The life lived in the external or internal world of a writer

When promotional material for Cult Writers: 50 Nonconformist Novelists You Need to Know fell into my inbox, I couldn't resist comparing its contents against my own mental list of quirky writers and literary obsessions.

Written by Ian Haydn Smith and illustrated by Kristelle Rodeia, this volume covers a decent cross-section of slightly off-mainstream literature available to the English reading public. Some of the writers are better known for their poetry or essays, but all had authored at least one novel. (For those interested, the publisher's page reveals the full list of writers.)

Note: The contents of my digital review copy differ slightly from the public list (swapping out five entries). I truly hope Eve Babitz and Joan Didion made the final cut over Joseph Heller and James Joyce.

I've read 32 of them, and obsessed over several of them throughout various phases of my life (though only one served as namesake for a pet cat).

Women writers are relatively well represented (23 of the 50). Regarding language, 18 of them do not write in English. All but 12 writers are dead.

Only one author had I never heard of (Juan Rulfo).

Each entry is topped by the writer's name and dates, with a pithy descriptive label, like "Chronicler of the Weird" (Murakami) or "The Literary Outlaw" (Genet) or "The Experimenter" (Lessing). Some of these are repetitive, not particularly insightful, arguably not even accurate, but I'd be hard-pressed to come up with better options — that's a tough exercise.

The entry covers a combination of biography, publication history, and public reception — it sticks to objective fact rather than attempt to offer insight. There is little attention to any particular work, but in most cases a style is attributed to the author — "Southern Gothic" (McCullers) and poetic Confessionalism (Plath) — and their work is described in broad thematic strokes. Every entry is complemented by an illustration of the author (that's Bulgakov below, and can you guess who it is on the cover?), and some of them feature quotations.

The book is indexed (mostly people, institutions, publications, and prizes) and includes a list of key works for each writer.

But how do you define the cult status of a writer anyway? Without setting hard and fast criteria, Smith focuses on the fervour of their readership and their transgression of genre boundaries.

However, for all its focus on their work, this book is ultimately about the creators. Which raises another question: is a cult writer defined by the work they produce or the life they have lived? As you will glean from the portraits included here, the answer is: both. More specifically, it depends on the life lived in the external or internal world of a writer.

(Umm, what? I think I disagree.)

I would dispute the status of some of the writers included (and here my own biases will be laid bare).

One stumbling block for me is that I don't think it's enough to have authored a cult book to be considered a cult writer. To me, you're only a cult writer if, having experienced your work, I'm compelled to search out and devour everything you've ever written.

By my thinking, JRR Tolkien does not fit the bill. The world he created is massive and influential; Middle Earth inspires worship, but Tolkien does not. Besides, he is too obvious and too present in our culture to be a discovery — cult status is reserved for the special, beyond mainstream.

Pauline Réage authored but one book, The Story of O. She is, I think, unfairly labeled here as "the sado-masochist author," diminishing the sexual paradox of liberation in slavery that it explores and the controversial brand of feminism it inspires. While I think her novel is an important one and it enjoys elite status, the author, anonymous for years, remains essentially unknown.

Ken Kesey. Really?

And Ayn Rand. Does anyone read her seriously after high school?

But I was pleased to see Chris Kraus in this company (whose work I only recently discovered, and yes, I am compelled to explore more).

And then there are the inevitable oversights.

Smith justifies some of his choices in the introduction: "Thomas Pynchon stands in for other experimental writers such William Gaddis, Roberto Bolaño and David Foster Wallace." Even while they're all postmodernists, and often maximalists, they're quite different. I suspect Pynchon is less prevalent on college campuses today than the others. But maybe not. (Smith acknowledges, "Times are changing and so should this list.") Since the entries tend toward the biographical with only a minimal attempt to place these figures on the literary landscape and describe their significance and influence, the idea that one writer might stand for a group isn't strongly conveyed. (I would've chosen Bolaño to represent this group, because he resonates more strongly with this millennium's readers.)

Smith nods at a few other writers that didn't make the cut (I would have included Mark Z Danielewski over several of the others).

The one writer missing who, in my view, absolutely ought to be here: Clarice Lispector.

Despite my quibbles, I love lists, and I think Cult Writers makes for a great coffee table book. It has smallish dimensions but the illustrations are a lot of fun. It's not the kind of book you read cover to cover; you flip through and learn a random fact, reminisce over the copy of Cortázar your ex gave you, be inspired to finally read Train Dreams.

I'd happily bestow this book on the right college student, possibly annotated to better mould their mind.

