Best of 2011 Countdown: #10

Top 10 Time!

Gianna:

Timeless Mexico
Hugo Brehme, Susan Toomey Frost
UT Press

Hugo Brehme (German born) worked in Mexico from 1905 until his death in 1954.  [Was he falsely accused of killing his wife, then went to prison where he created a library, then escaped by digging a tunnel through the wall and crawling through sewage, and end up in Mexico?  Whoops, wrong story.  Continue.] He created an idyllic vision of Mexico that influenced photography, film, and literature for a hundred years (specifically Manuel Alvares Bravo and Gabriel Figueroa).  Brehme began printing and distributing his images on postcards (collectible postcards) and these became so popular that when tourists would visit and didn’t happen upon a group of Mexican men in sombreros holding swords, just like the photograph of Pancho Villa's horsemen, they would think…huh…this must not be the real place.

Brehme was famous for photographing everything from the Mexican Revolution, to architecture, to people, to beautiful landscapes (landscapes are what he loved to photograph the most). The photographs in this book are wide ranging and absolutely gorgeous. It is my favorite book on the University of Texas Press fall list, and any photography lover will want this. [I love to take pictures of my cat!]

Susan Toomey Frost, who has collected Brehme's photography for many years, provides an illuminating introduction to his life and work. She also describes his practice of printing and distributing his photographs as collectible postcards.

Liz:

The Buddha in the Attic
Julie Otsuka
Knopf

I wrote about The Buddha in the Attic several weeks back, right before the announcement of the National Book Awards, as it was a well-deserved finalist for that prize.  Julie Otsuka has managed to capture the stories of a whole generation of Japanese women in an amazingly short 120 page novella.  This book is a marvel.

Starting at the turn of the century and continuing to the advent of World War II, Otsuka tells the story of the women who came to the United States as mail-order brides for Japanese-American men.  They were promised bankers, lawyers, doctors, and universally, a better life.  These were widowed women, poor women, trampy women (Gianna), plain women, smart women, dumb women, girls, old maids--the whole range of female citizenry in the Empire.  And they were sold a bill of goods.  Upon arrival, they discovered that their husbands were miners, laborers, farmers, pickers.  Still, they persevered and built strong foundations for their children.

Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic succeeds in accomplishing what few novels even attempt--telling a story about a group of people without narrowing to specific characters.  Nonetheless, at the end the reader has an appreciation for individual struggles, and a further appreciation for this talented writer.  I really believe that this book is one that everyone should read.

Julie Otsuka--Little Books, Big Books

Julie Otsuka

The 2011 National Book Award is announced this week and two Random House titles--The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht and The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka--are nominated for the prestigious fiction prize.  I (Liz) had read The Tiger's Wife back in March, and it is generally considered the odds favorite.  I'd overlooked reading Julie Otsuka's work, though, and this weekend decided that I should catch up with one of the books last year's winner, Jaimy Gordon, predicted might be an upset winner.  Being the crazy book fiend I am though (see: Operation Chuck), I read both The Buddha in the Attic and Otsuka's earlier book, When the Emperor Was Divine.

How to read two books in just over 24 hours?  It helps when both books are under 150 pages in length.  I'm not a speed reader--really, I'm not.  I just don't sleep.  I started with When the Emperor Was Divine, Otsuka's earlier book.  Emperor has become a classroom favorite along the lines of Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird, and it's not difficult to see why.  This is the story of a family of Japanese Americans who are evacuated to internment camps in World War II.  These characters--a mother, son, daughter, and absent husband who was taken to an enemy combatant camp--are relatively anonymous, archetypal.  The experiences they face are characteristic of those endured during one of the greatest civil rights atrocities in US history, and the absence of character names makes these stories feel universal and profound in their ordinariness.  I was also struck by Julie Otsuka's ability to write beautiful sentences with relatively simple vocabulary.  I'm not a language lover like the wannabe poets out there; my book love usually is character-related.  Still, I noted the vocabulary of this book and the beauty of her sentences.  This is a book that a high school student can read and appreciate, a book that challenges and educates and moves.

After finishing When the Emperor Was Divine, I picked up Otsuka's NBA-nominated, new novel, The Buddha in the Attic.  In one sense, Buddha is a prequel to Emperor, in that the time frame involved begins in 1919 and moves up to the Japanese internment in World War II.  However, while Emperor used a family to relate a more universal experience for Japanese Americans, Buddha uses a different tact.  This is a novel without specifics--it's the story of a whole group of Japanese women who come to the United States as mail order brides.  They are city girls, country girls, educated girls, innocent children, old maids, younger sisters too plain to become geishas.  They come to the US to meet husbands who were allegedly bankers, lawyers, business owners...but who are farm hands, day laborers.  These are women learning to survive in a foreign land.  In 120+ pages, Julie Otsuka manages to capture 25 years of struggle and strength for an entire subset of the population, and again she's captured beauty.  This little book is great.  If it manages to win the National Book Award, I won't be protesting, but even if it doesn't, The Buddha in the Attic is worth reading.