1.
Gwangju hits the news.

We visited this very pleasant South Korean city 2015. And in 2022, I read The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness by Shin Kyung-sook. The book's focus is South Korea's industrialization process, told through the individual lives it affected, but rumbling in the background is the evolving political situation. A brief 'Seoul Spring' is succeeded by various forms of oppression, culminating in a savage crackdown that took place in Gwangju over 10 days in 1980 (18-27 May).

Two related stories have come up recently. Firstly, Bradley K. Martin, who covered the stry at the time, continues to push back against allegations of North Korean involvement: "Even if some fifth columnists were put in place by Pyongyang before or during the events in Gwangju, I’ve yet to see convincing evidence that they were the dominant element or even close... I’ll keep examining theories that arise, and any evidence that may appear. However, even if someday it should be proven that some North Korean infiltrators were also involved in the uprising, I would see such a development as unlikely to negate the courage and resourcefulness of the Gwangju immortals -- the ones who dealt with the knowledge and fear of impending death, paid the ultimate price and pulled it off."


Gwangju, 2015

Secondly, Starbucks Korea was recently responsible for a terrible gaffe. It inopportunely chose 18 May to launch a marketing campaign called "Tank Day" to introduce its new, bigger, "Tank" coffee cups. The result was a firestorm of protest.

According to Raphael Rashid, "There was also a problem with a slogan the Starbucks campaign used: 'thwack on the desk'. It echoed a notorious cover story used by police after the 1987 torture death of student activist Park Jong-chul. Authorities at the time initially claimed Park died because an officer had used his fist to 'hit the desk with a thwack'.

"Marketers chose the slogan after consulting an AI tool, looking for suggestions, Shinsegae Group said. It turned out some managers who approved the campaign never opened the email attachments showing the marketing material...

"Cho Youngho, a political scientist at Sogang University, says attitudes towards the Gwangju Uprising mirrored the deepest divisions in South Korean society. 'For people who supported democratisation in the 1980s and 1990s, now in their forties and fifties, the idea of commercialising, mocking or trivialising 5/18 is simply unacceptable.'"



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2.
Agatha Christie (1890-1976) continues to draw interest. We've had a lot about the queen of crime on Book notes lately: On that brief disappearance; on her writing rituals; and on her conservative views.

And this year marks the 50th anniversary of her death, so there's likely to be more...

"Should we reread Agatha Christie?" wonders Isabelle-Rachel Casta. Her answer is a big yes, because there's so much culture packed into Christie's novels. From Shakespeare to Tennyson and Blake, from nursery rhymes to mythology, her work is full of references: "So Christie makes each novel into an unusual encounter between the entertainment expected of a good thriller and the cryptic presence of the most notable works in the literary canon."

Alicia Nila Martinez Diaz discusses Christie in the context of the unexpected resurgence of cosy crime. Unlike "true crime" (all blood and latex gloves), the pleasure of these stories derives from the resolution of the mystery (in which task the reader can play along too).

There has always been an element of social regulation to the detective novel, she continues. It stages a transgression, names it as such, but gives it back to the reader as a controlled, understandable story. Writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and G.K. Chesterton turned crime into an intellectual puzzle, and the detective into an almost domestic figure. And then came Agatha Christie, who redefined the conventions of the genre: "With her, crime became almost glamorous. Murders no longer took place in squalid alleyways, but in exquisite mansions or luxurious hotels. Thanks to her writing, the detective novel moved into the realms of elegance and sophistication."

Cosy crime, says Diaz, relies on repetition and the promise of restored equilibrium, feeding into a logic of moral reparation. She likens it to "kintsugi", the Japanese art of repairing broken objects using gold, according to the logic that you can't erase a crack, but you can make it visible and meaningful: "The damage exists, but the form dignifies it, transforming it into a narrative. Perhaps we continue reading these stories because they allow us to look at the fracture and accept that something could fit together again."


From the Crime and Punishment exhibition, Almada, Portugal, 2020

Gill Plain addresses the "conundrum" of Christie's success. She had talent, but so did others. She wrote prolifically, and her books were bestsellers, but that's also true of other crime writers. (She mentions John Creasey, for example, whom I'd not even heard of, despite his 600 novels, and 4+ million per year book sales...)

One of the proposed answers to the why-so-popular question is Christie's plotting. (Plain mentions in this context The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which is notable for me for two reasons: It's the only novel so far that I've read in Portuguese, and I actually understood the trick right from the beginning, which is very unusual in my reading of Christie novels.)

But it can't just be plot, argues Plain: "For all her ability to mislead readers, she wrote some prosaic, daft and far-from-convincing puzzles over the course of her 55-year publishing career."

What else, then? Well, she created two brilliant detectives: Outsider figures who may be seen as slightly ridiculous by others, but who turn out to be totally on-the-ball sleuths (Marple and Poirot). Yet that can't be the sum of the answer either, because they don't figure in some of her best work.

