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.

Mapping Nikolski

Nikolski is a remarkable little book. It's a quick, easy read. It's funny.

I can only hope that it was grasping at straws, during the Canada Reads debates, when it was argued that Nikolski was disjointed and hard to follow, that it was unconventional, that it was too much work. That's ridiculous! It hardly stretches the bounds of traditional narrative structure; it certainly doesn't qualify as experimental. What you have is two strong threads and one much thinner one intertwined, but they're pulled out straight from start to finish — the story is completely chronological, and it's always clear which thread is being followed in any given chapter.

Cartography is a running theme, not least how we map family.

Joyce spontaneously proclaims cartography as her intended profession to her high school counselor, but I don't think she means it seriously. Within a few years, however, she is mapping Montreal for the type and quality of its trash, associating it with businesses, financial records, receipts. Then she maps computer circuits.

The narrator lives by his own map:

The work is not as simple as it may appear; the S. W. Gam Bookshop is one of those places in the universe where humans long ago relinquished any control over matter. Every shelf holds three layers of books, and the floorboards would vanish altogether under the dozens of cardboard boxes, but for the narrow, serpentine paths designed to let customers move about. The slightest cranny is put to use: under the percolator, between the furniture and the walls, inside the toilet tank, under the staircase, even the dusty closeness of the attic. Our classification system is strewn with microclimates, invisible boundaries, strata, refuse dumps, messy hellholes, broad plains with no visible landmarks — a complex cartography that depends essentially on visual memory, a faculty without which one won't last very long in this trade.

But it takes more than a good pair of eyes and a few ounces of memory to work here. It's crucial to develop a particular perception of time. [...]

Noah, meanwhile, was raised on roadmaps:

The deliveryman's job, which he initially viewed as dreary, suddenly seems to him like an ideal way to map out the neighbourhood. Riding his bike, he constructs an aerial view of the territory — squares, alleyways, wall, graffiti, schoolyards, stairways, variety stores and snack bars — and when he talks with the customers, he gathers intelligence on accents, clothing, physical traits, kitchen smells and bits of music. Added together, the two catalogues make up a complex map of the area, at once physical and cultural.

All three characters are breaking with their past, stepping out of the lives they were raised in, even while desperately hanging on to them (mementoes, newsclippings, letters "home" that never reach their destination), and in so doing they are, ironically, fulfilling their nomadic, pirateering, scavenging destinies.

It's all written with a light touch, and there's a marvellous sense of the interconnectedness of our lives, what a small world it is, even while we are insular and don't talk to our neighbours.

There are also some wonderful thoughts on the archeology of garbage.

According to Nicolas Dickner, Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat" was something of an inspiration for and distillation of all he hoped to achieve in this novel. (I haven't entirely figured out what the song is about, but I started skimming Beautiful Losers a few weeks ago and I'm thinking I should soon read is concertedly.)

Political refugees get priority

That's what it said in the ad for the apartment, in the novel I'm reading (Nikolski, by Nicolas Dickner). Puzzling, but Noah makes the call anyway. It made me laugh out loud in public:

"It's still available," Maelo affirms. "You know I give priority to political refugees?"

Stammering, Noah says, "I come from Alberta."

"Okay," Maelo answers, apparently satisfied.

Annotations

Hello, Internet! How've you been? I've been distracted. There's just not enough time in the world.

I've been busy, kinda. And sick, some. Mostly I'm just tired.

I had this other little project on for a while — Bookdrum. Have you heard about Bookdrum? It's a depository of multimedia annotations on hundreds of novels. Bookdrum's set up to integrate images, music, maps, video, etc, so it can provide a richer experience than straight-up text summaries. I was invited to participate, and it seemed like a good idea and one novel immediately came to mind, so I jumped on the opportunity to mark it up. Has anyone contributed to this project?

I don't get why it's a drum. Perhaps definition 5d of Merriam-Webster comes closest: "a disk-shaped magazine for an automatic weapon." Nothing else much seems to fit as well as this, although its hard to attribute a shape to web-space.

Anyway, I worked on annotating (for lack of a better way to describe it) The Razor's Edge, by W Somerset Maugham, a book that I feel peculiarly bonded to. And a marvelous experience it was.

I realize how much I accept as given, when I read, being too lazy to understand it. For example, vocabulary. One component of the book profile is a glossary. This made me consider, as I read, whether I fully knew what was being stated. So much of my comprehension depends on context, and it's quite humbling to identify all that you don't know with certainty. But now I can tell you all about the dresses Isabel wore, and where Elliott got his shirts, and how Larry's interest in the mystics is foreshadowed in his reading William James's Principles of Psychology, and what paintings Louisa had on her walls. And the scenes are richer for it, and the characters loaded with meaning. Maugham is a bloody genius, and so underrated. Though I suppose I might say this of any author I put to a similar degree of scrutiny.

(I notice that no one took on High Fidelity, and I think it would be a blast to work on all those musical references!)

