Literary fiction

Review: We Do Not Part

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Cover image of "We Do Not Part" by Han Kang

We Do Not Part, Han Kang, translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. Hogarth (ISBN: 9780593595459) 2025

Summary: Kyungha makes a harrowing journey through a blizzard to save a friend’s bird, confronting the reality behind her nightmares.

The nightmares began a few months after Kyungha, a historian, published a book on a massacre. She is making her way in a blizzard through a field of erect torsos like tree stumps as the sea behind her rises…. In the years since, she has struggled with depression and considered suicide. But she shared her dream with Inseon, a photographer who collaborated with her on documentaries. Inseon, who has become a friend, agrees to create an installation that will remember the massacre that was the source of the dreams. Kyungha is not so sure about this idea and asks her friend to drop the project.

Then she receives a text from Inseon, asking her to come to a hospital. Inseon, a woodworker, cut off the tips of a couple fingers and is undergoing a gruesome set of treatments that will last weeks to try to save the tips of her fingers. She has a favor to ask of Kyungha. In the rush to get her to hospital, she left behind her bird, that will soon die without food or water. Inseon lives on the island of Jeju in a remote location by a remote village. Getting there involves flights, bus rides, and hiking a trail up to her remote home. There is no one back home who she can ask to do this.

There are some things you do not deny a friend of twenty years. Kyungha departs immediately only to discover that she is flying into a blizzard. She is not adequately dressed. She manages to get the last bus to the village. Then, in a blinding storm, she has to make her way up to Inseon’s house. Kyungha gets lost, falls, yet miraculously makes her way. She is cold with soaked shoes. She soon begins to feel feverish.

This sets the stage for the second half of the novel, which reads like something of a fever dream. She finds Inseon had not abandoned their project, having cut one hundred logs for the installation. More than that, through a series of visions/dreams/hallucinations, Inseon recounts her mother’s personal accounts of the massive genocide that occurred on Jeju in 1948-1950. The South Korean government, with assistance from the United States, embarked on an effort to cleanse the island of Communism, resulting in the deaths of over 300,000 people [this really happened].

Kyungha confronts the nightmare reality of which her dreams were but a figment. It’s a personal account of Inseon’s mother, father, and extended family, many of whom died. But she experiences something else–the bond between her and Inseon of which the title speaks. Han Kang juxtaposes unspeakable violence and enduring friendship. She captures something of both the unspeakable evil of which we are capable and the nobility that breaks through the darkness. The imagery of dark stumps, rising seas, blizzards, light, and flame powerfully convey that juxtaposition.

Han Kang was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2024 for her earlier body of work: The Vegetarian, The White Book, Human Acts, and Greek Lessons. While I’ve not read her earlier works, the combination of imagery, the plotting, and the juxtaposition of a friendship with a horror of history reveals Han Kang’s skill and artistic vision.

Review: Yellowface

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Cover image of "Yellowface" by R. F. Kuang.

Yellowface, R. F. Kuang. William Morrow (ISBN: 9780063250833) 2023.

Summary: What happens when a famous author dies immediately after sharing an unpublished draft of her latest work with her writer friend.

Athena Liu and June Hayward met at Yale. Both were aspiring writers. Athena rocketed to literary stardom. June’s book received lackluster reviews and didn’t sell. Both are living in DC and meet up. They migrate to Athena’s apartment, get drunk, and share a lot of girl talk. Athena shows June the draft of her latest, yet to be submitted book. No one else has seen it. It’s on Chinese laborers in World War I and June sees its potential. Next thing, Athena is choking, June’s efforts to save her fail, and Athena dies before help arrives. When June finally leaves, it is with Athena’s manuscript.

Reading through the manuscript, she recognizes both the brilliance and the unfinished state of what Athena had produced. At first, she edits the work as a writing exercise, for Athena. But the more she works on it, including her own extensive research, the more she considers it hers. She sends it off to her agent, representing it as her work, and not only does he think it brilliant, but so does her publisher, who offers her a huge advance. June publishes under the name Juniper Song (June’s full first name and middle name, but also ethnically ambiguous) with an equally ambiguous author photo.

The book enjoys critical acclaim…and booming sales. Then the controversy hits. At first, she has to defend herself against charge of cultural appropriation as a white girl writing on an Asian subject. Then the first allegations of plagiarism arise, which she manages to fend off, but at a steep internal psychic cost. In this sense, the novel is a kind of “crime and punishment” study of the deepening fear of being exposed coupled with the allure, yet the impossibility of coming clean. In the writing community, plagiarism may be worse than murder. But she also discovers that in stealing Athena’s work, she has become a captive to Athena’s voice, losing her own.

