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I like reading books about the second generation immigrant experience, especially when they talk about Asians growing up in America. This book was a sensation when it came out. The author was the daughter of a Korean mother and a Caucasian father growing up in Oregon and going to college in Pennsylvania. A few years after her graduation, she suddenly found out her mother was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. The themes of guilt, identity, individuality versus community, and problems with communication mix in this case with grief, anger, and acceptance, making it a compelling read. It's all expressed in a very forceful style that isn't afraid to go to uncomfortable places.

Growing up between two cultures can be confusing for a teenager. It's as though the misunderstandings and the baffling rules are just too much on top of trying to make your way through adolescence. That's the way it's described here in this book and to me it rings true. But at the same time people with these kinds of backgrounds also have wonderful experiences that other people don't get to have, which stick with them through the rest of their lives. The author writes about how significant it was to feel representation when she found out about Karen O of the band The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, another half-Korean, half-white woman singer and performer. And in a different way she also felt affirmed when she watched the YouTube videos by the Korean creator Maangchi showing how to cook Korean cuisine. A person who has only known the majority culture doesn't get to experience feeling seen this way.

There are lots of books that incorporate recipes along with the story they tell, but in this case we have a nonfiction memoir with cooking interludes, something a little different. There are no measures or precise quantities for any of the dishes for the reader, matching the way her mother cooked without cups and weights. Shopping and preparation of the food felt simultaneously unfamiliar even when the end result was completely familiar to her. To me, these foods are nothing like what I grew up with but I recognize this kind of dissonance, and how it ties back to culture. The author was quite familiar with her mother's home country by trips that they would take nearly every summer. What would it have been like for me if I could have experienced many of these food experiences in my parents' home country, a place I've never been? I never tried to picture it until reading about how that visceral tie was described here. H Mart, with its shelves of Asian ingredients, was one place that made it possible for her to reconnect in this country with that nearly abandoned side of her.

Besides the culture and language drama, I think there's also some interesting stuff here about the way in which a creative person sometimes unexpectedly comes into their own career. It's striking about how she talks about striving to make it in music for so long but only after practically giving up on making the dream a reality was she able to find a measure of international success. It is sad that she can only wonder what her mother would have thought about her making it so far.

I'm going to give this book my highest rating because I think it kind of perfectly depicts this kind of situation and so strongly relate to. It's like the perfectly seasoned dish. I don't know how one would follow this up with another work but I kind of hope she does.

This author writes books a little way between personal essay and nonfiction exploration of a topic. I read her book How To Do Nothing in 2020 not long after it came out. She refers to what it was like to have that book come out in this new book and how the emerging Covid-19 pandemic then affected the way she was thinking. This book is about her conception of time as a technical and scientific term, about social and cultural takes on it, about ways it is expressed in art, about the struggle between management and labor over it as a workplace resource, and about a measure of change in the natural world. Philosophically it can be taken to be either an almost tangible and uniform object to be measured precisely or as one tied to the passage of events in whatever fashion they take place. The first of these makes it seem more like a resource for people to hoard, the second depicts it as too fluid to be manipulated that way. There are biological organisms known now to be colonial collections of individuals which are thought to have a joint lifespan of thousands of years, far longer than that of any of its parts. To what degree does the human community bear resemblance to this? Just as Covid-19 alterered people's perception of how to go about their lives, it changed the experience of time for millions. The stress and uncertainty increased the sense of urgency, and the fragility it exposed encouraged many to shed once important activities, such as work, in favor of higher goals.

For much of this book, the author rambles among different locations around the San Francisco Bay Area which manifest some salience to the theme. She ruminates on what the various impressions that came to her had to say about time. For some readers this might seem more or less incoherent, but I felt like the vivid descriptions of how some ordinary process illuminates the workings of time were pretty perceptive, and laid out in a nice conversational manner.

I consumed this as an eighteen and a half hour long unabridged audiobook, so the last section is clearer in my memory than the earlier parts. It is mainly composed of long sections told from the point of view of Dylan Ebdus, starting when he was a twelve-year old boy on Dean St. in Brooklyn and ending with him in his thirties. It focuses primarily on his struggles, his friends and enemies, the various identities he tries on, his love interests, and the ways he was affected by different role models. Dylan is raised by a hippie mother and an artist father in a tough neighborhood, and is defined as an outsider by his race unavoidably. The novel's plot arc shows just how he gets himself in trouble and manages to squirm out of the worst of the danger. By the end, however, he is still fighting to work out an existential meaning for it all for himself. We also visit the thoughts of some of the significant presences in Dylan's life as vignettes: his best friend Mingus Rude, Barrett Rude Jr., and Dylan's father Abraham. His mother Rachel is the most significant female character, but makes an early exit. Over time, Dylan learns what matters to him as a person on the street through children's games, music, comic books, and petty crimes. In addition, there is a single magical realism element integral to the story - a ring that comes into Dylan's position with the power of conferring superheroic powers on its wearer, whether flight or invisibility.

As applied to 1970-1990s Brooklyn the book's title suggests to me a hard-edged place where the hero can go without the understanding or assistance of anyone else in the world. For the young Dylan it makes me think of the apartment he sometimes hides himself within when things get too hot for him outside with bullies and authority figures. Once he's grown up, it might refer to the burden of setting things right he has taken upon himself, Superman-like, at a distance from all those he cares about.

