Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 (2011)

I admit I had a preconceived idea about Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 (2011) before I turned the first page. A literary friend had told me it was a ‘postmodern classic’ (yes, they exist), and that although it did seem a wee bit long, she was very excited to read it and wanted to share the experience. I bit.

1000 or so pages later (it seemed like more), I felt like I’d been bitten right back. 

Let’s talk terms for a moment. Postmodernism is a philosophical position that questions, or dispenses altogether, with traditional thinking or approaches. In literature, postmodern writers disregard long-accepted methods, sometimes upending genres and narrative structures. Postmodern fiction employs permeable boundaries between truth and untruth, fantasy and reality, and self and society. 

In 1Q84 (a play on Orwell’s 1984 – intertextuality is another typical feature of postmodern literature) a young woman named Aomame stumbles into a secondary reality where some things remain the same, like memories, and others are startlingly different, like the number of moons in the sky. Aomame’s counterpart is Tengo, a struggling writer and teacher at a ‘cram school’. He and Aomame are connected by their pasts, and are looking for each other across a gulf of eddying events. A fantastical element is introduced in the character of Eri, a nymph-like mystery girl, whose novel, The Glass Chrysalis, exposes the workings of unfriendly magical forces, and excavates the desires and dreams of its readers (literary themes – yet another characteristic of PoMo Lit!).This novel is an ensemble piece and all of the characters (there is an elderly woman, a bodyguard, a publisher, a cop, a spy) are carefully, but somewhat coldly drawn. They are like acquaintances; I recognize their features, but I don’t feel like I really know them, and I don’t really care to. They do act passionately; there is a noble vigilantism and a rescue from abuse, but there is a foggy flatness to events that makes the characters seem like paper dolls. 

The novel’s settings are sparse and minimal: a monk’s cell of an apartment, an empty playground, and a sterile room in an old people’s facility.  The characters reside only temporarily in these places.  Also, there is persistent repetition of those moons, and we are reminded again and again of the fact that the characters are in a different world now - a different existence.

In spite of all that, I kept reading. I almost felt like I didn’t have a choice. My friend had started reading the book, but then abandoned it. What kept me reading was stubbornness, curiosity, and certainly there was a romance that needed resolving, for better or worse, but that alone was predictable.  Even though I finished the book, I still feel like I am reading it… like I myself may have fallen into a two-moon world where there are no pictures on  walls. 1Q84 doesn’t read like a ‘classic’  to me, but it does have a beguiling mysteriousness that kept me awake while I was reading it, and for some reason, still keeps me awake at times.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Not So Out of This World

The word ‘dystopia’ brings to mind some of the most powerful and prescient works of English fiction: Brave New World, 1984, and The Handmaid’s Tale are just a few examples. I am drawn to these stories for their breadth of imagination, sharp satire, and dense gloominess.  The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson is the new dystopia in town. However, the world it describes is not so new – nor so very far away.

Set in North Korea, Johnson’s novel follows the story of an everyman (albeit a trapped in hyper-communist, despotic North Korean everyman) as he seeks his identity. The protagonist, Pak Jun Do, wants to connect with others, and in doing so to know himself. He struggles in this desire against a society where self-reliance, not connectedness, is esteemed.

At the center of this story is the question of trust. In Pak Jun Do’s world, the ‘story’ of the truth is constructed for one purpose only: to support and venerate the state and its leader. No other versions are permitted, on pain of death, or – unbelievably – worse than death. The book is not without beauty; there is a tender love story, and humour. The landscape is gray as ashes, but bursts of colour and hopefulness peek out.

If you are not familiar with the setting, this book will enlighten. Johnson describes a nation where there are perfectly groomed highways, but no cars; modern high-rise apartment buildings, but no electricity to light them after dark, and no news, music, movies, or books, except for those sanctioned by the ‘Dear Leader’, Kim Jong Il (or smuggled at extreme risk). The author had little need to invent. One symbol I felt must surely be pure imaginative hubris on the part of the author is the KIMJUNGILIA, a species of begonia specifically bred to honour Kim Jung Il. It blooms on his birthday. Absurd, but very real details like this punctuate the book.

