Culture|Book review
The debut novel is lived in the reality of the lower middle class and the dune ladder.
Novel
Bryan Washington: What’s left of us (Memorial). Aleksi Milonoff, Finland. Big Dipper. 327 s.
Well now was refreshing! A trip to Texas, the life of a divorced male couple, amidst diverse family ties, to neighborhoods populated mostly by Latinos and African Americans.
American Bryan Washington (b. 1993), a multi-award-winning debut novel What is left of us table setting is not quite familiar and common to Finnish readers.
According to the publisher, the novel offers its reader a master class in empathy. I recognize something like this happening: I cling to these complex people and at the same time describe people in this way, without embellishment, but still with respect. Aleksi Milonoff a meritorious translation reinforces this feeling.
At the beginning of the novel Growing up as the son of his Japanese-born parents, Mike learns that Eiju’s father, who abandoned his family and once returned to Japan, has contracted incurable cancer. He wants to meet his father and leaves Osaka without knowing his return date.
Mike’s boyfriend Benson aka Ben is left alone, but Mike’s Japanese mother Mitsuko is moving into the apartment. From the very beginning, of course, the mother must swallow that her son has lived with the man.
From this sudden set-up, African-American Ben and Mitsuko, who cook rice with Japanese devotion, begin to reach out to each other. At the same time, Ben’s and Mike’s communication is thinning and truncated into WhatsApp’s short lines of letters.
In Osaka Mike, for his part, begins to close the gap between his father, who is fading in the grip of a serious illness, and himself. Familiarization must begin all over again.
This process of convergence includes discussions and acknowledgments about the boy’s sexual orientation as well as twists and turns over the transfer of ownership of the bar owned by the father. And, of course, the question: in which country to live your own life?
The work lives in the reality of the lower middle class and the dune ladder. Ben works in kindergarten with the kids, Mike in the fast food kitchen.
As personalities, they are very different: Mike more straightforward and harder, Ben more toned and softer. As a reader, I get to know them as whole people, as part of their complex family backgrounds and immigrant histories.
Ben’s family has been overshadowed by, among other things, the father’s alcoholism, with which the family still has to live – both adults and children.
The novel is great the merit lies in its lush and faithful to the world and in its gracious and honest description of man. Washington seems to want to say that even with awkward relationships, one can live without expecting perfection from oneself or others. Good enough is enough.
In addition, one can build one’s own family connection and identity through non-biological kinship.
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