Well, right; I knew of this project before Christmas, but then there was Christmas, what with the shopping and drinking and travelling, and then catching up on work, and then I had to go to Cuba. Fortunately, the Bookdrum people extended their deadline, because then I was sick for a whole weekend, and I had something else to do. But then I worked really, really hard on it for about a week and a half. And I was pretty proud of it. Only I'm still not done! And I haven't bothered to do much about it this last month. Where does the time go?

Another crunch at work. And this vicious cold that won't go away (how can so much mucus even fit inside my head?).

J-F was away for over a week, so that meant not being able to say would you mind picking up the kid tonight cuz I'm running a bit late at work, or do you think you could walk the kid to school this morning cuz I really need to just sit here and drink my coffee for a few more minutes. And for some reason, I don't quite understand why, it meant undertaking projects that involved a deeper level of involvement, like finally opening that kit she got for her birthday and making sand drawings, or shopping for vegetables and prepping them and chop, chop, chopping them to make potato salad like mom's, which may not sound like a big deal, but with a 7-year-old it's a day long feat to boil the carrots, and chop the radishes and the pickles and the this and the that and finally to have a meal of it. Plus the need to revisit some Doctor Who episodes. All of which meant quiet was a scarce commodity, so when it came, I wrapped it up and took it to bed with me.

Ah, to curl up in bed with a book instead of the laptop. And in this way I devoured that Fred Vargas book and then The Girl Who Played with Fire. And then I found much-needed stillness in The Winter Vault, about which I have a whole lot to say yet.

Did you follow Canada Reads? Some years are better than others, and this was a good year. I actually hadn't read any of this years's contenders, but was rooting for Nikolski based on what little knew of it, and Yay! it won! Thanks to the fine folks at CBC, and for whatever contest it was that I entered, I know have a full set of this year's featured books. I've already started Nikolski, and lo and behold! it's the name of a place, not a person!

Helena's doing great, by the way. She had a read-a-thon at school today, which entailed the wearing of pyjamas and the bringing of slippers and pillows and bears and the building of forts. And some reading too. I left for work feeling very jealous. I've been a bit negligent, I realize, in guiding her reading. She's much more comfortable in French than in English, but she's steeped in English books at home. So I don't want to force the English, and I'd like to encourage the French, but I'm ill-equipped to do so. I spent half an hour at lunch looking at French primary readers and didn't do so well at understanding them. If you have any suggestions for French books suitable for first or second graders, let me know. (Apart for Roch Carrier's Le Chandail.)

The other evening Helena told me she thought we ought to be listening to music. Rock and roll, she suggested. So I put on The Clash, and we danced. Then The Clash brought out their horn section, and Helena brought out her air trombone, and I thought, rock 'n' roll, baby!

Something made her cry tonight. I don't remember what it was — nothing serious, which is why I chided her gently for crying at all, and she said the most interesting thing. "But it's not me that's crying; the crying happens all be itself."

I should go to bed. I haven't been sleeping well. Last night I dreamed I was taking care of my sister's cat at her place across town, although in reality she has no cat and lives miles further away than across town. I kinda stayed at her place for a few days, and forgot all about my own cat at my own home, and when I remembered, I felt awfully guilty, and then I carried Rosie around with me everywhere, even to work, only she kept shrinking. Someone offered me a ride home, and we made a couple stops, but then I freaked out because it was 6:30 and I'd totally forgotten I was supposed to pick the kid up at school.

Are everyone's dreams like this? I mean, banal yet stressful. I don't generally remember my dreams, so when I do, I spend way to much time thinking about the phenomenon.

OK, that's it, I'm really going to bed now. Maybe I'll manage to read a couple pages before my eyes fall shut.

G'night, Internet. I'll write more soon.

Even his silence is orderly

He's still a fine bookbinder, but he's old now, and can't do all the work on his own. I like sitting with him at the big table, with vise clamps and glue and the smell of leather. Sometimes we don't talk the whole day. I can't tell you how much I like him, I like the way he touches the leather, I like that he's neat, every petit fers and mullen and marbling comb in its place, every pot of aqua regia and myrabolan tannin wiped clean after use, every endpaper cross-catalogued by colour and texture and age, and then filed away in square drawers — in a cabinet he built himself. I like that he keeps his letters from Edgar Mansfield close at hand in a wooden box on his worktable. He collects moss and mushrooms and photographs them. People come to his door with specimens, squares of moss in little boxes, like jewellery, or envelopes of fungi from all over the world — from Bolivia, India, New Zealand, Peru. He puts samples under a microscope and draws what he sees. Sometimes he uses the shapes in his designs, carving them into the leather of the books, a beautiful effect, almost marbled. When we sit together I feel even his silence is orderly, as if he says to himself, Okay, today we will not talk about what happened in 1954, today we will not talk about what happened when my wife went to the doctor, today we will not discuss the pain in my knee or the grief that bulges out suddenly sometimes from being childless, today we will not discuss Jakob Böhme, or spores, or what the rain reminds me of. It is a good feeling, to sit at a table with a man and not talk about specific things together. He thinks and I think, we keep each other company, and at the end of the day it is as if we'd had hours of intimate conversation.

