Mingji Liu

Short-ish book reviews

By Mingji Liu ·

Six short book reviews.

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (2009) by David Eagleman

Like a bowl of strawberries, accidentally dabbed in horseradish sauce, and consumed on a swooning autumn evening, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives is short, punchy and bittersweet. It’s a collection of wistful, existential, funny, and quirky stories about creation, existence and the afterlife. There are a few stinkers (some read like Pratchett/Gaiman ripoffs) but you can’t hit a bullseye every single time, of course. The ones I found most thought-provoking were (in no particular order):

If I have to make one objection to Eagleman’s writing style, it’s that he commits the sin of what I like to call the “overuse of the literary lover”. This refers to the hackneyed and endless referrals to ‘memories of your lovers’ or ‘recalling your lover’s caress’ or whatever. You meet people in real life who have a weakness for this style of speaking (it’s egregious among certain arty types) – individuals who are always going on about ‘my lover(s) this’ and ‘my lover(s) that’.

This behaviour annoys me. By all means, feel free to talk about your sexual predilections (it does not make you more of a marvel or less of a disappointment to me), but please, refer to a goddamn thesaurus. I interpret these people as self-mythologisers: weavers of grand pseudo-narratives about the fairy light string of people they’ve been intimate with. Gah!

My Year of Rest and Relaxation

My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) by Ottessa Moshfegh

Whenever I woke up, night or day, I’d shuffle through the bright marble foyer of my building and go up the block and around the corner where there was a bodega that never closed. I’d get two large coffees with cream and six sugars each, chug the first one in the elevator on the way back up to my apartment, then sip the second one slowly while I watched movies and ate animal crackers and took trazodone and Ambien and Nembutal until I fell asleep again. I lost track of time in this way. Days passed. Weeks. A few months went by.

Thus begins My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a wonderful and darkly comedic novel I recently finished.

The premise is simple: it is the year 2000 and a traumatised and existentially lost young woman decides to undertake an exercise in radical passivity. On the outside, our main character is an attractive “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant” Columbia graduate with a promising life ahead of her. But after losing both her parents while in college, she finds her inner life falling apart and she begins to follow the long, bitter road towards loathing the entire world around her.

Whereas most normal people would cope by travelling the world, getting a terrible tattoo, or finding solace in a puppy, our protagonist decides to use her inheritance to buy an Upper East Side apartment and lock herself in all day, watching endless VHS tapes (with Whoopi Goldberg films being a special obsession of hers) and taking an ungodly amount of medication to help her sleep as much as (in)humanly possible. That’s it. That’s the entire plot. A young woman at the turn of the millennium decides that the only way she can survive and renew her soul is by being in a pharmaceutically induced semi-coma for an entire year.

Thankfully, Moshfegh manages to pack plenty of twists and turns and thematic revelations into what initially comes across as a bit of an anti-narrative. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a lampoon of “feminine” self-help and wellness culture. It is a stab at the millennial dream of a hip, cosmopolitan lifestyle in the big city. And it is a loud, sardonic shout at the prescription medication madness that has gripped contemporary America.

If this book were set circa 2015, it would be titled “Netflix and Pill”.

I love the bitterness of the main character, channelled with incredible force into her eviscerating and astute observations. Consider this following passage, where she describes the “hipster nerds” she would come across in the Manhattan art scene:

As an art history major, I couldn’t escape them. “Dudes” reading Nietzsche on the subway, reading Proust, reading David Foster Wallace, jotting down their brilliant thoughts into a black Moleskine pocket notebook. Beer bellies and skinny legs, zip-up hoodies, navy blue peacoats or army green parkas, New Balance sneakers, knit hats, canvas tote bags, small hands, hairy knuckles, maybe a deer head tattooed across a flabby bicep. They rolled their own cigarettes, didn’t brush their teeth enough, spent a hundred dollars a week on coffee. They would come into Ducat, the gallery I ended up working at, with their younger—usually Asian—girlfriends. “An Asian girlfriend means the guy has a small dick,” Reva once said. I’d hear them talk shit about the art. They lamented the success of others. They thought that they wanted to be adored, to be influential, celebrated for their genius, that they deserved to be worshipped. But they could barely look at themselves in the mirror.

