"Spring Snow" by Yukio Mishima *****

●  Japanese author
●  Originally published in 1969
●   Vocabulary:
             》 bodhisattva- "someone who voluntarily travels the road of mortification and suffering before entering into the full enlightenment of buddahood
●  Quotes:
              》 p.13......"Kiyoaki was incapable of hiding his true nature,  and was defenseless against society's power to inflict pain"... foreshadowing
              》 p.15......"And, Kiyoaki, like an ant that senses the approaching flood, was experiencing the first intimations of his family's rapid collapse. "
              》 p.17....."As they stepped into the boat,  its wild rocking evoked in Kiyoaki his favorite feelings about the precariousness of life. "
              》 p.18......"  Greedy men tend to look miserable. "
              》 p.31......"He realized that as long as conscious desire is at work, it will permit distinctions to exist.  But if one can suppress it, these distinctions          dissolve and one can be as content with a skull as with anything else."
              》 p.38......"Their expressions blank,  innocent of foreknowledge,  they glided downstream like twigs hand in hand on clear waters mirroring blue sky and clouds, to take the inevitable plunge over the crest of the falls."....Satoko & Miyoaki
              》 p.46......"Dreams, memories,  the sacred--they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp.   Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable,  the qualityof miraculous.  Everything,  really,  has thix quality of sacredness,  but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is!  His touch defiles and yet he contains thexour e of miracles."   ????
              》 p.71......"Since early childhood,  all that he had been taught to revere as honorable and beautiful was to be found,  as far as the Matsugaes were concerned, inthe proximityof death."
              》p.100....."Do away with chance and you undermine the the props under the concept of the will.".......??????
              》 p.109....."And so I think of Kiyo as the spirit of snow, so masculine in your uniform.   I think of you as overwhelming me.  To feelmyself dissolve into your beauty and freeze to death in the snow--no fate could be sweeter. "
              》p.166....."If a candle has burned brilliantly but now stands alone in the dark with its flame extinguished,  itneed no longer fear that its substance will dissolve into hot wax.   For the first ti e in his life, Kiyoaki came to realize the healing powers of solitude."
              》 p.198....."And just as in the old wars,  there will be casualties inthe war of emotion, I think.  It's the fate of our age--and you're one of our representatives. "    Honda to Miyoaki.  ?....first sentence of book refeds to the Russo-Japanese War......metaphor and foreshadowing
             》 p.209...."Once passion was set in motion according to its own laws,  thenit was irresistable.  This was a theory that would never be accepted by modern law, which took it as self evident that conscience and reasonruled man."....Honda's realization based on the transformation of Miyoaki
            》 p.217......"The sunlight became awesome as it shone on the cumulus clouds,  towering up over the offing like huge masses of whipped cream,  and penetrated their deep curving hollows.  While the areas that lay in the shadows resisted the probing sun, its bright rays threw the rugged force of their sculptured outlines into relief.   In his imagination,  the parts cut off from direct light were totally different in character from those that were dazzlingly exposed.  They slumbered on uneventfully , while in contrast their counterparts fiercely enacted a swiftly unfolding drama of tragic proportions.   But there was no place for the human element,  and so slumber and tragedy came to the samething, an idle game at best."
           》 p.222....."Be it the edge of time or space,  there is nothing so awe inspiring as a border."
           》 p.255......"He felt, rather, that it was his youth, or the most glorious part of it, that was about to vanish below the horizon."  ......more ship imagery
           》 p.271......"Tadeshina felt that she and Satoko were matched like a boat advancing against the current and the current itself, so well matched that the boat was held immobile for a time, bound together with it from moment to moment in impatient intimacy. "
           》 p.277......."...bewitched by impossibility"
●  Notes:
             》 water imagery, youth escaping,
             》 Marquis' s disquiet at his son's beauty....p.10......foreshadowing
             》 The author likes boat imagery,  just as in "The Sound of Waves"....p.16
             》 Title.....springsnow is often intense, but does not last long
             》 Dynamic of force in lovemaking....cultural?
             》 Story of golden feathers destroyed by greed, a children's story...p.229
             》 Pleasure of the forbidden....cigarettes and love....Miyoaki waited until love with Satoko forbidden to act
             》 Total shock at 8 year plan to humiliate Matsugae. P.306
             》  Imagery of black dog at waterfall and dead white mole?
             》  Bohdisattva temple....link between Siamese princes and Satoko....p.317....suffering to enlightenment. ?..p.336
             》  Two sons of Marquis....one ugly, one beautiful
             》  Kiyoaki's firstview of amember of the aristocracybrought abouthis adoration of a woman
●  Review:    This is my second novel by Mishima, and I am firmly a fan!  This tale of young forbidden love, of a manipulative, devious aristocracy desperate to hold onto their way of life, set in Tokyo in the early 1900s is absolutely marvelous.  Mishima's prose is elegant, his use of metaphor and imagery is unparalleled.   The second half of the novel felt like an opera unfolding before me, full of drama, intrigue, and the sense of impending doom whichhad been brilliantly foreshadowed in the first half.  There was even a surprise twist to take the reader's breath away.  Beautiful read!

