"The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" - Haruki Murakami (11-18 Oct)

I feared for a while, that even though we tried to make this list of books as diverse as possible, going as fas as consciously throwing in books that we knew were outside of our "comfort zone", I would unarguably come to have a well crafted joy-ride through each one of them. However, "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" was no such joy-ride. What I mean is that halfway through the book I actually thought to myself: "this is bullshit; there's no philosophy here as the back-cover comments so staunchly proclaim, only a pretentiously spiritual mumbo-jumbo; the story is plagued with symbols and passages that fail to give any more consistency to the already drawn out story; and this Toru Okada is an empty shell becoming an even more empty shell who lives out of doing 'something' to the 'somethings' of some people."

But I am forced to believe now, that that senselessness mirrors the helpless confusion that Toru Okada must have been through most of the time. I seemed to have forgotten that one day his wife left him with no explanation whatsoever, and for someone like him, no, for anyone, that cannot be an easy thing to grasp. So I'm sorry, Toru. This is just another way to say, that in the end many loose ends do come together - albeit still in a very abstract manner, because Toru's final conclusions really were something only he (and not the reader) could have figured out, I believe - and my frustration might have just come from the fact that I got too restless with all of the side-stories.

However, this is not to say that it all made sense in the end - in a way, I did feel I was defiled by Murakami's narrative, in the sense that I now have to re-assemble the pieces I have read in order to make sense out of them, much in the same way Creta Kano did, after having been (SLIGHT SPOILER) defiled by Noboru Wataya. Because of this, I will write the rest in a different manner from before: trying to individually recollect the impressions that struck me the most. I will speak mostly of threads and nuances and associations, to try and squeeze some more sense out of them, not so much of the plotline, but some spoiler or other might slip through nonetheless. Then again, being the story that this is, that might not matter very much.

Toru Okada is a curious shell of a character. Most of what he does is resonate other characters' opinions and questions (it bothered me quite a bit that in most of his conversations with, for example, May Kasahara, his replies would usually be "maybe you're right", "it could be possible" or other such non-compromising words). In this aspect, he reminded me to some of Gaiman's characters as well (Shadow in "American Gods", Richard Mayhew in "Neverwhere"), because they too are (at least on the surface), fairly simple characters that provide, to some extent, little more than the eyes (and ears, and fingers...) through which I understood the unfolding story. But at least in those worlds, there was always somebody around who had any idea of what was going on! I like explanations. Which is not the same as being spoon-fed the story, I think, but the fact that every character here knew only a little bit and Toru had to work really hard to put all the pieces together, was a tough one.

Oh, I guess something makes sense now... After all, that's exactly what Nutmeg does with the stories she tells Cinnamon, which eventually become the actual "Wind-up Bird Chronicle". That is also the recurrent question of which ones are real memories, which ones dreams, which ones a cocktail of both, which ones neither. And Toru does throw this right at your face when he thinks about the shared Akasaka stories.Well now I feel silly. I have been confronted before with story-lines that are a kind of mosaic one has to put together (particularly an author from Venezuela, Eduardo Sánchez-Rugeles), but at least in those you can take the individual tiles' truth at face value (minus one or two). Here, each individual tile eventually becomes blurry, true and un-true at the same time, and one has to keep this in mind when trying to make sense out of things. Very Zen, yes... In hindsight, I enjoyed the exercise. At the moment, well, not so much.

Then again, I had been "warned" about this: a few months ago I had a coffee and a conversation with a friend who is a trained psychologist, amongst other things, about Murakami and his works (of which I had read nothing but the autobiographical "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running"). She said that from a psychologist's point of view, most of Murakami's main characters are sort of empty receptacles where the reader imprints her/his own reactions, because they rarely explain or explicitly reveal their emotions and their ways of dealing with things. From a narrative point of view, this may be one of the reasons he's such a popular writer outside of his own Japanese cultural home, because even though the surroundings and historicities are very much Asian/Japanese, the main character isn't culture-bound. And indeed, Toru spends most of the time babbling on about how he's getting closer and closer to the centre of things, but in real-life, he has only done three things: climb down a well, get filthy rich, and move into a new house. As you do.

But hey, I guess sometimes when you put rice pudding in the microwave, you do get cheese macaroni, right? Wise May Kasahara... Maybe this explanation helped Toru go along with it. Maybe he didn't get it at all.