The snarky narrative voice often comes across like a highly articulate Reddit rant. This millennial, Internet-era affect was very likely a conscious decision by Moshfegh. But the above quotation also demonstrates a weakness in her writing style as well. At points, the prose gives way to quantity over quality as the main character begins to endlessly list various objects of fascination or disgust for her. Her massive VHS film collection. All the types of ice cream her local bodega sells. Different variants of the colour blue. The lists go on and on.

Where the listicles shine, however, is when the narrator rattles off the sheer cornucopia of pharmaceutical products that can be ingested in the land of the free. Real-life brand name medications are mixed in with those of Moshfegh’s imagination (including “Infermiterol”, a terrifying, black-out inducing substance she invented for the novel), and quantity takes on a quality of its own as we learn about the uses and abuses of our protagonist’s chemical hibernation lifestyle:

I counted out three lithium, two Ativan, five Ambien. That sounded like a nice mélange, a luxurious free fall into velvet blackness. And a couple of trazodone because trazodone weighed down the Ambien, so if I dreamt, I’d dream low to the ground. That would be stabilizing, I thought. And maybe one more Ativan. Ativan to me felt like fresh air. A cool breeze, slightly effervescent. This was good, I thought. A serious rest. My mouth watered. Good strong American sleep.

Is she an unlikeable narrator? I certainly didn’t think so, though I imagine other readers finding her savage tone throughout the novel somewhat off-putting. But I have known and befriended people similar to her in real life, and I can absolutely empathise with her anger and desperation, as absurd as her solution might be. I think most people can.

Similarly, I can understand the toxic relationships she has with the small cast of supporting characters in the novel. Consider our narrator’s emotionally abusive friendship with Reva, or the way she is treated by her shitty on-and-off Wall Street boyfriend Trevor. These are all believable to a point. I have witnessed people behave in such ugly, farcical ways.

That said, I found the narrator’s psychiatrist, the insane Dr Tuttle who enables her drug habit, to be a weak link in the book’s web of relationships. “Daily meditation has been shown to cure insomnia in rats”, she states at one point in the novel. “There was recently a study in Australia that said that when you sleep on your back, you’re more likely to have nightmares about drowning. It’s not conclusive, of course, since they’re on the opposite side of the Earth,” she announces in another. Dr Tuttle is an absurd creation whose antics and dialogue strain too much for comedic effect, rendering her utterly parodic and unengaging as a consequence. I wish Moshfegh could have toned her down.

The fact that the book is set in Manhattan in the year 2000 is no coincidence. References to the Twin Towers abound and Moshfegh’s narrative very deliberately acts as a countdown to the September 11 attacks. The actual treatment of 9/11 itself aside (the novel draws on it in a very fascinating way), the book’s setting fits into an interesting period of the American pathos.

I would describe My Year of Rest and Relaxation as an example of “inter-crisis literature”, fitting into that rosy space between American economic and social woes of the 70s and 80s, and the War on Terror and Great Recession in the first decade of the 2000s. Fight Club (both the 1996 novel and the 1999 film) comes to mind as a masculine example of the genre — one where the despair of masculinity comes from a source of affluence and urban comfort, whereas today it would more likely come from a place of economic angst (think the hollowing out of Middle America and “Millennial Burnout”).

I give this novel a strong recommendation, obviously. For a similar book on the themes of transgressive, radical passivity from a feminine lens, Han Kang’s extraordinary and haunting novel The Vegetarian is worth checking out. Likewise, a story in which a female character has to grapple with intense existential crisis while trapped in her own home is Elena Ferrante’s wonderfully upsetting novella The Days of Abandonment. It actually has some startling similarities to My Year of Rest and Relaxation to the point that I suspect Moshfegh may have cribbed a little bit from it — namely, both books take place in a confined apartment space where the main female character is unable (or unwilling) to leave. Whereas Ferrante uses her space to upend notions of traditional, nurturing domesticity, Moshfegh uses it to critique high-end yuppie lifestyles.

