Forever Overhead

Norwegian Wood Read-Along: Chapters 5 & 6

2012-01-17T09:57:00.001-06:00

Norwegian Wood Read-Along
Chapters 5 & 6

I'm participating on Reading Rambo's Norwegian Wood Read-Along.

Apologies for the rambling nature of what you're about to read. There was lots of stuff to process in this section and I'm sure I'm leaving out a great deal. So with that said, let's get going.

We begin with the long-expected letter from Naoko in which she explains the "facility" where she's staying and invites Toru to come and visit her. Toru, who really seems like he's just happy to have something to do, hops on the first train in the morning to the Ami Hostel.

In order to reach Naoko, Toru must embark on a Journey that involves a long train ride, a bus and then a short hike deep into the mountains near Kyoto. (On this trip we see our first reference to a cat which, like ears, is kind of a Murakami hallmark.) When he arrives he is sent to find the weirdly wrinkled Reiko, who turns out to be Naoko's roommate.

Reiko explains that the situation at the Ami Hostel:

"Well, first I have to tell you about this place," said Reiko, ignoring my question. "The first thing you ought to know is that this is no ordinary 'hospital.' It's not so much for treatment as for convalescence. We do have a few doctors, of course, and they give hourly sessions, but they're just checking people's conditions, taking their temperature and things like that, not administering 'treatments' like in a regular hospital. There are no bars on the windows here, and the gate is always wide open. People enter voluntarily and leave the same way. You have to be suited to that kind on convalescence to be admitted here in the first place. In some cases, people who need specialized therapy end up going to a specialized hospital."
...
"Just living here is convalescence," she said. "A regular routine, exercise, isolation from the outside world, clean air, quiet. Our farmland makes us pratically self-sufficient; there's no TV or radio. We're like one of those commune places you hear so much about."

There are two things here that remind me of 1Q84. There's a part of 1Q84 where Tengo goes to visit his father in a sanatorium for a bunch of days and it reminded me a lot of this section of Norwegian Wood. Tengo and Toru both take a long train ride to a remote part of Japan to visit someone in hospital-like situation. They both end up in a place that feels separated from the outside world and both of them have a strange sexual experience. Part of this section of 1Q84 was printed in The New Yorker as "Town Of Cats" and Tengo refers to this place as the Town of Cats. From this point forward, I'm going to refer to the Ami Hostel as the Town of Crazy.

The other thing that reminded me of 1Q84 is the whole communal living/farming thing. There are two cults in 1Q84 that live out in a remote area and do a lot of farming and are very secretive. And then a goat dies and the Little People crawl out of the dead goat's mouth and... well, I wouldn't want to ruin it for anyone.

So anyway, Reiko is weirdly wrinkled and she's got this two-part story about how she got herself to Crazy Town that involves a unnaturally pretty teenager tricking her into some lesbian sexy-time.

We learn more about Naoko and her relationship to Kizuki. They were together since they were three years old and had found some kind of completeness in each other. We learn that Naoko's older sister committed suicide at age 17 and that she often considers suicide herself.

“I feel like Kizuki is reaching out for me from the darkness, calling to me, ‘Hey, Naoko, we can’t stay apart.’ When I hear him saying that, I don’t know what to do.”

Look, Naoko is VERY SAD and has TROUBLES but she has Reiko as a sister/mother figure and seems to be doing better. Tengo gets to understand Naoko better maybe understand new things about himself and most importantly, get snapped out of his funk.

When Tengo comes back from the Town of Crazy he is startled by all the noise and dirt and unappealing people in the Real World.. If someone that's mostly sane finds the real world jarring after a very short stint in the Town of Crazy, how is a more delicate person like Naoko going to survive outside of that insular world?

Finally, hand-jobs. Murakami loves to bestow hand-jobs on his characters. Like a benevolent father, Murakami is all "Tengo, you have been a good boy, here's a handy."

Review: The Great Lenore by JM Tohline

2012-01-16T08:00:00.000-06:00

The Great Lenore
JM Tohline
204 pages
Atticus Books
Published June 15, 2011

I kept seeing this book mentioned. It was on Twitter and then another blog mentioned it and then I ran across it on Atticus Books' website. The reviews were mostly positive and the premise interested me so I got myself a copy and read it in a single day.

Now, I'm a parent of three small children. I have a two-and-a-half year old son and 22 month-old-twins (boy and girl). My life is hectic and usually my only reading time is right before going to sleep or early on weekend mornings. But somehow I managed to squeeze Lenore into a single Saturday. I stole away from my family for brief moments to grab five pages here and there until finally, after everyone had gone to bed, I finished it.

The story takes the form of a memoir, narrated by Richard, a newly famous novelist. Preparing to begin his second novel, Richard's friend Sandy offers him the chance to spend the winter in Sandy's family home on Nantucket. Once he arrives he quickly becomes integrated into the neighboring Montana family and becomes tangled in the complicated relationships of one Lenore Montana, deceased.

This is the Montana clan: Momma Montana, who reminds me of a fake Paula Dean, Mr. Montana, the money-obsessed patriarch, the genius slacker-stoner Maxwell, the not-quite-good-enough-and-kind-of-an-asshole Chas, beautiful sister Cecilia and finally Jez, the impeccable young business associate of Mr. Montana. And let's not forget Chas' wife, Lenore.

Lenore, according to everyone that knows her is the perfect woman.

He talked about how, when you were with Lenore, you always felt like you were the only thing that mattered to her, like you were the single most important person in the world.

Lenore cared about people, he said, in a way you hardly ever see -- she cared about each person as an absolute individual. Lenore could be around someone for a week, or less, and understand them in ways no one else ever had before.

Lenore touched something inside you, Chas told me. Everything about her, it was all so intangible, so indefinable. But when you met her, you understood. You knew you would never meet another person quite like her, no matter how long you lived.

Everyone loves Lenore and they can't stop talking about her because she just recently died in a plane crash. Or, at least, everyone thinks she died in the crash. Days before her funeral, Lenore shows up at Richard's door and asks him to hide her while she watches how the Montana family reacts to her death. In the meantime, Richard learns about Lenore's very complicated relationship with the Montana's and despite his best efforts, gets dragged into the drama.

I grew up on the south shore of Massachusetts and I went to Nantucket three times in my youth. It's not a big island - almost 49 square miles. Common folks like myself could only access the island via ferry and it takes about two hours to travel from Hyannis on the southern coast of Cape Cod to Nantucket. It's a small, exclusive place and it's just out there in the ocean, isolated. In the winter months, the island population drops dramatically and I'm sure it gets pretty lonely out there.

