03

Dec

~jonas jonasson~ the one hundred year old man who climbed out the window and disappeared

tohyomwcotwadRead it in: maybe a little over two weeks

So this was a bit of a random choice, picked up in the bookshop for no apparent reason and waiting to be read so that I could finally add the ‘fiction alphabetical order J’ category to the list.  Also, to tell the truth I haven’t really read a comedy before.  It was an interesting experience.

Would I recommend it?  Sure, if you like books written almost entirely in exposition.  An example is called for:

Allan asked Julius if he had any ideas which, unlike previous attempts, would not make The Beauty even angrier.  Julius answered that the only way they could save the situation was by inviting The Beauty to partake in some sort of part ownership of the suitcase.  Allan agreed, although he pointed out that no good would come of telling a new person each day that they had stolen someone’s suitcase, killed that person when he wanted to get it back, and sent the corpse to Africa packed neatly in a steel cylinder. (pg 96-97)

At first it really bothered me.  Really, really bothered me.  I thought maybe it was something funny with the translation (the author is Swedish, after all), but then I realised that it hadn’t been translated.  Was that the problem?  Needless to say, I did get used to it, and the whole book isn’t written in exposition anyway.  Only the vast majority of it.

It follows the strange and intriguing life of Allan Karlsson, who managed to mix him up in just about every important world event of the 20th Century, and is currently, at the age of one-hundred, on the run.  So the book jumps between the past and the present, which got a little confusing towards the end, but was helped by the dates at the top of the chapters.  So Mr. Karlsson goes from Sweden at the beginning of the century to the Spanish Civil War, to Los Alamos in 1945, to China during the revolution, to the Himalayas and Iran, then back to Sweden and then shortly to Soviet Russia, mainly Vladivostok, to North Korea, to Bali and then finally back to Sweden.  Along the way he manages to meet with just about every major policy-maker of the times.  This is the history scholar’s dream, the international relations major’s greatest desire, to see all these factors come together for comment.  Unfortunately for us all, Mr. Karlsson isn’t particularly fond of politics and tends to try to change the subject quickly.  Now, that is unfortunate.

Well, this book was a little crazy, and maybe a little ambitious in that sense.  Mr. Karlsson with his incredible luck but apathy for politics got on the nerves a little, which is unfortunate because the entire thing is narrated from his expositional perspective.  And, though this may be a flaw with the comedy genre as a whole, the entire narrative seemed completely devoid of emotion.  Characters died, that’s right, died, and our protagonist seemed hardly phased, just continued on with his crazy journey.  Incredible things happened that, if given to another author, could have been laden with heart-wrenching descriptions and really milked for all it was worth.  We had labour camps in Vladivostok.  We had bombs going off during the Spanish Civil War.  We had interrogations with the top dog of the Iranian secret police.  In another writer’s hands, I could see this being an emotionally charged adventure novel.  This one, however, seemed to skirt the emotional bits and toddle along with the plot regardless of what the character was experiencing, in the same way, I suppose, that a one-hundred year old man would climb out the window and disappear – slowly but surely with no regard for anyone and no emotion whatsoever.

So it was a little irritating, but blame it on my inability to stand the comedy genre.  DeLillo and Mishima have made me into a cynical and pedantic literary hermit.  I will stay in my depressing genre-niche and reject everything whenever I emerge.

I am trying to broaden my tastes.  My attempts just haven’t been successful yet.

Read it if you: are an experienced adventurer in the comedy genre and know what to expect, are interested in world history, think coincidence and good luck are amusing.

While reading listen to: oh, lord, I don’t know.  Don’t ask me right now, I’m too busy being cynical.

11 years ago Short URL Comments

Comedy/Historical fiction/Last Name J

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04

Nov

~david mitchell~ ghostwritten

gwRead it in: around two weeks

This was my second David Mitchell, the first being Cloud Atlas, which I thoroughly enjoyed.  The main thing that drew me to this one was that it was partially set in Japan.  I am leaving in just under two months for my six month trip to the country and thought I should get some background reading done.  And I thought, because Cloud Atlas was so good, that this would be equally as good.

I must say, Ghostwritten reads almost as the prequel to Cloud Atlas.  If I remember correctly, it was his first novel, so Cloud Atlas definitely came after it.  But having read CA first, I could pick up little hints as to where some of the ideas came from.  I love seeing how authors play with ideas in one book that then go on to completely shape another work later on.

Ghostwritten is also really similar to Cloud Atlas in structure, as if Mitchell was experimenting with that sort of thing for the first time here.  It takes the form of nine different parts, all about completely different people on different corners of the earth, whose destinies go on to intertwine as the story develops.  In Cloud Atlas, Mitchell does this starting out with halves of the story that go in order… Look, I’m going to have to draw a diagram because words fail me:

CW: The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing –> Letters from Zedelghem –> Half Lives: the first Luisa Rey mystery –> The Ghastly Ordeal of Timoth Cavendish –>An Orison of Sonmi 451 –> Sloosha’s Crossin’ An’ Ev’rythin’ After –> An Orison of Sonmi 451 –> The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish –> The First Luisa Rey Mystery –> Letters from Zedelghem –> The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing

GW: Okinawa –> Tokyo –> Hong Kong –> Holy Mountain –> Mongolia –> Petersburg –> London –> Clear Island –> Night Train

So as you can see, the format of CW starts off by introducing the characters and then going back to them again at the end.  I sort of expected this as I read Ghostwritten, but as you can see, it doesn’t happen there.  I was a little disappointed because I wanted so much to learn about the characters more!  So things were left unanswered, but I don’t think that’s too much of a big issue when it comes to David Mitchell.