           

Read The Orphan Master’s Son because it is an engaging story, hauntingly told, but also to experience North Korea, a dystopia in our midst.

For some excellent photos that capture the feeling of the novel, I encourage you to visit this site:

http://www.testroete.com/northkorea.html

I don’t know how I feel about commercials for books, but here’s a link to the ‘book trailer’:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx0eAfegTjg

Mid-winter Reading? Dubious.

Currently Reading (and deeply disturbed by) The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus.

Truthfully, I had to take a break from this book and read the first four chapters of A Passage to India just to just to feel like myself again. The Flame Alphabet begins with a mother and father, Claire and Samuel, fleeing their home to escape the toxic effects of their child’s speech. Esther, their obnoxious teenage daughter, has the potential to make one slightly queasy without the poison voice problem. She sneers and scorns her parents for all she’s worth. Meanwhile entire neighbourhoods empty as the voices of children and teenagers become like so much thrown acid to the shocked and ever-weakening adults. The effects of hearing a child speak (or sing or laugh) include crushing pain, faces that shrink and harden (‘facial smallness’ Marcus calls it, in one of many cringe-worthy descriptions), skin that turns to paper, fatigue, vomiting, bruising, blood… and, as in the worst of plagues, victims linger. Additionally, Marcus includes a parallel plot. Claire and Samuel are Jewish, and in Marcus’ creepy world, they worship in hidden forest huts (“an entirely covert method of devotion”), where sermons are piped in to be listened to, but never discussed. Sheesh.

According to my Kindle I have read 63% of The Flame Alphabet. Should I continue? What would Mrs. Moore do? Respond softly, gentle reader.

Week Two of Winter Semester 2012

Tips for My Students

1.       Look at me. My face and eyes will tell you half of what you need to know to succeed in my class. Your face and eyes will tell me almost all of what I need to know to help you.

Actually, that’s it. See you in class

Currently Reading: Stephen King’s 11/22/63

and

 Sa’adi’s The Rose Garden http://www.omphaloskepsis.com/ebooks/pdf/rosegar.pdf

Planning for Winter Term: A Study in Procrastination

Currently Reading: The Nether World by George Gissing

I received confirmation of my classes for next term. I’ll be teaching advanced reading, writing and a vocabulary elective. These are exactly the classes I wanted, and I have more than a month to organize materials, review new resources, create lesson plans, and take care of some administrative details. So, this morning I began as follows: get darling daughter off to school, return home, make tea, start up Mac, clean stove top, read Facebook updates, look for advanced reading binder (unsuccessful), try on new pants – fit!, eat rye toast with peanut butter, put pajama pants back on, read email (check links to MTF Price Matters Flyer, Banana Republic, and Coudal Partners), tidy up stuffed animals, take photo of self with Mac Photo Booth, edit blemishes from photo,  email photo to friend for feedback, wait for feedback, post photo on Match.com, rearrange mantle décor, shower, tweeze, put nice pants back on while watching Restaurant Impossible, google ‘Kermit origins’ and read Wikipedia entry, fetch mail, read Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue, and pick up my daughter from school.

Time wasted: Approximately 5 hours

Work Accomplished: None

Plan of Action for Tomorrow: Proceed directly to university office and locate advanced reading binder, and try to do it without being distracted by pants, grease, or knick knacks. 

Books about Books

 Currently Reading: Cullum by E. Arnot Robertson

Nathaniel Philbrick’s  (http://nathanielphilbrick.com/) new book, Why Read Moby Dick? provides excellent reasons to read, not just Ahab’s tale, but any great fiction, from any era. He praises the story that is much itself and also another: “The book is so encyclopedic and detailed that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the middle of the nineteenth century.”  And yet, the book is also about “America racing hell-bent toward the Civil War...”. 

