bars of a very wild post war New Orleans.

Smith is a terrific writer who brings Nick to vivid life--but after my two previous reads (pre-Vietnam War and WWII,) I determined to study war no more and turned to the quiet sensibilities of Kazuo Ishiguro.

Not war as such, but this is the story of an artist in post war Japan. Masuji Ono made his name with popular patriotic paintings that supported Japan's imperialism. In the wake of defeat and the changing political environment, he finds himself in a delicate position, especially as he has a daughter for whom he is trying to arrange a marriage and whose parents will be, as is usual, looking into his background.

This novel reminds me a great deal of Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day despite the very different settings. There is the same preoccupation with self, with facades, and with the perceptions of others. And, of course, the same beautiful writing. A nice change from trench warfare.

And now, for something completely different.  I had not been aware of Samantha Irby until Book Bub offered her book of essays and something about the blurb convinced me to give it a shot.

I loved it! The woman is a self-deprecating, self-aware, non-filtered, raunchy observer of life. She is a Black, Bi, city-girl, comfortable with disclosing the most outrageous parts of her life. I am none of those things, as well as being of a very different generation. (Nothing outrageous to disclose, even if I wanted to.)

 But I found myself nodding and grinning and muttering, yeah, boy! time after time. 

Now to find her other books... 

 

Never Let Me Go

                                                                              

I am seriously late to this fine and disturbing book, published in 2005, just when I was writing under deadline and not reading anything new.

I haven't seen the film, but I'd heard enough to have some idea of what the book was about. It was the Audible edition that I listened to (an excellent narrator) and I can highly recommend it.

Dystopian fiction at its best. Like the scenario I envisioned a few days ago with Universal Auto-Correct, the premise in both cases is bizarre and far-fetched, but the idea at the core invites the reader to look around them for similar situations.

I can't say it better than these paragraphs from a review in The Guardian (full review HERE):

"Perhaps the most sinister aspect of the novel is the way it reflects ourselves back at us. In this world, the cost of a world free from cancer and diseases is, in human terms, catastrophic, but, as one character asks, how can we go back to a world where these diseases cause so much suffering and indignity? In the same way, our trade off for the luxury of development and the necessity of ending poverty seems to be locking us into a cycle of dependency on fossil fuels. Let alone the thought of where our cheap clothes, technology – and the raw materials which build them – come from. I’ve never quite encountered such a well-written fictional account of cognitive bias – the way we modify our beliefs or our behaviour to avert the guilt or discomfort at holding two self-contradictory beliefs in our mind at once – at society’s level. This alone makes this a precious book indeed. The spike in anti-migrant and anti-Muslim hate crime in a post-Brexit Britain, not to mention the rise of Donald Trump in the US or the far right in Europe, has been a salutary reminder of the need to always avoid ‘othering’ human beings; this book is full of such compassion for humanity it must surely be a worthy antidote. The idea of letting the technological or medical genie out of the bottle without considering the full moral, social and environmental implications is as relevant and haunting today as it has ever been."

Klara and the Sun

 I really loved this book--raced through it because I'd gotten so invested in the fate of Klara. That's Ishiguro's magic--he can bring to life an Artificial Friend, an android companion and make us care about her--more, indeed, than we care about the sick girl she is companion to.

The story is told by Klara and it's a fascinating exercise in imaging how an artificial intelligence would see and react to the world--a world not far removed from our present day, no flying cars or transporters but much like today: a world still full of inequality, a world in which love is fickle. Highly recommended.

(I haven't read Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go which is about human clones but now I'm eager to.)