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Hi everybody, and welcome to the Little Oracles podcast, an oracle for the everyday creative. I’m Allison Arth.
Welcome to another week, and another set of Little Reviews, this time I’m corralling them around the concept of dissonance — you know, that, uh, feeling of discordance within one’s self, or that jarring moment where something just shifts, and reveals a harshness, like, some small tear in the tapestry of reality, for example. [laughs] You know, just really fun stuff. [laughs]
So, today, we’re talking about three books: The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa; The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston, which was our book club pick for May; and Second Place by Rachel Cusk. As always, check out content warnings for anything we discuss here on the podcast, because reading should be safe and enjoyable, but, without further mothballs and marshlands, let’s get into the Little Reviews.
So let’s start with The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, in translation by Stephen Snyder. So this novel is, on the surface, a story about government surveillance and control, and about compassion and empathy in the face of those things, and about loss and the trauma that comes along with it. It’s about a fictional island where things disappear from the island itself, and from the collective memory of the islanders — starting with things like ribbons and roses; you know, mundane stuff, and then escalating to more intangible and, arguably, more important things over the course of the story.
And, of course, as the title implies, there is a band of enforcers, known as the Memory Police, who have one job — and I bet you can guess it in one — they are charged with rooting out and dispensing with the people whose memories aren’t, in fact, disappearing along with whatever’s been disappeared. So, it’s high-tension; it’s high stakes; it’s pretty, just, high-key right from the jump, you know what I mean?
And, to be clear, I’m almost always here for, you know, 1984–Handmaid’s Tale–Fahrenheit 451 dystopias; and, you know, that Kafka-adjacent, tonally subdued melancholia in fiction — like, you know, sign me up for that. [laughs] And The Memory Police really delivers on all those fronts. So, it reads like a book from another time — which it kind of is, actually, because I should mention that it was originally published in 1994, in Japanese, and it wasn’t until 2019 that it was translated into English, so that could account for the distance I guess I’m sensing — but the writing itself has this quality of reliability and omniscience, even though it’s a first-person narrative, and even though that narrative has this, like, diaphanousness of diction, I guess, that not only works really well with the content — you know, this idea of memory, and especially this idea of dissolving memory — but it also lends the book this veneer of temporal venerability, I guess I could call it; like this book is an artifact of some earlier time. And I guess it reads a bit Modernist, too, in a way, because it’s a story-in-pieces, and it’s split between the primary narrative — you know, the island and the disappearances — and then this fictional narrative that our point-of-view character, who happens to be a novelist, is writing in her current book.
So we’ve got this primary world that is slowly de-constituting by virtue of these random vanishings, and then this secondary world-within-the-world that’s becoming increasingly difficult for our novelist to create by virtue of the gradual dissolution of the world she’s living in — [laughs] so, you know, honestly, it’s just very spirally; very tightly wound; very fraught; just very well-crafted nested storytelling that hinges on a fundamental dissonance that’s overtaking this world. And I just really enjoyed it. And I’ve already mentioned a couple classic works of dystopian fiction, so if you’re into those, or maybe more recent work like Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, or TV shows like Severance or Silo, then you might get into The Memory Police.
So, next up, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston, and one of our ABC picks — one that’s pretty close to my heart because, you might recall, it was my mom’s selection for our Immortal Beloveds list back in January, and we revisited it again in May. So, at least in my orbit — and maybe in yours, too — this is one of those books that kind of floats around in the stratosphere as a really important, really groundbreaking work that, you know, you maybe never get around to reading? [laughs] You know what I’m talking about, just kinda canonically recognized and revered, and I am so glad I finally dug into it.
So this book is just fascinating for its format, and for its, kind of, mythos as a memoir-like: as in, it’s not really a memoir, in the sense that it chronicles “real” events (and I’m putting “real” in quotes, here), but it’s adjacent to that, in the sense that Maxine Hong Kingston puts our narrator in situations that were, in fact, real for her; and these, like, more philosophical or emblematic situations that have the shape of real events, but aren’t, you know, drawn, like, whole-bolt, from real life.
And, at the same time, she weaves this folkloric narrative in and out of the modern memoir-like timeline, and they, kind of, echo and bolster each other in this, you know, laddered telling. And this structure effectively fragments the whole book — which, at its core, is about our narrator’s struggle with personal dissonance predicated on this split cultural identity she feels as the child of Chinese immigrants. So, this sense of dissolution is at work within the narrative, and is apparent on the page, too, even as the two parts cohere and inform one another.