— from The Winter Vault, by Anne Michaels.

This bitter struggle between accuracy and vagueness

It was generally expected that Commandant Adrien Danglard would resolve the puzzle, partly because he was Adamsberg's longest-standing colleague, having spent years alongside him in a relationship which allowed for no concealment or precautions, and partly because Danglard couldn't stand Unsolved Questions. These Unsolved Questions cropped up at every turn, like dandelions, turning into a host of uncertainties, fuelling his anxiety and making his life a misery. Danglard worked ceaselessly to eliminate the Unsolved Questions, like a maniac who keeps trying to remove non-existent specks from his coat. The gigantic task usually led him to a dead end and then to a feeling of powerlessness; the powerlessness, in turn, drove him down to the basement of the building, where the bottle of white wine was concealed, the only thing that could help him deal with any Unsolved Question that was too thorny. If Danglard took the trouble to conceal his bottle so far away, it was not for fear that Adamsberg would discover it, since the commissaire was, by some supernatural means, perfectly aware of his secret. It was simply that going up and down the spiral staircase to the basement was sufficient of an obstacle for Danglard to postpone calling on his heart-starter until later. So he patiently gnawed away at his doubts at the same time as he shewed incessantly at the ends of his pencils.

Adamsberg had developed a theory running exactly contrary to the pencil-chewing, which posited that the number of uncertainties a single person can support at the same time cannot multiply indefinitely, and reaches a maximum of three or four. That did not mean that there were no more, but that only three or four uncertainties could be in proper working order simultaneously inside a human brain. Danglard's mania for eradicating them was therefore futile, since no sooner would he have resolved two Unsolved Questions than another two would take their place, and he would not have had to concern himself with these if he had had the wisdom to stick with the old ones.

Danglard had no time for this hypothesis. He suspected Adamsberg of liking uncertainty to the point of inactivity. Of liking it to the point of deliberately creating it himself, to cloud the clearest perspectives, for the sheer pleasure of wandering irresponsibly through them, in the same way he liked walking in the rain. If one didn't know the answer, if one didn't know anything, why bother one's head about it at all?

The sharp conflicts between Danglard's precise "Why?" and the commissaire's nonchalant "I don't know" punctuated the squad's investigations. None of the others tried to understand the core of this bitter struggle between accuracy and vagueness, but they all favoured one side or another. The positivists thought that Adamsberg dragged out investigations, taking them wilfully into the fog, leaving his colleagues trailing behind him without instructions or road maps. The others, the cloud shovellers — thus named after a traumatic visit by the squad to Quebec — thought that the commissaire's results quite justified the vagaries of the investigation, even if the essentials of his work methods escaped them. According to mood, or to the circumstances of the moment, which might inspire either jumpiness or relaxation, someone could be positivist one day and cloud shoveller the next or vice versa. Only Adamsberg and Danglard, the two principal antagonists, never varied their position.

— from This Night's Foul Work, by Fred Vargas.

Have I mentioned how much I enjoy Fred Vargas? This is the fourth book of hers I've enjoyed since last summer, and I think they're near perfect: delightfully odd and complicated and subtle characters, philosophical outlook and sly humour, and general I-can't-quite-put-my-finger-on-it charm. The stories are quite good too.

Forty rules

I had high hopes for The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi, by Elif Shafak, but it comes up short.

This is a story within a story. Modern-day Ella is unhappy in her marriage and she strikes up a correspondence with the author of a manuscript she's reading for work. It's his novel, about the relationship between a wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz, and the Islamic mystic poet Rumi, that is the heart of the book.

The forty rules are nuggets of wisdom, distilled by Shams from the Qur'an. The rules themselves do not exist historically — they are original to Shafak, inspired by Sufism.

This is a lovely window onto Islam as a religion of love. It's fairly simply told, but this veers toward simplistic, which is a shame; the material is so rich to be treated superficially.

Sadly, the writing is a little thin. The 13th-century story is told through the eyes of several characters; with every chapter there's a switch of narrator. While this helps to bring to light the many facets of our main subjects of interest (Shams and Rumi), the voices are insufficiently distinct to easily tell them apart or to cast any fresh perspective (apart from the physical one — different narrators occupying a different space and time) on them. I had trouble keeping track of them, but it barely mattered, so what's the point? (Cf the far more effective use of multiple narrators in Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red.)

I guess Ella's story is our way in to this "exotic" tale. But it takes up only a few pages, interspersed throughout the turmoils that Shams and Rumi suffer. There's no nuance to her. While I can relate to what she represents on some levels, her character does not live and breathe. The novel would be stronger without her. The American housewife simply doesn't ring true from the pen of the Turkish writer, and it feels like an artificial device for attracting a certain type of reader.

