“This was, I would later realise, a planet of things wrapped inside things. Food inside wrappers. Bodies inside clothes. Contempt inside smile
“This was, I would later realise, a planet of things wrapped inside things. Food inside wrappers. Bodies inside clothes. Contempt inside smiles. Everything was hidden away.”
This book made me laugh out loud, and that doesn’t happen very often. I wasn’t expecting it to be quite this good. The plot is a bit of a joke, the characters are all a bit ordinary and boring, but it is the irony and the dry wit that makes it all so brilliant.
Perspective can be an extraordinary humorous thing when the world is viewed through the eyes of an emotionless and uncaring alien. He arrives on earth and takes over the body of a maths professor, Andrew Martin. The alien is unaware of human social rules and basic etiquette and walks around campus completely naked at Cambridge University. He is quickly arrested, taken away, and finds himself having to explain his actions to the authorities. He doesn’t understand the world and is all a bit lost.
Ironically, the family of Andrew begins to prefer the alien to the original version. He is far more interesting and attentive to their needs in his efforts to conform to human social norms. He was sent to Earth to erase a big mathematical discovery that the original Andrew made, to halt the progress of humanity and to restore balance to their development. His mission is to also erase everyone who may also know about Andrew’s discovery, so it remains a permanent secret. However, the alien begins to like his newfound humanity and struggles with his task. He quite likes having a wife and a son and seeks an alternative life, a human life.
“Make sure, as often as possible, you are doing something you’d be happy to die doing.”
And that’s important advice and the book is full of it. Matt Haig is a self-help author as well as a novelist, and that does shine through the narrative. I feel like his books are always written with the intention of helping people in some way shape or form. This is the first novel I’ve read in several months because my reading time has been taken up by academic books, so I’m glad I chose wisely and had so much fun reading this. I hope you do too.
On another important note about the author and the book, I recently realised he’s a vegan. I didn’t know going into this but came across this quote:
“A cow is an Earth-dwelling animal, a domesticated and multi-purpose ungulate, which humans treat as a one-stop shop for food, liquid refreshment, fertiliser and designer footwear. The humans farm it and cut its throat and then cut it up and package it and refrigerate it and sell it and cook it. By doing this, apparently they have earned the right to change its name to beef, which is the monosyllable furthest away from cow, because the last thing a human wants to think about when eating cow is an actual cow.”
The alien is horrified by the ways in which we treat animals, and how we hide behind this façade of renaming them to make the notion more attractive to us. Things are hidden from the human eye behind wrappers, false names and distance. And this is certainly a great point to take away from this book and to close my book review with.
___________________________________
You can connect with me on social media via My Linktree. __________________________________...more
Gun Island is a beautifully written and clever novel that deals with myths and legends, environmental crisis and how our place in the world is fueled Gun Island is a beautifully written and clever novel that deals with myths and legends, environmental crisis and how our place in the world is fueled by uncertainty and catastrophe.
Amitav Ghosh is a writer whose work I've come to admire greatly. This novel deals with several themes that consider the difficulties of living in the modern world; it engages with displacement and identity, refuge and relocation: it captures the ever changing and ever evolving nature of a multi-cultural metropolis in the wake of increasing urbanization. It also captures the issues asylum seekers face as they cross boarders into the unknown. In the wake of tornedos and a shifting natural landscape, people are forced to evolve and adapt into something new: it’s a book written under the ever reaching and ever increasing shadow of climate change as we begin to enter an unrecognisable space. It's remarkable and potent.
“We’re in a new world now. No one knows where they belong anymore neither humans nor animals.”
Such is the dilemma of the protagonist, Deen Datta. He is a rare book dealer with Bengali background feeling at odds with his comfortable New York life. He feels out of place and like he has lost a sense of his true heritage. He goes on a quest to discover the details of The Gun Merchant, a fictional character evident in Bengali oral tradition, and in doing so learns a lot about himself, the world and life itself. The story is a slow burn, and in taking it cautiously Ghosh reveals the interconnected nature of the themes and characters.
