David Eagleman- Sum- Tales from the Afterlives

Sum- Tales from the Afterlives

Cannongate Press

David Eagleman
2009

“And once again the Rewarder and the Punisher stalk off, struggling to understand why knowing the code behind the wine does not diminish its pleasure on your tongue, why knowing the inescapability of heartache does not reduce its sting, why glimpsing the mechanics of love does not alter its intoxicating appeal.”

The phrase 'don't judge a book by its cover'; I've never understood that one. If you decide specifically not to judge book by their covers then you place serious limitations on what you'll buy. It's fine if you see a book that you've heard has a great reputation and you're willing to buy because of the author or the title alone, but if you go book hunting and don't find one of these examples then you have no other alternative but to go home and cry into a bowl of cornflakes. Judging books by their covers is great fun, I do it all the time, and sometimes it helps uncover an absolute gem.

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist, originally from New Mexico, currently working in Houston, Texas. His name on the front of a book, any book, would not attract my attention by itself. Nor would the title; Sum- Tales from the Afterlife, which could be any kind of esoteric new age hippy spiel. Put this title in the center of the book surrounded by a sparkling galactic arc of stars, and then place a glowing quote by Stephen Fry underneath and you're guaranteed to catch my attention.

In addition to this, other quotes of complete positivity from broadsheet newspapers, Phillip Pullman (His Dark Materials) and Brian Eno for some reason sold it. I completely and totally judged this book by its cover, making an educated gamble based on the information I had. I've done this with other books in the past, and a few of them were a bit of a waste of time, but on this occasion I found an absolute gem, because Sum- Tales from the Afterlife is one of the most uniquely interesting, compelling and memorable books I think I've ever read.

The book is essentially a collection of forty different micro-stories (I've made that phrase up) all emanating from the same simple theme; the afterlife. These forty stories consist of no-more than four pages each, resulting in a book that only just makes it past the one-hundred page mark; culminating in what isn't really a novel, but instead a collection of philosophical introspective wisdom. In each story, Eagleman describes to the reader through an extended summary the details of an individual (though generally Christianity-based) afterlife, where events have contrived to create a scenario far different to typical depictions of Heaven. For example, in the opening, title-track story Sum, Eagleman details an afterlife where the individual relives every moment of their life through experiencing every job, every sensation grouped together ('you spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. you sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes).

The story Absence tells of an afterlife where God has vanished, leaving his spiritual charges alone in heaven to spend endless years warring over Him, as they do on Earth. My favourite story is Quantum, telling of an afterlife where for each individual every possible action or thought they can have exists and occurs at the same time. This story is merely a lead-up for a joke about relationships. As becomes clear very quickly on with each different example, this book is about the world we live in today, simply turned upside down and shaken about a bit so Eagleman can make his point.

At times funny, inspiring, and very poignant this book was very enjoyable. I'm hesitant to describe it as a curio because it's more than that; it's a book that could be returned to as a whole, or in segments to provide a moment of interest. I shot through this book very quickly, reading it in two short sittings because I found it so compelling, so I have a suspicion that I didn't even get as much out of it as I could've. Before I do get around to looking at it again, I'm going to have to look at everything Eagleman's done since.

Haruki Murakami- A Wild Sheep Chase

A Wild Sheep Chase

Vintage

Haruki Murakami

1982 (Japan) - 1989 (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

“What is this Will?” I asked.
“A concept that governs time, governs space, and governs possibility.”
“I don’t follow.” I said.
“Of course. Few can. Only the Boss had a virtually instinctual understanding of it. One might even go so far as to say he negated self-cognition, thereupon realizing in its place something entirely revolutionary. To put it in simple terms for you, his was a revolution of labour incorporating capital and capital incorporating labour"

  

It's starting to really occur to me that I seem to be reviewing books by the same authors over and over again, but I tend to get hooked on writers' full bibliographies so there's still a good few Haruki Murakami, Paul Auster and Cormac McCarthy books to go. This time it's back to 1982, and Murakami's first major work, one that I initially thought was his debut novel but is instead the final part of a selection called The Trilogy of Rats. The confusion comes from the fact that Murakami's novels are published in the UK by Vintage, but for some reason they didn't publish either Hear the Wind Sing or Pinball, 1973 and those are harder to get (in yea olde timey booke stores, I mean, not Amazon). So I bought and read this out of order, but it didn't really make a difference to me because A Wild Sheep Chase works fine as a book by itself.

