Haruki Murakami- The Strange Library

The Strange Library

Penguin Random House

Haruki Murakami
2008 (Japan)/ 2014 (English)
Translated by Ted Goossen

Other Murakami Reviews- A Wild Sheep Chase - Dance Dance Dance - Underground - Sputnik Sweetheart - after the quake - After Dark - Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - 1Q84- Books I & II - Book III - Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage- Strange Library

"Mr. Sheep Man," I asked, "why would that old man want to eat my brains?"
"Because brains packed with knowledge are yummy, that's why.They're nice and creamy. And sort of grainy at the same time."

It came as a nice surprise to fans of Haruki Murakami when Harper Penguin imprint Harvill Sacker revealed that they would fill the post-Colourless Tsukuru Tsukuru depression caused by a Murakami void just in time for Christmas, with a new illustrated edition of short story The Strange Library. On the surface, this 77-page compact hardback admittedly doesn't look like much at first glance, designed as it is to replicate a generic library book, with an academic maroon cover and a replica old school ticket template fixed to the front. As an aside, the size and colour closely resemble that of Paul Auster's similarly-illustrated short story Auggie Wren's Christmas Story, so much that I had to check that they didn't have the same publisher. Upon opening the book, the first thing that jumps out is the immaculate artistic design; the illustrations were mostly taken from unspecified old books found in The London Library, and the sadly-uncredited graphic designers at Harvill Sacker have re-appropriated them into an immersive backdrop for Murakami's story. 

The Strange Library tells the story of a boy who one day innocently visits the library for research, and is shown by an old clerk through an impossible basement labyrinth into a single room with the books he needs, and a strange figure known only as the sheep man (whom Murakami fans will recognise from his appearances in early novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance). The old man tells the boy if he will return in a month. If the boy has memorised the contents of the books, he may leave. The Sheep Man tells the boy the truth; the old man wants him to learn because it will make his brain taste better when he eats it. The boy must rely on the help of the sheep man and the ghostly spirit of a beautiful girl who talks with her hands, if he ever hopes to escape. Haruki Murakami at his most fantastically surreal.

The art and text flow within each other, entwined so neatly that the evocative Victorian Gothic feel to the varied images seeps into the story, combining wonderfully with Murakami's deceptively-plain narration. It has the same power as a dark fairytale, flowing with the same ethereal dream quality of a Neil Gaiman story (it felt like it could've been an issue of The Sandman), given more power through the help of the design and pictures. It's one of the most memorable of all of Murakami short stories (though not my favourite, that will always be Superfrog Saves Tokyo), a creepy little tale that also distintly reminded me of Benecio Del Toro's film Pan's Labyrinth in its heavy use of magical realism. I'm struggling to find any reason to be critical of it really, the only thing that might bug someone is that it's quite expensive for a short story- but even then the craft in the art and designwork makes it much more than that. I wouldn't ever want to encourage Murakami (or any author I like) to make a habit of releasing full-price short stories, but if they're as engaging as this then it'll be easy to forgive.

Paul Auster- Travels in the Scriptorium

Travels in the Scriptorium

Faber & Faber

Paul Auster

2007

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - In The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - Auggie Wren's Christmas Story - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Man in the Dark - Invisible

“Without him, we are nothing, but the paradox is that we, the figments of another mind, will outlive the mind that made us, for once we are thrown into the world, we continue to exist forever, and our stories go on being told, even after we are dead.”

If there's anybody who's looked at this blog more than once and become reasonably annoyed at the constant stream of positive reviews for Paul Auster books, then this is your lucky day; an Auster book that I really did not like. Preceded in the author's bibliography by The Brooklyn Follies (which I have not read yet, though I hear and expect good things), and followed by the previously-reviewed similarly-sized novella Man in the Dark, the novella Travels in the Scriptorium is, an ambitious and confident piece of post-modernism. It's an author literally calling back to his characters and concepts of the past in order to try to create something distinctly new with the aid of a ton of metafiction. Far too much of it, as it turns out.

Auster, like all of the authors I most enjoy, has made a career out of focusing on certain deep-seated philosophical themes that become the basis for most of his novels. He's also a pioneering postmoderinist harking back to his debut collection of stories The New York Trilogy (mandatory reference complete) who uses his characters to toy with our notions of identity. I can see why the intensely focused strangeness of the genre can (fairly) put off casual readers, but usually with Auster's books, no matter how strange a plot development or how seemingly irrelevant a side-story might be, it all pays off for the dedicated reader by the end, and then I write an annoyingly positive review.

Spot the difference

The problems I had with Scriptorium arrived at the beginning. First of all, the main character is a non-entity with no memory and barely any personality. His name is Mr. Blank (or at least that's the name the narrator gives him, while insinuating he has another) and he lives in some sort of medical facility. Throughout the novella he is visited by a selection of different people whom he doesn't remember, but who know him, and they have a selection of pointed ethereal conversations where none of them actually explain what's going on (just like watching Lost). The real kicker, and the thing that's set to initially appeal to dedicated Auster fans, is that these visitors are all characters from prior novels of his. Anna Blume, from In the Country of Last Things is the most prominent one. Ultimately, though, there's no real established connection bar the character names.

