on reading murakami
Sunday, 3. December 2006, 00:30:54
I wish I were a compulsive completist; someone who sees all the films of a director or reads all the books by an author. I haven't seen every Scorsese movie nor every Coen film nor even every Soderberg, whom I like more than either. I have intentionally skipped movies by directors I normally like. But I feel guilty, like a set should be complete and the flaw is in me for breaking it up or leaving a piece out. Until last year, I had even seen every Woody Allen movie but then gave myself permission to start skipping them when Melinda and Melinda came out. And it's harder to keep pace with a living author who is constantly producing even as you try to fill in his back catalogue.
All this to say that I am about to make some generalizations about an author having only read a portion of his canon.
This morning I finished Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, one of the most popular books by Haruki Murakami. He may be my favorite author. He writes novels, short stories, non-fiction and all in a way that is at once artificial and distancing while being inventive, insightful, real and honest. This book not my favorite of his but still it drew me in, kept me interested, surprised me, and was filled with wonderful details. Perhaps too many moments where I could relate even though it was entirely surreal story.
Before talking about this specific book, I should say that his work varies from the extremely surreal to the very real. One of his best collections, in my opinion, is After the Quake. Short stories that all take the Kobe earthquake as their starting point. In one, a busy doctor vacations in Thailand and finds wisdom and truths about herself through her driver. In another a man is visited by a giant mystical frog who needs his help to wrestle the great subterranean worm whose movements threaten to destroy Tokyo. So you get a sense of the range of his surrealism. Often there are just hints around the edges and at other times all of reality seems to have been completely torn apart and reconstructed in a new way.
I first encountered him in a collection of modern Japanese fiction called Monkey Brain Sushi. How could you not love anything with a title like that? and so I have slowly been catching up on his books and short stories. I have a friend who even photocopies stories in magazines and mails them to me.
And so this book. How do I feel about this book? There are two stories here running in parallel and eventually into each other. One is a clearly unreal and metaphysical world where shadows can be cut from their owners and a herd of unicorns are the only creatures allowed to leave the walled town. The other story takes place in a near future where data secrets are encoded using uncrackable algorithms embedded in the Calcutec's brains. Each agent's work unique based on their own subconscious.
In both Kafka on the Shore and Sputnik Sweetheart, the action mostly takes place in our clearly reognizable world and only slowly does that world start to merge with another, different set of rules. Hard-Boiled mostly follows this mode and I think it's one weakness is when the near future world of the Calcutec becomes too otherworldly, too unlike our own. One of the things that so interesting about Kafka on the Shore is how, as the wall between the other world and our own breaks down we begin to learn the rules of this interaction and to see how the novel's meta-reality is organized. And here there is a similar progression but the near future becomes, in the middle of the book, too unlike our own.
However, it ends brilliantly and the characters are real and natural and understandable albeit in circumstances unlike any you will ever have imagined. I greatly enjoy being in his unique universe and the wealth of detail and interesting invention. Another recurring theme of his work is a character with an affinity for the trio of jazz/food/literature. Characters quote Turgenev while making a delicate and complicated cream sauce, Dave Brubeck or Benny Goodman playing in the background. This character is also likely to be the one who doesn't express his emotions well or whose emotional inertia causes him to barely raise an eyebrow when something truly bizarre happens. They might sit at the table, drinking a beer, alone and unfazed by the rips in reality around them. His accumulated life has no meaning, so when it's turned upside down, all you can do is light a cigarette and have a whisky and learn the new system.
So Hard-Boiled has a fascinating first act as you are begin to piece together the rules in these two unique and radically different worlds, gets a bit muddy (for me) in the middle as both plots become so far removed from anything remotely familiar, and then ends beautifully, tantalizing the reader with the resolution you want but giving you exactly the right one, the one that the story demands.