"Barren Lives" by Graciliano Ramos

• Brazilian author
• Originally published in 1938, this translation published in 1973
• Quotes:
• p.10...."Tomas too had fled from the drought and the wheel of his mill had ceased to turn. He, Fabiano, was like the mill wheel."
• p.20...."If drought came, not one green plant would be left.  A shiver ran over him.  Of course it would come.  It had always been that way, as long as he could remember.  And even before he could remember, before he had been born, there had been good years mixed with bad years.  Misfortune was on the way; perhaps it was near at hand.  it really wasn't worth while working."
• p.21..."Everything around was dry and harsh.  And the boss was harsh too, peevish, exacting, thieving, and as ticklish to handle as a spiny cactus."
• p.34..."What softened him was the thought of his wife and boys."
• p.100..."If he could at least recall some pleasant things life wouldn't be all bad."
• Review:  If Graciliano Ramos' intention was to convey the reason that "....to the city from the backland would come ever more and more of its sons, a never-ending stream of strong, strapping brutes....", then he was absolutely  successful!  Painting  the backland family headed by Fabiano and Vitoria, along with their two boys, the reader cannot help but feel despair and an intense desire for change from the drought-ridden, hard-scrabble existence of this family.  Simple people, depicted essentially as beasts of burden who are following their basest instinct for survival, this family tries tirelessly to survive and get ahead.  Unfortunately, Mother Nature and the wealthy, smarter locals conspire to make it almost impossible.  Yes, it is a dark, barren story.  Yes, it is deceptively simple.  Yes, it is profound.

"The Yellow Birds" by Kevin Powers ****

• National Book Award Finalist
• US author
• Originally published 2012
• Epigraphs:
• "A yellow bird, With a yellow bill, Was perched upon, My windowsill..........I lured him in, With a piece of bread, And then I smashed, His fucking head....."....Traditional U.S. Army Marching Cadence
• "To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetfull of evils past, is a mercifull provision in nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil dayes, and our delivered senses not relapsing into cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of repetitions.".....Sir Thomas Browne
• Quotes:
• p.11...."We only pay attention to rare things, and death was not rare."
• p.24....."It was hard to believe that we'd be OK and that we'd fought well.  But I remember being told that the truth does not depend on being believed."
• p.31..."At some point along the way I stopped believing in significance.  Order became an accident of observation."
• p.33...."He was harsh, but fair, and there was a kind of evolutionary beauty in his competence."....Sergeant Sterling
• p.35...."Eventually I had to learn that freedom is not the same thing as the absence of accountability."
• p.37....."We'd had small lives, populated by a longing for something more substantial than dirt roads and small dreams.  So we'd come here, where life needed no elaboration and others would tell us who to be."
• p.91....."I thought of my grandfather's war.  How they had destinations and purpose."...in contrast to his war
• p.93....."It's like a car accident.  You know?  That instant between knowing that it's gonna happen and actually slamming into the other car.  Feels pretty helpless actually, like you've been riding along same as always, then it's there staring you in the face and you don't have the power to do shit about it.  And know it.  Death, or whatever, it's either coming or it's not."......the sensation when moving into battle
• p.99....."Such small arrangements make a life, and though it's hard to get close to saying what the heart is, it must at least be that which rushes to spill out of those parentheses which were the beginning and the end of my war.....".
• p.100...."...if God had looked on us during that flight back home we might have seemed like fabric ready to be thrown, in surrendered blankness of our sleep, over the furniture of a thousand empty houses."......so very sad
• p.115...."It all seemed in that moment to be the conclusion of a poorly designed experiment in inevitability."..........the moment before engaging the enemy to fight over a patch of land which was fought over almost annually
• p.165....."He wanted to have one memory he'd made of his own volition to balance out the shattered remnants of everything he hadn't asked for."......Murph watching the pretty medic at work, grieving, and then in death
• p.225....."It reminded me of talking, how what is said is never quite what was thought, and what is heard is never quite what was said.  It wasn't much in the way of comfort, but everything has a little failure in it, and we still make do somehow."...after conversation between Bartle and Murph's mother at the prison
• Notes:
• the story of Murph's father bringing home canaries from the mine to set them free, and then they returned at night to their cage........foreshadowing, metaphor of a mournful life