I’m impressed with the number of themes Ghosh has engaged with here, and he has engaged with them carefully and sensitively. I’ve read a lot of his non-fictional work and I can see a lot of his interests pouring through into the narrative here. For me, he occupies a completely unique place in the fictional world because of what he addresses (and how he address it.) He is certainly an author that explores his ideas creatively through the act of writing.
I’m going to end my review by sharing a quote that sums up a large part of the central motif behind this novel here:
“Only though stories can invisible or inarticulate or silent beings speak to us; it is they who allow the past to reach out to us.”
And we can use them to inform the present. We can use them to understand the changes we are facing. I liked this novel, a lot.
___________________________________
You can connect with me on social media via My Linktree. __________________________________...more
This is the twelfth book I have read by Murakami and at this point you could probably say that I am quite invested in the author. I think he is fantasThis is the twelfth book I have read by Murakami and at this point you could probably say that I am quite invested in the author. I think he is fantastic, well, sometimes. And that’s the problem, I just don’t find him very consistent in his brilliance. My opinion of this collection only reinforces my point.
The title After the Quake immediately suggests that these are stories relating to an earthquake when in fact these are short stories that were written after an earthquake in Japan and are very loosely related at best to the actual quake. They vary in their themes, optimism, purpose and quality. I consider them quite a random bunch of stories that happened to be written after a natural disaster which briefly appears in the pages. Was I missing something? I just don’t quite feel like these all belonged together or even in the collection.
Anyway, that aside, I liked some of the stories in here a great deal. Others just lacked any weight and were a bit bland. One was suggestive of great and transformative personal change spurred on by the realisation of how fleeting life can be, but it didn’t go anywhere. Another just seemed to be about people burning things on a beach as a from of catharsis. They all remained a little open ended, as good short stories should be. Indeed, a good short story should hang over you and linger in your mind, but not all of them were that engaging in their content. Not all the characters were interesting enough to warrant much thought.
If I sound critical of Murakami, it’s because I know how great he can be. And for me, that greatness only manifested itself in one short story here. It was a story about a frog called “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo.” And what makes this story so great is how uncertain everything felt; it felt real and unreal at the same time: it felt like reality had been warped and that the narrator may or may not have lost his mind. An unreliable narrator is not quite the right label because he believes what he experiences is real, but we are left questioning his reality. It was a clever piece of writing.
For me, this was very much a mixed bag. This can often be the case with short story collections, but I've never felt quite so polar about stories in the same book before by the same author. To invoke a cliche, he has really become hit or miss for me. So I think I'm going to have a break from Murakami for a while. I will read more of his books in the future, but that future will be distant.
___________________________________
You can connect with me on social media via My Linktree. __________________________________...more
There is something special about libraries. They are full of possibilities, knowledge and adventure. For Murakami, they could also be full of danger, There is something special about libraries. They are full of possibilities, knowledge and adventure. For Murakami, they could also be full of danger, weirdness and the unexplainable.
Murakami turns the expected on its head. In The Strange Library he channels the spirit of Kafka, creating a nightmarish situation of entrapment, despair and freakishness. A boy goes to the library. He wishes to learn more about the Ottaman Empire but instead finds himself trapped by an unusual old man. He forces the boy to read three books and will only allow him to leave if he can recite them word for word. No easy task.
Although it’s marketed as a children’s story, and there are strong elements of the bizarre and absurd running through it, I consider this more horror than anything else. And I think Murakami does this very well. The horror lies in the unexplainable nature of it, of its seemingly randomness and unjustness. Like Kafka, the bizarre lies under a thin layer of normality and mundanity: it’s right there under the surface of our own reality.
'Why did something like this have to happen to me? All I did was go to the library to borrow some books.’
However, it’s not that simple. There are also hallucinogenic suggestions and questions over narrator reliability. Is it magic or is it a dream? Either way, I don’t consider this story suitable for children. It’s about a child but it is undeniably dark and adult in its theme and complex in its construction and delivery. There's much more here than the surface suggests.
In terms of the afterlife of the story, of its ability to linger over your mind and stay with you, this is quite potent. I read this last night and it has played on my mind ever since because it leaves you with questions. Again, like the writing of Kafka, nothing is particularly clear. It challenges you to imagine and fill in the gaps: it makes you wonder what the situation actually is beyond the surface of the writing.