I didn't really like this book — mostly I think it's just not very well written. However, Shafak's rules offer plenty of food for thought. I've found myself talking about this book quite a bit, even though I wouldn't recommend it to anyone (there are richer texts in the world!).

I continue to ask myself: Is it true hypocrisy makes people happy, and truth makes them sad? What does it mean to not go with the flow, but to be the flow?

Laughable, maybe; but it is a way in.

One of the rules:

Live this life as light and empty as the number zero. We are no different from a pot. It is not the decorations outside but the emptiness inside that holds us straight. Just like that it is not what we aspire to achieve but the consciousness of nothingness that keeps us going.

Interview.

Solar inefficiency

My first McEwan (Saturday) was an intellectual seduction.

My second McEwan (Enduring Love)... it was love.

My third McEwan (On Chesil Beach), I was basking in the afterglow.

My fourth McEwan (Atonement) — I was confused and bit angry about it.

This, Solar, is my fifth book by Ian McEwan. I spent the first half of the novel deciding it was over, the love is gone. The second half had me reconsidering, that there might be something more substantial here, worth puzzling over and working through.

From the Guardian:

The genesis of the book was McEwan's journey to the Arctic circle in 2005 with a mixed group of scientists and artists to witness climate change at first hand. "I adored that trip," he says. "While the sculptors and painters did their thing, I just hiked around with whoever would come with me." Walking the frozen fjords with Antony Gormley he discussed landscape and imagination. At dinner there was "idealistic conversation about how we had to be different in our relations with government".

But just the other side of the door from the living quarters was a boot room. "It was chaos. There was no malice, but people were careless and would inadvertently borrow each other's stuff. Clothes and equipment there to save our lives, which we should have been able to look after very easily, would go missing, and I thought, for all the fine words and good intentions, maybe there was a comic inadequacy in human nature in dealing with this problem." Copenhagen confirmed his fears. "It was unprecedented for world leaders to be summoned by science. But it resulted in disarray and conflict with elements of Whitehall farce. So I thought that if I ever did get round to this project, I would want to write about a very flawed guy. Someone hopeless, or hopelessly self-interested."

Thus, Michael Beard, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, was born. He's not likable at all, and I don't think McEwan works very hard to make him in any way sympathetic. I couldn't bring myself to care what happened to him. Certainly Beard doesn't care much about anyone or anything — for all his abstract work in photovoltaics, I don't feel he ever really believes that climate change is a real problem. The point of him seems for us to be able to point and laugh at him, and puzzle over how a Nobel laureate can be so subaverage, so stupid, on so many levels.

Among other blunders he has to overcome, Beard makes some public remarks that immediately recalled those made by Larry Summers, President of Harvard, in January 2005:

There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference's papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call the — I'll explain each of these in a few moments and comment on how important I think they are — the first is what I call the high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.

Certainly it was a hot topic in that neighbourhood of the blogiverse that I frequented then. McEwan in his acknowledgements credits the exchange between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke, which was directly spawned by Summer's comments. (Hey, Ian, It's Edge.org, not Edge.com — this is why it's a good idea to have someone check your work.) This to say the character of Beard does have solid grounding in reality, even if it is unpopular and unpleasant.

As ever, McEwan is great with language:

The flight from Berlin was a typical failure. At the start, as he lowered his broad rear into his seat, barely two hours after a meaty Germanic breakfast, he was forming his resolutions: no drinks but water, no snacks, a green-leaf salad, a portion of fish, no pudding, and at the same time, at the approach of a silver tray and the murmured invitation of a female voice, his hand was closing round the stem of his runway champagne. A half-hour later he was ripping open the sachet of a salt-studded, beef-glazed, toasted corn-type sticklet snack that came with his jumbo gin and tonic. Then there was spread before him a white tablecloth, the sight of which fired some neuronal starter gun for his stomach juices. The gin melted his remaining resolve. He chose the starter he had decided against: quails' legs wrapped in bacon on a bed of creamed garlic. Then, cubes of pork belly mounted on a hill-fort of buttered rice. The 'pavé' was another of those starter guns: a paving slab of chocolate sponge encased in chocolate under a chocolate sauce; goat's cheese, cow's cheese in a nest of white grapes, three rolls, a chocolate mint, three glasses of Burgundy, and finally, as though it would absolve him of all else, he forced himself back through the menu to confront the oil-sodden salad that came with the quail. When his tray was removed, only the grapes remained.

I do wish I'd known before starting in that Solar is a comedy (though a tragic one, to be sure). (That'll teach me for not reading the jacket flaps!) Had I been so predisposed, I might've found it much funnier. As it was, expecting something serious, and even though I chuckled aloud at least twice, I never really found my groove with respect to the tone of the book. Maybe I just don't find McEwan funny. Or maybe it's a British thing.

