"The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" - Milan Kundera (8-13 Nov)

Between 2008 and 2009, a much younger Juan had begun to wander into the fields of post-modern and erotic literature. It was only convenient that two kinds of changes were taking place in his life, which contributed to his liking "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" so much: first of all, he was becoming a young adept at juggling different kinds of affections with women, and secondly, he had recently left the place where he was born, never to settle there again. So this two-fold sympathy with Milan Kundera was a fertile foundation for his pretentious blend of intellect and spirituality, which, much to his disappointment, brought him some complications with women throughout the following couple of years.

Some years later he came across "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting". In reading it, he re-discovered some less likeable traits in these problematic men, which he had ignored some years back with a youthful gaiety. At the same time - because it seems like Kundera does have a habit of intertwining the historical with the romantic - he was able to trace many common threads between the political reality of these people and his own. Alas! He has lived first hand the struggle of blotching out bits and pieces of the past to shape his new self. But while Kundera rightly point out that this is a problem when applied to a nation, why should it be so when one talks about oneself?

It was a tough book. On the one hand, Kundera's scattered and impressionistic style has always been a challenge for our Juan - which doesn't mean he doesn't enjoy it - as his recent experiences with Murakami have demonstrated. Juan likes consistent plots (no matter the size, and regardless of whether they are winding or not) and when the author himself becomes self-aware and throws in bits and pieces of advice ('[this] is a novel about Tamina, and whenever Tamina goes off-stage, it is a novel for Tamina'), he feels tricked. Kind of like when somebody says "don't think about a white elephant". On the other hand, because there are so many precise questions he can relate to, it becomes harder to keep track of all the common threads. So this time Juan has attempted to collect some of the most interesting ones he came across, and just write them down with some of his own to try and make some more sense out of them:

'"I don't really get what it means, that they all turn into rhinoceroses," said Gabrielle.
"You have to see it as a symbol," Michelle explained.
"That's right," said Gabrielle. "Literature is made up of signs"'

Yes, yes, this is a good start.

He also finds a good laugh when he reads about symbols written from an Eastern European perspective, that easily apply to his Latin-American upbringing:

"Things deprived suddenly of their supposed meaning, of the place assigned to them in the so-called order of things (a Moscow-trained Marxist believing in horoscopes), make us laugh". Or adherents to a radical 21st Century socialism who rush into a home-appliances store to loot flat-screen tellies larger than their bookshelves. http://www.ultimasnoticias.com.ve/noticias/actualidad/economia/fotos-y-video---saqueos-y-destrozos-en-daka-valenc.aspx

"You know," said Banaka, "the novel is the fruit of a human illusion. The illusion of the power to understand others. But what do we know of one another?"
"Nothing," said Bibi.
"That's true," said Joujou.
"All anyone can do," said Banaka, "is give a report on oneself. Anything else is an abuse of power. Anything else is a lie."

This surprised Juan at once, as it echoed one of the first thoughts introduced by Murakami, when Toru Okada wonders how much he actually knows Kumiko. Only it seemed to be a problem for the Okada, not so much for the merry and the not-so-merry folk in Kundera's universe. But what do we do if not tell our own stories? Isn't every personal account a novel of sorts? I think we structure our stories in a way that makes sense to us, and it might be misleading, but it's what we've got, and I'd much rather believe that we can actually do so intending to cross personal boundaries, as opposed to the so-called 'graphomaniacs'. It seems to Juan that Kundera has more than just a handful of criticisms directed to particular authors or people he knows, and since speaking from outside of his novels is not Kundera's cup of tea, he has to give up on that question.

In other respects, Juan struggles with (one of) Kundera's definitions of love: "(...) because love is a continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love." Juan thinks he knows some more suitable definitions (though not necessarily more lofty or romantic), but because he's also an aspiring writer, he's saving those for later. Mind you, they are of coursed based solely on his experiences of love, and the ones he has witnessed around him.