Strangely enough, I was also struggling with insomnia at the time of reading, so I ended up whittling away the early hours of the morning reading this book. Staying up all night reading a book about a woman desperate to fall asleep. How ironic. I finished it on Sunday morning and, after closing it, I just had to lie in bed for a few moments and feel a powerful catharsis of lightness and sadness wash over me.

This was perhaps the strongest feature of the book for me. Despite its cynical and tartly humorous exterior, there is also a genuine tenderness at the book’s core that comes together in the end. The characters struggle, they feel anguish, they want to better themselves, and they want their actions to mean something. It is a story that strongly captures the human need to be fully, truly awake in this one brief life of ours.

Portnoy’s Complaint

Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) by Philip Roth

Why is a little turbulence so beyond my means? Why must the least deviation from respectable conventions cause me such inner hell? When I hate those fucking conventions! When I know better than the taboos! Doctor, my doctor, what do you say, LET’S PUT THE ID BACK IN YID! Liberate this nice Jewish boy’s libido, will you please? Raise the prices if you have to—I’ll pay anything!

A hilarious little book by the American novelist Philip Roth, who only passed away in early 2018. The titular “Portnoy’s Complaint” is supposedly a psychosexual disorder that certain individuals can suffer from if they’ve grown up under the thumb of neurotic, overbearing Jewish parents (I mean, who hasn’t?), which manifests in wild acts of “exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus”.

Our brave protagonist/patient is one Alexander Portnoy, a deeply intelligent and brilliant 30-something ‘Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity for the City of New York’. In a series of unhinged monologues to his psychotherapist, Portnoy reveals his struggles with his American Jewish identity and confesses to a legion of sexual transgressions.

Since a young boy, Portnoy has been burdened with wild sexual fantasies about gentile girls, as well as a rampant addiction to masturbation. And oh boy, does the main character like talking about the art of onanism: He vividly describes what it’s like to accidentally masturbate into your eye. He provides an emotional report of the time he masturbated into a baseball glove at a burlesque show. And (in perhaps the most famous sequence in the book) he mournfully confesses to having even masturbated into a piece of liver in the kitchen—which his family then unwittingly ate.

Unsurprisingly, the book was considered quite shocking when it was first published and was even subject to importation bans by the Australian government due to its obscene content. According to Wikipedia, Penguin Books, the Australian publisher, dodged the ban by having copies covertly printed in Sydney and “stored in fleets of moving trucks to avoid seizure under state obscenity laws”. Stay classy, ‘Straya.

The writing is clever, free-flowing, riddled with Yiddish slang, and dotted with hilarious reflections on American Jewish life (I did not know, for instance, that mah-jong is considered an iconic Jewish game). It’s also a great book to read to other people. There is an excellent lilt and cadence to much of the writing. Try reciting to your friends and family the sequence where brave Portnoy, after he has snuck into a burlesque show, observes the following:

The big thing at the Empire is hats. Down the aisle from me a fellow-addict fifty years my senior is dropping his load in his hat. His hat, Doctor! Oy, I’m sick. I want to cry. Not into your hat, you shvantz, you got to put that thing on your head! You’ve got to put it on now and go back outside and walk around downtown Newark dropping gissum down your forehead. How will you eat your lunch in that hat!

Simply beautiful.

It’s also a story that I personally sympathised with insofar as it’s about a young member of a minority group struggling to push back their home culture in order to fit into a western country and interface with Anglo-Protestant society. (Doctor, doctor! I too had neurotic parents who tossed a stew of conflicting messages into my head when I desperately wanted to fit in. Do I exhibit the same rampant psychosexual dysfunctions as Portnoy? Not to the same extent, I don’t think!)

There are two final observations I’d like to make. The first is that a good portion of the story takes place around the Second World War period, yet the Holocaust is barely mentioned and, at one point, is even treated by the narrator as a bit of a joke. This unusual omission was a great surprise to me. Going out on a thin limb, I suspect it was deliberate given that the narrative culminates with Portnoy visiting Israel and being exposed to contemptuous Israeli attitudes towards the greater Jewish diaspora.

