Nightstand Reads: Author Julie Otsuka talks about books

Author Julie Otsuka will read from her new novel, The Buddha in the Attic, on Friday, September 23, at 7 p.m. (doors will open at 6:30) at the Central Library. We’re thrilled to have Ms. Otsuka as a guest blogger today:

One of the most emotionally affecting books I’ve read recently is a short novel by the French writer, Edouard Levé, called Suicide. The book is about a character, “you,” who commits suicide on a sunny day in August. The narrator is a close friend who has known “you” for several years. The novel reads both as a description of “you” to “you” (“You used to take the elevator to go down, but not to go up.” “You couldn’t have been said to dance, exactly.” “You didn’t like to travel.”) as well as an inquiry into the nature of suicide. It also reads as a letter to a friend (“Given that I am speaking to you, are you dead? If you were still alive, would we be friends?”) and lastly, and most powerfully, as the author’s own suicide note to the world: Levé took his own life several days after delivering the final manuscript of his book.

If there is one novel I wish I could have written it would be The Gangster We Are All Looking For by lê thi diem thúy. This book, about a young Vietnamese refugee who comes to America with her father in 1978, is one of the most haunting and beautiful pieces of fiction I have ever read. lê tells her story through a series of fragmented, highly visual vignettes so vivid they seem to shimmer above the page. Her prose moves fluidly back and forth between past and present, America and Vietnam, the mundane and the horrific. At times, the power of her language— lê writes in rhythmic, incantatory cadences that build and build—approaches something like grace.

Another favorite book is Girl in Translation, by my friend, Jean Kwok. This is a heartbreaking coming-of-age story about a young girl named Kimberly Chang who immigrates to the US from Hong Kong in the early 1980s. She wins a scholarship to a prestigious prep school, where none of her classmates know of her double life—after school and on weekends she works with her mother in a Chinatown sweatshop. Kwok, who herself worked in a sweatshop and later attended Harvard, is a gifted writer with an intimate understanding of immigrant life in America.

I have just begun reading Concrete by Thomas Bernhard. Perhaps because I am about to start writing my third novel, I find myself drawn to this darkly humorous tale of a musicologist who has been trying for ten years to write the first sentence of his book about Mendelssohn…

I plan on taking with me on the plane, as I fly out to the West Coast to begin my book tour: Alison Rose’s Better Than Sane: Tales from a Dangling Girl. Years ago, in 1996, I read a piece by Rose in the New Yorker called ‘How I Became a Single Woman.’ I remember being struck by her descriptions of working as a receptionist at the New Yorker, which she refers to as ‘School,’ and her rather droll outlook on life in general: “I never did think of myself as a person who would get married and live in a house.” Her memoir, published in 2004, is an expansion of her New Yorker piece.

Editor’s note: The Buddha in the Attic traces the lives of young Japanese mail order brides who travel to San Francisco in the early 1900s to meet their husbands and create new lives in America. The novel follows Otsuka’s acclaimed debut, When the Emperor Was Divine, featured as the 2005 Seattle Reads selection. You can find details for the September 23 event here.