Despair, disillusionment, hell, reality

I like Murakami. I like that his books have libraries and music and cats, and people reading and listening and caring about cats. I love that the narrator of Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World has read Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge (a favourite of mine) three times.

But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn't going anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return.

Was that so depressing?

Who knows? Maybe that was "despair." What Turgenev called "disillusionment." Or Dostoevsky, "hell." Or Somerset Maugham, "reality." Whatever the label, I figured it was me.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is definitely my favourite Murakami, but Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is a solid second.

Two stories, chapters intersected and running in parallel. They don't seem to bear much relation to each other at first.

One thread is set in a slightly altered almost-now. The narrator is a Calcutec; he processes data for the System, and is wary of Semiotecs; he doesn't have much of a past, but there's a Duran Duran song he keeps thinking back to. Then there's the end of the world — fairly idyllic, but as with most utopias (is this an afterlife?), something's a bit off — a true sense of self seems to be lacking. To enter the town, the narrator has to have his shadow cut off; he's assigned the job of "dreamreader" and he reads dreams by sensing them through his fingertips from animal skulls. The Calcutec has a skull too; the mad scientist who gave it to him is working on how the trapped soundwaves should enable you to reconstruct memories. Both narrators (the same narrator?) grow into awareness of their realities.

You almost don't notice how odd the plots are until you try to summarize them for someone else. Despite the weirdness, the mind-bendiness, the surreality of Murakami's novels, there's something simple and sincere, completely unpretentious, about how their told. It's honest.

"I don't understand." In fact, I didn't understand. On the whole, I'm a regular guy. I say I understand when I do, and I say I don't when I don't. I try not to mince words. It seems to me a lot of trouble in this world has its origins in vague speech. Most people, when they go around not speaking clearly, somewhere in their unconscious they're asking for trouble.

Which is why, usually, I don't say much at all. (Maybe this is why I'm an editor — ridding the world of trouble one vague sentence at a time.)

Wait

Spotted, waiting on the metro platform: young woman, maybe 20 years old, but I doubt it, reading First Love, by Ivan Turgenev (in French).

I wanted to pat her on the arm, take the book away from her. You're too young, dear. Wait 20 years, then you might understand it.

The radish

A week on, almost two, I don't know where to start in discussing this book: Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev. And I came this close to crying.

[Spoiler alert.] The nihilist died! I can't believe he died. And the irony is: he wasn't a very likable person. He was an ass to his parents — and most people, really — but they have always thought of him and will remember him as a perfect son.

So what happens when a nihilist falls in love?

"Do you see, it's sometimes a good thing for a man to take himself by the scruff of the neck and pull himself up like pulling a radish out of its bed."

What makes the nihilist sympathetic is that he finds love. And it does lift him out of his nihilistic self, a bit.

But he's rejected! (Kind of.) Which makes makes him embrace his nihilism all the more! (Kind of.)

"Let bygones be bygones," she said, "especially as, to be quite frank, I was also to blame, if not by being coquettish, then in some other fashion. In short, let us be friends as we were before. The other was a dream, was it not? And who ever remembers dreams?"

"Who indeed" And besides, love . . . is a purely imaginary feeling."

"Really? I am very glad to hear you say that."

So spoke Anna Sergeyevna, and so spoke Bazarov, and they both believed they were speaking the truth. Was the truth, the whole truth, to be found in their words? They themselves did not know, and still less does the author. But in the conversation that followed each appeared to have complete faith in the other.

It's a wondrous moment.

(I can't believe the nihilist dies!)

Interesting, too, that it is the only instance, I believe, of the author inserting himself into the text.

There's an ease in the writing, in the dialogue — the story is shown, not told. So there's this beautiful love story, and another, and even another, unfolding, but all the while life, beautiful life, is happening. Turgenev exercised remarkable restraint in not waxing philosophical on the issues this novel encapsulates — he lets them speak for themselves, without passing judgment.

