The Saturday Morning Post (No. 57)

My book of the week this week was a  suggested read from the library based on The Fox Wife. The ebook was available, so I picked it up.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng   DNF 20%

I see on the cover that this book was a finalist for the Booker Prize for literature. I can understand why, since you have the main character whipping the "blisters" of rain drops off of her face. There is a lot of that type of creative use of language, and if you are a fan of that type of language, you may well like this book. I'm not, as you can see.

The story opens in the 1980's in Malaysia, with a female judge retiring to the Garden of Evening Mists on account of realizing that she is suffering from dementia that is going to rapidly worsen. Judge Teoh Yun Ling is the sole survivor of a Japanese prison camp that killed her sister, and cost her two of her fingers, which she wears gloves to cover their loss. After this framing chapter or two, the main story is a flashback to a few years after the Second World War, when she, after getting a law degree in England, wants, as a memorial to her sister, to build a Japanese garden, one designed by a Japanese gardener who lives in the hills of Malaysia, despite the fact that she hates the Japanese for how they treated her, her sister, and so many other people in the lands they occupied during the Second World War. It may've been mentioned why this gardener, but I don't remember it. The story seemed to me to be more than a bit contrived.

I found the pace glacial, the writing too ornamental for my taste. And to be honest, I felt that the story was more of a history lesson disguised as a story, rather than a narrative. In the part I read it had people always telling tales of the past, as well as talking about the present political circumstances (of the late 1940's) so that 20% into the book, we only had the framing device of her going back to the garden - it appeared to be hers now, (thus telegraphing the ending) and her account of her first meeting with the Japanese gardener, with lots of description of the garden. A slow and rather disjointed opening that seemed to promise much more of the same.

I don't need a lot of action - in fact, none at all - to enjoy a story. What I do need is clear, engaging writing and a story that does not meander artfully hither and yon, with all sorts of artfully contrived descriptions of commonplace things tossed in to make it literature. 

I guess I'm a barbarian at the gates of literature.