JM Tohline does a great job capturing that sense of isolation. There's never anyone else on the beaches and Richard doesn't really see anybody except the Montana family. Even with all of the commotion going on next door, the sense of loneliness is deep and it feels like it's in everything, everywhere. Richard drinks Hemingway quantities of whiskey and falls asleep at the computer but never writes a word. It made me think a bit of Jack Torrance in The Shining - banging out words that never amount to anything. Richard spends more type re-typing Poe's "Lenore" than producing any actual work of his own.

I can't finish this without mentioning The Great Gatsby. The book's title is a reference to Gatsby and there are a number of references throughout the text. The easy reference is that Richard is Gatsby's Nick Carraway, Jez is kind of a stand-in for Jay Gatsby and Lenore is, of course, Daisy. There's also a car accident and someone actually does die. But The Great Lenore stands on it's own, even without the Gatsby references. As the author remarked in an interview:

As things stand, I believe the creation of Lenore owes as much to the likes of Hemingway, Joyce, and Steinbeck – and modern writers such as McEwan and Tartt – as it owes to old Fitzy himself.

The writing has an nice, easy flow and Tohline easily wrapped me up in his story of missed opportunities and lost love. Tohline builds anticipation for the finale throughout the book, but it does start to feel a little heavy-handed near the end. Yes, yes, I get it. Big Event coming up. Right, I get it. But that's my biggest gripe with this story and it doesn't really diminish the quality of the work.

Remember a month or so ago when we were all talking about what literary fiction we might recommend to someone who isn't into literary fiction? Well, The Great Lenore is definitely on that list. It reads like a page-turner, but the writing is so smooth and almost poetic at times without ever feeling like a chore. It's a book that draws you in and holds you close.

I'll leave you with this quote:

I think of the finished product - how we hold it and feel its texture while we dive within its pages. How we sometimes read a book in a single, exhilarating sitting.

For those of us whose lives are too busy to allow for single-sitting reads I think of how a book accompanies us on the subway, or how we keep it in our car. How we sit in bed at night and burn through the pages until we're ready to fall asleep. I think of that fortunate fraternity who is lucky enough to have found someone to love - how that someone lies beside you with their body curled and their eyes closed, saying, 'Darling, please, turn out that light. Please, I'm ready to fall asleep.' And how you say to them, 'Just one more section, sweetheart. Just one more chapter.' And your love signs, and you rest your hand on their back, and you continue to turn the pages until you can't keep your eyes open one more minute.

Recommended? Yes
Book Source: NetGalley

Tournament of Books 2012: The Shortlist

2012-01-11T12:21:00.000-06:00

It's my favorite time of year - The Morning News 2012 Tournament of Books has begun! I can't even begin to tell you how excited I am about this. I wait all year to see the short list and then I read like hell to finish as many of them as possible. Last year I didn't do so well, but I found some really amazing books like Skippy Dies by Paul Murray. The official judging doesn't begin until March, but until then you can start reading the books you missed last year:

Here's the shortlist with books I've read in bold:

Nathacha Appanah, The Last Brother
Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
Teju Cole, Open City
Helen Dewitt, Lightning Rods
Patrick DeWitt, The Sisters Brothers (my review)
Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (my review)
Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding
Alan Hollinghurst, Stranger’s Child
Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones
Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 (my review)
Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife
Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table
Ann Patchett, State of Wonder
Donald Ray Pollock, Devil All the Time
Karen Russell, Swamplandia!
Kate Zambreno, Green Girl

Salvage the Bones, Swamplandia!, The Art of Fielding and The Tiger's Wife are all on my TBR list, so I should probably start plowing through those posthaste. I've been interested in Open City so this is a good excuse to read it and I've heard great things about State of Wonder.

Powells.com is a sponsor of the Tournament of Books and a bookseller that I absolutely love. If you're interested in buying any of the books listed above, please consider using Powells.com. I've created a 2012 Tournament of Books "bookshelf" that has links to each book here. Using that link will support a great bookseller and also earn me a few dollars of store credit so I can keep buying fantastic books. Thanks!

Do you follow the Tournament of Books? Which ones have you read and which ones are you looking forward to reading?

Norwegian Wood Read-Along: Chapters 1-4

2012-01-10T13:34:00.000-06:00

Norwegian Wood Read-Along
Chapters 1-4

I'm participating on Reading Rambo's Norwegian Wood Read-Along. If you're interested, go ahead and sign up! We just started reading and I'm sure you can catch up if you want to join.

I have so much to say. I hope this stuff makes sense.

The first thing I want to point out the Murakami newbies are the references to ears. Murakami's fiction is littered with references to the shapes of people's ears. I have to assume that he finds a special beauty in ears. In these first four chapters there were four references to female ears.

The second thing I want to point out is the reference to Western music and literature. Notice that Toru never reads or really consumes any kind of Japanese or Eastern media. It's all Western music and authors. There are references to Japanese authors, but Toru seems to have nothing but contempt for these writers. Western music is a staple of Murakami's work. Murakami himself once owned a jazz club and has said that he take a lot of inspiration from Western music.

Norwegian Wood doesn't have any alternate worlds or shadowy figures or other fantastical elements that are prevalent in Murakami's fiction, but I did feel like each of characters that Toru spends time with seem to inhabit their own reality. Scenes with Naoko feel distant and muted and melancholy whereas the scenes with Midori have a certain brightness and color.

I love all of the characters - except Toru. He's just so bland and sad. But I don't hate him, I just want to pick him up, give him a hug and move him forward. Dude needs help.

But I'm not sure what it says about me that I'm finding myself thinking less about Toru, Naoko and Midori and more about Storm Trooper. This kid built a nice room for himself in my head and he's been hanging out and trying to get me to recognize how important he is to understanding Toru.

Let's start with his nickname. He has no proper name, just Storm Trooper. Given that Norwegian Wood takes place in the 1960's, this isn't a reference to the Star Wars films but rather to the stormtroppers of Nazi-era Germany. The sturmabteilung were a paramilitary part of the Nazi party that were commonly called "brown shirts" since they typically wore a brown shirt as their uniform. The stormtroopers were known for their blind, fierce allegiance to Hitler and the Nazi party and often carried out acts of violence against competing political parties.

Storm Trooper in Norwegian Wood awakes to the raising of the national flag and the nation anthem and then he does the Radio Calisthenics, dresses in exactly the same outfit and goes about his day. All of his actions have a certain militaristic quality, from the atypical cleanliness of the room to the all-or-nothing approach to the Radio Calisthenics. Toru is slightly annoyed by this, but he conforms to the cleaning schedule and choice of posters on the walls. He almost seems to like it.

