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MALENA WATROUS / If You Follow Me and DAVID VANN / Legend of a Suicide

Monday, April 19 2010 at 7:30 PM

“Dear Miss Marina… First learn gomi law, second Japanese language, and third you can enjoy international friendship. This is like holding hands across a sea!”

And so begins Malena Watrous’ If You Follow Me and our narrator Marina’s lessons in “gomi” (garbage) law, Japanese culture, and the workings of Shika, the small, rural Japanese town in which she is teaching English for one year. For Marina, Shika is more than just her home as a “temporary person.” It’s also an attempt to escape the pain of her father’s suicide a year before.

In this masterfully written book, Marina discovers what it’s like to be an outsider in an intimate community. She receives unintentionally hilarious letters from her Japanese supervisor, informing her of her latest “gomi” errors – sometimes more than once a day. Everyone seems to examine her trash, and she has no privacy, which is an issue since her roommate is secretly her girlfriend. But as Marina comes to realize, in Japan, you can never really throw anything away. For a young woman who has fled to another country to try and outpace her grief, this comes to have a profound meaning.

“I love, love, love If You Follow Me. It’s fearlessly honest, occasionally heartbreaking, and extremely funny, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.” --

Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Prep and American Wife

Malena Watrous is a graduate of Barnard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was recently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, where she is currently a Jones Lecturer in fiction. Her Pushcart-nominated work has appeared in Story Quarterly, Glimmer Train, Triquarterly, and other journals. She also contributes to Salon and reviews books for the San Francisco Chronicle.

David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide offers a series of portraits of a father’s suicide and a son’s bereavement, powered by the son’s guilt and set against the backdrop of the Vann’s native Alaskan wilderness. His descriptions of this wild place have brought review comparisons to Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx, while his depiction of the relationship between father and son have brought comparisons to Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, and Turgenev. The stories follow Roy Fenn from his birth on an island at the edge of the Bering Sea to his return 30 years later to Ketchikan, where his father took the first steps toward infidelity and despair. In what the Observer calls “the truest memoir and the purest fiction,” Vann tries to understand his father and the origins of ruin.

“The reportorial relentlessness of Vann’s imagination often makes his fiction seem less written than chiseled. A small, lovely book has been written out of his large and evident pain. ‘A father, after all,’ Vann writes, ‘is a lot for a thing to be.’ A son is also a lot for a thing to be; so is an artist. With Legend of a Suicide, David Vann proves himself a fine example of both.” -- Tom Bissell, New York Times Book Review

David Vann is a professor at the University of San Francisco. A contributor to Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Men’s Journal, Outside, and National Geographic Adventure, he is author of a best-selling memoir, A Mile Down: The True story of a Disastrous Career at Sea, and the forthcoming Last Day On Earth: A Portrait of the NIU Shooter, winner of the 2009 AWP Nonfiction Prize. He has also been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His website is www.davidvann.com.