Antti
Just reread this in November 2023, and I've apparently written the following in the days gone by.
I'd read The Hobbit some ten years ago, went to see the film without any clear memory of the thing, and then just had to reread it again. What really struck me was how much fun this story really is. Sure, it has its meandering sections as do most travelogues. But especially the role of the narrator becomes the highpoint of the book for me: he pinpoints certain things, important or peripheral, breaks off the narrative to explain something else entirely, intervening in good humor.
The Hobbit is brilliantly redolent and entertaining literature on its own, not only as a kind of sidekick to The Lord of the Rings. I'm sure I'll revisit it many times in years to come.
Amazing! I have rarely loathed a book this much. A mess of narrative non sequiturs. A great example of an embarrassing deus ex machina. Throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. No humor, no heart, no sense of direction. I did wonder whether this would turn out to be an intentional, Pythonesque literary hoax and it would all resolve itself in a climax of... something?
I tried reading The Wizards of Once, had to give up after 100 pages because it was too painful. I thought this might be better. Yuck! Obviously this author is not my cup of sake.
Since we've been reading many classics of children's literature during the past year, it was only a matter time before we would start Aili Somersalo's Mestaritontun seikkailut. I remember the radio adaptation from my early childhood only vaguely, and my recollections were so hazy that I had forgotten about the plot entirely, so much so that even while reading I couldn't recognize anything in particular. I had an inkling of an underwater kingdom, but that was it.
Ironically, there isn't much to remember in terms of a plot. The book takes its time to get going, and there's another, loosely related adventure towards the end that doesn't even include the titular character. It didn't really matter, though, since my kids loved the story, and these are girls who like Harry Potter, Alice in Wonderland and Roald Dahl to bits. We usually read before bedtime, but since it's was a Saturday when we finished, they wanted to read during the day. So that a strong recommendation unto itself.
Elton John and Alexis Petridis's Me is a pretty marvelous (auto)biography. While Elton John has lived a life that's almost larger than any life can possibly be, there's a great deal of personality in this book. He's candid about his failings, and instead of pointing the finger he more often than not takes a good look in the mirror. He comes off as wonderfully humane, not a two-dimensional product of a writer's team that is scared of tarnishing a reputation. The book is chock-full of self-deprecation and introspection, and since it's seeped in sarcasm and irony, it succeeds in being funny and truthful at the same time, which is not an easy feat to accomplish.
The chapters on how he lost many friends to AIDS were the most gut-wrenching, and I read those through listening to The Last Song on repeat. His take on fame and the bubble in which one lives is levelheaded, and taking into consideration his extravagant drug use, alcoholism and consumerism, is clearly that of a person who's learned through trial and error. There's a huge amount of namedropping, which isn't the least surprising if you're a rock star who has lived through the golden age of modern rock music, and there are some amazing anecdotes (my favorite funny moment was how he and Rod Steward always pranked each other, and how it once escalated in Elton John calling his people to shoot down that blimp), but the most memorable was his depiction of the moment he finally met Elvis Presley face-to-face, and how shocked and saddened he was to meet the King in such disarray. The book succeeds in this so well: it's a joy to read because it flows so well, and there are laugh-out-loud funny bits almost on every page, and yet it's able to make a complete U-turn and get serious. Elton John's infectuously exuberant personality shines through the page, and Petridis's writing and editing skills obviously contribute to this greatly.
And finally, there are so many artists and songs mentioned in the book that makes it a treasure trove for music fans. I for one will be eternally grateful to have learned about Beth Nielsen Chapman's beautiful Sand and Water.
I liked The Handmaid's Tale. It took its time to deliberate, make us want more and then leave us hanging, holding our breath. Its atmosphere was claustrophobic, its implications were vague enough to let us fill in the rest with our worst nightmares. Gilead was beyond a nightmare. It was my personal inferno.
It worked so effectively in part because it was structured around a single voice, that of Offred's. She couldn't know everything, so we wouldn't have to know everything about Gilead. This made everything feel authentic.
Now that The Testaments is here, and after having read it, I am merely shaking my head as sagely as I can. Part of me dreaded what was coming when the book was announced, but I tried to play down that streak in me that was skeptical. The first season of the TV show was excellent, quite successful in capturing the hopelessness of the book, and it wasn't Atwood's fault the show took a nosedive after that.
