So, without further ado, back to blogging the bookshelf….

Synopsis: An influential collection of “Neo-realist” fictional novellas from a leading member of China’s “New Generation” of nihilistic authors.

My Take: Part of the reason that I love modern Chinese fiction is the rich vein of conflict that the nation’s ongoing economic and societal upheavals offer the nation’s authors. The fact that the economic and cultural structures that underpin Chinese society have been in a constant flux for more than 50 years offers Chinese fiction writers an enormously rich dramatic canvas on which to practice their craft.

Zhu Wen’s  “I Love Dollars” is close to the paradigm example of this. Released in 1994, “I Love Dollars” pushed Zhu to the forefront of the “New Generation” of post-Tianenmen, “Neo-Realist” Chinese authors. These authors sought to break from the strictures of both the classical and propagandistic Chinese literary paradigms and to portray the changing Chinese society as it is (or more accurately, as they saw it).  The result is a highly unsentimental take on a series of characters trying to adapt in a world that is moving rapidly beneath their feet.

Zhu’s novellas romanticise neither ‘traditional’ Chinese society nor the receding Communist economy, expressing equal contempt for the desire to cling too closely to either world. However, neither does Zhu’s writing express any particular enthusiasm for the future. The economically liberalising China of Deng’s creation is seen not as liberation from the repression of the past, but as a society wide sand-blasting of all human values bar the pursuit of economic enrichment.

As a result, Zhu’s characters seem almost universally cut off from a meaningful life.  Those who have adapted to the new China are often nihilistic or hedonistic souls adrift from any moral anchoring. Those who long to return to either of the nation’s agrarian or communist pasts are viewed as sad, slightly pathetic anachronisms. All however, are victims of the larger forces of Chinese society and the helplessness of the individual amidst the grand sweep of historical change.

While there’s more than enough of interest in the ‘big picture’ themes of Zhu’s books, his prose is also worth checking out. Zhu’s writing conveys the minutiae of modern Chinese life via a sparse and positively caustic prose.  The opening of one of the novella’s in this collection, Pounds, Ounces, Meat offers an illustrative glimpse:

On the bridge by the old Drum Tower I was stopped by a shabby individual, clearly someone who’d wandered in from out of town, with a black bag tucked under his arm and an unnerving gleam in his eyes. He told me my physiognomy was most unusual; he simply had to tell my fortune, he wouldn’t charge a cent. The plastic on top of the bridge had melted tackily in the sun: crossing felt like walking over spat-out chewing gum, or smoker’s phlegm, or snot, or semen, or fresh dog shit. I include these comparisons purely to illuminate, not disgust, you understand. If I were to suggest you imagine it was raw meat underfoot, now that, I admit, would be nauseating. Fuck off, I told him as impatiently as I could manage.

Briefly, all too briefly, the man was transfixed by shock, too transfixed to manage any kind of response, till I’d reached the end of the bridge’s elevation and was about to set off down the steps on the other side. Good luck’s coming your way this year! He screeched vengefully at me across the asphalt. About fucking time, I muttered to myself as I descended. When I was halfway down, I happened to look up and see a girl with a healthily tanned face coming toward me up the steps, carrying a black parasol and a copy of I Love Dollars. My heart began to pound. I wasn’t sure, at that moment, whether this counted as my good luck or not. In subsequent weeks and months, I often thought back over this scene, about this girl and that book, about how she kept the latter pressed beguilingly up against her chest, blinding me to its obvious flatness.

This blunt style of writing caused a not insignificant degree of controversy in the PRC of 1994. However it doesn’t feel affected in the context of the disconnected nature of the book’s characters and the neo-realist ambitions of the author. It’s blunt, but appropriately so.

Highlight:

“Is sex the only thing that matters ? Is there nothing else ?” Father threw the pile of manuscripts to one side, shaking his head furiously.

“Let me ask you a question: how come you only pick up on the sex in what I write, and nothing else ?”

“A writer ought to offer people something positive, something to look up to, ideals, aspirations, democracy, freedom, stuff like that.”

“Dad, I’m telling you, all that stuff, it’s all there in sex.”

My Take: “Spring Snow” is generally regarded to be Yukio Mishima’s greatest masterpiece. The first instalment in his epic Sea of Fertility tetraology, an allegorical examination of the Westernisation of Japanese society between 1912 and 1975, “Spring Snow” was a best seller on its release despite Mishima’s political unpalatability.

