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.

Charles Bukowski- Hot Water Music

Hot Water Music

Ecco Publishing

Charles Bukowski

1983

Other Bukowski Reviews; Post Office - South of No North - Factotum - Women - Ham on Rye - Hollywood - Pulp - Tales of Ordinary Madness - Notes of a Dirty Old Man

“Love is a form of prejudice. You love what you need, you love what makes you feel good, you love what is convenient. How can you say you love one person when there are ten thousand people in the world that you would love more if you ever met them? But you'll never meet them.”

I couldn't help but constantly compare Charles Bukowski's early 80's short story collection Hot Water Music to another collection I read prior, South of No North (both published in similar pulp-like editions by Ecco Press- an imprint of HarperCollins seemingly looking to replicate the original underground press feel of original publishers Black Sparrow Press), to look at how the author continued to refine his unique style of writing over the ten year difference in publication dates. The key overall impression I got from the 1973 collection from an as-then relatively unknown author was a raw, unrefined and barely-controllable anger, wallowing in the mire of a down-and-out alcoholic beatnik lifestyle. Mixing autobiographical works (starring Bukowski's alter-ego of his novels, Henry Chinaski) with some more original story ideas (though we're still talking about Bukowski here, his settings are still very familiar) Hot Water Music was a very easy, enjoyable read. 

The first story is a simply outrageous and incredibly black concept that would surely come across like a punch in the face to anyone experiencing his writing for the first time. You Kissed Lily is a short domestic horror story about a wife violently obsessing over her husbands infidelity from five years ago, until she snaps and shoots him in a fit of rage. Bukowski's minimalistic narration gives the feeling of brutal inevitability, of unsympathetic lowlife culture, but with a tongue-in-cheek undertone punctuated by a finalising punchline that confirms the whole thing as a disguised comedy all along. Later on the story Decline and Fall left a similar feeling of urban horror, in a second-hand story told to a barman about a meeting with voyeuristic couple who make him question his understanding of good and evil relating to hedonism. The masterful balance of violence with apathy; Bukowski's ability to control the tempo of his prose and the attention of his audience, go along with the chronology of his work to suggest that this was critically his best period.

The forth Henry Chinaski novel Ham on Rye is, to me, the best of all Bukowski's novels in offering his most meaningful, most desolate writing, and the form he showed there carries on into this collection released one year later. There may be those who find less enjoyment in Bukowski's most personal, self analytical and critical work because it is noticeably bleaker than his earlier, almost jaunty novels like Post Office and Factotum, but the fact remains to me that the amusing character of Chinaski who rolled through those novels with a harem of strange women and angry bosses always had a much darker side to his nature. To that end Bukowski includes within Hot Water Music the story The Death of the Father, which I read as an epilogue to Ham on Rye. The title gives the topic away with that one, as Chinaski attends his father's funeral without remorse, then takes the old man's last girlfriend afterwards, for good measure.

Most of the other stories have momentary plots that wouldn't sound interesting here, but rely on Bukowski's poetic mastery of one-liners and love of the down and outs. Some of them, like Home Run, have an unpleasantness to them. Bukowski made it very clear many times about his disdain for the human race, and that hatred flows from the page through the acts of morally repugnant characters in desperate situations. This was my favourite of all the Bukowski collections (I've so far read, only three left by my count), fiction or non, displaying Bukowski at his creative peak.

Ryunosuke Akutagawa- Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories

Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories

Penguin Classics

Ryunosuke Akutagawa

2004 (Collected)

“He disliked his own lies as much as his parents', but still he continued to lie -- boldly and cunningly. He did this primarily out of need, but also for the pathological pleasure of killing a god.” 

When I found this book on the shelves of my favourite of all book emporiums, my local Oxfam Bookshop (other bookshops are available), it was an easy purchase choice, despite never having heard of the author before thanks to my woeful ignorance of world literature. I'm enough of a literary hipster to easily be coerced into buying anything presented as a progressive Japanese classic, so when a quick browse of the cover and blurb told me this collection of short stories contained an introduction by none other than Haruki Murakami and had been translated by regular Murakami translator Jay Rubin, it was a no-brainer. A part of me (the snobby part, probably) hates admitting to my ignorance on, well, anything, but it seems pretty clear that this new collection of translations had been designed as an entrance point by publishers Penguin for the millions of English-reading Murakami fans to delve into the otherwise seemingly-inpenetrable realm of older Japanese literature without requiring a degree course or something- and that really is fantastic.

