Kawabata, Yasunari. The Master of Go. Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker. New York: Vintage, 1972 (1951).

Western readers should probably read more eastern literature, myself included; it would give us a broader view of the world. Wikipedia defines the game of Go in this manner: “Go is an abstract strategy board game for two players in which the aim is to surround more territory than the opponent. The game was invented in China more than 2,500 years ago and is believed to be the oldest board game continuously played to the present day.” In this book (hybrid of novel and nonfiction), the game has moved to Japan. For Kawabata the game of Go provides a wonderful extended metaphor for one man’s life. Shusai, Master of Go, spends time toward the end of his life in battle with a player named Otaké, a fine player but hypochondrial man. The game moves from venue to venue, where players may take hours to decide a play, where weeks may pass before the continuation of the game. There are end notes that help to explain the game. A brief but head-spinning read.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde

Sillitoe, Alan. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. New York: Penguin, 1992 (1959).

 
I enjoyed this mid-century collection of stories by British writer, Alan Sillitoe, because each male protagonist is a bit different, sometimes very different, from the leading bloke in one of the other eight narratives. Whether it is the sarcasm of the famed title character or one who wonders why his ex-wife has pawned a painting he thought she wanted back for sentimental reasons or the quizzical nature of a young man who narrates Eddie Buller’s sad story, each character is honed from Sillitoe’s astute observations of human nature.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Yasunari Kawabata's The Master of Go.

​Jones, Robert Jr. The Prophets. New York: Putnam’s, 2021.

This tremendous first novel seems at once both realistic and impressionistic in its articulation. The former because Jones’s portrayal of slave life in the nineteenth-century American South stinks with human toil and sweat, both black and white: “Mississippi only knew how to be hot and sticky” (27). The only relief may be the Biblical-like Yazoo River’s coolness. The novel is impressionistic in large part because it is as nonlinear as a novel can get: there are slave ancestors, the lives of a female king, whose descendants populate this hot and sweaty setting. If readers think this is only a novel about two young male slaves who have “grown up” together on the Halifax plantation (slaves call it “Empty” or “That Fucking Place”) and become lovers at a young age, may they soon discover their mistake. Single chapters are devoted to various characters within this “kingdom” of depraved corruption of Capitalism. Slaves tell their own truth. Owners live out their own truths: their indifference to pain (except their own), their greed, their ultimate unhappiness brought on by the shame and disgust they must feel (deep inside and unrecognized) at the mistreatment of fellow human beings.
 
In this book, sex between Samuel and Isiah isn’t sex but a stunning line of poetry that indicates what has happened: their red-and-white barn is an Edenic setting for their love. You sense the act has taken place but it is communicated with ease and subtlety. Neither is the sex graphic, nor is it quotidian, like, say, John Cheever’s Then they rolled over and went to sleep.
 
I believe I shall read this novel again and again. More than ever, white people need to wake up and see what a terrible blight slavery has been on our country’s history, how its stories cripple our present and our future if we fail to deal with slavery's legacy. Jones’s novel opens wide a window into our history by way of a beautiful and savage piece of art that will only unfold more as time passes.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Alan Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

Kendi, Ibram X. and Keisha N. Blain, eds. Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019. New York: One World, 2021.

 
This auspicious tome opens with one distinguished author/editor and closes with another writing about the collection of essays they have amassed. Kendi begins: “Racist power constructed the Black race—and all the Black groups. Them. Racist power kept constructing Black America over four hundred years . . . [w]econstructed, again and again. Them into we, defending the Black American community to defend all the individuals in the community. Them became we  to allow I to become me” (xvii). One hundred scholars each represent or write about four-year increments of Black history beginning, of course, in 1619, when twenty black-skinned people arrive on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia, aboard the (how bitterly ironic)White Lion. There the pernicious practice of slavery begins in the United States of America. Each of the book’s ten sections ends not with an essay but with a powerful poem, lending the quality of a Greek chorus to the collection, voices telling truths that prose perhaps cannot. 
 
