The Calligrapher's Daughter

The Calligrapher’s Daughter is Eugenia Kim’s debut novel and, as so many first novels do, the book tells a story very close to the author’s heart, one, in this case, inspired by her own mother’s life. Set in Korea between 1915 and 1945, it recounts the suffering inflicted upon the country by Japanese invaders that arrived there early in the 20th century. Japanese administrators, determined to wipe out any memory of an independent Korea, allowed only Japanese to be spoken in schools, taught only Japanese history to Korean children, destroyed the Korean royal family, and filled local prisons with those that dared protest. During World War II, when Japan realized its chances of prevailing were slipping away, life became particularly desperate for Koreans because Japan saw Korea as little more than a source of slave labor, food and raw materials to be exploited for the Japanese war effort.

Many Korean patriots, however, refused to submit to the inevitable – and they paid a heavy price for their resistance. Najin Han’s father was one of those. Najin began life as her Christian family’s first born child, enjoying the comfortable lifestyle her well known artist father was able to provide. But, though she was too young to recognize it, all was not well in her world. By the time she was five years old, Japan was well into its efforts to annex her country and her father had begun to attract the attention of local Japanese authorities concerned with snuffing out the resistance.

Over the course of the next thirty years, Najin will struggle to carve out an independent life for herself, one with which her tradition bound father will never be completely happy. Najin is fortunate, however, to have as ally a mother willing to defy her husband in the best interest of her daughter. Rather than capitulate to her husband’s decision to marry off his 14-year-old daughter (to the 12-year-old son of an old friend of his), Mrs. Han secretly sends Najin to the royal court in Seoul where Najin’s dream of an education is made possible.

The Calligrapher’s Daughter is, though, as much the story of 20th century Korea as it is an engaging family saga. Readers, like me, whose sense of Korean history begins with the Korean War of the 1950s and ends with the horrors perpetrated by the almost cartoonish North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, will come away from the book with a new appreciation of Korean culture and the suffering its people have endured for the last 100 years. They will also become emotionally attached to Najin and her family as they follow the course of Najin’s life and everything that happens to her during this violent period in Korean history.

Some readers may find the book’s initial pacing to be a bit sluggish. I want to encourage those readers not to give up on the book too quickly because its pacing mimics that of Japan’s efforts to assimilate Korea – things begin to happen quicker and quicker as the country, and the book, move toward their climaxes.

Rated at: 4.0

Borders Makes Another Move in E-Books Battle

According to the Washington Post there is another snazzy e-book reader on the horizon, one that will use color more than the rest of the readers currently on the market. And, although it's not mentioned in this Post article, Borders has apparently struck a deal with Spring Design, the new reader's manufacturer, to ensure that the Borders e-book store is the first thing to be seen when readers power up the thing.

The device will feature a Google Android-based platform with full Web browsing capabilities, Wi-Fi connectivity, audio and video playback and image viewing in a variety of formats. The Alex eReader will also be able to run a number of Android apps.

The Alex eReader boasts a 6? EPD (Electronic Paper Display) screen which allows users to browse the Web in full color while simultaneously searching for and reading digital books. Users can thus click on hyperlinks within online books that lead to relevant information or multimedia content found online in order to enrich their reading experience. EPUB digital books can be searched and downloaded using Google API applications provided by Alex?s eReader.

This is another e-book reader using the EPUB format, further isolating Amazon's Kindle users, and it won't be the last.

As the article points out, Spring Design, just a few months ago, sued Barnes & Noble, claiming that the giant bookseller stole its trade secrets and incorporated them into The Nook. It's a cruel old e-book world out there for booksellers, isn't it?

Take a look:

Pensioners Burning Books to Stay Warm

Mark this down as another of those stories I never expected to hear. It seems that some old age pensioners in the U.K. are burning books, instead of coal, as they try to stay warm during this unusually cold winter weather (are you paying attention, Mr. Gore?).

The complete article can be found here at this Metro website:

Volunteers have reported that ‘a large number’ of elderly customers are snapping up hardbacks as cheap fuel for their fires and stoves.

[...]

Workers at one charity shop in Swansea, in south Wales, described how the most vulnerable shoppers were seeking out thick books such as encyclopaedias for a few pence because they were cheaper than coal.

One assistant said: ‘Book burning seems terribly wrong but we have to get rid of unsold stock for pennies and some of the pensioners say the books make ideal slow-burning fuel for fires and stoves.

A lot of them buy up large hardback volumes so they can stick them in the fire to last all night.’

A 500g book can sell for as little as 5p, while a 20kg bag of coal costs £5.

Since January 2008, gas bills have risen 40 per cent and electricity prices 20 per cent, although people over 60 are entitled to a winter fuel allowance of between £125 and £400.

Just when you think you've heard it all...

The Unnamed

I suspect that the temptation to “walk away from it all” is a common one that almost everyone thinks about, even if only for an instant, at one time or another. Few of us, however, succumb to the temptation because our good sense allows us to control the fleeting urge to chuck it all away for a fresh start. What would happen, though, if, like Tim Farnsworth, the urge to walk away had to be responded to literally – no other option allowed? How would we survive the elements and the dangers of the streets? What would happen to those we leave behind? Joshua Ferris explores those questions in The Unnamed.

Tim Farnsworth, a wealthy Harvard-educated attorney and partner at a prestigious New York City firm, lives with a monster: an unnamed disease that requires him to walk until he drops into a deep sleep from sheer exhaustion. The disease comes and goes, sometimes disappearing for years at a time, but when the urge to start walking strikes, Tim Farnsworth has no choice. He starts walking, and neither the obligations of his job nor those of his family can check his need to hit the streets.

