Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Friday November 26, 2010
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TRESPASS
Rose Tremain
Norton
ISBN 978 0 393 07956 2
253 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Jane Smiley, the author, most recently, of "Private Life"
The ambitious and productive English novelist Rose Tremain sometimes writes about music (most notably in her 1999 Whitbread Award winner, "Music and Silence"), and, in fact, she reminds me of a classical composer in both her meticulousness and her scope. When I read a Tremain novel, whether it's set in Denmark, New Zealand, England or France, whether it's set in the present day or the 17th century, I simply do not disbelieve her details. Her research is so seamlessly woven into both the plot and the psychology of the story that I am convinced that, yes, this is the way it must have been, or must be.
Though somewhat better known for historical novels (such as "Restoration") than contemporary ones, Tremain won the Orange Broadband prize for her last work, "The Road Home," an upbeat tale of an Eastern European job-seeker who travels to England on a bus once the lumber mill where he has been working in his own country is shut down. As usual, "The Road Home" is nearly a guide to its milieu, and one of its pleasures is Tremain's witty portrait of the United Kingdom as seen through the often uncomprehending eyes of Lev, her protagonist. Lev's tale has a happy ending -- he takes what he learns in England back to his country and builds something hopeful there. Maybe "Trespass," also a contemporary work, ends happily, too, but that would depend on your definition of happy.
For "Trespass" is a Gothic novel, dark and eerie, set in the South of France -- not the sunny south around Nice, but the dour and secretive district of the Cevennes, mountainous and wild. "Fire and flood could come (and often did come) to sweep everything away," she writes. "But still the rain fell and the wind blew." The mood is established in the first chapter, through the eyes of a schoolgirl from Paris who cannot comprehend why her parents would trade the 9th Arrondissement of Paris for this. The region is beset by the end of agriculture, including such specialties as silkworm farming. Even vine-growing has become an iffy proposition, and this has resulted in the sale of many of the old farmhouses to tourists from abroad.
"Trespass" is a less expansive novel than "The Road Home," a string quartet rather than a symphony, but it excels in mood. After reading this novel, you will not be scouring the Web for your house in France.
It can't really be said that "Trespass" has a protagonist, but it does have several compelling and vividly drawn characters. Veronica Verey, an Englishwoman who has settled in the area with her lesbian lover, Kitty, is writing a book titled "Gardening Without Rain." Veronica's brother, Anthony, a famous and wealthy antiques dealer from London whose career is collapsing, comes for a visit, and by the way disdains Kitty's attempts at watercolor. On the other side, a secretive French farmer, Aramon, happens to have inherited the lovely farmhouse that he and his sister, Audrun, grew up in. Audrun has built herself an ugly modern shack nearby -- close enough to wreck the view, in the opinion of the fastidious Englishman.
The ensuing revelations move forward and backward. They are remarkable not so much in themselves as in how deliberately, carefully and suspensefully Tremain contemplates them. At one point, Aramon goes to the local graveyard ("almost full up") to confide in his father. He discovers that "the dead never responded to any living plea. They could, it seemed, arrange a confidential hour, but then when you whispered your longings to them and asked them to help you, they fell back to being inert and useless: just brittle branches, bare twigs, dust."
All of Tremain's characters are in late middle age; that they know they are coming to the end of their aspirations and, indeed, of their lives, presents them with dramatic dilemmas, but it does not mean that they have found either wisdom or peace.
The sinister mood of "Trespass" is considerably different from the social realist one of "The Road Home," showing once again that Tremain is as ambitious as her better known male compatriots. She seems ready to try any form, any style, even any worldview, but she is more controlled and more subtle than they are, a Haydn rather than a Beethoven. She disappears into the work, not readily revealing herself, except through her insights into characters, events and settings, and through her subtle wit (every time Anthony notices a beautiful object, he reflexively estimates its market value). Her happy ending is a realistic one for older characters -- a correcting of accounts, a modicum of mercy. With luck, "Trespass" will entice American readers to experience the riches and wisdom of Rose Tremain's large and varied body of work. She is a maestro.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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I HOTEL
Karen Tei Yamashita
Coffee House
ISBN 978 156689 2391
612 pages
$19.95
Reviewed by Marcela Valdes, who recently received the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism from the Center for Fiction
The building at the center of Karen Tei Yamashita's colossal new work of fiction, "I Hotel," is a creaky hotel that once stood on the edge of Chinatown in San Francisco. Built after the great quake that nearly destroyed the city in 1906, it had rusting plumbing, dangerous wiring and rats the size of cats in the basement. But for the aging workers and young radicals who found shelter within its deteriorating walls, the International Hotel was both "a fortress and a beacon."
