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A review by kalira
Fifty Sounds: A Memoir of Language, Learning, and Longing by Polly Barton
emotional
tense
slow-paced
2.0
Note that I found this suggested more as a focus on Japanese language, though I did realise when I had it it my hands and before I began reading that it is, in fact, a memoir merely nodding towards the idea of language for structure. (A language that is mangled to Barton's purposes in each section, opening with an onomotopeia that she misuses and often wrongly defines to draw the connection to the anecdote in that section. Done intentionally for the purpose, to be sure! But somewhat discombobulating.)
She also uses her own form of romanisation for Japanese words, of which I have never seen the like, sometimes making her quoted Japanese (or borrowed English-in-Japanese) words difficult to impossible to parse for someone who actually knows them or Japanese pronunciation/construction in general. . . And swings between different methods of representing the same sounds and structures, a rather graver sin.
Barton was a philosophy major prior to signing up to teach English in Japan and her thus immersive experience in learning the language there, and she will never let you forget it in her memoir - even when she expresses doubt or dismay at that part of herself. Her favourite philosopher is mentioned frequently ("and even the transformative philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein" the book blurb says of its contents; I think in fact the only things mentioned more frequently are Japan and Barton's unhealthy relationships) and her asides often have an impenetrable illogic one might find common amidst philosophy students. Some of them grow out of it as they cease to be young students. Some do not. Barton has not.
She explains she went to study philosophy rather apathetically, as something that happened to her rather than something she chose; a repeated theme for her life and major points in it - that something happened to her, or she wanted it to, and not to make a choice herself. This is how she came to Japan, as well. It is how she became a translator, which she at a later point in the book leans towards describing as her calling, only to shy away from having any such thing. (And to speak positively of having realised that building her house on the sand, a la the proverb about building on rock vs sand, is her comfortable zone. One raises a dubious eyebrow.)
In addition to this apathy she also emphasises her own misery, anxiety, ambivalence, arrogance, speaks down about herself frequently in a number of ways, both past and present.
Repeated throughout the anecdotes and invariably frustrating to me, she delivers a theme: 'people are horrible and small-minded and self-centred', she seems to say, again and again, 'and I am above that and different', only to wind up at the conclusion 'no, I, too, am awful and small-minded and selfish', declaring this the pinnacle in a fabulously miserable assessment of human nature.
She frequently makes sweeping generalisations as though whatever negative thought she displays is in fact the common and in fact default of humanity, or Westerners. They are often, it seems, expansions of how she felt herself with no other grounding.
"I am voicing the arrogance and judgmental nature of all Westerners, revealing the ugliness," she seems to say, with no particular basis outside herself.
It is all the more jarring and distasteful as she occasionally voices a common thread sort of experience that can be empathised with . . . only to jink back into such attitudes abruptly.
She seems, perhaps, to want, desperately, for her own embarrassment and judgement to be universal, as though she can justify such feelings by ascribing them to others. Yet at the same time she returns to the ways I am different - for example wondering how people cannot experience existential shifts in their very nature by speaking another language, and be devilled by such changes in their personality, horrified, wondering, baffled. She also speaks of how she began to deride each language when she spoke in the other, 'Japanese concepts only making sense when I spoke Japanese, only for me to declare them bizarre when speaking English with friends later'; it is one of the many things she suggests are a natural consequence of learning multiple languages.
One also gathers enough, from one of her screeds on this topic, to wonder if she thinks code-switching - such as the act of speaking differently with coworkers in a school than with friends at karaoke or again with family at home - is inauthentic, lying, a foible of mockery. She unironically mentions multiple personality disorder in this vein.
Barton swings wildly between venerating Japanese (the language and at times the culture) with a particularly personal stripe of romanticism (quite literally and in more than one sense; she several times anthropomorphises Japan in terms of a romantic partner to a somewhat startling degree) and fetishisation (even as she occasionally speaks with disdain and disgust of Orientalism), to infantilising or disdaining it; "it might occur to you to doubt whether this is, in fact, language" she says of one quote from a song lyric, for the way that the sound/words repeat. A thought I would not, in fact, have wondered.
I found far more troublesome and worrisome about her described relationships - such as her affair with a coworker (and superior) 'more than twice' her age (and married), which relationship she also characterises as the natural act of anyone learning a new language. (It is the relationship she focuses upon most in the book, both in depth and length, but one does come away with the uncomfortable wondering if Barton has ever had a non-toxic relationship, whether platonic or romantic.)
