01

Jan

~lionel shriver~ we need to talk about kevin

wnttakRead it in: probably 10 days

As you might have guessed, anything to do with mass murder and children makes me fascinated.  My choice in books to read really does reflect this, I feel.  At first, when this book came out a couple of years ago, I dismissed it as airport novel material, you know, with the hooking plotline that keeps you reading but really with no literary significance.  So it was finally seeing it for a very decent price at my favourite second hand book stall, along with the tag that it had won the Orange Prize (not quite sure how the Orange Prize differs from other prizes, but it certainly is a recommendation in itself), I decided I had to buy it and read it.

If you don’t already know, the basic premise is that our protagonist Eva is trying to come to terms with the fact that her son killed several of his classmates and is now in jail.  Eva wonders, of course, what went wrong, and spends much of the book trying to come to terms with a son she never really learned to love.

This book surprised me in more ways than one.  First of all, the characters were not entirely likeable.  Most of them had likeable aspects, but the unlikeable ones were perhaps emphasised more than the likeable ones.  At the heart of it, it is about blame, and most of the book revolves around the question of whether Kevin’s mother can really be called responsible, at least in part, for Kevin’s deed.  It starts right back at the beginning, even before the conception of Kevin, going through every stage of his life with incredible detail.  We hear about all his exploits as a child, Eva’s attempts to love him despite these, the hardships the small family go through and the shocking events that occur at Kevin’s hand.

I described it to my mother as a ‘parental horror story’.  It is horror in a sense, but probably a type of horror most affective for people who have had children.  It is about a child who seems to have gone wrong in every way, yet there is nothing in the child’s upbringing that is abnormal in any way.  Kevin as a child and as an adolescent was never happy with his place in the world, was never happy with the world itself.  He was the child that was impossible to understand, impossible to please, impossible to punish, who loved to destroy and injure others.  Yes, I found it a little chilling.

Shriver does write well, I have to say.  She (yes, Lionel is a she) creates a great sense of suspense throughout the book, written as letters from Eva to her husband, through which we grasp some details of the actual events but not all.  It is only at the very end that we realise what exactly occurred, in its full-blown, descriptive horror.

And like most things I enjoy reading, it delves into the philosophical aspects to this question.  Shriver talks about good and evil, about nature vs. nurture, about motherly love, distrust, hate, apathy and infamy.  Shriver depicts only one family whose child commits a school shooting – yet these things occur several times a year, therefore there must be hundreds of families by now who go through a very similar process to this.  Something that you would usually pass off, thinking more about the victims of such a tragedy than the perpetrator, as almost cliched these days becomes something big, a 450 page epic detailing decades of life.

It’s quite depressing, it definitely doesn’t leave you with much hope left, so read something happy once you finish it.

Read it if you: don’t mind tragedy, are interested in any of the philosophical things listed above, want a different kind of psychological horror

While reading listen to: Metric Help I’m Alive (Acoustic), Florence + The Machine No Light No Light, U2 Numb

11 years ago Short URL Comments

Horror/Last Name S

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31

Dec

~jonathon safran foer~ everything is illuminated

eilRead it in: around two weeks

I really quite like all of Jonathon Safran Foer’s works that I’ve read.  In both Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Everything is Illuminated, he takes something that is conventional, something that is already overdone – in the former’s case, September 11, in the latter’s, the Holocaust – and yet he manages to turn it into a piece of writing that stands out completely from all others.

One reason is that he has a very interesting style of writing.  In ELAIC (I’m not going to type the full title every single time) he used pictures as well as words, he put pen-marks on pages, he put text on top of text, in short, the book was full of surprises.  This book was less full of surprises in that sense, but it was his first work after all, and we can’t expect a writer to pull out all stops in their first work.  They have to experiment a little first, after all.

This book was actually created out of Foer’s university thesis, which traced a period of his own family history.  So it seems quite personal to Foer himself, like a private memoir of sorts.  He structures this novel in an interesting fashion as well.  It’s told through many different means and several different perspectives.  There are letters from the protagonist’s translator (in bad English) detailing his day-to-day life and talking about the protagonist’s novel.  There is the narrative of the protagonist’s very early descendent, and then of his later descendents.  There is also the narrative of the protagonist’s journey through Ukraine to find out about his family history.  In short, this is a novel about history and also about the discovery of such history.  It is a memoir in more ways than one.