The overall tone is a little bit irritating, written in the present tense with a certain sense of smugness, also minimalistic in style and explanations to the extent where I found it hard to care. I get the sense that Auster was trying to present an ourobourian piece of metafiction; Mr. Blank is clearly meant to be a simulacra of Auster himself, and some of the characters hint at knowledge of a higher relationship between them and he. I found it to ultimately be an unappealing mess thanks to the incoherent structure. Auster's typical elements are there in various ways, like a story-within-a-story tangent, but none of them hit the right note, and in this 120-page paperback have little time to leave an impact. Maybe other readers out there have deconstructed a clearer understanding of Scriptorium, but even if there is one the overall writing drove me away from seeing it. i hate to criticise Paul Auster's writing because I usually love it, but Travels in the Scriptorium was a big miss for me.

Kurt Vonnegut- Armageddon in Retrospect

 Armageddon in Retrospect

Kurt Vonnegut

 2009 (Posthumous)

“Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.”

Kurt Vonnegut is one of my favourite authors of all time, but I haven't read one of his books in a few years, thanks to running through his most popular novels during my late adolescence. Armageddon in Retrospect, the first of many posthumous collections of material from the prolific postmodern satirist, was a great reminder of how individually brilliant he was, and one that, through its selection of short stories, really gets to the heart of what the great man's work was really about. Though Vonnegut's famous short novels (such as, most obviously, the amazing Slaughterhouse-Five) wandered into the genre of sci-fi on a whim, at the crux of the matter was Vonnegut's own real life experiences during the Second World War; where he was captured as a prisoner of war by the Nazi's and incarcerated in a POW camp in Dresden. While he was there, the allies bombed most of the beautiful city to ruins. As a result, the POW's were sent out by their captors to deal with the thousands of dead bodies. Seems like the kind of thing that might leave a mark on a person.

The collection opens with the transcript of a speech Vonnegut was to deliver on stage in his native Indianapolis, but which he couldn't thanks to inconveniently dying. It's a good speech, entertaining, self-deprecating and poignant, but it's really just there for its importance as probably the last thing he ever wrote. This is followed by a letter written to his family written in 1945, the collection jumping back in time in the appropriate manner of Slaughterhouse-Five's Billy Pilgrim. There's not often the opportunity for posthumous author collection editors to make a clever mark on their work, but whoever put this one together was altogether pretty smart. After that comes an essay entitled Wailing Shall Be In All Streets, a short, direct essay about Vonnegut's time in Dresden. It's powerful, to-the-point, and more directly analytical than the typical style of his fiction.

The rest of the collection is comprised of pieces of short fiction, of varying origin and interest. When I criticise Vonnegut here I don't mean to do so of his writing; that is typically impeccable, full of the confident air of an experienced and masterful writer. As proven by novels like The Sirens of Titan and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (an unrecognised classic, in my opinion), Vonnegut has as wide as an imagination as anyone, hence his regular travails into science fiction. The problem for me with a couple of stories in this collection, such as Great Day and the eponymous Armageddon in Retrospect was that Vonnegut's imagination runs so wild that his characters and plots suffer. Don't get me wrong; I wouldn't want to change the man's writing in any way since it's this imagination that allows him to hit his greatest heights, but as a result it's fair to say that some of his stories are a bit messy.

Others are much more entertaining and poignant. Happy Birthday, 1951 is a gem of a short story about a man protecting a young boy during wartime. Just You and Me, Sammy is the best story of the lot (in my opinion, of course), going back to the ruins of Dresden to tell the tale of a group of POW's and their untrustworthy liaison with the guards. Only Vonnegut knew how much of this tale was based on true events and he wrote it as fiction, but the obvious ambiguity adds an intended slice of intrigue, tension and realism that's kept in check by a believable series of events and a great revelatory ending. As far as I'm concerned the absolute best twentieth century US literature emanates from the pen of authors mixing reality with fiction, following the development of a nation through mostly-realistic depictions of its variety of life in the manner of Kurt Vonnegut, Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac among others. Armageddon in Retrospect certainly isn't the best of Kurt Vonnegut, and for all I know so far it might not even be the best of his posthumously published work, but regardless it's still sublime stuff thanks to the sheer strength of Vonnegut's voice. This might be naive, but I simply can't imagine anyone not liking (or at least appreciating) the work of one of the most naturally-gifted counter-cultural authors of all time.

Paul Auster- Man in the Dark

Man in the Dark

Faber & Faber

Paul Auster

2008 

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - In The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - Auggie Wren's Christmas Story - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Invisible

“Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that's because they don't know anything about the world. People die of broken hearts. It happens every day, and it will go on happening to the end of time."

Continuing on my rapid exploration of Paul Auster's bibliography, I came to this curious, thoughtful and sometimes bewitching novella, taking a premise featuring an amalgamation of some of Auster's most prevalent ideas from both his earlier and later authorship styles. Weaving in a series of short, tangential stories of varying realism into the framework of one dominating main narrative, Auster was attempting the potentially paradoxical (alliterative mood) goal of fitting a meaningful, multi-layered series of reflective stories into the very limited space of a 180-page (in my Faber & Faber paperback edition) novella. Featuring the strong post-modern styles of Auster's ground-breaking and edgy earlier fiction- like obviously The New York Trilogy, which I think I must have mentioned in every Auster review I've written on this blog and have to re-read one day- mixed in with the more grounded, contemplative character-study-based, magical realism-tinged fiction of his latter days, Man in the Dark  is far from perfect, but overall is a great story containing a nice mixture of drama, suspense, and even a bit of action.