That's generally because Murakami's plots are often so surreal and dis-corporate that I don't expect a book I'm reading for the first time to make direct sense to me. I'll try and accurately describe the plot of this one; an unnamed narrator (fitting the bill of Murakami's favourite lead type; male, anonymous, sensitive, detached and uncertain) introduces the reader to his life, consisting of a dull profession in advertising and P.R. with a partner, and a girlfriend with the most beautiful ears in the world. The narrator unassumingly takes possession of what he believes is merely a photograph of scenery, of a group of unknown sheep in an unknown field. Instead the photograph is far more valuable than that, as a representative large and powerful society of people approach him offering him a great sum of money for both the photo and his silence.

Naturally, the lead is far too intrigued by this strange series of events to simply let things go, and after some investigating he realises that the key to the issue is one particular sheep in the picture; one with a strange star-shaped pattern in its fur that proves to be unidentifiable to anyone. Our lead character and his girlfriend with the beautiful ears are forced by narrative law to investigate further, and so begins a confusing, paranoid, mysterious odyssey. As in Murakami's other longer fiction (like 1Q84 or Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the Edge of the World), events proceed under an unpredictable logic. Characters disappear and arrive unexpectedly, as the reader and narrator become almost as equally lost as each other.

Comparing Murakami with other authors is fairly easy by now. He's clearly passionate about Western fiction, film and music, with the results seeping into his work. Like Murakami's other work it's all thematically and stylistically comparable to the surrealism of Franz Kafka (The Secret Agent, for me), and the hard-boiled dialogue of Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlow character. Or you could go deeper back in to literary history and even more roughly compare it all to a classical Oedipal odyssey, if you want to be a bit snarky and all that. To me, though Murakami throughout each of his novels remains unique because of the combination of his influences and his attributes.

A Wild Sheep chase is not amongst Murakami's best efforts, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it to a first time reader of the author. As the plot progressed and became more inexplicably convoluted the novel failed to match up to Murakami's later efforts (Kafka on the Shore) in presenting the absurdity and surrealism as meaningful for the character. Murakami's lead is very much an alien, who loses contact with the reader further into the novel. Ultimately I enjoyed the book as another powerful, imaginative novel through its prose and tone, but the story and the characters didn't grab me.

Ray Bradbury- The Silver Locusts- The Martian Chronicles

The Silver Locusts- The Martian Chronicles

Corgi

Ray Bradbury
1950

'“Do you ever wonder if--well, if there are people living on the third planet?'
'The third planet is incapable of supporting life,' stated the husband patiently. 'Our scientists have said there's far too much oxygen in their atmosphere.”' 

Returning to Ray Bradbury and his seemingly-endless droll science fiction antics, after reading and very much enjoying Bradbury's take on 1984 in Fahrenheit 451 I returned to a short story collection not unlike the first Bradbury book I read, The Illustrated Man. The stories in The Silver Locusts (a book more commonly known as The Martian Chronicles in its native United States, but that's not where I be) were written between 1946 and 1950- or later, depending on the edition of the book you own, mine is the UK original- for various science fiction publications. In this bastardized novel form Bradbury attempted to include thematically similar stories and added around a handful of new ones in an attempt to bring the concept together cohesively. For me, it just didn't work.

The original edition of this collection contains twenty-eight stories, arranged in chronological order to tell the greater story of a suffering and desperate human race attempting to colonise Mars. The stories are split in to three parts; the first selection tell of man's desperate attempts to reach the red planet and escape a nearly totally devastated Earth in the face of nuclear destruction. Those that do make it arrive to encounter the martian race in various ways, but almost all with tragic outcomes. Bradbury writes several of these stories with a heavy emphasis on the Martian's perspective, and as a result quickly establishes the key narrative element of using his alien characters to offer a twisted glimpse into humanity. Though I've only read three of his books, it seems that he has certain concepts that remain paramount throughout his writing; for me, those were boiled down to the essence of a lack of faith in humanity to be able to deal peacefully with others.

As in H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, the downfall of the Martian race is through a lack of immunity to common human diseases, and soon the human colonists seem to have the planet to themselves. Transposing important human issues and history into new visions with new perspectives is an integral part of the best science fiction, I think, and it perhaps wasn't a distant concept to turn the prairies of the newly colonized American west into vast empty Martian deserts. Anything seems possible, in an understated mesh of southern gothic and alien horror genres.