So, as all of Foer’s books do, this one pokes and prods at those deep and meaningful questions as well.  It does this in a humorous way and it does this in a very tragic way.  He gives us little hypotheses about life as well, small things we never knew about nor would ever think about had we not come across it.  Example:

‘THE BOOK OF REVELATIONS
(for a complete listing of revelations, see APPENDIX Z32. For a complete listing of genesises, see APPENDIX Z33.)
The end of the world has come often, and continues to often come.  Unforgiving, unrelenting, bringing darkness upon darkness, the end of the world is something we have become well acquainted with, habitualized, made into a ritual.  It is our religion to try to forget it in its absence, make peace with it when it is undeniable, and return its embrace when it finally comes for us, as it always does.
There has yet to be a human to survive a span of history without at least one end of the world.  It is the subject of extensive scholarly debate whether stillborn babies are subject to the same revelations – if we could say that they have lived without endings.  This debate, of course, demands a close examination of that more profound question: Was the world first created or ended?  When the Lord our God breathed on the universe, was that a genesis or a revelation?  Should we count those seven days forwards or backwards?  How did that apple taste, Adam?  And the worm you discovered in that sweet and bitter pulp: was that the head or the tail?’ (pg. 210)

I like Foer’s prose, and I like the way he easily strikes at the heart of what it means to be human.  His characters do strange things, inexplicable things, and sometimes you don’t know whether to love them or hate them for what they have done.  But his characters, overall, are incredibly human, and this is quite refreshing in the current literary world.

For a first work, I’d say this has to be a winner.  It’s well-written, an interesting read, full of history, humor and tragedy.

Read it if you: are interested in history, especially Holocaust/Jewish history, like meaty characters, don’t mind experimental literature

While reading listen to: Low Roar The Painter, The Antlers Kettering, The Cinematic Orchestra To Build a Home

11 years ago Short URL Comments

Historical fiction/Last Name F/Literature/Memoir/Postmodern literature

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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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03

Dec

~patrick suskind~ perfume

per Read it in: three days (it’s holidays again)

I’ve been wanting to read this book for a while.  I know I say this about a lot of books, but this was especially true for this one.  The concept never really appealed to me (a book about perfumes and smell… what on earth? I thought) but in high school English class we once read an excerpt from the first couple of pages which described in incredible detail the streets of Paris during the late 1700s.  It went something like this:

In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women.  The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of mouldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlours stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber-pots.  The stench of sulphur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood.  People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease…  The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master’s wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the King himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the Queen like an old goat, summer and winter.  For in the eighteenth century there was nothing to hinder bacteria busy at decomposition, and so there was no human activity, either constructive or destructive, no manifestation of germinating or decaying life, that was not accompanied by stench.’ (pg 3-4)

I do love a bit of description.  I love it a lot.  And I did love this book quite a bit.  The only thing that irritated me slightly per2was the cover.  Actually, this irritated me a lot.  The cover I’ve chosen to put up the top here is not the cover of the book that I read.  Rather, this one right here is.  Look at it.  It is a romance novel cover.  The person who designed this cover was a romance cover designer who couldn’t think of anything else to put on a book about fragrance and perfume.  Try some perfume bottles next time or, like the cover above, somebody’s nose.  Yes, the book includes some very important red-headed girls, however in no part of the book are they lying around under bedsheets looking like back-alley whores.  In fact, strange as it may see with a cover like this, this book is not about sex.  For most of this book, there is no sex, and when there is sex the main character is not involved… as such.  But, for reasons unknown to me, I had to brave public transport for three days reading a book that looked like this and trying not to be judged by people.  Oh the shame!

