First, my apologies to U.S. readers for writing about a book that isn’t available yet. I try to avoid discussing books that aren’t yet published, but this time I got mixed up. Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton was published in the U.K. by Fitzcarraldo Editions earlier this year, and it was listed as coming out here this August (on Edelweiss for those of you who use that site). But now that listing is down and it turns out it’s being published by Liveright next March. So it’s one to preorder if you want it, or you can order it directly from the U.K.
Second, Fifty Sounds is really great! Polly Barton is a literary translator from the U.K, and here she describes moving to Japan at the age of 21 to teach and learn the language. She’s not entirely sure where her love for Japan came from — and is tired of being asked that question and not knowing how to respond — but that love is all-consuming, if complicated. Moving to Japan at 21 was a shock: she blithely trusted that the organization she worked for knew what they were doing when they sent her, and she wasn’t exactly wrong, but it was much harder than she anticipated. She is plunged into a new world where she doesn’t know the rules, and immersed in a language she has only begun to learn, a language with an entirely different writing system. It’s a lot.
The book takes us through her first teaching experience, which is on a remote island where she begins an affair with one of the teachers, the kind of relationship that is great and wonderful and tricky and weird all at once. She eventually moves to Tokyo and back to the U.K. and begins work as a translator. She slowly learns Japanese, coming to understand the deeper she gets into it just how much more she has to learn. Her love for Japan stays strong, but she comes to see how hard it is to adapt to a different culture, how this changes her in uncomfortable ways, and how hard it is to live where you’re always considered an outsider.
But I’m describing only the memoiristic aspects of the book, when it’s also an examination of language and culture. The book is organized into fifty chapters, each of which is titled using Japanese mimetic language, or words whose sound quality relates to the meaning. These words are sort of like onomatopoeia, but looser in the relationship of sound to meaning, and much more prevalent in Japanese than onomatopoeia is in English. The words that form the chapter titles relate to the ideas in the chapter both denotatively and connotatively: Barton discusses the literal meaning of the words but also how they came into her life and the particular — very particular sometimes — meaning they have for her.
One short chapter is titled “moja-moja: the sound of electric hair.” The children she teaches describe her hair using this word, and she’s mystified by what it might mean. There’s a different term for curly hair, which she tries to use to describe herself, but people correct her and say, “no, moja-moja!” Much later she discovers the word is used to describe sheep’s wool. She confronts her boyfriend for never telling her this fact, and he isn’t sure how to respond:
He looks at me for a little while, blinking. “Not only sheep, though. Other things too.” Like what, I say. He looks away, either in thought or in diffidence. “Like…Struwwelpeter? You know, that German character with hair like this. Like he’s been electrocuted.” His hands form an excited arc of moja-moja around his head.
Like moja-moja, each of her fifty words yields Barton new, often surprising, insights into Japanese, into herself and how others perceive her, and often into the nature of language itself.
This is a very philosophical book. There’s a lengthy scene early on where Barton describes how important Wittgenstein is to her — she studied philosophy at Cambridge — and she does this in a personal manner that captures one of the things I love about her writing. A non-philosophical friend asks her to explain Wittgenstein’s ideas and why she loves him so much and she utterly fails to rise to the challenge, giving the friend a halting, round-about explanation that only confuses him. They both drop the topic with relief. While narrating this story, she explains how she probably should have answered these questions — it’s so easy to give an eloquent explanation of a complicated subject when you can write it out! — and gives an overview of Wittgenstein’s early and late work and how the later work shaped her thinking and the book itself.
Telling this story makes Barton such a sympathetic character. I, too, would probably fail when faced with a similar challenge, and I felt her frustration and shame keenly. But it also allows her to summarize Wittgenstein — which, from what I understand, is not easy to do — both to redeem herself and to fill the reader in. It’s charmingly personal and philosophical all at once.
I noticed that the Fitzcarraldo edition of this book has no subtitle and is listed in the “essay” category (all their nonfiction is listed that way), while the Liveright edition is labeled “memoir” and is subtitled: “A Memoir of Language, Learning, and Longing.” I do not like this subtitle. As far as I’m concerned, a book-length essay is much more intriguing than a straightforward memoir. I’ve been an avid reader of memoirs for a long time, and will probably continue to be in some manner, but I’m coming to feel bored with the genre in its usual form.
