Read Books? Wait…What?

Sacchi Green

I admit it. I’ve spent all too much time lately reading media news, or, most often, social media news. My longest time away from the Internet was Saturday when I joined the Women’s March in Northampton, MA, which was great exercise for body and soul, but still firmly planted in the world of politics and protest.

Books were not on my mind at all, except—a fairly big except—when I was driving. I try to always have a book on CD  from the library on hand in my car. Lately I’ve been going back and forth between two that could scarcely be more different.

One is After the Quake by Haruki Murakami. Yes, I was inspired by Lisabet’s post last week, and luckily the Amherst library had a copy on CD of his short story collection. I’m only halfway through the book, which means three stories out of six, but I can understand perfectly why the blurb on Amazon includes the term “mesmerizing.” The prose draws me into the kind of state I find from some music. It holds my attention without drama, keeps me at a distance and involves me, both at the same time. I can’t tell how much is due to the original writing, the translation, or the very good narration, but the combination somehow works.

The stories are theoretically inspired by the earthquake in Kobe, Japan in 1995. The connection is tenuous ,and sometimes just a fleeting thought about mortality, but each main character in the stories I’ve read so far feels that something is lacking, that he or she is empty inside, which surely involves at least a subconscious preoccupation with mortality. The endings are ambiguous, as I expected; one seems slightly tilted toward the positive, one toward the tragic, and one doesn’t need to point in any direction.  If I were reading this description of the book I wouldn’t expect to enjoy it, yet the writing, its cadences, complex simplicity, glimpses of deep feeling in those who don’t think themselves capable of feeling, really hooks me and keeps me listening.

I do need a change from it now and then, though, so I switch to something worlds away, Terry Pratchett’s Raising Steam from his Discworld series. I’ve read this one before, but Pratchett is worth re-reading, and it saddens me that he won’t be writing any more books, having died last year.

The series is at once a fantasy with intricate world-building, a sharp satire on earthly politics, culture, and human foibles, a treatise on social justice, and among the funniest things I’ve ever read. Proceeding from a more or less medieval condition and rapidly evolving technologically (after a fashion) to the point where steam engines are being perfected in the current book, the society progresses bit by bit. All the various sentient species, humans, dwarves, trolls (made mostly of stone,) vampires (converted to drinking coffee,) werewolves, and eventually even the previously despised goblins (who turn out to be the cleverest of all when given the chance,) take their equal places in the overall population, and in the Watch as well, the police force of the largest city, Ank-Morpork. Diversity is at its peak.  All the vanities, bigotries, stupidities, absurdities, of our own civilization are still there, being skewered by Pratchett’s wit, but so are heroism, compassion, fellowship, and all the comparative virtues we possess, and we can bond with appealing characters as complex and often confused as we are ourselves. I tried to think of a quotation to use here, but no single one will do it, so I’ll just resort to the one most often cited by Pratchett fans. The people of Discworld believe it to be mounted on the backs of four elephants who are standing on the back of a giant turtle cruising through space. When a lady at a social gathering is asked what she thinks is under the turtle, she replies confidently, “It’s turtles, all the way down.”

Well, maybe you have to be there. Or rather, read there.

Uh-oh, I’ve got to go now. Somebody may be wrong on the Internet! Or there may be some new scandal or outrage that I need to know about! I can never catch up, though, because there are always outrages and scandals, all the way down.      

Magical Realism, Japanese Style (#murakami #amreading #magic)

By Lisabet Sarai

This fortnight here at the Grip, we tackle our recurring topic “What are you reading?” I’m always in the middle of several books, but lately most have left me with a ho-hum feeling. When I realized that this topic was looming, though, I decided to crack open a novel I’ve been “saving” since I bought it a couple of months ago: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and HisYears of Pilgrimage, by Haruki Murakami. I’m now about two-thirds of the way through this three hundred page volume, certainly far enough to chronicle my feelings here.

Murakami has been one of my favorite authors since I first read A WildSheep Chase, more than thirty years ago. I’m not alone in this sentiment; Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki sold more than a million copies in Japan during the first week after its release.

When I try to analyze why I enjoy his work so much, though, I’m left with a bit of puzzle.

One thing that normally attracts me to an author is originality or diversity. For instance, I love T.C. Boyle’s chameleon-like ability to produce a wildly different type of story with each release. Murakami’s books, in contrast, tend to be quite similar to one another in language and tone. His characters also share many characteristics from one book to the next. His heroes tend to be quiet, hard working, nondescript, often lonely, men, drifting almost anonymously through Japanese society.

Thirty-something Tsukuru Tazaki fits this mold exactly. He lives alone in a Tokyo condo and works as an engineer building railroad stations (which happen to be one of his rare passions). He does his own laundry and often cooks his own simple food, drinks alcohol sparingly, swims regularly at the public pool for exercise and to quiet his mind. He has never been outside Japan. He has no friends—in fact an issue at the crux of this story—until he meets Sara, a enigmatic woman to whom he’s strongly attracted, but about whom he knows little.

