Yasunari Kawabata, Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, 1988

— In these brief and intense tales, all aimed at some heightened perception or ineffable truth and many based on dreams expressed or implied, we find loneliness, love, the passage of time, and death. Palm-of-the-Hand Stories captures the astonishing variety and complexity of form, setting, character, voice, and tone of one of the twentieth century’s greatest literary talents.

Seventy miniature short stories that Kawabata wrote between 1923 and 1972. It’s said the essence of Kawabata’s writing can be found in these brief episodes in Japanese lives more so than in his novels, but in truth they often feel like fragments of larger stories that Kawabata may have discarded then stripped down to their absolute minimum. Many end with a character staring into the distance, perhaps wondering something, or with an unresolved issue still hanging uncomfortably in the reader’s mind, but there’s also a sense of give-and-take here because while Kawabata often goes for the minimalist effect he’s also careful not to remove the points and markers that can give his characters an often luminous form. It’s interesting to read short stories composed differently from the way we are used to experiencing them, though the reader may still be left with a small sense of dissatisfaction with many, although those written nearer the end of Kawabata’s career are rounded off with more depth: best of all is the brief, impressive ghost story ‘Immortality’, the imaginative flourish of ‘Snow’, and ‘Gleanings from Snow Country’, loosely connected to his famous novel Snow Country. Altogether gentle and enjoyable, but frequently too slight.  PY

MORE ON YASUNARI KAWABATA :  NOBEL PRIZE BIOGRAPHY  |  WIKIPEDIA

Imre Kertész, Liquidation, 2003

— Ten years have passed since the fall of Communism. B., a writer of great repute – whose birth and survival in Auschwitz defied all probability – has taken his own life. His friend Kingbitter discovers among his papers a play entitled Liquidation, in which he reads an eerie foretelling of the personal and political crises that he and B.’s other friends now face. Having survived the Holocaust and the years of Communist rule, having experienced the surge of hope that rose up from the rubble of the Wall, they are left with little other than a sense of chaos and an utter loss of identity.

Communism has fallen in 1990s Hungary, the publishing house of the literary editor Kingbitter is about to fold, and his friend, B., the only author he admired, has just comitted suicide. B. was an extraordinarily perceptive writer, having written a play, Liquidation, which predicted precisely how his coterie of friends and lovers would react after his death: Kingbitter reads about himself doing exactly what he has recently done. This clever beginning to the novel hints at layers of metaphysical introspection, a clever interweaving of meanings and motives, but this ‘Matryoshka doll’ technique of hiding stories within stories only goes so deep here. Further in, and always central to Kertész’s concerns, is the nature of evil and its coexistence with good, the impossibility of truly escaping the mental confines of Auschwitz even after that too has come and gone, and the question of how does one continue to live on after or whether there’s greater dignity in ending it all before the survival instinct disappears forever. A book that’s full of things coming to an end with no new beginnings, short novels don’t come much weightier than this.  PY

MORE ON IMRE KERTÉSZ :  NOBEL PRIZE BIOGRAPHY  |  WIKIPEDIA

Imre Kertész, Detective Story, 1977

— Antonio Martens was a torturer for the secret police of a recently defunct dictatorship. Now in prison, he requests and is given writing materials in his cell, and what he has to recount is his involvement in the surveillance, torture, and assassination of Federigo and Enrique Salinas, a prominent father and son whose principled but passive opposition to the regime left them vulnerable to the secret police. Preying upon young Enrique’s aimless life, the secret police began to position him as a subversive and then targeted his father. Once this plan was set into motion, any means were justified to reach the regime’s chosen end—the destruction of an entire liberal class. Inside Martens’s mind, we inhabit the rationalising world of evil and see first-hand the inherent danger of inertia during times of crisis.

As an Auschwitz survivor the study of evil has always been Kertész’s focus and yet this novella, in the form of a prison memoir written by one of the police officers after a civilian government has been restored, focuses more on its banality than its excesses though is no less gripping. The officer shows nothing in the way of remorse and instead tries to show how he was just doing his job, following orders, and the surveillance techniques he uses are straight out of East Germany’s Stasi. This works as an excellent and very accessible piece of writing that serves to illustrate how an untrammeled police force will often be inclined to pursue the wrong leads, and it that respect it helps to cast light on the kind of mindset that results in the death of innocents at the hands of the police. Recommended.  PY

MORE ON IMRE KERTÉSZ :  NOBEL PRIZE BIOGRAPHY  |  WIKIPEDIA

Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1981

Based on an event he remembers from his youth, Márquez adopted a journalistic yet personal style for this novel as a speculation on what led a possibly innocent man to be murdered in a South American form of honour killing, after a Colombian bride’s doomed wedding night. It would be easy to fall into line and call this a masterpiece the way everyone else does, but that’s to overlook that the structure of this novel can at times be difficult, particularly in the early few chapters where Márquez’s rhythm is not at all easy to establish. The fact that he removes the mystery from the murder in the first few pages is what makes this book exceptional because he can still keep the reader interested in events with the way he ranges back and forth along the story’s non-linear timeline, well beyond the killing itself. It’s one of those books short enough (and OK, important enough) that it deserves to be read by everyone, if only to witness the non-intrusive hints of magical realism that he adds, the multiple viewpoints that illustrate how the whole town failed that day, and his complex composition which drives the point home that the story’s dénouement is actually as important as the story itself. An intimidatingly masterful read.   PY


