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anasofia_'s review
5.0
“As the parable tells us, success is reserved for the man who builds his house on the rock. Nowadays I think that maybe I’ve known always somewhere deep down that I couldn’t live for long on any rock. What took me longer to figure out was that living on the sand didn’t have to be just a running away or an experience of permanent overwhelm. That the topsy-turvy place between languages and cultures, which has been a site of humility and triangulation and self-knowledge, of absurdity and inanity and the best source of creative fertility, can also offer, paradoxically, a kind of safety”.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
jola_g's review
4.0
Yum-yum: the sound of Jola devouring Polly Barton's book, often feeling euphoric, albeit not liking it as much as she wished.
Too much Polly Barton and Ludwig Wittgenstein, too little Japan. This is my general impression after having read Fifty Sounds (2021). The issue I had with this book was the distance between me and Polly Barton. Sometimes she was either...
⟹ Too far, hiding behind Ludwig Wittgenstein and his theory of language, which is enthralling, but I found her fascination overwhelming, especially in the first part of the book.
⇒ Too close. I would prefer more observations on Japan to the snippets of Polly Barton's love life. I was looking forward to basking in the sounds of the Land of the Rising Sun, not necessarily eavesdropping behind the author's bedroom door.
I was not thrilled by Polly Barton's self-indulgence and her tendency to feel victimized, nonetheless there were things in Fifty Sounds which I absolutely adored. Most importantly, the creative idea behind the book which gave it a unique, poetic structure: it consists of fifty vignettes, each devoted to a different Japanese onomatopoeia. I also admire the author's erudition and her linguistic skills. Frankly speaking, I fell in love with Fifty Sounds at the stage of reading the blurb for the first time and bought the book immediately after it had been released which goes to prove how infatuated I got.
I think Fifty Sounds will appeal more to the readers who are into the philosophy of language, teaching and learning foreign languages and translation than to those keen on Japan. The hunger of the latter might not be fully satisfied. As for Japan, Polly Barton is in a love-and-hate relationship with this intriguing country which attracts and repels her at the same time. The story of her affair with Y, a Japanese teacher, encapsulates that. It constantly feels as if she were enamoured of someone distant, cold and demanding but concurrently bewitching: I am in a pseudo-romantic relationship with Japan, which is jealous, intense and full of burning, flailing ego. Her fixation is not blind though. For instance, she wonders why Japan, being such a well-off country, accepts so few asylum seekers.
Besides, I loved the author's writing style and her reflections on learning a foreign language. They are not only spot-on but also beautiful. Just a few examples:
The language learning I want to talk about is a sensory bombardment. It is a possession, a bedevilment, a physical takeover.
If language learning is anything, it is the always-bruised but ever-renewing desire to draw close: to a person, a territory, a culture, an idea, an indefinable feeling.
My body was alive with the sounds it had collected up throughout the day. When I shut my eyes in bed at night I was souped in them, sounds that hovered between known and unknown, as if comprehensibility were not in fact the currency in which my brain dealt any more, and what was being processed was rather the rhythms.
Needless to say, the best way to put Polly Barton's opinions on Japan, the Japanese and their language to the test would be to simply go there. Hopefully, I will do it in the future, provided Oscar Wild was wrong when he declared: In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people… The Japanese people are… simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.
David Burliuk, On the Beach, Japan.
Too much Polly Barton and Ludwig Wittgenstein, too little Japan. This is my general impression after having read Fifty Sounds (2021). The issue I had with this book was the distance between me and Polly Barton. Sometimes she was either...
⟹ Too far, hiding behind Ludwig Wittgenstein and his theory of language, which is enthralling, but I found her fascination overwhelming, especially in the first part of the book.
⇒ Too close. I would prefer more observations on Japan to the snippets of Polly Barton's love life. I was looking forward to basking in the sounds of the Land of the Rising Sun, not necessarily eavesdropping behind the author's bedroom door.
I was not thrilled by Polly Barton's self-indulgence and her tendency to feel victimized, nonetheless there were things in Fifty Sounds which I absolutely adored. Most importantly, the creative idea behind the book which gave it a unique, poetic structure: it consists of fifty vignettes, each devoted to a different Japanese onomatopoeia. I also admire the author's erudition and her linguistic skills. Frankly speaking, I fell in love with Fifty Sounds at the stage of reading the blurb for the first time and bought the book immediately after it had been released which goes to prove how infatuated I got.
