Another month, another little stack of books 📚
Here’s a look at what I read this month — the stories that kept me turning pages, the ones that surprised me, and a few that might just stay with me for a while.
Let’s take a look at this month’s reads. ✨
Yellowface
FinishedSummary
Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars: same year at Yale, same debut year in publishing. But Athena’s a cross-genre literary darling, and June didn’t even get a paperback release. Nobody wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks. So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers to the British and French war efforts during World War I. So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song–complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn’t this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That’s what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree. But June can’t get away from Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June’s (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves. With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface takes on questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation not only in the publishing industry but the persistent erasure of Asian-American voices and history by Western white society. R. F. Kuang’s novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.
The best way to hide a lie is in plain sight.
My Review
Insufferable is the word I would use to describe the main character of this story, June Hayward.
Rebecca F. Kuang, whose tragic series The Poppy War I had heard so much about, was an amazing discovery through her novel Yellowface. Unlike many books where the main character is portrayed as either a kind-hearted hero or a sarcastic antihero you can’t help but grow attached to, Rebecca F. Kuang chose to make hers as insufferable as possible.
Between racism, jealousy, betrayal, bad faith, pathetic behavior, and a complete lack of self-awareness, you might expect June to eventually learn from her mistakes—but not at all. That’s actually what makes this book so fascinating: every time you think she’s hit rock bottom, she somehow manages to dig herself even deeper. What’s even more surprising is the confidence with which she keeps making one terrible decision after another, even though most of her problems are entirely self-inflicted.
Overall, this was a huge favorite of mine. I’ll definitely be reading more of Rebecca F. Kuang’s books.
Nachtland
translated by Maja Zade
FinishedSummary
The people who buy paintings like this aren’t just driven by aesthetic desire. People who buy paintings like this want a story. A story that catapults them into the orbit of the Führer.
As Nicola and Philipp are clearing out their late father’s house, they find an old painting stashed in the attic: a quaint watercolour of a church on a pale summer day, signed ‘A. Hitler’.
Nicola wants to sell it. Philipp wants to keep it. Philipp’s wife Judith wants to burn it.
A jagged satire from one of Germany’s foremost playwrights, Nachtland opened at the Young Vic Theatre, London, in February 2024.
There's no statement without the person making the statement, there's no art without the artist.
My Review
Nachtland, by Marius von Mayenburg, is a play that deliberately embraces provocation as its dramatic engine. It exposes the worst in its characters to explore a burning question: can we truly separate the artist from their work?
Through figures that are by turns opportunistic, moralizing, or simply overwhelmed by their own contradictions, Mayenburg crafts a human gallery oscillating between the grotesque and the disturbingly plausible.
The play multiplies its angles of attack: ethical debates, vulgar provocations, and parallels so heavy-handed they sometimes verge on irrelevance. Yet despite these excesses, it manages to evoke a wide range of emotions. We laugh, we cringe, we feel outraged, but we also – sometimes reluctantly – understand the characters? reasoning, however twisted or exaggerated it may be. It is precisely in this tension between rejection and comprehension that the play finds its strength.
Reading Nachtland, it is impossible not to think of contemporary debates surrounding the separation between an artwork and its creator. The controversies involving Roman Polanski during his Oscar recognition, or the public accusations surrounding Gérard Depardieu, resonate strongly with the questions raised by the pLay. Nachtland seems to converse with these cases, not to judge them, but to reveal how deeply they divide us and expose our own moral contradictions.
On another level, the play reminded me of Le Prénom by Matthieu Delaporte, a French comedy that sparked intense discussion upon its release. Both works share a similar device: a family gathering that spirals out of control around a charged symbobvo here a painting, there a name But while Le Prénom relies on 6-humor and social discomfort, Nachtland pushes provocation much furtherluv ziotisq confronting the audience with its own ehical boundarie.
Ultimately, Nachtland is disturbing, sometimes excessive, but indeniably stimulating play. It forces us to face questions we often prefer to avoid, and or that may well be its greatest achievement.
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