Book Review: Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami

´Forget about readers, I rarely have friends´.

The voice of Japanese women writers is becoming strong and particularly complex lately as it attacks nonchalantly former taboos topics, such womanhood in the society while praises the wild independence of the body and the soul. Mieko Kawakami that I´ve discovered two years ago, is one of them.

After reaching the end of Breasts and Eggs - I had the book in its audio version - I needed a break. A break to figure out what I really think about the book. It is dense and attacks frontally so many women-related topics that you don´t have to be necessarily Japanese - although a middle knowledge about women in Japan is required - to be in sync with the ideas and challenges.

The women from this book, which is made up of two different novellas - but I will not keep copying and pasting from the description as I think this is not an important part of the story - are on the forefront of their lives: single mothers, single by choice, women without men and not interested to negotiate their lack of sexual interest. And what a time to be alive, when you can even get pregnant and be a mother - the highest traditional label a woman can aspire to - without a man. 

The diversity of voices and women is overwhelming and makes it easily to identify at least with one of them. Or rather, to the limitations and stumble blocks a woman has to overcome in order to move further or simply live their lives as genuine human beings. In the words of one of the characters, a woman cannont become a Budha, she needs to get reborn as a man first. 

I´ve read in the last months many books - mostly literary works - that deal with the women social and physiological status and their limitations but Breasts and Eggs is definitely covering all and even more aspects of this condition. It shakes to the ground your beliefs and safety in order to rebuilt it again on a better, self-oriented basis. Maybe you want to have children and enjoy your family life while being offered the social status and stability through your man, but it is all you ever wanted? Can you beat the worm of doubt any more after reading this book? I would be so curious to read more by Mieko Kawakami, maybe not necessarily about the woman condition only...

Rating: 4 stars

Middle Grade Book Review: Amina´s Voice by Hena Khan

I love middle grade books with a multicultural touch because it helps me to understand a world where children can freely share and assume their identities - ethnic, religious particularly. 

Amina´s Voice by Hena Khan is about the life of an American-Pakistani faily living in Greendale, Milwaukee, in the USA. A place where different religions and denominations are coming along together and the schools share the usual diversity we associate with the American dream. All went well until one night someone vandalized the local mosque, but the action proved the strength of the community against any form of extremism. A planed Qu´ran reading competition will be hosted in a Presbyterian church and everyone will help to rebuild the destroyed mosque. ´We all have to stick together in times like this´ is an optimistic message of unity against extremism. We will not know who exactly attached the Muslim center, but the solidarity aftermath is more important for the overall message of the book.

The author focuses on the positive experiences and the efforts towards a middle-path of living and practising the identity, particularly the religion. Even Bhai Jaan, Amina´s uncle visiting from Pakistan which favors a stricter way of Muslim life will be in the end convinced to tolerate a girl singing in public. 

Amina and his brother Mustafa are a projection of how a second generation practising Muslim immigrants in America can be. Accomodating other people´s identity and accepting who you are - as Amina´s friend and colleague, the Korean-born Soojin who wants to take an American-sounding name after naturalization - is a challenge at any age, particularly in the pre-teens years. 

I appreciated the simplicity in portraying the inner family dynamics and how both parents are both commited to respect their traditions in a way which accommodates and respects other people´s identities. The voices who count in this book are children´s and the adults are mostly the regulative background who may allow or challenge their behavior, but largely in a mildly, not dramatic tensed way. Therefore, the book is both useful for children and their parents, both with a multicultural background and just curious to learn about other cultures and communities as well as about how co-existence may look like in a democracy.

Rating: 3.5 stars

WWII German Stories: The Spy Woman from Charité

Based on a true story, The Spy-Woman from Charité - read in the original German language Die Spionin der Charité - by Christian Hardinghaus is focused on a resistance group against the Nazi establishment around the famous surgeon Ernest Ferdinand Sauerbruch who operated at the Charité between 1929 and 1949.

The role of German physicians, especially from the famous Charité hospital, is highly controversial and a fiction book does not bring clarity in their role of the eugenics and other controversial Nazi-led medical politics. Sauerbruch himself was a main personality of the Nazi medical establishment, with positions in various academic and medical comissions and being awarded numerous medals. Professionally he was considered a main personality and the official post-war narrative was that he played a role in countering the eugenics programs within the hospital as well as for treating and saving Jewish patients and operating various resistance circles.

The book by Christian Hardinghaus follows this narrative, fictionalizing the story of Sauerbruch personal secretary that, among others, seduces and recruits for his boss an important German diplomat, Franz Kolbe that further communicated with the future CIA director, Allan Dulles, during the war operating from Switzerland. Sauerbruch wanted to take ´his country back´ and was able to smoothly move between various Nazi centers of command to hide his traces. 

In the book, the details of the center of resistance from the Charité was kept secret for 30 year and revealed for an American journalist. There are no shadows and everything seems to be clear for the author. The story is interesting, with some suspenseful episodes, with clear distinctions between the good and the bad, but the historian in me was maybe expecting more sophistication. Probably the said historian should rather read more history and less fiction when it comes to such complicated encounters.

Rating: 3 stars

Flash Fiction Stories Review: Memoirs of a Lagos Wedding Planner

Flash fiction applies to stories of maximum 1,000 words. One of the most entertaining example in this respect is the SMITH Magazine, whose 6-word game I used to play passionately week after week a couple of years ago. The flash fiction stories do have a plot, dialogues and action, but everything should be concentrated in a very short amount of words. Big literary names as Kafka, Hemingway, Saadi of Shiraz or Daniil Kharms, to mention only few of them tried their hand to this type of writing as well. My latest collection of flash fiction was written by Tolupe Popoola - Memoirs of a Lagos Wedding Planner.

