It's been a few months now. I feel like I'm always saying that. It's because I build this thing up into an insurmountable wall and give up before doing anything same as with everything else. At least this thing is easy because I'm mostly just rambling and talking about things only I care about. Still, I've convinced myself everything has to be an essay or else it's not worth posting. I've forgotten what personal websites used to be; have I actually lost my sense of nostalgia?
That aside, I suppose I can talk a bit about what I've been reading. I've been taking more time to read lately. There are all kinds of reasons, ones I could even write longer posts on, but that's not important right now. The important thing is that instead of doing nothing I'm reading. I'm reading books, even. It's funny that I feel I ought to specify that, but that's how it is. If I don't say 'books', then perhaps the impression might be that I'm reading fanfiction instead. There has been little for me to read for a while in that regard, unfortunately. More fortunately, there is literature out there to pore over.
A lot of what I've been reading has in fact been re-reads. First of those has been a couple of selections from Atōda Takashi's The Square Persimmon and Other Stories, namely "Paper Doll" and the titular "Square Persimmon" piece. Both are tales of middle-aged men becoming lost in time and memory about different things, fairly wistful in character. They're also partly about first loves or at least childhood fascinations. In the latter tale, the narrator is smitten as a young lad by a young woman in a sweets shop, his preferences being influenced from then on by her image. The former story's narrator has a slightly older childhood companion whom he has a certain fascination with, though it's more confused erotic feelings than anything too formative. They both also share somewhat ambiguous endings that consign memory to, well, the past; no matter how they chase their memories in the present, the narrators have to be content to leave the past as the past. I remembered liking "Paper Doll" more the first time around, if I'm honest. This time, I think it was a little twee for my tastes, though I did find the general wistfulness of it attractive. On the other hand, "The Square Persimmon" was definitely still as strong as I remembered. The ambiguously ghostly atmosphere at the end is the sort of thing I recall Atōda being good at, and I wasn't disappointed.
Following those re-reads, I spent some time reading Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun or Bab al-Shams in the original Arabic. I was recommended the book a while ago, but I hadn't quite found it in me to take an interest for a while. I'm not generally that acquainted with the Middle East beyond some fairly rudimentary facts, and even then I'm often in doubt about what I actually know. Gate of the Sun opened my eyes to a lot of things regarding Palestinian refugees, the Lebanese civil war, and the state of things in the region in the Nineties. The outlook of everything is pretty bleak in this story, and it does seem like everyone involved lives in a present state of despair. Nevertheless, they all carry on with life, aware of all of the exigencies and trying to turn their eyes away as much as possible. What I got was that there is a strong sense of denial about everything. The narrator is living with both grief in the recent past and in the present, one of his closest friends and father figures lying in a coma in hospital at the opening of the story. To comfort himself, he takes to recounting narratives that intersect his life and that of his comatose friend, circling back again and again to different details of the two men's lives. The effect is something very conversational but literary at the same time. It's very much a story about dealing with grief and, honestly, going mad with it. There's such a strong element of humanity, too, in all of the sorts of stories told, even when things start getting a little detached and surreal towards the end. Probably most interesting to me was how the narratives of the story are in conversation with each other in a way, questioning the value of narratives themselves as they're continually told and re-told. In the end, I'd say this book is one of very few I'd recommend without reservations.
Lastly, as far as completed reads, I've gone back and re-read Kawabata Yasunari's Thousand Cranes for the second time. The book is on the scale of a novelette, so it shouldn't take very long to read, though I did end up spending a couple of sessions on it. Something about the prose can be a little difficult to parse. I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe it's in part the way Kawabata, like many Japanese writers, doesn't always clearly attribute dialogue, so it can take a minute to figure out who's said what in a conversation. That said, some of it is Kawabata's own sensibilities, flitting about to what seem like incidental details about the natural world or other such matters, some of it no doubt having shades of significance beyond just the literal descriptions. I can't say I've decoded every layer of nuance in the story, but I certainly feel I've appreciated a bit more about it this time around. The plot itself is a simple one about a young bachelor whose life is invaded by some of his father's former lovers, one whose daughter he ends up getting involved with for the rest of the story. That's a gross oversimplification, but to fully explain the ins-and-outs would constitute an analysis, so I'll just leave it at: the main character and the daughter become muddled in a way with their respective parents. There's a lot about death and the transience of life, and the story is, well, fairly Japanese in its sensibilities. For anyone who can deal with things being a touch ambiguous, I'd say it's a good story, as with most of Kawabata's work. I really need to give Snow Country, another of his works, a re-read, though I'm not in a hurry to do so.
In the outset of this post, I started off saying that I turned everything into a mountainous task to overcome, yet I've done just that with this post. I suppose it's hard for me to not turn everything into an essay, ultimately, even with my best efforts. Still, I haven't gone into incredible detail with anything, so maybe I've gone a step in the right direction with these sorts of posts. I have had a few thoughts about things like the relative lack of discoverability of certain kinds of books that I'd write slightly more involved pieces on, but I'm not up to it right now. I'd also like to start some more distinct pages for this site, but the limitations of Cobalt make that a bit unwieldy at the moment. It'll have to wait until I can get a bit of PHP under my belt so I can build a more functional (but still statically-generated) site. There is a certain oppressive weight of what feels like unrealised projects bearing down on me, though few concrete projects actually exist. I think it's largely a product of feeling harried by life circumstances that I won't explain here. For the most part, I've been in full hermit mode for the past month. Engaging with anything has felt like a chore. Well, at least with this I can say I've done something. Until next time.