Whom would you include in a list of cult writers everybody needs to know?

Nobel thoughts

The 2016 Nobel prize in literature will be announced Thursday, October 13.

New Republic gives a rundown of who's in the running, in full awareness that there are more factors at play than merely the quality of the work.

I've been rooting for Adam Zagajewski for several years. Because Polish poets rock. But his rank has been slipping, and another Eastern European after Alexievich is unlikely.

Adonis has been favoured by the odds for about a decade now. This choice would not surprise me. I'm not very familiar with his work; it doesn't really speak to me. Poetry's like that.

Haruki Murakami would be disappointing. Entertaining as his books can be, I think he lacks depth.

Margaret Atwood is deserving. I'm surprised she didn't win years ago, but as a Canadian she may have several more years to wait.

Ursula K. Le Guin would be awesome. It may be America's turn, but perhaps she's too genre.

Elena Ferrante would be an inspired choice, an opportunity for the committee to send a message about privacy rights, women's rights, or the intersection of truth and fiction. No odds listed just a few days ago, but now she does.

Currently leading Ladbrokes at 4/1: Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o — completely unknown to me, but he has the right geography to be a winner this year.

But the odds are changing daily. The Guardian covers some of the movement.

Chrysalis

More than a few of the reviewers seemed perplexed by — or simply undecided about — the meaning of the air chrysalis and the Little People. 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. This may well be the author's intention, but many readers are likely to take this lack of clarification as a sign of 'authorial laziness.' While this may be fine for a debut work, if the author intends to have a long career as a writer, in the near future she may well need to explain her deliberately cryptic posture."

Tengo cocked his head in puzzlement. If an author succeeded in writing a story "put together in a exceptionally interesting way" that "carries the reader along to the very end," who could possibly call such a writer "lazy"?

The review Tengo reads, of Air Chrysalis, the novel within the novel of 1Q84, could apply equally well to 1Q84. Haruki Murakami is no debut novelist, but I don't doubt that he knows exactly his own strengths and weaknesses and what the critics make of him. He also is guilty of deliberately cryptic posturing, and yet he carries me along to the very end.

Lines like these crop up every so often:

On a table behind the dowager stood a vase containing three white lilies. The flowers were large and fleshy white, like little animals from an alien land that were deep in meditation.

This description strikes me as brilliantly weird. But other lines aspiring to similar effect fall flat.

I prefer a couple other Murakami novels over this one, but I like this one better than some.

I've developed a fondness for Murakami, not for what he says, not for how he makes me feel, but for making me remember how I once felt.

At the risk of repeating myself, reading Murakami reminds me of my university days, talking late into the night, being and discovering deep and cool.

It turns out that the world of 1Q84, for all the talk of parallel reality, is scarcely different at all from, uh, reality.

The most interesting review I've read of 1Q84, in addition to connecting it to dots drawn by Philip K Dick, makes the point that it works differently on readers depending on where they're coming from literarily speaking:

I suspect part of the problem is that critics tend to focus on the fact that Murakami is a Raymond Chandler fan — he's even translated three Philip Marlowe novels into Japanese (and that dowager in the sunroom I mentioned way back at the beginning? Straight out of The Big Sleep). So they "get" the parts of Murakami that feature aloof, minimalist protagonists stumbling through the world looking for answers to their mysteries, but the weird stuff? That's just... weird. Science fiction readers, though, are much more accustomed to this sort of thing, and the first question they'd ask isn't so much "what the heck is going on?" but "does Murakami make this work?"

The disappointment I feel in this book lies in its lack of 1984ishness. A few potentially ominous signs that the character had slipped into a world not like the one we know had me expecting some doublethink, a denunciation or wrongful imprisonment for misunderstanding the rules of this world, but a couple hundred pages on I realized this wasn't going to happen.

[The novella I happened to be reading alongside the undertaking of 1Q84 was, coincidentally, far more Orwellian, and frightening for being grounded in a real time and place in our recent history. That book was After Midnight, by Irmgard Keun, set in 1930s Germany. But more on this another time.]

There's nothing Orwellian about 1Q84. Which is fine. But I feel a tiny bit cheated. Even though I was carried along to the very end. And really, I loved every minute of it.

The forest of story

How do you say "1Q84"? Do you pronounce all the elements separately — one-Q-eight-four? Or eighty-four? For months I've been wrongly referring to it at IQ-84 (because IQ trips so naturally). Maybe Q-teen eighty-four? (My daughter has taken to reading the cover by column — Japanese style! — as eighteeen Q-ty-four.)