To get to the bottom of her success, says Plain, we need to take into account her style, wit, and psychological insight. "The puzzle of 'why Christie?', then, demands recognition of a range of less familiar Christies. There was noir Christie, a writer of disturbing, manipulative psychological fiction; comic Christie, a sharp and witty deconstructor of social mores; and uncanny Christie -- a crime writer whose familiar voice has a curious knack of making the reader feel at home, while pulling the rug from under them." Perhaps it's this final element that is the determining one: "In an astonishing high-wire act of authorship, she exposes the profound darkness of human nature through the prism of the prosaic and the comforts of the mundane."

It's almost a year since my last Christie, so I really am overdue another...



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3.
An oral history project offers new light on the HIV/Aids epidemic.

The tragic beginnings of this sickness were movingly explored in The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst. There are a number of oral history projects documenting the epidemic, says Liz Tracey, but the one she particularly highlights, Visual Arts and the Aids Epidemic, involved interviewing forty artists about the ways Aids affected their lives and work. The collection, says Tracey, "demonstrates the power of oral history to preserve not just historical events, but what it felt like to live in the moment and survive it when so many people did not".

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4.
Like Daniel Gluck in Ali Smith's Summer, Robin Lustig's father was interned. But not for long...

Fritz Lustig, a musician, fled Nazi German early in 1939, and landed in Southampton as a refugee. He was one of the 70,000 or 80,000 escaping Jews to be allowed in, his son Robin tells us. Up to 10 times that number were refused entry. Robin's maternal grandmother, not so fortunate, was shot by a Nazi execution squad in 1941.

"While researching my family history," Robin comments, "I have frequently been struck by the parallels between the experiences of the 1930s refugees from Germany and Austria and those arriving on our shores today. Whereas in the 30s, Jewish refugees were often demonised as work-shy Bolsheviks or worse, today’s refugees from countries such as Sudan, Eritrea, Afghanistan and Iran are portrayed as potential Islamist terrorists. There is nothing new about fear of the foreigner."

In 1940, Fritz was interned. Unlike Smith's Daniel, who was in a camp in Douglas, Lustig was placed in Peel, in one of those boarding houses towards the northern end of the prom. But he was there only six weeks because his application to join the British army was accepted. Go figure... In the meantime, he and other detained musicians put on a series of impromptu concerts.

Initially employed in an army orchestra, Fritz was then recruited into a military intelligence unit, and tasked with transcribing the bugged conversations of German POWs (who, it was hoped, might inadvertently reveal military information). "It was quite a leap from when he had been classified as an enemy alien and labelled a potential threat to the UK’s national security," Robin comments. And the eavesdropping mission was successful: "It was careless prison cell talk about the 'secret weapons' being developed at Peenemuende that enabled the RAF to unleash Operation Hydra against the Nazis’ V1 flying bombs -- known as doodlebugs -- in August 1943.

Once the war was over, Fritz became a British citizen. Which is exactly the kind of thing today's right-wingers can't countenance...


Looking across Peel bay from the houses where Lustig was interned

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5.
The evolution of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was more complex than we're often given to believe.

Miranda Seymour asks: "Was Frankenstein first breathed into life in the shadow of Bath Abbey, or had Mary already started to construct her masterpiece over a month earlier, while she was living beside Lake Geneva? Short of the miraculous emergence of that conveniently mislaid journal of 1816, we shall never know. What we do know is that Mary’s carefully recorded alpine ascent from Chamonix to the Mer de Glace would provide the scene for Victor Frankenstein’s first meeting with his rejected Creature and that she wrote about that unforgettable encounter during the time she was living in Bath."

Seymour also discusses the degree to which Percy Shelley was involved in the creation of Frankenstein. (TL;DR: He had little direct input, but "acted as a quietly empathetic editor", and provided the "company and creative input" on which Mary's writing thrived.)

But there's another tragic influence: "The ways in which Frankenstein’s development was influenced by books, conversations, and even a dramatic alpine excursion can be tracked and identified. The potent connection between the novel’s dark mood and two dreadful events that took place during the autumn of its creation proves harder to define." Both Mary's half-sister (Fanny) and Percy's first wife (Harriet) committed suicide within a couple of months of each other at the end of 1816. This was only the beginning of the terrible things that happened to Mary Shelley, but these are the events that occurred during the writing of Frankenstein. Seymour again: "Impossible though it is to connect the shocking suicides of Fanny and Harriet to any particular event in Frankenstein, a sense of indirect responsibility for the deaths of these unfortunate young women undoubtedly haunted the minds of its two creators, strengthening their sense of identification with both the rejected Creature and the monstrous creator who spurns his man-made child."


Geneva, 2023

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6.
Every list inspires another list...

The Guardian list I featured a couple of Book notes ago (the one where critics and authors picked their top 100 novels) has spawned a readers' equivalent.

Of course it has...

Of the books included on this second list, I'd read 64; am currently reading 1; had DNF'ed 1; intend to read (so strongly that I actually already have the copies) 3; want to read 17; have no intention of reading 11; and hadn't even heard of 3. I'm slightly surprised that The Lord of the Rings came top... Not that it's not a fantastic read, but well, there are so many other fantastic reads...

Frankenstein, by the way, was No. 39 on this list and No. 30 on the original...