Alright, now that I’ve got that off my chest, I may as well talk about what is beyond the cover.  You can’t judge a book by it’s cover, after all, though I certainly would have if I was riding public transport with myself during this time.  Okay, that’s enough now.  This book is about a young man, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, who has this superhuman sense of smell, meaning that he can pick up the scents of things that we wouldn’t usually consider having a scent.  Like rocks.  He can smell rocks.  And red-headed virgins.  He can smell red-headed virgins from miles away.  He meanders his way through life in various classes of society; he goes from an orphan to a lowly tanner’s assistant to a perfumer’s assistant, to a cave-man-esque hermit, to a man of high standing within his village, to the self-professed ‘Grenouille the Great’.  We see his entire life unfold, right from his birth until his death.  It is quite a momentous work, especially given that it’s able to fit all that into less than three hundred pages without skipping over the years in an irritating manner.  It even includes vast tracts of philosophical thought on life, giving the reader a map of the brain de la Grenouille.

One of the interesting things about this book is that the main character is almost an anti-hero, and in some ways he isn’t the main character at all.  There were definitely parts of the book where we detached from him and our omniscient narrator told us about the activities of other characters in a way that excluded our protagonist completely.  It felt as if I was hearing the story from a witness of certain events who did not know the truth behind them and the way that they secretly involved our main character.  It was interesting, I have to tell you that.

I’m not even sure I liked Grenouille, to tell the truth.  And that makes for an interesting read.  Although I didn’t necessarily like him, his exploits were definitely interesting, yet it was the detachment from emotion at his triumphs and failures that surprised me.  I wouldn’t have cheered for him, if I’d met him in real life I definitely would have avoided him, and the fact that he was the protagonist didn’t stop me from being a little disgusted by some of the things he did (if not all the things that he did).  It’s not a book that you read because the characters are likeable.  You read it because the characters are intriguing and they carry the plot.

There is also, now that I think about it, a sense of inevitability, of fate, in this book.  Perhaps it is the way that it starts right from the very beginning, from Grenouille’s birth, leading to the assumption that it will lead on until his death.  Or perhaps it was the setting – the unforgivable eighteenth century in which nobody really lived very long at all.  Maybe it was his exploits, which you knew would reap some sort of a consequence in the end, which you were just waiting for throughout the whole novel, knowing that things could not go on as they were forever.

In this way, the final scene didn’t surprise me, but then it did.  It was horrible, but unassumingly horrible.  A writer with the sort of descriptive tools that had been used throughout the book didn’t pull them out in this final scene, but left it as is.  In some ways, it’s more shocking that way.  But you will have to read it and tell me what you think.  I won’t say anymore.

Read it if you: are interested in the historical setting, like descriptive passages, like reading the cognitive musings of characters

While reading listen to: Lucia Popp Depuis le jour, Dvorak New World Symphony Movement I, Ravel Gaspard de la Nuit

11 years ago Short URL Comments

Historical fiction/Last Name S

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07

Nov

~george r.r. martin~ a storm of swords

asosRead it in: both books?  Two months, probably.  One to two months.

Sorry all you non-game of thrones people out there.  Thought I’d do a bit of the series while I’m at it.  I did spend probably about half of the year reading these massive tomes, so it has to count for something.  But hey, I’m being good.  I’m doing two books in one here.  I could have tried to up the post count by doing them separately, but no, I’m not!

Anyway.  So I’ve already told you that George likes to start of slow and build up and up and up until you literally can’t put the thing down (unless you’ve already read all the spoilers on wikipedia, like I had).  This one (or two) is at the height of the series, in my opinion.  Things are really getting crazy.  There are wars – several wars going on at once – and all our favourite characters are scattered all over the place in all sorts of crazy situations.  Our favourite characters are changing (or dying) and everything seems so uncertain and exciting.

I would say this book/books is the best of the series.  It’s at the height of reader expectation.  We’re still into it, still hooked, haven’t had to wrestle our way through five books to get to it (only two) and all our favourite characters are still alive… for the time being.  The storyline isn’t overly confusing yet!  It’s still recognisable from when it first started, which I think is one of the main things.  There haven’t been too many really, really, really drastic changes (they’re yet to come).  So we’re still on familiar ground and I think that’s important.