There are several reviews that describe The Testaments as either fan fiction or YA literature. Those hit pretty close to home, I think. Since I haven't read anything else from Atwood I can't compare to what her other books might be like, but much of this book felt more like The Hunger Games, and while that book has its place as an entertaining dystopian adventure, it's not a connection I was expecting to make. Yet there it is. On one hand I applaud Atwood for her courage to completely deconstruct the first novel and go in a completely new direction with this latter book, but on the other it's a path taken by so many apparently lesser writers it's somewhat beguiling as to what the point of the book might actually be. And then again it's understandable: there's no point to write a sequel in the spirit of the original, since it stands so well on its own that it would be even harder to justify the sequel's existence.
Since I find the TV show rather banal in how it has morphed into an action-adventure with some shocking social commentary for frills, I'm disappointed yet not altogether surprised to find that The Testaments has followed in its wake. It's predictable, the characters waltz around (and in and out of) Gilead as carefree as ever, and even the occasional sparks of Aunt Lydia's personality can't rescue it from itself.
This review was written in September 2016. I've reread the collection three times since, the last time upon learning of Merwin's death in March 2019.
In part dictated to his wife Paula when he was losing his eyesight, William Stanley Merwin's new book of poetry is a heartbreaking elegy to the evanescence of life, a celebration of a life lived through love, and a bittersweet journey into the world of darkness from the world of light and books.
Who knows, maybe Merwin, who turns 89 later this month (on 30 September), will have more poems to give us still, but reading this book is like reading his farewell. From a man who has been remarkably consistent in his art, and even in the company of his award-winning The Shadow of Sirius (2008) and the collected Migration (2004), his latest collection, Garden Time (2016) might be his most breathtaking work yet. In its 96 pages and 61 poems, starting with “The Morning” (which could just as well be “The Mourning” it sounds alike when read aloud), he lets us enter the titular garden, their garden, the place of comfort, quietude, peace and inspiration for him, as if he was saying his last goodbyes to it. And by the time we leave with the last poem, “The Present”, we have realized that for him, those images and memories are a goodbye already due to the loss of his eyesight. “I forget that,” as he writes in “December Morning,”
I am almost blind and I see the piles
of books I was going to read next
there they wait like statues of sitting dogs
faithful to someone they used to know
but happiness has a shape made of air
it was never owned by anyone
it comes when it will in its own time
I looked at that old 3-star rating and wondered how I could have given this such a low one, especially after Pet Sematary (another 3-starrer) blew me away after a reread (review on my blog). Some great characterization, backstory and atmospheric thrills, but it kind of wore me down in the end, when I just didn't care anymore. More thoughts on my blog.
“So remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don't just give up. Unleash your imagination. Shape the future.”
As always, Stephen, with your intelligence, eloquence, wit and empathy, you have floored me. You will be missed. Couldn't look at your picture at the end of the book without breaking into tears.
In the end there was only the clock, and the markers, which became eroded and nameless in the passage of time.
Louis Creed, a doctor, moves with his family to Bangkor, Maine. Next to their house there's a path to a pet cemetery. When tragedy pays a visit, he soon finds it holds powers beyond his wild nightmares.
I read Pet Sematary in my teens. I hadn't read much of King by then, and in a burst I read through his most famous work, mainly consisting of the early novels Cujo, Carrie, The Shining and, of course, Pet Sematary. The Shining was all the rage, no small part thanks to Kubrick's film. It was cool to read King then, and having a copy of The Shining in the house made you cool. But later as my tastes swerved, I left him behind. For many years. I think it was Doctor Sleep (2013) that brought me back. I read 11/22/63 (2011) and enjoyed it, then the Bill Hodges trilogy, and enjoyed it. I even tried The Dark Tower, something I had avoided because I remember King and me as quite unequivocally hit-and-miss. (Didn't get too far with that project, though.)
Then, during Halloween in 2018, I don't know where exactly I got the bug from, I wanted to go through some of his early classics. Maybe I just miraculously had some space in my reading schedule, and perhaps it was just the right kind of reading. And it was Halloween! This was to be the designated time to do just that.