The recurrent symbols... So many of them, I'm sure entire I.B. Higher Level Language papers could be (have been?) written about them. There's the mark on the cheek, shared by three people. There's labyrinths throughout history and worlds: the mines in Siberia, the hotel corridors, and the then-a-novelty circuitry of Cinnamon's computer, are all depicted as labyrinths in one way or another. All of these, places where people went to realize themselves one way or another - to die in the mines, or to execute great feats in the computer, or the risk for either one in the hotel corridors and room. There's the wells, as a practice for this: the one in Mongolia where Lieutenant Mamiya loses himself, and the one in the "hanging house" where Toru finds himself - then loses himself again. There are wigs that May Kasahara makes for bald people, and there are scalps taking from dead men's heads hanging from the ceiling. There are the new clothes that give Toru his new path towards Kumiko - his new persona, perhaps - and there's the old clothes that belonged to Kumiko, which Creta Kano wears in peculiar situations. There's the mark that May licks, the same mark that Nutmeg masturbates, the same mark that Noboru Wataya (?) slices open with a knife. There is Noboru Wataya's boot-licking dog, Ushikawa, and Toru and Kumiko's rather normal cat, Noboru Wataya. There's the Wind-up bird winding the spring of the world throughout time, but why is it only heard by a few particular people? That is still a mystery to me. Was it only heard by people holding the bat? I suppose the guitar player in Sapporo had some idea of what was going on in the world. But didn't the zoo's vet hear it too? I don't remember him being particularly keen-eyed.

In any case, when all of these come together in the end, what I got was a remaking of a classic fairytale: Noboru Wataya, the gifted and heinous tyrant with dark magic powers rises to glory and kidnaps our hero's princess, Kumiko. Upon realizing that the hero is figuring things out and meddling with unstable forces, he tries to throw him off the path, but alas! Toru Okada does not desist, and through unorthodox means breaks the spell and defeats the monster!

So is "The Wind-up Bird" the force of good? Or love? The desire for Toru to save Kumiko? Didn't May Kasahara think that Toru was trying to protect her? Were Kumiko, the woman on the phone, Creta and May the same person all along? Were Noboru Wataya and Boris Manskinner the same person too? Was rebel in baseball uniform No.4 both Toru and Noboru at the same time?

Kind of silly though, that it all boiled down to that - the dubiously honourable hero retrieving the promiscuous damsel in distress - yay gender roles... yay - in an otherworldly battle reminiscent of Inception's proportions. Though I don't think it's as simple as that, for if May, Kumiko and Creta are the same person (which I still think might be the case) (and if there's one thing this story puts forward without a doubt) it follows that no one story is "the truth".

But then, the one other relevant impression left in me was the one provided by the guitar player from Sapporo, that first night on stage: this is another story about stories. This is a premise I have always enjoyed (as most of "The Sandman" by Neil Gaiman is based on it - note, I hardly think Gaiman and Murakami are similar authors, there have only happened to be these two common traits), but this was, for me, a completely new focus to it:

Seeing individuals suffer or rejoice, we empathize - this is scientifically supported by what are called "mirror neurons" - but we have to look at pain or joy to the eyes to feel this, both for mirror neurons to trigger, and for such accounts to be as strong as they can be: the stories of massacres in the Siberian mines trigger indignation, helplessness, loss of faith. But the vivid description of the man being skinned alive in the middle of the Mongolian steppes, the telling of the chinese hostages being bayonetted to death, and the continuous cracking of skulls... Those trigger physical revulsion, nausea, nightmares, and tears. Individual stories matter. And looking back upon this as an age-old story of the struggle between creation and destruction, told in such personal terms, I think - maybe - I can forgive the winding roads.

"The Day of the Triffids" - John Wyndham (19-30 September)

A while back I said that the strongest message I got from "The Shadow over Innsmouth" was a sort of abhorrence towards the nasty inside of us. After reading "The Day of the Triffids", I think that anything that Lovecraft made me feel falls short of the revulsion Bill Masen went through. Several times.

Shortly after reading Lovecraft I felt like jumping right into Wyndham, because I thought they were both about some species or other taking over the world. Of course, it's never quite as simple as that, is it?

