May 29, 2007
After Dark by Haruki Murakami
I am new to Haruki Murakami, as I’ve noted. which becomes my approach to his latest novel After Dark. While reading I am conscious of treading in unfamiliar territory, that the bounds of the novel are stretched in a way that feels strange to me, that this fictional world blurs the line between fantasy and reality, and all this is quite disquieting. Which is appropriate really, for After Dark is the story of the city at night, the known in the darkness, the familiar gone strange.
Mari, sitting in a Denny’s drinking coffee, meets Takahashi who remembers her from years before. Their interaction is not terribly significant, but begins a chain of random events which reveal unsavory elements of the city at night. Seemingly random connections are explored, as characters meet one another, or pass by unknowingly. The night is presented as a kind of monster, each individual enveloped by the very same darkness. And throughout all of this Mari’s sister Eri is sleeping in a mysterious room, but we don’t know why.
Point of view is the most significant aspect of this narrative. Detached, limited, but exact, Murakami’s narrator is not much more than a recorder, albeit self-aware. The narrator explains, “It’s not that difficult once we make up our mind. All we have to do is separate from the flesh, leave all substance behind and allow ourselves to become a conceptual point of view devoid of mass. With that accomplished, we can pass through any wall, leap over any abyss.” And so he does, recording all the way, but never more than this. The connections must become clear on their own, and the narrative becomes a careful negotiation of questions and revelations, betraying only what is essential and never giving too much away.
I find reading books in translation a frustrating but fascinating experience. The Japanese novel is constructed differently than those I’ve come to know, founded in a system of thought which is foreign to me. Translation means that the words came after the concepts, and I can read that strangeness in awkward expressions, but then it me think about words and expressions differently, outside their contexts. I have to twist my head around what is being said to make it fit, but having to work like that allows for an engagement many other books can’t offer. Analogous to the city at night, I think, in its strangeness, offering an altered perspective of the world come morning.
May 29, 2007
Books on a plane
Just beginning Thieves, which must be finished before we go to the airport on Thursday. For one cannot take a library book away on a plane. What if one lost it?!
I’ve still not decided what to bring to read on the plane. I’ve got an issue of Vanity Fair, and it also might be the best time to finally read my beloved copy of Lancashire Where Women Die of Love. I do suspect it will be an awfully curious book.
May 29, 2007
Summer on the Shelf
I mentioned before the psychological problems books can cause me– when I read Fight Club and became psychotic, and how prairie fiction puts the weight of the world on my shoulders. Here’s a new one, though I can’t blame it on the text. Remember a few weeks back when I said I was going to read Summer? I really had the best intentions, and even went and picked it off the shelf. So far so good, and I opened up the book. I was surprised by the dedication on the inside cover, by a friend who was once a best friend, and is now a friend no longer. I had forgotten the book had come from her, and to read her words and how sad they’ve come to be with time was positively devastating. I am not so much in the habit of losing friends, you see, and blantant proof of that loss was hard to take. And so I put the book back on the shelf where I suspect it will remain.
May 29, 2007
Of corporate governance, executive compensation and the muse
I’ve been back to work now for just about a month at this summer job of mine, and things are in full swing. I’m really enjoying it, and it’s nice to be back and know what’s going on, rather than enduring the steep learning curve I endured last year. So I’m working 9-5 and writing short stories in the evening, and though my productivity has not been at an all time high, I am pretty satisfied. And I am trying to blur the line between my writing life and my daytime life by including components of the latter in the former. I am currently writing a story about Thomas, who is a compensation consultant. I suspect this could be the first story about a compensation consultant ever written. I’ve certainly never read one. How exciting! I wonder what will happen?
May 28, 2007
Positively transporting
After Dark is the first novel I’ve read by Haruki Murakami. Previously I’ve read his short story collection After the Quake and his nonfiction book Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. And it’s strange that it’s taken so long for me to start reading Japanese fiction; while I lived there, I hardly read any, too busy overdosing on fiction from the Britain I had left behind. Sometimes, I think, reality was something too much, and I wanted something different. But now that that world is far away from me, I am turning back to it through fiction. Positively transporting.