As his doubts increased, Tengo began deliberately to put some distance between himself and the world of mathematics, and instead the forest of story began to exert a stronger pull on his heart. Of course, reading novels was just another form of escape. As soon as he closed their pages he had to come back to the real world. But at some point Tengo noticed that returning to reality from the world of a novel was not as devastating a blow as returning from the world of mathematics. Why should that have been? After much deep thought, he reached a conclusion. No matter how clear the relationships of things might become in the forest of story, there was never a clear-cut solution. That was how it differed from math. The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. Depending on the nature and direction of the problem, a solution could be suggested in the narrative. Tengo would return to the real world with that suggestion in hand. It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell. At times it lacked coherence and served no immediate practical purpose. But it would contain a possibility. Someday he might be able to decipher the spell. That possibility would gently warm his heart from within.

The older he became, the more Tengo was drawn to this kind of narrative suggestion. Mathematics was a great joy for him even now, as an adult. When he was teaching students at the cram school, the same joy he had felt as a child wold come welling up naturally. To share the joy of that conceptual freedom with someone was a wonderful thing. But Tengo was not longer able to lose himself so unreservedly in a world of numerical expression. For he knew that no amount of searching in that world would give him the solution he was really looking for.

— from 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami.

To the end of book one, the worlds in 1Q84 do not appear to be all that different from our own (except for the two moons, but maybe that's not another world after all, maybe that's the book the girl wrote, or the one Tengo is still writing). Certainly there's no hint of a totalitarian state as is suggested by referencing Orwell's 1984. The affinity with 1984 comes in the treatment of memory, and its power to rewrite history.

"Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us — is rewritten — we lose the ability to sustain our true selves."

The characters of 1Q84 are beginning to accept that their realities are "an endless battle of contrasting memories."

This novel did not grab me from the start as some other Murakami books have, but still it exerts some magical pull. It moves swiftly, almost without you realizing it, and before long is deeply engrossing. All the Murakami I've read has been dream-like, disorienting, provocative. 1Q84 is no exception, but I find it also touches on some much more serious subject matter: violence against women, but also the morality of vigilante justice (more than one scene put me in mind of Natsuo Kirino's Out).

Having finished book one, I am very grateful at this point that the whole of the story has been published in a single volume. It's not a mindfuck the way The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is, but it definitely comes across as better controlled and more mature than some other Murakami novels I've read. And I want to know more about Chekhov and the Gilyak.

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.)

A vision of the superior sofa

The sofa was perfect for sleeping, Not too soft, not too hard; even the cushions pillowed my head just right. Doing different tabulation jobs, I've slept on a lot of sofas, and let me tell you, the comfortable ones are few and far between. Typically, they're cheap deadweight. Even the most luxurious-looking sofas are a disappointment when you actually try to sleep on them. I never understand how people can be lax about choosing sofas.

I always say — a prejudice on my part, I'm sure — you can tell a lot about a person's character from his choice of sofa. Sofas constitute a realm inviolate unto themselves. This, however, is something that only those who have grown up sitting on good sofas will appreciate. It's like growing up reading good books of listening to good music. One good sofa breeds another good sofa; one bad sofa breeds another bad sofa. That's how it goes.

There are people who drive luxury cars, but have only second- or third-rate sofas in their homes. I put little trust in such people. An expensive automobile may well be worth its price, but it's only an expensive automobile. If you have the money, you can buy it, anyone can buy it. Procuring a good sofa, on the other hand, requires style and experience and philosophy. It takes money, yes, but you also need a vision of the superior sofa. That sofa among sofas.

— from Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami.

The sofa Murakami's character stretches out on is leather and, I believe, white — a tasteful decorator shade of white. Not exactly my style.

The Sofa must've been one of our first major purchases as a couple some dozen years ago, and it was complicated. It took a lot of time, discussion, and compromise before we settled on the Kalahari model (no, that's not it pictured here), which struck a reasonable balance, within our budget, between style and comfort — comfort coming out slightly ahead.

These days it's formidably cat-scratched and discoloured, so now covered, but still comfortable, if a little too large for our living space, and a little too small to accommodate toute la famille at once. I love it and I hate it and it will someday in the not-too-distant future be replaced. But I will always recall the Kalahari with fondness.

Two shocking scenes

It seems I am capable of being the kind of person who reads more than one book at a time (not including the couple books it's taking me years to get through and which I will not consider abandoned).