(Part of me still thinks it's up the writer and his words and the way he puts them together to make it clear that it's meant to be funny or sarcastic or pompous or sincere, but the more it goes, the more I think there's some other ingredient that's beyond anyone's control. The reader's mindset definitely plays a role. This is perhaps why I'm finding Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain so delightfully funny, and why everybody in the office is cursing email for all the communication difficulties it generates.)

Despite my not loving it, I think Solar would make an excellent bookclub read. Beard's personal and marital failings, along with his social faux pas, not to mention the issue of climate change (and the role scientists, politicians, and artists ought to play), are great fodder for discussion. Oh, right, and the crime — there's a pretty big crime committed, which, even though it's pretty central, kind of gets glossed over. The ethics of that whole thing is also something to talk about. But see? There's all this interesting stuff — it just doesn't hang together well.

I wouldn't recommend this book to you if it's your first time out with McEwan, but if you've been around the block with him already, you may find things in it
that may deepen your appreciation of him.

Review.
Profile.
Climate change.
Digested read.

Chess

Chess Story (previously published as The Royal Game), by Stefan Zweig, is a great novella, with all the elegance I'm told the game itself possesses.

Chess fascinates me, but on some level, I feel I don't really know how to play. That is, I know all the moves, but I can't make the pieces dance the way I think they ought to. I played the very occasional game when I was growing up, with a cousin at the cottage, on game day at school. I sought out a few more games as an adult; my boyfriend du jour (well, three I can think of off the top of my head) would say he played, so we would, every other night for a week or two, and I was pathetic really, but eventually I'd beat him, and we'd never play again, and then we'd break up. I'd say these most satisfactory wins had more to with pig-headedness, somehow magically staring the board into submission, than with any kind of mastery of skill or insight.

(I can't possibly be very good; I still find it challenging to play.)

These days the kid is in chess club, so I'm learning terms and notation, and rules I never knew existed. I guess I'm also trying harder to see the art and philosophy of it, to know its mindset, to help her find a way in. I know that the possibilities on the board at any given time are finite. Certainly I cannot calculate them all, nor is there a need to — so many of them amount to being meaningless or inconsequential (it's not quite the same thing, is it?) that the relevant possibilities are significantly reduced. Still, I can only "think ahead" so far, and I'm in awe of the "instinct" some people seem to have for it.

Anyway. The book. The story is essentially a meeting of two players, two different types of player who come to the game via very unique histories. It's also very clear that psychology is a major element of the game — the very particular game that's the main event here, but also of their individual game styles.

One player is world chess champion. Of humble upbringing, he came to the game quite by accident as a teenager, and rather astounded everyone with his skill, because he was otherwise generally thought to be something of an idiot. He is criticized by some for his limitation of not being able to play "blind" — he has to have a board physically in front of him — and this betrays a lack of imaginative power. But it's a power game, isn't it? He bullies his way through, controlling the conditions, intimidating his opponent.

The other player also came upon chess quite accidentally. In confined circumstances a chess manual comes into his possession, and he spends his days, for months on end, poring over it. He has never played on a board, only in his mind.

I don't doubt, given the reference to the politics of Nazism, that there is some allegory here also, for the struggle between classes, or whatever else these two characters might represent, but that interests me less.

Right, so: 84 pages, absolutely gripping.

I first heard about this book from Richard: Thanks! I may search out some more Stefan Zweig. I admit I got a bit tired of hearing about The Post-Office Girl, and I still can't get excited about it, but I hear Beware of Pity is devastatingly good. Also, the recent screed against Zweig in the London Review of Books makes me want to read him more.

(According to Wikipedia, Chess Story inspired the 1960 Gerd Oswald film Brainwashed (Die Schachnovelle), as well as the 1980 Czechoslovakian film The Royal Game, neither of which seem to be readily available, but I'll keep an eye open for them.)

If this sort of book interests you, might I also suggest The Master of Go, by Yasunari Kawabata, which relates a real-life match of Go ("If chess is a battle, Go is a war."), pitting the upstart modern world against the traditional old guard.

At this point, my rambling here is almost as long as Chess Story itself. (Oh, I hope I haven't said too much and spoiled it for anyone.) Go read it.

Monomaniacs

All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.

— from Chess Story, by Stefan Zweig.

Bunga!

Being mom to a 7-year-old means I get exposed to a lot of crazy TV.

We've come to love iCarly. The show is fun and dynamic. It doesn't patronize or moralize to its audience. Often it's brilliantly weird and random.

Here's the funniest thing I've seen in ages. (Sadly, the video at this link cuts short the barrage of cabbages at the end. To see the full (unembeddable) clip, go to iCarly's cool web show highlights. This video is described as: "Fred meets iCarly — We have Fred HERE in our studio!!! And this is an ALL NEW Fred video featuring US!!!") I don't remember laughing so hard!