Then, as he realizes his ramblings have been drawn out too long, Juan tries to tie some loose ends in the shoelaces of Kundera's helplessly childish and spoiled male characters: many of the men in this book remind him of someone, as if they were shadows or sketches of somebody else he has known for a while, but who could this be... Ah, yes! Of course! It is Tomas, the slightly more complex (but hopeful) womaniser of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". Could it not be? The difference being that Tomas actually wanders back and forth in this cycle of 'lightness' and 'weight'. It doesn't mean that he has overcome his oppressive desires, but Tereza does seem to keep him true to himself, in her innocence and gentleness.

In the dreamlike island of the children where Tamina finds herself at a loss, she feels a hollowness in her stomach. "That hollowness in her stomach is exactly that unbearable absence of weight. And just as an extreme can at any moment turn into its opposite, so lightness brought to its maximum becomes the terrifying weight of lightness, and Tamina knows she cannot bear it for another moment. She turns around and starts to run." Much like Tereza fears Tomas.

"'When a woman says "No," she really means "Yes."' That male aphorism has always outraged me. It's as stupid as all human history."
"But that history is inside us, and we can't escape it," replied Jan. "A woman fleeing and defending herself. A woman giving herself, a man taking. A woman veiling herself, a man tearing off her clothes. These are age-old images we carry within us!"
"Age-old and idiotic! As idiotic as the holy images! And what if women are starting to be fed up with having to behave according to that patter? What if that eternal repetition nauseates them? What if they want to invent other images and another game?"
"Yes, they're stupid images stupidly repeated. You're entirely right. But what if our desire for the female body depends on precisely those stupid images and on them alone? If those stupid images were to be destroyed in us, would men still be able to make love to women?"
Edwige broke into laughter: "I don't think you need to worry"

Silly, silly Jan... You haven't been paying attention, it seems, to all the talk about how capable we are to alter our history.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera, 29.10-7.11 (Sunniva)

So, how will I write about this book?

Will I mention the autobiographical and non-fictional blended with the fictional and slightly fantastical? Will I mention the history and factual and political inbetween the sexual and sensual and philosophical? Or will I most of all mention the disturbing parts that creep up on you without you really noticing?

I really don’t know where to start. All right. I started reading the book on the plane the morning I left for Tenerife with my cousins and aunt, to celebrate my mum’s 50^th on a restaurant in Spain. I read a lot of it, then listened to music, looked out the window, talked with my cousins, and saved the last hundred pages or so for the last bit of the trip when all electronic devices must be switched off. Then we were landing, and I still had eighty pages to go. It was impossible for me to pick it up again while on holiday, for nine whole days the book stood in my room, went in my backpack and waited to be read. I couldn’t read this book, which had captured me, while lying on the beach in a bikini, or slouching on the sofa in our rented flat drinking Fanta limón (the most important drink of my childhood vacations in Spain, when Norway only had Fanta orange).

On the plane back, however, I did read it. So, you see, I didn’t read it between October 29^th and November 7^th, I read it on October 29^th and on November 7^th. But I am stalling.

How does Kundera make this perfect (although imperfect, but still perfect in its own way) mix of stories that become a book that makes sense, even if I can’t say what sense? I enjoyed the separate stories. I realise that together, they make a book about Prague, and history, and memories, maybe people in general but more about Czechs.

What disturbed me was the SPOILERS YES THEY’RE HERE amount of mentions of rape, while now that I’m thinking back,  I couldn’t tell you that there was any explicit rape mentioned in the book. Let’s see. There is the one time Kundera – because we must suppose the I, who is, I think, named Milan or Kundera  is the author himself – there is the one time he gets an inexplicable urge to rape his friend. He is confused himself as to why. And I wonder what the author is trying to say with this scene. Do all men have this dormant urge inside them? Or is he trying to comment on our ideas of rape, and saying that we should call it by its right name more often? Then there is the scene with Tamina on the island of children, which I thought was a strange scene, but still it seems to happen with her consent, even if Kundera calls it rape a few pages later. Finally, the discussion between Jan and Edwige had me enraged at the author, until Edwige got more of her say and I remembered that I often project main characters’ views on the author themselves, and probably without reason. It also brought up an issue I was thinking about while reading Murakami. Even though Murakami can write some strong women into his stories, as far as I can remember, the weaker women far outnumber the strong ones, and the strong ones (example: May Kasahara) often become weak, or dependent on the man. I remember hearing  that in Japan, or perhaps in some Japanese subcultures, there is a fetishization of rape. It goes back to the idea that Jan is talking about, that women are supposed to be chaste, fleeing from sexual encounters, while men attack and are very manly for doing so. Apparently, there is an idea that a woman should say “no” several times when a man propositions her, even while they are having sex, even to the point of saying “stop, stop, this is rape” or something similar. It is completely ridiculous and undermines our free will, and also blurs the lines between regular intercourse and a sexual assault. This comment partly belongs with the Murakami review as well, because while his books and texts never go as far as that, they have a milder version of the idea that the men want to have sex, the women resist, or they accept the act but can’t say that this is what they actually want. Toru Okada says something like “Then we had sex for the first time, in Kumiko’s apartment. I think that is what she wanted, because even though she was just lying there [so and so]”. This is a man who’s been married to this woman for how long? Six or eight years? And he still doesn’t know.

