Sunday, February 5, 2023

Review: 'Weasels in the Attic'

©2023 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Weasels in the Attic
By Hiroko Oyamada
Literary Fiction
New Directions

In less than 100 pages, a woman writer, using a male narrator, tells the stories of three couples and their journeys toward parenthood. Whether there is joy or sorrow, what each grouping reveals is how deep and strong the ties of family are, including chosen family.

Hiroko Oyamada's third book, Weasels in the Attic, begins in an oblique way with addressing its focus. The male narrator talks about his friend Saiki, who wants him to go to the funeral of another friend. The narrator remembers when they went to visit the deceased man, Urabe. He came from a wealthy family so did not have to work for a living, and was living above a tropical fish store that he had tried to run, but which failed. Urabe and Saiki are fascinated by the fish; the narrator, far less so.

The men are surprised that Urabe has a very young wife and a baby. She spends all her time with the newborn or tending to the men's food and drink. When the baby naps, she even goes to the store to get more victuals. The narrator is the only one of the three men who considers her needs as a new mother. He has sisters with children and enjoys holding the baby. It's then the reader may remember a throwaway paragraph earlier in the story, that the narrator and his wife are trying to have children but it hasn't happened.

Instead of focusing in that direction, though, Urabe tells them about the time he thought an animal had broken into the fish shop's storeroom. Instead, it was a starving girl. He gave her a packet of dried shrimp food for her and her impoverished mother to eat. When she would show up at night, he would give her another packet. If she showed up when the shop was open, he would ignore her.

It's not made explicit, but what if that starving girl, a few years later, became the young mother in the story. Urabe is not an involved father. Is that a link to his strange way of helping the hungry girl? There is a connection between his off-handed family arrangement (especially when it turns out he didn't marry the young mother, but the baby was his), and his interest in fish breeding? He is trying to see what happens when discus with different markings breed. It's not scientific though.

“So a lot of thought goes into pairing them?” Urabe took a second to think. ... “Maybe. In a way, there’s a lot of intention behind it. At the same time, it’s pretty intuitive.” “It’s too hard to explain,” Saiki added, even though he was barely listening. “It’s the same for people, though.” Urabe stood up and walked over to the tank with his cup in his hand. “We meet at school, or work, or maybe a store. Wherever it is, there’s just a random group of individuals, right? Within that group, you find your mate. If you were in a different group, you’d end up with a different mate, right? But we never dwell on that. We live our lives in the groups we have—in our cities, our countries, even though we didn’t choose them. Know what I mean? We like to tell ourselves it’s love, that we’re choosing our own partners. But in reality, we’re just playing the cards we’ve been dealt.”

The randomness of Urabe's breeding fits right in with his commitment to family.

A few years later, former confirmed bachelor Saiki marries. He and his wife move to the country, and weasels invade their home. Whenever a weasel is trapped, Saiki travels farther up in the mountains to set it free. And more weasels come into the attic. The narrator's wife grew up in the country and tells them what her grandparents did when weasels invaded her parents' home, including drowning one. It's hard to read, especially as his wife witnessed the death of an animal she thought was adorable. It's even harder to read when she says that her grandmother knew the reason for performing the death near the house. It was because of family.

"She said that sound—the mother weasel’s final scream—was a warning to the father weasel and their children. This house is dangerous . . . Don’t stay here or they’ll drown you . . . Leave and don’t come back . . . Goodbye. That’s why we had to do it here, my grandma said. Now they’ll never come back."

The loyalty and sacrifice of the weasel are the opposite of Urabe's care of family.

Later, the narrator relates that Saiki and his wife followed the advice of his wife, and the weasels disappeared. His feelings about his country neighbors improves and he and his wife have a baby. The narrator and his wife visit. An unexpected snowstorm has them spending the night. The baby is colicky and fussy, and Saiki's wife is exhausted with her nursing duties. Saiki, former heavy drinker and devil-may-care man, relishes his role as house husband, taking care of everything else. He turned out the opposite of Urabe, and he loves it.

Where does that leave the narrator? Well, there is a clue at the end about his future. But more important to the overall focus of the story than this revelation is a dream the narrator has. They spend the night in a room filled with aquariums; Saiki has once again taken up the hobby of tending to tropical fish. He may even be interested in Urabe's breeding focus. 

In the dream, the juvenile bonyfish that is in one tank suddenly jumps out of it and lands on the narrator's chest. He can't breathe. His wife is no longer in the room. He tries to sit up, to throw the fish off him, but cannot. When he wakes up, the fish has not left its tank and his wife is sleeping peacefully beside him.

Is he trying to throw off the idea of fatherhood, which has continued to elude him? If he ever became a father, what kind of a parent would he be?

Oyamade uses the stories of the animals to show the ways in which the three men react to being part of a family. Saiki not only embraces the idea of fatherhood, he extends his family circle to his neighbors. His wife and the narrator's wife become close friends, creating another familial circle. The narrator is part of these circles, yet distant from them in his descriptions. Is this his way to report what happened? Or is it indicative of how he feels? 

One of the fascinating part of Weasels in the Attic is that the focus is on the men. It's an opportunity for a woman, such as Oyamada, to look at the themes of fertility and family that are often relegated to the sphere of women. Her showcasing that not all men react the same is an important consideration.