Murakami's introduction was an interesting lead, and I'd be lying if I said that the chance to read more of his writing wasn't a big factor in my desire to pick this up next, such is the state of my fandom for the author. Murakami's detailed, thoughtful biographical analysis of the short life and career of Akutagawa gave me a welcome head-start on what to expect from the author, but also hinted at a strong familiarity with the cultural impact of his work that I feared might be initially lost on me. The older I get and the (hopefully) more well-read I become, I've become more and  more certain of the power of familiarity in understanding the true craft of each lauded author. That may be an obvious statement now I read it back, but its importance lies within the ability of the first time reader to recognise the hidden depths of subtle writers, particularly ones who obsess over themes and explore them inside out in their novels and short stories.

The first story in this collection, the eponymous Rashomon, was a fine introduction to Akutagawa's style. One of the shortest stories in this collection, it nevertheless left the biggest impact on me, thanks to the playful narrative adding an almost-indefinable edge of the surreal. The story of a servant exploring the earthquake-ravaged city of Kyoto is too short for an unraveling plot, instead encapsulating just one scene with an air of poignant mystery. Akutagawa's influence on Murakami, meanwhile was already clear. The next story, In A Bamboo Grove shows Akutagwa's playfulness with the short story format; presented as it is as a succession of witness statements from a murder trial. It's also a very bleak story in tone, something which it becomes apparent is a common feature of Akutagawa's work. It's at this point that if I had more experience with the author I'd be able to analyse more succinctly what he was feeling, but I only know a few facts; that Akutagawa feared madness, was obsessed with death, and committed suicide at the age of only 35.

Such bleak facts cast somewhat of a clearer eye on the status of Akutagawa as not only a popular author, but as a tragic cult icon, a Japanese literary Kurt Cobain-style figure who's voice transcends typical narrative. There is undeniable power in his bleakest work; Hell Screen is a longer story of an obsessive painter interested only in depicting visions of hell on his canvasses, and whose drive to envision the images leads him to setting up real-life scenarios of hell in which to witness for inspiration. It stuck out as me particularly for its similarities to classic romanticist literature of the west, ingrained comfortably with Akutagawa's voice. The later stories in this collection veer more to autobiography, and, to be honest, these lost my interest in comparison, probably requiring a greater appreciation of the writer to enjoy.

As an introduction to an author from a time and place a world away from me, this was an engaging, thoughtful read. Though it's so easy for me to compare Akutagwa to more familiar contemporary Japanese authors, many of whom have a western tint, Akutagawa's work was unique to me thanks to its lack if such influences. As a result it seemed naturally more foreign, though that added to a feel of early magical realism. Though I feel as though my own cultural distance from this work and lack of understanding limited my full enoyment, but at the same time gave me the great excitement of exploring a new period of literature. Haunting and memorable, this is something that will grow on 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.

Charles Bukowski- South of No North

South of No North

HarperCollins

Charles Bukowski

1973 (Collected)

Other Bukowski Reviews; Post Office - Factotum - Women - Ham on Rye - Tales of Ordinary Madness - Notes of a Dirty Old Man

“My objection to war was not that I had to kill somebody or be killed senselessly, that hardly mattered. What I objected to was to be denied the right to sit in a small room and starve and drink cheap wine and go crazy in my own way and at my own leisure.”

When people talk about Charles Bukowski, they almost always only talk about his Henry Chinaski-starring series of novels and about his poetry. His career as a short-story writer unfairly gets overlooked, I feel, though Bukowski was such a prolific author that there are numerous collections available bringing together samples of the many, many articles he wrote for various underground literary magazines throughout the 1960's and beyond. I've quickly looked at a couple of them on this blog, Tales of Ordinary Madness and Notes of a Dirty Old Man, collected in eye-catching new editions by Virgin, and while I enjoyed the material individually I do feel that as collections they're somewhat inconsistent; where the frantic pace and anger of the author's tone combined with the lack of context (for me, anyway) for many of the topics and references ultimately took away some enjoyment when reading them from start to finish as one chronological piece. 

