Howling Frog Books

I've got some good reading going on!  Here are the two latest, including my WIT title. Summerbook #15: The Story of Hong Gildong :  This is a Korean classic of literature, and the author is unknown.  For a long time, Koreans were taught that this was the first story written in Hangul, the Korean script, and that it dated from the 17th century, but our translator argues that modern Korean scholarship has found that it dates from the late 19th century.  Anyway, Hong Gildong occupies approximately the same spot in Korean literature that Robin Hood does in English, that of a delightfully tricky noble robber who steals from rich and advocates for the poor, but Gildong has another dimension -- he rebels and argues against Korean laws that, back then, discriminated against illegitimate children.  Hong Gildong's father had a beautiful prophetic vision of having a brilliant son, but this son is born to a lowly concubine, and so despite his intelligence, prowess, and mast...

  The Gray Earth, by Galsan Tschinag I finished my 31st Spin title!  This poor book has been waiting around for a while.  It's the second book in an autobiographical trilogy (though considered novels, so somewhat fictionalized) which was written in German.  I read The Blue Sky a few years ago, and am quite upset that the third book, The White Mountain, never actually got published in English.  That was supposed to happen in 2018. Galsan Tschinag is Mongolian, of the Tuvan culture, which was ravaged by Soviet dictates.  In this trilogy, he tells the story of his life; the first volume was his early childhood on the steppes, and now he is 8 years old and taken to a Soviet boarding school.  Instead of his childhood name of   Dshurukuwaa, he is now known as Galdan. Galdan's oldest brother is the principal of the school and his other sister and brother already live there, so he is fortunate in that he has family there, but he's also under pressure n...

 Samguk Yusa: Legends and History of the Three Kingdoms of Ancient Korea, by Ilyon the monk, trans. Ha Tae-Hung In the 1200s, a Buddhist monk by the name of Ilyon, from the Kim family, set down the history and legends of the three early Korean kingdoms of Silla, Paekje, and Koguryo -- with a strong emphasis on Silla.  He seems to have written these stories down privately, for his own amusement, and the book was not subjected to official restrictions.  It was probably not printed until after his death, and the book was nearly lost, as the carved wooden plates used for printing were found to be unusable.  Fortunately, a nobleman of the 16th century was able to find an original copy of the book, and had a new edition prepared in 1512, thus ensuring its survival.  Since very little is known about early Korean history, this is an invaluable text. The book is written in Chinese, because at this time, Korean had no writing system.  Koreans borrowed the script of t...

 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...

 Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan, by Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya  After I read Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo , my brother informed me of the existence of this book, so I borrowed it.  While I love reading history, and I'm fascinated by lots of things around war, I'm not much on reading the actual military war part with battles and weapons.  As a result, I'm somewhat ignorant; I've hardly ever heard of famous war books like Thirty Seconds , or this one, and a month ago I could not have told you about the importance of the Battle of Midway.  Which was pivotal! Mitsuo Fuchida, the main author, explains himself as a naval aviator.  After being badly injured at Midway, he went to teach at the Japanese naval academy and was asked to write up an analysis of the battle for his superiors -- the truth of which had been covered up in Japan.  He was given access to secret documents, wrote the analysis, and the copies were sent off.  In the Japanese ...

 The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic, by Nick Joaquin I really like this wonderful cover image, which illustrates one of the stories.... Nick Joaquin (1917 - 2004) is, as far as I can ascertain, a fairly major Filipino writer.  His full name was Nicomedes Joaquín y Márquez, and he also wrote as Quijano de Manila.  Although his first language was Spanish, he wrote his stories in English, and he wrote for 70 years.  These stories were written over time, with the earliest in the 30s and others in the 60s.   Joaquin started off wanting to be a priest, but decided that his calling was to be a writer.  These stories are suffused with Catholicism both cultural and faithful, but not conventional.  In fact none of Joaquin's characters could be described as conventional; they seem to exist in order to upend expectations. The first stories are set in the days of Spanish colonialism, and are indeed Gothic in tone.  A girl meets ...

  The Man Who Sold a Ghost: Chinese Tales of the 3rd - 6th Centuries, translated by Yang Hsien-Yi and Gladys Yang One of the fun things about working at a college library, even one as small as mine, is the interesting things you run into on the shelf.  I found this in the Chinese literature section, and the book itself is ten years older than the college is, so it must have been donated when the library was started.  It was printed in the PRC and is clearly part of a Chinese classics series meant for export and education.   This book is not rare, however, and you can easily find it used or in ebook format. This is just a small book of tales gathered from several historical sources, so the contents are highly varied.  There are anecdotes of the doings of various emperors and sages, moral folktales about kindness to animals, honesty, and so on, ghost stories and tales of marvels.  A lot of people die and come back to life, and sometimes they tell about ...