MORE ON GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ :  THE MODERN WORLD  |  NOBEL PRIZE BIOGRAPHY  |  WIKIPEDIA

Gao Xingjian, One Man’s Bible, 1999

A long and completely detached autobiographical but fictionalised retrospective on Gao’s time as a revolutionary Party cadré under China’s catastrophic Cultural Revolution, and a navel-gazing analysis of how women and sex have shaped him throughout his life. In this account of his life Gao has deliberately divorced himself from his past: he refers to his younger self in the third person and to his present 1990s self in the second person throughout, which at times makes it something of a challenge to follow the dual threads but is still a neat literary device. Often heavy going and ponderous (as one might expect from a Nobel Laureate), it nevertheless does offer a unique first-hand insight into the paranoid nightmare that was everyday life under Mao.  PY

MORE ON GAO XINGJIAN : ARTSY.NET  |  NOBEL PRIZE BIOGRAPHY  |  WIKIPEDIA

Naguib Mahfouz, The Day the Leader was Killed, 1985

Goings-on in a middle class Cairo family in the months before the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat in October 1981. The book has three narrators: Randa, constantly at the receiving end of her bad decisions, her indecisive fiancé Elwan, and his mischievous, sloganeering grandfather Muhtashimi; this triad of viewpoints each reflect the national despair at Sadat’s open-door economic policy which wreaked havoc in the everyday lives of Egyptians. There’s a great deal of irony to be found in their self-confessed impotence even though there are millions more far worse off than themselves, and their preoccupation with their own small problems and desires comes to an unexpected head for Elwan in a way that simultaneously reflects the emergency situation facing the nation. The Day the Leader was Killed has ironic political undercurrents but at its heart is soap opera, enjoyable nonetheless.   PY

Naguib Mahfouz, Voices from the Other World, 2004

Five little-known short stories that Mahfouz wrote between 1936 and 1945, centred around his explorations of ancient Egyptian history. They’re actually quite good fun (especially ‘Evil Adored’), told straight but always with a biting undercurrent that is either political or allegorical, bringing the time of the Pharaohs and their belief in the afterlife right up against the equally strange twentieth century.   PY

Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, 2005

For his ninetieth birthday, a newspaper columnist gives himself a night with a fourteen year-old virgin, a night in which nothing happens. Instead as he continues to see her he comes to treasure her innocence, and with his newspaper column finding a fresh vigour he at last achieves some semblance of fame and success that he has gone without for too long. This is a kind of belated, nonagenarian coming-of-age story that’s thankfully a long way from the ‘memoirs of a dirty old man’ that a reader could reasonably be half expecting from its title, because it focuses on the humour of old age rather than any melancholy yearnings for lost youth. Lively and natural, and it ends brilliantly.   PY

MORE ON GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ :  THE MODERN WORLD  |  NOBEL PRIZE BIOGRAPHY  |  WIKIPEDIA

Gabriel García Márquez, Leaf Storm, 1954

There’s hardly a trace of any magical realism to Leaf Storm, which is set in Macondo, the imaginary town Márquez was to return to later for One Hundred Years of Solitude. But he does use multiple viewpoints from three generations of a family, whose grandfather is the only person who wishes to provide a dignified funeral for a doctor that the rest of the town would prefer to see rot in hell. Márquez prefers to slowly reveal the mysterious doctor from behind a veil of obscurity in a way that doesn’t allow other characters to resolve their own individual kinds of spiritual limbo in relation to him; another issue for me was that all three very different narrators seem to relate their versions of events in the same written style, a tactic which I found problematic though was probably entirely deliberate. Hence a puzzling story, and one which perhaps conceals its intent a little too well.   PY

MORE ON GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ :  THE MODERN WORLD  |  NOBEL PRIZE BIOGRAPHY  |  WIKIPEDIA

Gabriel García Márquez, No One Writes to the Colonel, 1961

The retired Colombian colonel is a man whose body, house and country are all falling apart, an elderly man with “no occupation other than waiting for the mail every Friday”, and in lieu of his ever-absent war pension the only thing that keeps him going is the windfall that may yet come from his prize rooster’s upcoming cockfight. Essentially it’s a rather cynical shaggy-dog story, and I recently read that the situation of the colonel, if not the character himself, was directly inspired by the experience of Márquez’s own grandfather, and this knowledge gives an extra vitriolic punch to the book’s final scene.   PY

MORE ON GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ :  THE MODERN WORLD  |  NOBEL PRIZE BIOGRAPHY  |  WIKIPEDIA