• Review:  One of the epigraphs for this book seems to summarize it best with the metaphor of an innocent yellow bird being brutally destroyed by a human.  Certainly, Murph, experienced the same before he died, a death chosen rather than survival.  Yet perhaps the worse destruction is experienced by his surviving buddy, Bartle.  It did not surprise me to read that the author, Kevin Powers, was a Michener Fellow in Poetry in graduate school.  Powers' prose is absolutely beautiful, creating a stark contrast with the anything but beautiful plot.  This novel is heartrending! A very impressive debut.  In many ways this book earns five stars by my criteria.  The use of language and characters are stellar.  However, there is something about the rhythm of the story that fell a bit short.  So, 4 stars, and a desire to see more from this author in the future.

"The Housekeeper and the Professor" by Yoko Ogawa ****

• Summer Sub Club with Beth
• Originally published in 2003
• Japanese author
• Characters:  no names.....the housekeeper, the professor, and her son, nicknamed Root by the professor, because his flat head looked like the symbol for square root
• Set in Japan, 1990s
• Quotes:
• p.7..."Numbers were also his way of reaching out to the world.  They were a safe, a source of comfort."
• p.19..."With my finger I traced the trail of numbers from the ones the Professor had written to the ones I'd added, and they all seemed to flow together, as if we'd been connecting up the constellations in the night sky."
• p.43....I uncovered propositions that existed out there long before we were born.  It's like copying truths from God's notebook, though we aren't always sure where to find this notebook or when it will be open."
• p.62....."To me, the appeal of prime numbers had something to do with the fact that you could never predict when one would appear."....not unlike a deep connection to another person
• p.100....."Math has proven the existence of God, because it is absolute and without contradiction; but the devil must exist as well, because we cannot prove it."
• p.116....."Eternal truths are ultimately invisible, and you won't find them in material things or natural phenomena, or even in human emotions.  Mathematics, however, can illuminate them, can give them expression--in fact, nothing can prevent it from doing so."
• p.124...."In my imagination, I saw the creator of the universe sitting in some distant corner of the sky, weaving a pattern of delicate lace so fine that even the faintest light would shine through it.  The lace stretches out infinitely in every direction, billowing gently in the cosmic breeze.  You want desperately to touch it, hold it up to the light, rub it against your cheek.  And all we ask is to be able to re-create the pattern, weave it again with numbers, somehow, in our own language; to make even the tiniest fragment our own, to bring it back to earth."
• p.130...."He treated Root exactly as he treated prime numbers.  For him, primes were the base on which all other natural numbers relied; and children were the foundation of everything worthwhile in the adult world."
• p.140...."So you think that zero was there waiting for us when humans came into being, like the flowers and the stars? You should have more respect for human progress.  We made the zero, through great pain and struggle."
• p.141...."Someone had to overcome this reasonable assumption, someone had to figure out how to express nothing as a number.  This unknown man from India made nonexistence exist.  Extraordinary, don't you think?"....mind boggling actually

• Review:  I thought this book was an elegant gem of a read.  The touching story of the relationship between a housekeeper, a professor whose short-term memory lasts only 80 minutes, and the housekeeper's son.  The relationship is both unique, simple, and profound.  The interweaving of mathematical theory and relationship was deceptively simple.  I think Ogawa has created a theorem for both eternal connection and divine order. I smiled the entire time I was reading it.  Just lovely!  

