Freewheeling Andy
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Posts posted by Freewheeling Andy
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I used to be the same with Dan Brown. But my girlfriend had a copy of each of the two famous books, so I felt sort-of-obliged.
And, you know what the funny thing is? My prejudices were entirely correct. It is the most astonishingly risibly bad prose I've ever had the misfortune to encounter. It is utterly, utterly, shocking. The plots, too, are spectacularly laughable, although at least enough romp-a-longy to keep reading, despite being grimly bad. The prose, though, is a real challenge unless you read it for its comedy badness value. If you're doing that you'll find nothing to beat it.
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Honestly, the best way to improve your wine-tasting skills is drinking lots of wine.
Next thing to do is learn the flavours that go with certain grapes. So, flowers with gewurztraminer, or cherry with pinot noir, say, or ribena and shiraz. It's obviously not universal, but it's a good start.
Although, really, don't try and impress people with wine pretentiousness. Just have nice wines.
It's not quite a book, but these: http://www.nezduvin.co.uk/ are good. Not cheap, mind you. But good. Wine tasting is most about the smells, and this really helps you isolate the kinds of smells from certain grapes, and therefore wines.
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Hard Boiled Wonderland is on my shelf. Many of the Murakami readers I know consider it his best, so I'd say that it's a good place to start. Otherwise I'd start with A Wild Sheep Chase, which I love, and isn't too long...
And interesting thoughts, Weave. Particularly on the May/Kumiko/Toru thing, about him wanting to make them safe, and them wanting to make him safe; so him using May as a substitute for Kumiko, rather than May actually, in some ways, being Kumiko.
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As I was saying to Kell, I think Murakami's very much one of those authors who's not going to be universal in appeal, and some people will just not enjoy his books. There's a lot that I really like, but which - if I try and look dispassionately - I can see that others will just dislike. The coldness of the prose, mixed with the characters who seem to be just a bit apathetic, to let the world wash them, rather than engage with it, the weird use of sex, the way that the story/ies seem to be completely unconclusive and not completely tie together. It's one of the reasons I'm continually surprised by his popularity - it's very unpopulist fiction.
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Haven't started on the Troutmans. Instead I'm reading Kapuscinski's The Shadow Of The Sun, which is a broad memoir of his time in Africa. As anyone who's read my burbling on here before knows, I love Kapuscinski and think he's probably the greatest writer of reportage I've ever encountered.
The mix here is great, because although it's written in the 90s, he's generally trying to not write with the prior knowledge of history. It's also great because, well, he just lived through and reported on some amazing times. And it's also great because he really mixes up the stuff between the astonishing (seeing the independence of Uganda, or Zanzibar), with the personal astonishing (getting malaria and TB, or seeing the Serengeti), with what appears to be mundane (just getting to know local families in Dar Es Salaam). And adding comments on what it's like to be a poverty stricken reporter for the Polish news agency when they had no other correspondents in Africa (or anywhere else, I think).
Only one slightly grating thing, so far, which is that every so often he does that "Africans think this", "Africans do that" stuff, which I'm sure his editor demanded but does begin to treat the continent as a homogeneous entity. It's not like that marvellous piece in Granta, or anything, but it's just there every now and again.
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Oh, and I too, I think, enjoyed it more second time around. It may be because I've been thinking through the connections and behaviour for this reading circle, but it might also be because I've been better at following the clues.
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I'm afraid I'm struggling somewhat with the seeming randomness of everything. Nothing seems remotely connected and therefore I'm not seeing any point to it all right now. Therefore, I'm afraid I'm going to put it down for the time being, but I thin kit'll be one I come back to at a later date as the intrigue of whether or not everything comes together coherantly at some point will probably nag at me ill I do!
It certainly seems random at times, but I think that's one of the things I like about it - the way the randomness begins to coalesce, and then flies apart, then begins to coalesce, but without reaching an ultimate conclusion or explanation.
But I can see how that would not be great for everyone. I will say that much though I love it, I'm always surprised at how widely popular Murakami is. The japanese-ness, the dissonance, the way the plots often seem to go nowhere (the title of A Wild Sheep Chase being very relevent in this case) is not really the material that would normally bring such a wide audience.