Where to begin... It seems I couldn't find a more appropriate moment to read this - the day after I move back into London. I would try to read outside as often as possible to get a clearer impression of the setting (at least for the London bits, but some overgrown gardens in my university campus would suffice at other times), but needless to say, I can no longer cross the Waterloo bridge every morning without feeling a kind of haunting when gazing at the skyline. There are things though, which I'm not sure I want to admit to myself.

Partly it has to do with what Isadora Wing called a kind of satisfactory helplessness in the face of natural catastrophes. I believe this is the same feeling that lets Bill and Josella say that they're happier in Shirning than they were before. It is also because of this fleeting image: Ozymandias.

Bill, Josella, Beadley and even Coker spend the big part of the story figuring out how to write the antithesis to the Percy B. Shelly poem. After all, the catastrophe did give them a chance to start anew, right? If we just assume (given we've sympathized enough with them throughout the novel) they're more or less on the right track, then this kind of lazy cataclysm was also slightly endearing. Or would these new ruins eventually become tourist attractions in the distant future?

Then again, it hasn't been easy getting there, of course. I can't remember the last time a book made me so sick, as when Bill describes some of the horrors he came across: the man on his way to his last drinks remembering his wife and children; a young man holding and comforting a little girl as he trudged towards the window at the end of the hallway; a blind girl who offers the most she can give in hopes of keeping her only chance of surviving around her...

But well, the journey certainly teaches. And I was also surprised by how relevant almost every commentary and discussion was to the world today; not only in the contents (say, the practicalities of leading a search party) but also the fact that all characters are really forced to cooperate and challenge their views from time to time, slowly becoming admirably fair people - thankfully, no silly U.S.Americans in shiny jet-packed armours playing the high-school heroes.

I grew specially fond of Susan as she was the one to represent, what I guess would be the "new kind" of people, that generation that grew up in the ideal point to acquire a no-nonsense character. However, I also have to say I found Coker to be one of the most interesting characters, as he seemed to be a really useful (and rare) mix of the thinker and the doer, besides being a kind of universal translator, which I found hilarious - no matter how much I shared Bill's frustration in his captivity, I easily began to forgive him as I got to know him. Bill himself was an interestingly thoughtful fellow, because even though he often avoided taking a stand in practical matters, he held fast to his principles when he was challenged. However, some things about him seemed a bit queer at times - for example, I never really understood how fast or why his relationship with Josella actually sparked at the beginning (maybe that's what happens after a catastrophe? we all become helpless sleazes?).

In the end, adaptation is key. And I think this is well put by a man who wanders around London decisively prodding around him with a stick, and complaining about all these newly blind people as if they should have learned to live without eyesight earlier in their lives. Maybe they offered courses for "sonar-orienteering" in case you thought you'd go blind? Maybe that's what books are?

"The Day of the Triffids" by John Wyndham, 16. -23. September (Sunniva)

Yes, man. I probably sneaked this book into the list because I remembered a conversation I had with my uni housemate Emma years ago. We were discussing our enjoyment of Science Fiction written in the 1950s or thereabouts, and how interesting it can be to see what inventions the authors have trusted us with in the year 2000. She mentioned this book, which is more of a Dystopia, and how she liked it because they also poke around a bit in her local geography of Devizes and Marlborough.

Never did I expect it to be this well-written. Or this creepy. I usually stay away from horror stories and suchlike before bedtime (The Shadow over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft was impossible to read after 9 pm), because I have a very active nightly imagination. And right enough, as I was carrying this book with me through Finnmark (about as far north as you can go in Norway), speaking Spanish with my Nicaraguans and Mexicans along the way, and only reading it during the quiet hours before bedtime, I have had so many strange dreams. There have been people that wanted rescuing. There have been strange dystopian places where people, including me, have had to trust complete strangers on their word, and ask beggars for their food. I even think my dream a few nights before I finished the book, about one lady wanting to commit suicide, and later on a group of teenagers wanting the same thing, come from this book.

WARNING: SLIGHT SPOILERSBecause right from the beginning, some twelve pages into the story, we have suicides. There are plenty of people who can't handle being suddenly blind, or who realise what a struggle there will be to survive, and choose another way out. My dream was incredibly disturbing, and I am choosing to believe it had with all the occurrences of suicides in the book, because I don't want to believe it has anything to do with anyone else.

