Murakami’s complex metaphysical tale of self-reflection, betrayal, connections and synchronicity resonates with the weight of the Japanese psyche and twines over itself with skillful precision, but still leaves a stain of emptiness in its wake.

What we have is a series of elements: a wayward cat, a dull-as-dishwater–and inert–unemployed protagonist, an absconded wife, a brutal politician-economist-power-mad-brother-in-law, and a curious central fulcrum of 1930s Manchuria (or Manchukuo, as the Japanese puppet state was called).

Murakami leaves the connections as yours to plug in to each, though he does offer some occasional exposition. Meaning blinks in and out of characters’ lives, leaving them vacillating between banal nothingness (so effetely expressed as to make the reader want to slit their own wrists) and profound–if inscrutable–psychological journeys in which they make supernatural visits to hotels and witness the mass execution of zoo animals. All as Murakami tightens the laces connecting events seemingly discrete in content, time and geography.

There is something haunting and meaningless in the web of meaning spun in “Wind up Bird”. One is hard-pressed to forget that Toru Okada, the protagonist, is wholly unremarkable. His apathy runs deep and his days are mostly naps. The disappearance of his wife seems to be the central concern of the novel, but Okada never makes you believe in his loss more than as something to motivate the increasingly bizarre underworld he slips into.

The problem with this book is that, in the way that some of its characters lose their meaning, it left me feeling hollow. A kind of quiet madness. A creeping futility. There is such mundanity in Okada’s real world that without the awful, often viscerally violent things that happen to him and his orbiting co-characters, there would be no point in his existence. That is, Okada is saved by the terrible, magical things that happen to him–they’re better than the other, reality-based possibilities.

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Tags: Books, fiction, japan, japanese, reading, review

Both quiet and compelling, Groff’s imperfect but lulling multi-generational tale of a neurotic family in small-town upstate New York is charming if not a masterpiece. And the sea monster is sweet, if not profound (expect some bang-you-over-the-head symbolism).

Despite frequently-updated family tree diagrams throughout the book, keeping the generations of the Temple and Averell and Upton flocks of protagonist Willie’s family sorted out is not a minor feat. It’s easy to get lost in the branches. But for readers who are suckers for multi-generational family affairs (I am looking at myself here), the book is formulaically digestible: emotional secrets, historical ephemera woven in with mythology, madness, sadness and love.

Groff is clearly enamored with her own personal setting and background: she explains in the preface that patriarchal writer Joseph Temple is based on John Fenimore Cooper and goes so far as to bring Cooper’s characters back to life (Natty Bumppo, Chingachgook) and reworking his hometown of Cooperstown into the novel’s eponymous Templeton. This trick is more clever than integral to the novel’s core meaning.

We are introduced into Templeton’s sphere by way of Willie, a late-twenty-something grad student who is simultaneously too precocious to be believed and woefully naive. Her own personal crisis leads her to investigate the realities of her own family, realities that suddenly become more complex. Told in many voices and through many generations, “Templeton” is not without its flaws–slightly unbelievable 19th-century stylizings, a bit too clean and peachy at times, and clearly a first novel–but it is enjoyable and worthwhile. A noble first effort from Groff. Hope to see more.

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Tags: Books, family, fiction, new york, reading, review

Is there an author that you find yourself drawn to in times of over-angst?

Yesterday was one of those times for me when pressures and stress kept getting fed into me via a one-way valve until my psyche was bloated and taut. A minor situation involving a waylaid text message regarding a wedding shower and a problem with the voicemail on my mobile phone while sitting in calculus frustrated by a concept, realizing my midterm would require epic studying, irritated by a classmate and feeling ill…oh, in retrospect, that does seem like a bunch of petty but grating crap.

By the time I got home after class I hadn’t eaten for much of the day, the dog was sneezing on me, AT&T Mobile’s customer support had closed ten minute earlier, I had an overdue water bill I can’t pay due to an ongoing problem with 1st Tech Credit Union’s online banking site.

These things are petty and typical of our culture, yet they were etching a gully of grief into my soul.

Instead of booze, I reached for Willa Cather. There is something about her clean, scenic style that blasts the scum out of me. My Ántonia was something I picked up off a bookshelf once because I knew it was a classic–but it was such a sweet, joyous read. I read O, Pioneers! last year and it left me feeling the same soulful peace.

I have not yet read Death Comes for the Archbishop, mostly because I was holding out for a nicer edition than the one I bought at some garage sale for a quarter, but had realized that there, curiously enough, aren’t really any “nice” editions of this book–well, actually, Virago has released a tolerable one but I haven’t seen it in any local shops. The edition I have has a rendering of the bishop, effeminately, as if done in colored pencil by a twelve-year-old.

Just I had hoped, Cather’s landscapes and understanding (and love) of core of the American continent pre-settlers eased me into a calmed state that no large glass of cheap box wine can. The wonderful contrast of the Roman Catholic politic against the Mexican-and-Native-American southwest in the mid-19th century is fabulous. Just the description of a midday meal in a hidden pueblo village: frijoles with chili, goat milk, fresh cheese, fresh apples–that was enough to calm me in its immediate sensuality.

Cather’s biography has always sounded difficult to me, and I would love to travel back in time and comfort her; or perhaps I will be so fortunate as to meet her on the fields of asphodel after I too am a shade.

Tags: reading

I participate in LibraryThing’s Tuesday Thingers group — a weekly blogging exercise. This week’s question:

Today’s question: Cataloging sources. What cataloging sources do you use most? Any particular reason? Any idiosyncratic choices, or foreign sources, or sources you like better than others? Are you able to find most things through LT’s almost 700 sources?

With respect to this I am entirely without anything useful to say. I leave the little Amazon.com radio button checked and do my adding and searching using their data. Say what you will, that Amazon is the evil empire or Not to be Trusted, but their data is consistently valid for my purposes. I have to hand-enter anything without an ISBN (my old books), generally. Some books I’ve given up on entering altogether, because I am lazy and whenever I hand-enter, it doesn’t feel normalized.

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This book nearly ruined me for all other books. Not from joy. Not from marvel. But sheer exhaustion. Its scope is so immense and foreign (to me, an ingoramus of Indian mid-century politics), its symbolism so constant and deep that instead of the thrill of discovery I turned furtive and avoided its clutches. I could only pound through a dozen pages in a sitting. Every sentence so dripping with meaning, every setting and object multi-dimensionally important. I have nothing bad to say about this book–it is a seminal masterwork–but did I enjoy it? Sadly, no.

Rushdie has done this to me before. Tempted me with such completeness of vision, led me into a labyrinthine tome that then wracked me for a fortnight. It happened in 2001 with “The Ground Beneath her Feet.” I thought this would be different. And now, as then, I feel that I am the failure. Why did the genius of this book beat me down?

Perhaps I feel I gave it short shrift, even though it took me more than two weeks to read–a veritable lifetime in my normal reading pace. This book deserves a seminar series, a dissertation, not just a dilletante’s shallow perusal. I hammered on my brain trying to put all of the symoblic pieces together, but I know, know, know I have fallen far, far short.

The book’s early settings in mountainous Kashmir were evocative and easy-reading enough to lull me into thinking I could deal with the rest of the book. But then: enter the fracas of Bombay, and then politics: my academic Achilles heel (OK, along with biz/economics) and one of the few things in the world that bores me to seizures.

In all, reading this book seemed like an artistic duty. An offering up to the shrine of Rushdie’s import and brilliance, but one of guilt, not joy.

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Tags: Books, reading, review