Haruki Murakami- After Dark

After Dark

Vintage Press

Haruki Murakami
2004 (Japanese)/ 2007 (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

“In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It's important to combine the two in just the right amount.”
 

After Dark was one of the first Murakami books I'd read, back during the times where I'd read through an author's bibliography relatively consecutively, and I didn't like it very much at all. Five years on, and my growing infatuation and obsession with the work of Haruki Murakami, including the need to have my own copy of each book, led me again to After Dark. This time, though, I was confident I'd enjoy it, because it's much easier to doubt the reviewing credentials of my younger self than it is to imagine that my current literary hero wrote a bad book. To cut a long story short, I really enjoyed it this time.

At only 201 pages of decently-sized font, After Dark only just escapes the 'novella' catagorisation. In truth before I just checked the number I would've guessed that it was even shorter than that. In both size and atmosphere, I'd compare it to Murakami's South of the Border, West of the Sun (one day to be reviewed), though really it's a fairly unique piece of work from the author considering both its length and the short space of time in which the story plays out. It's also written in the present tense, which is something that nine times out of ten annoys me, but here wasn't a problem because of the large amount of dialogue.

After Dark is set over the course of one night, focusing around the experiences of a small group of characters. Each chapter has a small illustration of a clock at the beginning, showing the story progressing in real-time, in a manner of speaking. The main character is Mari, an intense and withdrawn 19-year-old girl who misses her last train home and settles herself in an all-night diner with a book. Soon after she is interrupted by Takahashi, a jazz-loving (Murakami staple alert) student who recognises Mari from going on a date with her sister. As the night progresses, Mari is dragged into a series of events at a nearby low-class hotel involving gangsters and a Chinese prostitute. Segueing in between the chapters, the reader is shown Mari's sister, Ari, who two months ago went to sleep and hasn't woken up since. 

After reading this again it became clear to me that Murakami was having fun with this book. He changes his narrative tone somewhat, talking to the reader very directly in the manner of simulated stage directions, as thought this were a short movie of sorts, where he as the narrator is the omniscient god cutting between scenes. As a result, the cuts between the adventures of the main characters and of Ari, the sleeping beauty seemingly in danger from typically Murakami-esque mysterious ethereal dangers are presented in a much more direct way than the author's usual manner. 

Essentially what I feel the reader has with After Dark is a short story that Murakami enjoyed so much he extended it to a small novel. The noticeably different style of narration and the rather direct positioning of the two events occurring that night suggest to me the attempts of the author to establish the context for the mysterious existential happenings in a short space, only to find himself extending the whole narrative. Personally, I'm not entirely sure what to make of the brief flashes into Ari's strange sleep in relation to her sister's very urban, realistic experiences through the night. It's so brief and mysterious that lodged itself firmly into my brain, but without leading me to mull over it as much as I did with a novel like, say, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. It's more like a dark fairy tale, a tribute to the intangible uniqueness of the witching hours. I enjoyed it very much, though perhaps its brevity and unenlightening conclusion forces me to place it only about half way on my mental list of Best Murakami that one day I might even write.

AA Gill- The Angry Island: Hunting the English

The Angry Island: Hunting the English

Simon & Schuster

AA Gill

2007

 My recent indulgence in more non-fiction than what I did used to read led me to this random little number, a book I wouldn't call 'good' as an overall description, but had enough about it for me to at least be glad that I read it. To a certain extent, anyway. If I fall off a cliff and get amnesia I probably won't read it again. Anyway, this review should be a pretty short one; not because I'm lazy (far from it), but because hopefully it'll be reflective of AA Gill's The Angry Island in being highly stylised in its use of yea olde English language without actually saying much of relevance.

Anyway, I picked this book from the charity bookshop shelf simply because of its topic, rather than having any inclination towards AA Gill's writing. Though I knew the name, I didn't really know who he was (previously confusing him with Will Self), but a quick bit of background looking-up and a quick bit of reading revealed the truth; he's basically Jeremy Clarkson with an upmarket image, and a vastly superior command of the English language. He's also full of shit at least 90% of the time, but it's rather entertaining all the same. As the title suggests, this is book is about English people. As an English person, I was intrigued. AA Gill is also mostly English in nationality (and completely so in appearance), but he pretends not to be, seemingly for the sake of annoying his readers (this is a common theme).

Gill's method of analysing the nation consists of addressing the key features and stereotypes of English culture, adding a bit of historical and anthropological perspective, then mercilessly poking fun at them through his incredibly dry and well-constructed prose. This is, in some places, very good stuff indeed. The historical stuff is enlightening (well, for me) and amusing in places, though Gill rarely goes into much detail. It's a short book, and its brevity is both a gift and a curse, as his genuinely interesting historical knowledge is dealt short shrift for the sake of keeping his witticisms from overstaying their welcome.

There's really not much else to say about this book than that. In a certain way I absolutely respect it for what it is; a character piece. I have no idea what AA Gill is really like, but here his narrative is directly linked to an exaggerated character designed to provoke both controversy and loyalty in equal measures. It became clear early on to me that this was the case, which changed the nature of my reading it substantially; in its attempts to achieve its goals as an aggravating, charismatic extended magazine piece it works almost perfectly, but that's essentially all it is. As a highlight of its author's talent with words it is very good, like a modern day Thomas de Quincy (whose Confessions of an English Opium Eater is of course the title I stole/homaged for this blog), but there's only so far that can actually take you. When comparing this book with the last piece of non-fiction I read, Richard Dawkin's The Blind Watchmaker, it becomes clear just how little actual substance there is in this book; while Dawkin's friendly, amiable tone works very well in presenting heavyweight, astounding real-world facts, Gill has to struggle to be as loud as possible in an effort to disguise the fact that he barely says anything.

