jung yun with alexander chee!

2016 march 23, UES barnes and noble:  i've been raving about jung yun's shelter since i read it last year, and i'm glad it's finally out in the world for everyone to read.  if you haven't read it yet, read it; it's amazing; and it will wreck you.

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jung yun:  i used to live in new york city but left fourteen years ago with this vague idea of being a writer.

JY:  i started writing [shelter] in 2010, but it's set in 2008.

[the scene they discuss below is the one she read -- pages 12-17 from the novel.]

alexander chee:  i think the incredible power that you give the mother as she approaches is just one of the moments when i knew that i loved this novel because you allowed her the dignity of her suffering, in a sense, amid the humiliation that was happening.  and the misunderstanding of the son -- it's so heartbreaking.  that's not a question.  how did you come to this idea?

JY:  so that scene -- i was an MFA candidate, it was 2004, and, at the time, my parents were getting older and heading toward retirement.  you know, my parents are fantastic and they're loving people, but i was thinking [...] [about how you can love someone, but it can be inconveniencing].

that was sort of the beginning, then i put it away in a drawer, then, in 2007, there was this high-profile home invasion in cheshire, connecticut.  [two men broke into a home of a family of four; the mother and two daughters were brutally raped and murdered, while the father survived.]*  i became really obsessed with that case, but i didn't understand how this man was ever going to have a life.  i didn't know how this man was going to recover knowing that his loved ones had all died in fear.

that particular crime that happened in real life was the connecting thing between the scene in the field and everything else.

* wiki page here

AC:  the parents are also remarkable characters, and i think that was part of what moved me about the novel, this sense that i was reading characters i'd never really seen in a novel.  and, to some extent, that includes your portrayal of kyung.  it's hard for someone like to understand that there is a great deal of love in all of the demands placed on him, and yet that's also part of the heartbreak.  so this is a kind of crisis in which crisis happens -- this gap.  what were the biggest challenges in structuring that?

JY:  i think, in not making it overly sentimental.  i wanted kyung to be kind of unlikable from the start but also for readers to understand him.  there are times my husband would be like "he's so frustrating," and i was like, "good!"  i wanted to capture some of the tension and expectation of someone who came to the country with his parents and has felt the weight of having to do just as well or better than his parents did.

JY:  i tried to avoid delving into too much sentimentality but tried to subvert expectations and to avoid stereotypes and make him more three-dimensional.

AC:  how much did you research the family and kyung?  maybe the expectation would be that you're korean so you wouldn't have to, which is ridiculous.

JY:  i did a lot of research into domestic violence in immigrant communities.

AC:  what surprised you in what you learned?

JY:  i don't speak korean very well myself, and one of the most messed up things i learned was about the korean language.  in english, you can say, "you hurt me," but you can't say that directly in korean.  but you can say, "it hurts."*

* i had to sit and puzzle over this for a good five minutes there.  it's kinda blowing my mind ... but not.  sounds very korean.

audience Q&A

Q:  did you purposely want to write about korean-americans?

JY:  i write a mix of characters, but i did want this character to be korean-american, and i wanted him to be married to someone who wasn't korean-american because i wanted that question.

JY:  when i was doing press, i'd get the question, "are these people based on real life?" a lot.

AC:  the most boring question.

JY:  taking care of parents -- taking care of lousy parents -- that's not a korean-american problem; that's a universal problem.  struggling with money, having financial problems -- that's a universal problem, too.

JY:  [explained how she gets up at 4:30 in the morning to write before work because she realized that, after the work day, she has no wherewithal to write.  writing is the most important thing to her, though, so she'd start getting up at 6, then 5:30, now 4:30 to write, and now she wakes up without an alarm.]

JY:  when i don't write, i'm terrible.  it's better for everyone if i start my day doing the thing that's most important to me.

JY:  there's a whole lot in my life that i can't control.  i can control what's on the page, and that's about it.

