What are you reading?

[Faust]

Though the latter's not doing much for me; read a lot of cognitive psyche studies on empathy but the colloquial approach isn't getting at me in this case. Still giving it a chance, though.

A good antidote

[Mail-Moth]

^ I remember reading The Wind-up bird chronicles and The End of the world several years ago, along with some short stories by Murakami. My first impression was quite enthusiastic, before I realized that I had been mainly enticed by an elaborated narrative construction and some bizarre sequences, both hiding the otherwise rather expected thematics and purpose. Very lynchian in that sense (I love Lynch, mind you.)

[Arkady]

A good antidote

I'll definitely check, thank you.

[Mail-Moth]

Rilu, I understand what you're saying, and I'm not telling you that Murakami writes about nothing.
But maybe he should a bit more ?
Today I find it more and more difficult to read books from which you mainly retain the thematics and ideas they were meant to illustrate. The Hollow men you're quoting are not, from my point of view, just a possible reference in Murakami's novel : I can think of several other books, or works of art, or discourses in general, built on borrowed architectures - which is, after all, quite an usual and even unavoidable process. But when you end up seeing the same old skeletons of thoughts peaking out of what looks like far too much like stuff ?

I just finished Marcel Moreau's Bal dans la tête. It is clumsy and grandiloquent, most of the time, like the rambling of a drunken self-proclaimed poet with a tattered copy of Les Illuminations in the pocket of his raincoat and no work of his own yet, after years of trying. But it's a great book to me, even if I felt seriously bored more than once reading it, just because it looks like something its author needed to write. Not like the application of recipes learnt in ateliers of creative writing, not a personal work elaborated through generic methods - an impression I get more and more while flipping through the pages of contemporary novels - a routine. Writers that are writers because they know how to do books.

Not exactly new, I am aware of that. And some great works went out of it also. Maybe I'm just bored with good writing.

[Acéphale]

█ Bohumil Hrabal, Total Fears

«

Sometimes when I get up and emerge from the mists of slumber, my whole room hurts, my whole bedroom, the view from the window hurts, kids go to school, people go shopping, everybody knows where to go, only I don’t know where I want to go, I get dressed, blearily, stumbling, hopping about to pull on my trousers, I go and shave with my electric razor -- for years now, whenever I shave, I’ve avoided looking at myself in the mirror, I shave in the dark or round the corner, sitting on a chair in the passage, with the socket in the bathroom, I don’t like looking at myself any more, I’m scared by my own face in the bathroom, I’m hurt even by my own appearance, I see yesterday’s drunkenness in my eyes, I don’t even have breakfast any more, or if I do, only coffee and a cigarette, I sit at the table, sometimes my hands give way under me and several times I repeat to myself, Hrabal, Hrabal, Bohumil Hrabal, you’ve victoried yourself away, you’ve reached the peak of emptiness, as my Lao Tzu taught me, I’ve reached the peak of emptiness and everything hurts, even the walk to the bus-stop hurts, and the whole bus hurts as well, I lower my guilty-looking eyes, I’m afraid of looking people in the eye, sometimes I cross my palms and extend my wrists, I hold out my hands so that people can arrest me and hand me over to the cops, because I feel guilty even about this once too loud a solitude which isn’t loud any longer, because i'm hurt not only by the escalator which takes me down to the infernal regions below, I'm hurt even by the looks of the people travelling up, each of them has somewhere to go, while I've reached the peak of emptiness and don't know where I want to go. I know, but in the end I'm saved by those childfren of mine, the little cats in the woods, who are waiting for me, they're my children, so I take the metro, but now even the metro hurts, people go up, while others, and I with them, go down, we stand in our places, going down the escalator, then up the stairs I go again, and there in the little buffet I guiltily buy four grilled chicken breasts, and guiltily I pay, watching my hands tremble, because I’m buying chicken for the cats, while out there somewhere in Africa children starve. Even that little buffet hurts, and the busy street, with its trucks and private cars criss-crossing in opposite directions, every driver knows where to go, I’m the only one who doesn’t, even if out there somewhere in the woods my last hopes are there waiting for me, the last reason to live, my little cats, petrified, in case I never come, what would become of them, who would feed them, who would stroke them, because they love me, those kitties, whereas I’m hurt now, not just by my own little bedroom, I’m hurt by this whole town in which I live, I’m hurt by this whole world, because towards morning certain beings come to me -- beings not unfamiliar to me, on the contrary, they come slowly but surely up the escalator of my soul, and not only their faces come into focus, but also certain horrible events, just like a portrait, or a film, a documentary not only about how I was ever madly in love, but also how I failed people. So that interior monologue continues, no, I’m no longer talking alone with myself, but it's as if I'm up before an interrogating judge, everything I ever said, everything I ever did, everything is always against me, from this time on whatever I’ve been made to think about has been against me.