Toru becomes known for rooming with Storm Trooper. Funny stories about his roommate become Toru's bridge to connecting to other people. It's his thing. But I couldn't help but notice that Toru never really says anything. He tells his stories about Storm Trooper and that's about it.

Storm Trooper seems to signify the last remaining vestiges of old Japan in the youth culture and it's no surprise that after the university protests and riots over the summer, he doesn't return. Toru attends all of his classes, but he doesn't respond to the calling of his name when attendance is taken. He walks out on protests and thinks of the protesters as "assholes." He is alone in every way, maintaining Storm Trooper's habits, working and attending class. He's perpetually outside of and separated from the culture that surrounds him.

I've got some other thoughts on how Naoko represents his old busted life and Midori represents the new hotness and that the stuff going on at the university is kind of like a macro version of his relationship stuff, but I don't think I've got that all worked out yet - plus there's so much story to go!

One more thing is that Toru is only really able to communicate well with Kizuki (dead) and Nagasawa (sex machine) as a sort of catalyst. He's kind of adrift otherwise.

Final quick thought - in the other translation of Norwegian Wood, Storm Trooper isn't called "Storm Trooper" - he's called "Kamakazie" instead.

Review: The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan

2012-01-09T09:03:00.000-06:00

The Last Werewolf
Glen Duncan
304 pages
Knopf
Published July 12, 2011

Literary genre fiction was supposedly a big thing in 2011. Colson Whitehead's Zone One, Patrick deWitt's The Sisters Brothers, and Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers were all examples of literary writers dipping into the murky dank waters of horror, westerns, and post-apocalyptic landscapes. Critics acted as if this was the first time this had happened

Jacob Marlowe is the last living werewolf and his days are numbered. He's being tracked and hunted by an organization called the WOCOP (World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena) and frankly, Jacob doesn't really care. He's two hundred years old and he's just plain tired.

Live long enough and nothing is news. “The News” is “the new things.” That’s fine, until a hundred years go by and you realise there are no new things, only deep structures and cycles that repeat themselves through different period details. I’m with Yeats and his gyres.

Of course something happens and Jacob suddenly has something to live for and then lots of action follows.

The Last Werewolf is a strange book that combines some truly fantastic writing with a sub-par YA-grade writing. This book is rife with literary references; There are mentions of literary figures, famous books and locations with literary significance throughout the book. The first quote in this review is actually pretty indicative of how Duncan inserts literary references into his prose. The mention of "Yeates and his gyres" is in reference to William Butler Yeates, his association with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and his experiments with automatic writing. Near the end of the novel, Jacob is reading American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis, which is a book about a serial killer that contains a lot of violence and sexual content - essentially the same stuff that makes up The Last Werewolf. The big difference between the two is that American Psycho didn't have all of the hand-wringing, brooding, and self-pitty that fills the pages of The Last Werewolf.

The writing is impressive and Duncan is good at slipping in some winking literary references, but the werewolf novel is really the most simple of all the types of gothic novels. The whole concept of man's inner-beast is so literally illustrated in the character of the werewolf that there isn't really anywhere else to go with the idea. There isn't much room for subtlety and so the naturally you have to go for the unsubtle which, in this case, includes lots of references to erections and anal sex. I don't really have a problem with it, but it just seemed out of place and maybe that's why so many reviews mention it. It just gets so porn-y.

I enjoyed the writing and I liked making note of all the literary references. Duncan is obviously smart and well-read, so it's just so hard for me to understand how he ended up with this book. When I got to the end and realized that he had set up the (strong) possibility of a sequel I was so disappointed. It just reinforced my opinion that he was trying to write a Twilight or some other YA-type series for the more literary crowd.

The Last Werewolf was not at all my thing. The pacing was poor (the first 100 pages are slog) and the plotting was worse. Even the excitement in the action scenes wasn't enough to keep me engrossed. Maybe this book wasn't written for me or maybe I'm being too hard on it, but I just can't recommend it to anyone.

When you can watch the alchemy that turns morons into millionaires and gimps into global icons, where’s the thrill in men who turn into wolves?

Rating: 5/10
Book source: purchased

Literary Blog Hop: Research

2012-01-07T08:30:00.000-06:00

It's that time again. Once again I'm participating in the Literary Blog Hop, hosted by The Blue Bookcase. This month's question is this:

Do you like to supplement your reading with outside sources, like Sparknotes, academic articles, or other bloggers' reviews? Why or why not?

I typically don't look at any outside sources while I'm actually reading the book. Once I'm finished and I've got a good feeling for what I want to say about the book I'll jot down some notes, write my quick GoodReads review, and then I'll run out in the internet and see what everyone else thought. This is the research for my review.

Typically I'm looking for a few things:

Some ideas on how to summarize the plot if it's particularly tricky.
Verify that I basically understood the book and that I didn't miss any Big Ideas
If I can find an academic article then I'm all over that like white on rice
Author interviews for that extra bit of insight.

I don't think I've ever read a Sparknote(s). Is that like CliffsNotes?

I have to be a little careful with this stuff because I don't want to be too influenced by what anyone else has to say about a particular novel. There are those times when I'm not sure what I want to say in a review and that's often because I missing some kind of context. For example, in my review of Georges Simenon's The Train, I spent a lot of time reading interviews and hunting down the original New York Times review. Only some of that research made it into my review, but it gave me the confidence to write about it.

What about you? Do you supplement your reading with outside sources?

Review: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

2012-01-06T08:02:00.000-06:00

The Sisters Brothers
Patrick deWitt
336 pages
Ecco Press
Published April 26, 2011

As it turns out, I love westerns. I especially love westerns with wonderful covers. Go ahead and click on that image, make it big and just soak it in. This was probably my favorite book cover of 2011.

But it's not all about covers and pictures. There were words on the pages between those pieces of cardboard. The words were nearly as good as the cover. Apparently I'm not the only one who thought so since The Sisters Brothers was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Eli and Charlie Sisters are a murderous pair of hired killers that have been sent by their boss to kill a man named Hermann Kermit Warm. On their journey, the brothers run into wide cast of characters and leave death in their wake.

We see the action through the eyes of Eli. He is the more introspective brother, less interested and certainly less enthusiastic in killing than his brother Charlie. But despite Eli's "aw shucks" persona, he is as deadly as his brother. Most importantly, Eli loves his brother and balances Charlie's boozing and recklessness with his quiet sadness.

I felt two things at once: A gladness at this turn of fortune, but also an emptiness that I did not feel more glad; or rather, a fear that my gladness was forced or false. I thought, Perhaps a man is never meant to be truly happy. Perhaps there is no such a thing in our world, after all.