AC:  i think the thing that's so frustrating about the autobiographical question is that you put all this energy into creating something and the thing people want to talk about is the thing you didn't write about.

about haruki murakami.

someone on tumblr asked what i thought about haruki murakami, so i figured i’d share my answer here as well because i have a lot of thoughts and this is my dedicated book blog!

i used to love murakami when i was in my early twenties, which is when i “discovered” him.  i started with the wind-up bird chronicle and went through his backlist like water and read probably 90% of his novels over the course of two-three years — i was obsessed and couldn’t get enough.

i think that murakami has a way of writing loneliness that speaks to lonely souls.  in my early-twenties, i found his work comforting, not necessarily because of narrative or character but because of the tone and mood he captures with his simple prose and surrealism (despite my dislike of surrealism) (and magic realism), and i think part of me could strongly relate to the solitude of [all] his main characters’ lives, their quiet repetition, their nostalgia even, their sense of aloneness in a strange world.

which is why i still think of murakami fondly despite having fallen out of love with his writing in recent years.

it does bother me how male-centric his novels are and how one-dimensional his women characters are, but, to be honest, my loss of love has mostly to do with how his novels all follow the same formula.  you generally know what’s going to happen in a murakami novel — you’ll follow the male protagonist through his quiet, hum-drum life, and he’ll have one loud, brash friend, and he’ll encounter strange things and meet a girl and obsess over her ear, and he’ll be sort of changed but maybe not by the end of his journey.  it’s a rudely reductive way of looking at his work, i acknowledge, but i find that to be the usual expected framework of murakami’s novels (with a few exceptions, of course).  if murakami is anything, he’s totally consistent, and i think, at one point, mostly likely after 1q84 (which i did like and find interesting), i simply lost interest.  i mean, colorless tsukuru is so beautifully and thoughtfully designed, and i do still love that opening passage, but, otherwise, it was just so, so bland.

maybe it says something that the murakami novels i still think of kindly are the ones that follow women — sputnik sweetheart* and after dark — as well as south of the border, west of the sun, which had one of murakami’s less one-dimensional women (i quite liked shimamoto).  and 1q84 even, thought it could have been (should have been) edited down severely.

or that the novel i absolutely hated (hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world) had one of the most offensively one-dimensional women i’ve ever read, as well as your very typical murakami protagonist male who gets sucked into another world while on his quest.

or maybe none of this says anything at all, and i’m simply trying to over-analyze.

* i must also add that it has been years since i read sputnik sweetheart and have not gone back to it, especially since my second read of norwegian wood drastically diminished my initial love for that.

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writing about murakami makes me think about influence and how writers are influenced by everything — the world around us, the music we listen to, the books we read, etcetera.  my love for murakami may have shifted and diminished over the last few years, but i can’t deny that he was a big influence on me as a writer — like, i distinctly remember writing a piece (for the vignettes that have become marble bird bakery), and my friend/reader/editor commented on a passage, saying that it reminded her of murakami.

that’s a very blatant example of influence, and influence obviously does not only manifest itself in such ways.  murakami specifically is one of the authors who made me think more about atmosphere, about mood and tone, about the mental spaces writing can put us in, and he might be one of the reasons i’m obsessed with what i call headspace (that has nothing to do with meditation).

(nell, my favorite band on this planet, is the principle reason i’m obsessed with headspace.)

i love writing that puts me in a different place — and, by writing, i mean writing as on the prose level, not narratively, not character-wise.  murakami, in all the sterile plainness of his writing, has always put me on a different plane, in a world that’s oddly familiar but also off-kilter, just enough to be strange but not enough to be disconcerting.  the reader in me responds very strongly, almost viscerally, to that kind of ability because the writer in me aspires to that kind of atmospheric force, and that’s where influence comes in and why i do still think of murakami fondly and respectfully because, despite all the problems of his male-centric plots and his one-dimensional women (and i fully recognize that these are big problems), he’s tapped into this voice that still entrances me and comforts me.

(i do realize that i’m taking the translation here at face value [maybe trusting the translator too much?], but this is what i meant when i wrote about reading korean literature — i don’t know much japanese [though this is a different topic; japanese is the language that frustrates me most not to know], so i simply accept the translation.)

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would i read murakami’s next novel?  maybe.  probably.  i haven’t read the recent releases of his first two novels in english, though — for years, murakami didn’t want them translated, so i’m not inclined to pick them up.  i would also love to hear him read one day; i really, really hope i can.

(i read most of murakami when i was in my early twenties, which means pretty much all my murakami novels are still back at my parents’ in california.  i do wish i had them all with me here!  that would have made a great photo, especially because i love these vintage covers.)

international women's day!

it's international women's day, and i'm not that big on hashtags (despite sporadic participation), but i'm all about opportunities to share asian-american and [east] asian books-in-translation (i admit/acknowledge that my geographic focus is narrow).  here are ten books by international women i love.

