Trust

 I read Trust, the co-winner of the 2023 Pulitzer-prize for fiction.  I haven't read the other winner, Demon Copperhead, but can't imagine it's as good as Trust.  In all my recent reading of prize-winning novels, I've read none better than Trust.

But on the downside, it would help a reader if he knew something of economics and the stock market.  I know more about the former than the latter.  Years ago, a long-shoreman who was greatly impressed by a fellow long-shoreman who was a well-versed in communism, would urge various books upon me.  I read them all and didn't then have a good answer to Marx, but I spent time in the company library at Douglas Aircraft and discovered John Maynard Keynes, after which I discounted anything this longshoreman, or his friend had to say on the subject; however, I wasn't all that interested in economics and haven't spent any time with it until Trust.  How much trouble someone would have with no background in economics at all, I don't know, but I suspect some.   As to the stock market, perhaps most of us know a bit more about that.  And maybe the novel is self-explanatory enough, and I am exaggerating its difficulty.

But even if one knows quite a lot about economics and the stock market, Diaz, takes us beyond with the capability to get into a zone and know what is going to happen (without having facts in mind) before it happens.  Still having the concept of interactive reading, I recall being in a lunch-time hearts card game at McDonnell Douglas.  My partner was an electronics engineer named Bob Servis who counted cards.  I did not count cards, but at critical points when I needed to do the right thing and paused, not exactly thinking it over but feeling (or something) my way, I soon felt what was probably right and it invariably was.  Bob Servis would smile with satisfaction, but it was during this time that I met Susan on the McDonnell Douglas bus and subsequently gave up card playing.  Bob Servis never forgave me.

To account for my success, I did pay close attention to everything being played, so maybe I subconsciously counted cards, but then maybe the heavy hitters at stock market trading do something like that, but certain people, perhaps only one person in Diaz's novel goes way beyond that.  By the time I learned who this was and what had happened, I was entirely impressed.  The only reason I won't say "happy" is that the ending was a bit sad. And yet the most important person in the novel, dying unrecognized, died happy, mostly, or so it would seem. 

Creation Lake, second reading

 

Feeling I hadn't done Rachel Kushner justice in my sketchy review of Creation Lake, I read her The Flamethrowers, and then her Mars Room.   And then I read Creation Lake a second time.  In between, I read some other reviews of Creation Lake and they weren't so far off from my reaction after reading it the first time.  And yet the people running the Booker Prize had some very laudatory things to say about it in justification for moving from their long list to the short one, things I didn't see after reading number one.   But with of her previous novels under my belt, I became accustomed to her style and was better able to appreciate Creation Lake.  It seemed to me then that the reviews on Youtube critical of the novel were made by reviewers, as I was in my previous review, who were reading Kushner for the first time and being thrown off by her strangeness.  But she grows on you.  She did on me. 

My assumption that some of Sadies assignments were hits may not be right.  Kushner is somewhat vague about what she is asked to do on her assignments.   She is asked to kill Paton and says she doesn't do hits, but she has her price and the ones employing her accept it.  She doesn't actually have to kill the target.  The target climbs up on some logs to get away from a young foolhardy motorcyclist.  The logs collapse, that the target is killed.  We hear the song Get Lucky in the background on one occasion and coincidence is mentioned in another; so maybe Kushner doesn't want Sadie to be an ordinary hit-woman, but she takes the assignment this time and seemingly retires at the end of the novel.  She isn't completely home free.  People are looking for her in regard to a civil suit associated with one of her earlier jobs, one that went awry.  But the statute of limitations has run out on the event so she won't be threatened with jail.  She will, however lose a lot of money if she loses that suit; so she spends a lot of time looking over her shoulder.   She quit smoking and drinking.  She wants to stay retired.  It seems like she'll be able to, but she's living away from people, living by herself, never able to have children, maybe never able to live with anyone, filled with so many things she can't talk about, not able to be herself in a future relationship.  She's in her thirties and counting.

One of the Youtube reviewers said she was "evil, evil, evil."  I didn't see that.   She sets her morals aside when she takes on a job, but she doesn't want to keep on doing that, and she hopes, by the end of the novel, that she won't have to do it again.   When you give up drinking, you can no longer make excuses for the things you do that you don't like.  You need to learn to live with yourself, if you can manage it.  Seems like Kushner is telling us that Sadie can.

Is The Vegetarian also a political treatise?

