Wow! That Book Discussion post by Baron is a hard act to follow. Luckily, the business portion of the meeting was pretty short. Everyone paid their book club dues. We are accumulating quite the fund! At the next meeting perhaps we should discuss some potential uses for our fund. Maybe a field trip to a winery? Or a masseuse at one of our meetings? Just throwing out ideas...
Baron presented the group with his new and improved book club drawing, which will, after much waiting and anticipation, hopefully soon adorn our book club T-shirts. Deuce represented that she will color the drawing and the T-shirts will be made! Yay!
I shared with the group an app I had heard about on the radio, called the NPR Book Concierge. It has reviews of the best books of 2015. Since all of us have been thinking about our selection for the next round of books, I thought this might help us identify some winners. Although, as we all know too well, sometimes the reviews of books can be deceiving!
Mentioning NPR reminded Gilligan of an NPR podcast called Serial. Gilligan told the group that Season 2 of this podcast is dynamite, and he highly recommended it to the Novel Spirits. Gilligan also mentioned that he needs blog access, which Baron has since squared away. Thanks Baron!
Drawing inspiration from Indy's Off the Grid segment from this meeting, Deuce had an idea for our next meeting - a game called "Whose Line...", in which we all bring a quote by an author of one of the books that we have read. It doesn't necessarily have to be from the book that we have read, but it can be. Sounds interesting!
We also had a brief discussion of some recent news items that were related to this month's selection, GRAY MOUNTAIN. There has recently been legislation proposed to ban mountaintop removal mining in Cumberland, Tennessee. Also, a mining executive was recently convicted of a misdemeanor related to the Upper Big Branch mine explosion, in which 29 miners were killed.
At the end of our meeting, we did our first Novel Spirits gift swap, which was a smashing success (I hope). I have certainly been using my wine aerator! Boss and Chief have been chomping at the bit to make a trip to Barnes and Noble to spend their gift cards from the Novel Spirits.
Our next book is BOSSYPANTS by Tina Fey. We only have three books after this one!! Chief selected Guardians of Ga'hoole - The Capture by Kathryn Lasky as his next bonus book. Our next meeting will be on January 24, 2016 at Baron's castle, where we can all break our New Years' resolutions to drink less and eat healthier. Until then, Novel Spirits, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!
SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW
Voice of the Voiceless
‘The Reason I Jump,’ by Naoki Higashida
By SALLIE TISDALE
AUGUST 23, 2013
Autism is an endless mystery, largely unknowable by its nature, yet there are dozens of books by or about autistic people determined to explain the lives of those affected. The newest is “The Reason I Jump,” popular in Japan since it was published in 2007. The author, Naoki Higashida, was 13 years old at the time he wrote the memoir, and nonverbal. He wrote by spelling out words on a Japanese alphabet letter board.
The slim volume consists of short chapters beginning with questions like “Why do you speak in that peculiar way?” and “Why do you like spinning?” Describing why, exactly, he likes to jump, Higashida tells us: “The motion makes me want to change into a bird and fly off to some faraway place. But constrained by ourselves and by the people around us, all we can do is tweet-tweet, flap our wings and hop around in a cage.”
Higashida is bright and thoughtful. He maintains a blog and has written other books. His American publisher describes Higashida, who can also type on a computer and is able to read aloud what he has written, as a “motivational speaker.” As the parent of an autistic adult, I know autism has hidden depths, but they are hidden under real impairment. The author tells us that he gets lost and panics. He can’t remember rules, sit still or make sense of time.
The book comes to English readers through the passionate efforts of David Mitchell, the author of “Cloud Atlas” and the father of an autistic child. Mitchell and his wife, KA Yoshida, provided the translation. Mitchell believes the book is proof that the standard definition of autism is wrong, that autism’s obvious restrictions of socialization and communication “are not symptoms of autism but consequences.” Higashida, he has also said, is “more of a writer than I am.”
I will leave that consideration to others, but by its own context, “The Reason I Jump” makes for odd reading — a book about disordered sensorineural processing by a person with disordered sensorineural processing, written one letter at a time in adolescent Japanese prose and then translated into colloquial English (“It really gets me down”). The author barely mentions other people — there are brief references to his mother and his teacher — but he uses the plural (“our,” “we”) on almost every page. The constant presumption that he speaks for “people with autism” and “us kids with autism” is jarring.
The English edition is being treated more as a fragile objet de consciousness than as a book, as though criticism or analysis would be vulgar. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to sort out what is Higashida here and what is Mitchell. The two have never met in person, and Higashida had almost no involvement in the English edition. Mitchell has said that Yoshida “did the heavy lifting” from the Japanese, and that he “provided the stylistic icing on the cake.”
“The Reason I Jump” may raise questions, as many books have, about the nature of autism. But it raises questions about translation as well — that “icing.” Translation, at its best, is a dance between an objective search for equivalent language and an intuitive grasp of the author’s intent, which may have nothing to do with the translator’s point of view. The parents of an autistic child may not be the best translators for a book by an autistic child.
Mitchell writes that reading “The Reason I Jump,” he “felt as if, for the first time, our own son was talking to us about what was happening inside his head.” No parent of an autistic person — and I include myself here — can help longing for such a chance, and looking for it wherever we can. We have to be careful about turning what we find into what we want.