I think Fifty Sounds will appeal more to the readers who are into the philosophy of language, teaching and learning foreign languages and translation than to those keen on Japan. The hunger of the latter might not be fully satisfied. As for Japan, Polly Barton is in a love-and-hate relationship with this intriguing country which attracts and repels her at the same time. The story of her affair with Y, a Japanese teacher, encapsulates that. It constantly feels as if she were enamoured of someone distant, cold and demanding but concurrently bewitching: I am in a pseudo-romantic relationship with Japan, which is jealous, intense and full of burning, flailing ego. Her fixation is not blind though. For instance, she wonders why Japan, being such a well-off country, accepts so few asylum seekers.
Besides, I loved the author's writing style and her reflections on learning a foreign language. They are not only spot-on but also beautiful. Just a few examples:
The language learning I want to talk about is a sensory bombardment. It is a possession, a bedevilment, a physical takeover.
If language learning is anything, it is the always-bruised but ever-renewing desire to draw close: to a person, a territory, a culture, an idea, an indefinable feeling.
My body was alive with the sounds it had collected up throughout the day. When I shut my eyes in bed at night I was souped in them, sounds that hovered between known and unknown, as if comprehensibility were not in fact the currency in which my brain dealt any more, and what was being processed was rather the rhythms.
Needless to say, the best way to put Polly Barton's opinions on Japan, the Japanese and their language to the test would be to simply go there. Hopefully, I will do it in the future, provided Oscar Wild was wrong when he declared: In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people… The Japanese people are… simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.
David Burliuk, On the Beach, Japan.
questingnotcoasting's review
I thought I'd be more interested in this. It's more philosophical than I want. Not knowing any Japanese certainly makes it harder to understand what Barton is describing, in terms of how the language works and I just know I'm never going to be rushing to pick it up.
foggy_rosamund's review
4.0
Each chapter in Fifty Sounds takes as a starting point a mimetic word in Japanese, i.e. a word that evokes a sound or, more broadly, a physical sensation. Japanese has a wider ranger of mimetic or onomatopoeic words than English, such as mushi-mushi, the sound of being steamed alive, or yochi-yochi, the sound of tottering like a small child. Barton uses these words to explore her fifteen years spent in Japan, as well as the ways in which we use language and what language learning feels like. She goes to Japan to teach English as a 22-year-old, and is placed in a rural school on a small island. Over time her relationship to Japanese and Japan develops and broadens: while very young, she has a relationship with an older married man, Y, and his influence helps her to develop her Japanese, but when she leaves him, her relationship to Japanese deepens as she learns new words obsessively and throws herself into language. I really enjoyed the experience of reading this book: the chapter are brief and engaging, and capture the mixture of overwhelming and fascinating that characterise immersing in a new language. Barton is often funny, self-deprecating and her work is full of anecdotes.
On a sentence by sentence level, I sometimes found her writing clunky: she uses clauses like "in fact" and "any yet" far too often, and her paragraphs can repeat the same thoughts, but she usually saves herself by providing a moment of insight or an interesting thought about how Japanese language works. She tries to distance herself from fetishizing Japan, something that is a common problem for outsiders in Japan, and I think she succeeds most of the time. Strangely, though, at times she seems blame her own emotional distress on elements of Japanese culture and society while it seemed that her problems were more to do with her age and loneliness. One of my biggest problems with this book was the way in which she wrote about learning a second language -- she chooses to learn Japanese and to immerse herself in Japan, but she doesn't acknowledge that many people learning a second language, especially English, don't have that choice. For immigrants and refugees the kind of immersion she chooses is forced, and speaking a second language poorly can have real consequences. Fifty Sounds is more interested in language-learning as a source of pleasure and intellectual curiosity, and that makes it pleasurable to read, but I wonder if different experiences of language-learning should have been acknowledged. That said, Barton does approach much of her work with nuance, and I found this book entertaining and vivid. The hook, of focusing on specific mimetic words, is really effective, and I appreciate how Barton balanced emotionally honesty and raw feeling with an exploration of words and learning.