Even while I promised myself I'd make a concerted effort to move through The Magic Mountain this winter, it turns out that the book I consider myself to be reading (ie, the one I'd name if someone asked, so whatcha readin' these days?) is too cumbersome to carry on my commute as it doesn't slide nicely into either my purse or my lunch bag, and even though I carried it with me a couple times anyway in my hand, basically I've had enough of that shit, I don't like carrying stuff, I can't handle the extra baggage, it doesn't sit well in my psyche, so it's become my at-home book to read, usurping Thomas Mann at bedtime, and I've had to start reading yet another novel but this one chosen specifically for its virtue of travelling well (so it be one of several I've amassed lately in digital format).

So I read for a few minutes this morning, my at-home book, with my coffee while the child breakfasts and I await my turn to shower. I don't remember what I fell asleep to, but the caffeine jolts me into realizing oh my gawd he's dead and decapitated and he's watching his body be torn apart by wolves. And with this thought in my head I start my day — walk the kid to school, head down into the metro, and open my other book.

There's something very zen about my metro book — the long probable-ascent of the silent elevator, the blank office, the idyll of the animals outside the gate, the labyrinth of caves. Time to go to work.

I read again on my way home. "He spreads wide my right eye with his fingers and pushes the knife into my eyeball." Ew. "The knife sinks into my eyeball soft and silent, as if dipping into jelly." This time I say it out loud. Eww. On the metro. People look at me. It's my stop.

I don't know how people can stand the intensity of more than one book at a time, when you don't know what happens next and you can't balance your choices for mood, or attitude, it's too much of a good thing, or at least, too much of a thing, I don't think I can go on like this.

On the shore

"What is it?"

"It's not something you can get across in words. The real response is something words can't express."

"There you go," Sada replies. "Exactly. If you can't get it across in words then it's better not to try."

"Even to yourself?" I ask.

"Yeah, even to yourself," Sada says. "Better not to try to explain it, even to yourself."

I won't try (too hard) to explain it (much). I read Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore over the holiday season, finally and having made some false starts on it over the last few months. I find reading Murakami demands a certain state of mind — sometimes the willed reading of him might bring this state into being, but sometimes it doesn't come so easy. That said, once I was in it, I loved it.

Murakami's not exactly a prose stylist, at least not in translation, but he does have the occasional way with words ("Her smile steps offstage for a moment, then does an encore"). He's more an idea guy. Thing is, I'm not really sure what the idea is.

Now, The Wind-up Bird Chronicles was pretty mind-blowing. Dream-like and trippy. But now that I "know" Murakami, his style of slipstream is a literary normal that I'm perfectly accustomed to. I mean, this being the fourth Murakami I've read, the edge is gone; it's no longer weird.

It's a lovely feeling, to be swept up in this surreality, the strange interconnections. I kind of wish I'd discovered Murakami decades ago — as a university student I'd have peed my pants with excitement to get my hands on his latest. But now, as much as I enjoy getting lost in Murakami's world (and make no mistake: I will read plenty more, and I'm plenty excited about 1Q84), I feel like I've been tricked — it just doesn't strike me as all that deep.

I'm not entirely sure what makes me say that, and I'm not all that sure what "deep" is. But take for example this idea: "People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues." It's just thrown out there in a casual conversation. Sure, the character doesn't say this in a vacuum; there's context, there are references to Aristotle, to Oedipus. But the idea itself is the sort of thing you could write volumes about; yet there it is, for the reader to latch onto, or not, for a paragraph or two, and that's pretty much the end of the idea. It doesn't exactly weave itself throughout the novel as a grand theme (unless you work really hard at analyzing the novel that way).

I suppose this makes it deeper than the books that don't even bother throwing that kind of idea to the reader, but it makes me feel teased and short-changed. Maybe, even, there are too many ideas, and they're all over the place, touched on lightly, and this upsets some literary order I keep in my head. Not that I'm averse to doing any thinking for myself, but Murakami lulls me into believing that I'm thinking when I'm not. I finish Murakami novels with a "What just happened?" feeling, not with regard to the plot, but with a question mark hovering over the (pleasurable) immersive experience of reading a Murakami novel: Why did I love it so much? Neat trick. I don't know how he pulls it off.

Do you love Murakami? Do you think he's "deep"? Or just beautiful?

Apart from the talking cats, and that a guy carried on conversations with the cats, my favourite part of Kafka on the Shore is the digressions on music. The book should come with a built-in soundtrack. Schubert. Beethoven's Archduke Trio. Haydn. (I had to make due with other Beethoven trios.)

They say writing about music is like dancing about architecture, which is hard to do well. I love that Murakami has characters talking about music, with interesting things to say about it, and naturally.

