poetic processing by neptunecrystal

I went into John Le Carre’s A Legacy of Spies with a certain trepidation, as the book is a late-career novel that retreads the events of Le Carre’s first break-out hit, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Years after the events in the earlier book, Smiley’s right-hand man Peter Guillam finds himself the focus of a legal investigation into what exactly went down during that mission.

Frankly, the premise struck me as a tired rehash of an earlier success. But this is not a fair assessment of A Legacy of Spies, in which Le Carre cheerfully twists a few knives that he had hitherto left untwisted in the general Smiley saga. As such, this review will feature ( spoilers for all the Smiley books )

Despite my doubts, a perfect end to the series, really. Brings the story full circle, updates us on all the most interesting characters, continues the exploration of Le Carre’s favorite themes. Were we the bad guys? - by “we” meaning not England, or Europe, or the West, but the international brotherhood of spies.

About a year ago, I realized that some of the older children’s books that I wanted were available in the archive of the university where I work. “If only I knew where the archives were and how to request books there,” I mused, without of course making the faintest effort to acquire this information.

But I have become incrementally better at turning ideas into reality, so it took only a year before I learned where the archives are (the top floor of my favorite library, which incidentally is the library closest to my office) and how to request an appointment to read a book there. Then I traipsed over to the archives for The Little Angel: A Story of Old Rio, illustrated by Katherine Milhous of The Egg Tree, which is the real reason I wanted to read it, although I was also nothing loath to renew the acquaintance with the author, our old friend Alice Dalgliesh of Newbery fame.

The archives are not quite as fancy as the Lilly Library Reading Room: no mural of Great Thinkers in History! But they make up for it with comfy rolling chairs, and the archivists do still bring you your book on a pillow, which is the most important thing.

The book itself is in that particularly mid-twentieth century style where we’re gently drifting through some time in the life of a family long ago and far away. (Sometimes it is just long ago or just faraway, but here it’s both.) We enjoy some street festivals, meet a cute kitten named Gatinho, cheer as the daughter of the house furiously refuses an arranged marriage with a man who just tossed Gatinho across the room (Gatinho is unhurt, except for his dignity), and accept that this is not the kind of book that is ever going to interrogate the fact that this upper-class Brazilian family in the 1820s has slaves. Milhous’s illustrations are charming but not as magical as the illustrations in The Egg Tree or Appolonia’s Valentine.

Nonetheless, pleased by my success, I went back to trawl the library catalog for more books to read in the archives… and discovered they have a copy of one of my remaining Newbery books, Valenti Angelo’s Nino! What a score! So I’ve got an appointment tomorrow at lunch to begin reading.

Recently littlerhymes reviewed Asako Yuzuki’s Butter, “a novel of food and murder,” to quote the cover. “Food AND murder?” I said. “Two of my favorite things in one book?” AND the book was translated by Polly Barton, who translated Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are, which absolutely clinched the deal.

This book is fantastic. It is a novel of food and murder, but also about the impossible demands of femininity, fat-shaming, the extent to which it is possible to be responsible for another person, the difficulty of truly embracing your own desires (starting with the surprisingly difficult task of figuring out what you even want), the brutal hours demanded by Japanese companies, the meaning of friendship, and also what the heck is UP with Manako Kajii.

Manako Kajii is in prison, convicted of murdering three men. The evidence is entirely circumstantial: she was dating all three men, having met them through a website for people looking for marriage, except instead of marrying them she got them to give her loads of cash in exchange for gourmet meals and, one presumes, sex. Unfortunately for her, three of her boyfriends died in quick succession, and although there’s no evidence she pushed one off the railway platform or snuck the other that lethal overdose of sleeping pills, people are so mad about her lifestyle that she’s convicted of the murders anyway.

They’re especially mad because Kajii managed all this while being (by Japanese standards) FAT. The siren who lured three men to their deaths is not even pretty. This terrifies everyone: men because they shudder over the humiliation of potentially being murdered by a girl who is not even a perfect 10, and women because this only strengthens their belief that what men really want is not an equal partner but a mommy-wife who feeds them, cleans up after them, and coos over their boring rants about work.