Plus the series hasn’t quite gotten up to the end of this book yet.  We’re still around halfway through, so readers will be excited by the prospect of reading ahead of the series and seeing the exciting developments that result!

Anyway, that’s probably enough from me about this one.  Honestly, this entire has sort of been mashed together in my head so I can’t really say ‘oh, yes, A Storm of Swords, I remember exactly how I found that book’, it’s sort of mixed up with the other five, or six, or seven or however many books I read while I was into this series.  So please forgive me.  I’ll do something non-GOT next I promise.

Read it if you: are reading the series.  Otherwise, don’t bother.  Because why would you start from the middle of the series anyway?  (Seriously!)

11 years ago Short URL Comments

Fantasy/Last Name M

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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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30

Oct

~nick cave~ and the ass saw the angel

atastaRead it in: about two weeks, if I remember correctly

I first picked this one up because I love Nick Cave’s music.  I’ve only recently come across him, with his new album ‘Push the Sky Away‘.  I thought the lyrics were singularly the most amazing thing I could ever conceive of.  Strange at times (well, most of the time), but I liked them in a strange sort of sense.

So I knew this book would contain some strange things, and it did, but it was powerful and memorable at the same time.  It was dark, very dark, with lots of religious themes thrown in, madness, death, violence and destruction.  Interesting to read, if depressing.

It’s about Euchrid Eucrow, who lives in the (you would assume) deep South, remote town of Ukulore, whose residents are all unnervingly religious, even Euchrid himself, although his beliefs differ somewhat to that of the other townsfolk, hence he is an outcast.  More loneliness and isolation.  I made a point in my last post that all the books I seem to read these days seem to be about isolation.  Or maybe it’s just all the books these days.

Anyway, so into this small, religious community arrives Beth, an angelic looking child who is taken in by the townsfolk and raised as a miracle child, their own personal saviour.  Euchrid develops a strange, long-distance, barely connected relationship with Beth, half-despising her and half almost devoted to her.  We see the downward spiral of Euchrid’s life, starting off low to begin with and sliding down into desolation, madness.  It’s an interesting transition.

I feel like, in this novel, no one is quite human (that is, human as we know it to be).  Everybody is carried along by their own passions, their own hyperactive versions of faith, their sorrows and their joys.  Nobody is normal.  Not even the little girl who was raised to be perfect is truly free of this.

Yes, this book is depressing, utterly depressing, especially as we know what the ending is from about halfway through, and we are simply waiting and waiting for it to come about.  But what makes this book bearable and, most of all, a very interesting read, is Nick Cave’s descriptions of things and simply the way that he writes.  Instead of using ‘I’ as a typical first-person narrator would, he uses ‘ah’, like “Do you think that ah don’t know what’s running through your minds?”, “Mah skull is polluted with sickly poetry” and “standing in the turret that ah built upon the roof of mah clapboard castle”, you get the idea.  It results in a very different kind of read, in which you can hear Euchrid’s voice in his deep-South accent as if he were talking to you, instead of almost the absence of a physical voice in other books, especially those narrated in third person.

And I do have a quote for you.  There’s just something about Cave’s prose, the despair, the eventuality of it all, that makes me so attracted to it.  Here’s a little poem that’s in the book that shouldn’t give too much away (hopefully):

‘It seems you’re inching unner, sir, inching slowly unnerBut what it is you’re inching in, ah cannot help but wonder.’
O booming voice up in the clouds, to speak cuts like a knife
Ah’m simply inching into Death, while inching out of Life.
‘You’re wrong, you poor deluded boy, True Death’s up here with Me
Hell’s dungeons boil below you, child, Eternal Agony!’
O climb down off your crap-hill, O fiend hid in the sky
You’re Lucifer!  The Great Deceiver!  Your word is but a lie!
You will not fool me anymore with your wrath and rolling thunder
‘Tis God that stands behind mah wheel and inches me now unner.
The bog it yawned and pulled me down, mah body trussed in chains
And Satan sighed and shook his head, played harp amongst the flames.
‘It’s Hell up there in Heaven too, for all that that is worth.
Heaven is just a lie of mine to make it Hell on Earth.’ (from page 212)

Nice, hey?  Anyway, that’s the other thing.  While the prose is scattered with deep-South speech, it’s also home to a lot of religious and old English speech, such as the good old ‘thou’, ‘thus’ and so on.  It’s quite a contrast and gives this novel an incredibly unique voice.

