In this "exploration of lives fragmented by the Pacific side of World War II, spanning more than 150 years and set in multiple locations in colonial and postcolonial Asia and the United States, ... a kaleidoscopic portrait of its characters [is painted] as they grapple with the legacies of loss, imperialism, and war"--
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In this "exploration of lives fragmented by the Pacific side of World War II, spanning more than 150 years and set in multiple locations in colonial and postcolonial Asia and the United States, ... a kaleidoscopic portrait of its characters [is painted] as they grapple with the legacies of loss, imperialism, and war"--
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Add this copy of Inheritors to cart. $1.78, very good condition, Sold by The Maryland Book Bank rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from baltimore, MD, UNITED STATES, published 2020 by Doubleday Books.
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Add this copy of Inheritors to cart. $2.25, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Baltimore rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Halethorpe, MD, UNITED STATES, published 2020 by Doubleday Books.
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The tenth chapter of Asako Serizawa's novel "Inheritors" (2020) discusses at length Jorge Luis Borges's short story "The Garden of Forking Paths" and its view of the ambiguous, contingent character of history. There are two interlocutors in Serizawa's chapter, "Pavilion" who discuss the Borges story before one of the characters fulfills his mission of killing the other. Borges's story, the philosophical discussion in the chapter, and the action of the chapter all show the complexity of Serizawa's book about the difficulty of understanding history.
In an author's note at the end of the book Serizawa writes: "this book is foremost engaged with the texts and media, scholarly, popular and fictional, that have represented and discussed this history, and the concept of history, from myriad perspectives." Serizawa writes further that the goal of her book is to show the difficulty of the concept of "historical fiction" as "an objective occurrence bound to a time and place." Instead, she hopes her book "will complicate this idea and spark questions about how history is made, how it is lived, remembered, reproduced, and used, and how ultimately unbound it is by the time and place in which it is grounded. The Second World War didn't start and end with specific people and events: its roots reach back to values seeded long ago, and its sundering effects have hardly lost their spark and propulsion."
The need for the author to explain her goals and some of her sources in a note at the end of the book is a sign of the unsatisfactory nature of "Inheritors". The book deteriorates markedly with the lengthy, wordy discussion of the Borges story, interesting as it might be in itself. The author is reduced to talking about her theme, and in a confusing way, rather than in showing it. So too, the book loses whatever coherence it may have had in the futuristic, preachy section with which it ends.
"Inheritors" is a commendably ambitious work for a first novel. As Serizawa says, it is more a series of interrelated vignettes which cover the history of a Japanese family from 1913 into the present and future through 2035. The family tree and chronology at the beginning of the book don't offer much help in allowing the reader to follow the story. With sections in the United States at the beginning and end of the work, the book revolves around WW II in Japan as recounted from various perspectives in a series of incidents. The book does not spare the reader the brutality of Japan's war of colonization and imperialism, and the terrible brutality and destruction of the fighting. The book also shows the suffering resulting from American occupation in the War's aftermath.
The thirteen separate chapters of the book are most effective when the incidents are described in detail through the perspective of one of the characters. The effective sections of the book also work in other textual materials, stories, and histories effectively. The writing is often lyrical and beautiful. The book is better in particular details and in encouraging the reader to reflect. It does not convince in its own rambling meditations about the course of history, such as in the discussion of Borges or in the concluding sections and in other parts. The book does not cohere and it does not hang together well.
Although it includes sections of beautiful perceptive writing, I found "Inheritors" ultimately unsatisfactory both as a work of literature and as a meditation on history and philosophy.