What am I trying to say? That there is a dark streak throughout the book, lying underneath the funny and serious and poignant stories about everything and nothing? I’m not sure. This is a book to be read again, and probably one that will change in my mind as I get older.

I did enjoy the book very very much, and I am already looking forward to reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I have in Norwegian and have owned for two years without getting as far as reading it yet.

"Doktor Proktor og Verdens Undergang. Kanskje." - Jo Nesbø (23-31 Oct)

Well this was heaps of fun - as in, cracking up sitting in my living room, and trying to contain that a little bit whenever I heard one of my house-mates walking down the stairs for not wanting to seem silly or too childish-fun.

The thing is (a bit about my daily life at the moment), thanks to our house's composition of house-mates, most of our conversations over dinner or about books revolve around issues of post-colonialism; power structures inherent in migration policies in Europe; everything that's wrong with the global patriarchal tradition; the ways in which sociolinguistic structures reveal these power relations; why and how we should collectivise the food we buy in the house to accommodate for vegetarians and how all of this is tied to the dissertation topics that everybody's working on - all of this usually accompanied by exquisite and perfectly enjoyable German and Venezuelan cuisine. Don't get me wrong though! I wholeheartedly enjoy and appreciate this sense of community and discussion we have in the house right now, and I couldn't ask for more. But (perhaps unfairly and because I'm a bit prejudiced), I felt that laughing out loud to children farting their way up into the sky with a para-glider was something I'd best keep to myself.

This book though. Admittedly, it had been a while since I read a proper children's story (I think "Stardust", "The Lionheart Brothers" and "The Solitaire Mystery" are the closest ones, but they're very, very different), and this one was so cartoonish that I enjoyed it a lot. Of course, there is also a lot of political commentary in it, which I think is perfectly suitable and even necessary in children's literature, along with a few healthy references to mortality and all that. But the way the characters are built and the tension and misunderstandings that happened between them all too often:

(A sudden blast far off - "what the hell was that?!" - "a perfectly tuned A-flat, I believe")

made me really enjoy it every single time I picked it up. I also liked the fact that amongst the odd team of heroes there were all sorts of personalities, and each one of them was absolutely necessary to overcome one or another impasse of the story.

I'm not going to make any unfair comparisons with children's literature from Venezuela or Latin-America or the ones I grew up with, because, I must admit, I never did read many children's stories from the place I grew up in. I'm inclined to say we imported most of it, produced very little, and until not too long, many families tended to value the foreign over the national, which is in great part a shame. Not in all parts though, as I was a happy child with Harry Potter, Robinson Crusoe, The Lord of the Rings and a few anonymous Spanish folk tales about gnomes and fairies. So it might as well be the same in children's literature in other places, but in any case, I've noticed some things I really appreciate from Scandinavian stories, and that is the plurality in characters and portrayals, which leads me to my last and more formal remark about this book in particular.

It might be particular to Norway because of the lively discussion around language, but I think the way Nesbø (and other writers, I remember noticing that Anne B. Ragde does this too) writes "in dialects" whenever people from Trøndelag or elsewhere show up, is a very effective and positive habit in several ways: it is efficient in describing characters, as one makes up an image about them without the need for so much description. Even if kids might not pick up on these things because they might not have been exposed to them that much, it begins that process of exposure and acceptance to the fact that people speak differently. This, at least, is something I really would like to see in more literature. Spanish being my main frame of reference, I can say it is somewhat disappointing to what extent authors enshrine "Spanish" Spanish, missing out on so much that could be said through writing differently. The only author I can remember who differentiates between sociolects in his characters (and I've already referenced him before in this blog) is Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles, but even then, there is much more that could be done and much fun to be had with language.