Interestingly enough, although I remembered much of the plot, I had also forgotten some surprisingly elemental components of the story, sometimes so much so that I had no idea what would happen next. Ideal circumstances, then, if you ask me. And now, years later, as a father of three young girls, the novel opened up as a completely different experience. In my youth I was looking for the thrill, but this time, in a more meditative frame of mind (death is the topic of one of my favorite books in recent years, Frank Ostaseski's The Five Invitations), I was above all stricken by the depth of King's writing: the prose is cruel, the sense of anguish and loss so thick you could touch it, the grief so heartbreaking I broke down in tears several times. I was certainly not expecting to find Pet Sematary so heart-wrenching, brilliant, meditative and profound as it turned out to be. The bottomless darkness of losing a child, the endless what ifs that drive you mad, the heaviness of the wheel of time that you'd love nothing more than to overtake and coerce to go backwards. The emptiness, the bitterness.
Everything that follows in the story, the macabre, the horrible, the gruesome, comes from the notion of what it is like to feel so lost in one's grief that if one had the chance to tinker with the laws of nature and the universe, what would compel one not to do so? In this context I understand King's own statement, in the Introduction to the 2014 reissue by Scribner, that he considers it the most frightening book he's ever written. “Put simply,” he writes, “I was horrified by what I had written and the conclusions I'd drawn.” And this is the books' strength: it draws us in like the book's titular cemetery (the book draws its name from an actual pet cemetery King and his family had in their neighborhood), and it takes us far beyond the darkness we are comfortable with. Not for the thrill of it, but for the mere predestined-seeming and unrestrained compulsion. Life and death have reached their singularity, and there's nothing else left.
I read this on my Kindle, and also had the audiobook I listened intermittently, thanks to the Whispersync for Voice feature. Michael C. Hall's narration is stupendously good.
“But you know, it seems to me that reality itself has a screw loose somewhere. That's why I try to keep at least myself in line as much as possible.”
It's been four years since the English translation of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013), a welcome addition to Murakami's oeuvre. It was a sort of anti-1Q84: tightly edited and rooted more in the everyday than the magical. Now Murakami is back with another heavy tome, and while it's not exactly 1Q84-length, at 704 pages it's almost the length of Colorless Tsuku Tazaki and Kafka on the Shore combined.
It's vintage Murakami. There's always something lurking under the surface of the mundane, each moment a possible trigger for strange events. And, since this is Murakami, you know that sooner or later this stranger realm penetrates the one we're inhabiting. Murakami is so good at this that even when the watershed moment comes, he's able to readjust us in the narrative to accommodate basically anything he throws at us. A bit like David Lynch, but perhaps more nuanced in the sense that in Murakami, he actually more easily inhabit the world and it makes sense to us.
So it is that for me, Murakami's greatest achievement is the strong ambience he's able to create. You can touch and smell within the narrative itself.[1] One of my favorite moments of terror is in 1Q84 and involves a hideout apartment and reading In Search of Lost Time. There are many such quality moments in Killing Commendatore. Add to this his lovely sense of humor,[2] which surfaces at times, and you've got a recipe for a hugely enjoyable read.
But just as Murakami at his best takes us to great places, I think he gets such a rollercoaster ride going that ultimately I always find his endings lacking, a bit like some of my encounters with Terry Pratchett, where the journey is so great that when the end approaches, there's something lacking when he has to grind it to a halt. This was my greatest problem with 1Q84, and something that a less ambitious work as Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki avoided. From what I can remember, Kafka on the Shore found a sweet balance.
I wasn't quite as invested in the endgame as I would have liked, either. He takes a leaf out of Dante's book, and while I completely respect this decision in the context of the creative process and its description, that's one moment where I felt the narrative turned on the autopilot and merely sailed home without further ado. And, gosh, is everyone in the book obsessed with what Lorelai Gilmore would term ”breastage”.
Since I'm incapable of reading it in the original, I read the English translation. I wonder if it was merely my own projection, knowing there were two translators, but I felt the style changed dramatically especially during the first quarter of the book. It would be interesting to know from someone fluent in Japanese whether any trace of this exists in the original.
I think that, on the whole, Killing Commendatore is a book I will gladly revisit in the future. Even now as I'm contemplating reading more Murakami, I'm really drawn to rereading 1Q84, never mind that it somewhat epitomizes the traits I find tiresome in Commendatore, too. In short, Murakami is such an original voice in contemporary fiction that he has yet to leave me cold.
