Fiction — Literary Fiction

Few moments mean much beyond the transcription of events as they happen; there is little metaphor or symbolic interpretation at work within the pages. Character growth seems linear–again, like an RPG–where each character in the story has an issue that they confront and then resolve: being a part-time employee makes Jungsuh sad, but meditation helps her accept it; Yeongju want to run a bookshop but it is potentially unsustainable, yet she learns to accept the risk one day at a time; Mincheol feels like life has no broader meaning, but eventually finds meaning enough in simply existing. Characters grow into themselves in the same way a squire grows into a knight–none of them truly change, they just sort of prestige into the next tier of themselves.

David DinaburgDecember 18, 2024Korea, Bookstore, Fiction, employment

The Divorce

The Divorce makes it pretty clear that Bea and Niklas do not belong together, and the specifics of that conclusion is my one real qualm about the story. I would have preferred a less clear, and thus perhaps less clichéd, presentation of Jacob—Bea’s sibling and Niklas’ erstwhile best friend—whose suicide was the meetcute for our future divorcees. They both come with intense baggage: Bea with her unmoored loneliness and Niklas with his self-abnegating sense of duty, gloming together into a pair unsuited to support each other in any way other than through conventional familial bonds.

David DinaburgNovember 29, 2024Fiction, Dual Perspectives, Marriage

What you are looking for is in the library

What you are looking for is in the library falls directly into the path of “cozy” by way of social-structural integration. It is a delightful collection of interdependent stories, each one focusing on a character that “betters” themself through a quirky recommendation from an insightful buddha-esque librarian:

"Is being a sales assistant in a department store really not such a great job?”
I don’t know what to say. Ms. Komachi waits patiently for my reply.
“Well, I mean…Anybody can do it. It’s not like its was my dream job or anything I desperately wanted to do. I just kind of fell into it. But I live on my own, so I have to work to support myself.”

Each chapter, I found myself rooting for the character to find happiness. Each time, they did. The book is joyful, within the metes and bounds of proscriptive, achievable success. It is formalistic in a non-derogatory sense of that word: in the library overflows with comfortable and expected rhythms.

David DinaburgJanuary 3, 2024cozy, library, Fiction, Japan

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

A wish fulfilled for fiction lovers–unlimited time with unlimited books. Outside of that singular moment with the spooky TV, I was never again outside of the pages; the book completely, and seemingly effortlessly, brought me into someone else’s life. Even though nothing particularly profound seemed to happen, the experience was pleasant enough.

David DinaburgNovember 9, 2023Fiction, Japan, Bookstore

Y/N

It lives in the beat between being graced with a haphazard “Be careful” and having the speaker finish the injunction, with specificity, clarifying of what one should be careful. You, the reader, are made aware something requires attention but are left to wonder whether it is simply the entire world of which one must be wary.

In thrall to the same lack of specificity that can shade a child’s world in unknowable and constant danger, the book opens with its title: here there are details of a subculture to be gleaned, but if you, like me, are a relative child within the genre, its signifier will land without even signifying that it is a genre’d work:

David DinaburgAugust 11, 2023Fiction, kpop, fandom, void

Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers

That’s sort of the theme of this book– “I dunno” with a mild shrug. I liked all the people. They’re likable. The villain is comically despicable so no one cares that he’s dead. Vera herself…oh boy, somebody put their finger on it. She’s a treat. Who doesn’t love a bossy, nosy old lady? More Vera Wong in more books, please. But aside from being a vehicle for platforming Vera, there’s not a lot I cared about here. The plot felt secondary to Vera being Vera.

David DinaburgJune 21, 2023Fiction, Mystery, San Francisco

Fake Accounts

Imagine watching the Olympics. You see a peak athlete breeze through a mile. There is no context.

“I could run like that.” It skews your understanding of how fast a person should be. So you lace up some New Balances where the heels are worn down to a forty-degree angle, and attempt to push out an easy six-ten-for-four. Ten blocks out from the apartment, and reality sets in: a nine-minute mile would be a blessing. How much further is a mile, again?

Fake Accounts does that, but for writing.

David DinaburgAugust 1, 2022Fiction, New York, Berlin

A Girl Goes into the Forest

There is real bravery in presenting so many disjointed and abrupt tales, real danger that as many will fail to hit the reader as land in any meaningful way. Some stories are shorter than a page, some are thicker than mud, and it might serve as Rorschach test of Buzzfeed quiz to map out which stories meant what to whom. My Father and His Slim Beautiful Brunettes was, to me, the first remarkable note in the collection.

David DinaburgFebruary 6, 2022Fiction, Short Stories

Pizza Girl

If it is a story of the failures of capitalism, the collapse of the promise of an attainable American Dream for the generation reading it, then it is a clunky one. The book is called Pizza Girl, a job that delineates, without defining, the narrator. It is what pushes the plot forward, what serves as a call-and-response from the catalyst-character of Jenny Hauser, who eventually drops the, “Hey, Pizza Girl” detachment and perhaps sees her as we see her, as a someone who is both less and more than her occupation:

There was a plane in the sky and I was trying to guess how many people were inside it. I pictured every seat, every person, and I wondered about their names, ages, jobs, what they were listening to on their iPods, where they were coming from, who they were going home to.

David DinaburgMay 14, 2021Fiction, Contemporary, Bildungsroman

The Memory Police

When something is slippery, when you can’t quite hold it in your mind exactly the way you believe you ought to be able, that is how something burrows in. Weirdness holds you askance; interpolated meanings wrap your mind like so much fallen foliage covering the dead earth. To understand something completely—or believe that you can—leaves nothing to puzzle over.

David DinaburgMay 20, 2020Fiction, Japan

Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts

It doesn’t matter, you can know Le Morte D’arthur en français or Indiana Jones and Monty Python from their Comedy Central broadcast edits, you’ll end up at the same place in Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts. I appreciate the lack of judgement. Honestly, you really don’t even need to know more than their titles: Last Crusade, Holy Grail, bing bang boom you’re good to go.

Speaking of titular, Tuesday is a lady, and the type of protagonist we all love: misanthropic but actually super thoughtful; clever in a way people usually can only be when they’re going over what they should have said on the way home.

David DinaburgApril 24, 2020Fiction, Mystery, Adventure

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders

I finally solved a mystery before a mystery book ended! It only took knowing the exact reference—and having that exact reference mentioned by name—for me to get there.

David DinaburgFebruary 24, 2020Fiction, Mystery

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

For Drive Your Plow, I didn’t know the genre. I knew I was going to read it, so I didn’t look at the book jacket. I didn’t read someone else’s thoughts first. If you’re looking at reviews to decide if a piece of media is worth your time, you’re not going to be surprised in the same way. You cannot be, simply as a function of how time and/or brains work. You already know stuff, at the minimum the stuff I have told you. Which I don’t think is bad: your free time is limited, maybe, or you already have a lot of books and you can’t read everything! But I just want to point out that I think it is weird not to care if you know whether a book is about fantasy warriors or cowboys or Victorian-era ghosts, but do care to know that Rey’s lineage comes up in The Rise of Skywalker.

David DinaburgFebruary 7, 2020Fiction, Mystery, Poland, Ecology, Witcher 3: Blood & Wine