Kuang also exposes the capricious world of publishing, and the vicious world of social media. In particular, Kuang portrays how quickly adulation can turn to death threats and other forms of cancellation. There are even the complicated relationships between authors. June claims Athena stole from her, taking her secrets and turning them into stories. June, of course, uses this to justify her own theft.

This is not a pleasant book to read. Kuang makes us look at our rationalizations, the ways we re-narrate our stories. Simultaneously she explores the dark sides of the publishing, literary, and social media worlds. And she weaves all this together in a compelling story.

Review: The City and Its Uncertain Walls

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Cover image of "The City and Its Uncertain Walls" by Haruki Murakami

The City and Its Uncertain Walls, Haruki Murakami (Translated by Philip Gabriel). Alfred A. Knopf (ISBN: 9780593801970) 2024.

Summary: A young couple falls in love until she disappears to a mysterious city of people without shadows.

A teenage boy meets a girl at a writing competition. They write and are drawn to each other, visiting and cuddling and longing for more. He loses his heart to her but she asks him to be patient, saying she wants to give herself wholly to him. And then she just disappears. But before this happened, she told him that her real self lived in a city with walls, unicorns, a clock tower without hands, and that in that city, she was the librarian. The girl he knew was a mere shadow of that girl.

Understandably, he longs to follow her to that city, but does not know how. He never marries and works in publishing. Then, one day when he is forty-five, he falls into a hole and finds himself outside the city with a wall. To enter, the Gatekeeper must remove his shadow, which will live separately. Then he must go through a painful eye treatment to fit him for his job. He will work with the girl at the library reading everything in its collection. Not books, but the dreams of past inhabitants of the city.

So, each day, he arrives, the girl makes a tea to help his eyes, and gives him egg-shaped dreams to hold and “read.” Then he walks her home along the river to the housing where she lives. But she doesn’t recognize him from their relationship outside the wall. However, his shadow interrupts this companionable routine. The shadow is dying and must return to the outside world. Finally, he is convinced, but turns back at the last minute while the shadow departs.

Yet we meet him next, not in the city but back at home. He has a shadow again. But he is dissatisfied with his life. He asks a friend to help him find a different job in a small town. He applies for a job as a director of a small library. After an interview with the founder and retiring director, Mr. Koyasu, he is hired despite his scant qualifications. Mr. Koyasu is unusual. He wears a distinctive beret and a skirt. But he drops by and mentors the man, including taking him to a secret room that is warmer in winter. Only later do we learn that Mr. Koyasu is dead. A shade if not a shadow!

He finds Koyasu’s grave and talks to him on his days off. And he meets a woman who owns a nearby coffee shop. It appears that, if not first love, then some kind of love might be possible. Except a boy turns up who reads at the library every day, and knowing your birthday, can tell you the day on which you were born. Apart from that, he doesn’t communicate. Yet he connects with the director. And one day he overhears him talking to Mr. Koyasu at the grave about the city…

Shadow and substance. What is real? Murakami gives us his own version of Socrates’ Cave. And do we not sometimes feel alien to our own world, and think there might be another where we are more at home? And yet the nameless narrator doesn’t find his real love in the city without shadows–nor in this one. We wonder if he will accept the possibility of love in front of him from the coffee shop owner. Apart from that relationship, one feels he is living a shadow existence, unconnected with others in the town.

This is the second Murakami novel I’ve read, and I find myself drawn to his narrative voice. It is both quiet and evocative without becoming overpowering. He draws the reader into the mental and emotional landscape of his main character. Then he throws enough surprises and twist in to keep it interesting and make you wonder where this is going.

Murakami adds a fascinating postscript. He first wrote this story as a novella forty years ago but never was satisfied with the ending. This work is a re-working as he finally found a way to complete the story. We learn he added parts two and three. I’ve not read the earlier work. I’d like to hear from Murakami fans who have read both this and the earlier novella. Do you think he succeeded?

Review: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

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Cover image of "Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow" by Gabrielle Zevin

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin. Vintage Books (ISBN: 9780593466490) 2022.

Summary: Childhood friends, Sam and Sadie collaborate as game developers, in a different kind of love story.

From the ancient Greeks to C. S. Lewis, people have written of the different kinds of love. This is a story of a different kind of love. One that is not familial, nor one simply of friendship, nor erotic. Sadie meets Sam when they are both eleven. Sadie’s sister is being treated for cancer. Sam is recovering from surgery to try to put together his left foot, mangled in a car accident. One that took the life of his mother. She meets him in the hospital game room during one of those interminable times of waiting around when someone you care for is in the hospital. He’s really good at Super Mario Brothers. And they strike up a friendship.

