Back Reviews Reel: September 2016

With the reviews of five books, three classics and two contemporary works, I filled my blog this month three years ago. I started my tour in Barcelona of the 1930s with the coming-of-age of a recently married girl In Diamond Square by Mercè Rodoreda. Then Black Rain by Ibuse Masuji took me to Hiroshima to see what the Atomic bomb did to the city and its people after 6 August 1945. Afterwards, I travelled to Europe to join an Austrian girl of the 1970s who can’t bear her comfortable life as stay-at-home wife in Why Is There Salt In the Sea? by Austrian writer Brigitte Schwaiger and to observe the changes that the Muslim Brotherhood introduces in France of the 2020s as Submission by Michel Houellebecq imagines them. And finally, I returned to Japan between 1928 and the 1950s with the committed primary teacher of Twenty-four Eyes by Tsuboi Sakae.

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Set in Barcelona of the 1930s, In Diamond Square by Mercè Rodoreda shows a young woman who is coming of age in a strongly patriarchal society that hardly allows her enough room to discover her own self. From the care of a remarried father, she resignedly gives herself into the hands of an extremely egotist husband who takes charge of her world without giving her wishes and needs any thought. The more life is taken out of her hands, the more her hatred grows against everything that makes her feel helpless, most of all the unhatched pigeons in her garret. But the moment comes, when she is forced to take life into her own hands, or else her family will starve. Her slow awakening begins against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War made by men – again.
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The story of Black Rain by Ibuse Masuji begins five years after the USA dropped their “pretty terrific” Atomic bomb on Hiroshima. A man wants to marry off his niece Yasuko, but so far, the mere fact that her family has been living in the city at the time when it was destroyed ruined all her prospects as if she was suffering from a contagious, fatal illness. To prove to possible suitors (and to their families) that she was in the countryside on that very day in August 1945, he copies passages from her diary, but he soon realises that everybody should know what people have gone through ever since the bomb fell. So he sets out to gather more testimonials from people who survived the A-bomb attack of Hiroshima with the intention to archive them in the village school library…
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Click on the index card to enlarge it!

When the bride dressing for her wedding in the opening scene of Why Is There Salt In the Sea? by Brigitte Schwaiger realises that she is making a mistake, it doesn’t bode well for her future, and yet, she does as is expected of her. After all, the doctor’s daughter from a small Austrian town around 1970 doesn’t want to disappoint or even embarrass anyone… and then, she has no idea what else to do in life. She soon despairs at her lonely routine as stay-at-wife home of a promising young engineer who attaches great importance to appearances, discipline and order. Even worse, he reprimands her for her moods and explains them with her melancholy nature, immaturity and even madness. Almost suffocating in the empty bourgeois atmosphere of home, she begins an affair…
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Submission by Michel Houellebecq evokes France in the 2020s. Socialists and conservatives have been quasi marginalised in the elections, but they want to rule and therefore join forces with the Muslim Brotherhood as the lesser evil compared to the extreme right. The novel’s rather pathetic protagonist, a professor at Sorbonne University for nearly two decades, watches in disbelief how quickly and meekly libertine French society adopts typically Muslim ways. Without protest, women submit to a dress code and many even give up their jobs to stay at home with the family. The public educational system, too, is completely restructured requiring the exclusively male teachers to convert to Islam or accept anticipated retirement and Sorbonne University isn't spared…
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In 1928, the young primary teacher of Twenty-four Eyes by Tsuboi Sakae starts in her first job in a remote Japanese village, but at the time her country is already striving for expansion and supremacy in the region at any cost. Like any teacher, she is thus called upon not just to spread knowledge and to prepare the children for a life as valuable members of adult society but also to fill their young minds with the ideals that the government considers appropriate for its purpose and to keep silent about diverging opinions. If she likes it or not, the sensitive and critical woman has to help with the indoctrination and can only watch how fate leads her pupils into war. A few years later, a class reunion shows the impact that war had on the life of each one of her pupils...
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