This duality is exemplified by Nicholas Nickleby, “…when he thought how regularly things went on from day to day in the same unvarying round – how youth and beauty died, and ugly griping age lived tottering on – how crafty avarice, and mainly honest hearts were poor and sad – how few they were who tenanted the stately houses, and how many those who lay in noisome pens, or rose each day and laid them down at night, and lived and died, father and son, mother and child, race upon race, , and generation upon generation, without a home to shelter them or the energies of one single man directed to their aid – how in seeking, not a luxurious and splendid life, but the bare means of a most wretched and inadequate subsistence, there were women and children in that one town, divided into classes, numbered and estimated as regularly as the noble families and folks of great degree, and reared from infancy to drive most criminal and dreadful trades – how ignorance was punished and never taught – how jail door gaped and gallows loomed for thousands urged toward them by circumstances curtaining their very cradles’ heads, and but for which they might have earned their honest bread and lived in peace – how many died in soul and had no chance of life – how many who could scarcely go astray, be they vicious as they would, turned haughtily from the  crushed and stricken wretch who could scare do otherwise, and who would have been a greater wonder had he or she done well, than even they – had they done ill – how much injustice, and misery, and wrong there was, and yet how the world rolled on from year to year, alike careless and indifferent, and no man seeking to remedy or redress it – when he thought of all this, and selected from the mass the one slight case on which his thought were bent, he felt indeed that there was little ground for hope, and little cause or reason why it should not form an atom in the huge aggregate of distress and sorrow, and add one small and unimportant unit to swell the great amount.“, and yet sometimes, one must be thorough and proceed.    

Are you with me still? 

For contemporary students, hauled at pen-point from their app-encrusted sedation devices, the work of reading such a passage must seem ludicrous. “Whatever for?” they might say, or more likely not say but simply indicate with evermore upward lifting brows.  What will I tell them? To begin, that the story is about tenacity and triumph, and that they will be inspired by young Nicholas and his struggles (or Ahab and his). Oh yes, and that next week there will be a quiz.  Sigh.

Usefulness and Desirability: Is Reading and Writing Well a Waste of Time?

“This thing that I made would be useful.” The Knife Maker

I began my day by watching this short film about knives made by hand (via Coudal Partners): http://thisismadebyhand.com/film/the_knife_maker

For me, a significant challenge I face as a teacher is convincing my skeptical students the usefulness of reading and writing well.  I sometimes lean to the practical – impressing upon them the importance of written communication skills and the ability to interpret and distill ideas in the digital age.  I’ve also rested my philosophy upon more personal considerations: that honing these skills will make one more interesting to peers, even popular, and as a last resort – that chicks dig it. The effects of my gambits, as much as they are measurable, are usually negligible.  (In any case, I am not sure that the popularity notion isn’t a bit of an untruth).

Is it useful and desirable to read and write well? Consider W. Somerset Maugham on reading:

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”

He ought to know. According to one biographer, Somerset Maugham was orphaned at the age of 10, stammered and was cruelly taunted by classmates, practiced medicine, a career he despised, in London’s slums, contracted TB, fled the Nazi’s in a coal barge, was unhappily married, and so on. During his lifetime he produced twenty or more novels, in addition to short stories, plays, and essays. His most famous novels; The Razor’s Edge (1944), and Of Human Bondage (1915), explore transcendent themes such as spiritual awakening, and the value of happiness. 

Should we read him now? Should my students spend time considering the plight of a club-footed protagonist, or the intimidating visage of a maharishi? OF COURSE THEY SHOULD! How to convince them? That is the question.

I have tried allowing them to select their own readings, and will save that debacle for another day. For now, I beg you dear readers to submit your suggestions.

 Happy Monday (note to self: buy handmade knife)