 In my lazy visiting of the currently-being-published and receiving such prizes as the Booker and Nobel Prize for literature, and making my own judgment about their merits, I am presently in Han Kang, reading her Human Acts.  After the Korean War, South Korea endured some dictators and the military's subduing of a protest in 1980.   A political treatise, can't at the same time be a good novel, or so I was taught years ago, but Kang is hammering the dictator and the soldiers he ordered to shoot unarmed protestors.  The government at the time said about 20 or 30 were killed, but I read elsewhere that the true number might be closer to 2,000; so this is a part of South Korea’s history that nearly every Korean is going to have an opinion about and those in leadership in 1980 are probably being excoriated in the same manner that French leaders under Phillipe Petain have been. 

But, does the Nobel Prize committee need to worry about whether a novel is political?   I wonder if they don't use the opposite criterion.  Consider The Vegetarian, the novel that won Han Kang the Booker prize.  I understand it has been applauded by feminists.  This has been denied by the reviewers I read, but after reading the novel, that is what I saw as well.  It doesn't take much to rake the flowers aside and look at the brutal treatment of the poor protagonist who has taken a firm stance.  She took a recognizable if not popular vegetarian stance, but in response to the cultural coercion she received, she took a position that clouded by poetry though it may be is a feminist stance.   After being held down and force-fed meat which she threw up, she resolved to take a further step and eat nothing at all.  Was she crazy?  No, she asks her sister whose charges are keeping her in the mental institution to let her go home.  The sister refuses.  Not just because she slept with the sister's husband, but because she refuses the wishes of their father and culture by not eating meat.  She becomes a feminist martyr by starving to death.

If the feminists and I are right about the nature of this novel rather than those who admire the beautiful poetic language, which those of us who don’t read Korean can’t properly judge (even though the translator of The Vegetarian won the Booker prize for translation), then the question remains, can a novel with a political agenda be a great novel? 

The Booker Prize was awarded to The Vegetarian, but the Nobel the other day seemed to be awarded to Kang's whole body of work.  I have read only two and a half novels, but these are her major novels if I can believe what has been written about her.  

The Vegetarian, a Phantasm on Passive Resistance

 

The main character, Yeong-hye, a hitherto ordinary Korean wife has a dream, after which she decides to become a vegetarian.  Her family and friends aren't interested in her opinion, her dream.  They want her to conform to their opinions, the common ideas of her Korean culture, but she resists, quits wearing a bra as well.  Her father hits her, and her husband leaves her, but she doesn't submit.

Yeong-hye's brother-in-law, her sister's husband, a photographic artist of sorts, finds the relatively isolated Yeong-hye the perfect object (victim) for an off-beat, semi-pornographic video he wants to make.  He approaches, slowly seduces, Yeong-hye into cooperating with his project which involves painting her naked body with flowers.  She is rather haphazardly returning to nature in her thinking and so goes along with his plan.  After fully painting her, he wants to make love to her.  But she objects because he doesn't have any flowers painted on himself.   So, he rushes off and gets an old girlfriend to paint flowers on him, rushes back, gets Yeong-hye to make love with him, while he records the whole thing.  He and Yeong-hye fall asleep on the floor of his studio.  When they wake up, the artists wife, Yeong-hye's sister is there.  She tells them that they are both obviously insane and that she is having them committed to a mental institution.  The authorities arrive and take them away.

Yeong-hye at the mental institution moves beyond vegetarianism and quits eating anything as well.   Her sister, In-hye, admits to herself that she had her sister committed in order to punish her, but she won't admit that and renounce the decision that got Yeong-hye committed.  She lets the authorities at the mental institution try their best to get Yeong-hye to eat, but Yeong-hye's strength and resolve is too much for them.  In a protracted, ugly battle, witnessed by her sister, Yeong-hye succeeds in starving herself to death.

I won't promise that what I have written here is what Han Kang had in mind.  When I think about what that might be, I recall the softening and poetical beauty of Yeong-hye's resistance and refuse to give up my theory -- not that I'd be willing to starve myself to death in support of it.

On reading Han Kang

 

I woke this morning in the midst of a dream about Korea.  I spent a year there years ago straight out of High School, back when a war was going on and South Korea wasn't at all as sophisticated as it is in Kang's day.  I got half way through Greek Lessons before falling asleep.  I knew soft-spoken Koreans like the two main characters, but Kang doesn't imply this is a current national characteristics and provides an adequate number of nasty personalities to contrast with the main ones.

The woman is abandoned and divorced after which her husband obtains custody of their young son.  The woman loses her ability to speak and so has no hope of being able to regain her son.  She had an episode of this as a young girl.  Hopefully she'll eventually regain her ability to speak, but it doesn't happen during the novel, at least no more than a promising squeak at the end.

Ultimately worse is the teacher of Greek.  He has a genetic condition causing him to slowly lose his eye-sight.  He is mostly blind during the early part of the novel, but Greek is something he can teach from memory; so neither his students nor school administrators know.