The Sisters Brothers is a picaresque novel (look it up) and the brothers find themselves in a variety of situations, some bizarre and some heart-breaking in their own way. In fact, the more I think about it the more I see the book as collection of stories that make up the brothers' journey to San Francisco. It flows smoothly, but like all good yarns, each story could stand on its own.

I can't even begin to say how much I love this book. Since we're always hearing Eli's thoughts, it's as if the entire book is an endless dialog between Eli and the reader. And you can't help but love Eli and want him to find happiness and peace. I've seem The Sisters Brothers compared to True Grit and I guess it does share some similarities in tone. But there's also something so original about this book that transcends genre and forces itself into your head. These are my favorite kind of books.

I had highlighted so many parts of the book that I'm having a hard time picking just one more to illustrate the tone and humor in the writing. I guess I'll leave you with this example of deWitt's ability to be funny even as he splashes his scenes with violence.

“What was that noise?” he asked.
‘That was a bullet going into you.’
“A bullet going into me where?’
‘Into your head.’
‘I can’t feel it. And I can’t hardly hear anything. Where’s the others?’
‘They’re lying next to you. Their heads have bullets, also.’
‘They do? Are they talking? I can’t hear them.’
‘No, they’re dead.’

Rating: 9/10
Book source: purchased

Norwegian Wood Read-along: Introduction!

2012-01-03T08:05:00.000-06:00

Norwegian Wood Read-along
The Introduction

I'm participating on Reading Rambo's Norwegian Wood Read-along. If you're interested, go ahead and sign up! We haven't started reading yet and the more the merrier!

I first discovered Murakami when I was given a copy of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle a few years ago. The friend that gave it to me was often recommending or giving me books by foreign authors and there had been some successes and some failures. I wasn't sure what to think about this Murakami character. Japanese literature just didn't appeal to me at all, but I decided to go ahead and try it anyway and I'm so glad that I did because I loved it.

I immediately read Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and loved that as well. I started reading Murakami's short fiction that was featured in The New Yorker. I read A Wild Sheep Chase and then got crazy and ordered the rare Hear the Wind Sing off of eBay. Then I read Kafka on the Shore and despite everyone else loving it, I was disappointed. Last year I read 1Q84 and again I was disappointed by a Murakami novel. I'm hoping that reading Norwegian Wood will restore my faith.

My favorite thing about Murakami's writing is how it all feels like a dream world. Anything can happen and often anything does happen!

I don't know much about the plot of Norwegian Wood, but I did some basic research on the book and found that the translation that we''ll be reading is by Jay Rubin. It was originally translated into English by Alfred Birnbaum (who also translated much of Murakami's older work such as A Wild Sheep Chase and Hear the Wind Sing) in 1989 but re-translated by Rubin in 2000 for it's first publication in the UK and America. Rubin also translated the first two books of 1Q84 and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

The other thing I learned about Norwegian Wood was that it was Murakami's big breakout success in Japan and the book that really put him on the map. It was also a departure from the Murakami's usual weirdness in that for the most part, the novel stays pretty grounded. So there's a good chance you won't see Colonel Sanders popping up as a character.

Anyway, here's the readalong schedule:

January 10th: Chapters 1 through 4
January 17th: Chapters 5 & 6
January 24th: Chapters 7 through 9
January 31st: Chapters 10 & 11

Here are the intro posts from other read-along participants:

FINALLY - if you're interested in more Murakami, I suggest joining the 2012 Murakami Challenge!

Review: Hellboy: House of the Living Dead

2011-12-30T09:02:00.000-06:00

Hellboy: House of the Living Dead
Mike Mignola
Illustrations by Richard Corbin
56 pages
Dark Horse Comics
Published November 29, 2011

Does this count as a graphic novel? If it does then it's my first.

I don't really know a lot about Hellboy outside of what was in the movies, but I really enjoyed this. The story takes place in 1956 when Hellboy went missing in Mexico for five months. It turns out that he became one of those Mexican wrestlers (a luchador). One day after a match he is approached by a mysterious stranger who invites him to wrestle his boss's "champion." Hellboy isn't interested until he finds out that a girl's life is on the line. He travels with the stranger to meet the boss and the champion and then it gets crazy.

The champion, as it turns out is a sort of Frankenstein monster with super-strength and an unholy ability to take a punch. After the monster Hellboy has to deal with a werewolf, a vampire and some kind of evil ghost-ladies-vampire ladies. Once the action starts it really doesn't stop until the final page.

Look, I don't know much about these graphic novel things, but I thought this was pretty good. The comically nightmarish art of Richard Corbin really worked beautifully with the story by Hellboy creater Mike Mignola. A bit of research tells me that this is a sequel of sorts to another story, Hellboy in Mexico (collected in Hellboy #11: The Bride of Hell and Others), which was also a collaboration between Mignola and Corbin.

I've read this twice now and the first time through I mostly paid attention to the story, but the second reading allowed me to pay closer attention to the backgrounds and the subtle emotions in some of the character's faces. I'm coming to understand how a graphic novel can provide some of the same emotional depth as a traditional novel. This may have been my first experience with a graphic novel, but it won't be my last.

Rating: 7/10

Book Source: NetGalley

Review: Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto

2011-12-29T12:41:00.000-06:00

Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto
Gianni Rodari
192 Pages
Melville House
Published December 6, 2011

I'm not even sure where to start with this. Have you ever read something and really, truly enjoyed reading it but still left you with the lingering feeling that you've missed something? That there's a hidden subtext or a grand statement that you've completely failed to notice? That's how I felt reading Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto.

The story is this: Baron Lamberto is "an exceedingly elderly gentleman (he is ninety-three years old) who is very wealthy (he owns twenty-four banks in Italy, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Singapore, and so on) and invariably ill." Lamberto and his butler, Anselmo, come across a cure that involves hiring six individuals to repeat the baron's name over and over. The idea being that "the man whose name is spoken remains alive." Lamberto eventually begins to pull a Benjamin Button and ages in reverse so that after a while he is an energetic young man.

But what is a book without conflict? There's the arrival of Lamberto's soda-addicted nephew Ottavio, who conspires to hasten his Lamberto's demise so that he may inherit his uncle's vast fortune. There is also a group of bandits, called the 24-L (because all of the bandits are also named Lamberto) that take the baron hostage. And then there's the twenty-four bank managers that convene to try to negotiate with the bandits, only to be confused by fact that their ninety-three year-old boss looks a lot different these days.

Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto was first published in Italian in 1978 as Twice Upon a Time there was a Baron called Lamberto or The Mysteries of the Isle of San Giulio and was Rodari's last book (he died in 1980). This is the first time it has appeared in English in an excellent translation by Antony Sugaar. This Melville House edition also contains some wonderful illustrations by Federico Maggioni.

I don't know much about children's books. If Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto is a children's book then it's like the Pixar of children's books. There's a lot of silliness and lots of fun details. For example, there's a section that lists the locations (and the elevations of the locations) of all of the international journalists that have come to cover the hostage crisis. At one point the journalists are shouting questions at the grandchildren of the man that operates the ferry between the mainland and Lamberto's island. One of the questions is "How much is three times eight makes twenty-four?" For the kids this is just silliness, but for adults there's a certain amount of familiarity in how modern media spectacles play out.

The language is a lot of fun too. I giggled out loud when I read this section about the twenty-four bank managers:

They get to their feet as one man, bid the mayor good day, walk down to the town square, climb back onto their tour bus, followed by their twenty-four shadows and their twenty-four personal secretaries. The driver quickly conveys them to Miasino, where their secretaries have rented for them a seventeenth-century villa, with eighteenth-century frescoes, nineteenth-century paintings, and twentieth-century electrical appliances.

The whole time I was reading Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto, I was thinking about what an amazing translation it is. The language is incredibly precise and I had to run to the dictionary a few times. It's so rare that a translation doesn't feel at all like a translation - it all felt so natural and perfect.

As I said above, I did have a nagging feeling that I was missing something. Rodari makes a few explicit references mythology a few times (the ferryman Duilio's nickname is Charon) and I kept wondering if there was more there that I just didn't see.

Overall the writing is excellent and the story is fun and surprising. The story is told in such a joyful way and I felt like Rodari was winking at me the entire time. The illustrations are a lot of fun and add to the playful elements of the book. It's the kind of book I can definitely see returning to when my kids are older.

Rating: 8/10

Book Source: purchased

Review: The Train by Georges Simenon

2011-12-27T17:00:00.000-06:00

The Train
Georges Simenon
144 pages
Melville House Press
Published July, 2011

How often do you buy a book because of it's cover? All of the books in The Neversink Library look amazing and have these simple silhouettes over a muted color. The covers are both simple and beautiful and that's what initially drew me to The Train. I downloaded a sample and decided that I needed to read this book immediately.

The Train was first published in French in 1961 and later translated into English by Robert Baldick in 1964. It tells the story of Marcel Féron as he and his family flee their home in Fumay, France as the Germans begin their invasion of Belgium on May 10, 1940. As the title suggests, there's a train involved.

Marcel's pregnant wife and daughter are placed in a passenger car of the train while Marcel ends up in boxcar with the other men. Sometime in the night, the train is split up and Marcel finds himself en route to La Rouchelle and the car with his wife and daughter have disappeared. Along the way Marcel meets a mysterious woman named Anna with whom he develops a deep relationship.

I wasn't really sure what to expect when I began The Train. I had done some research on Georges Simenon before starting the novel and learned that he wrote over 500(!) novels during his lifetime. There's an excellent Paris Review interview in which Simenon says that he typically spends 11 days writing each book. This worried me a bit. I couldn't imagine how Simenon could turn out anything of quality in only 11 days? But I loved those first few pages so much that I went for it anyway.

The experience of reading The Train was really a treat. One of my favorite writers is Steinbeck and I felt a certain closeness to The Winter of Our Discontent while reading The Train. I checked and saw that both were published in 1961 - so maybe there was something in the air, maybe it was just the essence of the time captured on the page. A sort of post-war, pre-cultural revolution vibe, I don't know. I felt a similarity there regardless.

I've been thinking about Marcel a lot since I finished The Train. He has a good life with his family before the invasion. He is a good man who, like many who are caught up in war, found himself adrift and no longer in charge of determining his own fate.

I had just lost my roots. I was no longer Marcel Feron, radio engineer in a newish district of Fumay, not far from the Meuse, but one man among millions whom superior forces were going to toss about at will.

And in all of this confusion he finds Anna, who seems to somehow be completely in his head and always knows what he's thinking, how he feels. In all this confusion and chaos he finds joy, love and passion.

When asked what themes or "problems" that Simenon has tried to tackle in his fiction, he answered:

One of them, for example, which will probably haunt me more than any other is the problem of communication. I mean communication between two people. The fact that we are I don’t know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people, is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the world. When I was a young boy I was afraid of it. I would almost scream because of it. It gave me such a sensation of solitude, of loneliness. That is a theme I have taken I don’t know how many times. But I know it will come again. Certainly it will come again.

I really felt like Simenon gave Marcel a gift in Anna. There was never any confusion between the two of them. Anna truly understood Marcel and he had the same understanding of her. If Simenon felt that "complete communication" was impossible then he gave Marcel the ultimate gift, the ultimate happiness. Thinking about The Train in the context of communication, the book really opens up because you see how a radio communication opens the novel, the breakdown of communication on the train and the slow re-building of communication in the refugee camp.

I read a lot of really great books this year and The Train certainly ranks high among them. The writing is simple but elegant and the story is beautifully constructed. I wasn't expecting to love the book as much as I did, but I'm glad that I got on the train with Marcel and got to see where it took him, if only for a short while.

Rating: 9/10

Book source: purchased

And Now A Word From David Foster Wallace

2011-12-26T08:35:00.000-06:00

Part of a series of posts entitled And Now A Word From...

David Foster Wallace in an interview in Arrival:

I spent a lot of time as a volunteer in a nursing home in Amherst last summer. I was reading Dante's Divine Comedy to an old man, Mr. Shulman. One day, I asked him where he was from. He said, "Just east of here, the Rockies." I said, "Mr. Shulman, the Rockies are west of here [Phoenix]." He did a voilà with his hands, and then said, "I move mountains." That stuck with me. Fiction either moves mountains or it's boring; it moves mountains or it sits on its ass.

This interview happened in 1987, nine years before Infinite Jest. I'm currently reading a upcoming collection of interviews with Wallace and this item just jumped off the page because I feel like it really captured where Wallace was with his writing at the time. The Broom of the System had just been published and he wouldn't finish Girl with Curious Hair for another year. Over his career Wallace steadily decreased the fireworks in his own writing in an effort to get at that capital-T Truth that "moves mountains," and I find it really interesting to think about how Wallace's concept about what it took move mountains changed over time.

Vollmann's Rising Up And Rising Down

2011-12-21T23:59:00.004-06:00

Over at biblioklept the claim was made that nobody actually reads anything by William T. Vollmann and that nobody actually owns the multi-volume, 3,000+ page complete Rising Up And Rising Down. I mentioned in the comments that I do, in fact, own the whole thing (although I haven't read even a page of it). I was challenged to produce pictures to prove my ownership (along with today's newspaper - but I don't get a newspaper so we're just going to have to pretend the newspaper is there.)