Always fascinating, I can't recommend him enough. If you haven't read any, start with the short stories of The Elephant Vanishes or After the Quake, then move to Sputnik Sweetheart and Norwegian Wood. If you're a dedicated surrealist with a taste for something entirely unlike any other author, start with Kafka on the Shore and then follow it with Hard-Boiled Wonderland. That said, I haven't read perhaps his most famous book, which is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. I'm looking forward to my next visit to a Haruki Murakami universe: they are sometimes flawed, always strange, a bit melancholy, and also like coming home.
All this to say that I am about to make some generalizations about an author having only read a portion of his canon.
This morning I finished Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, one of the most popular books by Haruki Murakami. He may be my favorite author. He writes novels, short stories, non-fiction and all in a way that is at once artificial and distancing while being inventive, insightful, real and honest. This book not my favorite of his but still it drew me in, kept me interested, surprised me, and was filled with wonderful details. Perhaps too many moments where I could relate even though it was entirely surreal story.Before talking about this specific book, I should say that his work varies from the extremely surreal to the very real. One of his best collections, in my opinion, is After the Quake. Short stories that all take the Kobe earthquake as their starting point. In one, a busy doctor vacations in Thailand and finds wisdom and truths about herself through her driver. In another a man is visited by a giant mystical frog who needs his help to wrestle the great subterranean worm whose movements threaten to destroy Tokyo. So you get a sense of the range of his surrealism. Often there are just hints around the edges and at other times all of reality seems to have been completely torn apart and reconstructed in a new way.
I first encountered him in a collection of modern Japanese fiction called Monkey Brain Sushi. How could you not love anything with a title like that? and so I have slowly been catching up on his books and short stories. I have a friend who even photocopies stories in magazines and mails them to me.
And so this book. How do I feel about this book? There are two stories here running in parallel and eventually into each other. One is a clearly unreal and metaphysical world where shadows can be cut from their owners and a herd of unicorns are the only creatures allowed to leave the walled town. The other story takes place in a near future where data secrets are encoded using uncrackable algorithms embedded in the Calcutec's brains. Each agent's work unique based on their own subconscious.
In both Kafka on the Shore and Sputnik Sweetheart, the action mostly takes place in our clearly reognizable world and only slowly does that world start to merge with another, different set of rules. Hard-Boiled mostly follows this mode and I think it's one weakness is when the near future world of the Calcutec becomes too otherworldly, too unlike our own. One of the things that so interesting about Kafka on the Shore is how, as the wall between the other world and our own breaks down we begin to learn the rules of this interaction and to see how the novel's meta-reality is organized. And here there is a similar progression but the near future becomes, in the middle of the book, too unlike our own.
However, it ends brilliantly and the characters are real and natural and understandable albeit in circumstances unlike any you will ever have imagined. I greatly enjoy being in his unique universe and the wealth of detail and interesting invention. Another recurring theme of his work is a character with an affinity for the trio of jazz/food/literature. Characters quote Turgenev while making a delicate and complicated cream sauce, Dave Brubeck or Benny Goodman playing in the background. This character is also likely to be the one who doesn't express his emotions well or whose emotional inertia causes him to barely raise an eyebrow when something truly bizarre happens. They might sit at the table, drinking a beer, alone and unfazed by the rips in reality around them. His accumulated life has no meaning, so when it's turned upside down, all you can do is light a cigarette and have a whisky and learn the new system.
So Hard-Boiled has a fascinating first act as you are begin to piece together the rules in these two unique and radically different worlds, gets a bit muddy (for me) in the middle as both plots become so far removed from anything remotely familiar, and then ends beautifully, tantalizing the reader with the resolution you want but giving you exactly the right one, the one that the story demands.
Always fascinating, I can't recommend him enough. If you haven't read any, start with the short stories of The Elephant Vanishes or After the Quake, then move to Sputnik Sweetheart and Norwegian Wood. If you're a dedicated surrealist with a taste for something entirely unlike any other author, start with Kafka on the Shore and then follow it with Hard-Boiled Wonderland. That said, I haven't read perhaps his most famous book, which is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. I'm looking forward to my next visit to a Haruki Murakami universe: they are sometimes flawed, always strange, a bit melancholy, and also like coming home.