Despite its shortness, this is a very clever and engaging story. It demonstrates how great a writer Murakami can be.
__________________________________
You can connect with me on social media via My Linktree. __________________________________...more
This is a very mediocre collection of short stories from a writer who can do SO MUCH better.
When an author can achieve literary greatness in their wrThis is a very mediocre collection of short stories from a writer who can do SO MUCH better.
When an author can achieve literary greatness in their writing, there’s an expectation that they must do it all the time. Murakami has achieved such a thing several times over, though he did not quite do it here. Unfortunately, whilst these stories do have a brief echo of his brilliance, they simply do not deliver: they are not what they could be.
In some ways, I feel like Murakami dug these out of his bottom draw. These don’t feel like new stories, but instead they feel like the stories of an author who is still refining his craft. They seem like the words of an author who would one day develop these themes into fantastic plot points with powerful narrative delivery. Here, though, they just don’t quite cut it.
The writing is fuelled by the same randomness that defines his writing. There’s casual sexual encounters and strong music references. There’s a sense of the unusual, the uncanny and of something not quite right. His tone is here and what’s a little bit confusing is the uncertainty about who exactly is speaking. Is it a fictional character or is it actually Murakami himself? The lines become blurred in more than one instance especially when a character has the author’s name. This is a clever device but it’s all very brief and none of the stories seem to go anywhere real. There’s not enough time or words for them to count.
And that’s the problem: Murakami is a great novelist, but he is not a great short story writer. He is at his best when his unique motifs are combined with excellent plotting. He churns out huge novels that are tense, emotional and very clever. The short story form doesn’t really work for him: he just can’t do what he does best within its limitations.
Although his previous collection of short stories, Men Without Women, was a little better, it also failed to showcase his real talent. If you want to learn what Murakami is really about, then I recommend reading After Dark and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. For me, he is at his absolute best in those two novels.
__________________________________
You can connect with me on social media via My Linktree. __________________________________...more
Murakami is a master of conjuring up chance encounters; he is a master of making the mundane seem magical, mystical and alluring.
And that is his greatMurakami is a master of conjuring up chance encounters; he is a master of making the mundane seem magical, mystical and alluring.
And that is his greatest strength as a writer; he uses it to lure you in and to tell you an extraordinary story that makes life seem just that little bit more interesting. He creates possibility out of the most basic human connections and conversations. He shows us the randomness of life that give it colour, flavour and excitement. There’s possibility everywhere.
I am not going to talk about the plot because it is not what makes this story so special. The characters are not all that interesting either. For me, it is all about the magical realist lens in which Murakami writes. It makes the ordinary seem extraordinary. And he can do it exceptionally well. In fact, I would go as far as to say I do not know of any other writer who does it quite as well. There is just something about his books. They have a certain unique characteristic that make them distinctively his own, I cannot quite put my finger to it. And they are always totally profound.
“Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive.”
This quote sums up so much of the main motif of this book and perhaps even life itself. We’re all struggling. We’re all trying to make our way. And this is captured beautifully here.
I must say, I've struggled greatly with Murakami as of late. His recent books Killing Commendatore and Men Without Women have been quite basic. Here, though, the author is the height of his powers. He is totally in control of his craft and it's amongst his finest of works. And it actually makes me want to go back and read the rest of his works because I now remember just how fantastic he can be.
So more Murkami for me in the future.
__________________________________
You can connect with me on social media via My Linktree. __________________________________...more
After reading the literary disaster known as Killing Commendatore late last year and the very tepid Men Without Women the year before, I was just abouAfter reading the literary disaster known as Killing Commendatore late last year and the very tepid Men Without Women the year before, I was just about ready to give up on Murakami.
However, this short story reminded me exactly why I love the author. What makes Murakami so great is what he doesn’t say; it’s the subtle suggestions and doubt spread across character encounters that gives his writing such depth. I always question everything when I read his words. Does that mean more? Is there some hidden point behind what is happening? There are always hints at the supernatural, but they are very rarely confirmed.