"It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that 'it can't happen here' – that one's own little time and place is beyond cataclysms." 

p.86

What makes this book so potent and convincing is the straight forward language that Wyndham uses. Even on the first page does he talk about the end of the world. He has a brilliant way of mixing information about what has happened and will happen with seemingly random descriptions of his surroundings. Even many of these have a value later in the book, either as plot points or just as groundwork for what will come. Much of the smaller details make the book so much more likely. Like how the press uses several tentative names for the triffids, such as trigons, trilogs, trinits, and trippets, all "near-scientific", or "quasi-etymological". Like they always do.

There are also plenty of corners marked in this book, as you will see from the quotes dotted around this review. Of course it is a commentary on how we've developed our society with too many machines, not knowing where anything is made or how, not relying on nature and so on. The plants are taking over. More intriguing is that this book was written more than sixty years ago, and this problem – our distance from the actual world – is just getting bigger.

"...the amount we did not know and did not care to know about our daily lives is not only astonishing, but somehow a bit shocking. I knew practically nothing, for instance, of such ordinary things as how my food reached me, where the fresh water came from, how the clothes I wore were woven and made, how the drainage of cities kept them healthy." 

p.16

I still don't know half of this.

There were no characters I sympathised with very much, except for the protagonist of course, because he is most the only character we get to follow for a long while. I did however project other people onto the characters in the book. Juan writes a little like John, or Bill, therefore they are the same person. Josella is in fact Erica Jong, who in her turn is of course Isadora Wing. Coker is the character I would have liked to see more of, to turn him from your standard engaged representant for the working class (I will give you my favourite of these: Mr Higgins in North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell) into a someone I am glimpsing underneath.

Mr Thornton and Mr Higgins, the best video I could find

Josella suffers from a similar problem to Coker's – she's borderline stereotype. Of course the first non-blind girl -nay, person - the protagonist meets is very good-looking, three or four inches shorter than him, blonde, although not too blonde, strong, and definitely middle class. Who had a short teenage rebellion before going back to her safe family home. Please, Mr Wyndham.

But still. All the moral questions! This book is so intriguing. Will you help a larger amount of people for some time, or a smaller amount of people for a longer time? There is actually some very sad research, also known as cold logic, that our charity funds would be spent better if we helped a few children throughout their lives, instead of giving nutrition packs to millions and millions of them, which will last one month. But we can't do that. How would you choose the children? So we/NGOs/the state is/are always Coker in the beginning of the book.

I could write the longest review yet, even though Fear of Flying seemed more important to me than this book. There are themes of divisions of class, and how different classes form after a disaster. There are also supposedly radical ideas of free love, while the underlying message seems to be that we must all be man and wife living together. There are supposedly some ideas that men and women are equal, but when it comes to it, the man works outside, doing the hunting and gathering of materials, while the women stay inside to cook, sew, and repair. Then again, we are in the fifties. Then again, Wyndham shouldn't pretend he's being radical and new when he's really not. Maybe he believed he was.

"'You know perfectly well that women can do – or rather did – handle the most complicated and delicate machines when they took the trouble to understand them. What generally happens is that they're too lazy to take the trouble unless they have to.'" 

p.175

"'You are Josella Playton, author of -'
'You're quite wrong,' she interrupted him, firmly. 'I'm Josella Mason, author of "David Masen".'"

p.253

There is also the shortly mentioned, but slightly frightening, idea that most people need to be herded, because they are not intelligent enough to know their own good.

Why did we include the soundtrack in "how to write a review"? I seriously never listen to music while I am reading. If I hear it, I'm not listening.

My favourite quote to finish this rambling review:

"The word was 'when', but the tone was 'if'." 

p.207

*This edition: 1974, Penguin Books, Middlesex, England

"Fear of Flying" - Erica Jong (28 Aug - 9 Sep)

I've read this book between slippery moments. It so happens that during these two weeks, my mother has decided to turn our home into a kind of daycare for some of my older cousin's children. For the first few days it was two two-years old and one four-year old, and though lately it dwindled down to one of the two-years old, the little boy has grown very fond of me (or my childhood toys), and I admit it, I of him, but our relationship has given rise to many brief moments where I try to pick up the book and just think: no, I simply can't focus on Isadora Wing's musings while this ever-laughing kid keeps pulling my hand to play with some Lego or other.