Mysterious inventions

I'd picked up The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares, some time ago, along with a few other New York Review Books classics, whose acquisition was in part inspired by the NYRB challenge I've been following with interest, but mostly, they're simply beautiful and very eclectic books that feel good, in your head and your hands. So it was after having chosen this title that I thought to look up the author and see if I ought to know more about this book before reading it that I discovered Sawyer spent an episode of Lost being interrupted while trying to read it. (Man, does he make reading sexy!)

There's not much I can tell you about this book. Jorge Luis Borges (to whom the novella is dedicated) in his prologue said that "To classify it as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole." A mere 94 pages of story, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it when I came to the end, but by now I've read it about two and a half times, and I find it hard to argue with Borges' judgement.

The story begins thus:

Today, on this island, a miracle happened: summer came ahead of time, I moved my bed out by the swimming pool, but then, because it was impossible to sleep, I stayed in the water for a long time. The heat was so intense that after I had been out of the pool for only two or three minutes I was already bathed in perspiration again. As day was breaking, I awoke to the sound of a phonograph record. Afraid to go back to the museum to get my things, I ran away down through the ravine. Now I am in the lowlands at the southern part of the island, where the aquatic plants grow, where mosquitoes torment me, where I find myself waist-deep in dirty streams of sea water. And, what is worse, I realize that there was no need to run away at all. Those people did not come here on my account; I believe they did not even see me. But here I am, without provisions, trapped in the smallest, least habitable part of the island — the marshes that the sea floods each week.

I am writing this to leave a record of the adverse miracle. If I am not drowned or killed trying to escape in the next few days, I hope to write two books. I shall entitle them Apology for Survivors and Tribute to Malthus. My books will expose the men who violate the sanctity of forests and deserts; I intend to show that the world is an implacable hell for fugitives, that its efficient police forces, its documents, newspapers, radio broadcasts, and border patrols have made every error of justice irreparable. So far I have written only this one page; yesterday I had no inkling of what was going to happen. There are so many things to do on this lonely island! The trees that grow here have such hard wood! And when I see a bird in flight I realize the vastness of the spaces all around me!

We don't really know what the narrator is doing on this island, but it soon becomes a love story, and then it's a mystery, and, well, I can't say much more. It's a slim novella, and the titular invention doesn't take hold (or at least become clear as having taken hold) till about half way through, but it's full of mood and mystery and musings on consciousness and the soul. And time. And memory. Love. Immortality.

Being a loyal watcher of Lost, I delighted in finding similarities between the TV show and this novella, and I couldn't help but read for clues to Lost's resolution. I'm fairly certain there is no answer to be found in these pages, but it's fun to draw parallels and theorize about the outcomes, to revel in the interconnectedness.

Consider:

- The action takes place on a desert island in the South Pacific.

- The island is rumoured to be the focal point of a mysterious, infectious disease.

- The narrator is a convict on the run from the law.

- He comes across a group of people, living in a civilized if somewhat anachronistic manner.

- He appears to be caught in a time loop.

- He considers the possibilities that these people are ghosts or aliens.

I highly recommend The Invention of Morel for literary Lost fans.

It's par for the course for me that the introduction is better saved for later. This one doesn't spoil the story per se, but it's more meaningful after having a sense of Bioy Casares' style and getting a feel for the way he transitions through seemingly different genres.

According to the introduction, Morel has become a kind of cult cultural touchstone; for example, it's referred to in the Argentinean film Man Facing Southeast (1985) as a possible inspiration for the eponymous man's story. (I repeat this here because that's one of my favourite movies of all time!)

If you don't want spoilers, don't read the Wikipedia entry on this book.

Introduction to this edition, by Suzanne Jill Levine.

Reading Group Guide.

Playing cards

J-F had asked me to pack playing cards, and, well, I forgot. On some level I was thinking, "Why would we need cards on vacation in Cuba?! There are other, better ways to spend our time."

On the whole, I think I was right. We survived the tedium of the airport; it was only once we'd reached our final destination, when we saw some people playing cards at a table in the hotel lobby, that he was reminded and he asked me, and I remembered that I'd forgotten.

On the whole, I was right. There was no time for cards. You don't bring cards to the beach, or poolside. "Free" time, "downtime," was spent napping or watching CNN. Time at the bar was spent talking. We talked. Quite possibly more than we have in years. It was only very occasionally that a lull would fall over us, and it was a comfortable lull, though one or the other of us might say, "Too bad we don't have a deck of cards," only half-heartedly meaning it.

It wasn't till the last day that we meant it.

On the last day, we check out by noon, with six hours to kill before boarding a bus for the airport. Relieved, emotionally and logistically, that this should be the first cool day we'd experienced. It was easier this way to not wish we were at the beach; easier also to wear jeans and sensible shoes. But it was early evident that we should do something more than quietly drink mojitos all afternoon.

We have 11 pesos (convertibles) to spare. We check the hotel gift shop. No souvenir playing cards, or playing cards of any kind. Against J-F's remonstrances ("We might really need another peso or two!") I spend one and a half pesos on a souvenir bookmark, for myself (I had to!). Two more pesos on a pack of Lucky Strikes to enjoy with another round of mojitos.