The two characters progress mostly separately until the woman tries to rescue a small bird in the mostly empty school building. The professor tries to see what she has cornered, stumbles, breaks his glasses and is rendered helpless.  The woman can't speak but she can write a word in the palm of his hand and manages to get him back to his apartment.  She sits with him as he talks. Eventually she leaves but comes back the next day.  He senses she is again there with him.  She intends to take him to get new glasses.  Emotions run high, and these work in her such that by the end of the novel we know her ability to speak will return. The woman and the Greek teacher are obviously together now, and if she can once again speak, we assume, they will be able to function adequately in the future.

My dry narrative doesn't do justice to the poetry of this short novel.  I should read it again, but not right now.  I don't want to tire my eyes because my son will arrive later to take me to Lens Crafter to be fitted for new glasses -- something scheduled long before Kang won the Novel Prize.

And with only my dog Jessica to speak to on most days, my ability to speak has deteriorated, but only to the extent that I typically sound foolish when I do speak.

In retrospect, I doubt that anyone familiar with Kang's published work would recommend Greek Lessons as a good place to start.  The Vegetarian, which won the Booker Prize is apparently more reasonable, but readers of this novel, report being reminded of Kafka's writings.  I read a lot of Kafka years ago and resolved never to reread him.  Nevertheless, with some reluctance, I just now downloaded the Kindle edition of The Vegetarian.

Review of Creation Lake

Picture a very successful “Hit Woman."  And she is willing to take on other nefarious tasks that don't quite seem like hits.  The government, the American government, hires her to take on the most challenging of hits. 

The author Rachel Kushner does us no favors as she shows this youngish woman in her fits and starts accomplishing her work.  It seemed to me most of the time that Sadie (not her real name) was in over her head.   She also has an ailment where she sort-of passes out that you’d think would cause a hit woman to take up a different line of work, but we learn sort of after the fact that she usually succeeds.  On one occasion when she doesn’t, she was fired, but we learn along the way that only means she no longer works directly for the government answering to a boss, but subsequently, agencies in the government feel free to give her ad hoc assignments.  

So what’s all this business about Bruno, Neanderthals and very dark caves?  Bruno is a sort of philosopher who impresses Sadie, but in a passing way.  Sadie looks for him as she’s bailing out of her most recent “hit” (in quotes because the target, Paton, is killed in an accident.  Sadie’s employers pay her without question because they don’t always know how she does it).

There is a lot of very well-written, interesting but as far as I can tell after a single reading, material irrelevant to what is presumably the main narrative, not all of it even true.  For example, someone argues convincingly that the Neanderthals discovered tobacco and Sadie, believes it.  She speculates that she probably has a large amount of Neanderthal DNA accounting for her inability to quit smoking.

Someone could advance the observation that Kushner’s well-written, interesting but irrelevant (to the purported main narrative) information is more interesting than Sadie’s narrative.

I’m no doubt being unfair inasmuch as I read most of the novel underestimating Sadie.  Perhaps I would appreciate the novel more upon a second reading.

I was very impressed with Rachel Kushner’s writing style and erudite cleverness. 

No Homo Sapiens DNA in Neanderthal Thorin

 Scientists Just Sequenced the DNA of Thorin The Last Neanderthal Ever And It Rewrites History (youtube.com)

Just watched this video.  Scientists have an complete genome from a Neanderthal who lived about 42,000 years ago in France.  They nick-named him Thorin from Lord of the Rings. 

 Homo Sapiens from that time show Neanderthal DNA, as we do today -- 2% to 4%, and we don't each have the same Neanderthal DNA.  Scientists identified all the different Neanderthal DNA found in homo sapiens examined so far and it amounts to something like 30% of the Neanderthal DNA.   Common theories developed by the scientists who examined Thorin revolved around the idea that contact between the two species was friendly so naturally some contact became romantic, hence, our Neanderthal DNR.

So of course, Scientists examining Thorin looked for evidence of homo sapiens DNA in his DNA sequence, and . . . didn't find any.  They did find evidence of inbreeding.  I listened to the narrator's conjectures about how that could be the case since Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens lived near each other in France for a long time.  The Scientists theorized that their wanderings were wide and maybe they just never encountered each other.

Bu coincidence I am currently reading CREATION RIVER, a finalist for the Booker Prize, and the author, Rachel Kushner, has one of her characters theorize about how homo sapiens got Neanderthal DNA, and one of the theories was "rape."  We might not hear that theory from many legitimate scientists working with DNA who seem to favor 

The theory that the Neanderthal was an Apex predator which drove Homo Sapiens into near extinction (by means of rape and cannibalism) may be given a boost by these findings.  Perhaps the little group which included Thorin and was engaged in inbreeding had thus far survived the Cro Magnon competition which may not have included rape.