A few years ago we had a freak incident in the middle of the summer that resulted in the first few volumes sustaining some minor water damage. You can see it in the pictures of volumes five and six.

So please excuse the poor pictures taken from my BlackBerry in the storage room of our basement...

A Year In Reading - 2011 Mega-Post

2011-12-21T17:08:00.001-06:00

clicky-clicky to embiggen

Total Books Read: 24 25
Published in 2011: 11 12
Published Before 2011: 13
Translations: 4
Part Of A Series: 5
Prize Winners: 2
Total Pages: ~~8,759~~ 9,084

The Top 6 7
Because five isn't enough and ten is too much

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray - A boarding school novel that brought back memories of Infinite Jest and my very own personal boarding-school memories. This is a beautiful novel that reminded me what it was like to be young, confused, angry and in love.
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer - I shed real man-tears. Do I need to say anything more?
The Marriage Plot by Jeffery Eugenides - This year's Freedom wasn't quite what people expected from the author of Middlesex, but The Marriage Plot was satisfying in its own way.
Tinkers by Paul Murray - The prose! Oh the prose! The most beautifully written thing I read this year.
The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak - This is a perfect little novel about cultural identity, war and family. This is the new book that I recommend to everyone.
The Slide by Kyle Beachy - Oh you've never heard of this? One of my favorite post-college-reality-smacks-you-in-the-face books of all time. Highly recommended and not just because it takes place in St. Louis.
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt - A Deadwood-esque western that's beautifully written with an excellent story.

The Complete 2011 List:
Ordered by date completed

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Speaker For The Dead by Orson Scott Card
The Slide by Kyle Beachy
Xenocide by Orson Scott Card
Remainder by Tom McCarthy (review)
Before I Go To Sleep by S.J. Watson
Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Children Of The Mind by Orson Scott Card
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (review)
A Dance With Dragons by George R. R. Martin (review)
The Magician King by Lev Grossman
Mile 81 by Stephen King (review)
Monsieur Pain by Roberto Bolaño (review)
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (review)
20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill (review)
The Marriage Plot by Jeffery Eugenides (review)
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (review)
Tinkers by Paul Murray (review)
420 Characters by Lou Beach (review)
The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak (review)
The Train by Georges Simenon (review)
Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto by Gianni Rodari (review)
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt (review)

updated 01.06.2012

And Now A Word From Georges Simenon

2011-12-19T13:03:00.000-06:00

Part of a series of posts entitled And Now A Word From...

French writer Georges Simenon, in conversation with The Paris Review in 1955:

...when a novel is finished I have always the impression that I have not succeeded. I am not discouraged, but I see—I want to try again. But one thing—I consider my novels about all on the same level, yet there are steps. After a group of five or six novels I have a kind of—I don’t like the word “progress”—but there seems to be a progress. There is a jump in quality, I think. So every five or six novels there is one I prefer to the others.

Simenon wrote nearly 200 novels during his lifetime.

Our review of Simenon's The Train should be hitting the site in the next few days...

Review: The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak

2011-12-16T09:30:00.000-06:00

The Sojourn
Andrew Krivak (author's website)
Bellevue Literary Press
192 pages
Published May 2011

Two in a row from Bellevue Literary Press. I've never really paid much attention to who publishes what until fairly recently and the thing I really love about these guys is that they're part of the NYU School of Medicine and that most of what they publish are non-fiction books relating to medicine. But there are these two books: The Sojourn and Tinkers, two works of literary fiction that they've published and both books have been recognized for excellence in some way. Tinkers won the Pulitzer Prize and The Sojourn was on the National Book Award short list.

I hate writing plot summaries, so let's just use the jacket copy: "The Sojourn is the story of Jozef Vinich, who was uprooted from a 19th-century mining town in Colorado by a shocking family tragedy to return with his father to an impoverished shepherd’s life in rural Austria-Hungary. When war comes, Jozef joins his cousin and brother-in-arms as a sharpshooter on the southern front, where he must survive a perilous trek across the frozen Italian Alps and capture by a victorious enemy."

The Sojourn is about war on every level. The personal wars that we wage against ourselves, the wars within a family, wars within a groups of men and war at the global level. And what keeps coming to me after reading this amazing little book is that all of these wars are based on necessity. Sometimes we need to go to war against ourselves so that we can be free of history and the weights that others have hung around our necks. Jozef literally caries his anger and aggression with him in the form of his adopted brother, Zlee. And when Jozef finds himself without Zlee, his anger vanishes and he is forced to experience a sort of baptism by starvation, exhaustion and brutal war.

Once he comes out of the war, Jozef finds himself a prisoner of war where he is alone with himself, left to sort through the baggage of war and loss. His post-prison journey provides the opportunity for rebirth and a chance to find redemption.

"Ghosts are not the dead. They are our fear of death. Tell yourself, Jozef, not to be afraid."
After a time I asked "What is left to be afraid of?"
And he said, "The possibility that a life itself may prove to be the most worthy struggle. Not the whole sweeping vale of tears that Rome and her priests want us to sacrifice ourselves to daily so that she lives in splendor, but one single moment in which we die so that someone else lives. That’s it, and it is fearful because it cannot be seen, planned, or even known. It is simply lived. If there be purpose, it happens of a moment within us, and lasts a lifetime without us, like water opening and closing in a wake."

I loved The Sojourn so much. The writing is gorgeous and I can see why this was put on the short list for the National Book Award. The scenes that book-end the war are beautiful and full of color while the war section is bleak, brutal and unforgiving. The book ends with redemption and hope and not in a way that seems saccharine, but very real. I highly recommend reading it for yourself.

Rating 9.5/10

Have you read The Sojourn? What did you think?

Book source: purchased

Review: 420 Characters by Lou Beach

2011-12-09T07:13:00.000-06:00

420 Characters
Author: Lou Beach
176 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: December 6, 2011

I would tell you what a beautiful book this was if I actually had the physical book. I'm told it's lovely. I'd requested a review copy and the wonderful (really) people at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt told me to just go ahead and grab it from NetGalley. So while I can't tell you how the book feels in my hands or honestly remark on the wonderful design, I can tell you about the wonderful little stories contained within.

Lou Beach is known more for his illustration work than his writing, but that doesn't mean this collection isn't pretty good.

