Review: The Disorder Collection (Part 2)

Last month I reviewed three books from Amazon's six-book Disorder collection, with the promise that I would review the other three later. Dear reader, that day has finally come. I actually read the other books a little while ago, before my free Kindle Unlimited trial expired, but I am only just now writing this review because my previous few posts have been wholly occupied by the From & About Asia reading project. If you haven't already, I recommend going back and reading the first post I wrote about the Disorder collection before reading this one, but the choice is ultimately yours.

With that explanation out of the way, let's get into these books. As you may recall, Part 1 covered Un-girls, Anonymous, and The Best Girls, leaving Loam, The Beckoning Fair One, and Will Williams for this post. Just as in the last installment, I will be reviewing these in the order that I read them, starting with:

The Beckoning Fair One by Dan Chaon

Out of the whole collection, this is probably my second favourite story (Min Jin Lee's The Best Girls having retained its top spot since Part 1). It's a creepy, suburban gothic, almost fairytale-esque story about a boy and his teenage sister, who develops a strange obsession with a young man in their town. While I admit I'm not entirely sure what to make of the story's emphasis on the apparent danger of teenage female sexuality, I was a big fan of the story's atmosphere and generally eerie vibe. I also liked that Chaon wasn't afraid to make it a genuinely weird story, especially towards the end. It might be bizarre and even a little disturbing, but it definitely left an impression. 

Loam by Scott Heim

Like The Beckoning Fair One, Loam focuses on a group of siblings from a small, creepy American town who are somehow involved in strange goings-on. This was certainly an unsettling story, with one part in particular making me regret reading it in bed at night, but I didn't like it as much as Chaon's. It wasn't as effectively atmospheric, was quite slow to get going, and lacked a satisfying resolution. I was disinterested at the start, got my hopes up about half way through, and then felt disappointed by the end. It also bothered me a bit that [SPOILER, highlight to view] the crux of the story focuses on false accusations, including of sexual assault. Stories like this are getting to seem horribly overdone at best, and encouraging scepticism of survivors at worst. Even without that, though, I'm not sure I would have been terribly impressed with this story.

Will Williams by Namwali Serpell

This book is apparently based on an Edgar Allan Poe story which, full disclosure, I haven't read. I mention that because this story might have special resonance for those who have experienced the original, but unfortunately I do not fall into this category. Will Williams tells the story of its eponymous (and supposedly pseudonymous) main character, who is haunted from childhood onwards by a mysterious doppelganger of sorts: a boy who shares his name and gradually comes to assume other aspects of his identity. I found this story quite unnerving, which is probably a good thing, since the story is somewhat frightening. I appreciated how Serpell connected the concept of a doppelganger to social issues like the school-to-prison pipeline, which gave fresh meaning to an old trope. That said, I didn't find this story as immersive or its main character as compelling as some of the others in this series, so I wouldn't rank it as one of my favourites.

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With that, we have reached the end of the Disorder collection. While I did enjoy reading this collection, I'm not sure if I would recommend it that strongly. The Best Girls is definitely my favourite and I would recommend that as a standalone story, as well as possibly The Beckoning Fair One if you want a straight-up horror tale, but I'm not sure I would do the same for any of the others. If you already have Kindle Unlimited and are looking for something a little strange and unusual, I would say go ahead and read the collection - or at least some of the stories in it. If you'd have to purchase it though, I would say to spend your money on something else. 

Book Review: The Accusation by Bandi (From & About Asia Reading Project)

Hello, and welcome to another post about the From and About Asia Reading Project! Those of you who have read my previous posts about the project (and if you haven't, I recommend perusing my masterpost here) will know that I have been participating in it for the last month. This has meant choosing and reading two books, one for each of the following criteria:

Category I: a book by an author from that month's country

Category II: a book about the culture of the subregion where the country is from

May's country was North Korea, meaning that my Category I choice had to be a book by a North Korean author. For this, I chose The Accusation by Bandi. As for my choice for Category II, I have actually already written a post about the book I selected, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, which I ended up reading first for reasons I have specified in that review. Hopefully next month I will manage to read the books in what seems to be the correct order! My choices for June will come later, though. For now, let's get back to the topic of The Accusation. 

As far as I can tell, The Accusation is a very unique book in terms of North Korean literature, at least among those books which have been translated into English. While there have been many books written by North Korean defectors, The Accusation is the first I have heard of that was critical of but written by someone still living within the regime. The pseudonymous author, Bandi (whose name means "firefly" in Korean), wrote the collection of short stories secretly and hid his manuscript until a family member who defected was able to help him get it out of the country. The manuscript was then picked up for publication, and the rest is history.

The fact that The Accusation is so unusual made me determined to read it, even though I normally struggle with short story collections. Its stories follow different members of North Korean society as they live life under their country's oppressive dictator. Bandi definitely doesn't hold back from criticising the regime, with every single story drawing attention to its hypocrisy and brutality.

I admit I was a bit surprised by this. Somehow I thought that the stories (at least some of them, anyway) would show the reader a less critical look at daily life in North Korea, showing in some ways the normality of it for those who live inside the system. Instead, I found that the oppression of the North Korean state hung over the stories like thick smoke. It wasn't possible to look for metaphorical gaps in the regime, where perhaps some light might be able to slip through, because its influence was so suffocatingly absolute. It was disturbing to read story after story where the basic humanity of North Koreans was crushed inside the iron fist of the Kims' dictatorship.