As the title suggests, this is a book about a generation gap. And while it's very firmly rooted in a specific time and place, I was struck by how modern, or rather how timeless, the family relationships are. The young upstarts, radicals and intellectuals, think their parents (in their 40s) have had their day. The Russian aristocracy is on the way out, the serfs are emancipated; to varying degrees all the characters see a need for reform yet still are tied to tradition. The older generation moves toward modernism as well, and in some ways more tangibly (the continued but new economic relationships with previous serfs; one father's love story transgresses class and traditional expectations) than the talk at the universities might accomplish.

Great book. If Russian literature intimidates you, if Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are too "big" for you, read Fathers and Sons.

Plus, there's a duel! (With a nihilist!)

Postscript: I did treat myself to more Turgenev last week. First Love. I first read about it at Reading Matters — a thoughtful review of an at times painfully exquisite novella.

The oyster of imagination

So I finished that little Turgenev novel (more on this on the morrow), and then I finished off that little work of juvenile fiction I'd left off, and I found myself sitting around the house wondering what the hell I'm to read next, it being the first occasion in months where I didn't have a plan, or some next great thing beckoning me — I have instead a very modest selection of somber, or at least soberingly intimidating, works on my shelf awaiting their right time and my proper attention (Bolaño! Lem! Pynchon! and more Lem!) — and all the while there is a recent nagging itch in the corner of my mind telling me, "More Turgenev," that is not eased by the most rational retort that simply there is none on hand, and I almost resort to imploring you, dear Reader, to suggest something — You who are never short on suggestions, but, frankly, more likely to leave me feeling confused and unfocused (no offense; it reflects poorly on me, not You) — when I realize it's late, time to turn in, sleep on it, something will come to me in time for the morning commute, but nothing has come but great fever upon my child, which does save me from braving the métro bookless, or unsuitably or irresponsibly booked, but brings with it, combined with the difficulty of dealing with work issues in a manner not face to face, instead a plague of other worries from which by noon I am in desperate need of relief: a respite of fiction with a cappuccino, please; when my eye should fall upon a book long discarded, abandoned, no — I'd merely set it aside awhile. I speak of The Adventures of Amir Hamza: Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction, by Ghalive Lahnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami, my bookmark at page 311, propitiously the start of Book Two:

The imperious pen departs to conquer the dominions of rhetoric, girding itself to trek the blank stretches of paper, and delivers the account of Amir's journey, painting a host of new episodes and choice encounters before the mind's eye.

What a lavish feast! Too rich to be devoured in one sitting.

Today Amir comes to a fork in the path and is tricked into taking the one by which his army surely will die of thirst; his "obedient servant" proffers a poisoned goatskin, from which Amir is saved, by fate, by luck, by chivalrous manners and in good humour, and by a voice upon the wind, from drinking.

Really. All that in just two pages.

I am faced with a fresh problem: wanting to know what happens next versus the encumbrance of this very big book. It will not commute easily and I'll have to plan ahead: no room for a packed lunch in my bag, I'll have to dress to wear the shoes I left under my desk, and work will have to stay at work — I won't be able to carry the laptop too.

"Divers of the sea of traditions extract treasures of discourse from the oyster of imagination, and bear forth the luminous offering of the pearls of narrative..."

A quiet life

Russians! In winter! Makes for excellent reading!

"No," she decided at last. "God alone knows what it might have led to; this was not something to trifle with. After all, a quiet life is better than anything else in the world."

Her peace of mind was not deeply disturbed; but she felt sad and once even burst into tears, though she could not have said why — certainly not because she had been outraged. She did not feel that she had been outraged: on the contrary, she had a feeling of guilt. The pressure of various vague emotions — the sense of life passing by, a longing for novelty — had forced her to a certain limit, forced her to look behind her — and there she had seen not even an abyss but only a void . . . chaos without shape.

— from Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev.

Turgenev, now, and this Turgenev, finally, because it was referenced in Orhan Pamuk's Snow. Thoughts already germinating...