Forced myself to start cleaning the bookshelves here at Maison KL. This is the best way I know to shake off the heavy lethargy that descends on my shoulders during vacations. Apart from the practical usefulness of helping keep the homestead clean it serves as a reminder of fruitful hours of reading in the past. The implication being that I'd better keep things up in the (possible) years ahead.
The problem is the increasing feeling that it would be so easy just not to bother doing much of anything. A sort of anomie of the aged.
15.54
We're playing host to Hamzah et al later this afternoon. Noi is busy making sure that our guests will be well fed and I'm endeavoring to free myself from the pleasant torpor that has gripped me for the past week or so. It will be good to get back fully to the land of the living.
12.00 midnight & beyond
Our guests are, happily, in no hurry to leave. Just enjoyed a pot of teh tarik with Hamzah along with on-going discussion on the state of the Malaysian economy and the changes therein being wrought by developments in AI. All the young people in the household have expressed considerable scepticism as to whether those developments will prove positive. My guess is that you'd get similar conversations in any household on the planet at this point in time. It's exciting to still be around to witness all this. But exciting in all the wrong ways.
Even as I was indulging in my bit of a moan yesterday about the stresses of home ownership I was experiencing a deeply nagging sense of guilt at doing so. This had its considerable roots in the fact that I'd been reading the opening chapters of Zola's Germinal and couldn't help but be aware of the deep disconnect between the luxury of my life here and the utter misery of that of the workers in and around the Mountsou mine that the novelist painstakingly itemises in Part One of his novel.
Zola takes his readers so fully inside the mine in terms of everyday agonising detail as to engender a painful claustrophobia. And does so in what seems to me an almost flat style, a kind of journalistic recording of the facts as they are: The mine never lay idle; night and day human insects were always down there burrowing into the rock six hundred metres beneath the fields of beet. You are forced to witness that burrowing in inescapable close-up, right next to one of the insects involved. And it's painful. In fact, more than one; making it relentless also.
Should the suffering of those working down French mines in 1866 impinge upon a twenty-first century consciousness? Well, Zola leaves the reader in no doubt of the reality of that suffering and the fact that it called for some kind of attention. And it doesn't take much to draw parallels with the equally real experiences in our time of those whose lot is similar exploitation. So I suppose I can take some solace in the fact that I have at least some awareness of my own inadequacies as a citizen of the world.
Today we've had a couple of workmen around: one to install an updated filtration system for the water; the other to get Noi's oven working again. Both endeavours seem to have been successful, though it's generally best to wait for a year or so, I find, before a final declaration on this front. By which time a couple more things will have managed to go wrong about the house. As always I remind myself we're lucky to have what we've got and as long as the place remains livable there's not much point in moaning.
And perhaps I should be even more positive than that. The fact that the old fridge has kept going since we last repaired it is surely cause for great celebration. The first attempt at putting in the spare part required didn't go well and I thought we'd need to find somewhere to dump the old model and buy a new one. But it's functioned perfectly since the second attempt. Indeed, the guy who came to repair our oven remarked that we were lucky to have it since this make is no longer available despite it being known to be an excellent refrigerator. Odd that - a manufacturer discontinuing a line on the grounds that it's so good at what it does.
Spent the last couple of days adventuring with Robert Louis Stevenson on Treasure Island. Odd that I've never read the full novel before. I seem to remember as a kid getting up to the bit where Jim is hiding in the apple barrel on board the Hispaniola and hears Long John Silver plotting mutiny and finding the whole thing pretty heavy-going. It's certainly not an easy read at any level. Silver himself is a deeply ambiguous figure and the action is often surprisingly complex. I'm still not sure exactly how Squire Trelawney and Doctor Livesey and the rest of the good guys got themselves into the abandoned stockade on the island after the mutiny. Or why Jim suddenly took himself off to sea in the coracle. But there's enough going on in terms of raw characterisation for me to have enjoyed the outing.
And it was nice to reach the final chapters not being at all sure how the story would be concluded, and then quite enjoying the good guys winning in the end, whilst still feeling more than a touch of sympathy for the mutineers left stranded on the island. Gosh, the Victorians were fierce in their sense of right & wrong, especially when calling such conventional morality into question. It's notable that Stevenson makes sure Silver gets away with it all, including a reasonable amount of the money.
It's the ordinariness of the characters in The Makioka Sisters that made the novel engaging on a simple level for this reader. For example, the four sisters themselves, Tsuruko, Sachiko, Yukiko and Taeko. None of them especially impressive or special in any way. All decent enough individuals, and loving to each other, though prone to bouts of irritation given the usual points of difference likely within any family. Yukiko's passive-aggressive behaviour in the various elaborate attempts to secure a decent marriage for her as she moves into her thirties is mildly puzzling, I suppose, and it's not at all clear the extent to which the most obviously 'modern' of them, Taeko, has exploited her various boyfriends, especially the weak-minded, over-privileged Okubata. But the ladies seem likable enough such that the reader wants things to turn out well for them.
And the family's sense of the importance of following their socially-sanctioned but semi-private customs results in sequences that are easy to relate to, despite their particularity to Japanese culture: the viewing of the cherry blossoms; the capturing of the fireflies. The reader is happily drawn into the significance of it all.
But why does the writer so subtly undercut their sense of family importance? And why hint at terrible things happening at the borders of the family's reasonably comfortable lives - in China, in Germany? And why so feature so much physical illness, sometimes genuinely deeply painful, as in the case of Itakura losing his leg and, eventually, life to the gangrene that sets in as a result of a simple operation?
I just can't figure it out. But what I can say is that the blending of ordinary, everyday aches & pains & sadness & happiness is balanced against the gathering dark in a way I don't think I've come across in any other novel. Perhaps the uncertainty is the whole point?