Endnotes:
[1] ”In the silence of the woods it felt like I could hear the passage of time, of life passing by. One person leaves, another appears. A thought flits away and another takes its place. One image bids farewell and another one appears on the scene. As the days piled up, I wore out, too, and was remade. Nothing stayed still. And time was lost. Behind me, time became dead grains of sand, which one after another gave way and vanished. I just sat there in front of the hole, listening to the sound of time dying.”
[2] ”The mansion was surrounded by a high white wall, with a solid gate in front. Large wooden double doors painted a dark brown. Like the castle gate in an Akira Kurosawa film set in the Middle Ages. The kind that would look good with a couple of arrows embedded in it.”
20 March,
2019
I never read any Pratchett when I was younger, and tried out The Colour of Magic some years ago, never advancing beyond the early pages. Only this year I somehow found myself in the proper mood for it — I had read enough of Pratchett to kind of trust that he would probably be up my alley, only if I just had the patience.
I decided to give the series a go, and since I wanted to read all the books anyway, considered reading them chronologically to be the best approach. It would be interesting to see the development of the world and of Pratchett as a storyteller. And it would be nice to collect those beautiful hardcover editions in the Discworld Collector's Library.
I didn't think the first two were as bad as some have made them out to be, and Mort is an early classic I'll very likely revisit often. Sourcery was the one with which I lost my gusto and had to abandon the project for a while, and perhaps because I was reinvigorated doing other things, I was thoroughly impressed with Wyrd Sisters and what follow, namely Pyramids and Guards! Guards!. I'm only starting Eric next. With these books I felt I was somehow entering the world of Pratchett's fans in the sense where they so highly credit not only his wit and narrative abilities, but also the deep humanity and life he gives his characters. I think this last bit was obvious very early on, I'd say that now that I've advanced a bit further on along the journey through all the novels, The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic and Sourcery exhibit a certain streamlined simplicity in how the story unravels that doesn't hold up well in comparison to these later books I've read.
I'd say I fell in love with his wit and how much he seems to care for his silly characters from the onset, but now his writing has reacher a level on which it's no longer so much work. The returns are imminent, and they are plentiful.
Olipa harvinaisen heikko kirja. Risto Räppääjä ei osunut omaan lapsuuteen, joten sitä ei koskaan tullut luettua, mutta omien lapsien ja ennen kaikkea varsin onnistuneen ensimmäisen elokuvan jälkeen tuli sellainen fiilis, että tämänhän voisi lukea lasten kanssa. Kirjastossa sattui olemaan tämä paikalla, joten valitsin sen.
Oletin tämän olevan ehkä viimeisimpiä Räppääjä-kirjoja, sillä kyynisesti ajattelin hyvän kerronnan ja vitsien jo sen verran laimentuneen, että sarjan parhaat päivät ovat takana ja autopilotin olevan päällä. Varsin yllättävää oli huomata, että tämähän on Räppääjä-sarjan toinen osa. Eipä olisi tämän kirjan perusteella uskonut, että tästä sarjasta olisi kehkeytynyt mitään ihmeellistä, edes Suomen mittakaavassa.
Juuri tätä ennen luimme lasteni kanssa Dahlia (Jali ja suklaatehdas), jossa absurdismi, pirstaleinen ja episodimainen koheltaminen ja lapsen näkökulmaan asettuminen olivat niin paljon paremmin saavutetut. Tässä koheltaminen käy nopeasti väkinäiseksi.
Lainasimme myös vähän myöhäisempää perua olevan Risto Räppääjä ja Yöhaukka. Luetaan se seuraavaksi. Toivottavasti ollaan eri tasolla.
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.