The translator, David Boyd, deserves mention as well. When a translator does a wonderful job, such as here, it is worth noting how important that work is. He places anyone reading Oyamada's work in English easily in her world as the narrator is placed in homes of the others he is bringing to life.




Review: 'Age of Vice'

©2023 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Age of Vice
By Deepit Kapoor
Literary Fiction
Riverhead Books

In the aftermath of a chaotic, deadly car crash in Delhi, a once-trusted driver is thrown in jail, a once-beloved woman is discarded and the son of a mobster once again finds out his limited options. Age of Vice is more than a story about beautiful and rich people in India. It's a story of how different this nation of old kingdoms is for those in different stratas of society, how the idea of India is admired and abused by foreigners and, mostly, it's a story of love and loss.

Deepit Kapoor's novel is the story of three main characters. The driver, Ajay, comes from abject poverty. His story is a fascinating one of what might happen when one lives to serve and only wants his family back. Wherever he ends up, Ajay learns what needs to be done, and does it. When it seems he is being rewarded for his loyalty and diligence, in truth, he is just ending up deeper in servitude.

What is fascinating about Ajay is that he is not a character to pity. He is not a fool. He knows who he is and what he wants, and he will work as hard as he can to make that happen. His interior journey is a fascinating one.

His abilities lead Ajay to becoming the driver, and basically keeper, of Sonny Wadia. Sonny is a golden boy of hard-partying young India. His father and uncle are renowned criminal masterminds and political bosses. Soon, a woman becomes an integral part of Sonny's circle. Neda is a journalist, yet she is portrayed as aloof from Ajay's perspective. He doesn't understand why Neda is so important to Sonny, and she may be unlikeable to a reader.

But then the perspective switches to Neda, and a lot is made clear about her and her relationship to Sonny. She is at first fascinated by Sonny, and tries to get to know him as part of the investigative journalism pieces her mentor/would-be lover is writing. Neda falls in love with Sonny and wants to protect him from his worst inclinations. Of course this is going to end disastrously.

Sonny's worse inclinations may not be his abiity to ingest great amounts of liquor and drugs. It may be his dual desires of wishing to impress his disapproving father, and wanting to actually do some good in society. These two wishes are mutually exclusive. And they leave Sonny open to being used.

Kapoor does something that I deeply appreciate as a reader. When she is writing Ajay's story, we see both how AJay views things and some clues as to the broader picture. It's the same when she's writing Neda's story, and Sonny's. And as the novel progresses and the points of view change, the reader sees how what she learned before and what she is reading now work together to form a more clear picture of all three characters.

Age of Vice is powerful, violent entertainment. The scope of crime and corruption, the ins and outs of how people use and get used, is portrayed vividly. But this novel also is poignant and shows how important love and loss can be in determining the course of a lifetime. This reader hopes for more from the author, especially regarding these characters.

Review: 'An Island'

©2023 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

An Island
By Karen Jennings
Literary Fiction
Hogarth

The notion of being alone or being connected has been prominent in several novels I've read recently. It's also a great factor in society, especially with the ongoing trauma of the pandemic and political upheaval. In An Island, by Karen Jennings, the protagonist goes back and forth between yearning for solitude and to belong.

Samuel has been alone on a small island for years, tending to a lighthouse that is falling apart. The only company he has are a small flock of chickens, especially an aged red hen that the other fowl pick on, and the fellows in the supply boat. Occasionally, a body washes ashore. He used to report them to the authorities as he was instructed to do, but they weren't interested and so he has been burying them within a stone fence he has been building as a sea wall.

When the body of a younger man washes ashore, he think this is going to be another one. If only he wasn't so old and hurting, it would be easier work. But then, the body shows signs of life. This victim of the sea is alive. Samuel is terrified and runs away, leaving the man on the beach overnight. He's alive the next day.

The man's appearance brings back ghosts of the past to Samuel. He recalls the 25 years he spent in prison after an unsuccessful protest against his country's dictator as one day spent over and over, like Groundhog Day. He remembers his father being crippled in fighting for independence against the government that proceded the dictator, and how his entire family turned to begging and subsistence living.

Later on, he remembers how he tried to connect with a group of protestors and how they didn't change each other's lives. He remembers refugees his father befriended, who he helped chase out of the neighborhood when the dictator began using rhetoric Trump and his ilk do.

Whatever he is doing, whatever group he is with, Samuel tries to fit in but there is little sense his heart is really in it. Only once, after years in prison and being ostracized, does he wish for friendship.

He longed to turn to his neighbor, to whisper a few words, to have someone answer him.

But when the stranger appears, Samuel veers back and forth between attempting to communicate and pushing him away. This back and forth continues to the very end, when the reader discovers the one creature for which Samuel stands up.

Samuel tries to prove the opposite of John Donne's famous line that "no man is an island" but his attempts to be cut off prove another part of Donne's Meditation XVII:

any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind. 

Every death, every loss, diminishes Samuel. He is an island unto himself, but he is disintegrating as surely as the island and the lighthouse he is charged with keeping. The relentlessness of Samuel's reality is one that he faces as if it was the waves crashing onto shore all day, every day. 

It's easy to see Samuel as a failure of a human being. And to see that the deck was always stacked against him.

But it's also possible to wonder "what if?" What if any connection he made with another person turned out to not be superficial, but to be real? What would his life had been like? There is a moment in An Island when that possibility is shown. It is a moment of sorrow and forgiveness, and, even if fleeting, a moment of redemption.