Haruki Murakami wants you to ask him a hard-nosed question

I got an email last night about this cool feature TIME.com does - they get famous people to agree to answer ten questions for them, but all the questions come from the reading public. This week's subject is Haruki Murakami and he'll apparently read through the questions himself and then answer the 10 he likes best.

So far, there are about 40 questions on the website and some are bad, some are okay, and some are quite intriguing. I would like to ask a question about how fame has changed what he writes and how his editor approaches his work (which is the work of the uber-famous, at least in fiction writing terms) but haven't yet found a way to do so without sounding combative. I do slag him for being the inspiration behind my naming of the Haruki Murakami Syndrome, but I really would like to get a real answer to that question.

Here's the link if you want to ask a question: http://time-blog.com/10questions/novelist-haruki-murakami/

And here are the submissions so far that I personally hope Murakami will address:

1) What brand of sneaker do you prefer to run in, and how often do you replace your running shoes?

2) I have never read any of your books but if you could only choose one for me to read, which one would it be?

3) What is the one book by another author that you wish you had written?

4) When you write, do you have an audience in mind? Or do you simply write the story that’s in you, for you?

5) When you write, do your ideas develop like images on a reel of film?

Alright, I need to get back to my convalescing. And my zombie book. BRAAAAINNNS!!!!

Why I can't break up with Sherman Alexie

The last time I blogged about Sherman Alexie, I pinned him for suffering from the then as yet unnamed Huruki Murakami Syndrome; i.e., both he and his editor have become metaphorically fat and sleek, and literally lazy from experiencing a superabundance of success really quickly (in book publishing terms, which are not the same as, say, pop tart terms). No longer hungry (either metaphorically or literally), Alexie, like Murakami, tends not to write stuff that's brilliant and edgy and show-stopping anymore.

So, why do I keep reading Alexie's stuff? It seems that while I detect an increasing complacence in his writing, his editor's right: people (i.e., me) will keep buying in the hopes of finding his original brilliance somehow restored. Le sigh.

In fact, I'm so unable to resist the possibility of Alexie putting out something as beautiful and perfect as The Toughest Indian in the World that I bought his latest, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, in hardcover. This is Alexie's first YA novel, and it's in diary form, telling the story of grade nine student Arnold Spirit.

Spoiler Alert!
Junior, as Arnold is more commonly known, is a really smart kid who feels himself being smothered by all the poverty, fear, and alcoholism on the reserve and so transfers to the white school in Reardon, a town about 20 miles away. The diary covers his first year there, his ass-kicking of some racist football stars, his acquisition of a white semi-girlfriend, and his success in school in spite of the deaths of several close family friends and family members.

Anyway, I honestly don't know what I think of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. It was an easy read, and sometimes a very good read. Sometimes it was truly hilarious, and it did manage to make me tear up a few times too. But for the most part it just seemed, well, insincere. Or maybe not insincere, but like the narrator is so far away from the difficult things he describes that he doesn't really feel it anymore. And hey, that's fine - he describes some really terrible things and who the hell wants to carry around terrible things from the past in an immediate and soul-destroying way forever?

In the end, I don't think I loved this book but it had just enough of the old Alexie magic to keep me coming back and trying again. Apparently, being able to identify the Haruki Murakami Syndrome isn't enough to allow me to free myself from its grip. My relationship with these writers is kind of similar to the relationship I had with this one boy in my undergraduate days - just as I was on the verge of leaving forever because I was getting nothing out of it, he'd do something super-sweet and reel me back in. I eventually escaped him but I'd be surprised if I can escape Alexie - he just gave me too much show-stopping reading time in the past for me to ever give up completely.

Feminist noir, Japanese style

I've been looking forward to Natsuo Kirino's crime thriller Out for a long time and it was definitely worth the wait. It was plot-driving in the best possible ways, being well-paced, tense, and creepy without being nauseatingly bloody like Ryu Murakami's In the Miso Soup.

I haven't read much crime fiction, however, so maybe that's par for the course and there's some other standard I should be judging the book by. Aw, never mind that - Out was just a really good read. Snakes and Earrings was the leprous, homeless man's Out. That burns, I know, but I think it's an apt metaphor.

Not to give too much away, Out follows the lives of 4 women who work together on the night shift in a boxed lunch factory. One murders her husband and the other 3 end up chopping up his body and getting rid of it. But this is just the beginning, and all 3 of the women who dispose of the body end up in various ways involved in other aspects of Tokyo's criminal underworld.