"A great meter is no mere implement, like pen or typewriter, but a keyboard a young poet learns to master, exploring its range and subtleties, stretching its capabilities of harmony and expressiveness. Merely to accept the meter as given by one's predecessors, to write one's verses “in” iambic pentameter, is to assist at the death of a metrical form and perhaps one's own poetry. The demise of iambic pentameter as the chief meter of English poetry probably owes much to its coming to be understood even by poets themselves as an available prosodic form, a meter to write poems “in,” a Roman road, rather than as a kind of heroic adventure or even a haunted house."[1]
Melville's Moby-Dick: or, the Whale is like the “Roman road” for the English novel. It's wildly inventive, riotously funny, excellently written, has an almost mystical sense of atmosphere, introduces one of the most transcendentally fascinating characters in the whole of world literature in Captain Ahab. And above all, it's simply a great joy to read.2
The greatest novels in the English language are not only excellent narratives; they enrich the language and show its beauty. They're exhilarating, they energize, they inspire. Melville's Moby-Dick certainly fits the bill, and only McCarthy's Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) has recently come close to replicating said grandeur of reading, and in many ways I believe it's a worthy companion to this book. They go hand in hand, and for this reason I invoked Wright's quotation. Melville is so all-encompassing here it's difficult not to think of Moby-Dick as an emblem of creative writing. I think Joyce's Ulysses (1922) is the logical continuation of the inherent complexity of Melville's thought, something we might call modernism. In Moby-Dick there's a sermon, essayistic, encyclopedic descriptions of whaling, sudden leaps into play acting, multiple points of view in narration, soliloquies. And the feeling one has is that all of this belongs there and without which it wouldn't be Moby-Dick. That's a sign of a great novel: that there's no superfluity, everything belongs, every particular creates the essentials.[3]
And then there's Captain Ahab. “He's full of riddles”, says Stubb after being told off by the Captain, and that's exactly what so fascinates in him. Cormac McCarthy definitely modeled Judge Holden after Ahab, so alike are the two with their diabolical and mystical aura. They're mere men but still beyond the narrative. His grandness is Shakespearean[4] It's boisterous, energetic, mesmerizing.
The Penguin that I own is quite nice, it has a good introduction and some supplements at the back: a list of variants between editions, annotations as well as maps and images. The annotations at their very best give insight into Melville's writing that becomes essential in reading the novel. Such is the gloss on Ahab's “Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!”: “Melville remarked in a letter to Hawthorne (June 29, 1851) that this is the secret ‘motto' of the book.”
I have also listened to an audiobook version of the book, narrated by Frank Muller. It's one of the best audiobooks I've heard. He reads it a bit fast at times, but it's his rhythm and the voices he produces that make it so utterly enjoyable.
Endnotes:
[1] George T. Wright, Shakespeare's Metrical Art, 18.
[2] I know there are people who would rathe jump out of the window than read it, so there.
[3] Again I hear somebody trying to jump out the window.
[4] “I'd strike the sun if it insulted me” in chapter 36; “What I've dared, I've willed; and what I've willed, I'll do! They think me mad—Starbuck does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer” in chapter 37.
2 October, 2011
Until now, my favorite Saramago has been his 1982 novel, Baltasar and Blimunda. But that's changed with The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991).
Saramago's insight into the human nature and psychology is as humane, his wit as biting yet at the same time as nuanced, and therefore his humor as cunning, delicious and hilarious as ever. His atheism lends a satirical perspective to the happenings, but here he's far subtler than he ever was in Cain (2009), whose primary objective was to be a full-on parody, a kind of Gospel on steroids.[1] It might be that people of a certain persuasion won't be able to see the forest for the trees, but I find Saramago's warmth and compassion for his characters the stuff of marvelous literary merit and entertainment.
Saramago's keen eye for irony and the absurd colors the proceedings, and with lucid determinacy he shifts from the farcical to elegiac, from earthly to poetic, never losing us into the mechanics of the story or the theoretical narrative framework behind it all. It's a beautifully told tale full of heartbreak, insecurity and not being able to know oneself, in other words, the hallmarks of what makes us human.
As for the character of Jesus, it's too easy to put him on a pedestal, quoting Scripture with a stern face and picturesque hand-waving, because he has to tick all the doctrinal boxes of any given denomination. Saramago, however, manages to create a true personality, and it is Jesus's torment that brings him alive. There's nothing believable in an automaton who approaches life as if reading from a script. Saramago's Jesus has a distinct voice, and it's easy to feel the rough fabric of his tunic and to smell the sweat and the desert in his hair. This is a gospel worth rereading.
Endnotes:
[1] He takes on God full on, though: ”It is true that God compensated Job by repaying him twice as much as He had taken, but what about all those other men in whose name no book has ever been written, men who have been deprived of everything and been given nothing in return, to whom everything was promised but never fulfilled”, ”When, oh Lord, will You come before mankind to acknowledge Your own mistakes”, ”blessed be Your holy name, since it is forbidden to curse You”.
27 November,
2017
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.
My story begins on January 1, 1950. In the two years prior to that, I suffered cruel torture such as no man can imagine in the bowels of hell.
