Norwegian Wood (#106)

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

What I said then: 

A Japanese writer and a book named for  a Beatles song? How could I resist?

What I say now:

Norwegian Wood is a book I'm having a bit of difficulty writing about. I suspect this will be an extremely unsatisfying blog post ... or at least, more unsatisfying than usual.

Because ... because ... well, because I absolutely loved Norwegian Wood but I'm not really sure why. There's nothing about it that stands out as being particularly brilliant, but it was brilliant. I can't point to anything in the plot, or the themes, or the style that vaults it above other books ... but it is better than other books. 

Murakami is usually a bit insane; his other books include flying elephants, Johnnie Walker and Ronald McDonald appearing as a characters, men who can talk to cats, and other wacko things like that. This novel, being strictly realist, is very unusual within his fiction. In his thirties, Toru Watanabe hears a bad muzak version of the titular Beatles song and is immediately reminded of the first couple of years he spent at university in Tokyo in 1969 and 1970, and of the two women (girls, really) who fell into, out of, and back into his life. His romantic fumblings take place before a backdrop of political unrest and student activism, and is soundtracked by the music of its time. A Norwegian Wood playlist would make for fantastic listening.

I suppose the real genius of this novel is the way that Murakami is able to capture the confused moods of his protagonist. Watanabe doesn't know what he wants, or even who he really is, and I think most of us have, at some point, felt something similar. I won't go so far as to say that it's a universal experience, but during our teenage years, didn't most of us have moments when we felt that childhood had fallen away, but had no idea yet what the hell kind of adults we were going to turn into? I think most people can empathise with that, and Murakami absolutely nails it. There are aspects of Watanabe that are completely alien to me, but then there'll be one sentence that perfectly expresses a feeling I've had for ages but never been able to put into words. The hopeless way he falls in love and can't, for all his trying, express what he's feeling, is as familiar to me as I guess it will be to anybody who's lived and breathed.

There isn't really that much more that I can say, I'm afraid. At different moments it's funny, and tender, and beautiful, and ridiculous, and sad. But at every moment it's fucking great.

Cheers, JC.

about to read: The Light of Day by Graham Swift

books to go: 105

Gomorrah (#107)

Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano

What I said then:

An expose of the Camorra, rivals to the Mafia as Italy’s most dangerous network of murderers and thieves.

What I say now:

Gomorrah was absolutely dreadful, to the point that it was painful to read. For the first time since I began this challenge I was tempted to chuck a book in the bin and cross it off the list that way. Not even Jane Eyre got my goat to this extent.

Saviano is a native of Naples, a city which has been effectively taken over by the Camorra (the local equivalent of the Sicilian Mafia) at every single level of its bureaucracy. And when he's writing about the Camorra, about things that they are doing or things that they have done, then the book is fascinating. Unfortunately, most of the book is not about the Camorra, but about Roberto Saviano's reaction to living in a Camorra-infested city. Saviano obviously believes himself part-poet, part-prophet, part-philosopher, and the majority of the book is taken up with self-important, pseudo-psychological blather about the meaning of what's being described. It's completely insufferable.

Let me give an example of what I mean. After a chapter detailing a war between rival Camorra clans (a chapter that consists almost entirely of a massive list of dead men's names, with no context given ... but that's another complaint), Saviano writes this: "It was as if I had an indefinable odor on me. Like the smell that permeates your clothing when you go to one of those fried-food places. When you leave, the smell gradually becomes less noticeable, blending with the poison of car exhaust, but it's still there. You can take countless showers, soak for hours in heavily perfumed bath salts and oils, but you can't get rid of it. And not because --- like the sweat of a rapist --- it has penetrated your flesh, but because you realise it was already inside you. As if it were emanating from a dormant gland that all of a sudden started secreting, activated more by a sensation of truth than of fear. As if something inside your body were able to tell when you are staring at the truth, perceiving it with all your senses, with no mediation."

A couple of things about this passage (and seriously, there are hundreds just like it scattered throughout the book): the observant among you might have noticed that it's not about anything! The whole passage is a metaphor (it starts "It was as if I had...") with not one, but two similes ("like the smell that permeates your clothing" and "like the sweat of a rapist") contained inside the metaphor! That's just horrendous writing, confusing as hell ... and worse, it's completely devoid of content. What does the Camorra have to do with the above passage? Not a god-damn thing. And that's not even mentioning the bizarrely melodramatic language, which goes past 'so bad it's good' and ends up back at 'dreadful' again. "Like the sweat of a rapist [...] it has penetrated your flesh." Seriously, Roberto? SERIOUSLY?!?!?