The main plot, from which the narrating lead character inter-weaves a series of other stories, is an intense, realistic human interest drama stylistically most comparable to Auster's later fiction, such as Invisible or Sunset Park. Lead character August Brill is an elderly writer living with both his daughter and granddaughter, all three of them grieving over separate losses that are explored further towards the end of the book. As the unwavering framework of the whole book, grief and the search to overcome it permeates every page, as Auster presents it with the utmost seriousness. So seriously, in fact, that when it came towards the very end, where Brill and his granddaughter face-up to the rather horrific death of her fiance, things had become so serious and straightforward that I started to find it actually a bit silly, which I suppose isn't a great recommendation. Thankfully things are kept from being bogged down in a potential mire of seriousness by the other stories that Brill tells with his own, one in particular.

Auster doesn't do colour.

August Brill, the narrator, changes from the past to the present tense to narrate a story he's composing in his head, a story much different in tone and style from the 'real' main story about his family. In this story a man named Brick goes to bed next to his wife one night and then wakes up in the morning to find himself stuck down in a hole, in the middle of nowhere, in a parallel universe. He soon learns that, in this world, the US is embroiled in a bloody, modern civil war, and that he specifically has been chosen to cross worlds and act as an assassin, one who could end the fighting with a single bullet. I'm refrain from giving many details, since half the pleasure of this side-story is the thrilling suspense- for the first time in a while, possibly since In The Country of Last Things, Auster embraces more contemporary popular storytelling techniques and genres, and it's a lot of fun. I don't think I'd want him to switch to this kind of thing more often, but I do think that he was perhaps making a conscientious effort to catch the eye of new readers, to lure them into his web of postmodernism as he balances the stories of Brick and August Brill.

I have to admit that it disappointed me to discover that Brick's story ends rather abruptly, mid-way through Man in the Dark, since it was very entertaining, but the truth is that Auster's key concern was always with the realistic human drama of his center story; August Brill's grieving widower-hood, and his efforts to connect with his daughter and granddaughter, so the three of them can together overcome the tragic losses they've suffered. Brill ruminates on other short stories and memories, with the cumulative effect all relating to the whole. Auster packs quite a lot into a small book, keeping things constantly fast-paced; something that also might appeal to newbies. The same quickness and short length of the book is in some ways a hindrance to the overall story, since I don't think it allows Auster the space he needs to create enough of an emotional impact; especially in regards to the revelations as to how Brill's granddaughter's fiance was killed, something that was meant to shock and move the reader, but left me feeling somewhat unmoved through its over-the-top nature. Very topical, though.

In conclusion then, Man in the Dark is a very enjoyable, but rather flawed novella that thankfully overcomes its flaws to stand as a notable achievement. Though far from Auster's best work from a critical standpoint, the suspenseful nature and quick pacing make it a very easy read with far more crossover appeal than Auster's typical novels. Cautiously recommended as probably a good introductory novel, with a nice blend of the author's preferred styles from across the years.
 

Haruki Murakami- Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Haruki Murakami

2013 (Japanese)/ 2014 (English)
Translated by Jay Rubin

Other Murakami Reviews- A Wild Sheep Chase - Dance Dance Dance - Underground - Sputnik Sweetheart - after the quake - After Dark - Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - 1Q84- Books I & II - Book III - Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Strange Library

Around two-and-half years ago I, like an idiot, decided to create a simple blog with a single objective; to obsessively compulsively review each book I read, as a personal exercise designed to make myself write more, and to understand the literature I'd read a little bit better. One of the first things I (badly) reviewed was Haruki Murakami's probably magnum opus 1Q84 (it really is quite a bad review, sorry about that), a book that I'd been extremely hyped for ever since I heard about it. So, when I finished reading, and after writing and posting my review, I automatically started tormenting myself with the knowledge that it'd no doubt be quite a while before Haruki Murakami wrote another book. From that point forward like any crazed fan I scoured the likely news sources for anything I could find, devouring each  eventual new snippet of information with aplomb. In the meantime I re-read After Dark and read Dance Dance Dance for the first time, and even wrote a pretty lazy preview of the upcoming Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. I think what annoyed me the most about waiting was how the novel was being quickly translated into seemingly dozens of languages from all around the world, but the English translation (from the trusted Jay Rubin) kept me waiting and waiting.

When Colorless (which I'm going to spell without the 'u', even though as an Englishman this sickens me) finally arrived in the post, I didn't have the patience to allocate it a spot on the to-read pile and as soon as I'd finished The Art of Hunger I happily dove into it. Twenty-four hours later and I'd finished it, though its imprint has held tightly onto my thoughts ever since- to be absolutely honest, to do a fair review of this book I think I'd have to read it twice. I did contemplate doing that but there's only so many hours in the day and so many books to read, so for now I can only give my still raw impressions of a fascinating book. First things first, the immediate urge for many people on the Internet has been to classify this book within Murakami's bibliography in relation to its fellows. I hesitantly have to agree with the majority of opinions in classifying this as a 'minor' work, in that it's not an extremely complex odyssey in the manner of his longer works like Kafka on the Shore or 1Q84, but more in the vein of a more realistic psychological character study through relationships, like Norwegian Wood and South of the Border, West of the Sun. Again I emphasis I hesitate in using the word 'minor' since it seems to downgrade a book by its usage, which in this case would be very unfair. 