For me, the standout story of the collection was definitely "The Stage", a heartbreaking tale of a family fractured by the son's desire to live, in his words, as a human being. A prominent theme in this story was the idea of "stage truth", which is described within the text as: "how actors perform a given play as though it were real life. To lie, in other words, but convincingly, so the audience will believe it is the truth."

Bandi extends this concept of stage truth to the behaviour of North Korean citizens within the regime, who are forced not only to perform whatever actions they are told to but also to do so believably, to convince their superiors that they are doing so out of a true inner devotion to the state and its ideals. I found this to be a very powerful comparison, which Bandi illustrates painfully well. Trying to comprehend the intimate, psychological oppression of the North Korean state is a task as horrible as it seems essential to understanding the lives of its people.

It's sort of difficult to review this book as I would another work of fiction, because I am aware of the horrible reality that inspired Bandi's stories. I feel like it's almost disrespectful to say "this is a great book, 10/10 would recommend", but I do want to say that it was a powerful and insightful book to read. If you are interested in North Korea or want to learn more about the struggles of the North Korean people, I would indeed recommend The Accusation. If the story surrounding the book's origins is true, then we are very lucky that this collection made it out of the country and into English-language publication. Bandi is an incredibly brave writer, and we are all fortunate to be able to read his work.

Book Review: Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-joo (From & About Asia Reading Project)

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about joining the From and About Asia reading project, which requires me to read two books about Asia every month (actually the rules are a bit more complicated than that, but we'll get into more detail in a second). Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of finishing my first assigned book for the project: Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-joo.

For those of you who need a refresher of the project's book criteria, let me give you a quick reminder. Each month focuses on a different country in Asia, May's being North Korea, and then requires you to read one book for each of the following categories:

Category I: a book by an author from that country

Category II: a book about the culture of the subregion where the country is from

Funnily enough, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 actually fits into the second category here, even though I finished it before my Category I choice. The reason for this is that I'm  reading my other North Korea book (The Accusation by Bandi) as part of a buddy read that continues until the end of this month. So, I have somewhat counterintuitively finished my Category II book before it. 

I will admit I was a little confused at first as to what book I should choose for this category. I ended up choosing Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 because I already owned a digital copy, I'd heard other feminist readers rave about it, and I liked the idea of reading one book from North Korea and another about South Korea. It seemed to fit the criteria for a book that looks at an East Asian subculture because it follows the life of the eponymous main character as she navigates life as a woman in South Korea. The story takes us from before her birth to her becoming a mother herself. Along the way, it tackles a variety of issues relating to sexism and patriarchy, all seen through the lens of Jiyoung's experiences.

One of the blurbs inside the book claimed that "Kim Jiyoung's life is made to seem at once totally common-place and nightmarishly over-the-top", which I admit I found quite strange. While I would agree that Jiyoung's life is both commonplace and nightmarish, there is nothing over-the-top about it. Everything she goes through is totally normal, even if the anti-feminist instinct to deny these experiences is so strong that Cho Nam-joo had to include actual citations within the text. Given that the book is written from a South Korean perspective and set in that country, Jiyoung's life is specifically that of a Korean woman, and her experiences with sexism and misogyny reflect that. For example, I think that perhaps the issues of sex-selective abortion and ideas about honour and tradition in families (and how this affects gender relations within them) are perhaps more particularly significant in Korea. 

On the other hand, as the great Mona Eltahawy said, "Patriarchy is universal." So much of what Jiyoung experiences is relatable even to me as a woman who has never so much as visited Korea. Being sexualised from a young age, encountering predatory men as a child, being told that as a girl you can't do things that boys your age are doing, having your choice of clothing constantly analysed and controlled, being harassed by men on the street, being told that this harassment is your own fault, living in constant fear of the violence you know other women like you have experienced, feeling a dull sense of inevitability when you finally experience that violence yourself - all of these are things that Jiyoung, myself, and countless other women worldwide have gone through. 

I know that some people reading this, specifically men, will probably hear my description of the book and think, "I'm not sure this is for me." Maybe you don't like reading so-called "feminist" literature or maybe you just feel like this book would be a bit too intense for your liking. Unfortunately, the women in your life don't have the opportunity to opt-out of sexism and misogyny like you can opt-out of reading a book which focuses on them. If I could, I'd get all the men I know to read this book, if only so they can see (however briefly) the relentless patriarchal onslaught that comes with going through life as a woman.

That's not to say that only men would benefit from reading this book, of course. Reading it as a woman made me feel very validated and vindicated in my anger at systemic sexism. I think this book deserves a place as a new feminist classic for how well and concisely it depicts the reality of being a woman in the modern world. It doesn't depict every single aspect, as I'm sure no book really could, but it depicts the life and experiences of one woman and it does so incredibly well. 

For those who have also read and enjoyed this book, like me, I would like to recommend two other stories you may enjoy. Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 reminded me a lot of The Vegetarian by Han Kang, since both depict Korean women whose conflict with the patriarchal society that surrounds them has manifested itself internally as a mental illness. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short story that shares a similar plotline, albeit from an American perspective. I was also reminded of Min Jin Lee's short story The Best Girls, which I mentioned in a previous post. Like Kim Jiyoung, The Best Girls gave insight into the lives of Korean women and how young women can be expected to make sacrifices for the sake of their brothers, simply by virtue of their gender.