And it all ties together in the end, but in unexpected ways.  Most of the time the protagonists of sections never actually meet each other, at least not in person.  They hear of one another, they sometimes see one another from a distance and usually they suffer the full extent of the consequences of the actions of another person.  Mitchell ties this story into one particular theme that isn’t really noticeable until the end.  It becomes more and more relevant until finally we realise why things that seemed utterly strange in the first part of the book are actually conceivable in the second part.

If you’re asking what it’s about, it’s about lots of things.  It’s about a frightened terrorist in Okinawa, a couple falling in love in Tokyo, a middle-aged and troubled man in Hong Kong, an old woman living an unchanging life on a changing mountain in China, a non-corporeal species living in the minds of different people in Mongolia, an art thief in Petersburg, a young man living in chaotic London, a leading physicist seeking refuge in a remote island off the British isles, a late night radio show in Brooklyn, NY.  It encompasses just about every corner of the globe and every walk of life that there is.  It’s about life, and non-life as well.  Reading it is like taking a voyage.  You step off and you think ‘where have I just been?’, or ‘where have I NOT just been?’.

It’s one of those books that you digest for a while after you read.

Read it if you: are interested in travel and different places and different people, if you’re interested in China or Japan, or Mongolia, or I suppose in Russia or America or England or Ireland, if you would have ever liked to see ‘The Host’ by Stephenie Meyer rewritten by someone who is actually competent, if you read Cloud Atlas.

While reading listen to: Low Roar The Painter, Bon Iver Calgary (this version in particular), The Irrepressibles In This Shirt

11 years ago Short URL Comments

Fantasy/Last Name M/Literature

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13

May

~jiang rong~ wolf totem

WTRead it in: close to two months

I read this on the recommendation of one of my relatives, who always gives me a stack of books to take away every time I visit her house so much so that I am worried I will have to pay more for overweight baggage on the flight home.  Needless to say, I tried to finish this one while I was still staying with her, but the whole 800 pages thing somewhat delayed me.

As my rule is that every book I start I must finish, taking on something 800 pages long is something I have to consider for a long time before starting.  Will it be worth it?  One hundred pages through, will I regret I ever opened it?  Will it haunt my bedside table for months and months before I can make the time to finish it?  It was the same with this one.  I’d never read anything like it and hadn’t even come to it myself, at that, but had had it passed onto me by someone who (I thought) didn’t know my reading tastes.  (Now from latter experience I know that she knows my reading tastes absolutely and will trust her on every recommendation)

Anyway, one of the contributing factors to beginning this one was that it had won the Man Asian Prize.  Any panel of judges who decide to take on a book of 800 pages, manage to read it to the end and after that decide to award it a significant prize must have thought it was pretty amazing.  I have to say that I understood why they thought so after I finished it.

So the story is about a young Chinese man who goes to live for a couple of months in the Mongolian plains, sampling the lifestyle.  At the same time it is about the shepherds of the Mongolian plains and their struggle to survive, in particular, the threat of the wolves to the survival of their sheep, also their livelihoods.  But on a larger scale it is about the diminishing lifestyle on the Mongolian plains which is being subjected to the Chinese cultural revolution, increasing industrialisation and the view that traditionalism equals backwardness.

The book is full of metaphors for one thing or another.  Through what the characters experience you can really get a sense that it means something else on a deeper level.  It is a beautiful book, yet it is also tragic, violent in parts, cruel and incredible.  The images depicted, especially the scenery passages, are written just beautifully.

When I first started reading it, I wasn’t sure what to make of it.  Reading the language, I sometimes felt as if I was reading a non-fiction novel, what with all the descriptions of the behaviour of the wolves, the lifestyle of the Mongolian shepherds.  But it turned out this was for the best.  Not only did I become used to this style of prose, but I also gained a complex understanding of what life was like for these people.  You knew what was going to happen because you could already understand the cycle of cause and effect that dictated these people’s lifestyles.

One more thing, and that is that although 800 pages is a significant trek, I often come out with the feeling that long books always trump small books.  You journey along with the characters, you live months and months with the regularity of picking up the same book every day, diving into the same world, the same characters, getting to know what it’s like.  You know everything there is to know about that world, all the information has been bequeathed to you and you understand it in the same way that you understand what you are learning in university or what your tasks are at work.  When I turned the final page, I felt like I had been shut out of that world, that the world had ended, even more so because the ending is such that you know that the events of the book can never be again, that it has all changed since now and those times can never reoccur.

It’s sad and long, but please read it.

Read it if you: are interested in the nomadic life of Mongolian shepherds, like nature-oriented literature, are interested in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, like wolves… or maybe not…, enjoy antagonism between human and animal with both sides having an equal chance of victory.

While reading, listen to: Varðeldur Sigur Ros

11 years ago Short URL Comments

Historical fiction/Last Name R/Literature

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