At the most basic level, “Spring Snow” tells the story of star crossed lovers, Kiyoaki Matsugae and Satoko Ayakura, as narrated by Kiyoaki’s stoic best friend Shigekuni Honda. While the financial prosperity of Kiyoaki’s family and the aristocratic standing Satoko’s family made the couple a mutually beneficial pairing, Kiyoaki’s initial equivocation about their relationship allowed Satoko to be betrothed to a member of the Imperial household. However, once Satoko’s matrimonial commitment makes her unattainable, Kiyoaki’s feelings for her crystallise and the pair are set on a course for self-destruction.

While “Spring Snow” starts slowly, dwelling on the characteristics of the alien and hermetically sealed Japanese aristocratic society, as Kiyoaki and Satoko’s relationship builds momentum towards its inevitable conclusion the story develops a gut wrenching intensity. It really does have an emotional weight that leaves you physically weak upon completion.

However, this novel is more than just a Japanese “Romeo and Juliet”. Like all of Mishima’s works, the real emotional impetus for “Spring Snow” flows from the deep internal conflicts within the author and the broader Japanese society. I’ve written before about the contradictions inherent in Mishima’s life as a homosexual fascist bodybuilder/writer but the force of these conflicting desires is writ large in “Spring Snow”.

While societal pressure plays a role in heightening the tension of “Spring Snow”, the fundamental conflict in the novel is internal to Kiyoaki. The protagonist’s alternating ambivalence, hostility and obsessive love for Satoko is the main source of tension in the book and mirrors Mishima’s love/hate relationship for the changing Japan. Kiyoaki doesn’t know whether to welcome the opening up of Japanese society or resist its Westernisation and as such is conflicted about how to deal with this contradiction within Satoko who, by virtue of her position as the daughter of an aristocratic family, is at the forefront of these changes. “Spring Snow” is much more than a simple story of obsessive or forbidden love.

“Spring Snow” isn’t an easily accessible novel and Mishima doesn’t make any concessions to the reader in terms of exposition. It’s literary fiction in its purest form and as with all Mishima novels, it’s prose is jaw-droppingly beautiful. It’s not airport reading, if you’re willing to put the effort in, it’s a rich and rewarding work.

Highlights:

“Just now I had a dream. I’ll see you again. I know it. Beneath the falls.”

My Take: Those who know me know that I’m a bit of a Sinophile. While the human rights record of the Chinese government is obviously indefensible and deserves public attention and debate, I do get a bit annoyed at the generally simplistic analysis applied to issues involving China.

China is obviously not a free society. Its citizens are constrained by the constant threat of brutal repression. But the trajectory of societal development is clearly towards increased personal freedom. There’s a legitimate discussion about whether the pace of this societal change is adequate, but nobody could argue that China under Hu Jintao is less free than it was under Jiang Zemin, or less free under Deng Xiaoping than it was under Mao. China today is more complex than the totalitarian police state caricature.

China’s people are far from a brain-washed, homogenous mass. While there are still absolute taboo topics with hideous consequences for transgressors, there is currently a vigorous political/philosophical debate occurring in China. Mark Leonard’s book, “What Does China Think?” provides a useful idiot’s guide to these debates. The book’s introduction provides a good synopsis of the ground that Leonard covers:

“Inside China—in party forums, but also in universities, in semi-independent think tanks, in journals and on the internet—debate rages about the direction of the country: “new left” economists argue with the “new right” about inequality; political theorists argue about the relative importance of elections and the rule of law; and in the foreign policy realm, China’s neocons argue with liberal internationalists about grand strategy. Chinese thinkers are trying to reconcile competing goals, exploring how they can enjoy the benefits of global markets while protecting China from the creative destruction they could unleash in its political and economic system. Some others are trying to challenge the flat world of US globalisation with a “walled world” Chinese version.

….While it is true there is no free discussion about ending the Communist party’s rule, independence for Tibet or the events of Tiananmen Square, there is a relatively open debate in leading newspapers and academic journals about China’s economic model, how to clean up corruption or deal with foreign policy issues like Japan or North Korea.”