Paradise of the Blind, by Duong Thu Huong This is truly an amazing novel; beautifully written and hard to put down.  It was also banned in Vietnam and the author imprisoned for her writing, which was -- even in a time that was supposed to be welcoming to dissent -- too directly critical for the government's pleasure.  As a young woman, Duong was part of the North Vietnamese Communist Party (she was exactly the age to be a young enthusiast during the war), but became disillusioned and spent the 1980s writing and speaking about what she had witnessed.  She was expelled from the Party and imprisoned for a while, and then released and simply not allowed to travel for years.  In 2006 she moved to Paris, where she still lives today. Hang, a young woman living in Russia as an 'imported worker,' receives a telegram summoning her to Moscow to see her uncle, a cadre leader.  As she travels on the train, she ponders on her family's history in episodes that jump around ...

Selected Stories of Lu Hsun For quite some time I've been wanting to read Lu Hsun (or Lu Xun, as some of the older books in the library have it).  I know very little of Chinese literature, but I know that Lu Hsun is one of the most influential writers around.  He seems to have written mostly essays, believing that it was his responsibility to influence politics and advance the liberation of his people from feudalist tradition and capitalist oppression (he wasn't exactly a Communist, but he was sympathetic to them).  However, he was also interested in the literatures of oppressed nations and was an admirer of Adam Mickiewicz among others (I recently read Mikiewicz's epic, Pan Tadeusz ).  Lu Hsun also wrote short stories, which are usually lauded as groundbreaking in Chinese literature and perfect specimens of their kind.  So I was pretty excited to read some. These stories are of everyday life, often from the point of view of an impoverished scholar who can...

A Golden Age, by Tahmima Anam (Just a note -- I've been traveling a lot.  I went to Portland for four days, took a day trip to Sacramento, and am about to head out for the wilds of Utah for eight days.  So while I'm reading, I'm certainly having a hard time finding time for blogging.  I'll be back, with plenty to talk about, fairly soon.  And I will have pictures to share too!) Meanwhile, Rehana is preparing for a party and remembering her past.  Widowed all too young, she had no means to support her two children, and her husband's relatives took them away.  The lengths Rehana went to in order to get her children back have always been her most closely-held secret, and now the kids are grown and attending university.  The party is for the anniversary of their return, but it's 1971 in East Pakistan and the kids are really more interested in politics and the movement to break away from West Pakistan.  The Pakistani rulers are not about to let ...

Old Demons, New Deities: 21 Short Stories from Tibet , ed. by Tenzin Dickie When I saw this cool collection of Tibetan stories, I knew I had to have it and read it for my world project.  I guess Tibet is not currently considered to be a 'country' since its annexation by China, but so what, we'll count it anyway.  When I was in college, "Free Tibet" stickers were everywhere; do people still have those? The blurb gives some good information so here it is: The first English-language anthology of contemporary Tibetan fiction available in the West, Old Demons, New Deities brings together the best Tibetan writers from both Tibet and the diaspora, who write in Tibetan, English and Chinese. The stories are varied: set in Tibet (pre- and post-occupation), or in various diaspora locations, such as India, Nepal, or Bhutan.  They are about all kinds of people and their struggles to survive or to be accepted, and a lot of them explore how Chinese occupation and exploi...

The Sea and Poison, by Shusaku Endo I'm not sure why I have this book on my TBR shelf.  I thought it was one my brother-in-law had sent me; he used to send us books from Japan and so I have several volumes of Murakami, Endo, and Oe just sitting around.  But this one is a discard from the public library and I have no idea where it came from.  I'm also wondering what happened to my copy of Silence , which I remember loaning out in a pile to a friend's daughter who was studying Japanese (she is living there now!).  But she gave them back.  So where did Silence go? This is a really tough novel, and it's written in such a quiet, understated way that the awfulness stands out all the more.  It's the story of Suguro, a young medical intern at a wartime hospital, as well as two others who work there.  The hospital is near the city of Fukuoka, but it's far enough out that it has not yet been bombed.  Supplies and food are short, and the hospital inm...

And So Flows History , by Hahn Moo-Souk The three-generational family epic is, I think, quite a popular kind of story, and it's not one that I usually read.  I kind of have a feeling that it may be really popular in Korean media!  This novel is a classic and very popular example of the genre, but it's also an unusual one.  The family saga is kind of messy, I guess I would say -- it's realistic.  The family members are all over the place.  And the whole story starts with a rape. Near the end of the 19th century, as the Chosun dynasty is waning, the Cho family is one of middling wealth and importance.  The head of the family, Tongjun, takes advantage of everyone's absence at a festival and rapes Puyong, a young household slave girl, which produces a daughter and ruins Puyong's plans.  From there we launch into a complex story involving the Cho extended family, the fortunes of several family servants, and the Cho in-laws, the Yi family.  Most ...

Jamilia , by Chingiz Aitmatov A while ago, I read Aitmatov's novel The Day Lasts Over a Hundred Years .  (It's actually over a year ago, holy cow.)  I also wanted to read Aitmatov's much shorter, and apparently more famous, novella, Jamilia.  The blurbs call it a great love story of the steppes.  It's told from the point of view of a Kyrgyz artist, Seit, looking back on his memories. Jamilia is the beloved daughter-in-law of the house, a beautiful girl and a hard worker.  Her husband is off at the front, and she spends her days working with her much younger brother-in-law, Seit.  Seit sees her as a perfect older sister and watches as she shrugs off the advances of the men still remaining at the village.  He also sees how hurt she is by her husband's dutiful letters to the whole family, never to her.  When an injured ex-soldier, Daniyar, moves to the village, Seit and Jamilia enjoy his singing talents, and Seit is wholly sympathetic when Jamili...

