Briefly Noted Book Reviews

Taiwan Travelogue, by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from the Chinese by Lin King (Graywolf). Presented as a translation of an out-of-print Japanese text, this National Book Award-winning metafictional novel takes place in colonial-era Taiwan, and follows a Japanese writer on a trip during which she falls in love with her local translator. Yáng details their sumptuous meals, teasing out the differences between Japanese and Taiwanese foodways—and between what is imposed and what is native. As tensions around the imbalance that characterizes colonial relations threaten their intimacy, the novel’s framing device, with its many footnotes, underscores the barriers to mutual understanding the two face. “I complained about the Empire’s treatment of its colonies,” the Japanese writer notes, “yet I was but another citizen of this world with all its earthly flaws.”

Tasmania, by Paolo Giordano (Other Press). Paolo, the protagonist of this searching novel, is, like its author, an Italian writer with a physics degree. When his wife ends their efforts to conceive a child, he takes up a wandering life, sleeping on couches and in hotels while teaching, writing newspaper columns, and researching a book on the atomic bomb. He finds distraction in the lives of others, including a friend embroiled in a custody battle, a charismatic climate scientist, and a priest carrying on an affair. As Paolo struggles to make sense of relationships characterized by both intimacy and distance, Giordano explores the challenge of finding safety in a world where disasters—from bombings to rising sea levels—proliferate.