All of these stories were written on Facebook. The title refers to the character limit of a Facebook status update and thus, each story is 420 characters or less. This constraint forces Beach to be sparse and economical with words, generating atmosphere and leaving doors wide open for interpretation. Here's one of my favorites:

THE WANKER IN THE WARDROBE sits on my wife's shoes. He amuses himself by pressing his face into her wool skirt. He breathes deeply, imagines himself a bat flying through a humid night. Each evening we leave a saucer of gin out for him. One time we panicked when the dish remained untouched for three days. He'd been away.

There's so much here! These people know there's a wanker in the wardrobe. He sits on the wife's shoes and presses his face into her skirt, but is he there because he loves the wife or is it just coincidence? Why does he imagine himself a bat when he puts his face in the skirt? Why not a bird? What is even meant by "wanker" anyway? Are we talking about a masturbater or just an asshole? And the wanker lives on gin? Does the wanker ever consume anything else? Where did the wanker go anyway? And wait, these people seem to support the wanker staying in the wardrobe? Does this wardrobe go to Narnia?

They're all like that in some way or another. Sometimes the "story" is a little more solid and we're left to work out the back-story and other times it just feels like a bunch of images that are loosely connected.

I imagine a fun thing to do would be to pass this book around a group of friends, read a story aloud and then talk it out with your friends and see where it takes you.

I can't finish this review without mentioning the illustrations that are littered throughout the book. Beach is a collage artist and his creations are often really stunning. What I like the most about them is that they kind of mirror the kind of stories that Beach writes. They're images that kind of go together but also appear somewhat jumbled and like they might tell their own story. Here's an example:

Overall the stories are really fun and creative and have a playful nature. Their length really feels like their strength and I really enjoyed the experience of reading them.

Rating 8/10

Book Source: Netgalley

Acquired: Salvage The Bones

2011-12-08T07:15:00.000-06:00

2011 National Book Award winner. I got it for just $1 from Amazon! Whoo!

Acquired: Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto

2011-12-07T15:11:00.001-06:00

I just bought it directly from Melville House. I'm so excited!

Written by Gianni Rodari, Translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar, Illustrations by Federico Maggioni.

2012 E-Book Challenge(s)

2011-12-07T13:49:00.001-06:00

Is it considered cheating to sign up for two challenges that have the same goals? I've had my Kindle for almost a year and I read quite a few ebooks in 2011. In fact, 1Q84, The Marriage Plot and Tinkers were all read on my Kindle.

The Workaday Reads 2012 Ebook Challenge sign-up page is here. The 2012 E-Book Reading Challenge sign-up is here.

The challenge requires me to commit to reading a certain number of ebooks by the end of 2012. I'll be reading (at least!) 10 ebooks this year - placing me in the "CD" and "Fun Size" categories. Check out the new 2012 Challenges page for updates!

Review: Tinkers by Paul Harding

2011-12-05T21:12:00.001-06:00

Tinkers
Paul Harding
192 pages
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Release Date: January 2009

"George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died."

And so starts one of the best books I've read in a long time. Tinkers is the short, Pulitzer Prize winning, debut novel by Paul Harding. In 2009 it came out of nowhere, published by a small press, barely reviewed anywhere (or at least, at any length) and then all of a sudden OMG PULITZER!

This is a dense little book.

On the surface, Tinkers details the final hours of George Crosby's life as he reflects on his past. The story is told from two perspectives. There's George, in the present, as he lays in his sickbed - a "rented hospital bed, placed in the middle of his own living room." As George's consciousness shifts, we see the story of his youth from the perspective of Howard, his epileptic father. Howard deserts his family (including young George) and later we get to see Howard as a boy, dealing with the disappearance his own father.

But this is just structure. The meat of this thing is just so... amazing.

The prose itself is so good that sometimes I felt myself sucking in and reading and re-reading again, just to savor the words and the depth and the lyrical flow of it all. For example, this passage is pretty indicative of what you'll find in Tinkers:

Howard, instead of trying to explain the hermit's existence in terms of hearth fires and trappers' shacks, preferred the blank space the old man actually seemed to inhabit; he liked to think of some fold in the woods, some seam that only the hermit could sense and slip into, where the ice and snow, where the frozen forest itself, would accept him and he would no longer need fire or wool blankets, but instead flourish wreathed in snow, spun in frost, with limbs like cold wood and blood like frigid sap.

And there's this one too:

A wind would come up through the trees, sounding like a chorus, so like a breath then, so sounding like a breath, the breath of thousands of souls gathering itself up somewhere in the timber lining the bowls and depressions behind the worn mountains the way thunderstorms did and crawling up their backs of them the way the thunderstorms did, too, which you couldn't hear, quite, but felt barometrically-a contraction or flattening as of tone as everything compressed in front of it, again, which you couldn't see, quite, but instead could almost see the result of-water flattening, so the light coming off of it shifted angles, the grass stiffening, so it went from green to silver, the swallows flitting over the pond all being pushed forward and then falling back to their original positions as they corrected for the change, as if the wind were sending something in front of it.

Right?

There's a lot about clocks and clock repair and many passages from a fictional 1783 work called The Reasonable Horologist, by the Rev. Kenner Davenport. As I was reading Tinkers, I figured that the clock analogy pretty clearly captures the arc of the novel. Howard's father acts as the mainspring, providing the coiled energy that powers the wheels and gears (that's Howard) and is finally spent on the escape wheel (George).

Tinkers was an amazing reading experience. It's already on my re-read list and I think it's a book that I'll revisit every few years. If you like beautiful writing, lovingly constructed characters and a truly wonderful reading experience then I highly recommend it.

Rating: 10/10

Book Source: purchased

Literary Blog Hop: For the Lit Newbies

2011-12-01T08:59:00.001-06:00

I've never done one of these before, but this sounded fun and interesting. I'm participating in the Literary Blog Hop, hosted by The Blue Bookcase

What work of literature would you recommend to someone who doesn't like literature?

Before I get started, let's just agree that every time the word "literature" is used it's mean to be pronounced with a snooty british accent. Okay? Good.

Look, my first instinct is go with Skippy Dies because it wasn't hard and the story was good (great!), but if I really think about the people in my life who aren't into literature then I know that Skippy Dies isn't quite right. I think something more genre-specific might be more appropritate, like Lev Grossman's The Magician King. For all the millions of people that love the Harry Potter novels, The Magician King makes for a nice adult version of a similar story. An alternate might be Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell if your someone is more into victorian-type stuff.

But if genre-fiction of the magical and fantasy variety isn't going to cut it then I'd have to go with Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. I loved (loved!) this book when I read it earlier this year. It even made me cry some precious man-tears. The writing is accessible, but Foer still uses some literary pyrotechnics to make it really pop.

