Sep. 6th, 2019 03:34 pm
Reading day
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
muckefuckIf this hadn't been such a year for allergies, I would've recognised the onset of a cold Wednesday evening for what it was. Maybe starting zinc then rather than the next morning wouldn't've made much difference. Certainly, tiring myself out with a half-hour stroll would've made less sense.
But I didn't and so I tried to compensate by taking all day Thursday. I assumed I'd be at my most infectious then and decided to spare my coworkers. If anything, I felt worse today, but that can probably be explained by not sleeping away the entire morning.
Despite some half-baked notions about making calls or doing laundry, I did nothing productive. Near the end of the day, I realised that I could still take a bath and change the sheets, which would not only make me feel much better but also give me a jump on weekend chores. But even after some frantic scrubbing, the tub was too filthy to consider filling and I abandoned the idea.
What I did get done was some reading. In a burst of indecision, I started on both the Erdrich and on a translation of Tanizaki that I'd bought some time in the last year and was just waiting for cooler weather to start on. It's an early novel of his, 黒白, which was serialised in a newspaper and might not even have been published separately in Japanese yet.
The English version was translated by Phyllis I. Lyons, who I met at a discussion last year before it had even come out. I remember that she explained how she settled on the title In black and white. I can't remember if she also talked about how she dealt with names, but if she did, I wish I'd listened.
Rather than get into a detailed discussion of how various kanji can be used to render homophonous surnames, she adopted the convention of romanising a name "Cojima" to indicate that it was a less-common form than "Kojima". This is rather important to the plot, which revolves around an author who makes the mistake of referring to one of his characters by the name of the acquaintance he modeled him after, who spells his name in a distinctive fashion.
It's a short novel--only 215 pages--and Tanizaki's prose is so comfortable that I've almost effortlessly read more than a quarter of it. His chatty narrator has some of the preoccupations of others in his books but is if anything even more neurotic; some readers would find him insufferable, but I find myself responding with a wry smile.
The Erdrich is a very different experience. It takes a hard turn in the very first chapter and I made a very conscious choice not to take it on transit because I don't want to deal with feeling wrecked in front of strangers. Some reviews faulted the dilatoriness of the narrative and the unsympathetic nature of the non-Indian characters, but I'm not finding either to be a problem.
But I didn't and so I tried to compensate by taking all day Thursday. I assumed I'd be at my most infectious then and decided to spare my coworkers. If anything, I felt worse today, but that can probably be explained by not sleeping away the entire morning.
Despite some half-baked notions about making calls or doing laundry, I did nothing productive. Near the end of the day, I realised that I could still take a bath and change the sheets, which would not only make me feel much better but also give me a jump on weekend chores. But even after some frantic scrubbing, the tub was too filthy to consider filling and I abandoned the idea.
What I did get done was some reading. In a burst of indecision, I started on both the Erdrich and on a translation of Tanizaki that I'd bought some time in the last year and was just waiting for cooler weather to start on. It's an early novel of his, 黒白, which was serialised in a newspaper and might not even have been published separately in Japanese yet.
The English version was translated by Phyllis I. Lyons, who I met at a discussion last year before it had even come out. I remember that she explained how she settled on the title In black and white. I can't remember if she also talked about how she dealt with names, but if she did, I wish I'd listened.
Rather than get into a detailed discussion of how various kanji can be used to render homophonous surnames, she adopted the convention of romanising a name "Cojima" to indicate that it was a less-common form than "Kojima". This is rather important to the plot, which revolves around an author who makes the mistake of referring to one of his characters by the name of the acquaintance he modeled him after, who spells his name in a distinctive fashion.
It's a short novel--only 215 pages--and Tanizaki's prose is so comfortable that I've almost effortlessly read more than a quarter of it. His chatty narrator has some of the preoccupations of others in his books but is if anything even more neurotic; some readers would find him insufferable, but I find myself responding with a wry smile.
The Erdrich is a very different experience. It takes a hard turn in the very first chapter and I made a very conscious choice not to take it on transit because I don't want to deal with feeling wrecked in front of strangers. Some reviews faulted the dilatoriness of the narrative and the unsympathetic nature of the non-Indian characters, but I'm not finding either to be a problem.
Tags: