Category: Books

Lost in Translation (film by Sofia Coppola) and Interior Chinatown (novel by Charles Yu) by Francis Chang 

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle posits that it is impossible to know the exact location or nature of a particle at any particular moment because the act of observation itself causes a slight shift in position of the observed subject. The resulting alteration in trajectory from the present moment will magnify over time, until the next act of observation and reflection. 

As someone in the thicket of middle age, I wonder how much my recollections of the past shift my understanding of the world. Even in this later stage of life, I still obsess over the questions “who am I” and “what is my place in this world”? It is with this mindset that I rewatched the movie Lost in Translation and read the novel Interior Chinatown.

Myth is on my mind. My partner and I recently tore through the first season of KAOS, a new Netflix series that plays fast and loose with classical Greek Mythology. In this retelling, Gods and humans live in a stylized world that somewhat resembles our own. Zeus, played to a tee by the ingenious Jeff Goldblum, lives in a gaudy mansion on Mount Olympus and wears velour tracksuits and gold-rimmed glasses.

“How old are you?” This is the question that everyone asks best-selling historian Nell Painter when she returns to school at age 64. She retires from teaching at Princeton and pursues her lifelong dream of becoming an artist. Not a dabbler, not a retiree taking a few classes, but a “serious artist.” Art may be all about seeing, but artists are about being seen. Painter doesn’t just want to paint; she wants to get her MFA and be seen as a professional artist. Criticism and judgement are at the heart of art school, and she kind of craves them.  

I have been a fan of Abigail Thomas ever since I read her memoir, “Three Dog Life,” years ago. I recently re-read it along with everything else of hers I could find. I just finished her latest, “Still Life at Eighty: The Next Interesting Thing,” with a beautiful photo of her multi-lined face on the cover and a beloved dog in her lap. I love her for the way she observes her life in moments, nothing longer than a few pages, exploring how she came to be the person she is. The everyday and the ordinary are her territory, and where her mind goes “when it’s off-leash,” as she says.

I order oodles of books from the library.  

The regional library system where I live spans dozens of communities across many islands, so there’s often a big lag between my request and the appearance of a book on the hold shelf at my miniature local branch. Sometimes its hard to reconstruct my literary breadcrumb trail—to remember why I wanted a particular title, but that wasn’t the case with Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space by Amanda Leduc.  

I’ve been reading Rob Taylor’s poetry for years and have been looking forward to his latest, Weather (Gaspereau Press, 2024). Now, once again I’m struck by his poetry’s honesty, heart, and honed insights. That’s the thing about news-- / you’ve heard it before, Taylor wrote previously (in The News) but here his poetic updates are fresh with previously unreported advancements.  

I arrived at Laura Cumming’s beautiful book, Thunderclap: A memoir of art and life & sudden death, just before it won the 2024 Writers’ Prize for Non-Fiction. I had lovingly remembered her previous book, On Chapel Sands, a story of her mother’s life. In Thunderclap, she turns her close attention to the golden age of Dutch art in the 1600s, in particular the cataclysmic gunpowder explosion in Delft that killed the painter Carel Fabritius and destroyed many precious works of art.

One of the poetry collections that I keep coming back to is a book of ghazals by Agha Shahid Ali, Call Me Ishmael Tonight. The beloved Kashmiri-American poet has been an absolute favorite of mine ever since I discovered him in my early twenties. His poems pave a path towards a level of lyric expansiveness with their tri-cultural — Hindu, Muslim, and for the lack of a better word, the Western — juxtaposition, which very few South Asian poets have ventured out to do. 

Thirty years ago, I read A.S Byatt’s Possession, the Booker Award winner of 1990, and was possessed by the novel. After her death, in November, 2023, I decided to revisit it, and (sorry for verbal overplay), was repossessed.