So begins a dizzying journey of literary ingenuity, effortlessness and sheer mastery of style and narrative. Mo Yan's Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2006) is a thoughtful voyage deep into the self, a kind of inverse Christmas Carol (1843), a chronicle of the times equal to One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) of such epic complexity it's unfathomable that Mo Yan[1] wrote this masterpiece by hand in mere 42 days.[2] I read it in 18 days, so it took him only twice the time to literally put pen to paper.
What can I say, I'm hooked. I don't care what other books I might have had the craving for, they're queued as of now. What I'm going to read is more Mo Yan. Two days after finishing Life and Death I'm already halfway through Sandalwood Death (2001) and loving every word of it. You know that feeling one everything that clicks? It's glorious, and it's a glorious thing to be in the beginning of my journey and knowing that there are six more novels and a collection of short stories to read after Sandalwood Death.
I think I'm going to have to revisit Gao Xingjian after Mo, since there is a similar burning love I remember feeling toward Soul Mountain (1989). The thing about this book is that Mo Yan is simply so brilliant a writer that it seems he throws everything at you and, contrary to all expectations, makes it all stick. It is gruesome, funny, beautiful, grotesque, philosophical, mundane, historical, fantastical, depressing and entertaining all at the same time. Not only does his literary genius shine through, it's also a very deep commitment to observing humanity and the silly things we do. Mo Yan is able to write things that bring out laughs, but at the same time he's able to make us laugh in such a way that reminds of the undeniable hardness of life, like bedrock, beneath the surface. He hides the tragic in the comic, and vice versa, alighting both processes with his immaculate style:
“‘Party Secretary Hong, from this day forward, all boars are my father, and all sows are my mother!'”
“That's what I like to hear!” Hong said joyfully. “Young people who view our pigs as their mother and fathers are exactly what we need.”
Life and Death
No one who has read this novel, which won the inaugural Newman Prize for Chinese, could ever, in good conscience, characterize Mo Yan as a government stooge.[3]
Endnotes:
My nature, which already tended to be dreamy, became all the more so, and thanks to the war, ordinary life receded even farther from me. For us boys, war was a dreamlike sort of experience lacking any real substance, something like an isolation ward in which one is cut off from the meaning of life.
The Temple of the Golden Pavillion is many things, but above all I was surprised how deeply and, as becomes Mishima, succinctly it described the war, not through presence but absence: for our narrator, Mizoguchi, the war is about staying behind, being pushed into a kind of surreal state of alternate existence.
Naturally, this sense of otherness and not belonging pervades the whole narrative on all levels, and it most certainly is Mishima's forte, something Murakami has, as well. The anxiety of existential meaninglessness, the strong feeling of guilt, freedom through an act of violence, either literal or metaphorical, and life, ultimately, a never-ending, alternating movement of these dark themes.
Rewarding yet demanding, making one poor before making one abundantly rich.
17 November,
2014
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 wait is over. David Mitchell is back! Please don't let me spoil it for you, however — I try to be as vague as I can in all that I do but sometimes it's just not enough. Consider this a friendly warning from your friendly neighborhood Anchorite.
Let's start with where I stand. I've read Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and while I respect the two earlier works, it is the last mentioned that ticked all the right boxes for me.
My expectations were, naturally, very high. And, now that I've listened to and read the whole thing, I can attest that for me it's a mixed bag. Closer to Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas than The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, on one hand it's an exuberant and hyperactive narrative ride, a flamboyant explosion of modern cultural reference, a tapestry of metaphysical mystery and larger-than-life climax; on the other, I feel it never achieves the level of the strong gravitational pull The Thousand Autumns has in terms of characterization and actual, pulsating human drama — all this despite the book being actually two books, a story of Holly Sykes' life told from different angles, the extraordinary in the ordinary, and a fantasy novel with a metaphysical war raging behind the scenes, the ordinary in the extraordinary.
What the book turns out to be is an incalculable tease for the first 400 pages, where the fantasy plot, which does take precedence in ”An Horologist's Labyrinth,” is merely referred to and glimpsed at once in every fifty pages or so, just enough to make me remember it's there in the periphery, and wondering why it is. I assume Mitchell's goals might be elsewhere this time, but I found The Thousand Autumns to be perfectly woven, deeply identifiable story, an intimate portrait, also full of mystery, whereas The Bone Clocks and its apparent siblings are harder to care for, rather inviting from me detached admiration.
