A World with Two Moons

By Lisabet Sarai

For the past three weeks I've been immersed in a single book: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. Lest you think that I'm a terribly slow reader, let me inform you that this novel, Murakami's most recent, is approximately 1150 pages long. Furthermore, this is not a tale to be rushed, but rather, to be savored. I'm currently on page 743, at the start of Book 3 – “October-December” - and I'm buzzing with pleasant anticipation as I contemplate the next week or two.

Murakami has been one of my favorite authors since I encountered him back in the eighties. I believe I've read all of his novels prior to 1Q84. His stories highlight the isolation and anomie of modern urban life, yet are spiked with a distinctively Japanese magical realism that I find addictive. Practically every character he creates is passive, alone, drifting aimlessly through his or her drab life, oppressed by a vague sense that something is missing. Then the impossible, or at least the unlikely, intrudes and impels the characters to action. In acting, they change. They may connect with other equally lost and lonely souls, though often in a transient fashion that begs any conventional happy ending.

The last Murakami book I read before this one was the slim and elegant After Dark. If you've got the time, you can check out my review on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/515578358 In that review, I commented that After Dark really has no plot, that it's like a curl of smoke or a riff of jazz, beautiful and haunting but without the constraints of novelistic structure.

If After Dark is jazz improvisation, the meticulously plotted 1Q84 is more like a symphony. Every movement, I believe, is carefully planned. Separate themes emerge as solo voices, then converge in choruses of the synchronicity that distinguishes Murakami's fiction. The scenario becomes increasingly fantastic and compelling as the book continues.

I don't want to give away too much of the story, because discovering the twists and turns as the author gradually reveals them is part of the joy of reading. However, I can sketch out the initial events that set the tale into motion.

In the first two thirds of the book, alternating chapters present the perspectives of two seemingly disconnected characters. Aomame is a determined, disciplined woman with a secret profession. Desperate to escape a traffic jam on the freeway that will prevent her from making a critical appointment, Aomame exits from her taxi and climbs down an emergency ladder to street level. Only later does she come to understand that this radical departure from the norm has left her stranded in a subtly different world, a world with a different history and two moons in the sky.

Thirty year old mathematics prodigy Tengo teaches at a cram school and aspires to write fiction. A manipulative editor colleague pressures Tengo into revising a fascinating but disturbing novel by a seventeen year old girl, in order to enter the book into a literary contest. Once he has read young Fuka-Eri's strange tale, he cannot resist temptation. He polishes it into a fictional gem; it becomes a best seller. Gradually he discovers that his creative act has set dangerous forces in motion, that he too has been drawn into a new and disorienting universe that challenges his familiar assumptions.

That's all I'm going to say about the events that propel IQ84 forward. I'll just reiterate that reading it is pure pleasure. The book is written in simple but evocative prose, with a certain distance from its characters that does not prevent you from empathizing with them. Like most of Murakami's books, this one concerns itself with the nature of reality and the malleability of human perception. It's a mystery, a love story, a fantasy, a horror tale, a voyage of self-discovery for its characters. I have no idea how it will end. I consider that high praise.

Here's a bit from one of my favorite sections, describing Tengo's experience as he works on the revisions to Fuka-Eri's manuscript.

He printed a draft, saved the document, turned off the word processor, and shifted the machine to the side of his desk. Now, with a pencil in his hand, he did another careful read-through of the text, this time on paper. Again he deleted parts that seemed superfluous, fleshed out passages that felt underwritten, and revised sections until they fit more smoothly into the rest of the story. He selected his words with all the care of a craftsman choosing the perfect piece of tile to fill a narrow gap in a bathroom floor, inspecting the fit from every angle. Where the fit was less than perfect, he adjusted the shape. The slightest difference in nuance could bring the passage to life or kill it.

The exact same text was subtly different to read when viewed on the printed pages rather than on the word processor's screen. The feel of the words he chose would change depending on whether he was writing them on paper in pencil or typing them on the keyboard. It was imperative to do both. He turned the machine on again and typed each penciled correction back into the word-processed document. The he reread the revised text on the screen. Not bad, he told himself. Each sentence possessed the proper weight, which gave the whole thing a natural rhythm.

