Kafka on the Shore

Just recently Haruki Murakami’s been all over my Twitter feed.  He’s got a new book out, and by all the 140 character or less accounts I’ve seen, it’s marvellous.  He’s tipped to win the Nobel Prize.  Despite this grand reputation, I haven’t actually read anything he’s written until now.  I’ve been quite reluctant to read Kafka on the Shore because I got the idea from somewhere that it would be very fantasy and I really have to be in the right mood for fantasy.  There are a couple of fantasy elements in this book, men who can talk to cats and stones, other worlds, that kind of thing, but it’s mostly just the story of two journeys.  Don’t worry, I mean literal journeys with trains and coaches.  Not the X-Factor like, “I don’t care that I’ve been eliminated; it’s just been a wonderful journey,” shit.  People actually physically relocate.

This is the story of Kafka Tamura, teenage runaway and Mr Nakata, the mentally handicapped victim of an unexplained wartime accident.  Although the pair never meet, they both leave the same district of Tokyo and head to Takamatsu.  While Kafka is escaping his father in a fit of what first seems like teenage angst, Nakata is following his own mystical impulse.  The latter’s journey is kicked off by the murder of Johnnie Walker, eater of cat hearts, in what has to be one of the most viscerally disturbing book chapters I’ve ever read.  But then, I have always been a cat person.  What comes next is a melee of metaphors, possible incest and personal growth.  Okay, I lied a tad about it only being a tale of psychically journeys.

I’ve been trying to put my finger on exactly what it is I love about Kafka on the Shore and I think it’s the library.  Vast amounts of the book take place in the Komura Memorial Library and I really quite like libraries.  The way the characters treat the library is the way I feel about them.  Kafka is, quite frankly, an impossibly well-read 15 year-old boy that leaves behind a family that doesn’t understand him to take refuge in a library.  And he’s not the only one, in a very Alice in Wonderland “we’re all mad here,” everyone who comes to the library is exactly where they’re meant to be and they’re all a little odd.  It is the only place characters are free to be just themselves.  It’s even a place illiterate characters get sentimental about the pity of not being able to read. 

I want to write so much more about the book, but I’m holding back.  It’s the kind of book I want to cajole other people into reading without whacking them with any great big spoilers before starting my campaign.  I suspect it does really have a few flaws that I’m overlooking, but that’s oaky.  It’s a fantastic book.  Read it.

I’m currently closing in on the end of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.  It’s a short one, so check back soon.

Beloved

I’m not sure how I feel about Beloved.  I don’t know if it can be chalked up to a busy week and only being able to grab the odd moment to read in, but I found the book so difficult to get into.  It’s a Pulitzer Prize winning book and Toni Morrison herself has won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  I feel as though it’s a book that I very much should have loved.  It’s miserable as hell too.  That’s usually a plus when it comes to great literature.  But something about this book just didn’t hit the spot for me.

The novel tells the based on a true story tale of Sethe, a slave who escapes her home after sending her children to live with their grandmother in another state.  She is later discovered by a posse and murders her infant daughter rather than allow the child to be recaptured.  As I mentioned earlier, this story’s based the real life tale of Margaret Garner.  Finding this out has, of course lead to some mad research on Wikipedia and her life was just fascinating as it was appalling.  After escaping from slavery across a frozen river, Garner killed her two year old daughter Mary (fathered by Garner’s owner Alfred Gaines) so that she wouldn’t be subjected to the same life.  Garner was never tried for murder, partially because the state of Ohio couldn’t decide whether to try her as a person or as property, and when she was returned to Gaines he moved her so frequently that she couldn’t be found to be arrested.  Only the bare bones of this story survive into Beloved.  In fact, in comparison to the truth, Morrison’s tale is actually quite cheerful.

Set 18 years after the baby-murdering events, Sethe is living as a free but albeit lonely woman with her surviving daughter, Denver and a lot of guilt. Her sons, unable to stand the ever present ghost of their sister have both run away and the pair are living a reclusive life. It’s at this point that fellow ex-slave Paul D shows up, seeming to make things better for a while until he is driven out of the house by the ghost of Sethe’s unnamed baby girl, known only as Beloved.  It’s an obscure novel, each chapter of part two is told from the point of view of a different character.  I don’t object to this method of story-telling, and other than Beloved’s adamant refusal to use punctuation (a serious pet hate of mine), the different character’s voices are all clear and distinct.  I particularly enjoyed the section narrated by Denver who, as the story progresses, is the only character whose motives remain clear and who actually shows some likely (if incredibly optimistic) character development.

As Sethe descends into what can only be described as madness, a community that hates her rallies around to save her.  There are even no repercussions when she attacks a white man.  Paul D, driven away by Beloved and the Sethe’s past returns to her when she explains that she killed her child through kindness.  Through all this former shut-in Denver sparks up the self-confidence to leave her mother’s house and become a part of the community.  Yes, the book’s about to be about coming to terms and doing what is necessary to move on, but I just don’t buy it.  It might just be me, but it seems like a wildly improbable happy ending to 18 years of utter misery.  I know it’s just a story, but it is a million miles away from Garner’s death from typhoid after watching her second daughter drown.

Next on the list is the first long book I’ve read since this blog began; Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore.

