I had actually forgotten I read another book by this author, FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES.  which is a good thing, because had I remembered I would certainly have avoided PACHINKO.  This would have been a pity, as it is a much better book.  It tells the story of multiple generations of Koreans who live in Japan and is an interesting set of human stories mixed up with a history lesson. 

It starts in the early 1900s, with a fantastic set of first lines:

History has failed us, but no matter.
At the turn of the century, an aging fisherman and his wife decided to take in lodgers for extra money . . . 

From their unspools a long and complicated family saga.  The Japanese do not come out of it very well; I guess this is not surprising; Japan is not famed for the welcome it gives immigrants.  Even into the 1980s, after multiple generations born in Japan, the Koreans still can’t even get Japanese passports. 

Beyond your classic immigrant and poverty problems, the characters also need to navigate what appears to us now an extraordinarily harsh set of moral structures.  For example, a forty year old man finds out his mother was not married when she got pregnant with him.  So he has the obvious response: he kills himself.  Yup.  He’s not alone.  People kill themselves left and right in this novel, apparently over basically nothing, and everyone else seems to find this pretty normal.

Also of interest is the ongoing debate about moving back to the Koreas, once they are created, with some characters wanting to move back to South Korea, but most deciding in the end for the new Communist utopia in the North.    It’s an interesting example of the road that definitely should not have been taken, and about how your parents bad decisions become your own

The book had a great premise, but not so much with the plot.  However, the premise was great, so let’s talk about that.  THE POWER imagines a world where women gradually acquire the ability to generate powerful electrical shocks from their own bodies.  Female readers, let me tell you, it is fun to see how the worm turns.  In some countries, like Saudi Arabia, it results in a revolution.  In Moldova, sex traffickers get what is coming to them.  I particularly enjoyed the parts where changes were less dramatic; one of the central male characters recounts with horror how frightening it has become to walk down an ordinary dark suburban street.  Welcome to our world, gents.

As women become more powerful they of course begin to abuse their power.  I was surprised how random and brutal it seemed when they force men to stay home (they are described as ‘dead-eyed’) though that is common in many cultures today for women.  There is also a horrible rape scene, which reminded me how rarely one reads about that kind of violence against men.  Thrillers are usually full of tortured and dead young women, so this was a fun (?) inversion too.

The book tries to resolve by having a global war.  Let’s ignore that.  The fun is the premise, which worryingly, for me, read a bit like wish-fulfilment.  I guess everyone wants to be on the winning side.

This is the last novel in a quintet I wrote about at great length here.  I’ve not got a great deal to add, except to say how incredibly more-ish it is.  I would happily read five more.  It’s like mainlining plot.  I  must just say how deeply annoying this review is in the Guardian:

And yet there remains something deeply and comfortingly old-fashioned about what we are told will be the last slice of Cazalet life. . .  it cleaves to the reassuring form of the family drama, in which people come and go, get born and die off, fall in and out of love, and either stay firmly on track or go spectacularly off the rails. Even in 1990, it was hardly innovative, and now, despite our Downton-friendly, pastiche-loving times, it is difficult to imagine many more novels like this appearing. . 

I suspect this person of being a judge on that waste-of-time prize the Booker, which just loves to reward ‘innovation’ in novelistic form – ie, the pretense that books are better without plots.   This is all nonsense.  I bet if you asked this person what their family was like, they would reply exactly as above – people come and go, fall in and out of life, etc.  LIFE IS PLOT.  And I bet this person, just like everyone else who ever lived, doesn’t like hearing other people describe their dreams (” . . and then the horse turned into a handbag . . “).  And why is that? BECAUSE PLOTLESS STORIES ARE BORING

I probably should not have begun this book by reading the Introduction by the author.  She described the book as a ‘modern classic,’ which it may or may not be, but it is certainly not something you can say about your own book.  It is like admitting you are pretty: no one with even basic social skills would do that.  Also, she dwells extensively in the Introduction on the deeply obvious point that there is a fine line between autobiography and fiction.  Anyone who feels this needs to be re-stated is, in my opinion, not very bright.  I KNOW I AM SO HORRIBLE BUT IT IS HOW I FEEL.

Introduction aside, there were some elements of the book that I enjoyed.  It’s about a young girl being brought up by an eccentric and fervent Christian mother, and is often very funny. Here, for example, is where she goes to see a girl she admires who works at a fish stand:

Week after week I went back there, just to watch.
Then one week she wasn’t there any more. 
There was nothing I could do but stare and stare at the welks.  Whelks are strange and comforting.
They have no notion of community life and they breed very quietly.
But they have a strong sense of personal dignity.
Even lying face down in a tray of vinegar, there is something noble about a whelk.

One can’t deny this is hilarious.  However while the main story is engaging and fun, unfortunately there are also long stretches of – get ready for it –  disconnected fragments of fairy tales.  I know! It’s worse than dream sequences.  I showed her by skipping these bits entirely.  Modern classic indeed.

Once upon a time a young man was savouring the pleasures of a new car.  He was thinking that there were really occasions when a car seemed to drive itself as it were, seemed to respond to some remote stimulus independent of the driver.  It had its moments of cursedness, of course, when it whined and snorted for no particular reason, then there were moments of heavenly smoothness when it floated on the crest of some intangible wave . . . It was like when you have gone into a woman.  Some of the time is taken up with clumsy flopping about; trying futilely to find the perfect position and rhythm.  Then there are moments of complete synchronization of limbs which seem to come about without effort.

It was going to be one of those mad, mad Mondays in Lagos, when motor traffic was snarled up all over the town in hot, murky despairing stretches.  The people who owned cars all observed the ritual of the beginning of the week with religious fervour.  On Monday, after the weekend interruption, they resumed the grim scramble for crusts that feel off the tables of the great of the earth. 

