DISCOVERIES

The Journey

A Novel

H.G. Adler, translated from the German by Peter Filkins

Random House: 292 pp., $26

“It seems unpardonable to me today,” wrote W.G. Sebald in “Austerlitz,” “that I had blocked off the investigation of my most distant past for so many years, not on principle, to be sure, but still of my own accord, and that now it is too late for me to seek out Adler, who had lived in London until his death in the summer of 1988, and talk to him.” H.G. Adler was born in 1910 in Prague. He survived Theresienstadt (where he was imprisoned from 1942 to 1944) and Auschwitz. He was liberated by U.S. troops in 1945, went back to Prague, then, in 1950, emigrated to England. Adler wrote 26 books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction.

In “The Journey,” he tells the story of the Lustig family, driven from their home by the strange governmental order: “Thou shalt not live among us!” Everything they have always done is suddenly forbidden. They are sent to camps; bit by bit their consciousness drops away, they struggle to survive in a surreal landscape. “Since our eyes are open,” he writes in the book’s first chapter, speaking directly to his readers, “and suffering is not all we experience, but also life, allow us to grant this ever-changing existence so full of memory its only proper name -- the journey.”

How to Cook a Dragon

Living, Loving, and Eating in China

Linda Furiya

Seal Press: 275 pp., $16.95 paper

By the time she moves to Beijing to live with her boyfriend Eric, Linda Furiya, 30, is already tired of explaining her ethnicity -- Japanese American from the Midwest. Through college and after, she writes, she was at odds with her “Japanese identity. I felt I had to be Japanese or American, and that there wasn’t room for both.” Eric, an executive at a computer software company, speaks fluent Mandarin, leaving Linda, all too often, to fend for herself. There’s something about the way Linda pulls herself up and out of a precarious situation (love with a commitment-phobic yuppie, financial dependence on said yuppie in a very foreign culture, pregnancy and childbirth) that is inspiring. How does she do it? Food, of course. Shopping in the markets, drinking in the teahouses and cooking delicious pan-Asian recipes restore her own unique brand of Asianness; a blend of Japan, China and Indiana. Recipes are included: corn and pine-nut salad, lamb kebabs and mint dipping sauce, hot and sour soup, to name a few.

Swimming With Strangers

Stories

Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum

Chronicle Books: 226 pp., $22.95

I am always extolling the virtues of writing (especially fiction) with the benefit of a few decades of experience under one’s belt. But every so often a young writer comes along and reminds me of what the world looks like before all those layers of experience are piled on. Lunstrum, 29, has written eight stories in this collection that shine with a melancholy clarity. In many of them, the dulling effect of life’s routines has worn her characters down to the nub. All meaning their lives might have had is now contained in restrained and familiar gestures and in the objects they live with: a “rumpled newspaper” says more about Loren as he tries to make a fire in the cabin he and his dying wife have rented than he could ever say about himself; the simple “tiny pitcher meant for cream,” conveys all the meanness and frustration of Alma’s lonely life. The writing’s plainness allows the reader great freedom to play and wander and invent (not to mention worry and project).

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com