With his unique take on magical realism, Murakami shows us that something fantastical could be happening in the very mundane reality of life. And that's kind of special. His stories are about real people who encounter some (possibly) extraordinary things. Birthday Girl, though very concise and short, lingered on my mind for days. I’m still questioning it right now. It could have been nothing spectacular, and it could also have been something grand and magical. It depends how you view the world.
Birthday Girl has a basic plot but it really lingers. A woman on her twentieth birthday is asked to deliver her boss’ meal to his rooms in the restaurant where she is a waitress. Seems ordinary, but after an odd conversation the man offers to grant her a wish, any wish, as her birthday present. We are never told what the wish is or if it has been granted, though the woman’s life did change afterwards. I don’t know if it’s a result of the wish or by the random places life can take us. Murakami leaves us in the dark.
So, it’s an interesting story, and one that made me realise that Murakami still has much to offer me. I need to read another one of his novels soon....more
“I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.”
This is a book that teaches us th“I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.”
This is a book that teaches us that we should never stop dreaming, that we should never stop seeing oceans in ponds and that we should never, ever, stop seeing better worlds in the things we read.
The pond that was an ocean bespeaks the level of optimism that is inherent with childhood dreams. Everything seems better. Everything seems bigger and grander. Imagination makes the ordinary seem extraordinary and fantastic. I have no idea what elements were fantasy within the novel. It could even be magical realism or a child’s interpretation and exaggeration of real life events. Part of me felt like it was based on real things but distorted and twisted to evoke the sense of unfamiliarity a child has in an adult world.
But to perpetually see the world through child eyes would be a boon:
“I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.”
[image]
It’s a book for the lost, for the social pariahs who do not fit in with normal society. It is a book for those who would rather spend their days reading than interacting with the human race. Humans are always disappointing, books are not. And our little hero knows this so he concocts his own friends and draws upon the lessons he learnt through reading. In this regard it reminded me of Coraline. It’s a book about an odd child who dreams of something a little bit better than the reality they experience.
The friend he meets becomes his guardian against the forces that would destroy him and his family. She becomes a doorway into understanding an entirely new world. In this I saw a lonely child longing for something he didn’t have, a connection with someone who would hold him up when the days become their darkest. In The Ocean at the End of Lane anything is possible as a child’s dreams and memories propel the narrative forward.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a truly fantastic book in every regard. I absolutely loved it.
[image]
___________________________________
You can connect with me on social media via My Linktree. __________________________________...more
This is easily one of the saddest books I have ever read. I found it extremely difficult to read in places. I know what it is to lose friends, to haveThis is easily one of the saddest books I have ever read. I found it extremely difficult to read in places. I know what it is to lose friends, to have people randomly walk out of your life as if you never existed: it’s not a nice feeling after years of friendship.
For Tsukuru its four friends and they all exit at once. He gets a phone call from one of them informing him that the group have unanimously decided that he is no longer part of it. The shock is something that he carries with him for his entire life. He loved his four friends and their departure has left him with an undying fear, a fear of ever getting close to anyone ever again.
“It’s as if he was sleepwalking through life, as if he had already died but not yet noticed it."
"Before him lay a huge, dark abyss that ran straight through to the earth’s core. All he could see was a thick cloud of nothingness swirling around him; all he could hear was a profound silence squeezing his eardrums.”
He had no idea why it happened and it has haunted him ever since. It made him question his own identity and his purpose in life, ultimately turning him into a cynic. He never expected to find joy again or any sense of happiness. He trudges through life, colourless and utterly dead inside. On the surface he is successful but inside he is a wreck, existing though not living. After sixteen years he decides to face his past and re-connect with those that abandoned him so mercilessly. He goes back to find the reason that almost destroyed him.
Murakami captures the intensity of emotions to such powerful effect through exploring such a history. Few writers can get such feeling into their writing. We are all waiting for something or longing for something. I wonder how many people are truly happy in life? Not many.
When we find our shot at happiness we fly straight towards it and do everything we can to ensure that it never leaves us. And if it does leave us, well, the aftermath is worse than death. When Tsukuru’s friends abandon him, he no longer is the same person. It’s as simple as that. He must find himself once more to carry on living.