Again, it took some getting used to, as I'm used to a straight-up plot (The Shadow Over Innsmouth was perhaps a snack, in that sense, while Fear of Flying required some more active engagement due to Isadora's interspersed narrative of present and hindsight), but I've enjoyed a lot getting to know a character so multi-layered and complex as her. Talking about characters, I've seen myself as many of them. When it comes to relationships, I've been Isadora; I've been Bennet for the most part; I've even tried to be Adrian once - but gave it up quickly, as it just didn't feel right. Isadora, though, she is surprising, and at first I sinned of pidgeon-holing her in the same way we do with real people. She's clever enough to warn us about these things, though. In one of her musings about writing as a means for surviving, she says that plots, verses and characters are only writers' way of tiding up the world around them, but never quite faithful to the complexities of the world, but she becomes clearly self-conscious when at one point, she asks the reader whether one thinks she's telling the literary truth as she speaks... She has clearly been through a couple of traumatic experiences - with or without the psychoanalytic thread of analysis that runs through the whole story - but some occurrences are only hinted at from the beginning, so just as a real person, it takes a long time to get to know her - down to her selectively xenophobic antics and other not-so-likeable features.

But oh, what is a book about... Good thing we didn't phrase the question that way for this blog, but rather "raw impressions". There are thoughtful and meta-literary discussions about the spiritual communion with books, escapism and the (seemingly mysanthropic) desire to give up our free will ("All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness"), mingled with heart-in-hand conversations about repressed sexuality and power-struggles in a relationship, not to mention her allegoric fears - of flying, and of lying. But the driving force, I feel, or the theme that I enjoyed the most, was the ever-cycling contradiction of desire: an expanded "Tatt av Kvinnen" (Erlend Loe), where we get to know Marianne's side of the story and her ever-changing desires (and I can vow that that is not only a feminine hazard). It is also one of the things Milan Kundera elaborates on with "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", but while his (male) main character struggles namely between stability and carelessness, Jong's (female) main character additionally struggles between two men that seem to be, personally, opposing poles - which I think is funny because she mocks Hesse at some point as being a kind of adolescent writer, and this sort of polarized characters are almost solely the ones he writes about. More about her criticism on Hesse later, maybe, but let it be said I'm not offended, only growing aware of different ways of reading, I suppose.

I often fretted halfway through a chapter, thanks to Isadora's manic-depressive way of telling her life, but there are so many interesting conversations with others and with herself that I quickly left these things aside. Often I tried making a parallel between her predicaments and similar situations I've been in, and thought that they could all be wittily put to music in Conor Oberst's (Bright Eyes) self-deprecating tone. Or, again, quoting lyricisms, I guess "the wanting comes in waves!".

"Fear of Flying" by Erica Jong, 26. August-1. September (Sunniva)

I don't know why I've been stalling this review for so long. It could be partly because these past few weeks have been very busy, and partly because I'm slightly scared of writing about feminism. If I do that, I'll have to define, in some way or other, where I stand. And while I am a feminist, some way or other, I find so many other subjects to engage in, that I've hardly thought it through. This is, I'm afraid, going to be more of a quote-fest and less of an actual review. The quotes do represent some of the most important things I got from the book though, so I hope it's all right.

When I was searching all the second hand book shops for this (and the rest of the books on the list), everyone kept telling me how popular, radical and exciting this book was when it came out in the 70s. First published in 1973, I imagined the issues would be forty years old as well.

"So I learned about women from men. I saw them through the eyes of male writers. Of course, I didn't think of them as male writers. I thought of them as writers, as authorities, as gods who knew and were to be trusted completely." p.145

This is one of the books in which I have folded down most corners. Needless to say, the character I sympathise the most with is Isadora Wing, the main character. I don't sympathise with all her actions. For some reason, although I have never (as far as I know) been cheated on, I've never been able to stand people who have affairs or are unfaithful to their partner in any way. The only good thing about how she leaves her husband is that he is completely aware of it before it happens. Yet there are so many other thoughts and ideas of hers that I recognise as my own.

