→ April 6, 2008
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Kafka on the Shore.

Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami’s most recent novel, wasn’t quite the masterpiece that its predecessor, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, was, but it’s still in the upper echelon of contemporary novels I’ve read.

Murakami’s narrative is split into two, although we know from the start that they will converge near the book’s conclusion. The first narrative, told in the first person, is the story of a fifteen-year-old boy who runs away from home for reasons that are never entirely clear and adopts the pseudonym of Kafka Tamura. Kafka flees to the city of Takamatsu, on the island of Shikoku, largely because there’s a library there to which he is inexplicably drawn. The second narrative, told in the third person, follows a sixty-year-old simpleton named Nakata who can talk to cats and who is either a mystic or a pawn of mystical forces. Kafka is, to some degree, on a quest to find the mother who abandoned him and his father when he was four years old. Nakata ends up committing a crime he doesn’t understand that may have involved an out-of-body experience … and this just skims the surface of the events in the book.

Like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore is a mind-bender with plenty of magical realism and dreamlike passages. And like its predecessor, it has one scene of very graphic violence (this time against animals, not that that’s much easier to tolerate) and lots of slightly awkward descriptions of sex, although confused sexuality is a major theme in the novel, perhaps as a subset of the larger theme of confused identity. Murakami also raises questions about independence and fate, but like any skilled writer, offers little in the way of set answers other than a few platitudes in the book’s closing pages.

What I particularly enjoy about Murakami’s writing is the way he makes coincidence and fate a part of the novel without allowing the characters to ignore it. They’re either amazed by the coincidences, or are pondering whether it’s fate or Fate at work. Even the magical realism elements get mixed reactions, with some characters unfazed but a few always there to offer some double-u-tee-eff thoughts on the matter.

Next up: We’ve had Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist for some time, and I’ve even brought it on a few trips, but never got around to actually reading it.

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→ February 29, 2008
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Song of Solomon.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved is one of my favorite novels of any time period or genre, and since Song of Solomon is considered her second-best work, it’s been on my to-be-read list for a long time. It’s not quite the masterwork that Beloved is, but it’s still a great literary achievement of phenomenal scope, another example of how Morrison can take universal themes and express them through individual characters and simple stories.

Song of Solomon is the story of the Dead family, a black family separated by disagreement, by location, and by financial situation into two branches. The book’s central character, Macon “Milkman” Dead, is born in the opening pages, and the central plot strand follows his lifelong search for identity, although it’s not until the book’s final third that he realizes himself that that’s what he’s seeking. Along the way, he breaks with his father and forges a relationship with his paternal aunt, then reunites with his father and sets off on an ill-fated mission that harkens back to the origins of the family split. The novel uses this quest by the grandson of a freed slave to explore questions of racial identity, the double oppression faced by black women, and the uplifting and destructive powers of love.

The book is rife with references to the Bible and Greek mythology, including the unusual character names that are par for the course with Morrison, all bringing us insight into the characters themselves. Milkman has a sister named First Corinthians, named by her father by the random selection of a Bible verse, but named by Morrison to signify the woman’s role as someone who attempts to bring people together. (The apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians was occasioned by reports of possible schisms in the fledgling Christian church in Corinth.) Morrison also works in allusions to other stories and novels, some obvious, such as the way the character Circe serves a similar purpose to her Greek namesake, and some more debatable, such as the resemblance of Hagar, named after Abraham’s servant and concubine, to Nately’s whore from Catch-22. The heavy yet seamless use of allusions and references make reading a good Morrison novel into a textural experience.

Next up: The Pickwick Papers, by my high school nemesis, Chuckie Dickie. I’ve got 600 pages to go, so it might be a while before my next book writeup.

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→ January 6, 2008
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Love in the Time of Cholera.

I’m a big fan both of Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez’s work and of magical realism in general, so I was excited to pick up Love in the Time of Cholera , which promised to take Garcí­a Márquez’ style and apply it to an epic romance. The result is more the story of a man who refuses to grow up, and in the end, is rewarded for it.

The plot of Love in the Time of Cholera revolves around the long-suffering Florentino Ariza, who falls in love with Fermina Daza when the two are teenagers, only to see her reject him and marry the wealthy young doctor, Juvenal Urbino. Florentino decides that he must wait for Dr. Urbino to die, at which point he can resume his pursuit; in the meantime, he will get his rocks off with almost every woman who crosses his path (the novel claims he has 622 affairs over the 51 years of Fermina’s marriage, not including one-night stands, seemingly a mathematical impossibility for a man with a full-time job, even granting that Florentino conducted some of those affairs simultaneously), with a particular jones for widows. (I’ll give you all five seconds to glean the significance of that. Got it? Excellent. Let’s move on.)

