This spring break, I decided to make it kind of Murakami inspired by reading to books by two different authors, both named Murakmai. Of course, I spent most of my time with Haruki’s 1Q84, and I loved every long minute of it. Next, I read the short novel Almost Transparent Blue by Ryu. Sadly, I did not like it nearly as much as the previous book. It is the kind of book I would have liked in high school. It is kind of like if the French writer Georges Bataille had written A Clockwork Orange. It is written like an early 20th Century piece of erotica, but the things it eroticizes are in no way erotic to any normal human being. Acts such as oral sex and the puncturing of the arm to shoot heroin are described as if they were acts of a warm and caring nature, instead of the gross and debasing things that they are. The story, which is as plotless as Trainspotting, follows a group of Japanese youths living near an American Army base, as they experiment with drugs and sex as they try to find meaning in life. The problem here is that the book is in no way shocking in today’s culture, and we see things like this in too many books to count. In fact, it gets kind of repetitive as it goes on, and quite annoying by the end, despite how good of a writer Ryu is, which is one of the book’s saving graces. As much as I don’t like it, eroticizing disgusting things like he does is quite hard (although he is no Clive Barker). It’s size helps to, being a slim 127 pages, if it went over 200, it would be unbearable. Not bad, but not really something I would read again, and am not really curious to find out more about Ryu, despite my love for the movie Audition.
Rating: 3/5
No comments:
Post a Comment