"I had gone to graduate school because I loved literature, but in graduate school you were not supposed to study literature. You were supposed to study criticism." p.180

"Whenever I was home, I wanted to get away, and whenever I got away I wanted to go home again." p. 214

All the quoted reviews on the back and inside the cover make the book sound like it's all about sex and sexual freedom. I don't think it is. It covers subjects such as being a woman, or an artist, or an American Jew, living in Germany some years after the war, travelling, stereotypes, academia, psychoanalysis... And probably a few more I've forgotten. In addition to discussing sex and sexual freedom.

"All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness." p. 188

"There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes." p. 211

"Even Bennett, with all his supposed psychology and insight, maintained that men tried to pick me up all the time because I conveyed my 'availability' – as he put it. Because I dressed too sexily. Or wore my hair too wantonly. Or something. I deserved to be attacked, in short. It was the same old jargon of the war between the sexes, the same old fifties lingo in disguise: there is no such thing as rape; you ladies ask for it. You laidies." p. 247

That this was a problem in the seventies and still is, is extremely sad. I even find myself thinking something similar sometimes, when I read about attempted rape in the newspapers. How can I think that? Then I shouldn't be able to wear all the short skirts that I do wear.

I really enjoyed this book. Even when I disagree with Jong, she's a good writer, and a funny one, even though she uses the alliteration technique you learn in writing class far too many times. I am tempted to read more of her books, only I am afraid of being disappointed. I need to read more about her, anyway. Off I go.

*This edition: 1975, Granada Publishing Limited

The Shadow over Innsmouth, 5.-14. August (Sunniva)

As this is the first review, I have no idea how to do this. Will it be full of spoilers? Will I refer to conversations I've had with Juan, the other person in this project? Will I try to make it commercial in case a magazine editor happens to stumble over our hidden little blog and think 'wow, this is the best review I've ever read, I will hire Sunniva and give her lots of money'? I think, so far, the answers to all these questions is no. So let's just start and see how we go.

I read this story in the beginning of August, when I went between finishing a much-worked with text, working as a volunteer at the charity shop every day, getting back as a volunteer with the Red Cross and the student newspaper, signing up with two recruitment agencies, and getting a part-time job with a not-quite-charity called Global Dignity. I had a minor breakdown one day, because all the expectations became too much for me. I'm still working on balancing all these responsibilities. I mainly read the story at breakfast, to avoid nightmares (very susceptible to nightmares, everything I read at night colours my dreams).

The Shadow over Innsmouth is a short story, or maybe a novella, by science fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft, of whom I'd heard a lot, but never read anything. I will admit to something, though: When we were talking about which books we could read and review for this project, H.P. Lovecraft came up on some list or other of books to read before you die. The main reason I agreed, and the main reason I chose The Shadow over Innsmouth, is that Neil Gaiman (one of my favourite authors) speaks a lot about Lovecraft in general, but has also written a short story called Shoggoth's Old Peculiar, set in another, British Innsmouth, but definitely inspired by Lovecraft. I never could understand this short story. It seems full of injokes that I'm not in on. I suspect that I partly wanted to read Lovecraft, and especially this one, just because of that.

Character I sympathise the most with: The main character? Or, actually, maybe more the agent at the station ticket-office, who gets to tell the stranger all about the local myths about Innsmouth. He does try to say that going to Innsmouth, especially on that old bus, is a bad idea, but at the same time he seems happy to be able to part with all this information and old stories about the small town. That would be me.

At the end of the story (no linear reviews here, do you hear), I realised that I've heard of Ctulhu before. Probably through listening to too many Neil Gaiman interviews. I've now realised that H.P. Lovecraft created the Ctulhu Mythos, which is all over the second hand book shops of Tromsø, especially in the fantasy and science fiction sections.

proof

There are no appropriate soundtracks. Listening to music while reading books has never been anything for me – the disappearing into a book and only being pulled out of it by a phone ringing, the sound of car tires, or the cat wanting to go outside, is the best experience you can have (before the pulling out).

Now there's hardly space for the actual review. I might go away from the guidelines for the next book, because I have so many feelings about it.

Let it just be said. H.P. LOVECRAFT! THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH! That's all. Brilliant.

It started out as (how I imagine) a classic science fiction/fantasy story from the 1930s, with the truth being told from the start, only with the main character not knowing this. And then came the end, and SPOILER ALERT (not really) the big twist that left me wishing for more text, more stories, and more knowledge about the Ctulhu Mythos. Without reading too much online before this review, I've already found that H.P. himself wrote more stories concerning Innsmouth and the Old Ones, which I will try to find after this.

