Han Kang, _Human Acts_, trans.Deborah Smith

 SPEAKING OF SATISFYING second novels (see yesterday's post on Caleb Crain's Overthrow)...actually, all I know is that this is Han's second novel to appear in English. But I did find it as worthwhile as the Booker-winning The Vegetarian. 

Human Acts is centered around the anti-government demonstrations in Gwangju, South Korea, in 1980, the brutal, even murderous repression of those demonstrations, and the afterlife of the events in the memories of survivors.  Each chapter takes the point of view of a different participant. The first two are set at the time of the demonstrations themselves, the subsequent chapters five, ten, twenty-two, and thirty years later. An epilogue gives us the point of view of Han herself, who was born in Gwangju and whose family had moved away just a short while before the demonstrations; she was just ten at the time.

The characters whose perspectives we get are not leaders or even all that near the center of things; they are volunteers, part of the crowd, with various reasons for being there and joining. Two of them are among the dead; those who survived struggle with memory and trauma, even after the fall and eventual conviction of Chun Doo-hwan, the coup leader who ordered the assault of the demonstrators. The need (or desire or imperative) to remember is continually in a struggle with the need (or desire or imperative) to forget.

The novel has a lot to convey about hope, courage, solidarity, endurance; it also has a lot to say about defeat, suffering, grief, and traumatic memory. It's short, but complex; the interrelationships among the characters are many, but they are rarely spelled out explicitly, so readers need to do some noticing and piecing together on their own. For me, the readerly engagement required made the novel all the more powerful--the gradual realization that I had met the point-of-view characters of Chapter 3 and Chapter 5 back in Chapter 1 became part of the novel's slow reveal of the long-term legacy of the demonstrations, parts of its lesson about the nature of political change.

Caleb Crain, _Overthrow_

 I THOUGHT CRAIN'S first novel, Necessary Errors, was the very best in the crowded field of Young American Literary Man Sojourning in the Former Soviet Bloc fiction  (LLL, July 8, 2014). Overthrow is his second novel and strikes me as less likely to appeal to a wide audience, but what do I know about wide audiences? It certainly shows Crain has been sharpening his fiction chops.

At the novel's center is a small group of young activists who become acquainted during the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011 and decide to form a working group dedicated to the "Refinement of the Perception of Feelings," i.e., sharpening their ability to know what other people are thinking. What they have in mind is less ESP than the sort of skills in discerning the minds of others that most Jane Austen heroines painfully acquire, but a mystic aura nonetheless hovers around the group, drawing in new recruits like Julia, a child of the 1% looking for an identity outside of her parents' wealth, and Matthew, a grad student with an unfinished dissertation on Samuel Daniel that dogs him like Philoctetes' wound. 

The mystic aura belongs largely to Leif, the group's poet and visionary. One of Crain's brilliant strokes is to use the points of view of different members of the group for each chapter, while never giving us a chapter from the point of view of Leif. He becomes more complex from chapter to chapter without ever acquiring a definite outline, and that's perfect.

The group and its surprising mission attract the attention of the police, who have their own method of knowing other minds--electronic surveillance. The group is tricked into finding some official folders (on themselves) on the internet. Their violation of state security is immediately detected, and Leif and several of the others are arrested--hence the plot of most of the novel, as Leif and his friends come under legal and media scrutiny, testing their loyalty and strength to the breaking point. 

There may be a turnaround and a qualified victory at the very end. Evidence leaks that the group was illegally surveilled, which means they will probably get off. It's a happy ending, I think--but one made largely possible by good luck, and the novel mainly makes us aware of the long, long odds against any group of young idealists with a vision of a better tomorrow.

The group of students I assigned the novel to liked it, basically, and one in particular said, "I know  these people," and was especially drawn to Leif, "a manic pixie dream boy." But could I sell it to the book club? I'm not sure. I am sure, however, that Crain is a gifted novelist, and I will pick up his next the moment my eye alights on it.

Roxane Gay, _Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body_

 I HAVE GOTTEN backlogged in my blogging--I read this back in January. I'm six or seven books behind, in fact. But school's out (for me), and it's catch-up time.

The crackling prose and maverick attitude of Bad Feminist are abundantly present in this book, but a lot of pain, too--not to mention shame, anger, and other blood-accelerating emotions. Gay is a big person--six foot three and 577 pounds at her biggest, she mentions on p. 6--and Hunger is about how that bigness came about it and why, despite repeated efforts and many exhortations to be smaller, she is still big. 

The crucial event occurred in middle school, when Gay was raped by a boyfriend and his buddies. The best way to avoid this kind of male attention, she decided, was to get really, really big, and so she put on 120 pounds in high school alone. 

The book proceeds roughly chronologically, through college, grad school, the beginning of a career in teaching and writing, on through Gay becoming famous with Bad Feminist. High levels of accomplishment alternate with fugues and crises of confidence while she learns the hazards and tactics of navigating the world as a really large person for whom relatively ordinary objects--airplane seats, restaurant booths, stairs--can inspire dread. Not to mention being someone nearly everyone feels entitled to sneer at and give advice to.

The book is nonetheless often funny, as when Gay describes how she will often tell herself to eat less and exercise more, "But then I get out of bed." And she does get a breakthrough when a broken ankle and subsequent operation bring home to her how much her friends and loved ones care for her. 

She has not forgiven and forgotten (see chapter 84, in which she details how the internet has enabled her to keep tabs on her rapist), and she takes pains to avoid a big swelling major chord ending, but she has certainly moved on, lived her life, made her mark.  

