The Nobel Prize, unlike any other institution in the world, compels readers and publishers to briefly pay attention to—more often than not—deserving writing they often haven’t heard of before, for at least a week or two and sometimes longer. Unlike the three most recent recipients (Fosse, Ernaux, Gurnah), Han was already somewhat of a star, so her profile will grow rather than explode. The problem is that we no longer have an ecosystem that can support many Hans, or Ernauxs, at once. The publishing industry is not currently constructed to cultivate or promote authors who are doing the kind of work the Swedish Academy seemingly wants to highlight.
In the late 20th century, Japan was known for its minimalism: its Zen arts, its tidy and ordered cities, its refined foods and fashions. But Tsuzuki peeled away this façade to reveal a more complicated side to his nation. And Tokyo was the perfect setting for this exfoliation. Like the interiors he photographed, it remains visually overwhelming – even cluttered. Outside, enormous animated advertisements compete for attention against a jigsaw puzzle of metal, glass, concrete and plastic. In the sprawling residential districts that radiate from the city centre, compact homes are packed in formations as dense as transistors on a semiconductor chip, while confusing geometries of power lines spiderweb the skies above.
In suburbs across the nation, homes filled to the rafters with hoarded junk are common enough to have an ironic idiom: gomi-yashiki (trash-mansions). And in areas where space is limited, cluttered residences and shops will often erupt, disgorging things onto the street in a semi-controlled jumble so ubiquitous that urban planners have a name for it: afuré-dashi (spilling-outs). This is an ecstatic, emergent complexity, born less from planning than from organic growth, from the inevitable chaos of lives being lived.
There is, after all, only one book at a time. Right now it’s by Han Kang.
There’s something about this moment in history that makes reading about the middle-third of the last century an exercise in both processing the past and navigating the present. The decline of democracy. The rise of extremism. The geopolitical realignment, the effects of which are still being determined. The questions lurking, perhaps just out of conscious reach, including, “What would I do, if …”
In Paris ‘44: The Shame and the Glory, historian and journalist Patrick Bishop writes a biography of a city experiencing occupation and, later, liberation. Covering the fall of Paris to the Nazis in 1940 to the aftermath of its allied liberation in the summer of 1944, Bishop captures the intricacies, events, characters and broader context of a remarkable moment in time that could have led to the destruction of one of the world’s historically significant cities.
If there is a message that Kershenbaum wants to get across, it’s that, as much as we’d like to be able to hold conversations with our pets or chat with chimpanzees at the zoo, it makes no sense to expect animals to communicate in the same way that humans do, “with the same equipment as we have, the same ears and eyes and brains.”