I would like to write more about this book, going through every aspect of patriarchy which is addressed in the novel and talking about how relatable it all was, but to be honest I could not say any of this better than the book does itself. That said, if you'd like to read more of my thoughts, I made a short post about the book on Instagram and also shared a few quotes from it there. Otherwise, I would suggest reading Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 if you want to know more. It's only a short book so it doesn't take long to read, but its impact will stay with you well after the last sentence.

Review: The Disorder Collection (Part 1)

Recently I decided to make use of Amazon's 30-day free trial on Kindle Unlimited, a service which lets you borrow as many books as you want from Amazon's selection for a flat monthly fee. I have no intention of paying this monthly fee or otherwise using this service outside of my free trial, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to read some (temporarily) free books. So, I am trying to read as many books from the Kindle Unlimited library as I can before my trial runs out.

Some of the books I have been reading during this period are those in Amazon's Disorder collection, a series of short stories and novellas by six different authors. While the individual plots vary, the stories are united thematically in that they each deal with semi-realistic but disturbing and unsettling events. I definitely preferred some stories over others, but so far they have all delivered on their promise to "get inside your head" and provoke feelings of mild to severe horror. In this post, I am going to take you through three of these stories and give you my thoughts on them, with the other three reviews coming in a later post.

Now, before I get into the individual stories, I feel the need to address the unethical elephant in the room: Amazon. Unfortunately, this short story collection is an Amazon original project, meaning that the stories are published by and primarily sold through Amazon. This is a problem, given that I consider Amazon to be a harmful and morally reprehensible company. They monopolise the online shopping market, dodge taxes, and mistreat their workers. I am normally so reluctant to promote their website on my blog that I will even censor the company's name, so you can imagine that I was unsure whether or not to review these books here. 

In the end, I decided to review these books anyway in the interests of supporting the authors, not Amazon. That is not to say that my thought process negates any harm I might be doing by supporting such a horrible company, and I can absolutely respect that some people may not want to purchase these stories due to their proximity to Amazon. It's a sad fact that Amazon's growth has become something of a vicious circle, making it harder and harder for people to avoid interacting with the company, as their market dominance grows and "ethical consumerism" becomes more and more of a challenge (especially for those of us without much money to spare). All of that said, I am very happy to hear others' perspectives on this, especially if you hate Amazon as much as I do and have suggestions for how we can avoid supporting them. 

Also, just to reiterate: the Kindle Unlimited free trial lasts a month and will run for the full 30 days even if you "cancel" it immediately after subscribing, so you won't have to pay any money. Just saying.

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With that out of the way, let's get into specifics. As I mentioned before, the series is comprised of six stories by six different authors. Although the evil A-site lists them in a specific order, as far as I can tell this is arbitrary and the stories can be read in any order you want. I am listing them in the order I read them, so you can see how my perception of each story was impacted by the ones I read before it.  

The Best Girls by Min Jin Lee

This was the book that first piqued my interest in the collection, with an intriguing plot summary and an author who I'd heard great praise for (Min Jin Lee being the author of Pachinko and Free Food for Millionaires, both popular novels). Having now read half of the books in the set, The Best Girls remains my favourite so far. It's a haunting story of gender roles and family sacrifice, specifically how they manifest in Korean culture. I thought this story was powerful and felt very real - perhaps especially because it turned out to be based on a true story. Min Jin Lee's writing is emotionally-affecting without being overly sentimental, and the twist at the end truly shocked me. 

Anonymous by Uzodinma Iweala

This story was a disorientating read, in a way I believe was intentional on the part of the author. It focuses on a Black American man who is stopped by border security upon his arrival back in US. What follows is horrific in its reality, but more so in its apparent meaninglessness and absurdity. Iweala gives a great sense of the helplessness and isolation of the protagonist, made all the more painful by the knowledge that things like this are far from just fiction for people of colour around the world. More than anything else, it is the existential horror of Anonymous's brutality that sticks in my mind.

Ungirls by Lauren Beukes

The plot summary of Ungirls sounded perhaps the most ambitious and definitely the most fascinating of the six stories, which is maybe why the result felt a little disappointing. Dealing with plot points ranging from sex dolls to prostitution to doxxing to mass shootings to Jordan Peterson-esque public speakers (I mean come on, we all know that was meant to be a Peterson clone right?), the story pulled together a lot of threads but fell just short of tying them together. I think Beukes has a lot of fascinating ideas, like the connection of the Barbie Liberation Organisation to sex doll production, but this book didn't quite do them justice. Ungirls would probably have worked better as a full-length novel or a slimmed-down short story. As it is, it sort of awkwardly straddles the two. That said, it was still thought-provoking and I don't regret reading it.

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With that, we have reached the end of Part 1 of this review. Please stay tuned (subscribed?) for the next instalment. In the mean time, please feel free to share your thoughts on these books in the comments. I would also very much like to hear your feelings about Amazon and whether we can use it to purchase books while still remaining ethical. 