There are a couple of recurring elements loaded with meaning. The magical ring can symbolize rising above the environment, escaping scrutiny, but also loss of life itself. It passes through Dylan's life and does damage along the way, teaching him about his own capabilities, though without inparting complete understanding. Also, the "yoke" headlock maneuver shows up as a motif that defines what it is like to live in the ghetto versus college outside New York. It is a brutal, quasi-sexual, and violent coercion, but the words accompanying it are always couched in the form of a question. In this part of Brooklyn, the prospect of prison starts out as a distant unknown for the children, but surfaces later as a frightening threat.

This novel was a grim tale told. The storytelling is complex and suspenseful but as a reader you got the idea that some things are not going to turn out well. By the end of the book, none of the main characters from Dean St. make it out unscathed, and some wear their hurts on the inside instead of externally in a spectacular way. It felt as though there was really little chance that Dylan could ever have come up on the winning side versus the heavy forces that acted on everyone in that neighborhood, and maybe he did about as well as he possibly could.

In the United States most people might know the author Colette through the musical Gigi based on a story she wrote, which was filmed as a musical directed by Vincente Minnelli. This pair of novels is not that, although it is also set in the same kind of demimonde French society at the turn of the 20th century. In her native France Colette is well known as a recipient of the of the prestigious Prix Goncourt and the Legion of Honor, a peer of her contemporary writer Marcel Proust. In the two forwards to this audiobook we learn about how difficult it is for the English reader to get an accurate sense of what it is like to read her writing in previous translations. The present translation by Rachel Careau preserves the syntactic innovations Colette introduced as much as possible, a kind of a punchy stripping down of the language by eliminating unnecessary words. In the audiobook you can really sense the tension this gives some of the dialogue and narration in this book.

The two novels are basically centered upon the character of a young, wealthy man nicknamed by the title of the first novel who started his life as a young gigolo in a six-year relationship with a courtesan twice his age named Léa. The first novel centers mainly on Léa's point of view although Colette is by no means strict about staying within one character's skull. The topic of sex is not shied away from as you would expect in about with courtesans and gigolos and affairs.

By the second novel, published some six years after the first one, we jump forward a decade to when the two of them have separated Chéri having settled into marriage after having been mobilized for the First World War. We find out that Léa is now a woman well along in years, overweight and showing her age. And there are the passages which luxuriate in the description of beauty both masculine and feminine. One of the key things that led Léa to take in a Chéri as a lover was his extraordinary physical beauty. He was a boy toy you might say by the standards of those days, a youth who knew little of the world and yet a delight for her to have around. The inciting event in the first novel is the announcement of Chéri's marriage to a wealthy society woman by the name of Edmée. It was a practical way to maintain his lifestyle yet his forced separation from Léa as a result took a heavy toll on them both. By the end of that book the two of them began to recognize that their relationship was no passing fling but precisely one of love, unequaled by any other in their lives, forever gone. The scene where the two of them have, starting out as a relatively light and frivolous discussion, only gradually coming to this deeper realization is crafted beautifully.

In a second book we start out seeing a glimpse into the someone distant marriage between Edmée and Chéri after World War I. Society's changed since the early years of the turn of the 20th century and Edmée has a position of responsibility in a hospital for the war wounded. Chéri's mother, herself a former courtesan, occupies much of her time in financial speculation, something new as a result of the absence of men during the war. Léa's name comes up by chance it seems in a conversation and this impels Chéri to look up his old mistress. The scene where he arrives at her apartment after a number of years absence to find her old and a great deal stouter is a kind of amazing. You can tell that the large degree play has moved on much more than Chéri and he finds something break inside him when he realizes that the special relationship they had is something that could never return for him. The devastation of his world completely changed is revealed in little bits at the end of the novel which I will not spoil here. All through these two novels there are these dazzling turns of phrase which remind me of what was said at the outset about Colette's use of language. She had true mastery of how to turn a phrase so that it could be cutting, or ambiguous in precisely a teasing and yet not provoking way, or hint at some character's action that's about to happen. Many times I noticed these touches in some bit of interior reverie or sometimes in a description of a scene, or of some characters appearance or a character, in instances of telling instead of showing. I cannot think of many instances where they came up in the course of some action or gesture the characters performed. They were really subverting the injunction to writers to show and not tell, but if you pay attention to these breathtaking passages, you find that that rule should not be taken as absolute.

The kind of person who might like these novels is one who does not require their fictional content to have plenty of action or snappy dialogue. There are long stretches where you just have two persons conversing in a room, or description of a woman changing clothes perhaps, or someone just thinking about someone else they know. I see in other people's reviews that some people find these books boring and I understand that. But for a reader who allows themselves to be seduced by the heady atmosphere of the early years of the 20th century in France and and wallow in the beauty of the words assembled on the page it's really a splendid experience. The characters in these books situate themselves beyond religion and beyond traditional morality. But if you take a bigger view of the entire arc of Chéri's story you see that the author wrestles with ideas about a new morality: who is it right to enter into relationship from? and what can one person expect from another to whom they consider themselves bound? There's vice in this book, but there is also an exhilarating view of characters working out what matters to themselves and what matters in life. The narration of this translation of Colette's work felt like a warm caress to my ear. This is one of the reasons I give this book the highest of recommendations.