The shame of it is, that when Saviano actually has something to say, it's worth listening to. The best moments of the book are the moments of actual reportage, when he's simply telling a tale, rather than commenting on it. There's the enthusiastic Camorrista who uses his connections to travel to Russia for an audience with his hero Mikhael Kalashnikov, designer of the AK-47. Or the teenage kids who drive trucks of toxic waste to illegal dumpsites because ordinary truckers won't go near them, then boast of their bravery. Or the junkie girl who revives her overdosing boyfriend by laying a handkerchief across his face and urinating on it (don't ask me how that worked ... but apparently it did). If Saviano had reported the facts, rather than insisting on intruding on them, he could have written a hell of a book. As is, unfortunately, you have to slog through endless BS to get to the good stuff.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
books to go: 106

The Magic Toyshop (#108)

The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter

What I said then:

All I really know about her is that many many people have insisted that I read her. I hope they know me well. 

What I say now:

All those people, they know me ... okay.

Melanie, fifteen years old, wakes up in the middle of the night while her parents are on an overseas trip, having left her and her siblings in the care of a nanny. She sneaks into her parents' bedroom, takes out her mother's wedding dress, puts it on, goes out into the moonlit garden and promptly locks herself out of the house. She takes the dress off and, naked, climbs a tree to her second storey window, dragging the dress behind her. When she finally forces her way back inside, the dress is torn to shreds. At that moment, on the other side of the world, her parents die in a plane crash.

Thus runs the first chapter of The Magic Toyshop, and it's an incredible piece of writing. Melanie's disordered thinking as she decides to try the dress on, as though she's trying on the idea of growing into a woman, is rendered with a panache that belies its subtlety. And when Melanie wanders the night-time house, and goes out into the garden, Carter's writing makes everything alive in a way that's nearly impossible to describe. She doesn't write what the stairs, or the lawn, or the nanny's cat look like; she writes what they think. Everything, even inanimate objects, seem to have their own opinions, their own agenda. Simply, there is magic in the air, animating everything. It's a really wonderful chapter, and an amazing start to a book. Unfortunately ...

After her parents' deaths, Melanie, along with her younger brother Jonathan and baby sister Victoria, are sent to live with their uncle and his family in London. Uncle Phillip owns a bizarre toyshop, and makes all his products himself in the basement, but the toys and puppets he crafts are the only thing he loves: he is a cold despot over his household. His Irish wife, Aunt Margaret, was struck dumb on her wedding day, and has never said a word since. Her brothers Francie, a kind man who plays the fiddle, and Finn, a scruffy vagabond with an imp's eyes and roving hands, live with them as well.

And the bulk of the novel consists of Melanie's impressions of her new situation and Finn's attempts to seduce her, which swing from indifferent to passionately sincere. But after we reached the toyshop, it was difficult to really care about anything. Every character but Melanie felt crudely drawn; the curious vividness which animated everything in the first chapter dies away (even though the puppets, Halloween masks and wooden toys that stock the shop should have been easy to bring to life).

The characters don't seem to live their own lives, instead simply going through the motions, pulled hither and thither by the author to suit her needs. Some will argue that's the point, that Carter is making puppets out of her characters because that is what Uncle Phillip (the villain of the piece) is trying to do to those under his thumb. Which is all well and good, and wonderfully clever, but if in trying to do something literary and clever an author causes me to lose interest in their story, I'd say they've got their priorities all wrong.

Carter is clearly an incredible wordsmith, and I'd be interested in reading some of her later (I'm told, maturer) works - The Magic Toyshop was her second published novel - but this one left me cold. Which, after the revelatory first chapter, was a damn shame.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano
books to go: 107

The Children of Húrin (#109)

The Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien

What I said then:

This smells like a cynical cash-in, but I bought it, so it obviously worked on me.

What I say now:

This might be a heretical notion to a lot of my fellow geeks, but I think Middle-Earth needs hobbits to really work.

The Children of Húrin is a story from far back in the 'history' of Middle-Earth, pre-dating The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by thousands of years in Tolkien's chronology of his imagined world. It tells of one anecdote in the long wars waged by elves and men against Morgoth (an evil fucker who wants to take over the world and enslave everybody and just be generally evil and cover all the lands in darkness and stuff). Húrin, a mortal man, gets captured in battle and is brought before Morgoth, but defies him to his face, so Morgoth curses Húrin's kin.