Book Review: Technology vs. Humanity by Gerd Leonhard

Following criticism that my previous post was "a clear cop-out" and "not at all relevant to media, as this blog is supposed to be" - most of that criticism coming from the writer herself, but still - I have decided to write a proper, media-centric post this week as an apology. This post will be a review of a book I recently read, Technology vs. Humanity: The Coming Clash Between Man and Machine by Gerd Leonhard.

I bought this book about a month or so ago and only finished it around last week, but I'd been interested in reading it for several years before that. As you can probably tell from the title, Technology vs. Humanity focuses on current and future conflicts between humans and machines, a topic which has long been of interest to me. Leonhard's book tackles this subject in quite a broad fashion, giving general overviews of recent technological progress and suggestions regarding what these advancements could lead to in the future. The author also stresses the philosophical aspect of the issue, discussing the need for ethical guidelines in the development of technology. Leonhard frequently breaks these down into lists, such as "seven existential questions to ask" and "nine suggested principles", which are less doctrinal than they are aimed at promoting conversation around technological ethics. 

For better and worse, Technology vs. Humanity is quite a basic book. Aimed at the general tech-using population rather than experts in the field, it provides a broad overview of relevant topics from technological "megashifts" to digital obesity. In some ways this works to the book's advantage, making it relatively accessible and a good jumping-off point for larger discussions, but a little extra depth (perhaps in the form of more detailed analysis or specific examples) could have taken the book from general to comprehensive. One also doesn't have to read very far into the book before they get the sense that it's moving in a somewhat circular direction, repeating the same points without really building its argument. I feel like you could read any one chapter of the book in isolation and come away with an accurate sense of Leonhard's perspective, without the need to read the rest of it.

Speaking of Leonhard, I did find the self-promotion in the book to be a little jarring. A passage about his concept of HellVen (hell/heaven) is interrupted with "#hellven", seemingly encouraging readers to tweet or otherwise post on social media with this Leonhard-affiliated hashtag. In a section about the need for a global council on technological ethics, the author adds "This writer is happy to chime in!". Even the very end of the book calls the reader to "join the discussion" at two of Leonhard's websites. While I understand the need to promote one's self in today's digital landscape, it felt at times like the author was taking a huge, world-shifting issue and using it for his own career promotion. This sounds a bit harsh, and I'm sure that Leonhard didn't intend it this way, but the effect remains.

While I take minor issue with the way Leonhard presents his perspective (the shallowness of the book, his self-promotion), I would like to say that I do agree with his points. He is clearly someone who has devoted a lot of thought and a deal of research to this issue, and I believe he is genuinely concerned for the implications of this so-called "coming clash between man and machine". I appreciated that he is not afraid to call out the role of capitalism in potential runaway technology, emphasising that the producers of such technology will naturally prioritise profit over ethics. I certainly also support his argument that we need to put in place ethical restrictions, and perhaps in some cases even barriers, to prevent technology from advancing in such a way that it hurts rather than helps humans. We must be sure not to, as Leonhard put it, "pursue efficiency over humanity".

Overall, I would say that Technology vs. Humanity does what it sets out to do, in that it manages to "highlight the challenges, start the debate, and provoke a spirited response" with regard to an issue that is in urgent need of attention. It provides a good introduction to the ethical problems of technological advancement and definitely works as a starting-point for deeper and more detailed discussion. I would recommend this book to those who, like me, don't have a great deal of technological knowledge but are still concerned about (or at least interested in) the impact of technology on the future of humanity. 

4 Short Book Reviews

For the last week or so, I've been on the kind of reading binge which normally only occurs when I'm on holiday and am somehow struck with an insatiable urge to consume as many books as I possibly can. I think the main trigger for this is the fact that my library membership is expiring soon, and as I won't be renewing it, this means that I have to read all the books on my library wishlist before I'm no longer allowed to borrow them.

Since I have been reading so much, I thought that for this week's post I would do a little reading round-up of all the books I've read recently. While not all of these were borrowed through my library, most of them were. Also, with the exception of Wuthering Heights, all of these were read in ebook format. With that out of the way, let's move on to the books.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Ah, the Bronte sisters. Authors of those elusive classic novels which I somehow never get around to reading despite always claiming I intend to. Thanks to Wuthering Heights, I've been able to actually read a second Bronte novel (the first being Jane Eyre), despite buying my copy approximately a year ago. This was an intense, emotional, Gothic read which I highly enjoyed, although in hindsight I wouldn't recommend reading it while ill - every other character seems to fall ill with a minor cold and then die with very little notice. I think Wuthering Heights gets a bad reputation because Heathcliff is romanticised by some, but the book itself makes it pretty clear (to me at least) that the man is a definitely horrible person. Most of the other characters in the book even say as much. Anyway, I liked this book a lot and would love to do some literary analysis of it in the future.

Verdict: darkly fascinating and very dramatic - a Gothic romance legend

Something to Talk About by Meryl Wilsner

I've been seeing loads of hype about this book online, which seems to be one of a few F/F (female-female, for the uninitiated) romance novels which has gone rather mainstream. Of course other books like Carol and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit have been successful too, but this one stands out as a light-hearted, fluffy love story in which there's little gay-related angst and no lesbians being killed. I sped through this novel in about a day, it was so easy to read and entertaining. Just a warning though: there is a sexual harassment plotline in here, which sort of makes sense given the Hollywood setting and it being published in light of #MeToo and #TimesUp, but it caught me a little off guard. 

