Book Box: How to read Taiwan Travelogue

DSpike Reader,Do you regain some prize-winning novels firmly to say? the like One Hundred Years of Solitude? I was eighteen years old and staying in my uncle’s house, taking Delhi Transport Corporation buses to Delhi University and standing in long lines for admission to college, when I began reading this much-beloved book of magical realism. I’d read a page or two and put it away.This carried on for days. I think there was too much going on in my life at that time. But somehow, it made me feel like a failure—this inability to read a book the world was raving about.Over the years, I gathered evidence. I’d read Beloved by Toni Morrison a few years before. Spending evenings alone in a tiny studio apartment on a cobbled street in Colmar, France, I had lived and breathed the ghastly, ghostly world of Sethe and Beloved. I’d read the Russian novelists, loved reading the very complicated Cloud Atlas, and been glued to tough and triggering books like A Little Life. Wasn’t this proof enough that I wasn’t being lazy with my literature?But then I’d pick up books like Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, winner of the Booker Prize, and The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Each time, after ten or twenty pages, I’d stop. Both books felt surreal and strange, with no characters I could identify with and no narrative that made sense to me. “Devastatingly moving,” “a luminous feat,” “a searing satire,” said the critics. I tried again. And failed. The third time around, both books were book club reads. Because I needed to read them, I read the first fifty pages of each as if they were textbooks. And then I couldn’t put either down.Maybe this is what I need to do with Taiwan Travelogue, the winner of this year’s International Booker Prize. When it first appeared on the Booker Prize longlist, I picked it up. I was immediately overwhelmed by unfamiliar Japanese and Taiwanese geography and history. I put it aside and picked up the racy, pacy Yesteryear instead.I tried again, this time with an audio version. Listening to the names of stations on the railway line, the names of cities and sights gave the book a different flavour. Hearing the rhythm of the unfamiliar language spoken aloud stripped away the visual intimidation of the page; my eyes were no longer tripping over syllables, allowing the atmosphere to finally wash over me.Plus, there seemed to be an interesting tension between the Japanese author visiting Taiwan and her local guide. But it was nighttime, the end of a long day full of errands, and too soon I fell asleep.On a rainy evening, after a day spent with plumbers trying to identify where a leak is coming from, I decide to go to bed early. Raindrops thrum steadily on the tin roof above me, and the wind whistles. But inside, my bedside lamp casts a cosy yellow glow over my room, and I feel warm and dry. I pick up Taiwan Travelogue again. For a third time.The geography, the history, even the descriptions of food feel rather mysterious. Here’s one such passage:“I did manage to wolf down a box of sushi rice, a banquet-sized plate of sashimi, stewed sweetfish, grilled mushrooms, fried burdock roots, bamboo shoot salad, tamagoyaki sweet omelet, grated yam with salted seaweed, steamed chawanmushi egg custard, clear clam broth, and, finally, unagi.”I know sushi. I know sashimi. But then—burdock roots? Chawanmushi? The list keeps moving, indifferent to whether I’m keeping up. I read about Aoyama eating all this while I can’t even pronounce it.But this time, I stay with the novel, slowing down, stopping to highlight sentences like this one:“Rushing to catch a bus or a train, rushing from one attraction to the next—that kind of ‘touring’ is just moving around, not ‘traveling.’”Does this hold true for books as well? There is a difference between rushing through a book and being immersed in it, living with its characters, feeling their emotions, inhabiting it.I finish reading the ‘Jute Soup’ chapter, then turn off my Kindle and the light, mulling over this Japanese-to-English translation of a novel titled with the word ‘travelogue’, written by a Japanese writer travelling to Taiwan.There is something familiar in this layering, even if the geography is entirely foreign. I grew up in a country still sorting through what the British left behind—the railways, the bureaucracy—with the English language always proclaimed superior even as it sits inside our beings like a borrowed tongue. Taiwan under Japanese occupation has its own version of this sediment.Taiwan Travelogue feels like a trick of light, a prism sometimes.Four languages, three countries, one rainy evening, and finally, a way in—into a world of shared sedimented colonial and caste histories that tie in so closely with my own. Beneath the unfamiliar geography, the hierarchies of food, family, and power provoke me to think about my own. I have stopped rushing; I am finally travelling.(Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and Founder, Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. For all questions about life and literature email sonyasbookbox@gmail.com.)