Hardly an alpha hero. Hardly a hero at all, by the standards of popular literature, but quite typical of Murakami’s protagonists.

I also admire books with intricate and beautifully constructed structure, plots that not only provide interesting conflicts and dramatic resolutions, but which also showcase the author’s awareness of and ability to control the narrative. Examples that come to mind include Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior and Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus. In these books, no detail is insignificant. Themes or events early in the novel turn out to have profound impacts by the end.

Murakami’s books, in contrast, meander from one event to the next, taking side trips along the way, which may or may not turn out to be relevant to the book as a whole. Murakami is also a jazz musician, and sometimes his books feel like improvisations. In addition, there’s little rise in tension. The story arc is so gradual as to be almost undetectable.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki follows this pattern, although it begins with an emotional cataclysm. During his high school years in Nagoya, Tsukuru Tazaki (whose first name means “the builder”) enjoyed a remarkable, close relationship with four friends. Studious Akamatsu (“red pine”), athletic Oumi (“blue sea”), beautiful Shirane (“white root”), warm Kurono (“black field”) and Tsukuru were inseparable for much of their teenage life. They spent work and play time together; they shared experiences and ideas; they complemented one another’s personalities. There was something intoxicating, almost erotic about their closeness, although the relations between the male and female members of the group were entirely platonic. Together the five were as much of a whole as the five fingers on a hand. Then during Tsukuru’s first year of university, the four friends whose names include colors suddenly rejected him. They refused to communicate with him. Furthermore, they would not tell him the reason.

Tsukuru almost dies as a result of this sudden amputation from the people he loves. The shock and grief are overwhelming. He stops eating. He sinks into grief and becomes preoccupied with death, as emotional pain totally consumes him. Yet Murakami describes this so calmly that the impact feels muted.

“Perhaps he didn’t commit suicide then because he couldn’t conceive of a method that fit the pure and intense feelings he had toward death. But the method was beside the point. If there had been a door within reach that led straight to death, he wouldn’t have hesitated to push it open, without a second thought, as if it were just part of ordinary life. For better or for worse, though, there was no such door nearby.”

This passage offers a sense of Murakami’s graceful, fluid style, as well as the distance he always seems to preserve between the reader and his characters.

The book does have a plot. Indeed, it is in some sense a classic mystery, as Tsukuru finally takes action to discover the truth of why his friends spurned him. He is set upon this quest by the insightful Sara, who recognizes that he can’t fully participate in building his relationship with her because he’s stuck in the past, pinned like a butterfly to an empty life by the pain of his old loss.

Still, it’s not really the plot that’s pulling me forward in the book, making it hard for me to stop reading at night even though I know I’ll be sorry when the alarm clock rings the next day.

What is it about Murakami’s work that excites me? Why am I trying to ration this book, so as not to finish it too quickly?

One answer lies in the richness of ideas the author explores. His characters tend to have long, philosophical conversations full of startling insights (which may or may not be important for the “plot”). Murakami is interested in life, death, talent, music, art, language, evil, logic, fate, luck, spirituality, relationships, and the nature of reality. There’s a deep pleasure in reading these conversations. You think, “Yes, that’s exactly right, that captures the truth.” Or sometimes, “what a remarkable perspective; that’s never occurred to me.” I find it difficult to retain these insights, just as it’s hard to hold on to the details of a dream. All you recall are the emotions. Of course, one joy of a book (especially a print book like this one I’m reading) is the ability to go back and re-visit favorite passages.

Murakami’s language is beautifully precise, whether he is describing inner or outer states of being. He has a gift for creating images that capture the essence of his subject. As an author, I can appreciate both the final effects and the difficulty of achieving them.

However, the main feature that calls me back to this author’s work may be the magic. Every one of his novels incorporates some hint of the miraculous or the unexplained. Don’t misunderstand me; there are no wizards or mages in Murakami’s books, no shapeshifters, blood drinkers or demons that characterize the paranormal genre. Instead, there are synchronicities, coincidences that defy logic, or states of being that take the characters beyond the material world. This is more like the magical realism that characterizes Latin American fiction like that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Laura Esquivel.The Latin magic is more vivid, though, portrayed in primary colors. Murakami, in contrast, describes these marvels in the same subdued and measured prose he uses for the rest of his books.

In Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, for example, Tsukuru has a disturbing lucid dream about his old friends as a well as a new friend, Haida (who vanishes not long after). The dream is a harbinger of reality, foreshadowing the reason his friends cut him off. When Tsukuru travels to Finland, where Kurono has moved, every experience seems edged with magic. He encounters the people he needs to assist him on his quest.

Like many other aspects of Murakami’s work, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly where the sense of magic comes from. It slips away, leaving a memory, like the refrain of a song that sticks in your mind, whose title you can’t recall. It’s haunting, though, creating a persistent sense that life includes something beyond the bare bones of physical experience. Often we can’t see this something, but it shines through the deceptively mundane events in Murakami’s stories, drawing the mind and the heart.

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.