1. banana yoshimoto, lizard (washington square press, 1995)
2. marilynne robinson, lila (FSG, 2014)
3. krys lee, drifting house (viking, 2012)
4. ruth ozeki, a tale for the time being (penguin, 2013)
5. mary shelly, frankenstein (penguin clothbound classics, 2013)
6. han kang, human acts (portobello, 2016)
7. helen macdonald, h is for hawk (grove press, 2015)
8. charlotte brontë, jane eyre (penguin clothbound classics, 2009)
9. jang eun-jin, no one writes back (dalkey archive press, 2013)
10. shin kyung-sook, i'll be right there (other press, 2014)

also, one of my favorite book quotes comes from yoshimoto's "helix," a story which can be found in her collection, lizard:

"even when i have crushes on other men, i always see you in the curve of their eyebrows."  (64)

happy international reading!

garth greenwell and idra novey!

2016.03.01 at community bookstore!

garth greenwell (what belongs to you, FSG books, 2016) and idra novey (ways to disappear, little, brown, 2016) are hilarious.  they're also both very thoughtful and well-spoken, and they bounce off each other well.  i have to say that idra novey talks really fast, and greenwell went into really deep territory, so there'll be more paraphrasing than usual.

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idra novey:  i came up with questions i can throw on out.

garth greenwell:  ok.  this is scary.  (laughs)

IN:  (she describes a scene about mothers that takes place on a train.*)  you're so good at pinpointing the complexities of experience that way.  [...]  i wondered if you could talk about the editing process.

* i haven't read either book yet.  sorry.

GG:  i'd never written fiction before i wrote this book.  i didn't know anything when i started writing the book -- i didn't know what i was doing, and i really felt like at every point i was trying to ride the energy of the sentence and carry my way forward.

GG:  (two phrases that kept coming up as he was writing the book)

• be patient and don't try to rush to the end of a sentence, don't try to rush to the end of a scene, don't try to rush to the end of a moment.
  • there's all sorts of information we take in whenever we're with other people, and it's not always verbal.
• be indulgent.  any idea, anywhere the sentence took me, i would go.  that meant, [when] editing, everything was already there; i just had to take away all the crap.
  • my thing is sort of to write 20% more than i know i need.

GG:  i have a question for you.  this book -- idra's book -- is a wonderful assemblage of disparate parts.  (not only are there many parts, there are also many stories and ideas for stories.)  where do your ideas come from, idra?!  were those ideas you took from your notebook over the years?  and are you tempted to realize any of them?

IN:  i was really tired when i worked on this book, and i had one job and another, and i would work on it at night, and i think i was a little delirious -- i think i just kind of wrote it.  i wanted to write, and i just missed writing, and there was no time to do it except after eight at night.

IN:  i think that, for me, was my freedom.  this book was a joy to write because i couldn't travel the way i used to, and, so, i would just travel in my mind and make up these crazy stories and that would keep me joyful.

IN:  i don't know if i'd give that advice -- get really tired (because then you'll be less inhibited).

IN:  i think you self-censor less when it's a weird hour.

audience Q:  is beatrice (the translator in ways to disappear) a combination of people you've known?

• IN:  i kept coming back to her as a different person.
• IN:  the first time, i kind of thought about clarice lispector [whom novey has translated].  it was more about thinking about that relationship between writer and translator.
• IN:  i don't think you can write a character with any emotional truth if you haven't had that emotion.  (you don't have to have experienced it in the same way as the character; it's just that the fundamental core has to have been experienced.)
• IN:  i was curious about how you can be known to readers as one human being, and you can be known to friends, and you can be known in another language.  when i speak portuguese, i think i become another person because i don't speak it very well, so i have to think of really simple jokes.

audience Q:  how does the nitty gritty practice of translation influence your own writing?

• IN:  i think translating is a great way to travel.
• IN:  it kept my emotional imagination going.
• IN:  there's a lot of american literature out that talks about how people come here and get their english wrong, but, as it happens, it happens a lot the other way around, too.

audience Q:  is it the writer aspect of you that makes you want to travel or the other way around?