So, to the plot. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is the tale of a man named Tsukuru Tazaki who was caused great pain under mysterious circumstances in his youth and as an adult is finally ready to discover what happened. As a student and adolescent, Tsukuru was part of a very close-knit group of friends whom he loved and relied upon, until one day the other four ousted him from the group permanently, without a single explanation. After going through a period of great sadness, Tsukuru is pushed into confronting his past by a new girlfriend, to finally contact his old friends to discover just why he was ostracized. I'll refrain from going in to more detail, since the magic of Murakami's writing is in his beautiful contemplative prose, the quality of which is so great that my clumsy attempts to describe it only does it a disservice. I will say that the hook of an interesting mystery, one that proposes more questions when investigated, drew me in to the narrative very quickly, but, in a slight criticism, I must confess to being disappointed that the book doesn't really follow the detective direction for very long.

The overriding factor to Colorless is that it's extremely introspective, and Tsukuru Tazaki might be Murakami's most introspective character yet. Murakami goes to great pains to describe his mind, to emphasise and clarify the emotions that life's troubles have forced upon him, and how his discoveries through the novel change him in certain ways. The theme of psychological rebirth is fairly upfront, as is the trauma of emotion, the pointlessness of hindsight, and a constant feeling of surreality. Unlike say, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, here Murakami chooses to limit his supernatural surrealist tendencies to strange dream sequences, leaving a few open-ended possibilities for the reader to mull over (that I won't spoil, but which hark back to previous situations in Murakami novels where characters are unsure what they have or haven't done and can never find out the truth).

Overall I can't help but agree with the majority that Colorless isn't on the same level of quality fiction as Murakami's epic longer novels because in comparison it's very limited. The cast of characters is small, the events are subdued, and it lacks a particularly dramatic ending. It's based around an easy to understand concept, tackled from a few different directions with the aid of a likable, normal main character, but without the aid of the excessive surrealness Murakami gives some of his novels. It's an experimental character study that revels in the development of said character, using episodes of his past and present to paint a cohesive picture of depression and eventual recovery, of the folly of youth, and of the power of a good relationship. I really enjoyed it on the same scale as I did Norwegian Wood and Sputnik Sweetheart, where the weirdness is controlled and mostly limited to tone, and the characters can breathe with the advantage of a realistic environment. I do, however, admittedly prefer Murakami's weird side so this definitely wasn't amongst my favourites, but I did remain enthralled throughout. It demands a re-read, and although that probably won't happen for a little while, the events of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage will be floating in my mind for some time to come.

Paul Auster- In the Country of Last Things

In the Country of Last Things

Faber & Faber

Paul Auster

1987

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Invisible

"The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say. The end is only imaginery, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you will never get there. You might have to stop, but that is only because you have run out of time. You stop, but that does not mean you have come to the end."

I had great expectations coming in to this very distinctive early Paul Auster novel, since like most people on the Internet I love a good piece of dystopian post-apocalyptic end-of-days fiction. In the Country of Last Things is an incredibly bleak story full of misery and death, set in a world with just the right balance of mystery and detail. Auster's heroin,, Anna, narrates in the form of a letter where she tells the story of her attempt to find her brother William in the decaying metropolis of an unnamed city. In this world society has crumbled as the earth has turned on the human race, with food and energy resources rapidly diminishing countless are dead, as the survivors desperately cling on to some semblance of civilisation. From the very first pages it was clear that Auster's dedication to establishing the tone of this world meant that his usual style of prose would also change.

 

I breezed through the book across a couple of days, captivated by this dying, polluted world, and aided by the familiarity I have with good dystopian survival horror narratives. I think it's clear that Auster was writing a form of genre fiction here. He made his name writing on the surface a form of genre fiction with The New York Trilogy (most specifically the first part; City of Glass) where he created a detective story with all the usual trimmings only viewed through a kaleidoscope. Only it was more than that somehow, a unique, mind-bending experience that reveled in messing with the familiar. I mention all this because In  the Country of Last Things, for better or worse, is not a genre-defying post-modern mindfuck, but is *simply* an excellent normal piece of genre fiction. I suppose I find that slightly disappointing thanks to my expectations of the author, to be honest.

Auster being Auster, there was no way that certain examples of his favourite literary themes wouldn't feature. As always Auster is fixated on the concept of identity, which in the book is under threat on a ubiquitous scale as the human race in the eyes of Anna seem to constantly be losing theirs. The title of the book itself refers to this, the 'last things' representing the final resting place of human culture. At one point in the book Anna is aghast when a man she meets has never heard of an airplane. In a more general sense, concepts such as charity and friendship are dying out in the face of pure despair, The term is cliche, but I found it to be very, very Orwellian altogether, with the main difference between this and Nineteen Eighty Four being the infirmity of the crumbling society. It has the same kind of hopelessness occasionally very slightly permeated by a drop of optimism.

