.:. Another Likely Story

I've posted a translation, by yours truly, of a humorous short story by Sanmao (三毛), a famous Taiwanese writer (links go to English/Chinese biographies).  She lived an exciting life, albeit one that ended in tragedy, and she wrote about a lot of it in clear, clever prose.  This short story, "The Chinese Restaurant In The Middle Of The Desert," comes from a time that she was living with her husband, Jose, in what is now the Western Sahara.  An excerpt:

The first course I made was chicken soup with vermicelli. Whenever Jose came home he'd always yell "get something going, I'm starving!" In the end, the sole result of his years of devotion was a daily demand for food without even a glance towards his beloved spouse -- though this did mean that I didn't need to trouble myself over any possible loss of looks after matrimony. Anyway, as I was saying, the first thing I made was chicken vermicelli soup. He drank some and said, "Huh, what is this? Chinese noodles?"

"Would your mother-in-law mail noodles from so far away? Of course not."

"What is it? Give me some more, it's great."

I picked some up with chopsticks. "This here is called 'rain.'"

"Rain?" He looked at me blankly.

Like I said, my philosophy is to pretty much do as I like in marriage, so I just said whatever inspired me and came to mind. "See, these are formed from the first rains in spring that fall in the high mountaintops and freeze there. People who live there pick the rain and carry it down the mountains in bundles and trade it for rice wine. It's not that easy to buy, you know!"

Jose stared at me blankly some more. Then he peered at me, then at the "rain," and said, "Do you take me for an idiot?"

I kept my face blank. "Do you want some more or not?"

"Yes I do, you goddamn liar."

Since then he's eaten quite a bit of "rain," and I still think he has no idea what it is. Sometimes I ponder to myself that Jose is kind of dumb, and that does make me a bit sad.

You can read the rest of "The Chinese Restaurant In The Middle Of The Desert" (2300 words) here.  If you catch any mistakes or have any comments, please feel free to comment and let me know.  Thank you for reading!

Most writers'/authors' blogs actually give writing advice, and I figured that I should probably do that too - give back to the people who've inspired and given me advice by passing it forward. But most of what I know has, of course, already been covered 1000000x on the internet and I don't think anybody wants to see it here again.

I do have a little bit of advice though that I think bears repeating, and that I don't see all the time.

The better you get at writing, the harder it becomes. You see all your pitfalls and mistakes (past and present) that much more clearly, and you feel that much more pressure to fix them, and that much more grief that things just don't seem to be as good as you know they can be.

But this is a good thing, because if you stop being able to see what's ahead of you, then that means you've gone as far as you can. Not that I think anybody ever needs to worry about reaching that point.  Remember what Murakami said: there exists no such thing as a perfect sentence. Just as there exists no such thing as perfect despair.

It gets harder, but it comes with the guarantee of getting better.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go beat my head against my laptop. Cheers!

I've updated my website with a page linking to some fiction that's been posted online.

I Have The Right To Destroy Myself, by Young-ha Kim

A note: Young-ha Kim has written a whole lot of other things, many of which are nothing like this book, so this review does not generalize to the rest of Kim's works.

I bought this along with The Other Side Of Dark Remembrance.  I didn't like this book nearly as much, although I attribute that to being totally out of the targeted audience, rather than actual lack of merit.  I do recommend this book to people who would enjoy it.  It's seriously stream-of-consciousness, wandering here and there, so be forewarned.  I probably wouldn't have bought the book if I'd actually known what I was in for, so I file this one under Broadening My Reading Horizons.

Also, I'd like to note, that's the catchiest title I've seen in ages.

The premise is revealed very early on so I don't consider this a spoiler.  The arguable protagonist is a nameless man who gets paid to help people commit suicide.  He wines & dines and chats them up and tries to nudge them towards offing themselves and paying him for the consultation.  Kim isn't a psychologist (for all that the characters' motivations are about as opaque as those from a Russian novel, this isn't one), but he's very good at at character, at portraying how a number of different people are all detached from the world, seeking anything that can heighten reality for themselves, and by the way are completely perverse/disturbed/delusional in their own ways.

At one point the narrator tells an outrageous story to a woman and she is implied to believe it.  Then the internal dialogue kicks in:

Sometimes fiction is easier to understand than true events.  Reality is often pathetic.  I learned at a very young age that it was easier to make up stories to make a point.  I enjoy creating stories.  The world is filled with fiction anyway.

Death is the ultimate reality that the narrator's clients find in the book, and the only solid anchor in the entire story.

Picked up Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy/In The Labyrinth, I don't know what possessed me to give this a try. Maybe I've been reading too much Eco? But here I am, and sunken cost fallacy be damned I will finish this book. Barthes' intro essay was interesting (and I haven't read Morrissette's or Minor's essays, sorry I went for the name I recognized) although it took 2000 more words than necessary to say that Robbe-Grillet has the amazing skill of writing a novel like one might write problems in a mathematical text, ie, when he describes something you don't really take it in as anything more than factual phenomena. Why is the table 1m wide? It just is and to think otherwise is to miss the point.*

Which is I suppose is legit an achievement, since most writers tune the mood of the world up or down to accompany their story. One might think that at the worst end of the scale sits dystopic fiction writers who make it feel like the universe is out to get you -- but Robbe-Grillet's universe is at the absolute zero: there exists no meaning one way or another, which in a sense is even harsher and colder than the universe's boot in your face.

* for the record: I don't agree with this universe; I agree with William Gibson (and I can't for the life of me remember the interview where he said this) that you can pick up a mass-manufactured disposable hot coffee container and write a whole book on how its materials, dimensions, and other specifications came to be. But that's a ramble for another day.