To my mind, the most interesting part of “What Does China Think” is Leonard’s survey of Chinese experiments with new models of governance. There seems to be a lot of experimentation with different ways of making Government more responsive to its citizens – without actually introducing democracy. The result is an interesting series of bounded public consultations – focus groups, opinion polls, citizen deliberative juries – designed to increase citizens’ voice within specific circumscribed parameters, without actually giving them the power to challenge the Communist Party’s power.

As Leonard tells it:

The west still has multi-party elections as a central part of the political process, but has supplemented them with new types of deliberation. China, according to the new political thinkers, will do things the other way around: using elections in the margins but making public consultations, expert meetings and surveys a central part of decision-making. This idea was described pithily by Fang Ning, a political scientist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He compared democracy in the west to a fixed-menu restaurant where customers can select the identity of their chef, but have no say in what dishes he chooses to cook for them. Chinese democracy, on the other hand, always involves the same chef—the Communist party—but the policy dishes which are served up can be chosen “à la carte.”

The authorities certainly seem willing to experiment with all kinds of political innovations. In Zeguo, they have even introduced a form of government by focus group. But the main criterion guiding political reform seems to be that it must not threaten the Communist party’s monopoly on power. Can a more responsive form of authoritarianism evolve into a legitimate and stable form of government?

Leonard terms the result ‘deliberative dictatorship’ and it’s interesting despite its numerous and obvious shortcomings. “What Does China Think” is a useful primer for the way the Chinese elite view the world and the policy challenges facing their nation.

Highlights:

“We are used to China’s growing influence on the world economy—but could it also reshape our ideas about politics and power? This story of China’s intellectual awakening is less well documented. We closely follow the twists and turns in America’s intellectual life, but how many of us can name a contemporary Chinese writer or thinker? Inside China—in party forums, but also in universities, in semi-independent think tanks, in journals and on the internet—debate rages about the direction of the country: “new left” economists argue with the “new right” about inequality; political theorists argue about the relative importance of elections and the rule of law; and in the foreign policy realm, China’s neocons argue with liberal internationalists about grand strategy. Chinese thinkers are trying to reconcile competing goals, exploring how they can enjoy the benefits of global markets while protecting China from the creative destruction they could unleash in its political and economic system. Some others are trying to challenge the flat world of US globalisation with a “walled world” Chinese version.”

Synopsis:

My Take: I had a typically ‘old Australia’ childhood in country Queensland. Cricket, football, fishing, “Australia All Over” with Macca on a Sunday morning. It was great fun, but it wasn’t exactly a melting pot of cultural diversity. The pictures of the Queen of England in the school assembly hall didn’t really count as multi-culturalism in my book.

Since moving to Melbourne after university of course, things changed dramatically. It wasn’t long before my friendship group was teeming with those permanent fixtures of Collins St corporate law firms; over-achieving first generation Asian-Australians.  In addition to dramatically improving my access to quality Yum Cha, I also managed to pick up a fiancée in the process so I feel like I’ve done pretty well from this cultural enlightenment.

So understandably, I was favourably inclined to enjoying Alice Pung’s ‘Unpolished Gem’. It had been recommended to me by a few of my Asian-Australian friends as strongly reflecting their own experiences of growing up in Australia and I was keen for an insight into a childhood experience that was very different to my own. They were right, it’s a lovely read.

Pung tells her family’s story with an elegant simplicity. Ironically enough for someone who’s edited a collection of stories titled “Growing up Asian in Australia”, I think Pung has a distinctly ‘old’ Australian voice – self-deprecating, laconic and matter of fact.  Her writing is both observant and insightful without being introspective or overwrought.

The strength of this book is in the details. The book is packed with endearing little observations of immigrant life. I particularly liked I love how her family “wah”s at the prosperity in Australia and how her grandmother referred to Centrelink reverentially as “Father Government… like Father Christmas, as if he is a tangible benign white-bearded guru”. Equally amusing was her parents desire for her to study at “Mao-Bin U”. ‘Their pronunciation made the place sound like a shonky university in China for discarded communists.’

At times, Pung’s story is genuinely sad. The pressures on a young Chinese girl, whether growing up in Australia or in Asia, are not insignificant. Similarly, the strains on mother-daughter-grandmother relations of not just a generation gap, but also a growing cultural gulf are a source of much family tension. At times I just want to wrap her up and say “It’s all going to be ok! You’ll survive and even better- Eurasian kids are going to be the coolest people in the next generation”

Highlight:

My father’s idea of getting familiar with someone was to tell them war stories. He didn’t do it to sober them up or edify them. He did it to crack them up.

