peter young’s listopia

39) Chart Korbjitti, Time, 1993
A Thai film director goes to the theatre to see what has been billed as Bangkok's most boring play of the year, in which half a dozen elderly women live their usual uneventful day in a care home for the aged. That may sound like a very dull premise for a novel, and it is, but deliberately so. Time earned Korbjitti his second SEA Write Award, and to find out why means ploughing through two hundred pages of mundane dialogue mixed with some minor personal crises. There are some winning passages in which Korbjitti gets people to look at their own lives in relation to what's being acted out on the stage; these are the novel's most interesting aspects as the sheer dullness of these ladies' existence – as people essentially discarded from Thai society – makes for tough reading because there is so little in what they do that will engage a reader. We often don't expect to encounter such uninteresting everyday activity in a novel let alone on a stage, so it's only the varieties of circumstantial self-reflection and analysis that Korbjitti puts a few of his characters through that will give Time any value. Does he succeed? Within such a deliberately uneventful book it's the journey's end here that matters, and I doubt I will read a book this year that has a better ending. Its conclusion was so unexpectedly moving, as well as being downright clever, that it left me speechless and made me pause for five minutes before I could do anything else. Time may have an empty vacuum at its heart, but it's a worthwhile and rewarding experience and – after some further introspection – only a superficially hard journey getting there.

9) Hikaru Okuizumi, The Stones Cry Out, 1993
Tsuyoshi Manase is a haunted World War Two veteran who received his first lesson in geology from a dying Japanese soldier in a cave in the Philippines. After the war ends he indulges his passion for collecting stones, runs a small bookstore, marries unhappily and fathers two sons, but how he struggles with his memories of the war ends up shaping the present and the tragic destiny of his family. This was Okuizumi's first novel to be translated into English, and it won Japan's much-coveted Akutagawa Prize. It's delicate and sorrowful with elements of strangeness, particularly in how Manase's memories, dreams and reality all blur in such a way that he never quite gets a grip on his life as his family falls apart. Okuizumi writes elegantly and he's clearly meditated on the story he's telling, although he requires a bit of patience from the reader as he ties up Manase's inner story with his family life and the world beyond. A quietly powerful book.

21) Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain, 2008
I'm one of those people who sees dogs as having distinct personalities if we only bother to look, so this kind of imaginative take on a dog's point of view is actually the type of book I like to find. Like all dogs, Enzo thinks and feels like a human and he considers this incarnation to be a trial run for being reborn as one. Now at the end of his life and looking back on his time with his Seattle motor racing master Danny, he considers his karmic track record particularly when Danny's family falls apart after the death of his wife. This is a very likeable book indeed and Enzo's first person story actually adds to its authentic feel, because Stein's aim is to put him across as being essentially the same as us, and deserving of a human rebirth. Sad in many places but also pretty uplifting, I'll probably be thinking back to this book for weeks to come.

59) Elina Hirvonen, When I Forgot, 2005
This debut has quickly become the most internationally successful Finnish novel ever. Anna, a Helsinki journalist, sits in a café piecing together the lives of her own family, shattered in a moment of domestic violence, and that of her American partner Ian, torn apart by his estranged father's experience of the Vietnam War. Through these two central and well-drawn figures tensions radiate outwards in all directions with each character carrying their own burden of family history, particularly Anna's own psychotic brother for whom mental suffering has become a fact of life, and Ian who lost his father to post-traumatic stress disorder and feels helpless in the face of his country revisiting its enormous mistakes upon another generation. Written in a taut style that jumps back and forth from the late 1960s to 9/11 to the Iraq War protests, this is a subtle and layered novel about the far-reaching effects of both small- and large-scale kinds of violence that never leave anyone untouched. Like entering someone else's head for a day, it even has a happy ending of sorts and is well worth a re-read. Rather unique.

83) Kate Jennings, Snake, 1996
A first novel by an Australian poet, feminist and political activist, and one that also narrowly missed the '96 Booker shortlist. After World War 2 the slightly rebellious Irene marries the returning soldier Rex, and they try to settle into life on an Australian outback farm. After having two children they are soon both profoundly disappointed in each other, and Irene finds herself courting disaster in various friendships and half-hearted affairs. Irene is a most magnetic and awkward character, never happy with anybody and least of all her own family, whose situations are just as well depicted and whose aspirations are all equally dashed. What is outstanding about Snake is Kate Jennings's prose, which carries all the sharpness that Irene's humdrum outback existence lacks; it's a brilliantly observed story, and one without a single wasted word. Tragi-comic but mostly tragic, and also undeniably excellent.

73) William Kotzwinkle, Swimmer in the Secret Sea, 1975
A couple in a remote part of Canada have a baby, the baby dies at birth, the baby is buried. It's been described as Kotzwinkle's best and is worth seeking out; the focus on all the life that the surrounds this event is what gives this novella its unsentimental tone, yet it doesn't fail to leave a very melancholy aftertaste.

7) Dith Pran, Kim DePaul, eds., Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields, 1997
Dith Pran is the Cambodian photojournalist on whose experiences the film The Killing Fields was based, and these brief memoirs of other survivors is made up mostly of Cambodian immigrants to the US, now in their 30s and 40s. They look at how the four-year reign of the Khmer Rouge deliberately focussed on the physical and emotional division of families, with very few surviving intact. The extreme levels of cruelty leave me wondering where and how the dehumanising process actually begins, beyond the Maoist illogic of Pol Pot, having to rely as it did on Pot's henchmen and the manipulation of the many thousands of soldiers who enforced his ideology of fear, with the ultimate aim of cultivating total paranoia in an entire population in the name of an unreachable communist utopia. If there is such a thing as a book of memoirs by various Khmer Rouge militia it will make very interesting reading, but in the meantime, now that the trials of the surviving Khmer Rouge leadership are under way, I expect this useful but ultimately tragic book is currently finding plenty more readers.

89) Michael Kimball, How Much Of Us There Was, 2005
A challenging yet brave book because of the specific absence of any life-affirming sentimentality. The story of a grandfather whose wife is going through her days of hospitalisation and dying leading up to her funeral and the grieving days beyond, How Much Of Us There Was is unusual in that it's an account of a very ordinary and unremarkable death, the kind that is around us every day, and Kimball describes the internal effect it has on the bereaved. The word to define this book is 'closeness': the first-person telling provides immediate and often unsentimental detail, and the reader is brought uncomfortably close to a private grief, such that I was grateful for the equally strong presence of love that acts as a counterbalance. There is comfort here but it is often hard to separate from the anguish, much as one would find at this stage of life itself.

77) Rigoberta Menchú & Dante Liano, The Girl from Chimel, 2000
Rigoberta Menchú won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for her work on the human rights of indigenous peoples, and here she combines her family history with an illumination of ancient Mayan fables. These short tales have a gentle simplicity as seen through childhood eyes, capturing the innocence of her rural life before Guatemala descended into its 36-year civil war. A brief but refreshingly positive read.