• GG:  in my case, the answer in the moment certainly felt quite dramatic -- i moved to bulgaria, and i started to write fiction.
• GG:  i'm not actually well-traveled.  i didn't go to europe until i was twenty-eight.
• GG:  bulgaria is kind of an incredible place to have as a home base to get around europe.  (istanbul is close by, and greece is just to the south.)  i never left bulgaria.  i just traveled around bulgaria, partly because i don't like traveling (or doing the tourist thing).  i hate being somewhere i don't speak the language.  but, definitely, bulgaria made me a prose writer somehow.
• IN:  oh, i think i kind of played around with everything always.  i think translating fiction was kind of a free apprenticeship.
• IN:  (she didn't tell anyone she was writing a novel until she'd sold it.  then she'd tell people she had a novel coming out, and they would ask, "oh, whose?" because she's a translator, and she'd be like, "mine!")

GG:  was there anything in particular that seemed hard or that you felt you had to learn as you were writing this novel?

IN:  i think it was the house of cards problem.  if you pull a poem out [of a poetry collection], the house doesn't fall.  i think it was this weird thing that i didn't want to contaminate the process, where you wouldn't want to pull something because of the work it would create.

IN:  you just have to be true to the book.

GG:  it was hard for me to move people across a space.

IN:  i found that impossible ... which is why i didn't really do it.

GG:  exactly!  that's why i decided to write it all inside his head, then i wouldn't have to move anyone!

GG:  it's interesting because we are in this moment where we have all these poets writing novels and it's interesting to see ways in which they're novels but they're not novels. [...]  like, poets will find ways to write novels without writing any scenes.

GG:  i do think there's a danger that there's a sort of monolingual canon of MFA texts, that you can assume that someone with an MFA has read all these american authors but they're totally unaware of literature in other languages.

IN:  i don't read a lot of american writing.

GG:  pedro lemebel -- he died january last year, and no one wrote about it in the english-language world, and it made me so angry.

(greenwell wrote a piece about lemebel in the new yorker -- he didn't ask his editor if he could, simply said he was going to -- you can find it here.)

GG:  it's estimated there are eight million bulgarian speakers in the world, and almost none of them reads bulgarian literature.

GG:  the thing that i became aware of as i was thinking about trying to put the book into the world is that this is the first literary representation of gay lives in bulgaria.  [...]  the spark for my novel really came from my experience in bulgaria and being a high school teacher and being the only openly gay person my students knew.

(i couldn't type fast enough, but what he said was important, so here's a paraphrase:  it reminded him of being a gay kid in kentucky and discovering james baldwin's giovanni's room when he was at a point when he was being told that his life was of no value, and it made him think of how books can actually save lives.  he was also very aware of the privilege of being american and that, had this been written in bulgarian, no one would have read it, and how sad that might have been.  the novel is being translated and published in bulgarian.)

GG:  if [the book] gets any attention, it will be that of scandal.  that's fine.  i speak bulgarian (and have some experience as an activist).

GG:  the greatest hope for my book and its fate in bulgaria -- i hope it says this is one foreigner's very partial experience in this community.  and my greatest hope is that one bulgarian writer will find the courage to say that this american writer got everything wrong.

álvaro enrigue with natasha wimmer!

160218:  at community bookstore!  álvaro enrigue is funny and charming and smart and has many ideas about what the novel should be, and natasha wimmer is a translator with bolaño under her belt.

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natasha wimmer:  one of the challenges of translating sudden death was translating the tennis vocabulary.  the tennis they're playing is not tennis as we know it today.  as i was struggling to get my head around this, i got my second email from álvaro, and here's the email:  "we have to talk, dear natasha."

• NW:  the initial contact between translator and author is always a little bit fraught.
• álvaro enrigue:  it's true.  before we made contact, natasha had given an interview -- of course i googled natasha immediately after i found out she was going to translate -- and she described the situation as "i have never worked with a living author before."
• NW:  (in the e-mail, enrigue describes a letter he got about the type of tennis played at the time.)  he had decided we needed to put this letter itself into the book.  to me, that perfectly sums up the fun we had working together -- the english version is not the same as the spanish -- just to sum up, that curiosity is at the heart of the book.  sudden death is the opposite of serious, but it's also serious, too.
• NW:  i think it's the humor that enables the seriousness.

NW puts AE up the challenge of summarizing his book and telling the audience what it's about.