“Our line of sight chooses an area of concentrated brightness and, focusing there, silently descends to it– a sea of neon colours. They call this place an ‘amusement district.’ The giant digital screens fastened to the sides of buildings fall silent as midnight approaches, but loudspeakers on storefronts keep pumpingg out exaggerated hip-hop bass lines. A large game center crammed with young people; wild electronic sounds; a group of college students spilling out from a bar; teenage girls with brilliant bleached hair, healthy legs thrusting out from micro-mini skirts; dark-suited men racing across diagonal crosswalks for the last trains to the suburbs. Even at this hour, the karaoke club pitchmen keep shouting for customers. A flashy black station wagon drifts down the street as if taking stock of the district throuigh its black-tinted windows. The car looks like a deep sea creature with specialized skins and organs. The young policemen patrol the street with tense expressions, but no one seems to notice them. The district plays by its own rules at a time like this. The season is late autumn. No wind is blowing but the air carries a chill. The date is just about to change.”
May 28, 2007
Literary Hot Dogs
Shot by Ms. Puddle Press, intrepid spotter of collisions between the literary world and the hotdog community, “Mrs. Dalloway’s Hot Dog Stand”. Turns out it’s famous, and read all about it here.
May 27, 2007
Spins
While last weekend was splendidly slow, this one spun so fast that it is nearly finished just as soon as it began. Friday we spent devoted to gardening. The results as follows, so that we could have a backyard almost fit to sit in when Chris and Andrea came over for a bbq Saturday night. Big big burgers, super saladas, and a perfect peach pie. Fun was had, and continued right into today, as Britt, Jennie and Deep came for brunch. Delicacies included banana scones fresh from the oven, fresh fruit, pastries, and Stuart whipping up eggs and bacon on the grill. After we walked down to Trinity Bellwoods to let the dog play, and to snap obligatory photos of the three of us, an Abbey Road-inspired shot, and later Jennie checks out the Murdermobile, and lives to tell the tale. 
May 25, 2007
My Office Haiku
(Now up at Bookninja. Go here for more)
clock hands ticking round
slow and stilted second hand—
outside it is spring
May 24, 2007
Evening classes
Summer has arrived with a slap of heat which has drained me of all energy. Now reading The Children of Men, and really enjoying it. And today from the library I fetched The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street and Thieves, which I must read in the next week. The former book will be a good preparation for our upcoming vaca, I think, though we’ll not being visiting London. But indeed in one week’s time we’ll be en-route to the airport. I’m very excited, as we haven’t been abroad in two years, with all our immigration madness and that year in which neither of us earned a living. I’ve still not decided what I am bringing to read on the plane, however– maybe my collected Grace Paley to reread? And I am a little disappointed that I’ll miss out on some good reading time as we’re driving and not taking the train. Nonetheless, I am thrilled that I will be able to hold next weekend’s The Guardian in me own two hands, and that sometime in the week I will pop into a Waterstones and steal some 3 for 2s. Oh England England, get ready to welcome us home (literally and otherwise, respectively).
May 24, 2007
Sense
Have you submitted your workplace haiku to Bookninja? I did today, inspired by the haiku they have posted (and by the workplace, of course). Read them here, including a few by my favourite poet Jennica Harper. And then submit your own!
Heather Mallick underlines why I perpetually sing her praises with her piece on challenging authority. Oh, when she writes, “I believe education is important for its own sake. It is the basis of civilization. I especially believe in the teaching of history./ I am an elitist. I want people to be well-read, to value books. Here’s my reasoning. Educated people are more likely to deny authority. People who don’t read don’t have an intellectual storehouse to help them think independently. They do what they’re told. They have an endless desire to please those in authority; they don’t know they don’t have to.” Has anybody in the whole world ever had more sense?
Maud Newton points me toward the following: the hierarchy of adjectives, which are rules you don’t even know you know; and a poem by Grace Paley. And it was my coworker (since we’re giving props here) who showed me this article on the evolution of phonebook catagories. No more shall you be able to look up a buttonhole maker, or carbon paper.
Today I met Erica G walking down Palmerston. I was on Harbord, reading and walking, and she pulled her own book out of her bag, which we discussed as we crossed the street, and then we said our farewells. I think it would be lovely if we all starting asking, “So what are you reading?” instead of “How are you?” when we met. The conversations might be better.