"That's why I like to listen to Schubert while I'm driving. Like I said, it's because all the performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I'm driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of — that certain types of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally, I find that encouraging. Do you know what I'm getting at?"

Cover story

I finished Sputnik Sweetheart, and I greatly enjoyed it.

But at about the halfway mark, I started periodically checking the back cover, thinking: this is not the story I thought I'd bought into. Not quite.

The back cover reads like this:

Haruki Murakami, the internationally bestselling author of Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, plunges us into an urbane Japan of jazz bars, coffee shops, Jack Kerouac, and the Beatles to tell this story of a tangled triangle of uniquely unrequited loves.

A college student, identified only as "K," falls in love with his classmate, Sumire. But devotion to an untidy writerly life precludes her from any personal commitments–until she meets Miu, an older and much more sophisticated businesswoman. When Sumire disappears from an island off the coast of Greece, "K" is solicited to join the search party and finds himself drawn back into her world and beset by ominous, haunting visions. A love story combined with a detective story, Sputnik Sweetheart ultimately lingers in the mind as a profound meditation on human longing.

Firstly, "urbane" — not so much. Perhaps what we see of Miu's Japan may be called urbane, but she would be the only character with any measure of polish. (However, her style is strong enough that I find myself suddenly wanting to buy fashion magazines; I want to be urbane.)

Jazz bars? None in this book. No jazz either, except for the Dizzy Gillespie glasses and a reference to Bobby Darin. I don't think that counts.

Coffee shops? I counted 3. None serve to provide atmosphere. Twice they are invisible backgrounds for a conversation — characters go in, they talk. I couldn't tell you the first thing about them — size, clientele, are they upscale? are there cigarette butts on the floor? brightly lit? quiet? I have no idea. (Oh, right. In one of these coffee shops, an Astrud Gilberto song is playing. A bossa nova. I guess that counts as a bit of jazz. But still, this is a coffee shop, not a jazz bar.)

The other instance, K tells us he stopped off at a coffee shop for around an hour and read a bit to kill some time before going off and doing whatever. A café in Rome and a couple in Greece also come into the story but only as incidentally as the coffee shops.

Jack Kerouac. OK. There's Jack.

The Beatles — none. There's one mention of Huey Lewis & the News, but definitely no Beatles. A fair bit of classical music though.

"A college student." This is a bit tricky. He was a college student back when he met Sumire, but that was 3 years ago. When exactly he realized he was in love with her I do not know. He covers the "college" part in, like, half a page. I'm not convinced this is an accurate representation of the story. Definitely merits rewriting.

"Classmate"? No. Fellow student. They met at a bus stop.

"[F]inds himself [...] beset by ominous, haunting visions." Count the continuing, pervasive sense that something bad has happened (with one scenario in particular returning to his mind). Count one haunting "experience" — "vision" is too sensorially narrow, and denies the plausibility of its actually having happened, which I believe it did. So I'd have to say "beset" is the wrong word here, and also "visions," and I'm not too happy with "ominous" either.

All of which has made me little bit angry. The whole description on the back cover is a shoddy piece of work.

It was a thoroughly entertaining novel regardless, but I'm a bit disappointed about the jazz bars. The promise of jazz bars was one of the selling points. I'd love to read about jazz bars, I thought, maybe while listening to some jazz.

(Haruki Murakami's website has a neat section that covers the music in his books.)

The book was lovely, though. Not nearly so rich as the The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. While Sputnik Sweetheart still messes with your sense of what's really happening, versus is this a dream or some alterreality, it's a pretty light read.

"You know, I've never thought I wanted to be somebody else," Sumire blurted out once, perhaps urged on by the more-than-usual amount of wine she'd imbibed. "But sometimes I think how nice it would be to be like you."

Miu held her breath for a moment. Then she picked up her wineglass and took a sip. For a second, the light dyed her eyes the crimson of the wine. Her face was drained of its usual subtle expression.

"I'm sure you don't know this," she said calmly, returning her glass to the table. "The person here now isn't the real me. Fourteen years ago I became half the person I used to be. I wish I could have met you when I was whole — that would have been wonderful. But it's pointless to think about that now."

Sumire was so taken aback she was speechless. And missed the chance to ask the obvious questions. What had happened to Miu fourteen years ago? Why had she become half her real self? And what did she mean by half, anyway? In the end, this enigmatic announcement only made Sumire more and more smitten with Miu. What an awesome person, Sumire thought.

The thing about Murakami books, you never do find out what happened to the cats.