Nevertheless, I did enjoy reading this book, almost entirely to indulge and hopefully learn from Gill's mastery of language (particularly in establishing a narrative tone), but I can guarantee I'll never read it again. I'd recommend it to other people looking for a short, amusing lightweight read (and even then only British people, since it's not going to tell a non-Brit anything valuable), but only if you take the gentle prodding with a pinch of salt and don't expect too much.

Chuck Palahniuk- Fight Club

Fight Club

Vintage

 Chuck Palahniuk

1996

“You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”

In 2013 it would be incomplete to talk about Chuck Palahniuk's most famous novel without constantly and incessantly referring to the 1999 Hollywood adaptation from David Fincher, so if there's anybody out there reading this who hates the entwined nature of virtually all film and literature in popular culture, then you're out of luck.  Furthermore, if my passive/aggressive assault on books that slightly annoy me but I nevertheless like also irritates you, then you should probably leave this one, since I kind of like Fight Club, but I also kind of don't like it too.

Fight Club is another book I first read as an academic (not to study, just for fun) about six years ago and I'm just returning to. My initial memories of it were good, if a bit disconcerting, but by no means a classic. Since then I like to think I've expanded my reading context a bit, enabling me to find new levels of insight when discussing literature with a bit of depth. With that in mind, my updated thoughts about Fight Club: The Book Version are that I quite liked it, but not that much... but for much better reasons, probably.

The plot of Fight Club and its essential twist is so well known I don't think spoiler warnings are necessary. Palahniuk's unnamed narrator meets a mysterious and extremely cool man named Tyler Durdan, who teaches him through extreme ways how to let go of his consumerist worldview and become a stronger, much more dramatic individual with control over his own life. This involves the forming of something called fight club, where a disenfranchised group of men- which is essentially what this whole book is about; the frustration of first-world nobodies who live comfortably but pointlessly and need to feel capable of effecting their own lives- come together to mutually fight like manly men. Fight Club is just the beginning of Tyler's plot though, and it transforms into blatant organised urban terrorism with Project Mayhem, which is where things really begin to spin out of control. Then the narrator finds out something important about the relationship between himself and Tyler. There you go, I didn't spoil it.

Anyway, I must admit that the power of the 1999 film unfairly takes away credit from Palahniuk's ideas through its ubiquitousness. Fight Club the movie is so good, and the performances by Edward Norton and Brad Pitt so memorable that I instinctively associate the title with that film before I do the novel (which is something I never normally do). Obviously this is unfair, since the vast majority of ideas, lines, and plot twists from the film are taken directly from the book, from the imagination of Palahniuk. These ideas are genius, as proved by the movies' popularity and influence on pop culture as a whole, and the author deserves every royalty payment he gets from just having these ideas, and presenting them in such a direct style as to appeal to everyone. In this respect, I really like Fight Club.

Also no tag backs.

The problem is- and this is going to annoy purists- that in terms of the presentation of the ideas, the film does it much, much better. Reading this novel felt like I was reading a slightly beefed-up premise for an idea, a sort of bizarrely presented screenplay to be expanded upon. Partly this is due to the style of Palahniuk's narration. As represented by Edward Norton's onscreen unenthusiastic tones,the narration is stripped down and intentionally understated. In fact the whole book is a very short read, as the author writes in short outbursts of thoughts, one line at a time; like an obsessive compulsive stream of consciousness. Almost every sentence in the book is a potentially memorable line, which, again, translated perfectly onto the screen. 'I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.'

On paper, though, it wore thin for me and was inconsistent in quality. Mostly I was put off (though not greatly) by stylistic similarities to authors who, I feel, do this sort of thing a lot better. The most prominent in my mind are Charles Bukowski and Kurt Vonnegut (who I'll actually review something by, one of these days). two authors with a far greater talent for putting down one memorable, powerful line after another. I've yet to read anything else by Palahniuk, but it seems clear that he's comfortable as a counter-culture writer like many other great names before him, paying homage to William Burroughs and such with his style and intent. As a nineties writer my closest comparison would be to Bret Easton Ellis, in particular comparing Fight Club to American Psycho. I guess the problem with this type of literature in this decade is that it's just not as interesting or progressive as the counter-culture movements of the 1960's. I'm not saying it's any less relevant; as someone who grew up in the nineties it's even more relevant than something like Slaughterhouse Five, for example, which actually serves to make it seem more depressing rather than shocking.

But seeing as I could probably ramble on about Fight Club all day and I have a bunch of other stuff I need to catch up on, I should probably round these rambles off a little bit. First of all, I absolutely recommend Fight Club to anyone with an interest in the history of counter-cultural literature (including postmodernism and other hippy phrases) and to anyone who really loves the film; that's a no-brainer. If you're not naturally inclined towards that style or philosophy, than Fight Club will more than likely annoy you because of how hard it tries to be cool all the time. Its philosophy is extreme and uncompromising, and shouldn't be taken at face value, but it is powerful and deep-routed. Perhaps the real key to this story's worldwide success is that it appeals to the psyche of those similar to the protagonist, which is essentially a lot of people, and creates an undeniable atmosphere of chillingly realistic tension, though through a (probably) very unrealistic plot. It's unlikely to be the best book you've ever read, but it would be amongst the most memorable, and for mostly good reasons too.