It seems that this is intended as a soaring romantic tale of a love that wouldn’t die, that transcended the years, and so on, but that feeling disappears from the novel the moment Fermina rejects Florentino until after Dr. Urbino dies. Garcí­a Márquez (GGM, from here on out) tells us Florentino’s emotional state is due to his immense ability to love, but it seems to me that Florentino was suffering from a case of arrested development. When he approaches Fermina just hours after her husband has died to reiterate his undying love for her, he’s not being romantic – he’s acting like a self-centered teenager, tone-deaf to the emotions of the people around him. It is as if he has caught a disease and doesn’t wish to be cured.

That ending is one of the book’s brightest spots; it’s a clever and unexpected resolution to a plot that looks to be headed toward a predictable, Hollywood-style ending (they get together, one of them dies, the women in the audience cry and see it over and over again), and it includes some of the book’s best writing. GGM does have an incredible gift with prose, and uses it to great effect in parts of the book about love and sex, fear of aging and death, and familial relationships:

But in her loneliness in the palace she learned to know him [her son], they learned to know each other, and she discovered with great delight that one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.

One negative aspect I’ve noticed in other GGM works shows up again here – his obsession with bodily functions. For example:

Even when it was not the season for asparagus, it had to be found regardless, so that he could take pleasure in the vapors of his own fragrant urine.

Wow. Thanks for sharing. Good thing this wasn’t a scratch-and-sniff edition. One of the fantastic things about GGM’s masterwork, One Hundred Years of Solitude , is that it transports the reader into a sort of dreamstate, where closing the book results in a brief moment of confusion that’s akin to waking up in the middle of a vivid dream. Yet Love in the Time of Cholera continually interrupts any of its own attempts to create that immersive, dreamlike feeling with verbal tritones about urine, feces, vomit, or semen.

By tying up the romance story and fading out the various little subplots one by one, GGM leaves the reader with a satisfying ending that’s not unrealistically happy (one of the subplots ends very badly, although it’s brushed off a bit in the broader context). The problem is the meat of the book, where the reader sees Florentino and learns he’s not a romantic hero but a juvenile antihero unworthy of the exaltation that the ending seems to give him.

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→ September 26, 2007
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Sleepwalking Land.

When it comes to it, we take stock in the middle of our existence and ask ourselves: do we have more yesterdays or more tomorrows? What I wanted was for time to slow down, to stop like the wrecked ship.

One of the various lists of books I’m working through is the twelve greatest African books of the twentieth century. Mia Couto’s Sleepwalking Land is the fifth I’ve read of this list, and it’s probably the most abstract of the group, but also features the most advanced plot, with two stories intertwining and perhaps – depending on how you interpret the book – connecting as well.

Couto was born in Mozambique, although unlike the other eleven authors on the list, he’s white. He lived through the country’s independence and the resulting seventeen-year civil war, between the country’s first government, a Soviet-aligned Marxist government that shut all the country’s religious schools, and a pro-democracy guerrilla group, RENAMO. Sleepwalking Land tells the story of that civil war by focusing on its effect on the population, eschewing any depictions of actual warfare.

The novel contains two narratives. One tells the story of a pair of refugees, an old man and a young boy he has saved from a refugee camp, who take up shelter in a burned-out bus, where they find a suitcase containing the notebooks of a dead man whose body was found nearby. The young boy reads the stories in the notebooks to the old man, with unusual consequences for their immediate environs. Those notebooks tell the story of Kindzu, whose life story appears to be part allegory for the history of Mozambique, but with a focus on what has been lost through colonialism, civil war, and corruption. He is guided by a dwarf who came from the heavens to a woman named Farida, who gave up her son to adoption many years earlier and begs Kindzu to try to find him. Kindzu’s search for Gaspar yields the occasional clue but he never seems to get close to his quarry, symbolizing the way innocence, once lost, can’t be regained, but along the way he meets many villagers and acquaintances of Farida, whose stories further depict the horrors of civil war.

Couto’s style makes heavy use of magical realism, while his prose mixes the simple structures of African literature (like Things Fall Apart) with the more poetic and metaphorical style of Western literature. It was an easy read, although I couldn’t shake the feeling that a lot of the symbolism was flying over my head due to my unfamiliarity with the history of Mozambique. (For a more detailed and informed review of Sleepwalking Land, you might want to read the New York Times review of the book.)

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