For instead of continuing to function and perhaps getting the better of time and circumstances, he simply allowed them to take the initiative and suppress him.  In life as in sports the important thing is not to win but to go on performing.

(Christianity) offered the negative values of self-denial and humility.  These values were contrary to his concept of himself.  And they were certainly not of much use to his people.  Self-denial was not much of an achievement, if you were born in circumstances under which it was inescapable. . . . An attitude of stoicism was possibly the best response to such a hard life but it would be cruel to try to make what was obviously a heavy burden appear like a virtue. . . . But if intellectually he had drawn away from Christianity, emotionally he was attracted back.  Especially during his period of despair.  Christianity was invented by underdogs for underdogs.  And Onuma had become one of the deprived of the earth.

Well let’s file this under DROP EVERYTHING AND START READING THIS.   It’s a story about love, and youth, but also – in a complicated way – about age, and loss.  It is on the face of it a tale of a few weeks in the lives of a pair of young lovers, but is somehow also a story about their whole lives, and about how rare happiness is, and how impossible to hold on to. 

At first the enjoyment of the book is in the vivid reconstruction of a teenage crush.  I had forgotten how painful and horrible that experience is, and it makes me glad to be a grown-up.  The crush is conducted in utter secrecy, as this is the mid-eighties in Italy and the pair are both men.  This reminds us that while first love is awful, forbidden first love is far worse.  Elio, the younger of the two, experiences wild excitement and horrible self-consciousness.   Here he is reflecting on something the other man, Oliver, has said to him in passing:

“If not later, when?” What if he had found me out and uncovered each and every one of my secrets with those four cutting words?  I had to let him know I was totally indifferent to him

Oliver returns to America at the end of the summer and eventually we hear he is going to marry. Elio’s father comforts him as he tries to deal with this news:

If there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don’t snuff it out, don’t be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we’d want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything – what a waste!

Elio goes to see Olive many years later, to find the feeling is still alive between them:

.. . we’ll speak about two young men who found much happiness for a few weeks and lived the remainder of their lives dipping cotton swabs into that bowl of happiness, fearing they’d use it up, without daring to drink more than a thimbleful on ritual anniversaries

The day I finished the book I went to the cinema to watch the movie.  I just somehow needed to go through it again, and, despite my summary in the first paragraph, I’m still not sure quite what to take from it. I think its something about how happiness is elusive, and to be treasured; I think it’s also about death; but I can’t quite put it into words.  I see that the author is a noted Proustian scholar, and that doesn’t surprise me at all, though I couldn’t say why exactly either. Read it and let me know what you think.  

What I got from this book is that Stephen Fry is a very nice man in fairly urgent need of an editor.  I collected this book from a pile given away for free on the street, and read it when I ran out of books I’d actively chosen.  Keeping a sufficient flow of books arriving sometimes feels like a least a part-time job.  

The book covers Fry’s time at university and the first few years afterwards. This is a brief period, but somehow takes 400 pages to tell.  This is partly because he has so much success to recount.  It is hard not to read this as a story of privilege and victory, as Fry has an agent before he leaves university and is thereafter almost always in work, going from television to West End to journalism.   

What cuts the honey is the vinegar of Fry’s sadness.  I have heard he suffers from depression, and I can believe it, based on this book.  He takes an extraordinarily bleak view of many topics.  He deeply romanticises Cambridge and after a long lyrical piece on punting on May mornings, here he is: 

Don’t be too hard on them. Suppress the thought that they are all ghastly tosspots who don’t know they’re born, insufferable poseurs in need of a kick and a slap. Have some pity and understanding. They will get that kick and that slap soon enough. After all, look at them now. They are all in their fifties some of them on their third, forth or fifth marriage. Their children despise them. They are alcoholics or recovering alcoholics. Drugs addicts or recovering drug addicts. Their wrinkles, grey, bald, furrowed and fallen faces look back every morning from the mirror, those folds of dying flesh bearing not a trace of the high, joyful and elastic smiles that once lit them. Their lives have been a ruin and a waste. All that bright promise never quite matured into anything that can be looked back on with pride or pleasure. They took that job in the city, that job with merchant bank, stockbroker, law firm, accountancy firm, chemical company, drama Company, publishing company, any company. The light and energy, the passion, fun and faith were soon snuffed out one by one. In the grind of the demanding world their foolish hopeful dreams evaporated like mist in the cruel glare of the morning sun. Sometimes the dreams return to them at night and they are so ashamed, disappointed that they want to kill themselves. Once they laughed and seduced or were seduced, on ancient lawns, under ancient stones and now they hate the young and their music, they snort with contempt at everything strange and new and they have to catch their breath at the top of the stairs.

This is an extraordinarily dark view of life after college, and makes me feel very sad for Fry. 

Less sad, more revolting, as if often the case of memoirs on professions that require your parents to have money to (politics, arts, media), is the tinyness of the world involved.  The same small set of people are involved from university onwards. This is the UK for you, and I am fairly inured to it by now.  Not Fry’s fault of course, and he name drops absolutely as lightly as possible, but still hard to swallow.   

I had a bit of a DEFCON 5 moment while on holiday in Cyprus when I ran out of reading matter.  I borrowed a book from our host for a day at the beach, choosing a re-reread, Stella Gibbon’s classic COLD COMFORT FARM.  I recalled this as being a delightful, easy read, about the power of a comic worldview.  It tells the story of a young woman who goes to live with her relatives in a farmhouse that is a sort of mix of the worst of Hardy, Bronte, and Laurence.  She resolves the various issues – incest, madness, etc –  with a jolly mix of common sense and cleanliness.