Merlin Sheldrake, _Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures_

 THERE ARE GOOD books of popularized science, then there are really good books of popularized science, and then there are the stop-you-in-your-tracks, stone-cold classic books of popularized science, the ones that reconfigure reality for us--Silent Spring, A Brief History of Time, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Entangled Life is of that small but mighty subset.

I picked this up with little knowledge of fungi other than as something nasty that could happen to your toes or as something tasty when fried with onions. My eyes were well and truly opened. For one thing, mushrooms are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, so to speak. Fungi are their own kingdom, alongside plants and animals. We all now know that trees communicate, but how do they communicate? Thanks to fungi, mostly, or the threadlike extensions known as mycelium. Fungi convey information. They solve problems. They make possible bread (!) and beer (!!). They colonize everything. They give us visions of the oneness of being.

Entangled Life is not merely brimming with illuminating fact, though; it is also gracefully, wittily, lyrically written. Try this, plucked at random:

   I walked into the growing rooms, packed with shelving units three meters tall. This was the fungus comb. Thousands of bags charged with soft blocks of furry mycelium filled the space. Some were white, some off-yellow, some a pale orange. If the fans filtering  the air had stopped, I felt that I might have heard the crackling of millions of miles of mycelium running through its food.

 Good lord. What is the happiest phrase hit upon in that short passage? "This was the fungus comb"? "soft blocks of furry mycelium"? "fans filtering the air"? "the crackling of millions of miles of mycelium"? And Sheldrake's not even in top gear here--try the chapter "Mycelial Minds." 

The best book I have read so far this year, that's for sure, and it will be difficult to surpass.

Richard Powers, _Bewilderment_

 AFTER THE GRAND opera of The Overstory, this is Powers in chamber music mode. A slim volume by Powers standards, a bit under 300 pages. Just two characters, narrator Theo Byrne and his nine-year-old son, Robin, or three if you count Theo's beloved wife and Robin's adored mother, Aly, who died in a car accident some while before the novel begins. Just one point of view, Theo's, and just one plotline, the story of Theo's valiant but frustrated efforts to do right by Robin. 

Robin is brilliant but also on the autism spectrum (a diagnostic concept to which Theo objects). Robin flies into sudden rages in which he can inflict real damage. Unsurprisingly, his behavioral problems have gotten worse since his mother died, and seem on course to grow worse yet. Managing his education is proving too much for the patience and resources of the public school he attends, so, with reluctance, Theo agrees to home-school him, difficult though home-schooling is to balance with Theo's teaching and research responsibilities as an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin.

Then, a breakthrough. Through some experimental (and fictional, I think) biofeedback based on brain scans of his mother, Robin starts to do better, then a lot better, then becomes a miracle cure story and an internet celebrity. 

Powers drops a reference to Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon way back on p. 41, before Robin's innovative therapy is even suggested, tipping the alert reader that Robin's dramatic improvement will be temporary. The treatment that is enabling him to flourish gets shut down about the same time that a major research project investigating extraterrestrial life, in support of which Theo had testified to Congress, loses its funding.

It's a brutal, heartbreaking spiral down from there.

Bewilderment has something in common with Powers's earlier short novel, Generosity, in its depiction of a radiantly good woman and and the avid quest to capture the bio-chemical signature of her goodness. Aly is even more radiant than Thassadit Amzwar (not altogether credibly so, I would say, though it makes sense that her bereaved husband and son would recall her as a kind of goddess). Here, though, the story is darkened by the storm cloud of Trumpian America and its war on science, intellect, curiosity, and imagination. It's a sad story. Sigh.

Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, _The Future We Choose: The Stubborn Optimist's Guide to the Climate Crisis_

 YOU LIKELY ALREADY know about the climate crisis and may even feel you are not in the market for another book about it, but this one does offer an unusual perspective. 

Figueres is "former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change," co-author Rivett-Carnac "her political strategist" (I quote from the paperback's author bio), and both were deeply involved in bringing about the landmark Paris Agreement of 2015. Accordingly, they are  able  to provide not only a crisp explanation of what the crisis is, but also an insider's view of what an international agreement to address it might look like and how it could be brought about.

The ability of Figueres and Rivett-Carnac to envision effective international cooperation allows them to dial down the apocalyptic tone usually adopted by writers on this subject. They seem downright hopeful, in fact. How justified that hopefulness is, I can only guess, but encountering it in a book on the climate crisis was certainly a change of pace.

Nathalie Léger, _Suite for Barbara Loden_, trans. Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon

 I PICKED THIS up because I liked Léger's Exposition, the first installment of a trilogy of which this book is the second. I had not at that time seen Wanda, the 1970 film Loden wrote and directed, nor even heard of Loden, though I had seen pictures of her as Maggie, the Marilyn Monroe-like character in Arthur Miller's After the Fall. Once I read the book, though, I got hold of Wanda as soon as I could, and it is as remarkable as Léger says it is. 

The book's French title, Supplément à la vie de Barbara Loden, does a somewhat better job of suggesting its nature than the English one does. Like Exposition, it orbits a scholarly/curatorial project, the writing of a film encyclopedia article on Loden; the book comes on like the article's more lyrical, more reckless twin, airborne and kaleidoscopic. This is not a biography of Loden, but a swirl of imagery and speculation that coalesces around that biography like a halo.

Also like Exposition, Suite for Barbara Loden answers the old question "why are there no great women artists?" by pointing out that we tend not to look in the right places. Wanda got scant attention in 1970, and Loden died in 1980, at the relatively young age of 48, without having finished another film. Seeing it will convince you that Loden was a great woman artist, however, and Suite for Barbara Loden convinced me that Léger is no slouch herself.