Category: Reviews

If we truly want an end to racism, we need to understand the past

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Superior book coverSuperior: the Return of Race Science
by Angela Saini

Saini, an engineer-turned-journalist, looks at how science was and is used to create, justify and perpetuate racism. She begins with the so-called science that defined race in the first place – using long-since discredited methods such as phrenology and skin-colour charts. The more you read about how people have been grouped differently over time, and the political reasons for the changing delineations between “races”, the more clear it becomes that race is an entirely social construct, not a scientific one.

But of course race became a social reality, one that has been used to justify a lot of very dodgy science. From European explorer scientists publishing ignorant untruths about native people they encountered to justify colonialism and slavery, to the ugly history of eugenics, there have now been centuries of racist lies masquerading as science. And worse, the lies still need to be countered because they are still part of public discourse.

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K-drama review: Reply 1988

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Reply 1988 poster

This is the third and, in my opinion, best instalment in the Reply series that began with 1994. In Reply 1988 (tvN 2015–2016) comedy and romance are still present, but take a back seat to the character establishment. The period setting is once again excellent.

Some of the Reply set-up remains the same every time. The main character, Sung Duk-seon, is a young woman with four close male friends – one of whom (we learn from flashforwards to the present day) she will end up marrying. Her parents are played by Sung Dong-il and Lee Il-hwa and, like in the previous series, these two characters share the actors’ names. The mother, Il-hwa, always cooks too much food.

Other than that, this series is rather different. The five families all live in one alley in the Seoul neighbourhood Ssangmun-dong. It’s working class, but even this tiny sample has its hierarchy of financial stability. 18-year-old Duk-seon (played by Lee Hye-ri) and her family are the worst off, thanks to her father making a series of poor financial decisions. They live in a half-basement flat (now a familiar term outside Korea thanks to Parasite) underneath the much larger and knick-knack-filled home of her schoolmate Kim Jung-hwan (Ryu Jun-yeol) and his family.

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We need to describe the invisible monolith

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Reni Eddo-Lodge coverWhy I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race
by Reni Eddo-Lodge

My favourite of the anti-racist books I have read so far (though they’re all good), this is an extension of Eddo-Lodge’s 2014 essay of the same title that pushed her to the forefront of British journalists asked to comment on issues around race and racism. Which isn’t quite as ironic as it sounds; the essay was after all a public statement about racism. She was (justifiably) tired of having the same conversations with white people who refuse to acknowledge racism; tired of racism being deemed a problem for black and brown people to solve; tired of racism and talking about it taking up so much of her time and emotions. She was giving herself permission to take a break, walk away, self-preserve.

This book expands on that essay by detailing the many ways in which racism exists in the UK that white people tend not to notice. From police bigotry to the language people use; from the largely erased history of black people in the UK to the systems and processes throughout our society that are racist, Eddo-Lodge lays it bare. She devotes a chapter to untangling arguments that confound race and class in Britain (“It’s really a class problem” is a common defence against the existence of racism here).

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We that believe we are better than all others

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We that are youngWe That Are Young
by Preti Taneja

I figured that while we were in lockdown, and I was back to a respectable reading speed, it was time to tackle one of the doorstop books on my TBR. There are a few of them. Generally I enjoy a big book as they have the room to really delve deep into characters and weave expansive plot. This novel ticked those boxes and much more. That said, it is now a month since I finished it, so I’m afraid this review will be far briefer than this epic saga deserves.

This is a retelling of King Lear set in modern-day Delhi. Devraj is the head of a megacompany and at the start of this tale he announces his retirement and intention to split the company between his three daughters. They all, in different ways, defy him. And he is growing senile, which makes him increasingly anti-women. It’s a brilliant, darkly fascinating interpretation of Shakespeare’s tragedy.

The story opens with Jivan, Devraj’s godson, returning to India after spending half his young life in America. He is attractive and well educated, and wants more than anything to reconnect with the family – especially his half-brother Jeet. But instead he is met by his estranged father Ranjit (Devraj’s right-hand man) and Devraj himself and swept away to the family estate, “the Farm”, where Jivan is told he now has a job in the company’s security department. This job comes with a creepy room from which he can monitor all the Farm’s CCTV and listen in on employee conversations – including the sisters’ lunchtime conversation.

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The heroin, that trickster, had made her feel actual love and then ripped it away

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black wave coverBlack Wave
by Michelle Tea

This is an apocalyptic feminist novel about queer culture in 1990s California. It is strange and dark and brilliant. Perhaps it’s because it gets very meta, which I tend to enjoy.

Michelle Tea has novelised a period in her own life, when her life in San Francisco sunk to such a bad place that she felt her only way out was to move to LA. But that move doesn’t happen until halfway through the book, so the first half depicts her falling apart. It’s not a pretty story but Tea’s prose is funny enough that it manages to avoid being depressing.

Fictional Michelle’s main (though not only) problem is drugs. In the opening chapter we learn that, since writing a memoir that “glamorised her recreational drug intake”, Michelle has continued to party in San Francisco’s Mission neighbourhood, almost every night moving from alcohol to cocaine to alcohol to cannabis. She has balanced this with a job at a bookstore and a steady girlfriend to whom she is frequently unfaithful. She is at the centre of a subculture that she herself epitomises.

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K-drama review: Let’s Eat

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Let's Eat series 1 poster
In series 1 Soo-kyung shares food with her neighbours Dae-young and Jin-yi, as well as her annoying boss.