South of No North, however, broke the streak of awkward Bukowski collections by collecting a much more balanced selection of work. Collected early on in Bukowski's career (proceeded by only Post Office in relation to the full-length adventures of Henry Chinaski), the stories collected here are incredibly raw and fresh, lifted of the invisible responsibility of reputation surrounding Bukowski's later work. Initially  collected and published by Bukowski supporters Black Sparrow Press, it's easy to see just how South of No North would've thrown the heavy-drinking, no-care-giving power of Bukowki's evocative and familiar, yet totally unique voice into the American literary conscious, and provided a strong backbone for Bukowski to build his name upon.

Young Charles

 From the very beginning of this collection, Bukowki's voice is in full flow, detailing short stories of low-life hedonism and crime starring ordinary people. You and Your Beer and How Great You Are is an early example of a biting, sardonic narrators voice telling the story of an egotistical boxer and his tired girlfriend. No Way To Paradise is the first story in the book I really loved, partially due to how unexpectedly surreal it is; Hank the narrator (probably Henry Chinaski, but it's not made explicitly clear) is sat in a bar when he meets a woman who has purchased a set of four miniature manufactured people who argue, fight, and sleep together for her amusement. There's a fairly even divide between the semi-autobiographical pieces we're used to from Bukowski as Chinaski and third-person character narratives, such as Love for $17.50, about a man who fills his need for a woman with a shop-bought mannequin. Such stories are strange and compelling, without a clear moral explanation besides the nagging feeling that it's powered by Bukowki's own jet black humour.

Later on in the collection the links between these stories and Bukowki's overarching literary intentions become clearer, as he slips further into the autobiographical fable mode that powered Post Office and would his later novels. The Way the Dead Love and All the Assholes in the World and Mine are great, great reads by themselves, but also seem like prototypes for his next novel Factotum. The longer short-story (nice oxymoron) Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts is very much an early version of a few chapters from Ham on Rye (released almost ten years later), including the same disturbing hatred of Bukowki's own adolescence. These later stories in this collection are all at least twice the length of the earlier ones, which I felt really added to the balance and variety of this collection, making it easier to read through consecutively.

Easily my favourite of all the Bukowski collections I've read so far, South of No North works on several levels; as a stand-alone collection of ingenious stylistic ideas, as a fascinating curio in relation to his later works, and quite probably as a powerful, undiluted introduction to Bukowki for readers curious about his work. Always powerful, occasionally disturbing, and amusingly poignant, South of No North collects the work of a man forcing himself onto the literary scene.

Haruki Murakami- Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Vintage

Haruki Murakami

 2005
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

“There are three ways you can get along with a girl: one, shut up and listen to what she has to say; two, tell her you like what she's wearing; and three, treat her to really good food...If you do all that and still don't get the results you want, better give up.”

Haruki Murakami's third short story collection, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman was one of the first works I ever read by the author; taken out from the library in hardback format not long after it was released, almost ten years ago. In the meantime, despite becoming a massive Murakami fan, I somehow managed to forget all about it and, crucially, failed to notice I didn't own a copy (I think I just subconsciously assumed that I did, my mind playing assumptive tricks). It wasn't until after finishing and reviewing Murakami's latest release, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, that I noticed via a goodreads list that I was missing this book from my collection. Thanks to the magic of Amazon, that was soon rectified, and soon after I was jetting off to Greece with the rather larger story collection in my suitcase. As it turned out, though, I ended up reading the vast majority of it upon my return to England, during an otherwise torturous seven hour wait for a bus from Gatwick Airport, from two o'clock in the morning.

Like his earlier collection The Elephant Vanishes, Blind Willow is comprised of various previously published short stories,  originally published in various Japanese periodicals and a Japanese-only smaller collection (Strange Tales from Tokyo). The big difference between the two collections, however, is that the range of stories in Blind Willow cover Murakami's writing career for over twenty years, from 1981 to 2005. Such a diverse range, then, gives the reader the opportunity to look at how the authors' style changed and hopefully improved over the years, as well as offering a pretty diverse selection of story ideas. From a more negative standpoint though, the sheer comprehensiveness of this collection left plenty of room for a few inclusions that, for me, brought the standards down just a little.

