Gimme more

So, hey, I'm still reading books. Last week I finished Heinrich Böll's Gruppenbild mit Dame which I found very enjoyable. I found it interesting how he played with postmodernism without ever going whole-hog for it, but what really kept me engaged was the humour, even if it does somewhat misfire in an odd and unnecessary coda. It's also reaffirming how easy the German read, even if it did get densely bureaucratic at times. (Part of the humour comes from the punctiliousness of the narrator, who is ostensibly being paid by some mysterious public agency to write this book.)

I'm less thrilled that it took me more than two months to read the whole damn thing, but it was 400 pages of very dense type. Plus it's winter and my ambitions are dulled (but more on that later.) But I finished it, which is more than I can say of Laxness' Independent people or Albert's (i.e. Català's) Solitud. The latter is a reminder of just how far short my Catalan vocabulary falls of where I'd like it to be. It's not a fair fight--Albert uses expressions local to rural Girona (in nonstandard spellings) that aren't even in the Alcover-Moll--but it's humbling to be dusted all the same.

Now I'm sailing through Pachinko, the family drama about Zainichi Koreans that everyone seems to be reading now. Literally the same day I bought it, I got a message from a former coworker inviting me to a book group to discuss it. It's a fat book, too, but the prose is simple and there's little or nothing in way of subtext. Want to know what a character's motivations are? Don't worry, Lee will tell you. Don't look for any clever narrative tricks either; she's telling The Story of Koreans in Japan in the most straightforward way possible as if that should be enough for you.

Given that's her ambition, it's notable that she chooses to focus on an essentially middle-class family that's spared the worst hardships of being members of a despised minority in a foreign land. I suppose it's a combination of drawing from her own background, needing "relatable" protagonists for middlebrow readers, and wanting to highlight the discrimination by showing how it collides with the characters' ambitions.

It's also because being poor is boring. I wish I could find the quote now, but an article I read years ago now about the writing of Japan's marginalised groups talked about the difficulty of conveying the realities of poverty in prose because the day-to-day lived experience is so tedious and the public doesn't want tedious novels (or at least novels which are tedious in that particular way). Nakagami was one of the authors discussed and he pulls this off better than most by heading off in experimental directions, something you obviously can't expect of everyone.

In any case, I'll finish it, I'll talk about it, and then I'll move on to something more nourishing. Maybe Miéville's Embassytown? I really want to like him because he writes well and has terrific ideas but The city and the city was a disappointment. I'm not a fan of police procedurals generally and strip away the fantastic elements from that book and a police procedural is what you're left with--and not a very interesting one at that. It's a similar flaw to Lee's book, but I've got more affection for multigenerational family sagas even when the family's not all that fascinating.

Februaritis

Sunday afternoon, I left my dwelling for the first time in 44 hours. I had some food in the house that I didn't feel like preparing and I'd been craving a tuna melt for some days anyway (why is it so damned hard to find a decent one in Evanston?), which is one thing the pancake joint on the corner does well.

This wasn't my original plan. I'd wanted to head down to North Chinatown for the New Year's Parade. How I got it into my head that this was scheduled for Sunday, I don't know, but late Saturday I saw a friend's photos on Facebook and realised I'd missed it. I texted him from the counter of the restaurant berating myself. When he asked, "How's your weekend?" I told him I'd finally managed to leave the house. He was all like, "Yeah, I need to leave the house too but I'm tired and hungover."

It was a small reminder of the communication gap that exists between someone dealing with depression (however mild) and someone who isn't. Which, for someone who's until very recently always been (as far as I could tell) firmly on one side of that gap, was sobering.

Last time I spoke to my sister about this, she burbled about the antidepressant she was on. I know what she was trying to say, but what I heard was, "Stop being sad or we'll medicate you out of it". I think these drugs are terrific. I'm glad she's found one that gives her the help she needs to meet her obligations, where are significantly more burdensome than mine. (Monshu's months of hospitalisation gave me the closest taste I've ever had to what it must be like to be a parent and that was plenty.)

I also think these drugs (and drugs generally) are something to be used cautiously. If I were really in trouble, I'd be amenable. But I pay all my bills. I make it to work every day (or almost every day). I feed my cat and myself as well--just not as well as I should. I can feel lust and joy and I go out and have fun. Yeah, I get the sads a lot. I neglect housekeeping and financial planning and my friends, but I was never exemplary at keeping up with any of those.

Honestly, I might be more willing to try something if it weren't for the fact that the number one reaction my body has to any new pharmaceutical is stomach upset and keeping myself nourished is enough of a pain in the ass as it is. Currently I'm on the eighteenth hour of a reaction to taking my allopurinol dose a few hours late (and by "reaction" I mean "a burning sensation that kept me from sleeping last night"). And now my doc wants to start me on statins! *sigh*

So I'm toughing it out--not out of some macho misapprehension that antidepressants are for the weak or that mental illness is something you can will yourself out of--because I think it's my best option. And as much as might rail on them sometimes for their gullibility and moping, I have my widowed group to thank for helping me see how normal this all is. Fifteen months is not nearly enough time to acclimate yourself fully to losing someone who was in your life for nineteen years.