Monday, November 14, 2011

The Buddha in the Attic

Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic, listed as one of the year's "notable" books in the NY Times, is a tiny work of fiction that is based on straight-up fact. Written in a plural voice, this collection depiction of the life of the "picture brides" from Japan in the 1920's is an impressionistic yet vivid portrayal of lives lived, in both broad and small strokes.

"On the boat, we carried our husband's pictures in tiny oval lockets that hung on long chains from our necks. We carried them in silk purses and old tea tins and red lacquer boxes and in the thick brown envelopes from America in which they had originally been sent."

Otsuka mixes the general with the specific, puts together speech with memory in this compact, effective narrative that takes us from the boat ride over to California through the forced internment of these immigrants during World War II. The perspective (oddly? interestingly?) departs when the Japanese do, switching to that of the non-Japanese population left behind. "Our mayor has assured us there is no need for alarm. The Japanese are in a safe place." It is still effective, but why do this? Is it to elicit from us the idea of a silenced voice? I found this to be a strange way to end this book, a book that was, otherwise, a very satisfying and illuminating read.

The book is beautifully written. The critics, therefore have bestowed the usual plethora of adjectives: "spare, incisive"; "exceptional"; "incantory";"resonant";elegiac"; "nuanced"; "crystalline". The descriptors are never ending and never-endingly trite. Unfortunately, when I first perused the back cover, I was put off by these overloaded blurbs. What I found out, though, is that they were all true. Well, mostly. There is this on the back cover, from Kate Washington of the San Francisco Chronicle: "Her spare prose is complemented by precise details, vivid characterization, and a refusal to either flinch or sentimentalize." Other than the "vivid characterization" part, this is pretty much dead on, but all this leads me to what I hate about book reviews: the bullshit. The idea is to pile on the adjectives so that someone can pull out a good excerpt to use on the book's cover. In this instance, "characterization" is an interesting choice, since the characterization is collective, so this phrase is a problematic one---Otsuka's concern is not character, though the writing is certainly vivid. Perhaps the reviewer is lumping all those brides together? Or maybe she didn't read the whole thing and wrote the review anyway---something I suspect happens more often than not. Yet the rest of the praise from the back cover certainly applies to this book: "Stunning economy"; "unsentimental prose"; and on and on. While I feel all this praise to be accurate, it isn't any different from all the blurbs on a thousand other book covers. Reading the back of Otsuka's cover, I realized that there is no way to tell if any of those reviewers actually read the book, or read it all the way through. Otsuka's book is surely worthy of praise. But are all those other books really "stunning" or "incantory" or "resonant" or otherwise "remarkable"?

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