In the introduction to the book, Murakami explains to the reader that he is, at heart, a short-story writer, one who has to work very hard at composing long novels but who loves to sit down and create a brief window into strange and haunting worlds. I can completely understand this; while I love his long-form work, the effort and composure it must take to create and sustain such intensely specific yet ethereal plots, characters and themes must be immense- a novel like Kafka on the Shore or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle can be overwhelming to read in long bursts, I find, thanks to the concentrated intensity, but each one of Murakami's short stories revels in its lack of space; free from the confines of expectation, his words float across the page with as much or as little context as he feels like offering, inevitably leading the overall feeling of unsettling magic- something even more powerful when you're reading at four in the morning in the entrance lobby of a massive airport, for some reason. 

So, the stories themselves then. The book opens with its title story, but I found it to be somewhat of a false start., at least in terms of its quality. Thematically it's very recognisably Murakami; the simple story of a very introspective narrator who tells of his strange companionship with his younger cousin, and compares their trips to hospital together to memories of his own youth. It's initially absorbing, but lacks a strong direction and seemed somewhat bland as a choice for an opener- to the extent where I think a reader checking him out for the first time might find him uninspiring. Thankfully I found the second story, Birthday Girl, to be much more interesting, and probably one of his best stories. It's an almost perfect slice of magical realism, the author at his best as he mixes mundane life with unexplainable surrealism, and crucially doesn't try to explain it. The collection continues on in this vein, with a run of stories that I found to almost all be great.

There were a few notable exceptions that broke up the flow as I read them. A 'Poor Aunt' Story is comfortably the longest in the collection, and the silliest, as an example of Murakami extending his postmodern style a little too far for too long. Crabs was just intentionally disturbing with no good reason. "The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day" was very stereotypical for Murakami, almost a plot someone might use to satirise him. Although maybe my viewpoint on all of these was skewered thanks to the circumstances in which I read them, for better or for worse. It's difficult to judge Blind Willow as a whole thanks to the wide timespan in which its contents were written, I suppose, but it does highlight Murakami's early focus on blatantly strange and unnerving ideas verses his later development into an author with a greater grasp on his characters. Personally I've never had a preference for his earlier or later works, since it really depends on what the reader is looking for; the earlier stories and novels are abrubtly odd and disconcerting, while the later ones far more emotionally resonant.

As I start drastically running out of steam in this review, I suppose it's fair but easy to say that Blind Willow is a book for the converted, one that I wouldn't necessarily recommend for a prospective fan of the author. It's collective nature cares preaches to the converted more than anything, with some of the author's weirdest short pieces. I enjoyed it again, as I knew I would, but I do think it struggles as a single piece when compared with The Elephant Vanishes or after the quake. It's a treat for the completest with some individually outstanding stories though, so if you're already a Murakami fan then there's literally nothing stopping you.

L-Space- Struggling with Borges

My book reading goes in line with my obsessive compulsiveness in certain ways. This blog alone is proof,, my attempt to catalogue each book I read with a short review. To some writers that amount of productivity is easy to achieve, but for me sometimes it just feels really, really hard. As a result over the past few years there have been more than a couple of novels and non-fiction books that I just didn't bother reviewing, for various reasons. One of the main ones is the nagging feeling in the back of my head that, with some of them, there's really not much to achieve. This happens a lot with older classics (most recently Marlowe's Faustus and Goethe's Faust) where I feel like even trying to place a critical eye on something that's been renowned, revered, and already picked apart by so many people already is a redundant, maybe even narcissistic thing to do.

After reading and reviewing Terry Pratchett's Raising Steam I fancied breezing through a shorter book, if anything just to try and make my to-read pile a little lighter (37 to go now I think), and so I made my third and final attempt to connect with an author whom I, in the past, have really wanted to like. He's both famous enough and esoteric enough (to me, anyway) to seem cool and reputable, as the most popular author in South American history. Like most of my books I first encountered Jose Luis Borges fairly randomly a few years ago by picking out a random title of his off the shelf of a charity shop, hoping to add him to the growing list of authors I enjoy. Ultimately though this recent third effort is likely to be my last with the author for a while. Three times I've tried to crack him, and three times I've failed badly enough to the point where I haven't bothered to review them. Hopefully these mini versions will make me feel a bit better about it.