In addition to the tons of authors and writers and cartoonists who have been inspired by Ctulhu to write directly about him and the rest of the Old Ones, I realised just how many modern science fiction and fantasy authors have been inspired by him. Plenty. Especially this idea that the human mind shrinks away from the truthful appearances of supernatural beings, or that seeing these beings can make persons mad as the brain is trying to protect us from seeing the entire truth. Namely in Mark Chadbourn's The Age of Misrule series is this one of the main points.

To conclude: I loved this story. While I read it I wasn't too sure, it was all right, with some good descriptions here and there. Then the end. Seriously. 

"The Shadow Over Innsmouth" - H.P. Lovecraft (12-21 August)

It took me a while to make a solid impression about this one, I think because the first few pages (A4 - first chapter) are so loaded with stories about The Esoteric Order of Dagon, The Marsh Refinery, the Miskatonic University at Arkham, that I quickly forgot how the narrator had begun the story: "there was something unspeakable down below Devil Reef, and he was going to tell the truth of it."

Although the "matter-of-factly" tone of the conversation between the travel agent and the narrator kept these "horrors" at arm's length for a while, I was slowly absorbed by the language in which everything was told. Perhaps this has more to do with the books I've chosen to read lately than with my English proficiency, but it had been a while since I felt like looking up so many words in a dictionary (with pleasure), and not only that, but every detailed description gave me an overwhelmingly whole image of whatever the topic was. When describing the first tiara he encounters:

"Among these reliefs were fabulous (as if he didn't believe they were possibly real) monsters of abhorrent grotesqueness and malignity (describes both the physical appearance and the perceived spirit of the creatures) - half ichthyic and half batrachian in suggestion - which one could not dissociate from a certain haunting and uncomfortable sense of pseudomemory (of course, later one realizes it might have been his actual memory, but at this point I thought of these creatures being distantly connected with humans, thus the pseudomemory, and not actual memory), as if they called up some image from deep cells and tissues whose retentive functions are wholly primal and awesomely ancestral (perhaps, inevitable? like genes one can't simply scratch out)"

This I enjoyed. A lot. Not a word is wasted. Had it been, for example, a George R.R. Martin story it could have easily taken him over a few hundred pages to narrate just the same. Of course, I think George R.R. Martin's case is different because his stories are largely based around extremely widespread and dense genealogies, a greatly expanding imagined geography and so on, so his sometimes-unnecessarily long descriptions serve another purpose - as in, you're already a few thousand pages into a same story, to read three hundred words describing the banquet that such and such morbid lord and lady were feasting their hostages with, doesn't seem like it's unnecessary anymore, really.

I felt this guy telling the story of Innsmouth was slightly more pedantic, maybe? Not witty like Tolkien, or incisive like Gaiman, but still as rich. I think I'll stick to what I said before about it: perhaps at the cost of making the narrator somewhat dull or lacking personality, not a word is wasted. Somewhat hand in hand, I had never felt so geographically well-located and oriented in a story as I did walking around Innsmouth: every time he stopped to describe his immediate surroundings I felt, at first a bit bored, but later thankful that I could turn around anywhere in Innsmouth and know, more accurately than usual, what I would be looking at.

Come to think about it, all of these meticulous descriptions seem somewhat off balance with the ending of the story. Assuming the narrator is telling everything in hindsight, after he has decided not to commit suicide and join "the deep ones", it seems a bit odd that his "narrator persona" actually conveys the dread and vertigo he feels when running from Innsmouth. Although he is an architect, isn't he? Measured, careful, precise.

Enough about style... I now realize it's hard to get rid of the dredges of boring academic analysis.

Along with all the careful descriptions and impressions packed with hints and connotations (when describing the Innsmouth locals one of the first times, he says "they seemed sullenly banded together in some sort of fellowship and understanding - despising the world as if they had access to other and preferable spheres of being". Wonderful.), one thing in particular I enjoyed about the story and the writing, and this is the only feature I can compare to other pieces I've read: I felt the sole purpose of the story is to build upon a single point of emotion.