Ultimately though, after having time to ponder it it's impossible for me not to conclude that In the Country of Last Things doesn't have the same depth that I've come to expect from Auster. It's streamlined, minimised prose does firmly establish it in its genre and I really did care to find out Anna's fate, but the lack of detail left me feeling unfulfilled upon the conclusion. Auster usually revels in exploring his ideas and creations from unexpected perspectives, offering stories-within-stories that melt into each other to create one undefinable whole, and I love how the ideas linger in my mind afterwards. I simply didn't get that with this book; it's very good for what it is but it's not really that much more complicated than The Road, for example. There's lots of edginess that gave me the feeling that this was a young author determined to follow his debut impact with something equally anti-cultural, but I think it was quickly proven by his next book Moon Palace that his real legacy would come from focusing on what obviously came naturally to him.

Paul Auster- Moon Palace

Moon Palace

Faber & Faber

Paul Auster

1989

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Invisible

“That was the trouble. The land is too big out there, and after a while it starts to swallow you up. I reached a point when I couldn't take it anymore. All that bloody silence and emptiness. You try to find your bearings in it, but it's too big, the dimensions are too monstrous, and eventually, I don't know how else to put it, eventually it just stops being there. There's no world, no land, no nothing. It comes down to that, Fogg, in the end it's all a figment. The only place you exist is in your head.”

I finished reading Moon Palace four days ago, but it's taken me a while to open up a Wordpad file to try and make sense of the novel I'd just read. My first reaction was to decide that this was one of the best works of fiction I'd ever read, and for a short while the best. Fast-forward to now and I'm leaning away from the latter statement but certainly towards the former, but it's all on a very contextual basis, which is what reading is all about, I suppose. All of our opinions on what makes great literature is shaped by our past reading experiences, and there are so many thousands of worthwhile books of all genres out there that we all follow our own paths, for better or for worse. The shaping of this path and the constant growth of individual context is what keeps me addicted to reading, and also draws me to particular authors who revel in exploring grand themes or obsessions over numerous books. My favourite authors all do this; Orwell, Murakami, Pratchett, Bukowski, Vonnegut, and of course the unique Paul Auster. A polarising figure for some, he has dedicated his writing career to exploring his own obsessions within maze-like neo-noir stories.

Published in 1989, Moon Palace is one of Auster's earlier novels (having already made his name with The New York Trilogy) but since I feel well-acquainted with most of his later work it felt like a perfect culmination of everything he'd been trying to show me so far. Had I read it earlier I know it wouldn't have had the same impact- the same reason why I feel the need to re-read more than a couple of Auster books- and for that reason I absolutely understand why Moon Palace probably isn't for everybody, but for me it was absolutely amazing. In many ways it strikes me that of the Auster bibliography it's most similar to the recently reviewed Book of Illusions, where a lead character on the verge of spiritual and physical death is saved by exposure to knowledge of the past of an enigmatic elder, with that story reflecting the narrator's own character arc in the style of magical realism.

The narrator, the curious MS Fogg, is a simulacra of Auster himself. A young man living and attending college in Brooklyn, his life is a shambles. When his uncle, his only known living relative, passes away (leaving him nothing but his thousand-strong collection of books) MS consciously decides to abandon his fate to the whims of the universe, essentially living in poverty and nearly starving, eventually living homeless in Central Park before being rescued by his only friends. Trying to recover from hitting an absolute low, MS applies for a job as the personal assistant of an old man named Thomas Effing. Effing, I think, is one of Auster's greatest creations, a devious, manipulative and decrepit shadow, whom constantly tests the wits of his new man servant (not too unlike the plot of Mr. Vertigo). When Fogg gains some measure of trust, Effing lets him in on the real job he's there for; to record Effing's own self-written obituary; leading in to another Paul Auster favourite, the story within a story.

For me, the strange tale of Thomas Effing's life is the real meat of the book, putting into context as it does the road that Fogg took to get to this point, while remaining a fascinating tale of its own accord. Drifting into the American frontier, taking in the landscape to present a meandering, dramatic and constantly surreal story that leans on the sense of magical realism without being impossible. In part it feels like a parable mixed in with a folk myth, but it's also dirty and grimy like a downtrodden Western. Effing takes Fogg on a journey leads to further developments in the plot of the book, including the revaluation of who the obituary is for. This leads into another backstory within a story, the details of which I'll refrain from giving aside from to say that eventually all three stories collide to provide a circular truth. I loved the ending, as I said before it made me wonder for a while if that was the best book I'd ever read. It's both tragic and optimistic, with an ethereal sense of destiny surrounding these characters. 

I suppose anyone who might regularly check this blog would get a bit sick of these constant Paul Auster reviews, but right now I'm finding it so very easy to choose his books as my next read, thanks to how much I've been taken by his obsessions that permeate each of his novels. The key is that the details of each story are dramatically unique, taking inspiration from cult stylistic genres to explore the notions of identity and reality by in different compelling ways. Bar the story structure and thematic coincidences, Moon Palace is less of a post-modern work than some of Auster's other work and more of a complex drama. It mesmorised me from start to finish thanks to the strong story and flowing prose, connecting with Auster's bibliography in a way that reminded me why I love the exploratory nature of reading and the places it can take you.