Read it if you: like experimental literature, appreciate good prose, do not have clinical depression, like madness of the human soul

While reading listen to: well, of course I have to recommend Nick Cave here.  He wrote the damn book.  So listen to Finishing Jubilee Street, Higgs Boson Blues, Hallelujah (start this one at 1:39)

11 years ago Short URL Comments

Last Name C/Literature

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30

Oct

~haruki murakami~ kafka on the shore

kotsRead it in: around a week and a half, I think

I quite like Murakami, and not just because he’s Japanese and because his work is set there, but also because his stories are always strange, but strangely poetic in a sense.  When you pick up a Murakami, you’re guaranteed an interesting read, that’s for sure.

This book is no exception.  There are fish falling from the sky and ghost girls and hordes of school children fainting all at once.  No stranger than the two moons in the sky of 1Q84, I suppose.

The novel is about Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home and stays in a small town on the island of Shikoku.  At the same time, the story focuses on an old man named Nakata, who is a finder of lost cats.  Both Nakata and Kafka, though they are completely separated, become implicated in a murder and must alter their lives around this.  Kafka, in particular, must go into hiding to escape the police.  Nakata also embarks on his own journey and both of these characters end up in Shikoku.

What strikes me about this novel – and about most of Murakami’s novels – is that they contain this sense of isolation in the characters.  Japan is a place with many, many people, yet I feel that a lot of Japanese literature contains themes of loneliness and isolation from society.  (Actually, this seems to be a common theme in all the books that I read…  this probably says something about my reading tastes.)

Reading Murakami, in particular, this work of his, you find yourself asking a lot of questions about the meaning of certain events.  I have a feeling that an English literature tutor I once had could run a whole course, if not several, on works like this, and still have more to talk about.  In fact, ‘Kafka on the Shore’ triggered over 8,000 questions from Murakami’s readers to his website (and he personally answered 1,200 of them – what a champ!).  He said this about ‘Kafka’:

Kafka on the Shore contains several riddles, but there aren’t any solutions provided. Instead several of these riddles combine, and through their interaction the possibility of a solution takes shape. And the form this solution takes will be different for each reader. To put it another way, the riddles function as part of the solution. It’s hard to explain, but that’s the kind of novel I set out to write.

(From the Random House website)

Reading ‘Kafka’ is like entering a dream world, where nothing really makes sense in the way you think it does.  Strangely enough (that’s sarcastic, by the way), it reminds me of Kafka’s ‘The Trial’.  As you can probably guess, Murakami is a great fan of Kafka’s work, and you can see some of the influence creeping in here.  The rules are not the same to what we know.  It’s like there’s some strange, spiritual world beyond our own that you don’t know about until it creeps into your life, as it does for the characters in ‘Kafka’.

Well worth a read.

Read it if you: haven’t read any Murakami before, it’d be a nice start, like things set in Japan, think isolated characters are interesting, are willing to suspend your disbelief

While reading, listen to: Fourtet Unspoken, Fourtet And They All Look Broken Hearted

11 years ago Short URL Comments

Last Name M/Postmodern literature

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07

May

~john green~ the fault in our stars

TFIOSRead it in: around two weeks

I have a friend who is a diehard John Green fan, and she chucked a fit when she heard I hadn’t read his latest work.  I’d read another of his, ‘An Abundance of Katherines’, and yes, it was a good book, but I wasn’t very much into YA anymore and I had a lot of great things coming up on my reading list…

Turned out this was not one to be turned down.  I had heard that it was great, but I didn’t expect it to actually fulfill my expectations.  Well, it did more than that.  I love John Green and everything, he’s a great guy with a great sense of humour and a talent for writing, but this was quite an amazing book.  It stood out from others and I can’t stop thinking about it.