“The human heart is like a night bird. Silently waiting for something, and when the time comes, it flies straight toward it.”
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is an absolutely fantastic novel, and, as with Norwegian Wood, reading it may hurt. This is a novel to learn from.
Rushdie is a great writer to study due to the controversy that surrounds his work. How many writers can say they went into hiding because of public deRushdie is a great writer to study due to the controversy that surrounds his work. How many writers can say they went into hiding because of public death threats? Not many.
Some believe that he wrote The Satanic Verses for attention and more fame. Some believe that he purposefully, and maliciously, slandered Islam so his book would sell. I don’t believe that. His work was taken the wrong way. Rushdie meant no harm. He just had a story to tell and perhaps the world (or at least part of it) was not quite ready for it.
What I’ve noticed with Rushdie is how he tries so very, very, hard to make his books relevant. He addresses current affairs and problems over identity in a world that is becoming globalised. As harsh as it may sound, I believe as he has got older he has become less relevant. His newer books don’t sell anymore and his words do not carry the power they once did. Perhaps he used up his creative spark too early or perhaps he simply grew tired. Whatever the case may be, the Rushdie that writes today is not as good as the one who was active in the eighties.
Here are essays and criticisms that he wrote on all manner of things when he was at his peak. He comments on his own novels, on the politics and religions of India along with stating his opinion regarding other writers such as Ishiguro and Marquez. There are some real juicy pieces. I always find it a little inspiring hearing how a man (who is already a great writer at this point) engages with other writes that the reading public also admire (that I admire). There was a little piece on Stephen Hawking too, which shows how beneficial it is for a writer to read widely. A Brief History of Time clearly influenced Rushdie intellectually.
This will be of great interest to those who are studying Rushdie or perhaps wish to write on him, like I was, though for those looking for a more engaging read I recommend Joseph Anton. It’s his autobiography and it reveals much about his creative process as a writer. I’ll be reviewing that one soon too. For the right reader though, there is some great bits in here....more
The Satanic Verses is vastly imaginative and creative; it is a force to be reckoned with in the literary world providing you can actually get through The Satanic Verses is vastly imaginative and creative; it is a force to be reckoned with in the literary world providing you can actually get through it. And there’s the rub because The Satanic Verses is quite possibly the single most confusing piece of fiction I have ever read.
I’m just not sure what happened. And after 500+ pages I feel like a book should leave me with a little more than an overbearing sense of bewilderment. Perhaps if I was more widely read I would have appreciated it more. That being said, I don’t think any reader should even attempt this book unless they have a strong grasp on Islamic theology and the Quran. Otherwise most of the allusions will be wasted on you like they were me.
It’s just so difficult to read without that knowledge base. It drew upon such a huge wealth of myths, religion and stories that it became so hard to follow. Multiple names are used to refer to the same characters and they frequently shifted in and out of the narrative making it hard to focus on the story and discern what the actual story was at any given point. So much of the novel went over my head that by around the half way point I’d lost the thread completely and was just reading a series of seemingly unconnected chapters.
What didn’t help is the fact that I’m also reading Joseph Anton, Rushdie’s biography. The personal relationship between him and his farther is detailed quite extensively throughout and much of Rushdie’s emotions regarding the matter are paralleled here in different forms. I became confused with events that had happened in Rushdie’s life and those that had happened in the fictional account here because they are so strikingly similar. This meant that a confusing novel became even more confusing.
I find the history of the novel, the events that led Rushdie to go into hiding as he feared for his own life, far more interesting than the actual work itself perhaps because I can actually comprehend the facts as they are not veiled in a web of incomprehensible allegory. One day I will come back to this book, not anytime soon; it will be a day when I am more familiar with the texts it discusses and engages with. At least then, I may be able to read it and form a solid opinion of it.
For now though, I’ve come to a simple conclusion: this book really isn’t for me, at least, not yet. ...more
On the surface Life of Pi is a funny little book, heart-warming and audacious, but dig a little deeper and you’ll see how complex the story actually iOn the surface Life of Pi is a funny little book, heart-warming and audacious, but dig a little deeper and you’ll see how complex the story actually is.
