Mikhael

My brother gifted me this back in November, but I'm glad I waited til break to read it. Felt bizarre how much the details resonated generally or even specifically with my life:

- UIUC, and specifically my current town Urbana

- Polynesia (although I've mainly been studying Polynesian languages, not the actual land)

- French, which I started learning last January

- AI (my advisor and I have had several discussions on this)

- Friendship among two avid readers of different cultural backgrounds, one of whom introduces the other to Go (subtle nod to my buddy Tanfu who taught me the game last January)

- Taoism, about which I just started reading this week (also at Tanfu's recommendation)

- Lady Wisdom. Literally YESTERDAY at church the pastor discussed Proverbs 8, of which verses 22-31 Powers inserts into the funeral scene before closing the book

Brutal. Well written and provocative, but for my money, gratuitous. I want to read more Ōe

Feel like I lived in France, I can see why a bunch of stuffy yet maybe sensitive literary critics awarded this the Pulitzer

Read most of this on a flight, occasionally looking out over sunlit desert hills, pretty scenic. This is some rich poetry, and my biggest takeaway was I think my brother is an unintentional Taoist, which if Lao Tzu is to be believed, is the perfect kind. Do without doing; be without being(?)

Also Le Guin’s footnotes for almost every chapter were helpful and sometimes contained nuggets more valuable than the poems they comment on.

Also kept in my mind that “Tao” is the same word used to translate “Logos” in the famous John 1 passage. Makes for a sort of Jesus-centered mysticism of the Tao, about which I wanna read more in the future

Honestly 3.5 stars but it gets bumped up for the great writing in the final chapter