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.

They Were Robbed! Part 2

Ask me what my favorite novel of the year was, and the answer is simple and fast to my lips: The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer.  I read it almost a full year ago (it went on sale in June) and yet it still sticks with me, one of those books that ruins reading anything else immediately afterward.  For that reason I was truly peeved that this wonderful book wasn't nominated for the National Book Award, so I'm hereby nominating it as a Slappy Award recipient.  As discussed in our last post, the Slappy is our fake award--you get a trophy! (there is no trophy)--for the best books of the year that weren't nominated for the prestigious National Book Award, and named after the Liz and Gianna dorky antics making fun of Gianna's short stature while at sales conference last March.  Gianna is definitely not a basketball player with that pathetic vertical leaping ability.  I mean, I'm not THAT tall.  She's should put a little effort into that flailing leap of hers and high five a woman.  Sheesh. 

Where was I?  Right.  Orringer.

I loved The Invisible Bridge.  It's an epic story of a young Hungarian who wins a scholarship to study architecture in Paris during the 1930's.  While there he falls in love with a fellow Hungarian expatriate, a dancer, and they wed.  With the advent of World War II, though, their lives are thrown in turmoil, and when they need to renew their visas, they find themselves trapped in Nazi-occupied Hungary for

the duration of the world.  I should mention that they are Jewish.  This is a war story, a Holocaust story, a love story, a family saga, but the book transcends these pigeon-holing categories.  There are so many places where the story or characters could veer off course and effectively ruin a fast-paced, engaging, literary reading experience, but Orringer deftly navigated the pitfalls and kept her story moving while building tension and making her characters both sympathetic and realistic. 

I struggle to find a fault with The Invisible Bridge.  The critics loved this book, I loved it, book groups should devour it for years to come, and I only wish the National Book Award judges had granted my clutched-to-my-heart wish that Julie Orringer walk on stage in November to accept her award.  Sigh.

They Were Robbed! Part One



It's a swing!...and a miss. Poor Gianna.



The nominees for the National Book Award were announced a couple of weeks ago, and like any other list, everyone has an opinion about this one, too, including your intrepid book reps.  I will not condemn the books that made the list--I haven't yet had much of an opportunity to read the non-Random House titles (I have read Parrot & Olivier in America, Peter Carey's historical fiction of an Alexis de Tocqueville-like character and his rascal companion).  Before the list was announced, though, Gianna and I had speculated on the books we read this year that we felt were worthy of consideration for one of the top literary prizes of the year.  Let's call our award the Slappy after the dorky high five Gianna and I shared on stage at our sales conference last March, as the diminutive Gianna flailed at my freakishly tall, fully extended arm.  We are not above company-wide dorkiness, particularly when lots of wine and barely edible conference food contribute to a sense of either ephemerality or indestructibility.

The first Slappy nomination for fiction published in 2010 goes to:

Jennifer Egan for A Visit from the Goon Squad.  We had the pleasure of meeting Egan at the Texas Book Festival a few weeks ago, and I'm pleased to say that she was personable, modest, brilliant, and charming.  Even if she'd been a Russell Crowe with her admiring public, though, I would still love her as the woman who wrote one of my favorite books of the 2000's, Look at Me.  That earlier book was nominated for the National Book Award (the same year that Jonathan Franzen won for The Corrections and other nominees for fiction included Dan Chaon, Louise Erdrich, and Susan Straight) and her latest, a group of linked short stories, received strong bookseller and review praise.  One of my booksellers at BookPeople in Austin even bet me that Egan would win the NBA this year. 

A Visit from the Goon Squad loosely centers around a music executive, Bennie, and his kleptomaniac girlfriend Sasha.  The stories reveal the characters' through time and across continents with a musical undercurrent binding them together.  Egan is a masterful creator of engaging characters and she doesn't shy away from telling stories innovatively; one story is told as a Power Point presentation, for example. 

Another reason Jennifer Egan is cool--check out her website: http://www.jenniferegan.com/.  The site includes lots of tidbits about how and where she wrote A Visit from the Goon Squad as well as songs that accompany the stories in the book.  From Led Zeppelin to Coldplay to Pink Floyd to George Michael to Bjork, the music that influenced the writing adds a depth to her process.  Not to mention that you have to give credit to a woman who would publicly reveal that she listened to David Gray (or am I the only one who finds him whiny?).  She's a gutsy, amazingly astute writer and definitely deserving of an awkward, flailing high five from a freakishly tall rep.