Here is a whole set of books I've read from various countries in the last few weeks.  Most of them will show up in my Reading All Around the World list, and one I picked for August's Women in Translation event, which I nearly missed!  Most of these were also on my original 20 Books of Summer list (which currently stands at 17!  No way will I finish that list in the next week, but I read quite a few other books too). Lyrics Alley, by Leila Aboulela  (Sudan) : This novel of a wealthy and powerful family in 1950s Sudan is a tapestry of interwoven lives.  The patriarch, Mahmoud Bey, is a forward-looking man invested in bringing infrastructure and wealth to his country.  His son, Nur, is about to marry a cousin and they are very much in love, but a tragic accident leaves Nur paralyzed and depressed.  The family dynamics are complex and sometimes disastrous. Nur has to break through the weight of expectations and pity in order to forge a new life and id...

Rashomon, and 17 Other Stories, by Ryunosuke Akutagawa Akutagawa is one of the great modernists of Japan, so when I came upon this very neat Penguin edition of his stories, I snapped it up.  (I have a small pile of Japanese classics to get to...)  Isn't it fun looking?  The 18 stories are arranged by the chronology of their settings, so first there is a set of stories set in the Heian period (which ended in 1185), then several in the Tokugawa Shogunate (1600 - 1868), and finally a few set in Akutagawa's own early 20th century.  A final set of pieces are semi-autobiographical, fragmenty sort of things that often reflect Akutagawa's struggle with his mental health. Since most of us have heard of Kurosawa's film Rashomon , the two stories that inspired it are first in the collection.  One story only contributed its title (the plot is illustrated on the book cover), and the second, "In a Bamboo Grove," is the actual source of the murder mystery shown in the f...

The Blue Sky, by Galsan Tschinag Dshurukuwaa is a young Tuvan shepherd boy in Mongolia.  His nomadic family lives in the Altai mountains; there are a few relatives in their remote settlement, but the little boy's world mainly consists of his immediate family, his beloved dog Arsylang, and the flocks of sheep.  He is closest to his adopted grandmother, who cares for him, and he has a happy life deeply rooted in Tuvan ways.  Through the story he suffers loss after loss, as his older brother and sister are sent to a Soviet boarding school, his grandmother dies, and, most shattering of all, Arsylang is killed by poison meant for marauding wolves. This is the first of an autobiographical trilogy of novels.  The next two are The Gray Earth (which I will be sure to pick up soon) and The White Mountain , which will only be published in English later this fall.  Tschinag, having lived the Tuvan life and then forcefully educated as a Soviet, spent years in East Ge...

The Accusation: Forbidden Stories From Inside North Korea , by Bandi Wow, check out what I found, everybody!  This book is a historical event -- it's the first book smuggled out of North Korea.  "Bandi" is a North Korean writer who asked a friend to take these stories out of the country.  While we now have several memoirs written by North Koreans who have escaped, this collection of short stories is, so far, unique. There are seven stories, plus some information about the writer in an afterword (which I skipped ahead to after one or two stories, I was too curious).  Honestly I was a little worried about how much information was given; it seems to me that it wouldn't be all that hard for the DPRK to identify this man.  I hope I'm wrong about that.  (Looking again, there is a note that says some of the information has been changed to protect him.  Which is better, but also, in that case why put it in?) The stories are arranged consecutively; they ...

The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years , by Chingiz Aitmatov Trains in these parts went from East to West, and from West to East . . . On either side of the railway lines lay the great wide spaces of the desert — Sary-Ozeki, the Middle lands of the yellow steppes. In these parts any distance was measured in relation to the railway, as if from the Greenwich meridian . . . And the trains went from East to West, and from West to East . . .  This is the recurring refrain in this novel about the Kazakh steppe.  Yedigei has worked at the desolate railroad station for over 20 years, and his best friend Kazangap has just died.  Yedigei is in charge of the funeral, and he insists that it be done properly and that Kazangap be buried at the traditional graveyard.  A few tractors set out on the trip, and Yedigei leads the way on his giant camel, Burannyi Karanar.  As he travels, he remembers his life--how he got to the station and what...

The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu, trans. by Edward G. Seidensticker The entire Tale of Genji is very long indeed, 54 chapters, and this is an abridgement consisting of twelve chapters, sort of an introductory Tale .  I had this copy around the house and I figured I'd read it, and then if I really loved it I could read the whole thing someday. Murasaki was a lady of the Heian Japanese court in the very early 1000s; it's thought that she died in 1015, before the age of forty.  She wrote most of the Tale --we think--but a few of the chapters were probably added later on. Murasaki Murasaki Shikibu was not her real name.  Shikibu was her father's office, and Murasaki is a designation taken either from a character in the book or based on a poetic image.  She was a member of the Fujiwara family, which was massive and powerful, but she belonged to a minor, less eminent branch.  In the Heian court, it was not polite to use the actual names of ladies (...