Kirjahaku

The novels of Jane Smiley, Jonathan Franzen, and Don DeLillo propose new readings of justice in contemporary American literature. Jason S. Polley argues that such distinctive writers as Smiley, Franzen, and DeLillo reconfigure what he calls «acts of justice» in various modalities and spaces. These authors re-conceptualize justice in their portrayals of peripheral groups, such as women, minorities, and outcasts. In lieu of fictionalizing justice in conventional courtrooms, these writers’ narratives make a virtue of representing the undetermined and everyday presence of justice. As a result, Smiley, Franzen, and DeLillo succeed in demonstrating the ordinariness of personal concerns with justice. Loosely tracing a legacy of justice in American literature, this book also compares contemporary American narratives to canonized earlier American novels, such as Melville’s Moby Dick, James’s The Bostonians, and Norris’s McTeague. The book likewise examines contemporary writers like Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison. Polley concludes by observing that justice in contemporary American life is not about closure, but is an open-ended practice of human action, a theory that corresponds to postmodern theories of narrative.

CEMETERY MISS YOU, in the form of transcripts from audio recordings (similar to Samuel Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape") recounts the first year or so of a Pakistani illegal's experiences in Hong Kong. The work begins by detailing the boy-man's middle-class experiences in Pakistan, before he's all but forced to flee his home after shooting a man in the name of family honour. His life in Hong Kong begins as a life of poverty, living on the streets. Less than a year later he's buying rounds of drinks on The Peak, driving around in private cars, spending thousands of dollars on footwear, and making regular short trips to mainland China.----The author writes: "Saa Ji-a name adopted by a host of Indian Subcontinent illegals and refugees in Hong Kong-tells not only his own story, but also the untold story of so many peripheral figures in Hong Kong, figures compelled into unimaginably intricate underworld networks-and not because of ethical unsoundness or suspectness. Instead, these perpetually marginalized and institutionally desperate figures have no other options. Saa Ji speaks of alterity in Hong Kong, of the otherness we all ignore."In her Preface to cemetery miss you, Ina Grigorova writes from New York: "The story of this man made me realize with chilled bones that there are places on earth where the known laws of social physics simply fall apart. ... The people and events in the story are grainy, pixelated, blinking on and off; reality has been exposed at the Planck scale where any apparent continuity breaks down. // Hong Kong is a good substrate for Sci-Fi constructs, not just because Hong Kong is so insanely futuristic, a spread-out tower of Babel, and not just because if you squint you can picture cemetery's characters crossing states more exotic than national boundaries (while borrowing each other's passports and pasts), but also because the book's very surface approaches quantum foam: objects of characterization blinking on and off, end-positioned subjects slipping away into the next sentence predicate; cause and effect inverting, like the thought-wave must flow in Saa Ji's native-tongue state... A text with the wheels of its own cognitive process both at work and exposed."