Impulse

Prompted no doubt by Kim's post on excuses for buying books, I woke up today itching to buy a book, and no good reason at hand. So what fortuitous timing that a store coupon should find its way into my inbox this morning!

As part compensation for muddling through a tedious project and part reward for doing so successfully (and part escape — because I wasn't quite finished with it yet), I walked out of the office this afternoon and into a bookstore.

I had a book in mind, kind of, but I found myself standing by the Haruki Murakami shelf, and though I'd had it in mind to check out a particular Murakami title next (later this year), my fingers set on Sputnik Sweetheart, and this is the book I pulled from the shelf and started reading, and left with minutes later.

The first 3 pages tell me it's about a 21-year-old college girl who reads Kerouac and wears Dizzy Gillespie glasses and falls in love with a married woman 17 years here senior.

I'd like to think it's about my 23-year-old self being in love with my 40-year-old self. She never read Kerouac, but if I am recalling correctly, my 23-year-old self would approve.

It all feels very right — it having been a Valentine's Day promotion, the book title featuring "Sweetheart," it being (at least a first glance) a kind of love story, and myself still basking in the afterglow of a vacation romance with Murakami (oh, and, hey! remember Sigue Sigue Sputnik? sigh) — that I should forsake Baudelaire, and Mann, and Casares, and take Murakami to bed with me tonight.

Wind-up

I love-love-loved Haruki Murakami's Wind-up Bird Chronicle, but I'm hard put to tell you why, beyond that it was so completely the right book at the right time.

Reading this on vacation yielded an additional dimension of pleasure: I had my own foreign, unspottable, strange-calling "wind-up" bird to provide a live soundtrack, winding up the spring of my reality on the beach. There's something extra unpleasant (in a good way) in reading about someone being skinned alive while mass tracts of my own skin are already falling away from my body and the sun continues to sear into my flesh. Time moves differently when you're in the sun by the sea, and you can lose yourself for hours at a time in your book — existence takes on a dreamlike quality, completely liberated from schedules, commitments, the ordinary; you move in a sun-drenched, alcohol-quenched haze. All this conspired to enhance The Wind-up Bird Chronicle in immeasurable ways.

What's it about? Well, it starts off with this guy, Toru Okada, looking for his cat, but before long, his wife is missing too. He doesn't spend his days actively looking for her (them) so much as he tries to grok what's happening, to come to terms with that slice of reality in which she (they) might've gone.

Then there are the women: the mysterious caller whose motives are unclear, though phone sex is one of her tactics; the Kano sisters, psychic consultants; a professional "healer"; and the teenage girl who lives a couple houses down (arguably the best developed character of the lot of them and the most instrumental to the narrator's awakening, quite possibly because she's the only one who's a real person, but maybe not).

In my books and stories, women are mediums, in a sense; the function of the medium is to make something happen through herself. It's a kind of system to be experienced. The protagonist is always led somewhere by the medium and the visions that he sees are shown to him by her. [...] I think sex is an act of . . . a kind of soul-commitment. If the sex is good, your injury will be healed, your imagination will be invigorated. It's a kind of passage to the upper area, to the better place. In that sense, in my stories, women are mediums — harbingers of the coming world.

— Haruki Murakami, The Paris Review Interviews, IV.

But women are not the only mediums in this book. There is a another psychic, an acquaintance, whose dying wishes include that a package be delivered to Toru Okada. And the war veteran who delivers the empty parcel, with his tales of Manchuria and Russians and Mongols, turns out to be more of a message in himself than he is a mere messenger.

There is not a lot of character development in this novel. They come as they are, and leave before you know it. They seem to exist only to provide Toru Okada with some reflective capacity by which to negotiate the reality of his own mind (whether it lies in a dream or somewhere else entirely), which seems to be a bit out of sync with that of his body.

Now I was enveloped by a darkness that was total. No amount of straining helped my eyes to see a thing. I couldn't tell where my own hand was. I felt along the wall to where the ladder hung and gave it a tug. It was still firmly anchored at the surface. The movement of my hand seemed to cause the darkness itself to shift, but that could have been an illusion.

It felt extremely strange not to be able to see my own body with my own eyes, though I knew it must be there. Staying very still in the darkness, I became less and less convinced of the fact that I actually existed. To cope with that, I would clear my throat now and then, or run my hand over my face. That way, my ears could check on the existence of my voice, my hand could check on the existence of my face, and my face could check on the existence of my hand.

