2025 Reading 1: Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton. A fascinating use of format for a memoir/linguistic commentary: Barton picks fifty onomatopoeic or more broadly 'mimetic' Japanese phrases and explores their meaning to her, using the form to narrate her experience of working in Japan as a teacher. - ThreadSky

jonathangibbs.bsky.social • 56 days ago

2025 Reading 1: Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton. A fascinating use of format for a memoir/linguistic commentary: Barton picks fifty onomatopoeic or more broadly 'mimetic' Japanese phrases and explores their meaning to her, using the form to narrate her experience of working in Japan as a teacher.

Comments

junklight.bsky.social•40 days ago

I really enjoyed that book. A standout from last years reading!

kda2433.bsky.social•14 days ago

Onomatopoeia is an important aspect of Japanese informal speech in ways it is not in English, making its mastery difficult for learners. You have to learn a whole category of speech. Barton’s using it to evince the feeling of being foreign in Japan and struggling to learn the language is inspired.

tisseurs.bsky.social•56 days ago

Haha sorry I read Dolly Parton!! Thus I was really surprised!

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•55 days ago

2025 Reading 2: The Hand by Georges Simenon, tr. Linda Coverdale. Perfectly acceptable sick bed reading: not too brutal, but far from the best Simenon 'roman dur' I've read. A small-town lawyer questions and then overturns his life when he kind of leaves his old friend to die in a snowstorm.

maxcairnduff.bsky.social•55 days ago

Have you read any Magritte? I’m always deterred by the sheer number of them. The romans dur are at least stand alone.

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•55 days ago

Oh I've a read A LOT but by no means MOST of the Maigrets. J'adore! To my mind they're more dependable than the durs, and there's absolutely no reason not to read them in any order. Go for it! Night at the Crossroads, Maigret and the Loner, The Madman of Bergerac, Maigret Defends himself all vg.

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•55 days ago

2025 Reading 3: You Spin Me Round: Essays on Music, ed. Adrian Duncan, Niamh Dunphy, Nathan O'Donnell. A decent little essay collection, with characteristically excellent contributions from Brian Dillon (on Iggy Pop), M. John Harrison (on memory and Dylan) and Wendy Erskine (on Rod Stewart).

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•55 days ago

2025 Reading 4: How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair. A bit of tidying up as I finished this a few days ago. A memoir of being raised by a strict Rastafarian father in Jamaica, which Sinclair escaped in part through literature, though that involved negotiating a lecherous mentor, the 'Old Poet'.

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•52 days ago

2025 Reading 5: A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell. The start of a book-a-month reread of A Dance to the Music of Time, which I last read in my 20s. (I'll be joining 2025 reading groups run by @shedworking.bsky.social and @neglectedbooks.com, so check them out!)

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•43 days ago

2025 Reading 6: Pointed Roofs by Dorothy Richardson. This year I’m trying an episode of Pilgrimage to follow my monthly Powell. That’s a reread; this is a first exploration, and first impressions are… mixed. Its experimental modernism - you could call Impressionism - is affecting but superficial.

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•40 days ago

2025 Reading 7: Parade by Rachel Cusk. Read on holiday on a boat, slightly distractedly. I had read an extract somewhere (not sure) about holidaying on a remote Mediterranean island. The first new work I've read of hers since the first two (not the third, I think) of the Outline trilogy.

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•43 days ago

The evocation of a young girl’s constrained but vivid life - first, briefly, among sisters, and then among fellow teachers and pupils at a German finishing school - is dependably plausible and involving, but the privileging of momentary impressions means my reading drifted and skimmed rather.

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•52 days ago

I'll be reading a complete though mismatched paperback set given me by my great-aunt Betty, who would have fitted perfectly into Powell's novels: well-travelled wife of a Foreign Office/MI6 operative, wildfowl breeder, dressed in jeans, fisherman's smock and espadrilles when not at Glyndebourne.

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•52 days ago

The book is, as remembered, an absolute delight, funny as I remember, and moving in ways that I may have intuited at 20, but couldn't have predicted. As an example, on his late return, the previously satirised and objectively quite pathetic schoolmaster Le Bas is treated with a touching sympathy.

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•55 days ago

The Rastafari history (including oppression by British and British-influenced governments) was interesting, but as a religion it doesn't come out well. (Nor do lecherous literary mentors.)

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•55 days ago

As a memoir, though, I found the book overly conventional and a little dull, with long passages depicting scenes decades ago as if in a novel, complete with full dialogue, and none of the kind of self-reflection, doubt and playfulness that makes me trust an autobiographical writer.

davidcollard.bsky.social•55 days ago

Odd how few religions come out well.
Quakers?