There's no way that not wanting to finish a Murakami book is any reflection on the reader, I think. It feels like it must appeal to a fairly niche taste.
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Hahaha! Great description of the Houllebecq. I thought it was trying so hard to be intellectual, whilst also being cleverly nihilistic, and failed to be either, really. I don't mind intellectual, not at all. I like being made to think. And I kept expecting some intellectual conclusion to tie it together. But this was pretension for the sake of it, the kind of thing I might have enjoyed as a snotty, spotty, geeky teenager. But it had no result, no purpose, and as such was really, just a bit rubbish. I'll not go for Platform. I'm still intrigued by Palahniuk, though.
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I realise I haven't posted much here recently. Perhaps that's because I've not read much. Just re-read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which is as good as I remembered and is commented on in the Reading Circle thread.
And then The Men Who Stare At Goats, which is lightweight and fluffy, mostly, as reportage goes. Not all that rigorous, but quite fun, and it'll be interesting to see how they made it into a film - which I should enjoy as it has lots of my favourite actors in. And Ewan Macgregor, but no film can be perfect.
Next up it's the Troutmans for ii.
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So, the funny thing about this list is that there are so many "highbrow" literary books on the list that I actually think are utter rubbish, and certainly massively overrated. My Name Is Red, Atonement and A Heartbreaking Work... are all terrible, and I genuinely hated them.
Something like the Da Vinci Code, on the other hand, although it's genuinely one of the worst written pieces of rubbish I've ever had the misfortune to wade through, is actually entirely succesful on its own terms. A very enjoyable, kind of gripping, romp. Complete nonsense and of no literary merit. But it never pretends to be anything else and is an entertaining way of spending a long-haul plane flight or an afternoon on the beach provided you switch off all your critical faculties.
I would think that the inclusion of Twilight and Harry Potter fall into the same category.
Incidentally, of the non-fiction books on that list that I've read, they are all genuinely good. I think the selection of non-fiction is, perhaps, easier. I don't know why perhaps it's because when non-fiction is succesful on its own terms, all it's doing is getting a story, a message, some idea across.
Literature, on the other hand, has so many different ways it can be a success, from dreary period nonsense like Atonement, where success is, apparently, in the writing style; to Dan Brown, where success is just in keeping a driving plot; to something like Cloud Atlas where success is a mix of stylistic innovation and weaving whilst keeping the reader interested; to, say, Oscar Wao, where success is as much a telling of the history of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo as anything else. So it becomes much more a matter of personal taste and preference, and it's much easier to dislike stuff that is still widely respected.
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What an odd mix. I guess in trying to find 100 books they have to mix up the serious novels with the popular with translations with non-fiction and poetry.
Surprised to find I've read as many as I have. Got to say it's actually a fairly good list, although also obviously wrong in places (The Road is clearly not as good as Cloud Atlas, and Atonement and Oscar Wao are surely in the list of worst books of the decade...)
1- The Road
6 - The Tipping Point
7 - The Life of Pi
9 - Atonement
10 - The Da Vinci Code
11 - War and Peace (well, I read it in 2007, not sure if it's the new translation)
12 - A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
15 - The God Delusion
18 - Bad Science
21 - The Plot Against America
25 - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night
30 - The Kite Runner
45 - London: The Biography (well, I've read just over half of it, which has taken most of the decade)
59 - Moondust
60 - Collapse
66 - Cloud Atlas
69 - My Name is Red
80 - The White Tiger
97 - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
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Oh, and one other thing:
What is the importance of Lieutenant Mamiya telling the story of Boris the Manskinner? It seems almost completely redundant in the context of the book, to me, although interesting in its own right. Unless Murakami is deliberately "bookending" the war, pointing out, the same as with the pre-European-WWII war stuff, it was also continuing in some form after we in Europe considered it to have ended?
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So - another question:
May Kasahara doesn't really seem to be linked to anyone else in the story, for most of the book. She isn't part of the loop of Toru, Kumiko, Honda, Mamiya, Noboru, Creta, Cinnamon, Nutmeg, etc.