The magically real elements make the story doubt itself; they call into question the probability of these events actually happening because they are so ridiculously unrealistic. As Pi says to those that disbelieve him:
"I know what you want. You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality.”
[image]
Such an assertion questions the truth of fiction. The details aren’t important. Change but a few of them and the journey Pi goes on remains the same. It does not matter if he was trapped on the boat with a bunch of zoo animals or people that reflected the animals in his life, the story remains the same: the truth is not changed. Belief is stretched to absolute breaking point and sometimes it needs to be with a story like this.
And such a thing harkens to the religious ideas Pi holds. He practices several religions believing they all serve the same purpose. This never wavers despite the violent and desperate times he eventually faces. And I really did appreciate this idea; it demonstrates unity in a world divided over matters of faith when it should not be. Again, are the details really that important? To a religious zealot such a thing boarders on blasphemy, though the harmony of such an idea speaks for itself in this book.
“If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?”
[image]
Although I disagree with many of the sentiments in this book, sentiments that may belong to Pi as our narrator and perhaps even to the author himself, I appreciated the degree of time taken to clarify them. The stance on religion was an interesting one with disbelief being compared to a lack of movement in one’s life (not something that I see as truth.)
Zoos are also described as places of wonderment for animals rich in safety and easy living, which can be true in some cases, though the horrors of bad commercial zoos and the cruelty and exploitation that go with them are completely ignored. For me, this is not a point that can be overlooked in such fiction or in life. To do so is somewhat naïve no matter the good intentions of Pi.
I did not love Life of Pi, I never could, though it is a book that made me think about the purposes of fiction and the power of stories, true or untrue....more
Exit West had the potential to be the greatest novel published in the last ten years. I don’t say such things liberally; it really did have a certain Exit West had the potential to be the greatest novel published in the last ten years. I don’t say such things liberally; it really did have a certain power due to it being so politically conscious, though somehow it failed to deliver what it could have done.
Let us rewind a little. Exit West begins in an undisclosed east, in a city at war. The corrupt government is subsequently toppled and the new regime isn’t exactly any better. The ordinary citizens, those with no particular political ties, are forced to do whatever they are told by whoever happens to be in power. Post-revolutionaries don’t exactly make life any better.
Enter Nadia and Saeed. They fall in love in the chaos that is approaching. The real world matters are pushed aside as they deal with the only real matter in their lives. They ignore the gunfire and the explosions and simply live for each other. Everything else is inconsequential until their lives become drastically threatened. Their freedom is a risk and as such they long for escape; they wish to leave the east and, as the title suggests, exit west. They leave much behind them in their bid for freedom though they know that, ultimately, it is worth it because they have each other. And here’s where the novel goes shooting down the toilet at light speed.
The only thing that would save it for me is a drastic re-writing of the last one hundred pages. As soon as the lovers exited west, all power the story had was wasted because of the mundane nature of what they then faced. I needed drama and I needed angry people and contentious political comment. Instead I got nothing. And this is where the novel’s potential was missed. What began as a political allegory ended as a petty domestic dispute. It would have been far more effective if when Nadia and Saeed finally exited west, they were met with all the issues surrounding immigration and refugees. I wanted to see hostility and fear in the eyes of the westerners, I wanted to Moshin Hamid tackle one of the most politically sensitive issues of our age. Had he written such a thing, from the perspective of the refugee, I think it would have been an exceedingly timely piece of writing.
It fell apart. Nadia and Saeed focus on matters of survival as the narrative goes absolutely nowhere. They shift from place to place as no progress is made within the writing other than the slow degrading of their relationship. For me, it all felt like one terribly large wasted opportunity. The author could have done so much more here.
And to quote the author to illustrate my point:
“When we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.”
When the characters migrated, Hamid murdered the potential of this novel leaving it behind in the dust. It was such a bitter disappointment because this novel could have been exceptional: it so nearly was....more
I am so unbelievably disappointed with this book. What should I talk about first, the bland characters, the flat plot or the convoluted prose? Either I am so unbelievably disappointed with this book. What should I talk about first, the bland characters, the flat plot or the convoluted prose? Either way it stank of mediocrity.
