Recent Literary Travels to Poland, Japan and Hong Kong

I haven’t been reading that much lately, or at least not for fun. The book selections have also been somewhat random, so I cannot really find a connection between these three recent reads, other than that they are all set somewhere far away from the UK and its current election shenanigans.

Kristina Perez: The Many Lies of Veronica Hawkins, Constable, 2024

I heard Kristina Perez speak on a panel at Capital Crime, but even before I heard about her journalistic careers and previous writing in other genres, I was attracted to this book, as I invariably am to any accounts of expats behaving badly. (Maybe it’s because I struggled to identify with that label myself, but could also sympathise with many of the challenges faced by expat wives in particular.)

This book is a slick commercial thriller, about Martina, a journalist who feels she married above her status (into a rich NY family) and now joins her husband in Hong Kong as a trailing spouse. Feeling rather lost and resentful, she is grateful when she meets the glamorous, extremely wealthy Veronica, the last of a British colonial dynasty, and is taken under her wing. But although Veronica seems benevolent, others are warning Martina off getting too close to her. Yet it is Veronica who goes overboard and drowns during a party on a yacht. Was it an accident, suicide or murder? Martina writes a book about her friendship with Veronica and tries to find out what happened.

The story itself is reasonably intriguing and well-paced, although we do have some clunky clichéed characters and situations, as well as a tiresome amount of brand labels name-dropping to capture the glamour and wealth of that society. There are all the ‘surprise twists’ and unreliable narrators that thriller readers have come to expect.

Hong Kong skyline by night, from Wikipedia.

But there were two things I did love about this book and which kept me reading till the end. The book is very good at capturing the complexities of a friendship formed between women later in life with a power imbalance at its heart. And the second was the obvious love of the Hong Kong setting, the almost nostalgic descriptions of a city that is rapidly changing. As the author herself says in the end note to the book: ‘The Hong Kong I recognised was vanishing before my eyes. Nostalgia, perhaps, but also something more urgent propelled me to write the city I had experienced, the city I loved and which had given me so much, on to the page. There are places that seep into your bones…’

Jennifer Croft: The Extinction of Irena Rey, Scribe, 2024.

I was eager to read this book ever since I first heard about it being work in progress. I’ve long followed and admired Jennifer Croft as a translator (an activist translator, as well, campaigning for #NametheTranslator on book covers). She has written a memoir/novel/autofiction book called Homesick and translates from both Spanish and Polish.

This book is a tongue-in-cheek description of a famous, potentially Nobel Prize winning author’s translators (Croft has translated Olga Tokarczuk) congregating in the primeval forests of Poland to work on the translation of her latest secret project. However, when they get there, the author disappears and the frictions between translators escalate. What makes the book even more interesting is that it is supposedly a book written about the event in Polish by the Spanish language translator, and translated into English from Polish by the English language translator, both of whom were present during the events. Their mutual grudge makes for hilarious footnotes, but there are also more serious points made about narrator and translator reliability.

The book starts off very strongly, and I love its wittiness and literary allusions, but it loses its way in the forest about halfway through, taking a bit of a wild, thrillery and somewhat unnecessary turn. This might have been designed (by either the author or the publisher) to make it appeal to a broader audience of horror or crime fiction fans. Personally, I could have spent forever with the discussions of whether translators should ‘adapt’ for their target audience, or the problem of linguistic identities, but I realise that might make for a very narrow readership (of translators or linguistics professors).

Is mother tongue still in any way a valid category. The implication is that we are born into a certain language the way we’re born into a body. But even our bodies can be modified, and families move into new linguistic territories, and some families fall apart. Our colleague Chloe Diop’s mother is Polish, but does that make Polish Chloe’s mother tongue? Is she not fluent in French, the language in which she has lived most of her life – almost all of her life outside her home? I suppose I support this author’s implied suggestion that fluency and belonging are more complex than was once thought, although I do not support writing bizarre books in garbled versions of languages you don’t speak half as well as you assume you do.

I also loved the almost throwaway lines that prick literary pretentiousness like an overinflated balloon: ‘The Bucharest Review was an achingly hip website without a print magazine that consisted of 70 percent white space, 25 percent prose in Akzidenz-Grotesk by authors without vowels in their names…’

Kenkō: Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness), transl. Donald Keene. Columbia University Press, 1967.

I reread this classic of Japanese literature, a collection of essays and thoughts written by a Japanese monk in 1330-1333. This is a prime example of what the Japanese call ‘zuihitsu’ literature, i.e. ‘free pen’ or ‘follow the brush’ – random jotting down of thoughts, observations, reflections, occasional nature writing, responding to the world around them etc. One might almost call it the social media of the day, except that these writings were usually private, at least during the author’s lifetime.

Some of the musings captured are just a couple of lines, others are longer, some refer to political personalities of the day, while others refer to Buddhist philosophy. Just like Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book and Montaigne’s Essays, this classic, clear and occasionally ever so slightly old-fashioned translation by Donald Keene (which suits the original very well) is one to dip in and out of, rather than read quickly. Some of the political allusions and court gossip are entirely obscure nowadays, and Kenkō often comes across as a judgemental snob, but there are beautiful passages about the impermanence of life that have become hugely influential in defining the Japanese aesthetic. I found myself often nodding or sighing in agreement and have got post-its on nearly every other page.

If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.

How delightful it would be to converse intimately with someone of the same mind, sharing with them the pleasures of uninhibited conversation on the amusing and foolish things of this world, but such friends are hard to find. If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.

Things which seem in poor taste: too many personal effects cluttering up the place where one is sitting; too many brushes in an ink box, too many Buddhas in a family temple, too many stones and plants in a garden, too many children in a house, too many words on meeting someone, too many meritorious deeds recorded in a petition. Things which are not offensive, no matter how numerous: books in a book cart, rubbish in a rubbish heap.

A 17th century visual representation of Kenkō by Kaiho Yusetsu, from the Suntory Museum of Art

I leave you with a somewhat lengthier quote which had me wincing in recognition, about people not focusing on what is important in life:

When people are young they are concerned about the projects they foresee lying ahead of them in the distant future – establishing themselves in different professions and carrying out some great undertaking, mastering an art, acquiring learning – but they think of their lives as stretching out indefinitely, and idly allow themselves to be constantly distracted by things… They pass months and days in this manner, succeeding in none of their plans, and so they grow old. In the end, they neither become proficient in their profession, nor do they gain the eminence they anticipated. However they regret it, they cannot roll back the years, but decline more and more rapidly, like a wheel rolling downhill. In view of the above, we must carefully compare in our minds all the different things in life we might hope to make our principal work… this decided, we should renounce our other interests and devote ourselves to that one thing only. Many projects present themselves in the course of a day or even an hour… If we remain attached to them all, and are reluctant to give up any, we will not accomplish a single thing.

OUCH!