"Navidad & Matanza" by Carlos Labbe **

• Open Letter Series
• Chilean author
• Originally published in 2014
• Review:   Well....I am all in favor of experimental formats, stream of consciousness narration, and other non-traditional formats, however, this novel failed to engage me at all.  It is the first Open Letter Publication that I just did not like.  Oh well!  

"Elsewhere" edited by Eliot Weinberger *****

• Poetry
• Japan, Haiti, Portugal, Senegal, Chile, Germany, Mexico, Turkey, Nicaragua, Austria, France, Spain
• Originally published by Open Letter in 2014
• Review:  Fantastic!  A book of poetry by poets from around the world, all of which are written about being "elsewhere".  Poems about Paris by a Chilean, a Japanese, and an Andean.  Better yet, each poem is followed by a brief biographical note about the poet and if he was affiliated with a particular school of poetry.  Only question....why no women?  Other than the gender issue, this collection is a gem!!

"The Testing of Luther Albright" by MacKenzie Bezos

• Audio book
• Originally published 2005
  
• US author

●  Review:  I think the best way to describe this novel is as a series of tests. Stability tests are run on dams after earthquakes. Just so are parents tested as children become adolescents and young adults. Just so are couples tested as they change over time. Tremors and after shocks test the stability of relationships. In this story, Luther Albright tries to fit his emotional world into his engineer's orderly framework. Frankly, the reader's patience is tested a bit too by Luther's/the author's pedantic process.

"The Transcriptionist" by Amy Rowland. *****

• Review:  Fabulous debut novel! Witty, dark, existential.....these are the first adjectives which come to mind after reading this book straight through. I could not put it down! The terror of alienation strikes the soul of a young woman as she tries to find a self in a world full of horrifying news. The characters are engaging, the plot is unique, and the author's use of language is memorable! Well done!
• Publication scheduled for 2014
• US author
• Early Reviewer edition

"My Own Miraculous" by Joshilyn Jackson ****

• Audiobook
• Novella
• US author
• Originally published in 2013
• Review:  What a charming novella!  This is, pure and simple, about maturing into adulthood, parenthood, and love.  Simply told, and well done! 

"Dust" by Patricia Cornwell **

●  Audiobook
●  #21 in the Kay Scarpetta series
●  US author
●  Originally published in 2013

Review:  What a terrible disappointment.  I have been a loyal fan of the Kay Scarpetta series.  Now she has become a hardened and embittered character.  Her cynicism is perhaps appropriate to the character, but she is no longer likable for me.  If this is the outcome of a life such as hers, it is truly a pity.  I will no longer follow this series......sad, but true!

"Ruby" by Cynthia Bond ****

• Early Reviewer edition for LibraryThing.com
• US author
• Scheduled publication 2014
• Review:  This is an Early Review edition of the novel, "Ruby".  I think Cynthia Bond is a wonderful writer.  Her use of language and phrasing were lovely!  This is a haunting tale set in rural Texas.  Two exquisitely sensitive young people are traumatized as children and then find one another as adults.  Despite the religious and social roadblocks they encounter, they realize their love.  This is not the Hatfields and McCoys, nor is it Romeo and Juliet.  This story is uniquely its own in a manner which is mystical, loving, and somehow rings deeply true.  There is sexual violence which is difficult to bear, but the core of this story is about love, and that makes the difference between too much and just right!

"Black Cross" by Greg Iles ****

• Audiobook
• German author
• Originally published in 2001
• Review:  Yes, another book about the Holocaust.  However, Greg Iles manages to really bring home the ethical dilemma of whether the death of a few to save the lives of many can be justified.  This is a chilling tale of people who are surprised at the depths of their beliefs and their reactions to the tests of those beliefs which they come upon unexpectedly.  It is about lies told to achieve the "greater good".  It is about the value of human life.  It is about good and evil.  Very good novel!