The New York Trilogy

As I mentioned last time, I am ever so slightly enamoured with Paul Auster.  He is one of the best discoveries I’ve made doing the list thing.  Reading The Book of Illusions made me feel like I was at university again, it reminded me so much of some of the first year film criticism.  It’s the story of a lonely man writing the biography of a fictional silent comic, Hector Mann.  It may as well have been a true history of Fatty Arbuckle or Buster Keaton, Auster nails the tone so completely.  I love the book because I read it at exactly the right time; it reminded me of everything I loved about my degree just as I was beginning to really miss being at university.

Another of my loves is the detective novel.  I have a real thing for noir.  I’m sort of devastated about Lauren Bacall’s death.  A lot of the books I’ve already crossed off the list are of a hardboiled variety.  In short, Auster plus detectives is just what I want. 

The New York Trilogy doesn’t disappoint.  Or at least two thirds of it doesn’t.  The book’s split into three short stories all about obsession: City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room.  The first two of these are so obviously linked by theme.  They’re practically the same story- man watches another man and becomes obsessed.  But I’m not mad for Ghosts.  Every character in the story is name after a colour in a way that ends up being reminiscent of Reservoir Dogs.  Yes, I know this book pre-dates the film and so it wasn’t intentional, but calling characters Mr White, Mr Brown, Mr Black makes it inevitable.  More than this, the main character is simply known as Blue.  He’s the only one whose name isn’t a common surname and it seems like Auster’s doing it on purpose to make him impossible to connect with.  And then, there’s this moment; a phrase Auster uses which is just wonderful, “Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever.  It can never be changed, never be otherwise.”  As a result, I’m just utterly confused about the whole matter.

The other two stories I love.  My only criticism of City of Glass is the introduction of a character called Paul Auster.  It’s a pet peeve of mine, but it drives me mad when authors give characters their own name, as if anyone reading will really question whether it’s actually a true story or not (spoiler: it’s not.  It never is).  City of Glass and The Locked Room contain obvious links to one another: overlapping character names, stories about writers, but that’s not it entirely.  The stories seem in some way to be two sides of the same story, one focussing on an obsessed watcher and the other on an obsessed man being watched.  And despite all City of Glass has going for it, The Locked Room is by far my favourite.  It all comes back to The Book of Illusions.  The Locked Room tells the story of a writer obsessed by writing the biography of a fictional author who, much like Hector Mann, disappears before the story begins.  It’s not a detective story about a detective; rather it’s about an author researching his subject and the story of an extraordinary life.  Naturally, the books written are the least important part of the author’s life.  What remains in both is something else Auster mentions.  The idea that one life is many things, people change their jobs, their locations, their friends and as a result lives have many stages.  It's this that's captured so well in The Locked Room and, if I'm honest, so much better in The Book of Illusions.

I’m currently reading Beloved by Toni Morrison.  It may take some time as I’ve gone about it by way of a cheeky re-read of Stephen King’s Carrie, that’s a story for another place, though.

Nowhere Man

I really wanted to hate Nowhere Man.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  First off it’s quite a lot more fun to write incredibly bitchy and vicious things than it is to sing the praises of something, secondly there’s an author’s photo on the inside cover of the book and Aleksandar Hemon looks a lot like G.O.B. from Arrested Development.  It might be the Norfolk Libraries sticker covering half his face, but there’s something about his dark intensity that just screams, “It’s an illusion.”  I really wish I could show it to you.  But, alas, I cannot.  And, Nowhere Man is actually a pretty decent read.

It’s the story of Josef Pronek, only it’s not.  Unlike The Years, it is actually a pretty coherent tale by the end.  It just takes a while to get there.  By this, I simply mean there are multiple narrators (the odd first person some third person omnipotence) and a non-linear narrative structure.  One narrator details Pronek’s life until he leaves for America, explicitly excepting the time Pronek spends in Ukraine, the next comes along and fills the gaps.  This holds true until the final chapter, which is more concerned with the life of a Captain Evgenij Pick, a Russian warmonger living in Shanghai who once used the name Josef Pronek as an alias.  A quick Google brings up an archived Wikipedia page suggesting Hemon based this character on a real person, but it’s impossible to tell.  The story seems too incredible to be fictional and the chapter is so disjointed from the rest of the book that I’m still not sure why it’s there.  The book is linked to others written by Hemon, but I somehow doubt that would clear the matter up. 

The novel’s also shockingly un-political.  I have no knowledge of the political events affecting Sarajevo in the early nineties.  Being more interested at the time in bright colours and learning to talk than Eastern bloc coups, I never really caught up.  But, reading the blurb for the book, I expected a story of a young man displaced by war and full of angst to return home.  And that’s not at all what this is.  The political events are only obliquely referenced: headlines in newspapers, characters asking Pronek about “back home,” an evacuation from Ukraine more motivated by a dying father than political unrest.  If the surface of the novel is to be believed, Pronek is a character who is not involved in the political ramifications.  He cannot return to Sarajevo, but he’s perfectly happy where he is.  There are only hints at anything deeper.  Pronek may be shockingly unsentimental when it comes to his family, but becomes nostalgic for traditional Bosnian music.  Never mind that he was brought up on The Beatles.

The thing about this book is it’s good.  In some parts it’s great.  I enjoyed it.  I don’t actually have that much negative to say about it.  Except, it’s one of the books that I’ve come across on the list which I’m not sure belong.  Sometimes it’s difficult to see why a particular book has made the cut and this is one of those cases.  I’m not sorry I read it, I just didn’t find it excellent and there must be more than 1,001 truly excellent books knocking around out there.

The next book up is Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy.  I adored Mr. Vertigo and The Book of Illusions, so my hopes couldn’t be higher.  I may need to prepare for disappointment.