The second observation is that of everyone’s dreaded m-word: Misogyny. The controversy surrounding the alleged misogyny in Roth’s books is inescapable, particularly in this day and age. Regardless of where you sit on this debate, it must, at the very least, be acknowledged. As entertaining as the sexist diatribes in Portnoy’s Complaint are, they are still sexist diatribes that reveal some monstrous feelings towards women. How much of this is the narrator and how much of this is the novelist? This book toes the line just enough, in my opinion, though whether the patina cracks in his later novels I’m not sure.

Small Country

Small Country (2016) by Gaël Faye

The earth had moved imperceptibly beneath our feet. It did so every day in this country, in this corner of the world. We were living on the axis of the Great Rift, at the precise spot where Africa fractures. The people of this region mirrored the land. Beneath the calm appearance, behind the façade of smiles were continuously at work, fomenting violence and destruction that returned for successive periods … This poisonous lava, the thick flow of blood, was ready to rise to the surface once more. We didn’t know it yet, but the hour of the inferno had come, and the night was about to unleash its cackle of hyenas and wild dogs.

Perhaps the best book by a French hip-hop artist about Burundi that I’ve ever read.

But in all seriousness, it’s a neat little novella that can be read over a weekend. It pinged on my radar after the economist Tyler Cowen (of Marginal Revolution blogging fame) named it as one of his favourite reads of 2018. If there’s a literary prize for the most harrowing setting of a ‘loss of innocence’ style Bildungsroman (and if the prize excluded every young adult novel out there about the Second World War), Small Country would probably make the short list.

Based on the author’s own childhood experiences, Small Country is a story about the Rwandan genocide, and how the violence spilt over into neighbouring Burundi, as told through the eyes of a young boy with both French and Tutsi heritage. It doesn’t hold back in its depiction of how a bucolic childhood can sour into sheer mortal trauma. And the children in this story aren’t just static victims either: they live and breathe and enact the violence of the adult world as well.

Small Country is also a very carefully structured book in terms of emotional cadence—with punishing moments punctuated by happy moments and glimmers of hope. The storyteller’s tricks are more apparent here than I would’ve liked, but it never felt inorganic either. It was also maybe a little too short of a book (and this is coming from someone who has to diligently allocate time to finish books). There were moments where I felt the book should’ve lingered on events, where it should’ve dug a bit deeper into the characters and their actions. Ah well, as the classic adage goes: the candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and books burn better than candles.

(P.S. Gaël Faye actually makes some pretty decent music!)

The Plains

The Plains (1982) by Gerald Murnane

My journey to the plains was much less arduous than I afterwards described it. And I cannot even say that at a certain hour I knew I had left Australia. But I recall clearly a succession of days when the flat land around me seemed more and more a place that only I could interpret …

What first attracted me to this book was the enchanting and bewildering figure of Murnane himself. By all accounts, he’s a true blue eccentric. Murnane lives as a recluse in Goroke, Victoria (pop. 200). He’s never left the country or flown in an aeroplane. He writes all his books with a typewriter using one finger. And he taught himself Hungarian for some reason. From his New York Times profile:

I cannot recall having gone voluntarily into any art gallery or museum or building said to be of historic interest. I have never worn sunglasses. I have never learned to swim. I have never voluntarily immersed myself in any sea or stream. … I have never touched any button or switch or working part of any computer or fax machine or mobile telephone. I have never learned to operate any sort of camera.

If the New York Times piece is to be believed, he’s a solid contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. (If he does ever win, I’m driving out east to Wimmera and ordering a beer from him. He apparently works part-time as a town bartender.) More recently, Murnane won the prestigious 2018 Prime Minister’s Literary Award in fiction for his novel Border Districts, which is also purportedly his last book.

Given Murnane’s cult reputation, I was eager to experience what was praised—according to the introduction of The Plains by Wayne Macauley—as “word for word, sentence-for-sentence, one of the best novels ever written in this country.”