Verdict: Very cute, very funny, and very gay.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

This is one of those contemporary "modern classics" which I've been meaning to read for ages but only just now got around to. I had high hopes for this novel based on Roy's reputation as a critically-acclaimed writer, and I'm happy to say it didn't disappoint. TGOST is the story of a wealthy but dysfunctional family in Ayemenem in India, focusing particularly on the lives of the twins Estha and Rahel. Themes of forbidden love (prohibited by the "Love Laws", in Roy's words), caste, and classism feature prominently alongside the importance of both the small and big things which impact us in our lives. I felt utterly immersed in the lives of Estha, Rahel, and their various friends and family over the course of the novel, an experience I didn't want to end even when it took devastating turns.

Verdict: Fluid, powerful, and heart-breaking - a justified modern classic.

Bunny by Mona Awad

Out of all the books mentioned in this post, Bunny is probably the weirdest. I read it because I saw it classed as a "dark academia" novel along the lines of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, but it reads more like a hallucinogenic combination of The Island of Doctor Moreau and Heathers, complete with both mean-girl cliques and human-animal hybrids. While it's definitely an interesting, reasonably inventive concept, in practice I didn't find it that fascinating beyond just a surface level "wow, that's kind of messed up". I'm not sure exactly what the author was trying to achieve (horror? comedy? bildungsroman?) so it's hard to judge if they managed to do it. The characters were too flat to be interesting, the satirical takedowns of artistic creator-speak got repetitive, and the ending took the punch out of the rest of the storyline. 

Verdict: Trippy enough to get a few entertaining conversations out of, but too muddled and vague to leave a lasting impression. 

So if you've made it to the end of this post, I will tell you a secret: this isn't actually all the books I've read recently. I just finished reading The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton and have started reading Tokyo Ueno Station by Miri Yu, but I obviously can't write about the latter yet and I feel it would be too rushed to add in the former now. Still, perhaps you can expect a post about them sometime in the near future. 

Until then, please let me know: would you read any of the books above? Which, if any, sound most interesting to you?

Game Review: The 7th Guest

Note: I wrote this post way back in October 2020 and, up until recently, was under the impression that I published it around the same time as part of my Spooky Season series of posts. I have realised now that I did not do this, and in fact this post has been languishing in my drafts for about three months. Luckily for this review though, I have decided to publish it now for the world to see. So if you will excuse the seasonal anachronisms, I hope you can still find some enjoyment in it.

It's not very often that I can say I remember playing a game when it first came out, and I definitely can't say that in the case of The 7th Guest, a point-and-click horror puzzle game I completed earlier this month. Released in 1993, The 7th Guest came out a few years before I was even born, let alone able to use a computer. While 27 years isn't that old for something like a book or a movie, for a medium that advances technologically as quickly as video games do, something like The 7th Guest can seem extremely dated to modern players. 

Paradoxically, the fact that The 7th Guest was on the cutting edge of video game development at the time of its release, particularly with regard to its graphics, means that it has in some ways aged even worse than other games produced at a similar or even earlier date. Unlike retro arcade games like Mario or Pac-Man, with distinctive but simplistic and ultimately unrealistic design styles, The 7th Guest leans more towards the realist end of things. It uses 3D graphics for most of the game, interspersed with live action video clips that are overlaid onto the CGI backgrounds to create cutscenes. While innovative at the time they were first used, it is these clips that stick out most as indicators of the game's age - for better or for worse.

I mention all of this not because I think the game should be discounted because of its graphics - on the contrary, I believe it's a mark of a good game if it can hold the player's attention without depending on flashy visuals - but because I know this is the first thing people are likely to notice when seeing this game. For some people, that will be enough to put them off entirely. Others may find a certain charm in the game's visuals, while many people might simply be indifferent. In short, I thought it was worth noting.

Apart from the graphics, for me the most famous part of The 7th Guest appeared to be its story. The game has the player character (who we do not see and who has no memory of how they came to be in the house) exploring the mansion of famed toymaker Henry Stauf, where they must solve puzzles and attempt to discover what strange and ghastly events took place there in the past. These events are slowly revealed to the player through the cutscenes I mentioned earlier, which show six guests arriving to the mansion. They have been invited for mysterious reasons, and it is only as the game progresses that we find out the true purpose of their visit. Don't let the video game setting of this story fool you into thinking this is a child-friendly tale - it's a full-blown horror story, complete with some decidedly adult themes. Even though the scariness of the cutscenes is occasionally mitigated by the graphics aging poorly or the acting veering into campy territory, the horror of the story itself has stood the test of time.

The player begins the game with only some of the rooms in the house unlocked, with the rest opening gradually as you solve the puzzles in each area. While I'm sure there are people out there who have had a totally different experience to me, I found these puzzles ranged in difficulty from pleasantly challenging to infuriatingly difficult. With one exception (which we will get to shortly), I managed to solve all of the puzzles without resorting to finding solutions on the internet, although I will admit I did have to do some research just to find out what I was meant to be aiming for in each puzzle, which seems to be part of the challenge. If you ever find these puzzles too difficult to move past, an in-game clue book will provide you with hints or (after checking it three times) eventually solve the puzzle for you. In-keeping with the theme of Stauf's toymaking, most of these puzzles (aside perhaps from the infamous "soup can" puzzle) are inspired by children's toys and classic puzzle games, which I thought was a nice touch and added to the game's immersiveness. 

