Gifted by Suzumi Suzuki
Japanese fiction
Original title – ギフテッド, Gifuteddo
Translator Alison Markin Powell
Source – Personal copy
I moved on to a book that had two reasons I read it. First, it was on the US Republic of Consciousness longlist, but it is also a book that could be on the booker longlist after tossing and turning about the longlist for the book I have decided to do that and the EBRD lists this year, and this means I need to push on and read and clear some of my TBR books from last year with books that could be on the longlist and this book which has many significant bits in such a short book. A mother-daughter relationship. Being on the edge of society as our writer was, Autofiction, the narrator herself was an adult actress and hostess. So lived in the after-dark world like the narrator of the book.
I’d wait until the very last minute to change my clothes, and even then, I avoided putting on outfits that looked like I was heading to the entertainment district. Whereas normally I’d take an hour to put on makeup and powder my skin, I started doing all that once I was already out. And somehow, the simple and modest guises I put on to keep my mother from stalling me seemed to her liking. There was one time when she said, “You look pretty today.” I was wearing a beige cardigan over jeans. It was the first time my mother had ever complimented my clothing or appearance. But I still ended up going out every night, after the meds had been administered and the questions had been dodged. When I left her as she dropped off to sleep, I hated the sound of the key as I locked the door from the outside.
As she heads out to work trying to blend in
This is a slim book but depicts the last nine days of a strained relationship[ between a mother who could have been a poet but because of her choices in life has had a knock-on effect on her daughter so when she is near the end of her life and she turns upon at her daughter’s apartment. What follows is the eggshell-like connection of these two women over the last few days of her mother’s life. It isn’t about reconnecting. It is about looking back and forgiving their mother; she was cruel. it is about that last connection and days in a was. The daughter shows her pain and tough life via the collection of tattoos she has on her body. As she navigates the night in Tokyo’s red light district, this book is about life, death, and sex in a sleepless part of town where, in this short book, it seems much larger, but with its subtle telling of this last connection, Add to that a loss of as close friend this is [lacked for the size of this book in which no-one really wins.
I’d been sitting in the same posture for two days, fid-ding with my cell phone today, and yesterday flipping through-but not reading various magazines I had bought, so not surprisingly, my lower back and legs were killing me, and I took advantage of my mother dozing off after her midday meds to duck out into the hallway.
Just as I made it downstairs to go smoke a cigarette, my phone rang. The number came up as the hospital, so for a second I thought my mother had died, but they were calling to say she had a visitor. I told them I’d be right back, though since I was already on the first floor, I stepped out the entrance on the east side, took three puffs of a cigarette, and then reluctantly made an appearance at the nurses’ station on the floor my mother’s room was on, the foor where they put the terminal patients.
Her mothers last days and how she deals with it
I loved this. For me, this is the sort of book that seems to become more available to us as readers. This book is about subtle emotions and connections told with a slight hand. You can see the writer’s own pain. It is like she cut her wrist and wrote this in her own blood, but the pain is only slightly released. It is about the cruelty of a parent to the child and how that can manifest itself her tattoos are like her ACES (Adverse Childhood Experiences These are things that happen in childhood that have a knock-on effect in adulthood and how they can cause someone to like this character get tattoos or drink to much have no barriers etc. there is an excellent video about this, something we are thinking more and more about in my job just as an aside )As I said this remind me of Eve Baltsar, another writer that writes short, hard-hitting books about relationships and of course the mistress of Autofiction Annie Ernaux for the way it is unflinching in its talking about the world they are in. Have you read this book ?
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