The main character, Masako, becomes the ringleader (she's the only one who has the chutzpah to chop off the heads) and ends up being forced into a twisted relationship with someone as broken inside as she is...and things really get crazy. Seriously good, if very often disturbing, storyline on this one. I'm REALLY looking forward to reading more of Kirino's stuff.

I can't only say that this novel was a really good read though. I've read a respectable amount of Japanese fiction but this is the first one I've read that really looks at the complicated social and economic position in which modern Japanese women can so often find themselves, particularly in urban centres like Tokyo.

The blood, gore, etc all creeped me out, yes - but so did the claustrophobia of these female characters' lives. They went nowhere but home and work, and sometimes to each other's homes, but usually only in an emergency. Their jobs and homes and entire lives were rendered in headache-inducing, prison-like terms that convincingly made chopping up bodies seem like freedom.

Feminist noir, indeed; in this novel, the horror of everyday life was never really outdone by the horror of the exceptional experience of cutting up a murder victim. But "feminist" is a term that can only very problematically be applied to Out. I can't say why I'm making this assertion without giving away important plot details. If you've already read it, you'll know; if you do read it, you'll know when you get there where the "feminist" in "feminist noir" starts to become broken inside too.

That said, the totally horrifying playing out of gender roles at the end of the book is also central to why the book is good. Like any good book dealing with either crimes or gender, Out never lets you get comfortable. Yes, folks, it's pulp - but it's smart pulp.

A short manifesto on reading for pleasure

When I started working on my PhD, I promised myself that if I ever got to the point where I couldn’t read only for pleasure then I would drop out, no questions asked. Luckily or unluckily (I’m not always sure), I never reached that point and so am currently still plugging away at the damned degree (but the end is finally in sight).

(Let me say that while I don’t believe in burning books, I do think I might be unable to resist setting my dissertation alight once it’s been defended; I dream as well of beating it with a stick, but not so much that I’ll put out the flames.)

I mention this because most of my peers confessed that within our first year of PhDing that they had become incapable of sitting down with a novel (related or not to the work they did) without pencil and critical mind sharpened and ready to start marking shit up. I pitied and scorned them, and maybe part of me still does, but the joke’s on me – I’m the only one from my year who hasn’t finished yet!

However, I just can’t bring myself to regret taking 3 solid weeks off just to read Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I don’t regret reading any of the other many excellent books unrelated to my research that I’ve read over the years. I regret the terrible books I’ve read, yes, but I regret them for their own sake, not for the work they kept me from doing.

But this makes it seem as though I had any choice. I find it literally impossible not to be reading books just for my own edification. I can’t take breaks from reading. I read, that’s what I do. I can’t even get on a bus or subway without a book. I love reading almost more than anything else (my hubby will be pleased to note, however, that he would probably win in a fight between himself and books).

I think this total abandonment to reading is related to the way I read (I mean besides obsessively). Muting the critical faculty has never been my problem. My problem has been that ramping it up has tended to mean destroying whatever emotional pleasure I get from a book, and that’s just sad (the one exception that comes to mind being John Ford’s incomparable Renaissance tragedy, 'Tis Pity She’s a Whore).

I once loved Shakespeare’s King Lear – the first time I read it, I marveled that anyone could ever have written it. It seemed impossible that anything that good could exist. Having worked on it research-wise, however, it’s now basically just a hideous collection of meaningless cliches to me. Part of me wishes I’d never read it, because then I wouldn’t know what I’ve lost.

The flip side to this sad inability to have my full critical mind function in tandem with the mind that reads for pleasure and lingers over sentences just because they’re beautiful is that I don’t have to work very hard at being convinced by stories. Not that I don’t note and scorn plot holes, weaknesses, etc, because I do – but I did that before.

No, what I’m getting at here is my natural ability to enjoy literature by becoming so completely immersed in what I’m reading that I forget the “real” world exists. The hair on the back of my neck stands up (as described in my recent post on Jane Austen). I laugh loudly. I cry. I get angry (or enraged, as was the case with Timoelon Vieta Come Home).

I still have the full experience, in other words, although as I type this I realize that this probably doesn’t come through incredibly well here in blogland. I guess I like to write with some malformed vestige of my extensive edumacation in literary criticism in evidence, but I like to read like I did when I was a kid – like books were magic which promised, well, everything.

A motley crew of two

Because it's still summer-, summer-, summertime
I know I said a while back I needed to take a break from Wodehouse because I'd been overloading on him a bit - I was worried I was going to stop enjoying his stuff for treating it rather too much like a rock star I was stalking and with whom I must eventually become disillusioned.

But I just couldn't resist picking this one up the other day when Toronto was experiencing yet another of this summer's fairly common homages to the sub-tropical deluge/thunder and lightning extravaganza. I honestly haven't seen this much rain and lightning since travelling through rural Cambodia in the back of a pickup truck (which was, indeed, terribly exciting).

