Antti

I'm impressed more and more with Mishima. The two works I've now had the pleasure to acquaint with, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea and now this, are singular works, Mishima's prose full of power, beauty and life. I'm going to visit the golden pavilion first before embarking on a journey to the sea of fertility. I can't wait.

The Sound of Waves is a coming-of-age story, a Romeo and Juliet of forbidden love, a social study of a closed island community like Imamura's Profound Desires of the Gods, a predestined Greek tragedy with the interference of the deus ex machina, and ultimately a very strong statement of Mishima's acute sense for the artful. His descriptions are alive with feeling for that which can be touched and that which can only be dreamed in silence; the characters are formed with broad brushstrokes, and come to life first as if from afar, then more and more in detail. And, it's as if Mishima wanted to show that once in a while, there is love and contentment, and happiness.

It's not easy to write economically and with clarity, and convey what's important. It's always easier to wander off a bit on the way instead of going straight ahead. Mishima certainly knows how to, and that's what brings such an edge to his writing. This is an author who seems to know what he's saying and why, a rare gift indeed.

28 October,
2014

The greatest novels in the English language are not only excellent narratives; they enrich the language, show its beauty, invent and make us realize how language is not a dead entity, instead very much alive. They're exhilarating, they energize, they inspire. Melville's Moby-Dick: or, the Whale (1851) certainly fits the bill. So does Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness In the West (1985), Cormac McCarthy's epic among his epics.

The best books aggrandize the act of reading itself. The joy of reading enthralling literature is immense. Only a handful have replicated my feelings for Blood Meridian; it's impossible to stop thinking about it, either between reads or after finishing. Its atmosphere and language are completely engrossing. Judge Holden, just like his predecessor proper, Captain Ahab, is beyond explication, since he's supposed to be superhumanly omnipresent, omniscient. He remains an enigma from beginning to end, and for this reason he's so mysteriously transcending. He's evil just as Iago is, yet unlike Iago, we never learn to understand him too much, not even at his most passionate, as evasion is how he converses with us. He breathes life into the narrative and we can't get enough of him.

McCarthy's prose is poetic, visual. The first line of the book emphasizes this well, being one of the most beautiful openings to any book I know of: “See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves.” It reads like a poem. But my favorite part, in fact the image that has become the emblem of McCarthy for me can be found from Chapter XV:

It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the ordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon.

I find José Saramago to be one of the greatest writers I've come across. His writing style complements his sense of humour and humanity, and the way he weaves his stories out of the sometimes comical, sometimes absurd, often both, and of the everyday comings and goings of people, results in his hands in strong prose, acute sense of humanity and overall entertaining literature.

That said, All the Names (1997) was, for some reason, a bit of a letdown. I did appreciate the play with catalogues, identity and search of self, and I think the parts of the book that had our narrator play detective against the regulations straight out of Gilliam's Brazil (1985) were fantastic literature. But something I couldn't connect with, and found myself losing the way at some point, and couldn't find back.

The overall feeling that remains after perhaps four months is that it could have been shorter, which is strange since I've never felt Saramago to meander or beat around the bush. It won't be until sometime when I'll give it another try, but maybe I simply read it at the wrong time.

6 October,
2014

A very quick read and a fun ride for the most part. It did become increasingly predictable, though, because I felt the narrative, blazing forward with incredulous speed, seemed to take the easy way out more often than not, effectively killing off any suspense it would have needed to keep me invested in it.

It was addictive enough, though, and made me start Armada, too.