So it’s really just a one-of-a-kind thing, and was such a groundbreaking work when it was published almost 50 years ago. And, if that’s not enough for you, I will reiterate: it was recommended by my mom, Leslie Arth, who is an absolute legend, to whom I owe so much of who I am today as a thinker, a citizen, a feminist, a human, so, if my words and thoughts and opinions carry any water for you, hers should carry absolute oceans. [laughs]
And, you know, if you like memoir in any capacity — which this isn’t, per se, but it has those elements, you know, those life-in-snapshots moments, and those formative moments; things like that — or if you like narratives that incorporate folklore — I’m thinking of The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht (which I reviewed back in Season One, and I’ll link that episode for you), and basically, you know, anything by Helen Oyeyemi — or you think Leslie Arth’s recommendations are as oracular as I think they are, then you might like The Woman Warrior, too.
And, finally, let’s talk about Second Place by Rachel Cusk. So I actually mentioned this book a little bit in our episode about criticism — and I’ll link that episode in the show notes, too, of course — but I just want to start out by saying that I was floored by this book, like, R-I-P me, you know? [laughs]
I don’t wanna overstate this, here, because I have a feeling Rachel Cusk isn’t for everyone as a writer; you know, this is my first experience with her work, but I think it generally takes the same shape of these very interior, spiraling narratives that aren’t everybody’s cuppa coffee, but, you know, they are definitely mine. [laughs]
So Second Place is a first-person narrative — and it’s implied that our narrator is addressing someone called Jeffers, who never actually appears in the story, beyond being directly addressed — so there’s this, kind of, pall of awkwardness or artificial distance from the get-go. And it’s really just this continual unraveling, and this continual struggle on the part of our narrator, to reconcile who she is in comparison to everyone around her — namely, her immediate family — and then this artist she’s invited to stay in her guesthouse — what she calls the “second place” — and whom she really, really, really wants to sit for, like, as a subject for one of his portraits.
And, as with a lot of the books I love and profess said love for on this podcast, nothing really “happens” in this novel; it’s very vignette-y, slice-of-life-y, and, like I said, interior. So everything we see as the readers is couched in our narrator’s own neuroses, and self-doubt — and let me tell you, there is a lot of that [laughs]; a lot of self-directed trash talk, if you will; a lot of wallowing and wondering from our narrator about her station in life, and her choices, and her selfhood, and her being, as in, her embodied being: you know, she’s settled as she is in mid-life, and motherhood, and a relatively easy existence in terms of work versus leisure. And all of this, like, sad noodling is so meditative and so searching, and even though it all revolves around the male-female binary — as in the convexity of male privilege, converse to the concavity of female liberty (which doesn’t really resonate with me; it’s a little bit pat, a little bit simplified) — it nevertheless uses that binary in really scathing and really illuminating ways, especially as it applies to who and what should be the subject of art — hence our narrator’s desire to be painted, and the artist’s reticence to do so — and also to the nature of some universal truth as discrete from one’s own existence, and to understandings and applications of, and assumptions about, feminine madness and masculine violence. Just– [laughs] just a lot of ideas, you know what I mean? [laughs]
So I dog-eared so many pages of this book, not necessarily because the words were just that luscious, but because the ideas were either really ringing true for me, or they were so knotted up that I couldn’t easily, you know, disentangle them, so I’m saving them for another read-through. And, honestly I don’t think I even scratched the surface of “getting” this book; like, I think this is one of those pieces of writing that takes on new shapes and shades every time you read it, and I really look forward to having that experience. And, honestly, to figuring out who the heck Jeffers is. [laughs] But, if you like meditative, kinda close and claustrophobic books — you know, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman comes to mind, here; and, in a way, the work of Eimear McBride, whose virtues I’ve extolled time and again here on the podcast — then you might like Second Place.
And that’s it for today; so glad you joined me. If you’re pickin’ up what I’m layin’ down here on Little Oracles, then I invite you to share an episode with somebody, and leave a rating or a review wherever you listen. If you’re looking for more big book energy and creativity content, follow along on Instagram (at) little oracles, and check out the blog at little oracles dot com. And, as always, take care, keep creating, and stay divine.
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