"Speedcubing offers a unique combination of cognitive challenge, [alongside] social connection, and personal achievement that contributes to happiness", says Polina Beloborodova, research associate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Centre for Healthy Minds.
And this is said to run far deeper than a simple momentary rush.
This book makes the case that there is a subtler iniquity in the sins of forgetting, in papering over, in moving in and moving on. They are everyday, understandable sins, banal and piercing. They linger after the immediate aftermath has settled: the “chaos of the train stations, hollow-faced people wandering the streets on bare feet,” as Van der Wouden describes it. The Safekeep is a hard-edged book cloaked in elegance; like the shard in the garden that begins it all, it is both cutting and a thing of beauty.
Generally a comedy of manners, Rental House—very much not vacation home—can blaze up with violent insolence. But, like Chekhov, Wang has a clear tenderness for her very fallible characters. If they have nothing else, besides a beautiful dog, they have each other, a place they can both work at being immigrants, to build a life in a new land.