“This fish reminds me of the Pol Pot years when the starved, dead bodies floated up the river during the flood. I got the job of dragging them to higher, dryer land. We wrapped them up in a dry blanket and me and my mate grabbed on to each end. Every time we tripped, the blanket would get water-soaked and even heavier. Hah hah, so funny! And listen to this – my mate turns to me and says, “Hope you’re not going to be this heavy when it’s time for me to drag you”, and I say to him, “What do you mean when you drag me? I’m going to be the poor soul who will be dragging you!””

He finished by exhorting his guests to eat more fish.

Synopsis: A collection of 15 of Haruki Murakami’s most surreal short stories.

My Take: The Elephant Vanishes is classic Murakami – strange, whimsical, reflective and more than a little confusing. You don’t find stories based on of the disappearance of a man’s favourite elephant or a woman being haunted by a gardening, green monster in every collection of short stories. However, despite being deeply strange, Murakami’s work never feels like fantasy or science fiction. Instead, it retains a dreamlike, contemplative quality that gives his writing a feeling of sophistication that goes beyond its unreal subject matter.

In this regard, I prefer Murakami’s surrealist work in small, day-dream size stories (like the similarly excellent Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman). While it’s still interesting, I find that when Murakami’s strange ruminations are expanded to novel length (like the overrated Kafka on the Shore) his oddness can start to get a bit tiring. Much better to get a brief taste of one of Murakami’s quirky ideas, enjoy the strange flavour for a dozen pages and then move on quickly to the next before the strangeness becomes overwhelming.

Highlight: It’s slightly twee, but for me, the highlight of The Elephant Vanishes” was the shortest story in the book: “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning”. In fact, it’s so short that I’ve reproduced it below:

One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo’s fashionable Harujuku neighbourhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl.

Tell you the truth, she’s not that good-looking. She doesn’t stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn’t young, either – must be near thirty, not even close to a “girl,” properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She’s the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there’s a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert.

Maybe you have your own particular favorite type of girl – one with slim ankles, say, or big eyes, or graceful fingers, or you’re drawn for no good reason to girls who take their time with every meal. I have my own preferences, of course. Sometimes in a restaurant I’ll catch myself staring at the girl at the next table to mine because I like the shape of her nose.

But no one can insist that his 100% perfect girl correspond to some preconceived type. Much as I like noses, I can’t recall the shape of hers – or even if she had one. All I can remember for sure is that she was no great beauty. It’s weird.

“Yesterday on the street I passed the 100% girl,” I tell someone.

“Yeah?” he says. “Good-looking?”

“Not really.”

“Your favorite type, then?”

“I don’t know. I can’t seem to remember anything about her – the shape of her eyes or the size of her breasts.”

“Strange.”

“Yeah. Strange.”

“So anyhow,” he says, already bored, “what did you do? Talk to her? Follow her?”

“Nah. Just passed her on the street.”

She’s walking east to west, and I west to east. It’s a really nice April morning.

Wish I could talk to her. Half an hour would be plenty: just ask her about herself, tell her about myself, and – what I’d really like to do – explain to her the complexities of fate that have led to our passing each other on a side street in Harajuku on a beautiful April morning in 1981. This was something sure to be crammed full of warm secrets, like an antique clock build when peace filled the world.

After talking, we’d have lunch somewhere, maybe see a Woody Allen movie, stop by a hotel bar for cocktails. With any kind of luck, we might end up in bed.

Potentiality knocks on the door of my heart.

Now the distance between us has narrowed to fifteen yards.

How can I approach her? What should I say?

“Good morning, miss. Do you think you could spare half an hour for a little conversation?”

Ridiculous. I’d sound like an insurance salesman.

“Pardon me, but would you happen to know if there is an all-night cleaners in the neighborhood?”

No, this is just as ridiculous. I’m not carrying any laundry, for one thing. Who’s going to buy a line like that?

Maybe the simple truth would do. “Good morning. You are the 100% perfect girl for me.”

No, she wouldn’t believe it. Or even if she did, she might not want to talk to me. Sorry, she could say, I might be the 100% perfect girl for you, but you’re not the 100% boy for me. It could happen. And if I found myself in that situation, I’d probably go to pieces. I’d never recover from the shock. I’m thirty-two, and that’s what growing older is all about.