Although the book may sound like a murder mystery from the summary, it’s notably uninteresting in actual evidence about Kajii’s supposed killings. The details I mentioned above we learn almost incidentally, and our heroine Rika, a magazine reporter working on a profile of Kajii, makes no attempt to follow them up. Her interest is in the mystery of Kajii herself: what makes her tick?

In trying to figure out Kajii, Rika reads Kajii’s food blog (a lush wonderland of luxury brands and fancy restaurants), interviews Kajii, begins to learn to cook herself, falls in love with food and flavor and maybe also a little bit with Kajii, or at least what Kajii represents to her, which is the willingness to embrace one’s own desires, whether that means eating what one wants to eat or (in Kajii’s case) giving up on “employment” to be supported as essentially the mistress of a variety of rich old men.

The problem, as Rika repeatedly discovers, is that like Kajii’s old men, what Rika sees in Kajii is what she’s projecting onto Kajii. They saw her as a sweet traditional girl who just wants to please men; Rika sees her as an avatar of chasing your own desires, even if those desires are socially disruptive. Kajii herself is both those things, as well as an outspoken misogynist who longs for a daughter, a daddy’s girl who never went back to her hometown after she left at eighteen, a walking contradiction who revels in manipulation but also, perhaps, longs for the connection that has thus far eluded her.

Or maybe not. Maybe Rika is projecting that longing for connection onto a basically heartless sociopath. Yuzuki maintains all these tensions, juggling all these different facets of Kajii without ever simplifying her to one single Kajii.

This is a very Kajii-centric review, because it was Kajii who most blew me away, but I also loved Rika and her friendship with Reiko, both for their own sake and because they allow Yuzuki to develop her themes about societal expectations about femininity in so many directions that the theme becomes almost fractal. Here is a writer who has a lot to say and is saying all of it at the same time in a way that’s so engrossing that I barely resisted the desire to take a sick day just to keep reading.

And she does it all AND includes some great food descriptions, too. I was so carried away by her enthusiasm that I actually tried Kajii’s recipe for rice with butter. It didn’t have the same transformative effect on me that it had on Rika, but maybe if I used the very fancy butter that Kajii recommended…

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Rebecca Romney’s Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend, in which Romney tracks down many of the books Jane Austen admired (often as ebooks, which I must admit takes much of the romance out of the rare book hunt) and discovers many lost gems of literary excellence. (And also Hannah More, whom she did not take to.) An engrossing read.

D. E. Stevenson’s Mrs. Tim Gets a Job. Like all of D. E. Stevenson’s novels, this is cozy like sitting curled up in an armchair by the fire with a cup of cocoa while a thunderstorm beats against the window in the night. It’s not that she’s writing in a world where bad things don’t happen, or even where bad things don’t happen to our heroes, but by the end of the book it will all turn out right.

Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States, edited by Mikail Iossel and Jeff Parker. An essay collection published not long after 9/11, although only a few of the essays actually touch on that event. Many of them include potshots at American political correctness (hard to embrace the concept if you come from the country where you could literally be sent to a gulag for “political incorrectness”), as well as lists of American books the authors read at a formative age.

I thank my lucky stars that I didn’t read this before Honeytrap, as the book might have been delayed indefinitely while I tried to work my way through the works of Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, as well as some other authors I’ve never even heard of. With truth the author of this essay notes “the average Soviet person probably knew [American science fiction] better than the average American.”

What I’m Reading Now

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Sadly suspicious that none of these characters are ever going to make it to the lighthouse.

What I Plan to Read Next

Does my lightning zoom through Jane Austen’s Bookshelf mean that I will at last read an eighteenth century novel? MAYBE. The library boasts Fanny Burney’s Evelina, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Romance of the Forest, Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda. Any recommendations among those works?