Popoola is a Nigerian-born writers living in England that authored several colllections of short fiction and a novel. Memoirs was my first for me and I am happy to add her on my list of Nigerian writers to follow. The ten stories are inspired by the everyday experiences of a wedding planner in Lagos. A well chosen and a never ending source of inspiration. You got all the emotions, feelings, stress, craziness and family dynamics in short installments. 

The tone is descriptive, matter of factly, focused on describing facts and events. Sometimes I had the feeling I am reading some entertainment pages in glossy magazines - the style of flash fiction was actually promoted by glossy magazines like Cosmopolitan, for instace, so the category may suit. As the topic is well chosen, the stories are the various illustrations of the encounters of a wedding planner which happens to operate in Lagos, therefore the geographical and social emphasis. 

Some of the stories are so hilarious that I couldn´t stop by laughing a bit. And as I was about to finish the book I started to miss this world and felt a bit frustrated for the limited amount of stories included in the memoir. I would have love to stay for at least the same amount of pages...

Rating: 3 stars

The Attraction of Storytelling: The Colours of Beauty/Die Farben der Schönheit by Corina Bomann

For various reasons, more or less clear, I do have difficulties in writing my stories lately. I lost my pace, my coherence and my hunger for words, being left often suspended somewhere between the words that wait to be told and those who will never be written. But life is still young and I don´t despair. I am trying every day to bring back the source of stories. The more I try the more surprised I am of the opportunities and the diversities of books I am offering myself to read as an alternative to my dry writing. Latest success was to delve deep into a story while listening to an audiobook, my latest literary passion.

Die Farben der Schönheit by Corina Bomann - which I listened in the original German language - is the first of a trilogy featuring the life of Sophia, an average Berlin-born girl following her dream of being a chemist. Estranged from her family after getting pregnant with a married man, she has to abandon her Chemistry studies and moves to Paris with her artist girlfriend. From there, she is offered the chance of working for the famous cosmetics queen and art collector Helena Rubinstein. But Rubinstein´s life circumstances and the Great Depression will put Sophia in difficult situation and she will soon deal again with uncertainties and change of fate.

What I really liked about this book was the flow of the story. The facts are simple and so is the ways in which they are further shared. Sophia´s story is about a simple girl that by the game of circumstances and her resilience went close to personalities of the time, both in Paris and the NYC. But she was assigned by the author to tell a story where she is the main character. 

The historical facts about Helena Rubinstein and her complex personality are relatable but I will not call this book a historical novel. Rather, it is a book about a woman whose character is built through the interaction with different environments and various experiences and this story is what really counts. 

Probably will be curious to read at a certain point the continuation of the story, but as for now, I got the right dosis of inspiration to slowly move on the right side of the writing journey.

Rating: 3 stars

Explaining Tragic Historical Moments in Children Voice

I´ve always found difficult to explain to children tragedies, both personal and historical, in writing or through direct speech. How, for instance, to explain in an easy, without the adult emotions, to a child, that once upon a time one country stand united in killing my relatives and other 6 million innocent people? Or that other humans, made from the same flesh and blood as the rest of the humans, might happily wipe me and the rest of my family out of the maps and world because we are assumed to pray to a different Gd or born with a different name.

Judith Kerr in When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit - I had access to the audiobook version in the German language, Als Hitler das rosa Kaninchen stahl - succeeded to give children voice to a terrible century in a very genuine way. 

Anna, the daughter of an inconvenient Jewish-German journalist, is forced to leave Berlin together with his brother Max and his mother. They join their father first in Switzerland, but there is no place for the truth of his father, therefore they move to Paris, a stop before crossing the Channel and moving to England. 

We, as adults, we may take those changes of language and environment and address as a serious challenge and we can keep complaining and talk about it for ever. Children, though, they see it in a different note, with a curiosity of world adventurers and with the innocence that does not see the trauma, the dangers and the difficulties. Playing with children whose language they cannot understand, learning a new language and trying to keep quiet during the passport control from Germany to Switzerland are facts that a child will just register. The meta-analysis comes later, eventually during a therapy session. 

I am in love withe Anna´s voice and with the art of the author. I´ve read other books by Judith Kerr but this book is something to remember for a long time and probably would be curious to watch the movie too that was released the last year. But about my relationship with me and movies made after books in another post...

Rating: 4 stars

Book Review: Almond by Won-Pyung Sohn

´But the human brain is rather a strange thing´.

I will add, that the human brain is also a fascinating thing, but this is rather an observation in cold blood, when one does not feel oneself moved by any emotion, but just overview facts and brain mechanisms from afar, with amused scientific curiosity. Almost like the main character in Almond by the Korean author Won-Pyung Sohn, who wrote and directed a number of short films. The book is translated by the San Diego-based Sandy Joosun Lee. 

The narrator of Almond is a young man that from an early age was diagnosed with alexithymia, which refers to the inability to express your feelings. His amygdala, the almond-shaped structures in the brain were not working properly. ´The words ´emotions´ and ´empathy´ are just meaningless letters in print´.

He grew up with his single mother and grandmother, who tried to challenge this inability, not only by feeding him almonds - which may be good for the brain development - but also teaching him to extend his network of associations, including by translating emotions into words. ´Mom was like a playright and never tired of using her imagination to come up with different situations´ (...) I needed to read the true meaning behind words, as well as memorize the proper intentions behind my responses´. 

The main character is having a long way ahead, going through shocking and highly violent episodes, at the end of which his emotional limits are challenged. The level of aggressivity described is raw but told with a matter-of-fact voice of someone who really is beyond fear.

The book is made of short chapters, with a fotographic impression. It´s a simple story with a complex emotional weight. I personally appreciated the innovative-creative way in which such a diagnosis is realistically inserted into a narrative and the literary developments. 

Rating: 3 stars