We pass in front of a flower shop. A small, warm air mass touches my skin. The asphalt is damp, and I catch the scent of roses. I can’t bring myself to speak to her. She wears a white sweater, and in her right hand she holds a crisp white envelope lacking only a stamp. So: She’s written somebody a letter, maybe spent the whole night writing, to judge from the sleepy look in her eyes. The envelope could contain every secret she’s ever had.

I take a few more strides and turn: She’s lost in the crowd.

Now, of course, I know exactly what I should have said to her. It would have been a long speech, though, far too long for me to have delivered it properly. The ideas I come up with are never very practical.

Oh, well. It would have started “Once upon a time” and ended “A sad story, don’t you think?”

Once upon a time, there lived a boy and a girl. The boy was eighteen and the girl sixteen. He was not unusually handsome, and she was not especially beautiful. They were just an ordinary lonely boy and an ordinary lonely girl, like all the others. But they believed with their whole hearts that somewhere in the world there lived the 100% perfect boy and the 100% perfect girl for them. Yes, they believed in a miracle. And that miracle actually happened.

One day the two came upon each other on the corner of a street.

“This is amazing,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you all my life. You may not believe this, but you’re the 100% perfect girl for me.”

“And you,” she said to him, “are the 100% perfect boy for me, exactly as I’d pictured you in every detail. It’s like a dream.”

They sat on a park bench, held hands, and told each other their stories hour after hour. They were not lonely anymore. They had found and been found by their 100% perfect other. What a wonderful thing it is to find and be found by your 100% perfect other. It’s a miracle, a cosmic miracle.

As they sat and talked, however, a tiny, tiny sliver of doubt took root in their hearts: Was it really all right for one’s dreams to come true so easily?

And so, when there came a momentary lull in their conversation, the boy said to the girl, “Let’s test ourselves – just once. If we really are each other’s 100% perfect lovers, then sometime, somewhere, we will meet again without fail. And when that happens, and we know that we are the 100% perfect ones, we’ll marry then and there. What do you think?”

“Yes,” she said, “that is exactly what we should do.”

And so they parted, she to the east, and he to the west.

The test they had agreed upon, however, was utterly unnecessary. They should never have undertaken it, because they really and truly were each other’s 100% perfect lovers, and it was a miracle that they had ever met. But it was impossible for them to know this, young as they were. The cold, indifferent waves of fate proceeded to toss them unmercifully.

One winter, both the boy and the girl came down with the season’s terrible inluenza, and after drifting for weeks between life and death they lost all memory of their earlier years. When they awoke, their heads were as empty as the young D. H. Lawrence’s piggy bank.

They were two bright, determined young people, however, and through their unremitting efforts they were able to acquire once again the knowledge and feeling that qualified them to return as full-fledged members of society. Heaven be praised, they became truly upstanding citizens who knew how to transfer from one subway line to another, who were fully capable of sending a special-delivery letter at the post office. Indeed, they even experienced love again, sometimes as much as 75% or even 85% love.

Time passed with shocking swiftness, and soon the boy was thirty-two, the girl thirty.

One beautiful April morning, in search of a cup of coffee to start the day, the boy was walking from west to east, while the girl, intending to send a special-delivery letter, was walking from east to west, but along the same narrow street in the Harajuku neighborhood of Tokyo. They passed each other in the very center of the street. The faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered for the briefest moment in their hearts. Each felt a rumbling in their chest. And they knew:

She is the 100% perfect girl for me.

He is the 100% perfect boy for me.

But the glow of their memories was far too weak, and their thoughts no longer had the clarity of fouteen years earlier. Without a word, they passed each other, disappearing into the crowd. Forever.

A sad story, don’t you think?

Yes, that’s it, that is what I should have said to her.

My Take: Sigh. I guess it is an inevitable part of getting older to be confronted with the increasingly spectacular public successes of people who were formerly anonymously moving in your peer group. Like Nam Le, I used to be a corporate lawyer in Melbourne. I used to work for a law firm in the Rialto. In fact the law firm that I worked for was on a higher floor than Nam Le’s. So why haven’t I published a subtle, perceptive and critically acclaimed collection of short stories? Why aren’t I uniquely talented and motivated?? Sigh.

