Freewheeling Andy

If I am, I'm unaware of it. I am sitting at the bottom of a well somewhere in South London, with a baseball bat and a cat for company, though.

Well, I think I'm still a way behind many of you, because I've been being lazy over recent days and not reading enough. 12 hours on a plane, plus more in airports and public transport, tomorrow, should sort me out. Anyway, there's a couple of things on the down-trodden women I want to bring up. First, there's the writing style. There's something a bit clunky that I'm finding in a couple of places. There's commentary from Seierstad that's not really needed. She wants to say how utterly degrading and horrible the burqa (or some of the other treatment) is - and she's right. But she says it explicitly from time to time, and I think that's unnecessary. The plain descriptions of what's going on tell you everything you need to know. The second thing is that it's very easy to pass judgement on Sultan for his treatment of his women, but in comparison to what is normal in Afghanistan and has been for well over a decade, he's actually taking a fairly large leap in how liberal he is, how accomodating, and so on. He's a long, long way from perfect, but if you think about how he's acting in comparison to what is normal around him, I think he comes out as actually relatively progressive. (So far, about 8 chapters in).

I loved Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. The key problem is that it's so long, and sometimes the plot seems to get lost under the other stuff. Although that's sort of inevitable with Murukami. The reason I may pick A Wild Sheep Chase ahead is that it's shorter, although possibly even more weird. Norwegian Wood is a great book, I think, but is in many ways quite un-Murukami like. It's a "proper" novel, rather than one with all the bizarre and weird stuff going on. It still has some classic Murukami stuff, including the amazingly dispassionate, maybe also unpassionate, descriptions of sex. But I'd go for something else first, probably.

Nor me. Trust me, it's not my idea, it's someone else's.

Grr! I just lost my post. Anyway, I was saying that there are people whose opinions are usually completely reliable who love Pamuk; and ones whose opinions are usually completely reliable who hate him like I do. I think it's really a matter of taste. Of whether you like Thomas Mann, almost. That deep introspective "poor frail emotional me" stuff. I'm sure some people find it to be a fascinating insight. Me, I think it's tedious crap.

To be honest, Amanda, I felt exactly, exactly the same after reading My Name Is Red. Unfortunately someone had bought me a copy of Snow, then a couple of people said how much they liked it. Then I thought it was a modern novel, so going to be different. And it had been sitting on the shelf for a year and a half making me feel guilty and I had a holiday in Turkey coming up. So circumstances forced me to pick it up and see. The trouble is that anything you hated in My Name Is Red is still here. Possibly even worse.

I read this with a load of Kafka short stories; the story itself is a long short story if I remember right. It's the weirdest of stories, too, like reading really well written horror. It goes back to Kafka's usual themes of helplessness and alienation. A long time since I read Kafka, though. I want to go back some time, after reading the suggestion (I think by Murukami) that Kafka is, in fact, just comedy. That it's not half as dark as it's portrayed and is effectively like reading PG Wodehouse, but without a Jeeves to get Wooster out of trouble. And perhaps my reading of Kafka is like when I used to listen to The Smiths as a 15 year old and think they were humourless miserable gits, where now I see all the humour.

Right now it's a British Airways "Change For Good" envelope. I suppose I should be feeling guilty for not giving money to the poor, but it's just the first thing that came to hand.

Well, I really should catch up. I finished A Traveller's Life, which at times was excellent but was slightly unfulfilling as a book. Newby writes lovelily and had done more cool stuff in his lifetime than anyone rightly should. But the book is sort of a mix between autobiog and travel writing, except that it leaves out all the stuff he's written proper books on, so it skims over the best parts of his life. Probably the best chunks of the book are his wartime experiences. Now I'm on to The Bookseller of Kabul.

I started on it yesterday, Kell, then finished A Traveller's Life. About to get more stuck in. The style isn't exactly what I was expecting, but I really need to read more to get a stronger opinion.

It's a big novel, and incredibly rich. The subjects covered, of immigration and separation, of loss and so on, are taken on with very light touch.

I absolutely love Kavalier and Clay. It's a wonderful book. I hope you enjoy it.

I've heard mixed reviews of Kafka on the Shore. I love Murukami, but perhaps he's not for everyone. The people who've loved stuff like A Wild Sheep Chase or Norwegian Wood weren't completely excited by Kafka, though, so it may be worth trying something else.

I'll agree about Merlot. As a grape variety it makes smooth, fairly easy to drink red wines. Sort of full, and fruity, I'd say. Shiraz is a grape, like merlot, Pontalba. (It's called Syrah by the French, but they're the same thing). Shiraz is fairly accessible, I think, but it's generally much bigger and bolder in terms of flavour, and you tend to get blackcurrenty kinds of tastes. The most famous of the French shiraz wines are Cotes du Rhone ones like Chateauneuf du Papes, but it's safer, and probably better (until you're spending a bit more), to drink Australian shiraz .

Ah. Oops. There I go being an idiot. Sorry. We weren't staying at Quartier Francais, but somewhere else with a French name (Manoir de Brendel - not that great). We did eat at the bistro at Quartier Francais, after despreately trying, but failing miserably, to get into the tasting room. The best meal in Franschoek was at Le Petit Ferme, which was just above Hautes Cabrieres, on a glorious road which went over a lovely pass and into a national park area. The best wine was probably at Warwick, where all the wine was fantastic; although Boukenhootskloof (if I've spelt that right) was also impressive - we love their "Chocolate Block". The whole winelands area was brilliant, as was Constantia on the Cape. - Was the tasting room as good as it was meant to be? It has an amazing reputation.

