week_in_readings(5???-aug22.2021)

[fwcu]

honestly I feel like I'm in some kind of hell because my mind is simply just replying olivia rodigro's crooning parts in deja vu and it's like. god please. not this. anyway I've been reading some books, except I'm not capable of writing out my thoughts on them
some cuts. I'm not sure they make any sense out of context. sorry if they seem to have a recurring theme.

Pachinko - Min Jin Lee

Etsuko stood there, believing that if she could just listen and suffer, then maybe her daughter could be saved.

“I am terrible. Soo desu. Forgive me, Hana. Anything but this.”

Hana dropped her large tote bag from her shoulder, and the two wine bottles wrapped in a towel made a muffled clinking sound on the pavement. She wept openly, her arms hanging by her side, and Etsuko knelt on the ground and held her daughter’s knees, refusing to let her go.

Celestial Bodies - Jokha Alharthi (trans. Marilyn Booth)

I remembered her mother's wailing. He beats her? She said he beats her? The peasant's son beats my daughter, mine? And what kind of man beats his wife? In all of al-Awafi I have never heard of anyone beating his wife except for that old drunk Furayh. He used to come home soused and throw up on her, and then he would start hitting her. And so this educated 'dokhtoor' - as he calls himself, hah - is just another version of Furayh the drunk? He beats her? The peasant's son beats my girl? No one ever put his hand on me and no one put his hand on my mother or my sisters, and now this dog comes and beats my little girl? What a scandal we must look amongst all the tribes, every clan, our own, out in the open. The man our daughter is already legally married to, even if, thank the Lord, they haven't moved in together, and Furayh the drunk - they're cut from the same cloth? By God, if only he had never set eyes on her! By God, he's divorcing her today and he'd better do it fast.

I also read: Kafka on the Shore, Annals of the Western Shore, Emma, some of Genji.

Comments

postnote

[fwcu]

both of these were really good. celestial bodies, just due to esoteric narration, is harder to appreciate. if you don't have respect for women, nor understanding for them, I don't think either story would mean very much to you.

hana my meow meow </3

[bonda]

ahhhh i just wanted to say i finished reading pachinko earlier this year and the themes were so good and every storyline so heartbreaking in one way or another....i can't stop thinking about the line that went smth like "a woman's lot is to suffer" like that rly is The Theme and once i figured that out all these other books i've read suddenly fell into this theme: circe, fingersmith, and so on and so forth....also hana is one of my faves in pachinko i was soooo distraught reading her storyline and it's the one i remember the most TT__TT

lmfao sorry for personal feminism rant I'm about to make u read

[fwcu]

okay honestly I disagree with that being the theme... I think if the book was just about >a woman's lot is to suffer< it wouldn't have been as good.

to me, the most striking realization of that line is that it's repeated a fair few times throughout the book, but at the last instance, it's followed by >we teach our daughters that they must suffer, but we don't teach our sons<. if anything, that acknowledges the strength of character of the daughters, the shortsightedness of how men are raised, and points out the weakness of men, and it's due to how they are unable to handle suffering on their own, that they take it out on the women around them. it acknowledges what went wrong in their stories and where it went wrong.

women suffering is a reasonable start point, but to end it there just degrades what it means to be a woman honestly. and I think the book does all it can to defeat that notion. it acknowledges that we're given an unfair hand and that it undercuts what we're able to do, but regardless of that, we're worthy of being given the attention and acknowledgement, even if all we are, are 'just' mothers and daughters and wives. sungja being the central character that we always return back to - even though she's contrasted by all these men who have far more 'interesting' or 'successful' stories, is the most meaningful acknowledgement of this.

and the reason why hana's story also stood out to me, and is the one that stays with me most as well [something we agree on!], is that by all metrics, both in a story and in real life, she's worthless. she's a stupid girl who fucked up her life and screwed up at every opportunity possible. she was terrible to everyone around her, she ended up as a prostitute and an alcoholic and trash. and still to the people who loved her, she was important. and still to the story, and the author, she was worth including and writing about. not as a lesson or a tragedy, but as a person and a woman. she was allowed her dignity and respect til the last moment, and that's what strikes me most about her story and the book.

I'm not saying that women don't suffer. I just think the point of womanhood is not that. and the point of the book also isn't that the worth in these women and their stories were due to their suffering, but simply because they were women and their stories have worth just like anyone else's.

[bonda]

haha sorry i guess i misled with that, i didn't mean that was the ONLY theme, just that it was the theme that really stuck out to me because i felt like my heart broke 3000 times reading each character's arc >_< i don't think books only have one theme, i just find that particular sentiment to be very prominent and what i thought about most afterward!! i like ur take on hana, it's been like a year since i finished the book so my memory's a bit off but i just remember reading solomon's pov and seeing how he always cared about her no matter how she looked or acted, that really shredded my heart TT__TT

"I'm not saying that women don't suffer. I just think the point of womanhood is not that. and the point of the book also isn't that the worth in these women and their stories were due to their suffering, but simply because they were women and their stories have worth just like anyone else's." i didn't say any of this and i agree i don't think that's what the book was trying to say at all!! i just think the woman's-lot-is-to-suffer idea was drilled in a lot, is all. not that it's the only thing womanhood has to offer.