Tim and his wife, by now, know what to expect when the disease returns. Tim is able to alert his wife to what his happening to him and she quickly outfits him in his warmest clothing and makes sure that he leaves the house (or office) with a backpack filled with things to help him survive on his own. Even all this planning does not always work, however, because Tim has a way of walking away from his possessions when coming out of one of his deep sleeps.

The Unnamed, despite the bleakness of its theme, is a terrific character study because it places the reader deep inside Tim Farnsworth’s head as he struggles to understand and control the disease that is slowly, but steadily, killing him. We share his frustration and despair when even the best doctors fail him; we worry with him about how his wife and daughter are holding up back home; we understand his anger at how his longtime legal colleagues take advantage of his illness; and, through his eyes, we see life stripped to its most fundamental elements.

This is a difficult novel to read because of its theme and storyline, and I have no quarrel with that. Ferris succeeds in making the reader feel Tim’s struggle not to surrender to the hopelessness of his situation as the unnamed disease more and more dominates his life. As a result, some readers might, after putting down the book, be a bit reluctant to return to it. This feeling, though, only illustrates how successful Ferris is in making the reader feel the Farnsworth family’s pain. On the other hand, I did struggle during the somewhat tedious section of the book during which Tim loses touch with reality to such an extent that he cannot distinguish the real world from his dream world. This overlong section of the book would have been more effective had it been presented concisely because, as it is written, I found myself rushing through it in order to get to the rest of the story.

The Unnamed is one of those books I will think about for a while – but not one that I am likely to want to read a second time. There is a lot to be gained from reading it once, however, and I recommend it to anyone ready to contemplate life at its most basic.

Rated at: 3.5

New "TV Book Club" in U.K.

BBC4 pulled the plug on Richard and Judy a while back and that had to be bad news for publishers, authors and booksellers in the U.K. because it also meant that the Richard and Judy Book Club would no longer have access to its large BBC audience. Richard and Judy may not have have sold books in Oprah- style numbers but the show did create its share of U.K. bestsellers, so lots of people took a hit when the show ended.

Now, in a bit of good news for U.K. book people, British producer Amanda Ross has announced the first picks for her new "TV Book Club." The complete article may be found here at The Los Angeles Times website:

Called the Simon Cowell of publishing, Ross was the woman behind Richard and Judy's book club. For years, the popular talk show "Richard & Judy" -- or "chat show," as they say in the UK -- included, among its many topics, a book club. Like Oprah Winfrey's book selections, Richard and Judy's picks could turn quiet books into mega-bestsellers. At its height, the Richard and Judy Book Club accounted for 26% of the 100 bestsellers in the UK.

[...]

Though Richard and Judy have continued their show elsewhere, it hasn't had the same profile. And Ross has embarked on a new venture, the upcoming "TV Book Club," a show that promises to talk about books on TV. Ten books were announced for 2010, featuring Abraham Verghese's "Cutting for Stone."

[...]

Verghese's book is joined by Nick Hornby's "Juliet, Naked," "The Little Stranger" by Sarah Waters and George Pelecanos' "The Way Home," among others, in the first roster of the new show. But it remains to be seen whether British readers/viewers will embrace Ross' new show -- will the not-yet unveiled format, which promises new hosts and visiting comedians -- make a show dedicated to books a success?

This sounds like fun and I wish there were a way it could be made available to U.S. viewers via the internet (wishful thinking, I know). Am I the only one wishing that our own Book TV would feature fiction as well as nonfiction books? There are some weekends during which I am just not in the mood for another bunch of political books, biographies, and histories. I suppose that is just more wishful thinking but I cannot, for the life of me, understand why fiction has been banned by Book TV.

Summer

Tame by today’s standards, Summer, Edith Wharton’s most sexually explicit novel, probably shocked more than a few readers when it was first published almost 100 years ago. That it is also one of only two novels Wharton placed in a rural setting makes Summer even more unique among her novels.

Charity Royall is bored with her little North Dormer community and only works as the town librarian so she can save enough money to escape the life she endures there. She cares little for books and is perfectly willing to allow them to self-destruct on the shelves while she daydreams about a more exciting existence. But, as it turns out, her fate will be forever linked to the little library.

Lucius Harney, a young architect, has come to North Dormer to visit his aunt and to study and sketch some of the old homes in the area. When he wanders into the library one day in search of a book about the old houses, Charity is smitten with him and unknowingly sets the course that will alter the rest of her life. It is the start of a relationship that, even though it begins innocently, is best kept from the prying eyes of the town gossips. Charity knows that her guardian, Lawyer Royall, the man who did a better job of raising her before his wife died than after, would never approve the match – and that there are those in town who would relish the opportunity to tell him about it.

Secrecy, though, requires privacy, and privacy often leads to a degree of intimacy that results in tragic consequences for the unwed. Only after Harney returns to his life in New York, does Charity realize that she is pregnant - and on her own. As Wharton makes clear, a woman of this period facing Charity’s dilemma had few options: illegal abortion, being sent away to have the baby in secrecy, running away in shame, or perhaps the unlikely luck of finding a sympathetic man willing to marry her.

Charity moves from desperation to despair when she realizes how limited her choices have become and that the life she was already unhappy with has been forever changed, and that change being for the worse. As she moves from one poor decision to the next, at times risking her very life, one is reminded of how greatly American mores and values have changed in the last five decades.

Summer, even though it was governed by the stricter limits of its time on language and theme, is a memorable portrayal of what it was like for a woman to be “in trouble” during the first half of the 20th century. That it still can have a strong impact on the reader today leaves one wondering why it was not more of a sensation when first published. Edith Wharton fans should not overlook this fine novel.

Rated at: 4.0