Alright, so I’ll admit it.  I cried.  I do that very rarely.  The only books in which I’ve cried that I can list off the top of my head are ‘Goodnight, Mr. Tom’ and ‘My Sister’s Keeper’ (the book is so much sadder, don’t bother with the movie).  In ‘Goodnight, Mr. Tom’ I cried multiple times.  In ‘The Fault in Our Stars’, I cried multiple times as well.

Alright, so I stayed up past midnight reading this because I couldn’t put it down.  And then cried.  And then finished the book.  And then couldn’t get to sleep because I kept crying.

Bravo, John Green, that’s probably one of the most literature-fuelled emotional times I have had in my life.

But, I thought to myself, I should have expected it.  The two main characters have/had cancer.  You read the blurb on the back of the book and you just know there’s going to be a death!  It’s expected!  You’d be disappointed if there wasn’t one!  I was reading through the book waiting for death to come knocking, and when it did, it bowled me over.

It wasn’t just the way it was written, it was the scenes and the emotions that were portrayed, and, most of all, Green’s amazing characterisation abilities.  The characters, the scenes, stayed in my head long after I’d finished this book.

Probably the best YA book I’ve ever read.

Read it if you: are looking at this review sceptically, shaking your head and saying, “Wouldn’t reduce me to tears…”, and are nodding right now while reading this, like interesting and humorous prose

While reading, listen to: I’ll Try Anything Once The Strokes, Patience Low Roar, I’ll Never Forget You Birdy

11 years ago Short URL 4 Comments

Last Name G/Young Adult

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06

May

~anthony burgess~ a clockwork orange

ACORead it in: two weeks

I read this book before knowing anything about it at all.  I knew Malcolm McDowell was in the film (I’ve loved that guy ever since I saw the film ‘If…’), but that was about it.  Well, apart from the fact that it had that charming orange cover that denotes a Penguin Classic – always good if you want to look smart while reading on the bus.

What struck me first about it was the language in which it was written.  I suppose I expected normal prose, like any book, but I was given this instead:

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard thought dry.  The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither.

So, yes, Burgess has made up not just a few words, as I found out, but an entire language of youth slang.  Not only that, I love the combination, seemingly unique to Alex, of older, almost biblical-sounding language, the ‘O’s the ‘thou’s and so on.  It is at once very old and very new.  This gives the extremely interesting character of Alex a unique voice to match.

Alex is particularly interesting because his morals are completely skewed.  He participates in violence for fun, he enjoys destruction, likes to seduce younger girls, lies continuously to everyone around him, yet beyond that he has redeeming features.  The most peculiar of these is his love for great classical music – something usually associated with people of high culture, who enjoy reading books, perhaps writing (blogs…?), and not violent individuals.  Although Hitler liked Wagner (so do I!), Alex is definitely not in his category.  Alex’s violence seems more childish, more fruitless and more like playtime than anything else.

Another thing to keep in mind is his age.  Alex is only around 15 throughout the novel, yet he commits great crimes and acts well above his age.  Yet at the end of the book, (last chapter, emitted in some versions) he seems to decide to become an adult, live a normal life, have children, settle down.  I felt while I was reading this that the book resonates with the theme of youthfulness, the childish urge for violence, attention, and the need to learn right from wrong, or at least to experiment with what is right and wrong.

This is a definite read, because it is so controversial and really plays around with morals.  Don’t read it like an action novel, though, because the language can be hard to get through in the beginning (but by the middle of the book, you find it easy to understand).  You will finish the last chapter confused, but it is a good book to ruminate on for a while – and it’s only after a period of thinking on it that you will actually be able to grasp perhaps what the book is talking about.

Read it if you: like controversial classics, are interested in experimental language, don’t mind a bit of violence and rape and such, have seen the film and think that is just the best thing on earth (you’ve gotta read the book), like moral ambiguity, appreciate interesting, well-written characters.

While reading, listen to: Ninth Symphony Ludwig Van Beethoven, The Thieving Magpie Rossini (the Beethoven is mentioned in the book so it’s probably important to have an idea of how they sound when reading it)

11 years ago Short URL 1 Comment

Classics/Last Name B

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