• AE:  i've been writing books like [sudden death] always, maybe not with as much luck as i did this time.
• AE:  i published in these incredibly fancy publishing houses in spanish where they do everything for you somehow, and they would publish the book whenever they wanted, however they wanted, you didn't have an opinion.  when i moved to another prestigious publishing house in spain that involved more of the author, they involved the author more in the publicity and packaging of the book.  so the editor told me to write what the book is about to put on the back of the book, so i said, why don't you just print the book in tiny print.
• AE:  the idea i always have is that a book should be difficult to be defined, and i don't think the rules should ever be respected, so why should you break the rules and explain how you did it?

NW:  do you want to tell us a little bit about quevedo?

• AE:  he's not very well-known in the english tradition; i don't know why.  he was a very samrt poet.
• AE:  he was an incredible writer of sonnets.  he wrote, i think, one of the best collections of erotic sonnets ever written.
• AE:  i think he's still the best critic of the imperial morals of spain.
• AE:  i have the impression that poetry stays in your brain somehow.  it wraps itself around your cerebral cortex.  there are many circumstances when you see something, and a poem returns.

NW:  my original reaction to the novel was that, at the same time, it was an intensely cerebral book but it was also an intensely physical book.  i'm curious about how you balanced the two things and whether, because you're writing about historical figures who can be dry, whether you used the physical to make them come to life?

• AE:  no, i never think about it when i'm writing.
• AE:  i am interested in the ability the novel has to hurt the preconceptions about many things that, in this specific case, included the modern spanish empire and the vatican and those things.  and you cannot become enemies of these things if they haven't first done anything.
• AE:  i think the novel should always be a little destructive about the means that explain ourselves as human beings.  i think of the carnality of my characters as bringing them down.  [as in, taking them off any pedestal and bringing them down to the human level.]
• AE:  why would you write a novel in which the characters look like, i don't know, the supreme court building in washington, dc?

NW:  i think the novel is a lot about imperfections.  in a way, you're building up and taking it [the novel] down at the same time.

• AE:  the novel is a register.  it's a register about the life of someone.
• AE:  i think it would be a little dishonest to ask the reader to suspend their credibility.  the thing about cervantes -- and i swear this is my last seventeenth-century reference -- is that you can put anything in a novel.
• AE:  a novel is about the novel.  a novel is about how that novel was written.  we live in this world full of fantastic things and to think that you can still write like jane austen, i would feel silly doing it.
• AE:  what i enjoy as a reader is to follow the mental process of someone ... what a person that is my sister or brother or is my contemporary can do with that material.

NW:  let's get to the new world.  were you trying to say that something positive can come out of the clash between the old world and the new world?

• AE:  i think there is always some sort of redemption in everything.  if you're mexican, you have this official story of mexico -- it's very similar to americans.
• the figure of cortez is so grotesque to mexicans that he doesn't really show up in mexican literature.
• [he went on to talk about how, as he researched and read, he found these cool connections between old mexico and new mexico and how they threaded through spain and to the philippines.  it was cool.  i'm sorry i couldn't get any of it down.]

audience Q:  do you play tennis?

• AE:  no.  two of my kids play tennis.  that's enough.
• AE:  i played baseball as a kid.  they're very close.  there's a ball.
• AE:  it was not love for tennis; it was love for caravaggio.
• AE:  i think the novel should also try to break the definition of what makes a novel.  the idea should always be to expand the definition of a novel according to your powers.

audience Q about the english edition and adding things to it.

• AE:  to publish the novel in english, having known english myself, would be silly.  you learn in the first few pages that you're reading a translation.  why pretend that what's impure about translation -- why should we hide that?
• AE:  translation is an itinerary through which literature moves.

audience Q about the strong women in the book.

• AE:  it's in general not recognized by the critic, the role of the model in the painting.
• AE:  in one sense, the artist gets freedom through fame.
• AE:  i have many beliefs about novels.  if you're a novelist, you can go to the sources that sustain historical discourses and have theories about them without having to legitimize them.

audience Q about whether the reception of the book is different in spanish and english.

• AE:  i have another book that's a novel in spanish and short stories in english.
• AE:  the reception of books is always different, and you have to consider that the spanish-speaking world is so vast.

another Q that i didn't write down.

• AE:  i think a novel shouldn't make you suspend your credibility.  i think the novel should offer you a way in as a contemporary of the story.
• AE:  a novel is a question; it should never be an answer.