The first Jose Luis Borges book I read was his Book of Imaginary Beings (1969 expanded edition), which on the surface of it seemed like a whimsical exercise in fantasy writing that appealed through its simplicity as well as Borges' name, I fancied it as a good entry point and having recently very much enjoyed David Eagleman's Sum- Tales from the Afterlife as a similarly-shaped collection of micro-stories. The book is simply an alphabetical trawl through 120 different mythical creatures of lore, each one assigned a generally brief paragraph dedicated to describing it, and it's as simple as that. It was, in hindsight, kind of an odd book to experience Borges for the first time with because its quirky, fleeting nature left me feeling like I'd not gotten much of an impression of Borges' writing talent overall, instead merely experiencing him writing in an atypical genre-specific style. Though I did enjoy it as a quick read I was looking forward to reading something more substantial and expressive from Borges, though ironically in the end concluded that I enjoyed it most of all of them.

The second attempt at Borges seemed more promising, the short story collection A Universal History of Infamy (originally 1935, my revised edition 1954), in which Borges writes fictional stories about real historical criminals. The stories are very short and this is a very brief collection, but they are much longer than the entries in Book of Imaginary Beings, thus giving me the chance to get a better feel of Borges' style. Unfortunately it just did capture me; from a technical standpoint he's an immaculate writer, able to portray each scenario with an expansive vocabulary, but perversely I found there to be something a little off about it all. As though he's so confident with his narrative style, descriptive and emotive that the narration offsets the characters in the stories. Though the subject matter seemed right up my alley the style and the brevity of each story pushed me away and I just couldn't connect. It's frustrating because I really did want to like this book. Maybe one day I'll pick it up again.

I finished the final Borges from my to-read pile only a few days ago, hoping that this time I'd finally get it, but it never really happened. Doctor Brodie's Report (1970)  was the most traditional collection of short stories that I read and some ways the most interesting. Famously written at the age of 70 after a gap in short story writing that lasted 20 years, this collection showed me more of Borges' voice than the prior two, thanks to its regular style of storytelling. Though I knew of Borges primarily for being such a well regarded South American literary export, I hadn't felt his cultural influences much until I read this. Unfortunately I found little I could relate to amongst these tales of Catholics in Argentina, and though I sort of enjoyed the distinctive Latin feeling (or at least my impression of it), it only worked to a certain extent. I think I was a little turned away by the religious undertones to be honest, which is hardly something to criticise the author for but isn't my cup of tea.

Ultimately I left my first looks at Borges feeling disappointed, but not completely disheartened. I do feel there's something there that's not clicking with me where I can't seem to enjoy his prose style despite knowing that it's good, if that makes any sense. There's so much stuff left to read that I doubt I'll find myself re-reading any of these any time soon, but I could still be tempted to pick up any other random Borges title that comes my way. Until then I'll be heading north of the border with my reading habits, starting with another novel by king of the low lives Chuck Bukowski.

Charles Bukowski- Tales of Ordinary Madness

Tales of Ordinary Madness

Virgin Press

Charles Bukowski

1983

Other Bukowski Reviews; Post Office - Factotum - Women - Ham on Rye - Tales of Ordinary Madness - Notes of a Dirty Old Man

“to ask them to legalize pot is something like asking them to put butter on the handcuffs before they place them on you, something else is hurting you - that's why you need pot or whiskey, or whips and rubber suits, or screaming music turned so fucking loud you can't think, or madhouses or mechanical cunts or 162 baseball games in a season. or vietnam or israel or the fear of spiders. your love washing her yellow false teeth in the sink before you screw.” 

After the disappointment of The Face of Another, my next choice of reading material was an intentionally safe one; picking from three Charles Bukowski options and coming out with another collection of out-there articles, in a similar vain to Notes of a Dirty Old Man. Like Notes..., Tales of Ordinary Madness collects a range of short pieces originally published in magazines and underground newspapers, from 1967-1975, with no stated theme or narrative in common than Bukowski's individually brilliant explosive style.