Only later does she learn from a nurse that this is the first time he has spoken since the accident. So the nurse asks if Sadie would continue to visit. Her mother reminds her of the service requirement for her Bat Mitzvah. So surreptitiously, she gets credit for her time visiting Sam–over 600 hours! And they deeply connect, Grok, if you will, until Sam learns that she has counted her time with him for her service project. He cruelly ends the relationship until…

They run into each other seven years later in Harvard Square. She is a student at MIT, and he, at Harvard. Sam spots her and manages to get her attention by calling out a favorite phrase from their gaming discussions. She is delighted to see him and hands him a floppy disk of a game she has written for a class. And so resumes the complicated friendship of Sadie and Sam.

Sam plays the game and loves it. They talk, and conclude that they ought to work on games together. They develop a game, Ichigo, in which a genderless child tries to survive being swept to sea in a giant wave. Sam’s roommate, Marx, offers their apartment as a workspace, and helps support the effort with everything from food to promotional ideas.

Sam and Sadie’s collaboration makes each of them, and the game better. There is a kind of oneness of mind between them that is more than close friends or even lovers, which they never become. Sadie’s lover was a former prof, Dov, a brilliant game developer who also had a penchant for sado-masochism. Sadie eventually gets out of the relationship, but not before securing permission to use Dov’s game engine to create visual effects for the game. Sam had urged this on her, oblivious to what he was asking. And so begin the tensions between them that intensify when they try to sell the game to a company that wants to make Ichigo male. Ideas of success and creative tensions pull at the collaboration, which Marx, now their business manager tries to hold together.

Then game promotion complicates things. Sadie’s insecurity comes out and Sam is the one on the stages promoting the game, and treated as its creator in the male world of gaming. While he gives Sadie due credit, press perceptions still represent Ichigo as his game, even though it was significantly an expression of Sadie’s genius and developing skills. And it is wildly successful. A sequel is developed, and Sam, Sadie, and Marx use their profits to create their own company.

Gabrielle Zevin traces this complicated friendship over 30 years as they build a company and do amazing creative work. Yet Sam drives himself so hard that his cobbled-together foot becomes infected, jeopardizing his life. Sadie and Sam create a “two worlds” game. Sadie’s side is technically brilliant, but it is Sam’s more prosaic side to which people flock. While creating non-violent games, an act of real world violence devastates both of them, and their company, and further drives them apart.

The title, quoted by Marx from Shakespeare, alludes to the allure of games, in which no character ever dies permanently. They keep coming back with each new game play. Both are haunted by death. Each asks if the other is dying when they first meet. Sam witnesses a woman jump from a building, landing in front of him and his mother walking on the sidewalk. Sam’s mother, on the cusp of success in Hollywood, dies when another driver fails to see them parked on the side of a road at night. Then, in the time following the act of violence, we wonder whether the unique love between Sadie and Sam will be stronger than death.

I am not into the gaming world, and my world is a far cry from the one Zevin creates. Yet the compelling characters and their unique, fraught relationship drew me in. Zevin offers an exploration of what an intellectual, creative, and yet deeply bonded love that is non-sexual might look like. She subtly underscores the toxic masculinity of the gaming industry, and the flaws in a society that believes in solving problems with a gun. It does not surprise me that Zevin is the recipient of numerous book awards. I will be on the lookout for her next work.

Review: Tom Lake

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Cover image of "Tom Lake" by Ann Patchett

Tom Lake, Ann Patchett. HarperCollins (ISBN: 9780063327528) 2023.

Summary: Lara, while cherry-picking with her daughters, recounts her love affair with actor Peter Duke, and how she met the girls’ father.

This is one of the best stories I’ve read with the COVID pandemic as a backdrop. In the summer of 2020, Lara’s three daughters have returned home to her and Joe’s orchard near Traverse Bay, in northern Michigan. And its a good thing, because the pandemic has thinned the ranks of workers who usually pick cherries. So it is “all hands” and Lara and her daughters spend their days in the orchards.

Nell, the youngest, is an aspiring actress. She knew her mother not only had a brief acting career but had a summer-long love affair with Peter Duke, who later went on to become a screen actor. None of them knew much about this part of their mother’s life. So, plying her with questions, Lara, over successive days of pickings, and evenings at the kitchen table, unfolds the story–at least most of it.

Beginning with high school, she recounts getting the part of Emily (the name of her oldest daughter) in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. She stars in the same role in college, and in a turn of fate, a Hollywood agent realizes she is perfect for a film in the works. She turns in what everyone says is a great performance, but the film sits in the can. Her agent gets her an audition for a Broadway production. She’s good enough, but without the movie, not famous enough. Just then a popular summer stock company loses their “Emily” and she takes the part.

The company is located by Tom Lake, in northern Michigan, part of a cultural festival site with offerings for downstate residents and others fleeing the heat. Another cast member, Peter Duke is a young, good-looking, and charismatic figure, and before long, Lara and Peter are lovers. Lara tells (and remembers) the story of that relationship, in the life cycle of a summer stock production where days are weeks, weeks are months and months, years.