So here's the final list.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

Runner up:
Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

Links go to Barnes & Noble

Review: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

2011-12-01T01:26:00.000-06:00

1Q84
Haruki Murakami
944 pages
Publisher: Knopf
Published: October 25, 2011

This is a big book. Infinite Jest big. And let me say before we get this started that I love Murakami. One of my favorite books of all-time is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and I've been eagerly anticipating the release of 1Q84 in English for years. So now it's finally here and I've just finished the book. I don't know if it's just because I over-hyped it in my head or if my expectations were sky-high, but while I enjoyed the read, I ended up feeling disappointed.

The bare-bones summary is this: Aomame is a fitness instructor and part-time assassin. Tengo is a former math genius and budding writer. For much of the novel, each character is on their own path: Aomame is tasked with taking out the head of a religious cult while Tengo is pressured into re-writing a novella (called Air Chrysalis) written by the daughter of the head of that same religious cult. Additionally, they both find themselves in an alternate reality that Aomame refers to as "1Q84." A reality that features two moons and other subtle differences from the reality that they're familiar with. Both Tengo and Aomame's "assignments" get them into a heap of trouble with the cult known as Sakigake.

1Q84 has all the hallmarks of a Murakami novel. There are cats, a particular attention to the shapes of people's ears, a weird sexuality and deeply fantastical elements. In the world of 1Q84, there are beings known as the Little People that emerge from the mouth of a dead goat. If that sounds vague and weird to you then you're on the right track. 1Q84 is over 900 pages long and the whole Little People thing is never fully explained. Murakami addresses this, masked as a review of Air Chrysalis:

One reviewer concluded his piece, “As a story, the work is put together in an exceptionally interesting way and it carries the reader along to the very end, but when it comes to the question of what is an air chrysalis, or who are the Little People, we are left in a pool of mysterious question marks.

True.

We are led to understand that Tengo and Aomame had been classmates as children and at the age of ten had briefly held hands and from then on were deeply and totally in love with each other. The only problem was that after their brief shared moment, they never spoke to each other again and Aomame's family pulled her from the public school. The two spend the next 20 years drifting through life, longing for each other but never actively searching. Throughout 1Q84, Tengo and Aomame circle each other, getting closer and closer. I won't spoil it by telling you if they finally find each other, but it's not rocket science.

The story is told primarily from alternating viewpoints - Tengo and Aomame for the first two "books" and with the addition of another character, Ushikawa, in the third book.

Like I said, it's a long book and even my summary above barely scratches the surface. But even with all the plot there are long sections of the book that just drag on and on. You see, the characters spend a lot of time waiting for things to happen and Murakami makes us wait with them. This might have been fine for a single section, but it happens repeatedly. Additionally, since the viewpoint is primarily alternating between Tengo and Aomame, we get the same scenes described from different (but very similar) points of view. This wouldn't be a big deal if it was a shorter book, but over 900+ pages, it gets really tiresome. The result is that the book feels flabby, overweight.

There are some really amazing sequences - Aomame's encounter with the Leader of Sakigake and Tengo's experience visiting his comatose father in the "cat town" really stand out. The Ushikawa sections of book three were also very well done. And maybe that's what makes the boring parts so hard to get through. You can see that Murakami can deliver the goods and it makes the book feel inconsistent.

There are a lot of tedious and boring stretches. I've read some discussions that try to pin it on Jay Rubin's translation - the argument being that Rubin's style is more sparse. M.A.Orthofer over at Complete Review compared the German translation to the English translation:

In comparing the translations the one sentence that really struck me comes right near the beginning, when Aomame is in the taxi. In German what the driver warns her is:
Die Dinge sind meist nicht das, was sie zu sein scheinen
Things usually aren't what they appear to be

Jay Rubin's translation has it the more absolute:
things are not what they seem
But that seems far too definite -- and hence too easy -- to me; the atmosphere Murakami creates is exactly one where things usually aren't what they seem, but not always, and its that slight but ever-present sense of uncertainty that adds to the richness of the work.

Given that Murakami's own English is very good, that he translates English novels to Japanese and that he worked with both Rubin and Philip Gabriel on the translation, I don't think the book's fault lies in the translation. Although Rubin's thoughts on translation are certainly very interesting.

So would I recommend 1Q84? If you're already a fan of Murakami then it is highly recommended. 1Q84 is definitely Murakami's most ambitious novel, but it's far from his best. If you're new to his work, I'd recommend picking up something like Wild Sheep Chase or Hard Boiled Wonderland first. It hurts me to be so negative of 1Q84 - I just wanted to love it so much!

Rating: 6/10

Book Source: purchased

New Review Policy

2011-11-29T17:08:00.001-06:00

Since it recently came up, I've written a Review Policy for this site. Check it out, if you're interested in that sort of thing...

And Now A Word From Jay Rubin

2011-11-28T16:13:00.001-06:00

Introducing a new series called And Now A Word From... in which we will be posting quotes from various people regarding books, art, etc.

Jay Rubin, in conversation with The New Yorker, discusses his translations of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami:

It's a very, very subjective process and I know I'm thought of someone who sticks very close to the original. Murakami himself has said that, but I don't think it's anything like his writing when you get right down to it - it's an interesting imitation maybe. On the other hand he's got how many translators - three active translators - and there's a certain something that comes through in all of us. And we all have very different styles, but he still has a recognizable voice.

I was very curious about the translation of 1Q84 since Jay Rubin translated the first two books and Philip Gabriel translated the third. I was wondering if there would be a recognizable shift in tone or feeling in the third book, but I honestly can't find any difference I can put my finger on. The nerd part of me would love to compare how Rubin and Gabriel would have translated a short chapter, but that's unlikely to happen.

But it's interesting to think about the writer's voice surfacing though various translators. Murakami and Bolaño are the only two writers I've read in translation and each of them has a unique voice. I haven't read Tolstoy or any other famous non-English writers (or, at least I can't think of any or I'm just being stupid...), but I imagine that if the translator is any good then the real substance of the writing will shine through.

I'm still struck by Rubin's statement that the English translation of Murakami's work is just a "interesting imitation" of the original. It's almost enough to make me run out and try to learn Japanese. And also Spanish, so I can read Bolaño in its original form.

I wish the interviewer (Blake Eskin) had asked Rubin about the section of 1Q84 in which one of the characters re-writes a novella written by a 17 year-old girl and how Murakami's description of the re-write mirrors the translation process. Interviews with translators always seem to be pretty light, but I think there's a really interesting opportunity to dig into the text since the translator has such an intimate relationship with every word on the page.