On a sentence by sentence level, I sometimes found her writing clunky: she uses clauses like "in fact" and "any yet" far too often, and her paragraphs can repeat the same thoughts, but she usually saves herself by providing a moment of insight or an interesting thought about how Japanese language works. She tries to distance herself from fetishizing Japan, something that is a common problem for outsiders in Japan, and I think she succeeds most of the time. Strangely, though, at times she seems blame her own emotional distress on elements of Japanese culture and society while it seemed that her problems were more to do with her age and loneliness. One of my biggest problems with this book was the way in which she wrote about learning a second language -- she chooses to learn Japanese and to immerse herself in Japan, but she doesn't acknowledge that many people learning a second language, especially English, don't have that choice. For immigrants and refugees the kind of immersion she chooses is forced, and speaking a second language poorly can have real consequences. Fifty Sounds is more interested in language-learning as a source of pleasure and intellectual curiosity, and that makes it pleasurable to read, but I wonder if different experiences of language-learning should have been acknowledged. That said, Barton does approach much of her work with nuance, and I found this book entertaining and vivid. The hook, of focusing on specific mimetic words, is really effective, and I appreciate how Barton balanced emotionally honesty and raw feeling with an exploration of words and learning.
kyotomylove's review
For nearly 40 years i am obsessed with Japan and i am obsessed with everything concerning language. Never in my wildest dreams i would have thought that this book would bore and annoy me. I tried several times to get into it, but the whining teenage voice of the narrator made it impossible. I am deeply disgusted by this book.
bleurghonaut's review
I've been in a reading slump recently and I think this book might have caused it. After having it in my 'currently reading' pile for months, I have decided to DNF it, as my feeling of having to finish this book before starting any others is causing me to not feel like reading at all. I really wanted to love this book: I like quirky memoirs, I like reading about complex women, I'm learning Japanese. What's not to love?
From the beginning, however, I just didn't gel with this book. Barton has a beautiful writing style (I would definitely be interested in reading some of her translations), but I found this book painfully self-conscious, almost adolescent. I found almost no evidence of the now more mature Barton reflecting on her experience. It was like reading a diary of a young woman's first proper love affair. Barton does weave a clever parallel between her love affair with the Japanese language (which seems an all-consuming obsession), and her affair with Y, a married Japanese teacher (about whom Barton seems more ambivalent). Barton hints at a troubled sense of identity (you get the feeling that she was using the language to try on a new self, a way of escaping) and I wish she had analysed this in more depth. It's not fair of me to use the word 'millennial' as a criticism, but there is something so earnestly navel-gazing about this book that I feel that I am not the right target audience for it.
I bought the book as I am learning Japanese, and it really has nothing much to do with that at all. There are glimpses of Barton's experiences of learning Japanese (she went to Japan after dropping out of uni with no prior knowledge of the language), but for a more nuanced and mature view of what happens to a person when they are learning a language I would recommend Jhumpa Lahiri's In Other Words. If you are looking for a raw, beautifully written memoir I would recommend Claire-Louise Bennett's Checkout 19. DNF at page 165.
From the beginning, however, I just didn't gel with this book. Barton has a beautiful writing style (I would definitely be interested in reading some of her translations), but I found this book painfully self-conscious, almost adolescent. I found almost no evidence of the now more mature Barton reflecting on her experience. It was like reading a diary of a young woman's first proper love affair. Barton does weave a clever parallel between her love affair with the Japanese language (which seems an all-consuming obsession), and her affair with Y, a married Japanese teacher (about whom Barton seems more ambivalent). Barton hints at a troubled sense of identity (you get the feeling that she was using the language to try on a new self, a way of escaping) and I wish she had analysed this in more depth. It's not fair of me to use the word 'millennial' as a criticism, but there is something so earnestly navel-gazing about this book that I feel that I am not the right target audience for it.
I bought the book as I am learning Japanese, and it really has nothing much to do with that at all. There are glimpses of Barton's experiences of learning Japanese (she went to Japan after dropping out of uni with no prior knowledge of the language), but for a more nuanced and mature view of what happens to a person when they are learning a language I would recommend Jhumpa Lahiri's In Other Words. If you are looking for a raw, beautifully written memoir I would recommend Claire-Louise Bennett's Checkout 19. DNF at page 165.