His son Túrin and daughter Niënor, separated from their earliest childhoods, become pawns in Morgoth's revenge, living their entire lives under the weight of his curse and eventually being destroyed by it, despite their best efforts to defy him. One of Morgoth's lieutenants, a flightless dragon called Glaurung, causes Niënor to forget who she is; when Túrin chances on her wandering in a forest, he rescues her. They fall in love, marry and conceive a child, at which point the dragon releases Niënor from her spell. Túrin kills the dragon, Niënor kills herself in horror at her unwitting incest, then Túrin does the same. It's not exactly a barrel of laughs.

The problem is that Tolkien's elves and 'high' men are characters unidentifiable with us everyday mortals. They are removed from any recognisable human psychology or understandable motivations. The codes of chivalry and honour that they live by make all their actions read as though they are pawns being moved by the author however he requires, rather than full-blooded characters groping towards decisions in their own right.

Which is why the hobbits of The Lord of the Rings are so central to that book's success: being much more down-to-earth folks than the high-faluting, cultured people they meet, the hobbits act as guides and commentators to the audience. They prick the pomposity of what's going on around them. Unfortunately, The Children of Húrin's pomposity remains unpricked. I found it impossible to feel any connection to what was going on, because all of the characters were so emotionally removed from me.

This is an expansion of a chapter in The Silmarillion and it actually, in my opinion, works better in the shorter form. The Silmarillion is a curious book: rather than being the story of Middle-Earth, it's more like a book written about the history of Middle-Earth, like it's an academic reconstruction of ancient texts or something. The nearest I can come to describing it is that it's like, rather than being a Middle-Earth version of The Iliad or The Odyssey, it's the fictional equivalent of a dry, dull book about greek myths. The Silmarillion is unquestionably a weird reading experience, but I think it's more successful than The Children of Húrin, because the expanded version of the story, so lacking in emotionality, shouldn't be presented as narrative fiction.

It doesn't help that Christopher Tolkien, in editing The Children of Húrin together, has 'helpfully' provided a long introduction to sketch out where we're at in Middle-Earth's history at the beginning of the book. This twenty pages is essentially an interminable list of made-up names, and is boring as hell. I was in a bad mood before the story of The Children of Húrin even kicked in.

And now the geeks of the world will descend and tear me to pieces, I'm sure. Sometimes duty calls ...

Cheers, JC.


about to read: The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter
books to go: 108

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (#110)

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

What I said then: 

A glimpse of the horror of Russia’s gulags.

What I say now:

Well, my Russian kick is officially over: this is the last Russian book I own. And I've sure ended it on a downer.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had first hand experience of the gulag system. He had been fighting for the Russian army in 1945 when he criticised the way Stalin was conducting the war in a letter to his brother. Arrested for treason, he was sentenced to eight years imprisonment in Siberia. When those eight years were up, he was not released; instead he was given a life sentence on a new charge. It was only after Stalin's reign ended and Kruschev took control of Russia that he was finally freed.

This experience is obvious in his writing: every moment and every minute detail in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich rings with truth. It is a very simple book, which merely details one day, from waking to sleeping, of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov's term inside a forced labour camp.

There is no story, as such. Nothing really happens that could be considered dramatic. The power of One Day comes from its accumulation of arresting, hideous detail. Every prisoner, at every moment, is on the lookout for a chance to scrounge or steal anything that they can. Every movement is watched by guards, every bit of food or firewood or tobacco is haggled over and contested, and all of it takes place in cold that would, to most people, be unendurable. Allegiances can switch in an instant: a toadie can be hated at one moment, but if he's part of your work team, then he's as close as a brother the next.

One of the most striking sequences of the book has Shukhov's team racing back to the camp from their worksite, the guards running as just as desperately as the prisoners, to try and beat another group from another worksite to the gate: whichever group gets there first will be counted through the gate and get to the mess quicker. In the race through the snow, suddenly the guards and the prisoners are allies, everyone racing to beat the other work team. And yet as soon as they're through the gates, the hostility resumes. Your head reels just thinking about how adaptable those guys needed to be to judge where they stood at every moment, when a single false step would lead to ten days confined in unheated cells, with no work to keep them warm ... which in that climate, was very nearly a death sentence.

But look, there's really not much to say about this book. Its value is less that of a novel, and more that of an important historical document, for without it, the day-to-day reality of the gulags would be less well known. It's not a book to enjoy, but it is a book to appreciate.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: The Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien
books to go: 109