The third act of the collection requires an important plot point to explain, so I'll refrain from that because nobody likes big spoilers, but truth be told it's a continuation of the colonisation theme taken to its natural conclusion, in Oroborous fashion. By this point, though, my interest had bottomed out and it was only stubbornness that forced me to complete the book. Thinking about what left me so cold about The Silver Locusts compared to how much I enjoyed Fahrenheit 451 (a lot) and The Illustrated Man (a bit), it seems to me that the answer lies in the telling of the stories; thinking back over the overarching plot and themes it's a very clever book, and a very well organised collection of cohesive parts, but I couldn't enjoy them. Partly I think because the variety of setting was understandably slim, but mostly because Bradbury failed to make me care about almost any of the characters in the short time they were each granted on the page. Montag, of Fahrenheit 451 is allowed much more space to breathe and grow in what is still a short novel, and existed as a point of identification. The characters of this book mean nothing to me. Perhaps as a Brit rather than an American I just can't bring myself to care enough about thoughts of a new world and the dangers of a fresh civilization.

Yann Martel- Life of Pi

Life of Pie

Cannongate

Yann Martel
2001

"I know what you want. You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality."

Okay, I've been lazy for far too long with this blog. My original excuse was that I moved house and didn't feel like writing anything while I was settling in, but to be honest it's just because I'm one of those people who finds it way easier to spend time reading or watching the work of others than actually composing something in my own words. That's probably why I write a book review blog. Anyway, now I'm finally forcing myself to catch up with the backlog of stuff I've read and haven't reviewed (so the Discworld stuff is going to have to wait), and it seems appropriate to start with a book that's soon to be released as a probably massive Hollywood blockbuster; Yann Martel's Life of Pi.

Before I started to read Pi, I wasn't honestly expecting to like it, because I'm constantly suspicious of any book I see that's been included and praised by a TV book club, because the type of people I've seen on those programs make me want to go to sleep for the rest of my life. I had the same problem with Cormac McCarthy's The Road before I read it, but I enjoyed that. So, after being promised it was brilliant, I gave Life of Pi a shot. Thankfully, it was brilliant.

I love this cover.

The initial attraction for most people to this book is its intriguing high-concept set-up; a young Indian boy named Piscine is shipwrecked on a lifeboat in the Pacific ocean with a Bengal tiger. It's very attention-grabbing, but obviously the reason why the book is such a successful and unclassifiable piece of work is because there's a great deal more than that. First of all, Martel presents the tale as a first-hand story being narrated to the author by Pi as an old man, recounting not just the primary tale but detailing his life from the beginning. From the beginning Pi is established as a very eccentric, but passionate and willful child (like Rudyard Kipling's Kim on Red Bull), who, despite being raised as Hindu, chooses to declare himself both a Christian and Muslim as well. Pi's family own and run a zoo in Pondicherry, India, and Pi enjoys an amazing childhood with the many animals he knows by name. But then the zoo is sold, and Pi learns he is to travel to Canada with his family on a large boat, with many of the zoo animals caged beneath deck. Guess what happens next?

As the ship sinks, Pi is thrown onto a lifeboat, alongside a Zebra with a broken leg, a ravenous hyena, an orangutang, and a  Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. What follows is a desperate fight for survival, with each day a battle of will and cunning between tiger and boy. Naturally events progress somewhat unexpectedly, but I'll stubbornly resist spoiling any of them. The third part of the book is different in style, as Pi has a long conversation with a third party of individuals in a manner which potentially changes the whole nature of the story we've just read. While I felt the main narrative was thrilling enough, it's this conclusion which elevated Life of Pi for me as something not just good, but great.

Hopefully at some point I'll re-read it, because it certainly seemed like a book that could improve and change with each revist, especially during the second reading when events can be approached in a much fuller context. Also, in hindsight I can see why Life of Pi was selected and highlighted by mainstream popular culture because it works well on several levels; not only as a surreal character odyssey but as an engaging human drama, and one that should be a pretty easy sell for the 20th Century Fox if they pitch it right. I'm pretty excited to see the film because a proper rendition of the novel could be stunning, but then I guess you should probably never get your hopes up in those cases.