So all in all, I'm convinced that Nesbø's books (at least Doktor Proktor's ones) would "incidentally" find their way into my hypothetical children's bookcases in the future.

Doktor Proktor og verdens undergang. Kanskje. by Jo Nesbø, 23.-24. October (Sunniva)

(Doctor Proktor and the end of the world. Maybe.)

Seriously, this book. When we first chose this book, I imagined that it was a children’s book for younger children, as in 3-5 year-olds, while I see now it is clearly aimed at 10-12 year-olds.  I imagined it would be a short picture book that I could read in one afternoon. Probably because the first book in this series is called Doktor Proktors prompepulver  i.e. Doctor Proktor’s farting powder.

I did read it in two nights, though. It is the strangest mix of satire and just plain fun and scariness (it’s a story about the end of the world. Maybe). It also took some time to realise where I had seen and read this kind of story before. It is a very grand comparison, but I think it’s the closest comparison I could find. Did you ever read The Witches, or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl? There you’ll find some of the same wild ideas and fluctuating story lines, where BOOM HERE THE SPOILERS START the most random-seeming thread still comes back in the end, either as a pun, a plot point or an important story-changing part.

It is brilliant in everything that happens. I did wonder, now and then, seeing that their plans kept being thwarted, but it was only seemingly so, as I said before. It doesn't underestimate the average ten-year-old, which I find amazing. That they understand humour on several levels, irony, and that some things can be true and some not. I was constantly thinking: my ten-year-old cousin needs to read this. But also his four year older sister, and his six year older one. Actually, also my aunt. And mum. Maybe my grandmother. It was just too much fun not to share with a lot of people.

This book is filled with all the Norwegian jokes. When the moon chameleons start to infiltrate the earth, they hypnotise people. The only way you can tell that someone is hypnotised, is when they pronounce some words the wrong way – the way that a lot of Oslo youth have started pronouncing words today. The illustration of the weather report has a man looking like one of the Norwegian now retired weather reporters. There is an odd man from Sør-Trøndelag called Petter who talks a lot about winning, and I am guessing it has something to do with Petter Northug, our best man at skiing, our national sport, who can be very cocky when it comes to talking about himself and winning. I also wondered a while about the band Debitels, that everyone is listening to, until I read the lyrics of their song Slåvsjujejeje out loud, and realised that if you put on a very Norwegian accent, OR you are ten years old and write words the way you hear them, this is how you would say or write The Beatles and She Loves You (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah). You also have the band BABA with Dænsin Kvin (ABBA with Dancing Queen) and so on. There were so many other small things I’ve forgotten. Of course there are things like the King’s New Year’s Speech. One of the funniest (I feel very odd translating all this into English, but hey) injokes must be that the King in exile gets a Swedish servant named Åke. Now, in Danish and Norwegian, “tjener” means servant or waiter. In Swedish, “tjänare” is a greeting. In this book the servant is constantly called Tjänare Åke, which ends up in the joke where the King is shouting for him: “Tjänare Åke! Said the King. Tjänare Kungen! Said Åke, laughing.” (paraphrasing a bit here). My bad memory won’t tell me where the expression Tjänare Kungen comes from (It's a film from 2005 but that is all I could find), but knowing that I’m sharing this project with a non-Norwegian makes me certain that I will have to get my cousins to read this book so we can have some Norwegian laughs about it. And just so that's said: No offense. I am never going to get any of the references in our Spanish-language book by Saramago.

Anyway. All the laughs. All the serious laughs with surreal fabulousness from Jo Nesbø with a shadow of Roald Dahl. If these are translated into English, please read them. Just forget all I said about injokes. It really is funny anyway, only a little less phunny.

