Yoko Tawada, Exophony ***

The word exophony refers to the experience of "existing outside of one's mother tongue." Tawada is a Japanese writer who lives in Germany and writes many of her books in German. In this collection of essays, she celebrates exophony as a source of creative inspiration. Non-native speakers notice aspects of a language that native speakers are blind to.

My experience reading Tawada's non-fiction was similar to my experience reading her fiction. She offers interesting observations, but they don't add up to larger points. 

Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore ***

Wild Dark Shore has an awesome setting: a mostly abandoned research station on a tiny island between Australia and Antarctica. The only human inhabitants are a man and his three children, left behind as caretakers when the scientists left due to encroaching climate change. Until, that is, a mysterious woman washes ashore.

McConaghy offers fantastic descriptions of the island, its abundant wildlife, its challenging weather, and its isolation. The characters, though, are unbelievable. Every one of them acts strangely due to traumatic secrets that will be revealed in due course. McConaghy exacerbates the believability problem by having characters narrate chapters in the first person; it makes their withholding of secrets more clearly a pure plot device.

The plot gets increasingly melodramatic as all secrets are revealed. The incongruous appearance of a copy of Jane Eyre forecasts one of the twists.

Wild Dark Shore is a thriller dressed in the clothes of a literary novel. Character's personalities follow from the demands of the outlandish plot rather than driving the action. I give McConaghy credit for exploring various emotional responses to climate change, but I was never able to accept the characters as real people.

Henry Threadgill, Easily Slip Into Another World ***

This memoir from a well-respected creative musician and composer seemed like the perfect accompaniment to attending the Big Ears Festival (a "celebration of musical and artistic adventure and discovery"). And it was. It introduced ideas about creativity in music, life as a working musician, interactions between bandmates, composition versus improvisation, and live performance versus recordings—all subjects relevant to the shows we were seeing in Knoxville.

While Threadgill offers ideas about the development of his music, most of the book is a straightforward memoir about his life experiences, including an intense period serving in Vietnam during the war. He (along with his co-author Brent Hayes Edwards) manages to convey his personal character, in ways both intentional and not. He credits his two grandfathers with providing him an uncompromising sense of dignity and restless experimentation. At the same time, he repeatedly tells stories in which he apparently innocently gets into trouble: he gets sent into combat for creating an avant-garde arrangement of patriotic American songs; he is twice dragged against his will into visiting prostitutes; his evolving quest to capture new soundscapes requires him to abandon existing projects. He has a suspiciously passive role in his interactions (good and bad) with band mates and musical heroes like Duke Ellington. I suspect he is more prickly than he lets on, and I applaud the authors' ability to include that character shading.

Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection ****

Perfection is a short novel about Anna and Tom, a couple of "digital creatives" living and working in Berlin during the early 2000s. They alternate between feeling self-satisfied with their expatriate life and feeling anxious about the mismatch between that life and the version they curate on social media. 

It is a life of coffees taken out on the east-facing balcony... while scrolling New York Times headlines and social media on a tablet. the plants are watered as part of a daily routine that also includes yoga and a breakfast featuring an assortment of seeds. ... And it is a happy life...for rental at one hundred and eighteen euros a day, plus the fee to cover the Ukrainian cleaner, paid through a French gig economy company that files its taxes in Ireland; plus the commission for the online hosting platform, with offices in California but tax-registered in the Netherlands...

Their social circle consists of young people just like them, meeting in clubs and galleries and speaking (non-native) English. They are in Berlin, but it could be any cosmopolitan city in the world. Anna and Tom eventually get bored and look for a way to recapture the excitement of their earlier adventure.

What was happening in the city—the replacement of its historical inhabitants with younger, wealthier newcomers, and the resulting price hikes and decline in diversity—was gentrification, a term used almost exclusively by the people who caused it.

The author has a delightfully droll way of describing modern life, where we gain aspirations from online sources and desire authentic experience as long as we also have a good WiFi signal. He captures the contradictory desires for unique lives and shared culture.

Anna and Tom stand in for an entire cohort of young online professionals: "an identical struggle for a different life motivated an entire sector of their generation... Mysteriously enough, they had discovered homemade fermentation kits, fire-roasted cauliflower, and umami at the same time..." Their symbolic nature means that they lack individuality as characters, much like Berlin is flattened into a generic global city.

The comparatively brief length and the lack of character development make Perfection feel more like a long short story.

George Santayana, The Essential Santayana ** 1/2

There's no way that truly essential Santayana should run to over 600 pages. The title suggests a judicious selection of important articles in which the philosopher George Santayana clearly and concisely explains his theories. The Essential Santayana, by contrast, includes whole chapters from his major books while strangely omitting entirely his first successful first book about aesthetics. For example, it includes thirteen chapters from Skepticism and Animal Faith when it could have relied on the paper "Some Meanings of the Word 'Is'," about which Santayana himself said "it contains my whole philosophy in a very clear and succinct form." 

The heart of Santayana's philosophy is the idea that a person's worldview or philosophical system is akin to a personal work of art: it's a product of productive imagination that provides "a distinct vision of the universe" built to help us understand and navigate our lives. It is not, and could not be, an accurate objective description of the world. Ideas are symbols representing the world, metaphors emphasizing qualities useful to human interest. Santayana also believed that art supports the aspirations of our highest selves, so it is no insult to call a philosophy a work of art.

I find this vision compelling as a framework, but the specifics of Santayana's philosophy feel to me derivative of other thinkers. I was also put off by his often dismissive tone toward other philosophers, especially those who attempt to construct universal systems such as Kant or Plato. His personality seems opposite from the open-minded curiosity of his former teacher and colleague William James. He reserves his admiration for Spinoza, Heraclitus, and Democritis.

Wolfgang Herrndorf, Sand ****

Sand is a "darkly sophisticated literary thriller" (according to its back-cover blurb), translated from the German. It was a bookseller's recommendation from the Napa Bookmine. In an unnamed North African country, an amnesiac finds himself hunted by intimidating thugs; who is he and what do his pursuers want?

Book One (the first 80 pages of 440) introduces the locale, the cast of characters, and a series of crimes: murders, stolen suitcases, an aborted espionage rendezvous, an escaped suspect. The descriptions are cinematic and the tone delightfully sardonic. 

Book Two narrows the point of view to that of our amnesiac hero. The action remains vivid and the mystery of his identity is compelling, but the author isn't able to maintain the satirical tone. Most of the characters and investigations from Book One recede into the background. From this point forward, Sand is a (very good but) more conventional thriller, with a few descents into surreal comedy.

Sand would make an excellent limited series. It has an exotic locale, absorbing mysteries, and colorful characters. Adapting it, I would attempt to retain the tone and wider perspective of Book One.

Sophie Elmhurst, A Marriage at Sea ****

The central event in A Marriage at Sea is a shipwreck: Maurice and Maralyn Bailey were sailing toward the Galapagos when their 31-foot boat Auralyn was struck and sunk by an injured whale. They spent 118 days drifting across the Pacific in a life raft before a Korean fishing vessel spotted them.

The title is the first clue that the book is not fundamentally an adventure tale. Elmhurst describes the Baileys ' improvised survival and subsequent press tour with a journalist's attention to detail, but she is most interested in what their ordeal tells us about their relationship. Just as the undeterred Baileys are about to embark on a second ocean trip, Elmhurst spells out her metaphor explicitly: "For what else is a marriage, really, if not being stuck on a small raft with someone and trying to survive?"

The final section of the book jumps forward a few decades to show how their marriage worked under more normal circumstances. We see how Maralyn's relentlessly forward-looking spirit was critical to their survival both on the raft and off.