Despite these efforts, my body began to lose its density and weight, like sand gradually being washed way by flowing water. I felt as if a fierce and wordless tug-of-war were going on inside me, a contest in which my mind was slowly dragging my body into its own territory. The darkness was disrupting the proper balance between the two. The thought struck me that my own body was a mere provisional husk that had been prepared for my mind by a rearrangement of the signs known as chromosomes. If the signs were rearranged yet again, I would find myself inside a wholly different body than before. "Prostitute of the mind," Creta Kano had called herself. I no longer had any trouble accepting the phrase. Yes, it was possible for us to couple in our minds and for me to come in reality. In truly deep darkness, all kinds of strange things were possible.

I shook my head and struggled to bring my mind back inside my body.

In the darkness, I pressed the fingertips of one hand against the fingertips of the other — thumb against thumb, index finger against index finger. My right-hand fingers ascertained the existence of my left-hand fingers, and the fingers of my left hand ascertained the existence of the fingers of my right hand. Then I took several slow, deep breaths. OK, then, enough of this thinking about the mind. Think about reality. Think about the real world. The body's world. That's why I'm here. To think about reality. The best way to think about reality, I had decided, was to get as far away from it as possible — a place like the bottom of a well, for example. "When you're supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom," Mr Honda had said. Leaning against the wall, I slowly sucked the moldy air into my lungs.

Murakami's prose is nothing special, not lyrical and poetic, nothing to swoon over. At times, particularly when physical descriptions and character backstory were being supplied, the language seemed decidedly unsophisticated. Murakami is no stylist, but the text is straightforward, and this may be a blessing in the conveyance of such surreal goings-on.

There is no clear delineation between dream and real life; they bleed into each other. The whole novel is imbued with that pleasant sort of confusion you feel when actual morning noises infiltrate the dream you're waking from. It hints at altered states of consciouness, alternate states of reality, but without overtly making a case for any such thing. It just is what it is, without always making sense.

Murakami excels at mood. And I can't put my finger on what that mood is. It makes me feel young. It reminds me of university days. Of staying up late and confessing secrets and dreams. When I was invulnerable, and more vulnerable than ever. When the meaning of life and of death and the essence of cool were palpable and coded into my circle of friends, that bottle of booze, and those song lyrics. When we actually talked, sometimes obsessively and usually genuinely, about the meaning of life. Not that the characters actually do this; they touch on this kind of behaviour in only the mildest way. My wise adult self wants to call Murakami out for relying on cheap supernatural thrills and being juvenile in his treatment of serious themes, even while I'm unable to identify any consistent themes (denying death, maybe; the power of mind over body?), yet The Chronicle speaks to some inner me, joyfully and forcefully.

(Some parts in their eeriness remind me of Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, but nowhere near as creepy.)

I'd recommend this book to almost anyone who doesn't mind if things aren't all tied up and neatly explained. (Because, frankly, I don't know what the hell really happened.) It's more than 600 pages, but it is a compelling and easy read. I've read only one other novel (After Dark) by Murakami, and a couple short stories, but I'd encourage you to jump right into The Chronicle, for it is very cool and weird.

I will be searching out more Murakami later this year.

New York Times review.

Excerpts:
The Zoo Attack
Another Way to Die

Coordinates

We return rested, warmed and sun-kissed.

I was surprised to discover that my two main choices in reading material shared the exact same colour scheme, featuring blue sky and fluffy white clouds somewhere around their middle, and both coordinated rather nicely with my bathing suit.

Spotted on the beach and around the pool: books by Barack Obama, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Marc Lévy (this last both in French and in German), and a few novels bearing that distinctive style of cover art that could signify nothing other than chick lit. The maid would gather literature left behind by guests and leave them by the elevator. I recognized only Fred Vargas (in German translation) among those authors.

I read all of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami, and loved every bit of it. Thank goodness my bookmark serves also as a a calendar so I could mark off the days and was not completely lost in time. I will tell you more about this later. (I considered leaving the Murakami book behind so other guests could enjoy it, but I'm pretty sure I'll be wanting to revisit portions of this book in the years to come.)

I started The Invention of Morel, and after loving page 1, for some reason I thought I really should read the introduction, as well as Jorge Luis Borges' prologue. I'm not sure why I did, because I have indeed learned that this is often a bad idea, as learnèd introductions often contain spoilers, and no matter how erudite they be I'd rather save the expert insight for until after I've had opportunity to make up my own mind, thank you very much. The intro in this case didn't spoil the book, but it did somehow spoil the mood.