Haruki Murakami- Dance Dance Dance

Dance Dance Dance

Vintage

 Haruki Murakami

1988 (Japanese)/ 1994 (English)
Translated by Jay Rubin
 

Other Murakami Reviews- A Wild Sheep Chase - Dance Dance Dance - Underground - Sputnik Sweetheart - after the quake - After Dark - Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - 1Q84- Books I & II - Book III - Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Strange Library

“Even so, there were times I saw freshness and beauty. I could smell the air, and I really loved rock 'n' roll. Tears were warm, and girls were beautiful, like dreams. I liked movie theaters, the darkness and intimacy, and I liked the deep, sad summer nights.”

In a somewhat morbid realisation of life being too short, I recently decided to stop spacing out as-yet unread novels by my absolute favourite authors, hence more Charles Bukowski and Paul Auster reviews recently. The daddy of them all in this regard was Dance Dance Dance, the last unread book available from Haruki Murakami, which I'd been saving on my to-read pile for a long time. It was kind of like my own tribute to Desmond Hume from Lost, the man trapped in an underground bunker  on a really weird island who saved his copy of Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend so it can be the last thing he ever reads before he dies. I wasn't going to take it that far, but I liked the idea of having that one book by (probably) my favourite author left over to constantly look forward to.

But then he wrote Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Jay Rubin translated it to English, and it's scheduled to turn up on my doorstep sometime around mid-August. So, after taking a short reading break following Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions, I began to read Dance Dance Dance, albeit not without a sense of apprehension. Written in an early stage of Murakami's superstar novelist career, it sits nicely in his bibliography nestled between Norwegian Wood (the novel that gave him national fame) and the novella South of the Border, West of the Sun (one of my personal favourites)- all of which sounded great, until I saw that it was a sequel to his earlier work The Trilogy of the Rat. Of those three books I haven't read the first two because they haven't been printed in English aside from an early limited run (second-hand copies of which go for annoyingly high prices on the 'net, and I haven't given in to temptation yet), and the third is A Wild Sheep Chase.

As my hasty review of it showed, I didn't really get on with that book. The prose style and characterisations were fine, though naturally not as well-mastered as later novels, but most importantly the use of magical realism (or postmodernism or surrealism or whatever you want to call it) felt too poorly controlled in its portrayal of what was actually going on. Murakami can write labyrinthine stories, yes, but on this one occasion I wasn't spellbound. The thought of returning to that style or similar was disheartening.

The nameless narrating lead character returns, not surprisingly, still blunt, not particularly friendly, and full of hard-boiled dialogue; this time, I found, with a more pronounced sense of fatigue. Straight away I knew there was a much greater chance of me enjoying this book, as the author's voice and style seemed so much more well defined and evocative. Though A Wild Sheep Chase was described as a postmodern detective story, I felt the latter aspect dominated the former to such an extent it became irrelevent, but Dance Dance Dance readdresses that balance through the superb narration; there's plenty of pulp detective fiction embedded, of the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. As Murakami begins to lay the story out things become even clearer; while returning characters and some references to prior events in The Trilogy of the Rat do exist, the reader doesn't need to be aware of them (or in awe of them) to make the book work whatsoever, as instead they sit back comfortably after initially helping to set the scene.

The plot revolves around the narrator's unwavering need to return to the mysterious Dolphin Hotel, to confront and understand the horror-like past memories it once left him with. When he does return, he finds the hotel rebuilt and restaffed, superficially seeming completely normal but retaining the ethereal sense of dread, an aura like the Overlook Hotel of King's The Shining (and you know when I say King I really mean Kubrick). While vaguely investigating, the narrator comes across a new set of important characters, some of whom link him again to his past, some of whom change his life very unexpectedly; like Yuri, a neglected 13-year-old daughter to rich parents, whom the narrator befriends and takes care of in a unique relationship that was the highlight of the book for me, such is Murakami's brilliant way of transposing two different characters across each other to create a relationship that almost feels real.

The thematic bulk of the book turned out to be something I absolutely loved, in that it was preaching to the choir by presenting a well-structured post-modern detective story, where, without giving too much away, Murakami focuses on the mysterious nature of unexplained connections between people and places as his character investigates a possible murder mystery. In actual fact it's probably a much more straightforward book than his other longer novels (Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle spring immediately to mind as far more complicated structurally), which somewhat limits its full potential, compared to later Murakami novels, but allows it to more fully embrace the notion of twisted genre fiction. It continues this way mostly to the end, which is again a lot clearer than other Murakami and provides somewhat of a happy send-off to his narrator or four books. I was pleasantly surprised by the ending and it added to my enjoyment overall, concluding the novel as a strong example of the author balancing his experimental nature with his control over the story. As his writing developed in the years to come he was able to more fully engage his experiments without damaging the narrative, and this book felt like an important stage in that development.

And so, unless I can quickly find copies of Murakami's first two novels for a reasonable price (ie less than a hundred pounds) I'm currently caught up on his available bibliography, around six years after I started. I can't wait for his next book to come out, I'm going to gush over it until I make everyone who reads this blog sick.