»

[Johngd]

I am referring to the entire oeuvre. Norwegian Wood is fine, from the ones I've read, but the more I read (The Windup Bird Chronicles, The Wild Sheep Chase), the more I thought that his prose is the equivalent of junk food masquerading as gourmet fair. You read and read waiting to get something good out of it and than it just ends.

The last week's awful New York Times Magazine article on Murakami brought all of that back.

Thank god for master moth.

I have only read the windup bird chronicles and I totally agree. Waiting...waiting for the story to end like something special and then it just ends like a simple shit story. Everything before the end was just a labyrinth to nothing..

[Johngd]

Going to try Bulgakov tonight:

[Faust]

/\ can't go wrong with that.

[TheNotoriousT]

Do not agree with any of the MURAKAMI bashing above.

Just finished the first two books of 1Q84 and enjoyed it very much from start to finish.

Up next is book three and I am already looking forward to the fourth part.

[zamb]

Evil in Modern thought-Susan Neiman

[Ochre]

[Philipppp]

Bohumil Hrabal, Total Fears. Thanks Acéphale.

I also like Murakami alot. He is a master of using metaphors in my opinion and also to write dreamy. I think it feels like a dream to read Murakami, it is easy to vanish if you believe it is true. I read six books of him and the only book I would not recommend is "Sputnik Sweetheart" due to the ending. "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" is a good start I think if you want to read something that is not as surreal as the other books. This is also in my point of view his most realistic selfbiographic work. Something which is characteristic in his way of writing is what he explains in that book, that he doesn't prepare what to write, he is sitting down and write what he thinks about in that moment. I guess that makes his texts more individual, emotional and true then if he would use his brain more than his heart perhaps? Read "Kafka on the Shore"!

At the moment I read "Autobiography of Red" by Anne Carsson.

“...some hours later they were down
at the railroad tracks
standing close together by the switch lights. The huge night moved overhead
scattering drops of itself.”

[Faust]

First comment on the New York Times article on Murakami (not me!)

"Calling him a "global imaginative force" is a nice way of saying he writes superficial American literature in Japanese. His writing is like fast food that makes you happy: nicely packaged, nicely advertised, in a flashy wrapper, a lot people like it, not a lot of care went into it, nor much thought, and it is not nutritious. His work is not in the Japanese tradition, and it is an embarrassment compared to Yasunari Kawabata, Soseki Natsume, Oe Kenzaburo. His work is a sign of Japan's descent into comic book characters ("Superfrog Saves Tokyo") and overall cultural failure. Murakami is not really a writer, and his answers to life's problems are sounding more and more fatuous. That tsunami story right after the disaster looked more like a marketing ploy than anything else. And about the tsunami he says, "we discovered hope." That is the comic book mentality, the weakness and the pandering that Murakami's work exudes. It is fast food for the mind, and good business."

[Philipppp]

To read fast, is like to eat fast.

"not a lot of care went into it, nor much thought, and it is not nutritious."

Well maybe Murakami didn't reflect any feelings to this writer who opposes, Murakami is not really a writer.

“When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.” - Wilde.

[theshametrain]

milan kundera - identity