Where I found the first four parts hard to get into, but it's the aforementioned fifth part that's such a high-intensity display of literary fireworks that it was addictive, finally shifting gear and pushing for the exposition only vaguely hinted at so far.
I wrote of The Thousand Autumns how ”it's a joy to see a contemporary writer most certainly not only improving but showcasing such understanding of narrative and language that his work becomes transcendental in how it transports and rewards.” While it will always take time for first impressions to fully sink in, it feels like I'm going to reserve for The Bone Clocks detached admiration: not that it isn't complex, not that there aren't remarkably beautifully written passages (The Ásbyrgi episodes are bliss, as well as the Koskov backstory), but I just felt like an outsider gazing in, most of the time. Perhaps you'll be able to enjoy it more.
24 October,
2014
it seems you must let them come
so you can let them go
you must let them go
so you let them come
from “A Step at a Time”
Merwin is one of a kind, even my spellchecker once suggested he's actually Merlin. His latest collection of poetry, The Moon Before Morning (2014), arrives six years after the sublime The Shadow of Sirius (2008), but in fact amid a very prolific publication period in Merwin's bibliography: the Library of America published the massive and beautiful The Collected Poems of W. S. Merwin in 2013, and Merwin's publisher, Copper Canyon Press, put out The Book of Fables in 2007 and Selected Translations: 1948-2011, translations of the haiku by Yosa Buson (with Takako Lento) and a reissue of Muso Soseki's Sun at Midgnight (with Soiku Shigematsu) in 2013. Not to mention that many of the poems in this collection have been published in the past five years in various magazines, and thus have found their way online.
But a new collection of poetry by Merwin is a sweet occasion. I'm quite new to his poetry, having only started reading him at the time of the publication of the Library of America edition, but even to me a certain voice I know to be Merwin's has presented itself. In this respect, The Moon Before Morning is of the usual Merwin quality. But that doesn't mean that it should be taken for granted. Instead, it's precious that he is still able to find the perfect words to describe the perfect mood, as he has been able to do for so long, “in a language I remember but do not know” (White-Eye), and as he writes in Variation on a Theme, “thank you — — for words / that come out of silence and take me by surprise.”
He writes of life and death as someone who has seen both, and the prevailing image running throughout the collection is that of a solitary frond, taken by the wind, carried to and fro. He's the sage who observes, to whom the words come to, and it's this kind of effortless grace that his writing has that makes him seem so forgettable to others but unforgettably brilliant for the rest of us. I admire art in which the work put into it doesn't show, merely achieving that level of bewildering genius in such a personal mode of expression that it looks like it was improvised on the spot. Nothing wrong with improvisation or revision, mind you, it's the appearance and impression I'm talking about.
My favourite poems at the moment are “White-Eye”, “A Step at a Time”, “Another to Echo”, “The New Song”, “The Green Fence”, “After the Voices”, “Elegy of a Walnut Tree”, “Before Midsummer Above Water”, “Ancient World”, “Wild Oats”, “How It Happens” and “The Wonder of the Imperfect”.
16 December,
2014
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
This is my third Mitchell, and I can honestly say that he really does know how to carry the narrative(s). While his debut is much closer to Cloud Atlas (the first book I read) than my personal favourite The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, the undersong of tension that he's able to weave to his stories is already there, strong and commanding.
Although I prefer his (at the moment) newest book also in terms of how concentrated the narrative is – despite the fact that it, too, carries the story through with the aid of multipled narrators – Ghostwritten is a thoroughly engrossing tale of transmigration, life, death and relationships in the middle of it. In other words, the little brother to Cloud Atlas.
The challenge is immense. The book is divided into chapters that all follow a different character, their destinies and lives somehow interlinked, in fact in a very particular way, which one will realize when all is said and done. How does one then carry the story so that it stays fervent and interesting? I think Mitchell does an admirable job, although there are some stories that didn't do it for me at all, the Hong Kong chapters for example. The mysteries of consciousness is the one topic with which Mitchell makes the most out of not only the story but his skill as a writer, and I think the theme works better here than it does in Cloud Atlas, although it might be I'm mixing too much of the film with the book.
In retrospect, the intertextuality between this and Cloud Atlas manages to deepen both works.
6 February,
2014