When you analyze any particular paragraph, Murakami writing is quiet, without rhetorical flourishes or excessive emotion. Yet somehow he manages to evoke an intense sense of loss, of desperation or of wonder, depending on his intention. I'm certain the author is describing his own writing process in the passage above. The final resulting prose shows exactly that sort of obsessive attention to detail. As a reader, though, you're not really conscious of the craft, because of the way it pulls you into the story.

I'll stop here. I've got to go exercise, and then make dinner. Later, I'll settle into bed for what may be the best part of the day – a few more chapters from this compelling novel.

Indulging Myself

By Kathleen Bradean

Last week, I was so excited when power went down in the West Side for two and a half hours. No computers, no phones, no internet (not even wifi) and no lights in our office. So I grabbed my Kindle, perched on a window sill, and dove in to a story. Best day at work in years.

Once I started reading I couldn't stop. I tore through a few novels in a couple days even though 1) the power eventually came back on in the office, 2) I was writing a novel nights and weekends, and 3) the people who live with me get grumpy when they stand two feet away from me and talk and I don't hear a word they say. You'd think they'd know better by now.  At least the cats understand. Reading Kathleen = cat lap.

If you want to know about erotica I've read lately, go to Erotica Revealed and read my reviews. Honestly, I haven't read much erotica just for fun for a while. Now that Remittance Girl's novels are available again I probably will, but my current reading outside of review work falls under crime, science fiction, and the weird. 

A while ago I picked up Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 but didn't get around to it until now. 1Q84 is either magical realism or urban fantasy, and very imaginative. It's also a bit repetitive, and as long as he was writing an eight hundred page tome he could have written twenty more to wrap up a few of his loose ends, but those are minor complaints for a very long novel that kept me captivated. It's not like any other story I've read and that was a wonderful surprise. But I also love beyond reason Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by Gordon Dahlquist, so I like surreal, odd, quirky, dense tales. You might not be so inclined.

Lisabet Sarai suggested Jonathan Lethem's As She Climbed Across the Table a while ago. I read it and liked it, so I picked up his Gun, With Occasional Music. Oh man. This was my kind of book. So weird. He throws you into a world that's at least one giant step away from this reality and keeps you off balance by never explaining anything. You can't even trust the things that seem normal. He challenges you to keep up as he charges ahead. That might be annoying. I haven't decided. I guess you could say it's a standard hard-boiled detective plot, but the science fiction aspect was so creative that I can't call it just a murder mystery.

I'm not a big fan of horror, mostly because I hate startling at noises in the middle of the night. That's the curse of an active imagination. But I picked up Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist because it has enjoyed such popular acclaim. I liked the reimagining of vampire mythos and the adolescent love story, but as a horror story, it failed me. Maybe the problem was the translation. Horror tends to use beautifully wrought language to evoke a spell but opulent wordsmithing was absent from this translation. I don't care so much about being horrified as it takes real people doing terrible things to truly scare me, but as I read a horror story, dread should take residence in my gut like the parental-myth swallowed seed that grows into a gnarled creeping vine. It didn't. The soulless subdivision could have been used to much greater effect to enforce a feeling of alienation. I sensed that theme running through the story but it never fully developed. It was as if he were afraid to write something that bleak. I saw from an emotional distance how the events built toward an awful conclusion but there wasn't enough tension. I wanted to like this novel more than I did. On the other hand, I slept perfectly well and the shadows in my bedroom behaved themselves through the night.

The Zahir by Paulo Coelho. Sometimes I wonder why I read his books as several chapters in I start to lose patience, yet I keep going. Does it always come down to a man chasing a woman and finally catching her? I suppose it does in his stories. I've only read three so that's hardly a definitive sample, but I sense a pattern. I'd rather read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's work.

Of all the books I've read these past few weeks, Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl is by far the most amazing. Twists, turns, and oh so dark. Flynn is a master at her craft. The suspense never let up. I don't want to say anything about the plot because you deserve to go into it as unsuspecting as I did and exhale in relief as you turn the last page. Admittedly, at first I wasn't satisfied with the end, but on reflection, I realized it was perfect. Every word of this novel was perfect. 

Next up:  Dark Places by Gillian Flynn.