Though Bukowksi is probably more well-known in the twenty-first century for his poetry and novels like Post Office, his bibliography of miscellanea is extensive; as someone who struggles to hold his brain together long enough to compose a four paragraph review of somebody else's work Bukowski is both my hero and antithesis. As such each of his many collected volumes have a parade of timeless essays and short fictions to present, and Tales of Ordinary Madness is probably my favourite of those I've yet read. Bukowski deviates from short stories to essays to self-portraying thinly veiled memoirs with equal ease, and this collection offers a good variety in style, thankfully preventing the intensity of thought Bukowksi presents from becoming overwhelming.

If you've experienced Bukowski before then you should know what to expect from his style and subjects, and if you haven't then this book would surely be a great introduction. The blurb on the book cover describes him as 'the godfather of lowlife literature', which is absolutely accurate. Each of his main characters (all of whom are essentially just variations upon the author himself) deal in the most disgusting, debased, drug-infested and morally-corrupt circumstances, as he presents an America drowning in its own debauchery. There is no happy ending, sometimes not even a plot, but Bukowski's narration bounces electrically from point to point, his vitriol unstoppable as he observes the decaying wreck of a once great empire. His humour is so black that it's impossibly to accurately determine what is and isn't a joke; my favourite story Rape! Rape! demonstrating that in the most offensive way possible.

In conclusion, obviously Charles Bukowski isn't for everyone, and if you're the type easily offended through text then he's clearly not for you. For anybody else looking for an uncensored artistic rant at the world through the medium of uncompromisingly vile short segments, if Hunter S. Thompson's not hardcore enough for you, then Chuck Bukowki's the man you need. He'll shake your brain up and make you enjoy it.

Terry Pratchett- A Blink of the Screen: Collected Fiction

A Blink of the Screen- Collected Shorter Fiction

Doubleday

Sir Terry Pratchett
2012

Other Terry Pratchett Reviews- The Colour of Magic - The Light Fantastic - Equal Rites - Mort - Sourcery - Wyrd Sisters - Pyramids - Guards! Guards! - Eric - Moving Pictures - Reaper Man - Witches Abroad - Small Gods - Lords and Ladies - Men At Arms - Soul Music - Interesting Times - Maskerade - Feet of Clay - Hogfather - Raising Steam - A Blink of the Screen - Sky1 Adaptations- Dodger - The Long Earth (w Stephen Baxter)

"The traditional enmity between dwarfs and trolls has been explained away by one simple statement: one species is made of rock, the other is made of miners. But in truth the enmity is there because no one can remember when it wasn’t, and so it continues because everything is done in completely justifiable revenge for the revenge that was taken in response to the revenge for the vengeance that was taken earlier, and so on. Humans never do this sort of thing, much."

It's safe to say that the vast majority of popular authors eventually release at least one collection of short stories, letters and other previously unreleased miscellanea, as kind of an easy cash-in on their success and as a treat for their biggest fans, who inevitably can't resist making sure they have their favourite author's entire bibliography. I reviewed George Orwell's Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (which is one only many collections of the legendary author's many essays and articles) not long ago as an example, as is Hunter S. Thompson's The Great Shark Hunt. Another that springs to mind as a favorite is the posthumous Douglas Adams collection The Salmon of Doubt.

As a devout fan of the great man Pratchett, A Blink of the Screen was an essential purchase. Upon first thought, it seems strange that it's taken so long for such a project to be released, especially since Pratchett has hardly been shy about contributing to a great many Discworld companions of various types. When you consider he's been hugely popular for twenty years now it seems odder. It turns out that the explanation for this is a simple one, and one that really defines the nature and appeal, or lack of (I'll get to that) this book. A Blink of the Screen collects thirty-three individual pieces of shorter work dating from 1963 to the present day. Eleven of these are Discworld pieces, and constitute most of the appeal of the book.

This is a definitive collection, no doubt. The first story, The Hades Business from 1963 was written when Pratchett was 13-years-old, and there are a quite a few originating from his younger years. These are amusing enough, clearly showing a young writer with lots of potential, but inevitably aren't anywhere near the quality we're used to from him. The later writings, including several of the Discworld bits, are very short bits of miscellanea that seem included merely to pad out the Discworld content and sell more copies. They're funny little sketches from the recognisable pen of the mature Pratchett, but I have the feeling many will be disappointed with their briefness.