This doesn’t feel like a Murakami novel. It doesn’t sound like a Murakami novel and it doesn’t act like one. I went back and read certain passages from After Dark and breathed in (once again) the beautifully rhythmic nature of the prose. It just flows from one sentence to the next, from word to word, forming a story that constantly progressed forward. This did not move. The prose was circular and constantly repeated mundane details about the plot that I already knew. I found myself wanting to skip sections that sounded like paragraphs I’d read before.
And that’s bad, real bad storytelling. It lacks the precision that makes Murakami’s writing so compelling; it lacks the usual edginess and the spark that keeps the words alive. Murakami novels rely on the uncanny, on coincidence and strange encounters that seem normal but have an undercurrent of anxiety and oddness. Some of that was here in a watered down and convoluted form. The problem is the novel is simply too big for the small amount of story it contained. It has the essence of his tropes, a shadow of them, but the prose is too weak to carry them forward.
The protagonist is an artist who has just separated from his wife. He moves to a mountain retreat and fails to paint anything until he finds inspiration in the face of his rich neighbour. He listens to some classical music, digs up a bell and fixates over his dead sister’s breasts. He sleeps with some women in his art class and displays the usual middle-age egotistical personality that I’ve already seen before in Murakami’s fiction. Give me something new! Give me a character that stands out from your others and surprises me with his personality and decisions. I fear the author’s characters have become a little generic.
Murakami has found a niche with his writing and he dominates it; he is not like any other author I have read, and his novels are distinctively his. But in recent years I feel he has started to play it safe. His short story collection from last year Men Without Women was very much the same kind of thing, a brief echo of what he can do but nothing more. So this is a very poor book from a great writer and, as ever, it is demonstrative of how less is sometimes much more.
And I’m quite sad to write these words. If I’m critical of Murakami, it’s because I know exactly how well he can write. I’ve seen it. I’ve felt it. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage moved me to tears whereas this moved me to boredom. I hope his next book has a little more energy.
___________________________________
You can connect with me on social media via My Linktree. __________________________________...more
I read a lot of weird shit in fiction, but I draw the line at people eating babies
I don’t care what the allegory is about, I don’t care how artful theI read a lot of weird shit in fiction, but I draw the line at people eating babies
I don’t care what the allegory is about, I don’t care how artful the imagery is and how poetic the language may be, if it involves vivid descriptions of people eating babies then consider me thoroughly disgusted.
The Republic of Wine is not a book for the faint hearted or for the squeamish; it is not a book for most readers. It uses some truly revolting themes to overtly capture its political message. It is direct and purposeful, but at what cost? In order to show the excesses of society, its corruptions and its unrelenting appetite, Mo Yan exaggerates to the point of utter ridiculousness. I simply cannot believe that the denizens of human society would be this cold and detached from their own suffering in any situation.
They raise their babies and sell them as meat, attempting to perfect their forms in order to yield the largest amount of currency. They pamper them, clean them and grow them for one purpose: to be a delicate treat for the table of the elites of society. Everything in the novel is treated as a commodity; animals are slaughtered in the streets when they no longer have “purpose” as a beast of burden. Humans (and their babies) are used in order to further the advance of communism and nation, absolutely nothing is free.
What Mo Yan offers is a dark reality, a twisted and pessimistic view of our own world that paints all its excesses in the most terrifying and brutal form imaginable. If I could, I’d erase this book from my mind completely....more
Carpentaria is an aboriginal epic; it’s a soaring story full of imagination that gives voice to Australia’s Indigenous population, though it is also hCarpentaria is an aboriginal epic; it’s a soaring story full of imagination that gives voice to Australia’s Indigenous population, though it is also horribly uncomfortable to read and even harder to enjoy.
Alexis Wright works directly with oral tradition, with folktale and myth, to interpose her narrative with as much authenticity as possible; she brings tribal legends into the modern space, asserting how important such things are to the remaining members of the civilisations that were almost destroyed. It’s an angry narrative, one oozing with frustration. The Aboriginals have lost their home and are forced to live in the most undesirable of locations in a nation that is rightfully theirs. Their birth-right has been usurped: their land stolen.