Needless to say, I began to worry about my level of intelligence when halfway through the book I began to suspect it was trolling me. The book—despite being quite short—is a deeply inscrutable and elliptical trudge through the mind of an obsessive artist. Its premise is of an alt-universe Australia where the authentic national culture resides in the regional/rural heartland, far away from the decadent and culturally bankrupt coastal metropoles. Great estates dominate the plains, ruled by mighty barons with generations upon generations of Byzantine sophistication, philosophy, and art. Desperate artists and scholars from decadent backwaters such as Sydney and Melbourne travel to the plains in order to court the country elites, so they may earn private patronage and devote their lives to exploring the mysteries of the plains.

Mein Gott, what a frustrating book to decipher! An entire sequence is dedicated to labouring over esoteric philosophies of time as interpreted out on the plains. Another is focussed on the protagonist, a hapless filmmaker, ruminating over a scheme to court a plainswoman by secretly writing a book for her which he will also destroy before she (or anyone) could ever learn of its existence. Then there’s the endless contemplation over the excruciatingly subtle qualities of light, heat, and shadow on the plains. It’s deliberately maddening.

The crux of The Plains (if there even is one) is a comfortless meditation on how art is incapable of conveying the full meaning of the artist. Such a commitment is doomed to failure. The haunting, intangible sadness of failed art shivers throughout the novel. I can’t exactly say I enjoyed it, nor can I exactly recommend it, but at least I now know my own middling limits at this point in my life.

A final, cheeky leftie remark: The fictional premise of the book—that there’s a unique, culturally exquisite inner Australia divorced from the Old World sensibilities of the coastland—is fascinating, except for the fact that Murnane forgets that one already exists. It’s called Indigenous Australia, which has one of the world’s oldest living cultures. Yeah, take that, ya bastard.

The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried (1990) by Tim O’Brien

They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment. They crawled into tunnels and walked point and advanced under fire. Each morning, despite the unknowns, they made their legs move. They endured. They kept humping. They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall … It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.

— The Things They Carried, Chapter 1

The Things They Carried was first recommended to me by a colleague who had recently binge-watched the ten-part Ken Burns documentary series The Vietnam War. And upon reading the first page, I was immediately hooked.

The Vietnam War was a crazy war. It was a war built on a shaky premise (Domino Theory) and kicked off by an even shakier catalyst (the Gulf of Tonkin ‘incident’). It was a war where roughly 20% of American servicemen were habitual heroin users. It was a war where the United States decided to literally blow up neighbouring Laos with the equivalent of a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes for 9 years straight. It was a war that poisoned domestic society like Agent Orange on Indochinese foliage. Say what you will about our troubling times, but at least we’re not living in the world of 1968 with all its global protests, mass riots, political assassinations, Tet Offensives and My Lai Massacres.

With The Things They Carried, its author Tim O’Brien (himself a veteran of the war) has written a fantastic, compact book about the extremes of human experience that he witnessed during that conflict. Think non-linear narratives; think the fragility of memory; and think the haunting conflicts—both external and internal—that change the human soul forever. It waxes poetically about not only the harsh and haggard world of grunts on patrol but also explores their civilian lives before the war and their transfigured codas as returned veterans. There’s gallows humour and military superstition; tall tales and platoon mischief; a failed attempt to dodge the draft by fleeing to Canada; a meditation on the life of a killed Viet Cong fighter; and a preposterous Apocalypse Now style story about a young woman swallowed by the primal forces of the jungle.

Its focus on the people that lived it is restlessly intimate. It’s a book that is also deceptively presented as a collection of short stories. In actuality, it’s a novel whose power comes entirely from being read linearly from cover-to-cover. The stories are often corrected, deconstructed or even outright debunked immediately after they are told. This deliberate fluidity of the narrative allows the book to come across as vulnerable and painfully human. The book frequently pauses to reflect on what constitutes authenticity in war literature, on what it means to tell a ‘true’ wartime story. Uncertainty is its essential condition. This element reminded me of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five where World War 2 veteran Billy Pilgrim is ‘unstuck in time’. Here, however, O’Brien goes a step further with his narrator being unstuck in perspective, unstuck in truth.

If any of that sounds fascinating to you, then I highly recommend you check it out.