Good evening!
There was no newsletter last week because I was 100 pages in to two different books and didn’t feel I had enough to say about either to really warrant anything legible. Sorry! This one will be a bit of a bumper edition considering I’ve read quite a lot.
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My twitter/X is @jessf_white and my Instagram is @lunchpoems.
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
The books I was part way through were Martyr! By Kaveh Akbar (2024) and Vladivostok Circus by Elisa Shua Dusapin, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins (2024). I had a wonderful time interviewing Elisa at Blackwell’s in Manchester on Wednesday; she’s a very thoughtful and introspective writer and person and it made for fascinating discussion. I’ll start with her book, which I loved.
Vladivostok Circus centres on a recently graduated costume designer called Nathalie, who takes a freelance job in Russia, designing competition outfits for three Russian Bar performers. She visits them at the circus they are based in during off-season, where they are able to practise their routine in which they attempt to break a world record for the most consecutive flips in a bar performance. Nathalie has taken this job because she formerly lived in Vladivostok with her father, a physicist who now lives in America and doesn’t know that his daughter has returned to their previous home. Nathalie enters a world she is completely unfamiliar with, in a landscape that she barely remembers but feels somewhat connected to.
As with Dusapin’s other novels (that have been translated), there is a focus on language and communication. Nathalie is unable to directly communicate with some of the performers and circus workers, not just because she doesn’t know enough Russian, but also because their connections are disrupted by misunderstandings and unfamiliarity. Nathalie is running away from complicated domestic situations with a previous partner and her father, which are briefly alluded to (but enough so that her behaviour and outlooks are justified within the narrative). During the event, Elisa spoke about meeting a Russian Bar trio quite by chance, and then contacting them in order to shadow them so that she could write a novel that centred on their sport. I think this comes across, because this is such a detailed and careful representation of a dangerous practice.
While preparing for the event, I read Elisa’s debut Winter in Sokcho, also translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins (2021). I had already read, and loved, her second novel The Pachinko Parlour (2022), and found similarities between the three. As an example, both her debut and her latest are set in out-of-season places; her debut in the wintertime of a beach city, and her latest in a closed circus. Loneliness and isolation are not just states that her protagonists find themselves in, but also pervade the settings, making them slightly eerie. There is no supernatural danger at play-- rather, the banality of everyday dangers present themselves to her characters, like anxiety around relationships and walking around at night. I find her focus on the mundane and what she does with it to be fascinating -- she has a real talent for layering in charged emotion to dialogue and individual perception. I was amazed to learn during our conversation that she started writing Sokcho when she was 17, as it is such a mature novel.
To quickly summarise Winter in Sokcho, it is about a recent university graduate who has moved back from Seoul to her hometown of Sokcho. She takes up a job in a local guesthouse, where she meets a French graphic novelist. He is aloof and she becomes fascinated with him, and eventually, he with her. Again, communication becomes the crux on which their relationship both strengthens and suffers. This is a really excellent novel that explores facets of Korean society like modelling, plastic surgery and how both Koreans and foreigners see Korea. It’s very subtle, very quiet.
I ended up dipping in and out of Akbar’s Martyr! as I needed to prep for the event, but I did end up coming back to it quite dutifully as I was enjoying it so much. This is a really great novel, which follows an alcoholic Iranian-American man called Cyrus as he begins to write a book about martyrdom, which may or may not culminate in his own martyrdom (he just needs to find a cause). Infused into his artistic motivation are the deaths of his parents; his mother died on a civilian plane that was accidentally shot down by the US army when he was a baby, and his father died not long after Cyrus went to college. He sees both of these deaths as pointless -- his mother is gone because of a cataclysmic error motivated by global tensions and his father is gone because, in Cyrus’ opinion, he had no more reason to live after he saw his son off to university. He is therefore fascinated in people who died for causes and who knew they would die as a result of their actions -- Bobby Sands and Joan of Arc being prominent examples. His interest in this area is serendipitously piqued by a performance artist diagnosed with terminal cancer living out her final days in Brooklyn Museum as her last piece. He goes on a pilgrimage to speak with her, which results in some surprising revelations about himself and his life.
What was particularly prominent in Cyrus’ sections (the novel flits between characters) was an awareness of prescribing everything as ‘late capitalism’, because Cyrus as a character is incredibly introspective and pushes things to their extreme. He is often wary of making grand statements about the state of the world because he hates cliches -- but he also misses out on pretty significant social cues and ends up in fairly big disagreements with his friends. He is a complicated character who is also extremely funny and loveable, which is something I don’t often say because I’m not that interested in the ‘likeability’ of the people I read about. ’Likeability’, however, is at the crux of much of Cyrus’ development as a young man, a queer person, someone who is sober and as an Iranian-American in the post 9/11 landscape. He often sees things through the framework of himself (as we all do), while also recognising how futile seeing ourselves purely through identity markers can be when we’re trying to think of the bigger questions. It is not that these identity markers are themselves futile and inconsequential (they demonstrably aren’t), but how conversations around his particular identities have thus far been carried out, and how he is largely bored of them. It was a refreshing way to view and question the world.
I’m excited to see what Akbar does next, not least because his writing was very good, but also because the concept of this novel was ever so slightly better than its execution. The writing itself is almost flawless, but I did feel that the narrative was kind of superimposed on it, and needed a little more fleshing out.
I’m now almost finished with Symeon Brown’s Get Rich or Lie Trying (2022), which is a study on deception in the influencer economy. I’ve absolutely raced through this, largely because it’s so fascinating but also because it’s extremely well-written and conceptualised. The study centres on the falsity of influencers on a range of social media platforms, although Instagram does feature heavily. It covers everything from how fast fashion companies operate in their collaborations with young women online, to the ‘make money from home’ industry to live streaming. The bit I’ve found the most interesting so far is on pyramid schemes (or ‘multi-level marketing’, as they brand themselves), and how nefarious they truly are. What is evident in the text as a whole is how often women in particular become victims to the worst of online behaviour, whether that be misogynistic abuse or as targets by companies that promise empowerment but actually deliver financial losses or exploitation. Another bit I loved was the section on live streamers, and how odd that whole world is. I’ll talk about it more next week, but can recommend based on what I’ve read so far.
Books on my radar
I think I might read Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (2017) next, because I feel like something that’s a bit odd but also extremely well-rendered, as Saunders writing (as I have encountered it) is. But we’ll see.
I’m also reading Martyr! Very impressed by the writing so far. Lincoln in the Bardo is well worth your time if you end up being in the mood 😃