I had a grim Greek wine last night. Best avoided.

I really like the Graham Beck wines. I think some of them are excellent (as is his sparkling "champagne"). We were staying about 3 miles from the winery when we were in Franschoek over New Year.

Don't feel bad at all. I only discovered him a couple of years ago, through a website recommendation. I partly posted this in the hope that other people might find the name and see some interesting subjects. The Soccer War is astonishing, just for the number of revolutions and civil wars he accidentally finds himself in. There's one particular scene where he's walking around pitch dark Honduras trying to find his hotel in the middle of an air raid.

Died yesterday: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6293005.stm I've only read The Soccer War of his books, but it's a great book, and he was a fascinating author. I must read Imperium. Anyone else read any?

I'm not a big fan of decective stuff on the whole, like you, but I love The Big Sleep. I'm not quite sure why. It might be the atmosphere that's generated, that it's not so much "Whodunnit?" It's more about Marlowe with the investigation running in parallel.

First I need to declare an interest: Rachel was in my year at school, and one of my best friends from school was very good friends with her. Anyway, she was nominated for a Booker for her first novel, and this is her first collection of short stories. It seems that many of the themes from the novel are carried through into the more interesting of the stories. I guess you could categorise them into the political and non-political. The non-political ones seem to be non-stories, really, and I didn't much enjoy them. They're "family does something, er, that's it" vignettes that might have worked in school creative writing, but I don't think they do much for me. The better stuff is the "political". Rachel has German parents, and has been living in Berlin for a while now. And the interesting stories are about the jarring nature of the interaction of German past with German present, either of the Nazi and war-time past jutting up against modern liberal Germany; or equally hard, the jarring of the communist East jutting up against modern, commercial Germany. These, plus stories set across eastern European frontiers, show fascinating insight into the contrasts that exist, and more crucially (and less widely reported) the impacts of these contrasts on individuals and families. Anyway, half of these stories are great. Half are just a bit dull, really.

This brief book is wonderful. It's one of those books that written in a crisp, empty way, where as much as said between the lines as is written in the text itself. A mere 200 pages, of sparse, clear literature. My initial reaction to the premise - a bleak book which won the Booker prize, written about a university professor - was worse than trepidation. These are all kinds of pointers to a book I don't want to read. Yet, on the persuasion of friends with better taste than myself, I read it. And was not disappointed. The story is really quite simple - a rather lecherous old professor, whose powers in his field of work are failing as much as his powers in romance, has a brief fling with one of his students, and rather than admit he was in the wrong, he leaves the university in Cape Town. In disgrace he leaves for the rural setting where his daughter is trying to run a small farm. All his chauvinistic prejudices are then shown to carry through to his views about his daughter and her attitude to life. Then, just as he settles in to his life on the farm, reassessing his own lack of skills, there is a brutal, violent attack. This brings into focus the violence and the racial edge of modern South Africa. The core of this book is about how people with rigid views deal with, or fail to deal with, changed circumstances, both for themselves, and within the new politics of South Africa. It's so enlightening, if not exactly life affirming.

I would say that's normal for Murakami, although it's probably worse in Wind-Up Bird Chronicle than anything else of his I've read. This had a bit more of a contained plot, but it's still not exactly obvious what is happening, nor why. But that's one of the things I like about these novels. They're so unlike most other books. I guess they're perhaps similar to some beat novels like Brautigan's Sombrero Fallout, or to some of the Philip K Dick, I think.

Ahhh! As one of the reviews on Amazon I've just been looking at says: Read more Murakami. Dance, Dance, Dance is a sort-of-follow-up to A Wild Sheep Chase, although you don't have to have any background from Sheep Chase to appreciate Dance, Dance, Dance. It is, really, very, very Murakami. It's quite weird coming to this straight after reading David Mitchell's Ghostwritten, which is very much a homage to the former. They both play with the ideas of interconnectedness of events, with the strangeness of modern Japan, and with the impact of the extraordinary on very normal people. The difference, though, is that Mitchell ties everything together with "real" stuff; whereas with Murakami everything is linked together in a semi-mystical way where there is another plane connecting everything. In this way, he is perhaps closer to cyber-punk than to anything in modern fiction. It's taking William Gibson back from the techies and placing it in mundane middle-class suburban Japan. In Dance, Dance, Dance, the narrator is linked to a series of deaths, and keeps encountering more and more bizarre characters who in turn threaten him, and give him a charmed, charmed life. I'm not sure there's really much place for describing the plot in the review, as there never is really, with this author. It's all about the place, the characters, the weirdness of events which you discover are interlinked. Anyway, this seems like a useless review, but perhaps it is actually impossible to really review Murakami, except to mention the characters, the 13 year old not-girlfriend girlfriend, the one armed poet, the deranged photographer, the hotel clerk who embodies hotel-ness. I guess, like others of his books, it's about how even the most mundane and linear of suburban Japanese salary-man lives can get transformed by extraordinary events. But that really doesn't do it justice. What I really mean to say is Read more Murakami.