Many things make up the picture a place leaves behind for us—waters, rocks, roofs, squares—but for me, it is most of all trees. They are not only beautiful and lovable in their own right, representing the innocence of nature and a contrast to people, who express themselves in buildings and other structures—they are also revealing: we can learn much from them about the age and type of arable land there, the climate, the weather, and the minds of the people. I don’t know how the village where I now live will present itself to my mind’s eye later, but I cannot imagine that it will be without poplars, any more than I can picture Lake Garda without olive trees or Tuscany without cypresses. Other places are unthinkable to me without their lindens, or their nut trees, and two or three are recognizable and remarkable by virtue of having no trees there at all.
Written at the dawn of German Romanticism, Novalis’s “Hymns to the Night” opens with a paean to day and then an abrupt pivot: “I turn to the holy, unspeakable, secretive Night.” There’s an exuberance, a literal breathlessness as the poet moves beyond the Enlightenment to seek inspiration in the darker, intuitive currents of our psyches, a precursor to Freud’s model of the unconscious. We may have evolved as a diurnal species, but at night we’re our most human, meandering among dreams and desires.
I thought of Novalis and Freud as I avidly read Mieko Kawakami’s “All the Lovers in the Night,” her engrossing, fine-boned new novel, deftly translated from Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd. Night, for this author, is an uncanny space where anything can happen, and narrator Fuyuko Irie’s preface unfurls as evocative fragments: “The red light at the intersection, trembling as if wet, even though it isn’t raining. Streetlight after streetlight. Taillights trailing off into the distance. The soft glow from the windows. … Why is the night so beautiful? Why does it shine the way it does?” Kawakami drops the Novalis-style lyricism immediately, though: The 21st century demands a flattened, deadpan voice, as Fuyuko tries to liberate herself, in fits and starts, from the miasma of her life.
For all its fluency in the languages of gaming, addiction and tech, “The Candy House” is a social novel, a kind of “Middlemarch” for the 21st century with an aptly whirling form. The characters’ stories are not wrapped up neatly; there are reversals and redemptions and, above all, an assertion that imagination can still trump technology.
This hope is subtle, redemptive, simple, and it makes Losing Face a stunning work: an evocative exploration of what it means to falter and to flail, to rise each day knowing your setbacks are embedded deep within you, and to turn up for the people you love even though they’re as screwed up as you are.
Of course, the flipside to such remorseless, brilliantly withering contempt is sentimentality. It is perhaps the most difficult genre to do well, and Toltz does it humanely, compassionately and unforgettably.