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A Very Happy Birthday to feorag.

2009 books

47) Yasunari Kawabata, Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, 1988
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 I'm used to experiencing them, though I'm still left with a small sense of dissatisfaction with most, apart from those nearer the end of the book where Kawabata rounds his stories 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. Enjoyable, but too often too slight.

2009 books

47) Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, 1969
Despite the millions of translated copies in print over the last forty years (with barely a trickle of royalties for its author) and its frequent bannings around the world this has had very few widely available English editions, so in his introduction to this new Penguin paperback Salih, who died in February, tried to outline how it has become such an important book in the wider context of African literature (and, as it was written in Arabic, was also voted the most important Arabic novel of the twentieth century). In storytelling terms it is far more successful, and several degrees more complex, than either of those equally famous post-colonial novels Things Fall Apart or From a Crooked Rib: an unnamed narrator returns from England to his village in the Sudan, only to find a newcomer who has adopted the village as his own: Mustafa Sa'eed is an enigmatic stranger from Khartoum, someone who gradually provides a very unflattering portrait of himself, centred around his own lurid experiences in England that are far more troubling, and necessarily secret, than anything anyone in the village may suspect. Tayeb Salih gives this story many interweaving layers as just about everyone submits to subconscious destructive forces that seem to spread forward and backwards, from person to person, throughout the novel. At the root of it all is the aftermath of British colonialism in Sudan, but that country doesn't come out of this novel looking at all respectable either, which along with the explicit sexual content probably accounts for its periodic banning. Certainly one of the most engaging books I've read this year.