I finished The Pearl Diver, Jeff Talarigo's first book, last night. It's very good.
It has some similarities to the book I reviewed last week, but it's also very different.
It's much longer, for one thing - Amazon says 256 pages - which makes sense, because the writing style is different. The book is well-written but it seems to me to stay closer to the ground, closer to the story, than Ginseng Hunter. It is 100% prose, whereas Ginseng Hunter ventured into poetry on a regular basis, I think.
The story in Pearl Diver is more compelling. The book narrates the life of a woman who is a pearl diver in Japan as the war ends, is diagnosed with leprosy in her late teens, and sent to a leper colony, where she remains for most of her life.
Her situation is rather unusual because treatment became available shortly after her diagnosis. She is not deformed in any way and could easily "pass" as a healthy person in normal society. She is not contagious. Her imprisonment (that's what it really is) is continued primarily because of prejudice in the medical community and in the community at large.
The book follows her personal growth, changes in (medical and social)treatment, the ways that she sees and deals with the outside world, the people who live with her in the colony, and issues they face.
I should make one thing clear: there are people who probably shouldn't read this book. If you have difficulty dealing with abortion or with suicide, you might want to give it a miss. But if you can deal with those topics on an emotional level, it's worth reading.
This is Talarigo's first book. His description of events and emotions is very good - painfully good, in some passages. His ways of showing the passage of time are just wonderful -- Miss Fuji (the main character) notes the first time she sees a jet flying at night; her first encounter with a vending machine. Television is introduced to the colony, she discovers, when she hears the laugh (cry?) of an infant for the first time since her diagnosis.
His second book seems to me to be much more ethereal. It remains my favorite, but the two are not far apart.
There are some books that are very good books, and then there are some very good books that are both paintings and book. Pearl Diver is a very good book. Ginseng Hunter is part painting. And Jeff Talarigo is now near the top of my list of favorite authors.