This collection possesses many positives: scholarship and research; eloquence the one hundred varied voices (some angry, some solemn, some patient and considered) lend to the gigantic mosaic or puzzle of lost American history. The most poignant moments of clarity may arrive when some overlooked gem of our stinking history is thrust up in our noses . . . and we must not turn away for it is a stench African-Americans have lived with for centuries—if not in their direct memory then within the cells of their punished bodies.

Co-editor Blain states in her conclusion to Four Hundred Souls: “From police violence and mass incarceration to voter suppression and unequal access to housing, the social and economic disparities that shape contemporary Black life are all legacies of slavery and colonialism” (391). If only we could motivate our congress to realize this fact and begin to allow the country to teach history in its full ugly truthfulness (as well as the beauty of democracy when it works), only then may we continue and then finish Reconstruction, a reconstruction of Black lives that must include every last descendant of a slave in this country.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Robert Jones, Junior's novel The Prophets

Bell, Matt. Appleseed. New York: HarperCollins, 2021.
 
Every novel creates an environment of its own. Author Matt Bell does so in spades in this ambitious work of three worlds and how they eventually converge. Slowly you do sense the three strands coming together, especially each time that Chapman and Nathaniel come to live with the Worth family and they witness the payoff of having planted apple trees from seed decades earlier.
 
Bell alternates chapters by way of individual characters beginning with Chapman and Nathaniel (loosely based on Johnny “Appleseed” Chapman and brother Nathaniel Chapman). This strand is set in the 1700s and traces the two brothers as they prepare acres and acres of apple nurseries in Ohio and surrounding states, planting individual seeds rather than using grafting—to earn money in the future. Bell makes Chapman’s character even more legendary by creating him as half human/half faun (a mythological character, not a fawn). 
 
The other two strands—a science-fiction thread set in the latter half of this century, and a thousand years from now when the earth is experiencing a new ice age, creating an environmental plea—alternate back and forth between the Appleseed thread until the cataclysmic climax and almost languorous denouement. Readers must trust author Bell, that he knows what he is doing because at times you feel as if you’re on a runaway roller coaster ride that won’t end. And the fact that he releases details gradually makes the speculative and sci-fi aspects of the novel more believable, more easily woven into its fabric (and your memory). At one point, he lists five and a half pages of what have become extinct species, and you make yourself read every one of them, to the experience the pain of what it would (will?) be like to lose that many creatures in the future.
 
Bell creates the novel’s own vocabulary, much like Anthony Burgess does in his A Clockwork Orange and other works—they are endemic to that novel. Words like “rewilder” (persons attempting to rebuild the natural world); Sacrifice Zone; Volunteer Agricultural Community (VAC); advertainments; nanoswarms; macrofarms; barkspot; no-when; somewhen. Just a few. (The publisher might wish to include a glossary in the back, in a final edition.) Bell makes a good practice of recapping or summarizing backstory so readers know where they are in the sweep of things.
            
Perhaps because this copy is the publisher’s “advance reader’s edition,” (I received it as a Goodreads giveaway fulfilled by HarperCollins) it may feature more than its fair share of typographical errors, but I list the ones I found because it’s a thing I do:

Typo: “hope_ are” (184) should be “hopes are”
Typo: “unlike t he one” (232) should be “the”
Typo: “Chapman say_,” (297) should be “says”
Typo: “Eury most not expect” (311) should be “Eury must not
expect”                                                                                      
Typo: “if Earthtrust was a country” (362) should be “if Earthtrust
is a country” to be consistent with contextual use of present   tense.

 
Reading Appleseed is a big ask, not so much on the part of the author (who is excused on the basis of creative control) or the publisher but on the part of literature itself. One must approach the novel with an open mind, especially if you don’t often read fantasy, sci-fi, or speculative fiction. Bell produces a phrase that might just rise up as a slogan for our earth’s future: Either we all survive, or no one does (159). Frightening but possibly true.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Kendi and Blain's Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019