Disengaged

I didn't get all that much reading done in December. I'd intended to read Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain, which was leant to me by a colleague, but I only finished it yesterday and read the bulk of it on the flight back. I got stuck reading it on the outward journey, bogged down by my inability to sort out the relationships in the family of its protagonist, Shingo Ogata. I suppose I expected something lyrically poetic, in the vein of Snow Country, and felt thwarted initially by the simple ordinariness of the action, or lack of it, in Tokyo. It does have its poetic moments, but these are embedded in what initially seemed to me day-by-day flat dreariness. Later it came to me that that was precisely the point and things picked up in terms of my readiness to apply myself to detail and grasp what was going on. But even then I felt I was missing a lot in the way of nuance. Must say, I'm glad there's no danger of me ever teaching the novel.