Casts develop tight relationships. Thus we not only meet Peter Duke, but also Pallace, a Black woman who is Lara’s understudy, fighting the prejudice that wouldn’t cast “Emily” as Black. Pallace falls in love with Sebastian, Peter’s brother, a tennis pro at an exclusive Detroit area club. And we meet Uncle Wallace, a venerable old actor who plays the stage manager. Sadly, Uncle Wallace collapses in Lara’s arms during a performance, a consequence of years of drinking.

Toward the end of the season, Peter and Lara are rehearsing another role. To get into the role, which Lara plays badly, they drink (as do their characters. Lara then plays a tennis match with Sebastian, the best in her life, until she blows out her Achilles tendon. She cannot take the Stage as Emily. And she realizes that playing Emily is about the extent of her talent. And Duke moves on to Pallace. At the end of the summer, they part ways, and Peter begins his ascent to Hollywood fame, ironically through Lara’s agent

She also tells the story of meeting her husband, who was also at Tom Lake that summer. Because of Peter Duke, he couldn’t tell her. Only later do they connect, marry, and make the cherry farm their home. Patchett offers an interesting contrast between the meteoric passion between Peter and Lara, and the quieter, durable love of Joe.

Patchett explores the intricacies of the stories of our youth. Lara must decide what to tell her daughters as she remembers. We learn of one memory that remains secret, except to the readers.

Patchett also weaves in an underlying story of place. The cherry farm had belonged to Joe’s Uncle Ken and Aunt Maisie (after whom the middle daughter is named). And Emily, the eldest, and her fiance, Nelson, are already thinking of the future of the orchard, perhaps combined with the farm of Nelson’s neighboring parents. Meanwhile, Maisie, a veterinarian in training, already is caring for the community’s animals. Only Nell has aspirations to move away and act. I wonder if she will after this story!

I won’t say how Patchett ends this one. I’ve not always found her endings satisfying, as much as I’m a fan of her writing. While there are some unexpected twists in this one, I felt the conclusion just “fit” for me as did the conclusion to The Dutch House.

Review: The Man Within

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Cover image for "The Man Within" by Graham Greene

The Man Within, Graham Greene. Open Road Media (ISBN: 9781504054003), 2018 (First published in 1929).

Summary: Francis Andrews flight from smugglers he betrayed endangers a girl with whom he takes refuge.

This is Graham Greene’s first published novel. The main character is Francis Andrews, son of an abusive smuggler. When his father died, Carlyon, his second, took him under his wing in the smuggling business. But he never fits in, no more than he did with his father. Consequently, he writes a letter to customs officers, tipping them off to the smugglers’ whereabouts.. When the customs officers show up, Andrews escapes during the fight that ensues, leaving a customs officer dead.

A group of the men are taken into custody and face murder charges. But Carlyon escapes and is hunting Andrews, his former friend. During a foggy night, Andrews flees across the downs, knowing that if Carlyon finds him, Carlyon will kill him. Desperate, he seeks shelter in a cottage whose only inhabitant is a young woman, Elizabeth. Actually, when he arrives, he finds himself face to face with a corpse, a man who had been Elizabeth’s guardian after her own father died.

Elizabeth shelters him, passing him off as her brother to a nosy cleaning woman. When Andrews tries to leave, he nearly encounters Carlyon on the road and retreats to the cottage. Elizabeth hides him and Carlyon leaves. A bond forms between them. She doesn’t want to be alone. But she also senses the turmoil Andrews struggles with in what seems a cowardly betrayal. She urges him to go to the assizes where the men will be tried, to give his testimony. He does, although he makes a hash of it. Not only is his testimony compromised by the cleaning woman, who identifies him as staying with Elizabeth, who she calls “a loose woman.” He sleeps with another woman, who was a kind of bribe for his testimony. The smugglers are acquitted and Andrews is the object of opprobrium.

Elizabeth is also in jeopardy. Carlyon is on the loose as are the other men. They know she hid Andrews. And this exposes the central thread of the whole story. Andrews struggles with seeing himself as a coward, a legacy of his father’s abuse. He saw betraying the smugglers as a way to strike back, yet betrayal feels the ultimate cowardly act. Now, will he save his own skin, confirming what “the man within” has been saying? Or will he attempt to save Elizabeth? She acted in courage in her love for him. Will he? And what risks and consequences could this mean for them both.

In a sense, Greene offers us two people dealing with a person within, the voices of the dead they are seeking to live free of. Each is bereft when they meet the other, alone in the world. Each faces the question of “is love worth the risk?” In this first published work, Greene gives us characters we come to care for and explores large questions such as the line between cowardice and courage and the risks of love.