Most of the lightning in Summer Lightning was of the metaphorical stamp but it crackled nonetheless. I think this is one of Wodehouse's best (in my extremely limited experience of him), up there with the incomparable Leave it to Psmith. Brilliant writing, charming and hilarious turns of plot, and a more energetic approach to the romance comedy conventions than the last few of his books I've read. Perfection.

I felt tremendously happy reading this book; it also gave me some good advice on how to deal with any difficult people I might have to deal with at my new editing job: "It is foreign to the editorial policy ever to meet visitors who call with horsewhips" (p. 149). Yes, I'm nerdy enough to have made this quotation into the scrolling marquee on my computer and to have printed it off in fancy cursive and taped it to one of the walls in my office.

Because I'm nothing if not persistent
I think I actually began reading Primo Levi's posthumously published short story collection A Tranquil Star before we went to PEI in June but I just finished it last night. I read the first story which didn't grab me at all and let it gather dust for awhile. Then, out of guilt, I began picking it up every once in awhile between reading fat, delicious novels.

The stories in this collection are pretty uneven in terms of quality (for example, "The Girl in the Book" is pretty good, while "Censorship in Bitinia" is mediocre at best and often irritating); none were even close to being sufficiently show-stoppingly amazing to make me sit up straight and fan myself vigorously.

Indeed, most of these stories walked the fine line between experimental and gimmicky and strayed far too often onto the wrong side of said line. I sadly felt that if Levi hadn't established himself later in his career with things like Survival in Auschwitz and The Periodic Table these stories would have gone the way of the minor characters he cleverly (but not brilliantly) discusses in "In the Park" - i.e., oblivion.

Because I can't stop fiddling with my blog layout
On a note unrelated to either of these books, check out the new pic behind my blog title and description - it's a snapshot of one of my many, many bookshelves.

How to be a book snob and still read crap

I like to complain about the ass-hattery of a lot of books and tend to subtly imply, if not loudly and obnoxiously proclaim, my superiority in taste to the readers of said shiteous books. Yet, as you've no doubt noticed, I also read some crap, such as Bernard Cornwell and Terry Pratchett. How can my claim to literary superiority be maintained, then, you wonder? Do I deserve to be beaten over the head with my hypocrisy?

To these fair questions I say: there is one crucial difference between the crap I read and the crap I make fun of, and this difference resides in how seriously authors take what they write. I think that if you asked Cornwell, who writes in more efficient and hack-like fashion than either Wodehouse or anyone who skulked about on Grub Street back in the day, whether or not he writes literature, he would laugh and assert that no, he writes fiction.

This is not a merely semantic distinction. Literature may be hilarious but to be literature it must transcends some kind of basic assumption, genre expectations, and/or blow your mind in some way - it may be enjoyable but it's not necessarily comfortable. Fiction is written for a mass, and dare I say undiscriminating, audience, often according to formula, and often without any particular interest in language except for the way it can get across the 1/2-inch deep tale being told. There's a reason that most bookstores distinguish between literature and fiction, with the latter section being filled with mass market paperbacks by the likes of Danielle Steele, V.C. Andrews, and Nicholas Sparks.

The literature section is, of course, filled with the Classic writers - Dostoevsky, Dickens, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Faulkner, Eliot (x2), etc - and the vanguard of what will be Classic in 50 years - Mitchell, Marquez, Pamuk, Sebald (not Sebold!!!), Carey, Y. Mishima, etc. But it's also, unfortunately, filled with books that are in evil disguise, written by authors who desperately want to write literature (with a capital L!), and which some evil marketing exec has decided he or she will package as literature and therefore fool a whole bunch of people into buying AND make the Steele-ites feel suddenly more cultured. It's brilliant, really, but it's evil. (I wish the preceding run-on sentence were half as brilliant or evil.)

So, this is what it comes down to: I like crap books that know they're crap and don't try to be anything else. Such books are usually really fun and often funny and provide just what they're meant to provide, which is mental candy - you can get more nourishing stuff with the Russian masters, thank you very much, but right now it's time to give yourself a sore belly, a toothache, and a sedated mind (for the most perfect fulfillment of this kind of experience, I highly recommend The Shadow of the Wind). That's fine.

No, it's the ones that offer nothing healthier than boiled potato with boiled potato sauce but claim to be a 10-course meal from the best gourmet restaurant in town (which happens also to be very good for you) that make me want to rend my cheeks, gnash my teeth, and tear my hair. These books often win the Booker and Giller Prizes.