So I turned to Ian McEwan's Atonement. I'm not finished yet, but I expect I will be before I get out of bed in the morning. It's not at all what I expected! I don't know why I anticipated something epic, but the first half of the book covers the events of a single household over the course of only a single day. There's no going back now, but I'm not sure I started this book in the proper mindset. It has, however, helped instill and maintain a certain kind of stillness since our return.

Notes

Miscellaneous
- Milorad Pavić died this week. Go read Dictionary of the Khazars. It remains one of the most original books I've ever read. The "story" is told via encyclopedia entries, with many of the same entries being reworked in each of the 3 major sections — Christianity, Islam, and Judaism — the mystery being to which of the religions did the Khazar people convert. There was a time when the problem of translation greatly fascinated me, and I worried over whether it would be better to change an entry heading and risk deviating from the very right word in order to preserve the alphabetical order of the original or to change the order of the entries in compliance with the target language but thereby tainting the impact of the proper unfolding of the narrative. In Krakow I came across a Polish version, which I treasure for its binding. I spent some time comparing translations, but I arrived at no conclusions.

- Which quite interesting dead person are you?

- Fabulous video of printing and bookbinding.

- International science fiction this month at Words without Borders. Includes work by Stanisław Lem and about Stanisław Lem. I've scheduled this issue as next week's lunchtime reading.

- The Doctor Who 2009 Christmas Adventure Calendar! Although, sadly, some treats are not available in my area.

Books I haven't said much about
- The Geographer's Library, by Jon Fasman. Don't bother. This review says it all.

- Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn. Weird and wonderful and really touching, provided you have a weird sense of humour and can get past all the freakshow stuff.

- Generosity, by Richard Powers. It's ages since I read this already, and I still don't know what to say about it. Wonderful premise, and worth talking about. But as to the question of happiness, its essence, other recent reads have handled this with more passion and guts (namely The Museum of Innocence, by Orhan Pamuk).

- The Confessions of Max Tivoli, by Andrew Sean Greer. I read this back in the spring and loved it. Very poignant. Much like the movie of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, in plot and mood.

- Platform, Michel Houellebecq. Houellebecq is very provocative and challenges my comfort zone. I quite liked Platform (I read it in March) and found the characters more mature (read: morally acceptable) than in the other couple novels of his I'd read. I think I have more to say on this book yet. I find myself rather hoping that Houellebecq has something new out soon.

Books I plan to read soon
- The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann. Under way; stay tuned.

- The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami. Because one day I was in a bookstore and I felt like buying a book, and I've been meaning for a couple years to look this one up, so I took a look and it just felt right, really right.

- The Glass Room, by Simon Mawer. Review copy.

- The Last Supper, by Paweł Huelle. I'd read about 100 pages when I realized I had no idea what was going on. A little too frenetic for the headspace I've been living in of late. But I'll come back to it in short order.

- The Book of Fathers, by Miklós Vámos. Review copy.

- The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Because it was cited by Roberto Bolaño as a book that marked his life. Plus I had trouble stopping after reading the first paragraph. (You can read the introduction for yourself.)

- Shades of Grey, by Jasper Fforde. Advance reading copy, of the US colorized version (ie, edited for spelling and I know not what else). Can't wait actually. I could use a little levity.

Slowly, like an ant

[A] novelist is essentially a person who covers distance through his patience, slowly, like an ant. A novelist impresses us not by his demonic and romantic vision, but by his patience.

— Orhan Pamuk, The Paris Review Interviews, IV.

I won a publisher's contest some time ago and was so very pleased to find the prize on my doorstep last week: The Paris Review Interviews (Boxed Set) I-IV. (The corners are smushed and one face is thoroughly gouged, but it still functions perfectly well as a slipcase. The books are fine, and their contents are priceless.)

I've read some of the interviews online, of course, but I expect the books to serve as a sometime reference and serendipitous source of inspiration, there when I need it.

(Here's an excerpt from the Pamuk interview. I remember being struck by a habit he told of, when working in the same space as he was living, of leaving home in the morning as if were going to work, walking round the block, and returning to sit down to work. If ever I find myself working from home again, I mean to try this strategy.)

I'm not really sure how to read this collection of interviews. It's not the sort of thing to be read cover to cover. Although, I'm discovering that a single interview makes for excellent metro reading, and I think I'd be wise to leave a volume in the bathroom.

I've decided to let my reading lead me through them. Since I've recently read novels by Orhan Pamuk and Graham Greene, I thought I'd check out those interviews first. I have Haruki Murakami on my shelf and I'm planning to get to it next month; then I'll read the interview to complement the novel.

Sometimes a reader too must move slowly, like an ant.