I’m not entirely sure, but I have a hunch that this TV show was cooked up (boom boom) to promote Korean food to the rest of the world. Let’s Eat (tvN 2013-2014) hits all the beats of a typical K-drama, but with cheesily shoehorned-in glamour shots of food and descriptions thereof. It’s a little like Kantaro the Sweet Tooth Salaryman but less wacky. And it actually made me want to eat most of the foods depicted.

Our hero, happily divorced paralegal Lee Soo-kyung (played by Lee Soo-kyung), is very comfortable with living alone. Her only frustration is that she loves to eat at restaurants, but dining out in her neighbourhood of Seoul is not designed for groups of one. (Most restaurants serve big sharing platters designed for 3 or 4 people.) Her best friend Kyung-mi (Jung Soo-young) is busy with her young children and Soo-kyung doesn’t really like her colleagues at the small law firm.

However, she discovers that both her next-door neighbours are also in need of company at mealtimes. Handsome but mysterious Goo Dae-young (Yoon Doo-joon, or Doojoon, a Hallyu star who has sung with Beast and Highlight) is a gourmand with a habit of lecturing his companions on the proper way to eat certain items. He works in insurance and has a tendency to put off new acquaintances by constantly trying to sell them a policy. It says a lot for Yoon that he manages to make this character charming.

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Invisible boundaries kept me boxed in from the real life of other people going on all around

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Hons and Rebels
by Jessica Mitford

I am not the first person to be fascinated by the Mitfords. For a few years now, I have felt that I need to read something by Jessica to better understand the family. She was the outlier, the one who left. And y’know, not a Nazi.

This is Jessica, or Decca’s, memoir of the first portion of her life. She recounts her childhood, her political awakening and her relationship with Esmond Romilly. I laughed, I cried, I shook my head often in disbelief.

As she admits, her childhood was unconventional. They were old-fashioned upper-class toffs, distantly related to royalty and less distantly to Winston Churchill. Jessica and her five sisters received no formal education (though their brother was sent away to school). They instead enjoyed a series of private tutors whom they teased and tortured. This meant they reached adulthood in a state that was both worldly and hugely naive and sheltered. Perhaps this explains the extreme political allegiances of at least three Mitford sisters.

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To have friends was a sign of degeneracy

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Loving SabotageLoving Sabotage
by Amélie Nothomb
translated from French by Andrew Wilson

I really love Amélie Nothomb. Which meant she was a no-brainer as my Belgium choice for the EU Reading Challenge. Not that this book is set in Belgium. Like many of her novels, this is a semi-fictionalised account of Nothomb’s childhood moving around the world thanks to her father being a Belgian diplomat.

In this case, Nothomb is recalling the time she spent living in China in 1972–1975. She was just five when they moved from Japan to a tightly controlled compound in Beijing (or Peking, as it was then known). They shared this large residence with many other diplomats’ families, and the perceived safety of having armed guards on the gate meant that all the children were largely left to play in the yard with each other whenever they weren’t eating, sleeping or at school. It could have been idyllic, were it not for children’s tendency to be vicious to one another.

But you would be forgiven if it took you half of this novella to figure out that is what is going on. While she occasionally acknowledges that the compound’s adults were dealing with complex politics at work and between each other, this story is entirely about the children and what Nothomb personally experienced. And she was largely playing pretend.

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K-drama review: Misaeng

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Misaeng poster
Jang Geu-rae (pictured with armful of folders) learns what it means to be a salaryman in this drama.

This TV show is a little hard to categorise, but I guess I’d plump for…office drama? It’s quite serious and low-key, and apparently won lots of awards when it first aired (tvN 2014). Misaeng is sometimes listed with its subtitle (and translation) “An incomplete life”, which gives quite a good indication of its overall tone.

As we learn early on, Misaeng is a term from the board game Go (or Baduk in Korean), which is relevant because the show’s main character Jang Geu-rae (played by Im Si-wan) is a former professional Go player. He wasn’t able to earn enough money to live on from playing Go, so he has given it up and is now taking any job he can get without a degree. When a rare opportunity for a proper office job comes along he takes it, even if it is an internship for something he has never particularly wanted to do: sales.

At this company – One International – rumours run rife, which means that everyone immediately knows that Geu-rae didn’t go to university and was recommended for the position by someone senior. He also has no office experience and doesn’t speak any foreign languages. This does not go down well with his fellow interns or with his new manager, Oh Sang-sik (Lee Sung-min). Manager Oh is brusque and loud, but turns out to be honest to the point of pissing off many people around him, which means he is actually a good match for eager, innocent Geu-rae.

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Quivering, like jelly, quivering like a small bird

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DoppelgangerDoppelgänger
by Daša Drndić
translated from Croatian by SD Curtis and Celia Hawkesworth

This was my Croatia choice for the EU Reading Challenge. It’s a novella formed of two stories linked by major themes and minor details. There were nice moments but overall I didn’t love this.

In the first story “Artur and Isabella” the eponymous heroes are old and think their days of romance are behind them, until they meet. Drndić doesn’t skimp on the grotesque aspects of ageing, to the point of making me quite uncomfortable. The third person narrative alternates with brief police reports on the two lead characters, the reason for which becomes clear at the end. There’s also a tendency to include lists, which in a longer story can provide nice change of pace, but in something so short it was disruptive. I’m pretty sure this is meant to be a sad tale but I wasn’t at all emotionally involved.

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