Review: "Almost Transparent Blue" by Ryu Murakami

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 20^th 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

Review: "1Q84" by Haruki Murakami

Not to use egregious hyperbole, but I feel that Haruki Murakmi is one of the two greatest living writers of fiction (along with South African novelist J. M. Coetzee). Not because he is one of my favorite authors, but simply because the way in which he views the world and the way his stories can touch people on many different levels, makes his talent as a writer of very long and weird novel indispensable. He is a rare breed of modern writer, one who has the many literary scholars with sticks firmly planted in their asses praising the postmodern sensibilities and magical realists techniques he uses in his stories (he has twice been in third to win the Nobel Prize, and think he will win it one day), but the stories have a narrative drive that surpasses any kind of alienating weirdness, and you cannot help but get caught up in wherever his characters are going, which makes his books perfect for vacation, beach, or airplane reading. They wholly envelope the reader in a world that transcends a mere fictional landscape or even another world: they actually become the dreams of the reader. For this reason, Murakami is a writer of our times, able to accurately portray the courage and challenge of reaching out to the world and being honest about your feelings and emotions while also capturing the reader’s imagination with breathtaking feats of storytelling magic. His new book, 1Q84, I really don’t want to call a masterpiece (I still think he has great works ahead of him) but it just may be. Judging by the length, both of the physical book and the size of the story, it is a culmination of themes Murakami has been known for; the idea of fate in a modern world, the little connections we make and the giant ripples they can create, and how love can go beyond important aspects of relationships and simply be destined, or how we want it to be. We meet the first main character, Aomame, as she gest out of a cab during a traffic jam on the highway in order to complete her job of killing a man. On the advice of the cab driver, she descends the stairs leading out of the expressway, and discovers, through observation, that she is in a new 1984, one slightly different from the one she was in. meanwhile, Tengo, an aspiring writer, takes a ghostwriting gig to rewrite the novel of a strange 17-year old. Over 900 pages, and these stories converge; we meet a weird cast of characters, odd events (such as a sky with two moons), and learn how both Tengo and Aomame had to end up in 1Q84. Really this is a book where a synopsis is pointless. You just have to read this book, and try to figure it out. You may not in fact, because with Murakmai, the mystery is the mystery, and the journey you take with this giant novel is filled with great truths and stunning leaps in the imagination. Cannot recommend enough.

Rating: 5/5

No Review This Week

No review from me this week, in the middle of a 900 page book about two moons. Pretty awesome. Will be back next week with that review, plus two more!

Review: "John Dies at the End" by David Wong

This novel was freakin’ weird, almost too weird, it has the quality of William Burroughs’s books that make Naked Lunch look like a Harry Potter novel and the mass appeal of something like Ghostbusters. Even though I was lost a lot of the time in how far this book when down that most bizarre rabbit hole, the movie adaption of this novel, directed by the ever unique Don Coscarelli, is something I am putting high on my to see list in 2012. It is breathtakingly original; although its gimmick wears pretty thin even at the 100-page mark of this near 500-page book. The novel begins in a Chinese restaurant where David Wong, the author is talking to some man who wants to write a story about him. He tells the man how at a party, a man with a fake Jamaican accent (oddly called Robert Marley) who introduces David and his friend John to a drug called Soy Sauce, that imbues the user with supposed psychic powers and portals to the underworld. What follows is a story of undead dogs, hellish demons, and distorted REM songs that promote racism and rape. It is a wild and confusing ride only for those willing to go down this dark hole, unaware of most of the things you will encounter. It is a mixed bag: story and character are thrown to side so Wong can add a few extra notes of bizarre ideas, some like, I really don’t. But this is also a very funny book, with said REM song and even a racist newscaster commenting on a black players calve muscles producing belly laughs in me. I really hope the movie sheds some light on some of the more vague and oddball ideas presented in this book. If you don’t mind a confusing mess that is also creative, by all means read this book.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "Last Man in Tower" by Aravind Adiga

Aravind Adiga, whose first novel, the insanely great The White Tiger, introduced a view of modern India unlike any of his fellow countrymen have been able to create in a fictional world. While writers like Rushdie and Ghosh have presented an India that is full of flawed magic, The White Tiger created a sociopathic character study of an amoral man in an India where bad people can prosper and good people victimized, all depending on social standing or financial situations. If you put a smarter and more sophisticated Francie Brady from The Butcher Boy into Slumdog Millionaire, you’d get something as compelling and disturbing as The White Tiger. It was a refreshing take on a place that for so long had this mystical veneer covering it, and this novel completely ripped it off, exposing the festering sores that greed and need for success has done to the country. His second book, the short story collection, Between the Assassinations, brought ups some of the same problems with modern India that The White Tiger brought to the surface, but it lacked a the narrative power of his debut work, and the people that populated his fictional town failed to be anything more than representations of social and political strife, and did not become something real and dangerous, the way Balram Halwai became at the end of The white Tiger. But here, in his new novel, Last Man in Tower, we see a return to the kind of powerhouse storytelling that made Adiga so famous to begin with. Playing out like a painfully realistic version of The Twilight Zone’s “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”, it shows how a society with so little can become cancerous when even a morsel of the life they have always dreamed of is offered to them. The setting is a decrepit housing development known as Vishram Society. It has leaky pipes, terrible plumbing, and is in constant threat of tsunamis, but there is a community there that goes beyond monetary needs. Then Shah comes into the picture, a ruthless land developer hell bent on tearing the building down to build a luxury apartment complex. He offers them an insane amount of money for the giving up of he is nothing but a carpetbagger, and Masterjii, a retired teacher who refuses to give, sees this immediately, and refuses to budge. Tempers flare, things are said and done that cannot be taken back, and it all leads to a terrible end for all involved that will leave you gasping. The real horror here is how people we know and love and see as simple and honorable can become rotten and reprehensible when a dream collapses, and Adiga charts this in very vivid detail, the change happening quickly and almost unnoticeably, making the things they do shocking, but not out of the ordinary. Sometimes dreams of few and of one collide violently, and in a place like Adiga’s Mumbai, treachery and resulting depravity have never been so eloquently rendered.

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Sunnyside" by Glen David Gold

What is it about 600 pages books that make them somewhat dull to me? First The Little Friend, and now Sunnyside by Glen David Gold. While it is not a big failure, and to be fair, neither was The Little Friend, it is just that these books were underwhelming, and they shouldn’t be, due to their sizes and the premises that had a lot of promise. Sometimes, I am not in the right mindset when I read, and I wander off and end up just reading words on the page. We all do that sometimes (I mean, nobody has that machine-like concentration?), but a good book can pull you forcibly, despite your bad days and wandering attention. I always try to give a book a fair shake, but sometimes a book doesn’t move you, and it is nobody’s fault, and it doesn’t make it a bad book, and Sunnyside really isn’t a bad book. It actually had a few surprising moments that showed Gold’s talent enough that I am eager to read his bigger hit, Carter Beats the Devil. The story revolves around the great Charlie Chaplin, where a mass sighting of him in 800 different places coincides with a period of great creative strife. From there, we go over to Europe during WWI, and follow to different soldiers, conflicted by the horrors of war and idealism. If it were a 300-page book about Chaplin’s struggle with his creativity, and the horrors of his popularity, this book would have been a smash, but the WWI stories derail this novel too much, and I give it a passing grade solely for the fictionalized Chaplin arc. It is nothing special, and it has an okay ending that adds a hint of sympathy to the preceding 600 pages, but it is the only thing that really keeps the book afloat.

Rating: 4/5