And again, I am sorry that my past two reviews have been a bit thrown together. I'm sat at the Red Cross Youth Autumn Camp at the end of October, trying to get these done before I go on holiday, after having handed in my laptop and getting told it would take 2-4 weeks to repair it, and before handing back this Red Cross laptop. I know I like to complain that I am busy, but the business these days is being happy with the Red Cross Youth, packing for my holiday, seeing my friends and actually going on the holiday. Completely not complaining, just trying to explain my laziness in doing these.

I have to say that sometimes I enjoy writing - i.e. when I have lots of time and the book has been exciting and stirred a lot of thoughts, but at other times I get stressed about it and the reviews become thereafter. I worry that my reviews are not literary enough, even though I prefer less academic reviews myself and am trying to write something that could be interesting to read even if you have no idea what I'm talking about. Well. We'll see how we do by Christmas!

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, 2-18.10 (Sunniva)

Now, let me first say how sorry I am that this review comes this late. Due to circumstances, mostly my work with Global Dignity Day, I was far too busy to read outside of breakfast time and bed time, and I quickly realised I couldn’t read this book before bedtime. It was simply too creepy, right out stomach turning (these passages often showed up at my breakfast readings) and surreal for my easily influenced mind to ingest before sleep.

Then, the night I was going to finish the book and write and post the review, three days after the original posting date, I was also busy registering online with a new agency that will give me temporary jobs as a kindergarden assistant (long story) and drinking tea and getting ready before a Norwegian Friday night tv show (Nytt på Nytt), when I spilled tea all over my laptop and it started failing almost immediately. And believe me, I cried. As in tears.  My six-year-old Macbook Pro is just about everything to me, I hardly think I knew how much before it broke down. This following week has been spent trying to hand it in to the local Apple Store for a repair job, going back and forth with demands of a six-year-old-receipt, then being told I had to go home and do the back-up myself, or they could do it for a small £200 fee. What with seeing different people (also having a brilliant halibut dinner with Christine, I’m not complaining about my free time), working in kindergardens and going to the Red Cross Youth Autumn Camp this weekend, I never found the time to sit and write this.

SLIGHT SPOILERS FROM NOW ON
This is already far too long. What I want to say about the book is: I really, really wanted to like it. I was prepared to enjoy it, which was probably what went wrong. I have read a lot of Murakami in the past, from 2009 till 2011 I was reading him quite often, until I needed a break. I realised that there were two books I couldn’t tell apart. They both (as far as I can remember) feature young, single middleclass Japanese men who drink a lot of whiskey and talk with strange women and go into slightly surreal worlds next to this one where you’re never certain whether it’s a dream or the truth or an allegory. Does that sound familiar?

I still like, and want to like, Murakami. I am longing to read Sputnik Sweetheart, and to reread After Dark. I just didn’t think this was one of his best books. It was all right. I loved it in the beginning. The strangest thing is that it went downhill after Kumiko left. There is one point, a while later, probably page 307 or 393 or something like that (I don’t have my copy right now), where May Kasahara says something, and it feels very final, and the book could just as easily, or maybe even better, have ended there for my part.

There are too many threads that are not gathered. I’m a little confused in the end. Also, how did amazing and slightly weird (and therefore more amazing) May Kasahara turn into this sweet little girl who feeds bread to the ducks and wants to share a pocket in the cold weather? Even though I didn’t understand her reasoning earlier in the book, I preferred her as the girl who would test how long she could keep Toru Okada in the well without saving him. As much as she makes the point about the girls in the village only wanting to get married and stop working, Murakami seems to imply that she is happy with everything now that she has found the job in the wig factory. I just don’t believe it.

All right: I still enjoyed reading the book. I liked the different sections. I’m a little bit in love with Cinnamon in a sort of young boy – pat on the head- sort of way.

This will be too long if I mention all the small, big, simple and complex thoughts I had about this book. I wondered how the war stories fit in. I didn’t think they did. They were interesting, but they were certainly from a different book. I wondered about the different Japanese customs and practices that I don’t get, and I wonder whether Toru and Kumiko are slightly upper middle class (yet he says they couldn’t afford a house) when they keep dropping stuff off at the dry cleaner’s, or whether I am just from a country where only fairly rich people would make a habit of getting their clothes dry cleaned. Probably the last one.

My thoughts are a little muddled by now, and by not having the book here with me. Maybe I'll comment more later on?

"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?