So what's her role? Is she, in fact, channeling Kumiko, as she seems to imply in one of her letters? And is that channeling of Kumiko linked to the fact that she hears Toru's cry for help and somehow saves him?
And is the separation she feels from her shadow towards the end, the splitting of "May Kasahara" and "Kumiko"?
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I really enjoyed the mysticism aspect of the story, and it was something that made it stand apart from 'western' books, even though there were losts of western aspects, the spirit type things are very rarely written about in a fictional format here, where as I gather it's a pretty big thing in Japan, which is really interesting to read about and it was certainly refreshing to not be reading about modern technology (other than the few small computer bits).
That's one of the reasons I asked the question, really. I love the way that Murakami uses a non-computery, non-false-techy, way of exploring some of the same ideas of people being dragged into/out of parallel worlds, that some modern SF does.
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So, a couple more questions for you:
(1) What do you think of the role of water in the book? Is there a direct link between the flow of Toru's life and the flow of water, or is it all, actually, metaphorical?
(2) (and this is really, just based on ideas of mine) Rather than the more obvious links to something like Alice in Wonderland and similar fantasy type books, do you also see a common thread with modern science fiction, Matrix-style or cyberpunk stuff, where, rather than using "technology" to get sucked into the computer matrix, the linkage is made through a form of eastern mysticism?
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I took Creta Kano's "rape" to be Noburu Wataya "taking" something from Creta sexually/sensually, rather than a literal rape, so it was impossible for Malta or Creta to report it.
As for Kumiko and Toru not knowing each other, I think that's a key part of the book - they're married but as Toru is such a passive, blank character, he's never tried to explore anything with Kumiko that she hasn't already told him.
But perhaps the blue toilet paper incident where suddenly he starts doing things she doesn't like - which he never knew about - is all part of the same stuff where the "flow" gets obstructed. Suddenly, from everything being very natural, everything breaks down and stops "working" in their relationship. It happens when the cat disappears, the wind-up bird appears, and so on.
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And since posting yesterday, I've been reading about the Nomonham incident that Mr Honda talks about.
The history of it is fascinating, and it's stuff I really never knew anything of at all. But is actually all fundamental to how World War II panned out.
Firstly, it was squabbling over a very small border area. But the Mongolians, and therefore the Soviets, encroached slightly, and the Japanese fought back. The next thing, though, was that the Soviets reacted by effectively invading Manchukuo, and there was a substantial bit of war.
The important elements of this were
1 - The Japanese relied on manpower and the resolve of their soldiers; the Soviets were heavily mechanised and used that to defeat the Japanese. The Japanese didn't really learn the lesson from that, and as a result were ill-prepared to fight the US later in the war. Whereas the Soviets were much more capable late in the war.
2 - It was where Georgy Zhukov learned many skills and made his name. It was because of Nomonham that he had the tactics he used at Stalingrad.
3 - The treaty that was forced on the Japanese meant that they were forced to look south in their expansionism, which meant they focussed on the Pacific and South-East Asia, and therefore, it led directly to Pearl Harbour and the US involvement
4 - The treaty was signed in August 1939, which immediately liberated the Soviets to stop thinking about East Asia altogether and could move all their forces to the the west, and be involved in the invasion of Poland, so in many ways it was the trigger that started the war in Europe.
It's fascinating history, and stuff I knew nothing of before, and is in some ways as crucial to WWII as, say, Munich, Molotov-Ribbentrop, or Pearl Harbour. It was the key that forced almost all of WWII to proceed as it did.
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Holmes was written in serialised form, for trashy magazines. Conan Doyle always felt unhappy that he was writing such low-brow, populist stuff.
That is to say, of course, that it was considered trashy in its day. These days it looks classy.
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I'm with Partyanimal on the Austen thing - except that at 38, I'm pretty sure I'll never read it. There's just nothing about it that appeals. Not just my hatred of period dram; but also the fact that the stuff I've read that it's been compared to I've found unutterably tedious. And the fact that I've found almost every piece of pre-WWI fiction I've read that wasn't consciously trashy completely unreadably turgid (see Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Jules Verne for trashy and enjoyable).