Let's check the gift shops on the strip. Dominoes everywhere, but no cards. (What about canasta? Doesn't the whole world love to play canasta? Didn't the Ricardos play canasta?) We've gone the length of the strip and into the town proper. We go into the shopping mall, which has more-regular stores such as locals (what few of them there are in these parts) might patronize. No cards at the grocery or the toy store.

We try a shop that's displaying an odd combination of children's books, stationery supplies, and souvenir trinkets. There's one pack of cards in a glass display case, locked. The cards are miniature (about half the size of usual). The fronts of the cards appear to be unspectacular. I believe the backs are marked "Cuba," but because of the angle I can't be certain. We have to ask for the price. About 6 pesos (~$7 Canadian).

The afternoon is near gone by now. We opt to save the pesos for a snack at the airport.

J-F spends the rest of the day fantasizing how we will defect to Cuba, open up a shop, a house of cards. (Certainly, his surname hints that he is destined for this life.) There will be souvenir cards with landscapes and landmarks, cards with beach scenes, cards with topless beach scenes, and cards depicting Che. Regular cards and miniature cards and novelty cards, for Cubans as well as for tourists.

The fantasy gets us back to the hotel, and through one last mojito. It carries us to the airport, and through a couple more hours of waiting. It rides with us all the way home.

It's a nice fantasy. We talk about it still, every day.

I learn now from The World of Playing Cards that, in Cuba, cards have been banned since the revolution.

My research into the matter has been fruitless. I find one document asserting that playing cards were quite popular after the defeat of Batista, and those featuring revolutionary leaders were traded much in the manner of cards with sports figures. A card with Commander Camilo Cienfuegos was more valuable than one with Castro (Camilo mysteriously disappeared later that year). I surmise that this fact may also play into the disappearance of cards from Cuba.

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.

The assassins

This book — Hashish, Wine, Opium — is one of the weirdest, sublimest little gems I've ever had the pleasure to stumble upon. It's four essays — three by Théophile Gautier and one by Charles Baudelaire — with a marvelous introduction (by Derek Stanford) that sets the historical, artistic context in which the essays were conceived.

Baudelaire makes the point in his essay, "Wine and Hashish: Compared as Means for the Multiplication of the Personality," that a dictionary tells you nothing about wine. (He quotes Lavater: "May God preserve those he loves from profitless reading!") You can learn the meaning of the word "wine," but you will learn nothing about the meaning of the thing itself.

Well, no need to do drugs yourself when you can refer to the decadents' accounts. Gautier describes the effects, in "Hashish," as occurring in three waves; here is his impression of the second, arguably most intense, phase:

Not more than half an hour had passed before I succumbed once more to the hashish. On this occasion, the vision was of greater complexity and even more astonishing. In an atmosphere of confused light, there fluttered a never-ending swarm of myriads of butterflies, their wings rustling like fans. Giant flowers with crystal cups, enormous hollyhocks, lilies of gold and silver, shot up and spread about me with detonations like those of fireworks. My sense of hearing had become abnormally acute. I could hear the very sounds of the colours. Sounds which were green, red, blue or yellow, reached my ears in perfectly distinct waves. An overturned glass, the creaking of an armchair, a whispered word, vibrated and echoed within me like peals of thunder. My own voice seemed so loud that I did not dare speak for fear of shattering the walls or of myself exploding like a bomb; more than 500 clocks were singing out the hour to me in their fluting, brazen or silvery voices. Any object brushed against would emit the notes of musical glasses or an Aeolian harp. I swam in an ocean of sonority in which there floated, like an island of light, motifs from Lucia or the Barber. Never had such beatitude flooded me with its waves: I had so melted into the indefinable, I was so absent, so free from myself (that detestable witness ever dogging one's footsteps) that I realized for the first time what might be the way of life of elemental spirits, of angels, and of souls separated from their bodies. I was like a sponge in the midst of the ocean: at every moment floods of happiness penetrated me, entering and leaving by my pores for I had become permeable and, down to the minutest capillary vessel, my whole being had been transfused by the colour of the fantastic medium into which I had been plunged. Sound, perfume and light came to me through multitudes of channels as delicate as hairs through which I could hear the magnetic current whistling. According to my sense of time, this state lasted some three hundred years, for the sensations came in such numbers and so thickly that true appreciation of time was impossible. The attack passed and I saw that it had lasted a quarter of an hour.

Gautier's entries appear to blend fact with fantasy; they bear the typical dreamlike quality of his stories.

It seems that in the mid-1800s, inspiration was a very serious concern, to artists and philophers, but also to scientists. Thinkers of various persuasions would engage in drug behaviour not in pure debauchery but as part of a thorough study of those elements that contribute to an aesthetic.

