« Posts under Literature

“The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” by Haruki Murakami

April 4, 2011 / Debo posted in Literature / No Comments

I finished up Haruki Murakami’s ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’ the other day, and I felt like someone had snapped me out of a hypnotic trance. (Of course, that could have been the effects of the compound hangovers I was suffering.)

Murakami’s style is dreamy, riveting, and occasionally exasperating. For a book in which almost nothing happens (and at almost 700 pages, that is a lot of nothing), it is astonishingly hard to put it down. My favorite aspect of his writing is that you can’t tell what is fantasy and what is reality, and you quickly find yourself not caring, as this is obviously not of any real consequence to the characters involved.

All of this contributes to the feeling that you not really reading the book, but that you are instead meandering through a very lucid daydream. This is an impressive feat, given that the English version was actually a translation from the Japanese.

After turning the last page, I had the feeling that I had subconsciously learned some subtle lesson that I couldn’t specify in words. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that was simultaneously so raw and yet so … delicate, like cotton candy made from gossamer cowflesh.

If you have the patience for this sort of thing (e.g. You can read Nabokov for enjoyment), I’d strongly recommend it.

P.S. this is the first blogpost I’ve ever written from a smartphone. Big ups.

P.P.S. I’ve previously read ‘After Dark’ by Murakami as well, a good long time ago. I remember really enjoying that as well.

P.P.P.S.: This is one of the first books I’ve read where I had a hard time finding plot synopses / discussions online. Now I’m stuck using my own brain to interpret the significance of major plot events, which kinda sucks.

On the road…

January 9, 2011 / Debo posted in Books, Literature / No Comments

I started reading Kerouac’s “On the Road”. I sort of wish I’d done this when I was living in the Bay Area. File under “better late than never.”

I prepared to take notes, but I instead found myself just copying quote after quote out of the book. This seems to recapture my feelings about it much better than anything else I could have done. Here are some of my favorites as I arrive at chapter 12.

Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.

and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was — I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.

I have finally taught Dean that he can do anything he wants, become mayor of Denver, marry a millionairess, or become the greatest poet since Rimbaud. But he keeps rushing out to see the midget auto races.

They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.

Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk — real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.

I climbed in and there he was, sleeping with his girl, Lee Ann — on a bed he stole from a merchant ship, as he told me later; imagine the deck engineer of a merchant ship sneaking over the side in the middle of the night with a bed, and heaving and straining at the oars to shore. This barely explains Remi Boncœur.

I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief. I was getting the bug myself. I even began to try to see if doors were locked.

The one about Remi and the bed is definitely my favorite so far.

Thoughts on ‘Burning Chrome’ by William Gibson

November 17, 2010 / Debo posted in Books, Literature, Thoughts / No Comments

Just finished up Burning Chrome a couple of days ago. I read it mostly on the subway, which was definitely the right environment for it.

My general impression is that there was too much outer space. I hate outer space about 75% as much as I hate time travel. However, there was at least one story in the collection that did it well (“Hinterlands”), where governments send these poor folks into this weird slipstream thing because they know they’ll come back from some unknown place with high technology. This is the first time I’ve heard of the the theme of the “cargo cult”, so it was worth the read for that alone:

A cargo cult is a religious practice that has appeared in many traditional tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced cultures. The cults focus on obtaining the material wealth (the “cargo”) of the advanced culture through magic and religious rituals and practices. Cult members believe that the wealth was intended for them by their deities and ancestors.

Thanks, Wikipedia. You can go back to begging for money now.

My favorite story by far was “The Winter Market”. It’s about this girl who is completely paralyzed, but is able to retain mobility by wearing this exoskeleton thing that jacks into her brain and moves her body for her. A wheelchair on steroids, basically.

It’s really a story about ambition and the nature of circumstance, though. She’s hellbent on landing a contract where she can upload her entire being into a computer and let her body die, and the story is written from the perspective of an editor of “dream albums”, since buying and sharing albums of the dreams of “dream artists” is this story’s equivalent of the music industry. The main character is wigged out by how determined she is, and then he’s even more wigged out when he catches glimpses of her in a moment of weakness the night before she suicides her way into the bitstream. It’s one of those tales that makes the back of your spine tickle a little, and sort of coerces you to look at your own foibles in a different light. (Or any light at all, depending on your personality.)

The collection was definitely worth the read. The thing I like most about reading really early work from successful authors is that the quality of their writing usually isn’t too far from that of a beginner — namely, myself. And it’s pretty evident that they got where they are now by practicing their craft, a LOT. So that’s sort of inspiring, huh?

Mr. Vertigo redux

November 5, 2010 / Debo posted in Books, Literature, Thoughts / No Comments

I’m sitting here in a Starbucks right now with a friend who is pretending to work and I’m sketched out of my mind after overdosing on caffeine (as is my friday habit). While waiting for the transfer to the next venue, I finished off Mr. Vertigo.

Not a bad piece of work. It kept me turning the pages, but often at a rate that signified I was just trying to rush ahead to the next plot point at the expense of missing big chunks of prose. The biggest sticking point I had with the book was the deliberate fakeness of the dialogue. No kid would ever be capable of talking with the simultaneous crassness and sophistication that the main character has. Not even this one.

I guess I should actually talk about the book itself. It goes like this. Walt is born in 20s America into a particularly base geneaology. Some urbane dude called The Master finds him in the street and promises him fame and riches. If Walt is not famous by his 13th birthday, the Master agrees to let Walt chop off his head.

The Master teaches Walt how to levitate. He does this through a 33-step program, most steps of which involve some sort of torture. At first, the Master appears to be completely infallible, and mostly evil fellow. As time goes on, you find out that he does have many flaws, and that he is actually quite a stand-up guy. It is really hard not to like him. He and Walt bond closely.

The rest of the story describes Walt’s (literal) rise to fame, which is quickly followed by massive failure and the death of the Master. In the wake of Master Yehudi’s passing, Walt occasionally picks up a successful venture by virtue of his own grit, but without the strong value system imposed by the Master, his victories are always fleeting.

I guess the Master is supposed to represent the combination of virtue and ambition (and the willingness to trade them off) that was the spirit of the early 1900s America. Auster practically rams the spirit of the book down your throat on the last page, but the way it is done was actually rather enjoyable, in my opinion:

We’re not as tough as we used to be, and maybe the world’s a better place because of it, I don’t know. But I do know that you can’t get something for nothing, and the bigger the thing you want, the more you’re going to have to pay for it.

…

Deep down, I don’t believe it takes any special talent for a person to lift himself off the ground and hover in the air. We all have it in us — every man, woman and child — and with enough hard work and concentration, every human being is capable of duplicating the feats I accomplished as Walt the Wonder Boy.

Mother Sioux, on love

November 5, 2010 / Debo posted in Books, Literature, Thoughts / No Comments

They love and they hate, they grapple and spoon, they want and don’t want, and as time goes on they each sink deeper under the other’s skin. It’s a real show, patty-cake, the follies and the circus all rolled into one, and dollars to donuts it’s going to be like that till the day they die.

From “Mr. Vertigo” by Paul Auster

« Older Posts