For Yamashita it is also the girder in a tremendous feat of creative engineering, because "I Hotel" is no ordinary work of fiction. As original as it is political, as hilarious as it is heartbreaking, "I Hotel" is the result of a decade of research and writing that included more than 150 personal interviews. It's also a finalist for this year's National Book Award in fiction, which will be announced on Nov. 17. Whether or not "I Hotel" wins the prize, it will be dog-eared and underlined and assigned to college reading lists for generations.
Oddly enough, the novel began with a request from Wisconsin. Provoked by a questionnaire for Asian American writers that she received from a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Yamashita decided to write a book about the Asian American movement in California during the 1960s and '70s, of which she herself had been a part. Diving into archives and tracking down first-person participants, Yamashita put as much fact-collecting into her "Yellow Power" research as any historian.
When it came to dramatizing her facts, however, Yamashita may well have channeled I.M. Pei. "I Hotel's" table of contents includes a series of drawings that lay out its narrative architecture: 10 linked novellas, each exploring a different narrative technique (pastiche, social realism, cinema verite, etc.) and each focusing on three different main characters. (Yes, Hollywood, that makes for 30 star roles!)
One novella presents the story of a Japanese American criminology professor through a series of FBI-like surveillance reports. Another juxtaposes the marriage of two Third World Liberation Front activists against Ferdinand Marcos' declaration of martial law in the Philippines. My favorite novella features a roast pig contest directed by a Filipino migrant-worker-turned-chef with a taste for tall tales.
All the novellas, in turn, are cantilevered off a larger story about how the International Hotel inspired and protected its inhabitants. The radical intellectuals of the Asian Community Center, the veterans of the International Hotel Tenants Association, the artists of the Kearny Street Workshop and the Maoists of the Chinese Progressive Association: All of them found work space, think space, love space in the crumbling hotel. And all of them fought fiercely against the developers who wanted it demolished.
The term "Asian American" blurs together wildly different linguistic and religious cultures. As one narrator says, "Maybe we all look alike, and maybe the laws lump us all together so we got to stick together, even though we're really different and can't understand each other and our folks back in the old countries hated each other's guts."
"I Hotel" resists this lumping. Its wild narrative architecture springs from a need to delineate separate Chinese, Japanese and Filipino histories, as well as separate aesthetic, political and intellectual positions. It's as if Yamashita wanted to capture the diversity of an entire cultural ecosystem, displaying each distinct species -- idealistic gay Chinese poet, wisecracking Filipino Marxist, Japanese Black Panther strategist -- in all its particular glory, and its particular pain.
"I Hotel" may be a political book, but it's no ideological tract. Yamashita obviously admires the fervor and idealism of the activists in her novel, whether they're demanding more Third World professors at U.C. Berkeley or making charcoal drawings in a Japanese internment camp. But her activists are often as problematic as they are inspiring.
Chen, a dashing professor of Chinese literature, for example, teaches his proteges about Mao's cultural revolution but neglects to mention that "everything that Chen loved about art and literature had to be destroyed or changed" to fit the revolutionary ideal. Other radicals commit greater and lesser crimes: stealing cars, abusing women, stockpiling guns, sabotaging colleagues they consider too capitalist. Even the most generous characters, like Ria Ishii, who organizes a garment workers' collective in 1973, are forced to confront the limitations of their Marxist aspirations. "I know what you think," one of the old garment workers tells Ria, "but I am not the revolution."
"Yes, you are," Ria replies. The older woman shakes her head. And three decades later we know she's right.
Such scenes of intellectual and physical humbling come faster as "I Hotel" marches through the 1970s. Collectives fall apart. Important battles are lost. Protest chants ("The people united will never be defeated!") begin to sound more and more like wishful thinking. The disappointments might have been overwhelming if it weren't for the zing of Yamashita's prose, which is full of waggish jokes and saucy mash-ups. The sliest of them may be a series of line drawings spoofing the long-standing rivalry between the playwright Frank Chin and the novelist Maxine Hong Kingston.
In the end, the way "I Hotel" accounts for the Asian American movement is both sweet and sour. And for all the losses Yamashita records, there are, we know, great achievements as well. High among them is this beautiful book.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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