The meat and potatoes, as they say, lies in Pratchett's years of developing fame, roughly encapsulated here from 1986 to 1993, where his stories clearly display the work of a man just beginning to plumb the depths of his imagination. The High Megas (1986) is the short story which eventually evolved into last year's The Long Earth novel (which I annoyingly don't have, yet alone have read) and it's a breath-taking piece of imaginative sci-fi reminiscent of the short stories of Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury, only with a lot more wit. Meanwhile, there are three brilliant Discworld short stories that are almost worth the price of admission themselves, if only they hadn't been available on the Internet for free since they came out.

Pratchett gives short introductions to each piece, and it's through this that he reveals the truth; he doesn't enjoy writing short stories whatsoever, and envies those people who do them for fun. It's an honest admission for someone selling a short story collection, but it really defines the truth. There are at least 100 pages of legitimately great, on-form Pratchett stories in here, but the rest of it is merely collected for the sake of it. Rather than having reams and reams of material to source from, Pratchett was left with the scraps. It makes complete sense because there's absolutely loads of published material from Sir Terry, he doesn't leave many scraps. So, as it is, this book is really only for obsessives, or for people who don't mind paying for convenience. I'm happy to have it because it looks very nice and makes me feel like a cool librarian (oxymoron?), but I doubt I'll be referring to it as a must have to any burgening fans of my favourite author.

Haruki Murakami- after the quake

after the quake

Vintage

Haruki Murakami
2000
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

"Strange and mysterious things, though, aren't they - earthquakes? We take it for granted that the earth beneath our feet is solid and stationary. We even talk about people being 'down to earth' or having their feet firmly planted on the ground. But suddenly one day we see that it isn't true. The earth, the boulders, that are supposed to be solid, all of a sudden turn as mushy as liquid."

As well as being my favourite living author in any known universe, Haruki Murakami is a masterful short story writer. Each of his smaller pieces manages to tell a compelling and almost-always mysterious tale that somehow manages to both exist brilliantly as a purposeful self-contained story and as a window into a potentially much larger imaginary universe, a potential novel in itself that the reader can dwell on to imagine their own bigger, individual tale. Most of Murakami's short stories were originally published in a few different sources and then collected into novel-sized collections (namely The Elephant Vanishes and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, which I'll probably end up reviewing here one day), and as enjoyable as they are their compiled nature means the stories generally aren't connected within their own topics and themes. after the quake contains a bunch of short stories that were written and published exclusively in this book. Essentially, it's a Murakami concept album.

Awesome Super Frog cover.

Having been gestating in Murakami's mind for about five years, after the quake (lowercase intentional, by the way) addresses through the medium of short fiction the Japanese public consciousness regarding the Kobe earthquake of 1995, in which 6,400 people died. The six short stories that comprise the book all relate to it in some way, with varying degrees of specificness. It seems to me that Murakami designated the order of the stories in a particular way to give a certain effect, where the first four stories in the book hold little direct thematic relation to an earthquake, but instead exist as small emotional character pieces; stories about relationships, love, family and dreams that struck me as particularly existential, each in their own way representing an earthquake as an emotional tribulation. These stories particularly struck me as almost smaller pieces of an imaginary whole; in that I wouldn't be surprised if Murakami decided to write another four hundred pages for each one to turn it into a novel.

 The fifth story is my favourite by far, and it's almost completely insane. 'Super-Frog Saves Tokyo' tells the story of a normal guy named Katagiri, who one day finds a powerfully-built six foot tall frog in his apartment, who asks him for help in saving Tokyo from the threat of a giant earthquake, delivered by a giant worm deep beneath the city. Frog needs Katagiri to go with him underground, and help him fight worm in a battle to the death. It's ridiculous, but also funny, endearing, powerful and heart-warming, and it's probably my favourite short-story I've ever read. It's imagination at its finest, and I'd recommend after the quake on the basis of that strange fable by itself.

Running in at around 130-pages, I think after the quake would be a great introduction to the author for anyone attracted by his work. 90% of the book keeps the surrealism at a minimum, gradually introducing it in the fourth story before throwing the reader into the sheer brilliance of Super-Frog. Fans of Murakami yet to read this will probably already assume that it's essential, and they're right.