She also uses her own form of romanisation for Japanese words, of which I have never seen the like, sometimes making her quoted Japanese (or borrowed English-in-Japanese) words difficult to impossible to parse for someone who actually knows them or Japanese pronunciation/construction in general. . . And swings between different methods of representing the same sounds and structures, a rather graver sin.
Barton was a philosophy major prior to signing up to teach English in Japan and her thus immersive experience in learning the language there, and she will never let you forget it in her memoir - even when she expresses doubt or dismay at that part of herself. Her favourite philosopher is mentioned frequently ("and even the transformative philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein" the book blurb says of its contents; I think in fact the only things mentioned more frequently are Japan and Barton's unhealthy relationships) and her asides often have an impenetrable illogic one might find common amidst philosophy students. Some of them grow out of it as they cease to be young students. Some do not. Barton has not.
She explains she went to study philosophy rather apathetically, as something that happened to her rather than something she chose; a repeated theme for her life and major points in it - that something happened to her, or she wanted it to, and not to make a choice herself. This is how she came to Japan, as well. It is how she became a translator, which she at a later point in the book leans towards describing as her calling, only to shy away from having any such thing. (And to speak positively of having realised that building her house on the sand, a la the proverb about building on rock vs sand, is her comfortable zone. One raises a dubious eyebrow.)
In addition to this apathy she also emphasises her own misery, anxiety, ambivalence, arrogance, speaks down about herself frequently in a number of ways, both past and present.
Repeated throughout the anecdotes and invariably frustrating to me, she delivers a theme: 'people are horrible and small-minded and self-centred', she seems to say, again and again, 'and I am above that and different', only to wind up at the conclusion 'no, I, too, am awful and small-minded and selfish', declaring this the pinnacle in a fabulously miserable assessment of human nature.
She frequently makes sweeping generalisations as though whatever negative thought she displays is in fact the common and in fact default of humanity, or Westerners. They are often, it seems, expansions of how she felt herself with no other grounding.
"I am voicing the arrogance and judgmental nature of all Westerners, revealing the ugliness," she seems to say, with no particular basis outside herself.
It is all the more jarring and distasteful as she occasionally voices a common thread sort of experience that can be empathised with . . . only to jink back into such attitudes abruptly.
She seems, perhaps, to want, desperately, for her own embarrassment and judgement to be universal, as though she can justify such feelings by ascribing them to others. Yet at the same time she returns to the ways I am different - for example wondering how people cannot experience existential shifts in their very nature by speaking another language, and be devilled by such changes in their personality, horrified, wondering, baffled. She also speaks of how she began to deride each language when she spoke in the other, 'Japanese concepts only making sense when I spoke Japanese, only for me to declare them bizarre when speaking English with friends later'; it is one of the many things she suggests are a natural consequence of learning multiple languages.
One also gathers enough, from one of her screeds on this topic, to wonder if she thinks code-switching - such as the act of speaking differently with coworkers in a school than with friends at karaoke or again with family at home - is inauthentic, lying, a foible of mockery. She unironically mentions multiple personality disorder in this vein.
Barton swings wildly between venerating Japanese (the language and at times the culture) with a particularly personal stripe of romanticism (quite literally and in more than one sense; she several times anthropomorphises Japan in terms of a romantic partner to a somewhat startling degree) and fetishisation (even as she occasionally speaks with disdain and disgust of Orientalism), to infantilising or disdaining it; "it might occur to you to doubt whether this is, in fact, language" she says of one quote from a song lyric, for the way that the sound/words repeat. A thought I would not, in fact, have wondered.
I found far more troublesome and worrisome about her described relationships - such as her affair with a coworker (and superior) 'more than twice' her age (and married), which relationship she also characterises as the natural act of anyone learning a new language. (It is the relationship she focuses upon most in the book, both in depth and length, but one does come away with the uncomfortable wondering if Barton has ever had a non-toxic relationship, whether platonic or romantic.)
Content Warnings
Graphic: Infidelity, Suicide, Toxic relationship, Xenophobia, and Toxic friendship
Moderate: Sexual content and Alcohol
Minor: Car accident and Sexual harassment