And the land is of such vital importance in understanding this novel; the Aboriginals are connected to it on a spiritual level. They understand it and care for it in ways the colonisers are completely dumb to. They speak to it, and it speaks back to them. They use it thwart the efforts of the white man and eventually attempt to destroy him with it. Magic is combined with faith and belief making it very hard to determine what is actually real within the story and what is a mere matter of an alternative understanding of reality.
This forms the crux of my conflicting opinion of the novel: I just don’t know quite what to take from it. Perhaps if I was an Australian I would understand it more and even more so if I was an Indigenous Australian: it may speak to certain readers on a stronger level, though I do think it of vital importance that we should read the writing of many authors on a wide global scale (not just the popular white western Eurocentric volumes that bombard the shelves and dominate the literary cannon.) It just so happens that this one is rather difficult. I feel like I need to read it again to conceptualise it, but I enjoyed the reading process so little that I will never bring myself to do so.
It’s a novel that really needed to be written, and it’s a novel that ought to be better known. At times it reminded me of modernist fiction in the vain of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s nonlinear and extremely confusing at times. I would not recommend this to readers who have not read similar fiction before, fiction that spirals in circles and messes with your mind as you try to put the pieces together and form an interpretation of what is actually happening.
Overall it’s an important piece of writing, but not one I, or many other readers, will engage with....more
Kintu opens with unbridled authority and mercilessness. In just a few pages a man has been hunted down by an angry mob in Uganda. He is then brained wKintu opens with unbridled authority and mercilessness. In just a few pages a man has been hunted down by an angry mob in Uganda. He is then brained with a concrete slab; his woman is left in widowhood and has the hard task of dealing with her man's debt. Blood flows easily, and quickly, when your family's steps are haunted by a curse that spans generations.
I found this such an effective piece of storytelling, the idea that the history of our ancestors never full leaves us and has the potential to one day assert itself in our present age. Two hundred and fifty years prior to the incident with the concrete slab, a freak accident lead to a fa`ther murdering his own son; it was an accident he never forgave himself for. It set off a chain of events that would shape his life thereafter and ultimately see him torn from the remainder of his family. He is cursed and leaves his village in solitude. Once a respectable man, Kintu Kidda is ruined. His actions have ramifications for all his descendants, for those that been scattered across the globe over the years. Breaking Kintu's curse will finally bring them all together in the conclusion of this hugely dramatic story.
In his novel Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe demonstrated that Africa does not possess a silent culture. African language is formal, developed and intelligent. Here Makumbi plays around with language and storytelling; she writes in English, as Achebe once did, but she also inserts Ugandan words into her prose. Such a narrative technique makes the story distinctively her own, and it's completely unafraid to shout out its voice to the rest of the world like Achebe's writing. Words are, indeed, powerful tools and they have been used here to full effect.
The novel is divided into six separate (yet intricately interconnected) books. I found this very intriguing, hearing about the curse from different perspectives and seeing how it affected people differently across history. Traditional African culture relied on an oral accounting of history, and as such truth can often become distorted and easily turned into myth. Each generation adds a little bit more or takes a little bit away from the original facts. By the end it has become something else, though it is still pervaded by the original ideas as shown here with the original saga of Kintu Kidda.
Despite the time that has elapsed, the original truth of the events in the story can never be changed: they did happen once and they will always exist in the shadows of life. In doing so Makumbi demonstrates how the colonial history of Africa will never fully stop asserting itself in the present. It will never go away, and it's important that it doesn't so humanity can learn from its mistakes and understand exactly what it once did to a people that were essentially their neighbours from across the sea. This novel is, certainly, a worthy study for those interested in postcolonial theory and global literature.
Kintu is a difficult novel to read, and as such it requires a reader who is willing to be patient and put time into appreciating it. Keeping track of all the characters is also difficult, I recommend taking brief notes whist reading and perhaps even researching some of the terminology. As such I would only recommend this to readers who enjoy complex modern novels such as NW by Zadie Smith....more
Sean Barrs
>
Books:
magical-realism
(28)
Loading...
