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A review by bleurghonaut
Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton
Did not finish book. Stopped at 46%.
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.