books @ cc.

by Marjane Satrapi (2001)

An autobiographical comic/graphic novel/bande dessinée, Persepolis tells the story of Marjane Satrapi as a girl growing up in Iran around the revolution & wartime, then abroad by herself. Chronologically told, with each chapter focusing loosely on specific events, the memoir tells us more about everyday occurrences in the life of a daughter of a (relatively) priviliged, “liberal” Iranian family than about general Iranian life (the family lives comfortably even during troubled times, and Satrapi spent a good deal of her youth abroad in Vienna) or history. The illustrations are simple, basic figures, and Satrapi effectively and stylistically uses stark black and white with no greytones.

by Danilo Kiš (1965)

A semi-autobiographical story, Garden, Ashes is a recollection of Andy Scham, a young child living in Hungary during the World War II. Despite the ubiquitous shadows of Holocaust, Kiš’ masterful composition of vivid, precise minutiae of surrounding details and events, with an intense focus on the (eccentric) father, Eduard Scham, Garden, Ashes evokes the densely atmospheric writings of Bruno Schulz in The Street of Crocodiles.

Menjadi Mahasiswa di Uni Soviet
by Koesalah Soebagyo Toer (2003)

A collection of vignettes about his study in the former USSR, Kampus Kabelnaya is divided into two parts: the first written as a recollection, the second more of diary entry-like short pieces, written during Toer’s study. Most of the pieces in the first part are longer, carefully-thought of (taking age into consideration), while the second has the youthful (if sometimes naive) romanticism.

by Georges Perec (1975)

A book of two alternating texts, one (written in italics) an imaginary adventure story, “an arbitrary but careful reconstruction of a childhood fantasy about a land in thrall to the Olympic ideal”; the other consisting of autobiographic fragments of wartime childhood “made up of scattered oddments, gaps, lapses, doubts, guesses and meagre anecdotes.”

by Knut Hamsun (1890)

A poor, emaciated writer, unable to afford a rent (but with too big of an ego), roams the city, his state of mind and physique heavily disoriented by his hunger. Tragically impulsive, he swings from one grandiose, “dignified” idea and perception to the next, only to regret and to chastise himself in between, encountering misadventures, “imagining things” and suspecting everything, making up lies which deprive him further of any help, desperately and painfully clinging to his “intellectual vanity”, e.g. refusing to admit himself as a vagrant at the police station (saying instead that he’s a journalist on a wild night out), which lost him the free meals he so badly needed.

A Father’s Journey with His Son
by Peter Carey (2004)

When Charley, Peter Carey’s shy 12-year-old son, became acquainted (and soon) obsessed with manga (Akira, Barefoot Gen) and anime (Gundam, Ghibli’s, Blood: The Last Vampire), Peter too was soon enticed by the foreign “strangeness” and “exoticism” of modern Japan. Together they went to Tokyo, guided by Charley’s visualist online friend, Takashi (and as always, baffled by the toilet).

Chronicle of the Future
by Svetlana Alexievich (1997)

( New version from the Dalkey Archive Press available )

“This is not a book about Chernobyl, but about the world of Chernobyl,” so Alexievich wrote, and indeed, instead of writing about what happened, she compiled a wide range of oral, first-hand testimony, accounts, sometimes occasional rant and condemnations from broad range of people involved and/or affected by Chernobyl. Plenty of tongue-in-cheek resignations in the face of something big and unknown gone wrong. Alexievich is mostly invisible—she allows everyone to speak for themselves—although a certain amount of editing has definitely been done. Alexievich realises that “suffering is our refuge”, that, as one of her interviewee said, people who haven’t suffered hungered for stories about suffering— “cheap philosophy”.

Led Zeppelin Unauthorised
by Stephen Davis (1985)

Probably won’t be of much interest to anyone unless a fan. Because even though I am, and even though Davis went beyond the usual grovel at Led Zeppelin classic “dinosaur” status, it is too mould-casting to be noteworthy. The story of the rise and fall is typical of any rock n’ roll group, but it still made me laugh, the typical, brainless Zeppelin’s vertigious debauchery and misogyny. Groupies, “shark episode” (which turns out to be red snapper apparently, according to Richard Cole), their hostile relations with the media, insults hurled by “punks” and New Wave kids, Faustian curse, etc. etc.

by Primo Levi (1975)

Levi is a superb storyteller, with an ability (and delight, admitting himself as belonging to “that species of persons who do things in order to talk about them”) to turn words into engaging stories. The Periodic Table consists of twenty one short stories named after elements, arranged chronologically based on events in Levi’s life, with two short fictions, Lead and Mercury, inserted at the point they were written.