The one puzzle I had to get the clue book to solve for me was the so-called "Microscope Puzzle", which has apparently acquired a level of infamy undiminished by the decades that have passed since its creation. Unlike the other puzzles in the game, this one pits you against a hideously difficult AI in a game of something similar to Reversi. I spent much longer on this puzzle than I am willing to admit, and in fact I only gave up after I recruited a gaming expert friend to help me with it and found even she couldn't get close to solving the puzzle. Having looked up this particular puzzle more after finishing the game, I'm starting to think solving it without resorting to the clue book is so rare as to be almost an urban legend. That said, if anyone is able to beat the puzzle and can tell me what clip is shown after doing so, I would love to know. 

As I mentioned before, The 7th Guest is an effectively immersive game, thanks in large part to its previously un-mentioned music. Composed by George Alistair Sanger, AKA The Fat Man, the soundtrack to The 7th Guest is so good that I would gleefully add it to my hallowed Halloween playlist if only it were available on Spotify (for now, we will have to content ourselves with YouTube). Featuring leitmotifs for different rooms as well as each major character, the music brings the setting of Stauf's eerie mansion to life - sinister, mysterious, and tauntingly playful by turns. It is a testament to the quality of the soundtrack that, even after spending over an hour on a single puzzle with the same song playing on repeat in the background, it never became annoying. I am listening to the soundtrack even as I write this now, proving that The Fat Man's score works in and out of the game.

In conclusion, The 7th Guest is considered a classic game for a reason, and it has a lot to offer if you go into it knowing what to expect. You might not get (modern-day) cutting edge graphics or a plot that answers all of your questions, but your sacrifice of those elements will be rewarded with brain-stretching puzzles, a frightening story, and a hauntingly good soundtrack.

***

PS: After writing this, I realised that the version of The 7th Guest I played is no longer available on Steam, although I believe it is likely the same as the "Legacy Edition" now being offered as downloadable content for The 7th Guest: Anniversary Edition. This is only an educated guess, though, and I can offer no guarantees as to their similarity. 

Book Review: Goodbye Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto

My copy of Goodbye Tsugumi - the colour looks

a bit different in real life.

A few years ago, probably when I was around the age of 16 or 17, I became mildly obsessed with the novel Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. Somehow this fixation managed to develop without my having actually read or even bought a copy of the book. Maybe I was afraid that the experience of reading it wouldn't live up to my expectations of Kitchen, but when I finally did I was relieved to find that it was everything I'd hoped for. It was beautiful, sensitive, and powerful, and it immediately made me want to go and read everything else Yoshimoto had ever written. And then I didn't.

Aside from one short story of hers (Newlywed), I didn't get around to reading anything else by Yoshimoto until just last month, when I finally bought a copy of another one of her novels: Goodbye Tsugumi. If anticipation of disappointment was what kept me from reading Kitchen originally, it was definitely still in the back of my mind when reading Goodbye Tsugumi. Nothing could change how much I'd loved Kitchen, but what if I hated this other novel so much that my opinion of the author was forever changed? Luckily, I'm glad that I took the risk and did read it.

Before I get into what I thought of the book, I'd like to give a little background. First of all, if you were not already aware, Banana Yoshimoto is a Japanese author. I don't read any more than a tiny amount of Japanese, so I have always read the English translations of her work rather than the originals - a habit that can come with its own issues, as I will address later. As far as I can tell, Goodbye Tsugumi (called simply Tsugumi or TUGUMI in Japanese, I think) is her fourth novel, having been published in 1989 but only translated into English in 2002. The edition I read was published by Faber and Faber with a translation by Michael Emmerich. 

Speaking of my edition of the book: I personally think that the Faber and Faber editions of Yoshimoto's novels are really lovely, which is especially notable given that it's become a sort of running joke that the international editions of her work are often given bizarre or unappealing covers, to the point that she actually has a gallery of some of these on her website. The Faber and Faber covers are simple but beautiful, done in blocks of colour with the original title of the book in Japanese characters on the front - thank you to Didier for translating the kanji on the front of Goodbye Tsugumi, by the way. My copy of Kitchen is also from this collection, and it's a vibrant pink colour that goes nicely with GT's dark purple. You can see a photo of the Faber and Faber edition of GT near the beginning of this post, although I suggest googling more photos if you want to get a better idea of the colour - I took that photo in artificial light and the shades came out a bit strange.

Moving on to the content of the book now. There's actually not that much I have to say about GT, because I genuinely loved it. When I respect and admire an author, I find it hard to write a review for their books, mostly because I feel I am somehow unworthy of passing judgement on their work. This obviously wasn't the case in my review of American Psycho, but it is true here. 

It has been a while since I last read Kitchen, but I can say that GT shares many similar themes with its predecessor, which I get the sense might recur throughout Yoshimoto's work: grief, nostalgia, ideas of home and family, and of course youth. There is a reason why Yoshimoto has been referred to as "the voice of young Japan", after all, and I think it's because she is so good at depicting that peculiar uncertainty which comes with early adulthood, which is important in both Kitchen and Goodbye Tsugumi.