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•55 days ago

I also enjoyed Declan Long's short memoir-piece of the first time he heard Laurie Anderson's 'O Superman' in the family car, to the astonishment of all present, and Tabitha Lansley's piece on Busta Rhymes and working in a takeaway, which reminds me I must read Sea State.

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•55 days ago

It's US set (Connecticut and New York) and reads very much like Patricia Highsmith, with the humdrum narrator character discovering unimagined depths to their own psychology, and possibilities to their life. But Highsmith would have made the (poor?) bastard squirm, would have ratcheted up the plot.

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•55 days ago

There's a strange lack of tension here, and a strange placidity to all the characters' behaviour that I didn't quite buy. I was reminded of Antonioni's L'Avventura, which I watched for the first time last year: 1960 to this book's 1968; Highsmith's Deep Water, which this reminded me of, was 1957.

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•55 days ago

It's an interesting psychological study of a particular kind of humdrum and hapless nascent sociopath, but it suffers from the one-dimensionality of the first person narration. Interestingly, David Hare adapted in for the stage but Michael Billington's review has The Red Barn as a film noir manqué.

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•55 days ago

re: the cover: it's misleading both for the glamour of the Weegee shot (this isn't quite that world) but also the implicit association of the hand in the photo to the title. The hand in the book is the dead man's wife's hand, as she sleeps, which the narrator takes as an invitation to an affair.

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•55 days ago

There's also a weird 'undertone' to the Weegee photo as shown on the cover, in that Penguin's standard rubric of showing on the back cover a thumbnail of the whole image, where the front shows a cropped version, reveals that the woman's breasts in the photo are completely exposed.

drewsof.bsky.social•55 days ago

I saw the stage production in London and was… largely disappointed. Lots of unnecessary set trickery masking the script’s thinness.

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•55 days ago

The novel's pretty thin, too. It would have needed a Highsmith-like 'script doctoring' session to turn it into proper film noir material.

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•56 days ago

e.g. "giri-giri: the sound of just about getting by, or being weighed on a moment-by-moment basis", or "bin-bin: the sound of having lots of sex of dubitable quality"

As that suggests, Barton is a candid narrator, especially (though not solely) regarding her affair with an older teacher colleague.

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•56 days ago

The book's balance between the experience of a new culture and language, and keen self-scrutiny, is highly effective. Barton is great on how learning a new language is like re-entering toddlerhood, with joy, tantrums, dependency - but also on how Japanese culture infantilises women, and foreigners.

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•56 days ago

As someone who has never been to Japan, and is drawn to and bemused/disturbed by many aspects of its cultural output (I'm listening to the very odd O Yamo O right now, as it happens), and who is proud of their partial multilingualism (Fr/Ger), and who loves innovative essayism, this was a top read.

cristinleach.bsky.social•56 days ago

📌 love the sound of this!

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•56 days ago

It's great, with a caveat that I'm about to add to my original thread...

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•56 days ago

My one caveat is the book's length. I think it would have ended perfectly 32 'sounds' in, when Barton returns from Japan to the UK, after three different teaching stints, and the definitive end of her relationship. What follows does involve drama, and insight, but the formal play loses power.

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•56 days ago

I feel like holding back some of that material would have made the book stronger and more cohesive (while still being marvellously diversionary, and non-linear), and would have given Barton scope for exploring its later themes in other writing.

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•56 days ago

But the writing in the first two-thirds of the book is almost uniformly excellent.

Here is Barton on the doubled feeling of being newly in love with a person and with life itself – how other people's inability to feel what you feel is due to them being "immunized in some way"

ronanhession.bsky.social•56 days ago

I liked this and reviewed it at the time. I thought it was interesting to read it with echoes of Botchan by Natsume Soseki.

jonathangibbs.bsky.social•56 days ago

Ah, I don't know that Soseki. I've read Kusamakura (a favourite), Kokoro, and Sanshiro.

ronanhession.bsky.social•56 days ago

It was the book that got me into Japanese lit. Described as a sort of Japanese Catcher in the Rye. About a young school teacher who goes to teach in the sticks. Lots of humour.

drtechnical.bsky.social•55 days ago

Read that last year. I really enjoyed it. Afterwards I went to one of her translations, Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai, which I also very much enjoyed.

iamrobhughes.bsky.social•56 days ago

I bought this on spec at the LRB bookshop a couple of years ago. Will get round to actually reading it this year based on this thread

stane.bsky.social•40 days ago

Bought completely on spec also, and really liked it - and the candour, which could have been too much, was actually not; we wouldn't be too surprised to read such an account in a book by Annie Ernaux but perhaps the Englishness of the tone makes it seem more difficult?

iamrobhughes.bsky.social•40 days ago

Interesting. Particularly as her follow-up book is basically about porn if I recall and understand correctly.

stane.bsky.social•39 days ago

Yes I think so.

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