I'm sure it's brilliant, but I'm equally sure that my taste is for the modern, and that I'd gain very little from reading it other than discovering that either (a) I was right, but now I can smugly say that I was right or (
It's not quite as bad as I was expecting, but really, I could have spent my time better reading something else. -
So, some more thoughts of mine on the book.
First up, I think maybe more than other Murakami books, there's a strong narrative drive to it. As Kell mentions, lots of things seem to happen at random, but perhaps unlike something like After Dark, it coalesces more clearly, and things drive towards a potential goal, a potential conclusion. Even if that conclusion is never quite reached properly, I find it a more rewarding and engrossing read.
There's also something about the style of writing that I really, really like, although I don't know whether that's Murakami himself, or the translation. But the prose is all very simple, and almost crystal clear. And there are little digressions of observation - such as the way he always described the food, or always describes the ambient music, that fill out and pad atmosphere without swamping the novel with annoying adjectives.
Or for Toru Okada, I have huge sympathy for him, because I think I'm a similar character - if I don't want to do anything, I'm really inclined to just do nothing and let the world wash over me. I'm happy not talking to friends for ages. And I think I take weird events in my stride, generally. Although, obviously, not as weird as the weirdnesses in the book.
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(You don't need to use the spoiler tags on this thread, Gyre; the assumption is that everyone's already read the book)
Anyway, I agree very much with what you say. I love the way the lieutenant Mamiya stuff works with the rest of the book, but also the way that the Japanese history in World War II resonates throughout the book, particularly given the way that a lot of Japan tries to bury some elements of this part of their history. I'll probably come back to that history stuff later in the month, but I really think it's very important.
Also interesting is that it all takes place pre-1939, which is when us westerners think the war started. I've often heard people from the far east referring to the 1933-45 war.
Given the way that the book interplays lots of western behaviour (drink beer, make spaghetti, music is all 60s jazz and western classical) with eastern elements (hints of shinto and buddhist mysticism - although I don't know enough about these to pinpoint where they link to the mystical/fantastical elements of the book, the Japanese and Mongolian/Manchurian locations, the divining and fortune-telling, and so on), it seems to me that Murakami is deliberately making a point about how it's not just Japanese understanding and recollection of the war is flawed and informed by local ideas; but also that Western understanding is flawed, or at least informed, by our own experience, that we conveniently ignore the wars between Japan, China and the Soviets for the first 6 years.
Which is, incidentally, what us Europeans often complain about when Americans sometimes describe the war as really starting with Pearl Harbour...
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Gyre, Lucy, Nova - as this is your favourite of the Murakami's that you've read, what is it about the book that appeals to you?
In what way is it your favourite?
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I missed this thread the first time around.
For first hand accounts of the most shocking stuff, I can only reinforce the recommendations for Primo Levi.
Particularly If This Is A Man and it's companion piece The Truce.But also much of his other work, too.
On a completely different track, and much less deep and poignant, but utterly wonderful in many ways, Fitzroy Maclean's Eastern Approaches is a spectacularly readable description of the early days of special ops, and the beginning of the SAS, and is probably 60-70% WWII material. Maclean was one of the prototypes that Ian Fleming used for James Bond, by the way.
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Kell - yes, I've read a fair few Murakami's, and I'd say this is pretty indicative of his style, representative. It's very long, though, compared to most of his novels.
Sara - the sex thing in Murakami is very peculiar, because it's always open, but it's also always described in a very functional and cold way, very similar to the way he describes cooking pasta, I think. That cold and functional thing I find very interesting, because he is deliberately using sex as a tool in the book to represent something else - often the emotional (or just practical) linkage between people, rather than as erotica.
What do you stubbornly refuse to read, and why?
in General Book Discussions
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I think that's very true about Rowling. I think it would also be true, she would be praised and uncriticised, if there weren't so many adults reading her books; it creates a fairly strong reaction seeing grown up people waiting for the latest instalment. I suspect it might also be true if her books remained of a normal length, rather than turning into larger and larger and longer and longer books.
These things give a patina of "seriousness" to those books, and therefore people begin to criticise them as serious books rather than as childrens' fiction.