The plot is not surprising - from the very beginning one knows there's some kind of terror in Innsmouth and that the narrator will have some sort of horrific (but not deadly) encounter with it, as he is alive to tell it now. The narrator (I'm tired of calling him the narrator now, and I looked up that his name is actually Robert Olmstead, so I'll call him Robert from now on) is a bit of an empty fictional character, which makes it easier for me, as a reader, to experience what he does - the fear, the tension. All other characters are only passers-by that build around the history of the place, but there are no intricate relations or anything. The core of the story is to build this impending and inevitable realization: the abhorrent and croaking horror within Robert.

Taking this realization of the horror within oneself a bit further, I read it as a modern horror-version of the myth of the wolf inside us all. After all, someone in the story also refers to these fish-frog-men as being all around the world, and being able to take over at any moment, if only they felt so inclined. I guess the oceanic associations are very useful not only because it is most unknown (I seem to remember reading that scientists know, presumably, proportionately more about visible outer space than about the deep seas) and mysterious, but also closer to all of us than, say, ideas about a "cosmic collective consciousness" or extra-terrestrial life or whatever. We all (think we) know the sea, but if we're daring or unfortunate enough (or fortunate, perhaps?) to try to dig below the surface, as Robert tried to do with Innsmouth, we might be surprised by what we find. After all, was it his own uncle who took it upon himself to do a similar trip years before, and also disappeared or committed suicide? But even after that, it doesn't seem to be a destructive nature they give in to. Yes, they're creepy and they chased him all around Innsmouth with no clear purpose, but that I remember, these "deep ones" weren't really guilty of anything else besides freaking visitors out. And, well, the disappeared tourists here and there could be attributed to them, but I'm inclined to think they disappeared because they somehow discovered their true calling, as Robert did.

Or that's what they would have you believe, I suppose.

(this is what http://quantumbranching.deviantart.com/ believes would happen, should Cthulu awaken and the deep ones arise. would definitely be more interesting than a zombie apocalypse, and seems much more realistic given sea level variations in the last decades, right? ...right? I am, however, more inclined to give in to them rather than planning all that military defence nonsense)

The only story that comes to mind (as I had never read any horror literature before, besides another Lovecraft short-story) is the poem "The Raven" (Edgar A. Poe), in which, similarly, the core purpose (that I could discern, at least), was to express this ever-growing and all-consuming feeling of loss - the irreparable void that comes after losing a loved one.

Of course, Lovecraft does build much more than just "disgust", "grotesqueness", fish-frog men and the stench of the sea around this, and yes, there is a well elaborated imagery around the myth of Cthulu, and The Esoteric Order of Dagon, and Innsmouth, and Arkham. But reading the story by itself, I felt that this creeping realization was something enjoyable in and of itself, and for me, that was the marrow of it.

And now I realize that I don’t practice what I myself appreciate: this ecology of language that I appreciated in Lovecraft. Here I am, two pages later (A4), having covered only two of the points we said we’d cover... I’ll try to persuade you that it’s OK because this is the first one we publish, but you’ll decide whether you forgive my carelessness or not. Maybe the following, as an epigraph, will serve to justify some of my opinions above, at some level, in spite of this transition completely devoid of delicacy.

At the moment I am spending the summer back where my biological family lives – Caracas, Venezuela. As I write this I feel goose bumps  down my spine because I feel an odd parallel between myself and Robert, digging into his own family history and realizing where (at least half of) his blood actually comes from.

Caracas is nothing like Innsmouth. If you anything about either one, that might have been stating the obvious. But I seem to have a love/hate relationship with this city, probably having a lot to do with the fact that I don’t live here most of the time, but only come and spend a month or two every few years. This makes it hard to link myself to some parts, some of the changes, some of the people, but at the same time, most of my childhood and (only a few of my) old friends are still here, so of course there are tracks that never get old. I spent the previous year in Northern Norway, and these two months are a kind of interlude before I move back to England again for another year, so this just adds to the feeling of arriving/departing almost at the same time. Perhaps because of this I might have slightly romanticised Innsmouth and fallen for the tale of “rushing back to the primitive” – but only as I read it.

Still without a better idea for a fitting musical piece other than a stereotypical classic horror movie soundtrack – though some lyrics in Epica’s metal symphony “We will take you with us” make me think of the potential gospels sung deep down Devil Reef, the music itself is far from oceanic.