The web of Dance Dance Dance

Paul Auster- The Book of Illusions

The Book of Illusions

Picador Press

Paul Auster

2003

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Invisible

“It was one of the most sublimely exhilarating moments of my life. I was half a step in front of the real, an inch or two beyond the confines of my body, and when the thing happened just as I thought it would, I felt my skin had become transparent. I wasn't occupying space anymore so much as melting into it. What was around me was also inside me, and I had only to look into myself in order to see the world.” 

As I continue to fill the gaps in my collection of the bibliography of Paul Auster, my fandom has definitely increased remarkably over the past few months thanks to reading firstly the recently-reviewed Oracle Night, and now the book he wrote just prior to that- and subject of this review, obviously- the uniquely curious The Book of Illusions. I noticed this specifically recently when briefly skimming through reader reviews posted on Goodreads, and became curiously angry with the few people who chose to give Illusions a poor score; unfair of me I know, since everyone has the right to their opinion, and art by its very nature is subjective, but after just finishing the book myself the idea of people massively negatively criticising it drove me somewhat insane, especially since said criticisms were all exactly the same, exactly the same in fact as any criticisms I ever see of Auster novels; that they're self-absorbed and pretentious. Well first of all, yes Auster certainly is absorbed with particular philosophical and post-modern concepts he addresses from different angles in most of his books, but he's so adept at it and each effort so rich with individual attributes that you might as well criticise Dickens for being overly concerned with Victorian England, or Orwell for worrying about fascism.

I definitely prefer this cover.

While I don't like to begin a review with a bit of a whiny complaint, the truth is that I enjoyed The Book of Illusions so much for so many reasons that I can't help biting back at such harsh criticism. I found this book to be one of Paul Auster's very best efforts (that I've read so far, at least), particularly for its ability to stick with Auster's trademark introspective, often noir-ish post-modern take on murky issues of identity and narrative power without slowing down the genuinely outstanding, constantly intriguing plot. Auster creates a rich backstory for two very different, but somehow similar main characters and brings it to the forefront with a developing human drama that somehow sits comfortably between real human drama and uncontrolled surrealism, containing elements of magical realism without ever pushing too far into that genre.

The book begins with a tale of human tragedy that sets the stage for things to come. First person narration from lead character Robert Zimmer (who, like so many Auster leads, is a curious amalgamation of the author's own traits) introduces his life as a ruined mess. Once happily married with two children, writer and professor Zimmer's immediately family were all killed simultaneously in a commercial airplane crash, leaving Zimmer absolutely devastated, unable to work, unable to talk to other people, unable to do anything bar wander his now-otherwise empty home and drink very heavily. Zimmer is clearly heading towards suicide, until a moment of chance saves him; while drunkenly watching television he comes across an old silent film by a comedian named Hector Mann, and, miraculously, it makes him laugh for the first time in months. At that moment a spark of obsessive compulsive behaviour saves his life and gives it meaning, as Zimmer decides to find out more about the man who bought about a moment of happiness to him. He discovers that Mann's career in Hollywood was mysterious cut short through his abrupt vanishing and presumed death. As it happens, Zimmer discovers that very recently a previously unseen set of Hector Mann films has been mysteriously sent to various museums and film houses across the world, and from that moment Zimmer decides to watch every one of those films and write a book about Mann's career.

Not too bad either.

Eventually Zimmer achieves his goal, becoming a foremost expert on the works of the comedian, but that's really only the start of the novel. After his book is published, Zimmer receives a letter out of the blue purporting to be from Hector Mann's wife. Fifty years after Hector Mann's presumed death, Zimmer is told that he is alive somewhere, and he wishes to meet the man who so expertly wrote about his life. Zimmer is naturally suspicious, but a visit from a young woman (and future love interest) claiming to be part of Mann's family finally changes his mind, and inevitably wraps him into a fifty year plot involving murder, deceit, and the last, never before seen films of Hector Mann. I found this plot to be gripping, eerie in places and constantly tragic, but involving honourable, likable characters that somehow balance out the tragedy with uplifting hope for the future. Auster meticulously lays out the foundations for the plot's present through detailed descriptions of a murky past, essentially making Robert Zimmer and Hector Mann equally important as characters, and interesting reflections of themselves as a similar character archetype.

Interestingly. I found this book somewhat balanced in style between Auster's classic experiments using postmodernism techniques to explore the intangible questions of identity and reality, and his more recent efforts to ground his characters in realism through more relatable human drama. Everything in this book is technically possible (unlike the fantasy of of Mr. Vertigo, for example), with the overarching aura of surrealism surrounding the events powered by coincidence, or narrative fate. It's perhaps a more traditional way of progressing the plot than other Auster books (I think it could make a good low-key on-screen drama), but I found that it engaged me with the fate of the characters very well, and gave the mixed messages of tragedy and human resilience more power upon the novel's dramatic conclusion. Auster also cleverly uses the Hector Mann's Hollywood background and subsequent underground film making as another way to more directly present a few powerful, fantastical scenes packed with resonating symbolism entwined with the novel as a whole, within the context of Hector's films. It's very carefully composed, a labyrinthine arrangement of plot threads unfolding on each page.