“A Memoir of Language, Learning, and Longing” sounds like a perfectly fine but probably pedestrian personal narrative. And this book is not that. It’s weirder than a traditional memoir, more rambling, more idea-driven, and with less of the usual character arc than you would expect. I think it has some structural problems: the last third or so feels rushed and undeveloped in some places and like Barton hasn’t quite figured out what to make of certain later experiences. Or perhaps I mean it has structural “problems,” since I really don’t care. If the reader doesn’t care, are imperfections really problems? So what. I love a lot of imperfect things.
I finished the book feeling like the underdeveloped parts toward the end might make a good starting point for another book. I finished it caring a lot about the Polly Barton in the book and wondering what will happen to her next and, more importantly, what sense she’s going to make of it. This is a book that makes sense of so many things, and for that, I loved it.
Publishing This Week
This is a HUGE week in publishing! Yes, Sally Rooney and Lauren Groff have new books out this week. But want to hear about something else? These are new small-press books out this week that I haven’t yet read and am adding to my TBR. All quotations below from the publisher:
The Breaks: An Essay by Julietta Singh (Coffee House Press): I hardly ever preorder books (I know, I should), but this one is already on its way to me: “In a letter to her six-year-old daughter, Julietta Singh writes toward a tender vision of the world, offering children's radical embrace of possibility as a model for how we might live.”
On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint by Maggie Nelson (Graywolf Press): New Maggie Nelson!! Why have I not preordered this?? “Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day.”
Insignificance by James Clammer (Coach House Books): I mean, this description! “For fans of Ducks, Newburyport and Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances, a day-in-the-life of a plumber whose troubles are all coming to a head.”
Hao: Stories by Ye Chun (Catapult): A story collection “following Chinese women in both China and the United States who turn to signs and languages as they cross the alien landscapes of migration and motherhood.”
Imminence by Mariana Dimópulos, translated by Alice Whitmore (Transit Press): “A new mother holds her month-old son for the first time, but her body betrays her with an absence of feeling. Disoriented, she wanders with her partner around their plant-filled Buenos Aires apartment.”
Faraway by Yi-Chin Lo, translated by Jeremy Tiang (Columbia University Press): “In Taiwanese writer Lo Yi-Chin's Faraway, a fictionalized version of the author finds himself stranded in mainland China attempting to bring his comatose father home.”
Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados (Verso Fiction): “In her diary, Isa describes a sweltering summer in the glittering city…Happy Hour is a novel about getting by and looking great in a system that wants you to do neither.”
Planet of Clay by Samar Yazbek, translated by Leri Price (World Editions): “Rima, a young girl from Damascus, longs to walk, to be free to follow the will of her feet, but instead is perpetually constrained…One day while taking a bus through Damascus, a soldier opens fire and her mother is killed.”
New on the TBR
Added to my wishlist (books that have caught my eye but I don’t yet own):
The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910-1923 by Franz Kafka (Schocken Books, 1988): Some of my favorite writers talk about loving Kafka’s diaries, so it’s time to see for myself.
Currently Reading
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette (New Directions, 2020, originally published in 2017): I’d been thinking about reading this for Women in Translation Month in August but didn’t get there. Then David Naimon released a Between the Covers interview with Shibli, and I decided it was time. The novel tells two stories, one set in 1949 and the other in the present, both exploring the consequences of Israeli violence toward Palestinians.
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (Knopf, 2021): My current audiobook, a memoir about growing up Korean-American.
The Cormac Report
Right now, Cormac is playing video games with a friend while I work on this newsletter. I’m someone who used to be judgmental about video games and people who spend a lot of time playing them. I still can be that way sometimes. But now that I have a kid who is into them, I’m realizing how much free time they give me. I get a lot done while he’s playing video games — work, newsletter writing, reading. Same for when he watches videos on his tablet. It turns out, I don’t want him to give those habits up!
Of course, we have limits on how long we allow him to play, and, at this point in his life at least, he’s pretty good at putting the video games aside when he’s had enough and finding something else to do. But I’m surprised to find that I am a video game fan, even though I haven’t played one for decades.
Have a good week everyone!