Baudelaire's account attempts to be a more objective account of the effects of wine versus hashish; it carries an authoritative tone and is sprinkled with anecdotes. He ultimiately comes down on the side of wine: it is profoundly humane, whereas hashish is anti-social (and in particular warns those whose "temperament is confined to the splenetic" against it).

Why ingest any substance at all when you can exult in such poetry as these men have to offer!

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.

Atoning

I must be a philistine. I didn't love Ian McEwan's Atonement. And I feel terrible about it. This is the fourth McEwan book I've read, and I consider myself a fan, but I didn't love Atonement, and I prefer Saturday (and we'll see what else as I continue to read through his oeuvre).

There is much that is highly admirable in Atonement, but I simply didn't connect with it. After forgiving the fact that the novel is terribly predictable, I admit there are things about this book that are exquisitely beautiful — the story above all — and it brought me to tears.

(For a précis, see elsewhere. I'm not interested in reviewing the book so much as examining my reaction to it.)

McEwan has a deft way with some very complicated emotions, particularly not fully formed ones, inching toward being effable. And yet he is able to map them; he seems to know what parts of the emotion are common ground, what will be understood without being said, in order to describe the rest of it most simply.

Also, there were a number of wonderful maxims McEwan produced throughout the book. For example, "It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone."

I like this passage for conveying all the naive self-certainty of any reasonably smart 13-year-old:

These thoughts were as familiar to her, and as comforting, as the precise configurations of her knees, their matching but competing, symmetrical and reversible, look. A second thought always followed the first, one mystery bred another: Was everyone else really as alive as she was? For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was? Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony? Did her sister also have a real self concealed behind a breaking wave, and did she spend time thinking about it, with a finger held up to her face? Did everybody, including her father, Betty, Hardman? If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance. But if the answer was no, then Briony was surrounded by machines, intelligent and pleasant enough on the outside, but lacking the bright and private inside feeling she had. This was sinister and lonely, as well as unlikely. For though it offended her sense of order, she knew it was overwhelmingly probable that everyone else had thoughts like hers. She knew this, but only in a rather arid way; she didn't feel it.

So why don't I love Atonement the way I'm supposed to?

I expected something epic (I don't know why). Instead: the first half covers the emotional life of little more than a single day. The second and fourth sections cover similarly slight slices of time, with only the third part describing the experiences of a couple weeks. There's a certain kind of stillness required for reading time treated in this way, and the words themselves couldn't draw me into that state. Maybe, simply, this wasn't the right time for me to be reading this book.

It's the first section, half the book, that sets the stage, that culminates in the act for which the atoning shall be done. The second section confused me. I'm still not entirely sure why it's there. It's Robbie in France, retreating to Dunkirk. Conditions are hard, and one might almost think Robbie is atoning, that this is his punishment. Robbie's been wronged, of course, but this section has the effect of making me forget. Rather than intensify his suffering, it serves to dilute it — he suffered war just as thousands of other young men did. Perhaps he would not have, had Briony behaved differently, but this fact does not elicit sympathy from me.

So then, finally, Briony gets on with her atoning, late in the novel, and this reassured me somewhat. (But as a writer, she's God: to whom does God need atone?)

I think Briony's rejection letter (at about three-quarters through the book — I'd just about lost hope) holds a clue to my disenchantment:

However, we wondered whether it owed a little too much to the technique of Mrs Woolf. The crystalline present moment is of course a worthy subject in itself, especially for poetry; it allows a writer to show his gifts, delve into mysteries of perception, present a stylized version of thought processes, permit the vagaries and unpredictability of the private self to be explored and so on. Who can doubt the value of this experimentation? However, such writing can become precious when there is no sense of forward movement.

Certainly Briony's initially submitted draft was improved upon, as it's clear she incorporated some of the other suggestions made, but I can't help but believe some of the observations might be equally well levelled at McEwan. "Precious" is a bit strong. But it feels too much like an exercise in style (and not being a fan of Mrs Woolf, it's an exercise lost on me). It lacks the ease and simplicity I've come to associate with his writing. Yet, the prose has a "floaty" quality (I'm sure that's a technical term), but in a heavy way, like a wet butterfly. It's not languorous but rather wilted in the heat. There's something like a surface tension, an anticipation — the thing can't move freely, but it won't alight, trying to keep a cool distance on the hottest day of the year. In this way it remind me a little Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy, which I loved. So maybe this attitude is all very deliberate, but it feels at cross-purposes and doesn't work for me here.

**********

Days later, my opinion has softened somewhat. The several passages I've reread are quietly charming; they are not assaulting me with their pretensions.

However, I continue to believe that style gets in the way of the sincerity I've loved in some of McEwan's other books.

If you are among those who love this book, please, share with me why.

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.

By degrees

It was -8°C in Montreal yesterday, with a windchill factor making it feel like -16°C. Today was bone-chillingly damp. In Varadero tomorrow, it should be 28°C, or 36°C with the humidity.

So I'm heading to the Tropicana, where there's a mojito with my name on it. Hasta luego!