peter young’s listopia

76) Jan Blensdorf, My Name is Sei Shonagon, 2004
The rights to this novel were reportedly sold to eight countries before publication, an enviable record for a debut novelist. Aiming at being a modern rendering of Sei Shonagon's 11th century Pillow Book, it's the story of a Japanese-American woman who inherits a Tokyo incense shop and finds herself acting as counsel to the insecure inner lives of her customers. It's a 'spiegel im spiegel' of interiors, constantly looking further into the life of 'Sei' and how she engages with the lives of other people, lives far more interesting than her own which seems to have had most of the joy written out of it. This book is also good for providing a discreet look inside the private behaviours of present-day Japanese who come across as a nation mostly terrified of offending each other, largely reflecting what generations of Japanese would still see as the truth despite the excesses of post-war Western influence. As a whole it has the feel of a book that's been assembled from disparate parts and rewritten maybe too much, all pieced together with the joins and spikes of interest smoothed over. It is observant and artfully prismatic, though not as engaging as I'd hoped for.

78) Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran, 2001
A teenage Jew, Momo, may be stealing from Monsieur Ibrahim's Paris shop but over time they form the kind of cross-cultural father-son relationship that both seem to have been seeking out. Ibrahim's Sufi beliefs come across as a light-hearted and positive way of dealing with the world, while Momo seems to find them more useful than Judaism and all but converts to Islam. It has echoes of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist but is far more engagingly written, and Schmitt's tale (the first in his four 'Cycle of the Unseen' books) has also been turned into a film which might be worth seeking out. An easily-digestible story well-served by good, fluid writing.

79) Andreï Makine, A Life's Music, 2001
Of the twenty cover quotes used to promote this book possibly the most apt is "as assured as a self-contained Chopin nocturne", and a particularly sad one at that: Makine is Russian but writes in French, something that somehow heightens the sense of detachment for this tale of a promising life sent completely off-track. In a snowbound railway station in the present-day, far Siberian east, a stranded passenger comes across an old man playing the piano. He is Alexeï Berg, and we learn that he was once a young concert pianist who had grown up in pre-war Stalinist Moscow at a time when the Russian intelligentsia were being 'disappeared'. He gets secret word that he is next in line for the re-education camps, and before his first solo concert he is forced to disappear himself, away from his pursuers and instead into the arms of the Russian military as it repels the German invasion before returning to the old totalitarianism which Berg, once again, falls foul of.

Infusing the book from start to finish is Makine's adopted concept of homo sovieticus, encapsulating the kind of stoic and peculiarly Russian patience that is required to deal with life's endless difficulties. A Life's Music pushes the reader in different and unexpected directions that may seem too sudden when told in such a short space as a hundred pages, but it is the right length because too much sentimentality would, otherwise, dilute its stunningly good ending. Recommended.