There is another emotion that Yoshimoto is brilliant at depicting, and that is something which I believe is known in Japanese as mono no aware. This is apparently translated to English as "the pathos of things", and I've seen it compared to the concepts of memento mori and lacrimae rerum, similarly evocative but untranslatable phrases. I apologise if I'm butchering the meaning here, and I am very willing to be corrected by someone who knows more about Japanese culture and language, but my understanding is that mono no aware is a sense of sadness or melancholy felt when confronted with impermanence, be it in life or the material world around us. 

Goodbye Tsugumi is suffused with this type of feeling, of nostalgia and a bittersweet type of happiness, where joy is tinged with sadness by the knowledge that whatever happy experience is happening now must eventually come to an end. That this would be the most prominent emotion in GT makes sense, given that its plot follows a Tokyo university student named Maria who returns to her childhood home to spend one last summer with her cousin, the titular Tsugumi, whose family run a seaside inn. Tsugumi is chronically ill with an unnamed condition, and the threat of her death constantly hangs over her family and friends. They all live alongside Tsugumi with the knowledge that each day could possibly be her last. At the same time, Tsugumi's parents have decided to sell the family inn and retire away from the town in which Maria and Tsugumi have grown up. So when Maria returns to the town for one last summer, it is with a mix of nostalgia and a constant sense of impending loss. Although she has a seemingly bright future ahead of her, living in Tokyo with her parents, Maria is always aware that she is about to lose her childhood home and possibly to lose Tsugumi, her childhood best friend. 

The beauty of Yoshimoto's writing is that she succeeds again and again in making the personal, universal. While Maria's situation is unique - the family inn, growing up in a seaside town, having a terminally ill cousin - we can all relate to the emotions she feels. No doubt most of us have experienced that kind of half-melancholy, the pre-emptive nostalgia of being happy and yet knowing that it inevitably can't last. I've seen a few novels attempt to depict this feeling, and I know even fewer that have done it well. Some books fall into the trap of over-idealising the past or jumping straight to tragedy. Yoshimoto's skill lies in her ability to portray complex emotions in a way that is both delicate and moving, and in Goodbye Tsugumi she does that brilliantly. 

I only have one minor criticism of the book, and it is to do with the translation. Or at least, I think it is. The trouble with reading works in translation is that you are aware that you are not experiencing a text in the exact words of the author but rather through the eyes of a translator, and if you cannot read the original version as well as the translation, you are left wondering where the author's writing ends and the translator's interpretation begins. This is my problem with Goodbye Tsugumi, specifically with its dialogue, and particularly with the dialogue of the character of Tsugumi. I believe that in the original text Tsugumi must have spoken in a way that was very informal and borderline disrespectful to her elders, which was no doubt a challenge for Emmerich to translate. Unfortunately, Emmerich seems to have tried to solve the problem by making Tsugumi speak like a parody of an American teenager. She calls people "kid" and "babe" and uses phrases like "this is the pits" and "talk about dumb with a capital D". I understand that translating what was likely colloquial Japanese would have been hard, but the (to me) obvious Americanness of Tsugumi's dialogue is rather jarring. Funnily enough, I had this exact same problem with the novel Naoko by Keigo Higashino, which was translated by Kerim Yasar, so perhaps this a standard translation practice when going from Japanese to English? I wouldn't dismiss GT based on this one issue, especially as I believe it is a translation problem rather than the fault of the author, and to be honest I did become less aware of it as the novel went on. That said, I'm still very curious about why this happens in translations of Japanese novels and if it is widespread and/or intentional. I'm probably going to try to research this in the future, so if I find out anything enlightening I'll add a note to this post.

Verdict: Goodbye Tsugumi is another brilliant novel by Banana Yoshimoto, one which might well challenge Kitchen's place in my heart if I didn't believe I had enough room in there for the both of them. Although the English rendering of Tsugumi's dialogue is distracting at best, it wasn't enough to prevent me from enjoying this otherwise wonderful depiction of nostalgia, love, and the passage of time. 

Book Review: American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

TW: discussion of violence and sexual assault

In the evening light of a July sunset, this is how I spend a few hours: I read my paperback copy of American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, published by Picador. I have a cup of tea made from Earl Grey teabags from Twinings, which I drink out of a white mug I bought from Sainsbury's. If it's late in the evening I would usually drink Clipper's organic white tea, but it is still early now so I am drinking Earl Grey instead. I use some cushions from Asda to prop myself up and put a fleece blanket from Primark over my legs. Primark is a good place for blankets because the fleece they use-

Okay, I can't do this anymore. How did you feel, reading the passage above? Vaguely amused? Confused? Bored?  If you felt any of those emotions, then you have some idea how I felt while reading American Psycho. To spoil the end of this post: I didn't like it.

You might be familiar with the plot of American Psycho from the rather famous 2000 film adaptation, which starred Christian Bale. Fun fact: Christian Bale's stepmother is Gloria Steinem, who apparently opposed the book based on its graphic depictions of violence against women. To be fair to Steinem, there is a lot of violence in the novel, which follows Patrick Bateman - Wall Street yuppie and titular, self-declared "psychopath" - as he alternates between living a life of extreme materialism and decadence among his other young, wealthy friends, and brutally torturing and murdering innocent people. Ellis writes all of this in what has become an iconic style: a coldly detached, stream-of-consciousness narrative littered with brand names and 80s references. I have made a poor attempt to satirise it in the italicised paragraph at the top of this post, but to get a real taste for it you only need to find a copy of the book, open it, and read a page at random. One good thing I can say about Ellis is that it must have taken a fair amount of dedication and focus to maintain that narrative voice for the entirety of this almost-400-page novel.