So, as I always end up doing with Auster, I'm going to recommend this book to anyone looking for cutting edge contemporary literature by a master of the style. With a rounded, conclusive story that you don't always get from him, The Book of Illusions would probably be a great introduction to Auster for someone who likes the sound of what he does.

Paul Auster- Oracle Night

Oracle Night

Faber & Faber

Paul Auster

2003

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Invisible

“Thoughts are real', he said. 'Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren't aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that's what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future'.”

An unpredicted but undoubted discovered throughout writing this humble blog has been a personal improvement in the average amount of focus I put in to reading a book. It wasn't instantaneous upon starting out, but falling in to the habit of reviewing each book often led me to begin composing short snippets in my head as I read; as a way of processing things as they go along. Back in the yea olden days of pre-blog, I was sometimes guilty of lightly speed-reading books without properly absorbing enough of what I was looking at, making the whole exercise somewhat of a waste of time. This was especially true with library books, the advancing date on each encouraging me to rush through to the detriment of the experience. This is what happened the first time I read Oracle Night by Paul Auster.

Picador edition

Fast-forward five years of so, and after buying my own copy and then eventually picking it up off the to-read pile, I sat down with a much more concentrated attention span, and, within only a few pages it became quickly apparent that Oracle Night is a novel that deserved and required my full attention; packed as it is in the author's familiar style consisting heavily of post-modern symbolism, meta-fiction, elongated (but relevant) tangents, and varying degrees of magical realism. As is common with Auster's fiction, he makes his lead protagonist a writer; Sidney Orr is a successful novelist living in Brooklyn (another of the author's tropes, from the days of his first smash hit The New York Trilogy) who, at the start of the novel, is slowly recovering from a life-threatening illness. Written in the first-person, Auster establishes Orr as a normal, thoughtful and imaginative man, and introduces his small, close-knit environment consisting of his wife Grace and their long-time close friend and fellow author John Trause. Sidney meets the novel's fourth and final 'real' (I'll get to that in a second) character of any relevance, Mr. Chang, when he somewhat randomly ambles into Chang's new stationary store in downtown Brooklyn, where he finds himself compelled to buy a particular unassuming blue notebook, in which he begins to flesh out what he hopes will become his latest novel. 

For the first half of the book at least, Sidney's new story is given as much space and detail as its framework- though despite what the some of the many lazy reviews of Oracle Night I've found around the net suggest, it ends abruptly with plenty of the main story to go- but it's only the first (and largest) of several extended tangents produced via the blue notebook. It did, however, quickly endear me to Oracle Night through its basis in another novel I greatly enjoyed (and must re-read and in all honesty re-review) in pulp detective fiction writer Dashiel Hammett's The Maltese Falcon; Trause suggests to Orr to re-imagine a full version of an anecdote that Hammett's classic gumshoe Sam Spade tells in Falcon, about a man who survives a random near-death experience and from that moment decides to abandon his life completely and begin a new one. Sidney Orr's protagonist does the same thing in greater detail, and with this story within a story Auster manages not only to tell a compelling yarn (with a postmodern theme similar to Auster's earlier novels, particularly, for me, The Music of Chance) but add to the depths of both Orr's character and the ethereal background tone of the novel that doesn't definitively move into realistic fantasy but goes as far as it can otherwise. 

Paul Auster's serious face

  As the pace of the events in Sidney Orr's life quicken towards the end of the novel, following a series of tangential stories and experiences that deeply effect the narrator's thoughts, things come to more of an organised head, leading to a somewhat conclusive ending that satisfied my curiosity as to the fate of Orr and his wife (who I found myself very attached to, perhaps more so than any other of Auster's leading characters) without being too definitive. In an act of meta-blogging I'd been heavily thinking about the intents and effects of Oracle Night long before I'd finished it, composing mini-reviews in my head, many instantly forgotten. The ending of the book didn't change much in terms of my overall perspective of the novel, and could perhaps be criticised as somewhat of a lacklustre finish. Essentially though the very nature of this book is the entwining of the various narratives and storylines in it, and how they ultimately effect the life of Sidney, particularly in relation to the strange blue notebook. I've seen it described as an exploration of synchronicity, a less-defined look at fate, choices and the power of narrative (thinking about it now there are some similar notes to a key theme and idea of Terry Pratchett; narrativium).

If you've looked at the little goodreads blogspot gadget somewhere down the right hand side of this page, you may have seen that there I rated Oracle Night as five stars out of five, essentially a perfect score (though I'd never call it a perfect book, it's just that taking the average standard of books listed on goodreads and the inflated average scores that pretty much everything recieves, by those standards this book is absolutely five stars). Though I place that opinion based on the flawless quality of prose, layered characters, and masterly composition of varying complicated ideas to produce a literary work of art, I wouldn't necessarily offer Oracle Night up as a book everyone will enjoy. There's a certain madness in the style that relies on a prior appreciation of the authors work and certain expectations based on that appreciation, so it's not the perfect place to start with the author (no matter what the front cover blurb declares), I'd recommend Mr. Vertigo for pure storytelling or The New York Trilogy for in-your-face edgy postmodernism. Luckily for me I think I was in the perfect place and time to enjoy Oracle Night, much improved over speed-reading for the sake of a return date. A fascinating, uncompromising book.