Unfortunately, it's that same commitment to one particular gimmick that ultimately costs American Psycho its appeal. When I first started to read the book, I was rather charmed by its style. I thought it was a great example of "Show, Don't Tell", very clearly showing the reader how extreme Bateman's obsession with material goods was without explicitly stating it. Ellis is quite good at depicting the world Bateman inhabits, of shallow fixations and excess, which he is able to render humorously yet believably. It's not the sort of lifestyle I have any experience with, so I can't say how accurate Ellis's version of Wall Street's yuppie world is, but I know that Bateman's interactions with his peers were some of the most entertaining parts of the novel for me. I enjoyed reading the original "business card scene", in which Bateman and his colleagues exchange cards and obsess over minor differences in font and background colour, that I had previously only been aware of through the film adaptation. A prolonged section of dialogue in which Bateman and his friends make a futile attempt to decide where to eat one evening was also amusing. Episodes like these are where Ellis is at his best, depicting a world where the characters' preoccupation with absurdly trivial details, like the font of a business card or which restaurant to have dinner at (taking into account where is considered trendy or where they have been seen recently, rather than something less important, like the food). It's funny and clever enough to be a relatively good satire, and it is scenes like this which give me some idea of what Ellis might have been aiming to achieve in writing American Psycho.

That said, the aforementioned scenes only come to maybe a dozen pages in a book that is nearly 400 pages long. I have referenced the length of the novel before, and I stress this point because it is the root of many of the problems with American Psycho. I was entertained by the first few chapters when reading, but the charm started to wear a little thin by around the 50 page mark. Ellis does well to skewer a particular brand of 80s consumerism in those first 50 pages - the problem is that he then continues to stab at it for the next 330. This brings me to the other infamous aspect of the book: the violence. The problem I have with American Psycho's violence is more or less the same issue I have with its attempt at satire: after a while, it's just a bit boring. The only difference is that where Ellis's yuppie meet-ups are unsettling insofar as they depict a group of nauseatingly privileged people, whose hobbies include tormenting the homeless and cutting lines with their American Express cards until the coke stops them working, the murder scenes are disturbing because of their explicit and sadistically creative brutality. Different, but ultimately the same; they're both unpleasant, and they're both fairly uninteresting.

Since it has been the subject of feminist criticism in the past, I'd like to take a slight detour from the body of this review to address the nature of the violence in American Psycho. First of all, I fully agree with claims that the various scenes of murder, torture, and sexual assault have an unmistakably misogynistic angle to them. Most of Bateman's victims are women and much of the violence in the book is heavily sexualised. This is not to say that misogyny is the only type of hatred driving these crimes - Bateman gets his fair share of racism and homophobia in as well - but violence against women is by far the most frequently and explicitly depicted. The descriptions of Bateman's murders are disturbing enough in their own right, but they would be even more horrifying if I felt that Ellis had written them purely as filler scenes for the readers to get some sort of enjoyment out of. ("Oh, he's torturing that woman with a live rat? How delightful!"). Thankfully, I don't think this is what Ellis intended - although a quick scan of reviews for the book on Google will show that many people do in fact get some kind of perverse pleasure out of these scenes. Rather, I think he wrote them to prove a point, which most likely goes something along the lines of: consumerism is so bad that an incredibly wealthy man like Bateman has become so emotionally numb that he's actually become a serial killer. Something like that. Wikipedia has a whole section devoted to themes and interpretation of the book, but it all comes down to a similar argument. 

To clarify: I'm fine with violence in media, but it has to serve a purpose. Broadly speaking, that purpose can either be: 1. to entertain and/or amuse (as in Tarantino's over-the-top, comic violence in his films), or 2. to prove an ethical or thematic point (as in most media which chooses to graphically portray aspects of the Holocaust). The cardinal sin of American Psycho, in my opinion, is that it fails to do either particularly well. I'm willing to admit that the more gruesome parts of the book made me feel nauseous, as I imagine and hope they were supposed to. I have read plenty of other books which disturbed and horrified me, but they usually felt like it was in service of something. When I finished reading this novel, I just felt that I'd repeatedly put myself off my dinner for no real reason. Maybe I am being too shallow, but it seemed to me that any point Ellis was trying to make could easily have been achieved in a short story, and it needn't have been dragged out and flogged to death over the course of an entire novel.

In short, I didn't like American Psycho. Although there are a few examples of wit that shine through, most of the book alternates between being tedious, gross, or both. I might have been able to understand the violent misogyny and general hatred depicted if it had been done well or for a good reason, but it comes across as the half-baked attempt of a young writer using sensationalism to establish himself as his generation's literary enfant terrible - an attempt which, by many accounts, was bizarrely successful. Sadly, reading the result of this attempt feels like being forced to watch torture porn narrated by Ronald Reagan, while simultaneously being whacked over the head with a copy of The Great Gatsby - not fun, not subtle, and not particularly clever.

Verdict: 2/5 stars