Anyway, my own petty jealousies aside, Nam Le is the real deal. While superficially, there are no obvious common threads between the short-stories in “The Boat”, at their core, each of the stories shares some extremely perceptive characterisation. Le is a subtle writer and explores the nuances of his characters impressively in such short stories. While I thought some of his stories were slightly over-long for what they were, in general this didn’t bother me as I appreciated Le’s obsessive attention to his characters. I’m really looking forward to seeing Le employ this talent in a full length novel.

While Le has honourably tried to cast off the limitations of ‘ethnic lit’ by setting his stories across the cultures of six continents, I enjoyed the two stories that he wrote from a Vietnamese-Australian perspective the best. This is no criticism of the other works in this collection, but the emotional intensity of the subjects closer to his own experience dramatically outshone that of his extra-cultural explorations.

A good example of this is the first story in the book “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” (Substantially extracted here). This opening missive tells the story of an aspiring Vietnamese-Australian writer at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop hosting a visit from his father while trying to finalise an important piece of assessment (some not to subtle parallels to Le’s own life here!). In a few short pages the story movingly explores concepts as complex and diverse as father-son relationships, the trauma of memory and the role of ethnicity in literature. It’s a masterpiece and obviously a topic that is close to home for Le.

Based on what I’ve seen in “The Boat”, I really I hope that Le doesn’t restrict himself from writing about his own cultural experiences. You get the feeling from reading “The Boat” that Le sees mining his own background as a bit of a literary cop out or the intellectual low road. Further, Le clearly shows in “The Boat” that he’s talented enough to write convincingly about characters in any cultural setting. But Le shows a real virtuosity when delving into the nuances of Vietnamese-Australian characters that it would be a tragedy to waste. Many great writers have mined the rich vein of their distinctive cultural backgrounds (Marquez, Mistry, Ha Jin, Achebe) not simply because it was the path of least resistance, but because it was a rich and interesting emotional resource. I hope that the natural instinct of an over-achiever to shine at the most difficult of tasks doesn’t distract Le from his talent for writing about topics closer to home in the future.

Highlight:

We had just come from a party following a reading by the workshop’s most recent success, a Chinese woman trying to immigrate to America who had written a book of short stories about Chinese characters in stages of immigration to America. The stories were subtle and good. The gossip was that she’d been offered a substantial six-figure contract for a two-book deal. It was meant to be an unspoken rule that such things were left unspoken. Of course, it was all anyone talked about.

“It’s hot,” a writing instructor told me at a bar. “Ethnic literature’s hot. And important too.”

A couple of visiting literary agents took a similar view: “There’s a lot of polished writing around,” one of them said. “You have to ask yourself, what makes me stand out?” She tagteamed to her colleague, who answered slowly as though intoning a mantra, ‘Your background and life experience.’

Other friends were more forthright: “I’m sick of ethnic lit,” one said. “It’s full of descriptions of exotic food.” Or: “You can’t tell if the language is spare because the author intended it that way, or because he didn’t have the vocab.”

I was told about a friend of a friend, a Harvard graduate from Washington, D.C., who had posed in traditional Nigerian garb for his book-jacket photo. I pictured myself standing in a rice paddy, wearing a straw conical hat. Then I pictured my father in the same field, wearing his threadbare fatigues, young and hard-eyed.

“It’s a license to bore,” my friend said. We were drunk and walking our bikes because both of us, separately, had punctured our tires on the way to the party.

“The characters are always flat, generic. As long as a Chinese writer writes about Chinese people, or a Peruvian writer about Peruvians, or a Russian writer about Russians …” he said, as though reciting children’s doggerel, then stopped, losing his train of thought. His mouth turned up into a doubtful grin. I could tell he was angry about something.

“Look,” I said, pointing at a floodlit porch ahead of us. “Those guys have guns.”

“As long as there’s an interesting image or metaphor once in every this much text” — he held out his thumb and forefinger to indicate half a page, his bike wobbling all over the sidewalk. I nodded to him, and then I nodded to one of the guys on the porch, who nodded back. The other guy waved us through with his faux-wood air rifle. A car with its headlights on was idling in the driveway, and girls’ voices emerged from inside, squealing, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

“Faulkner, you know,” my friend said over the squeals, “he said we should write about the old verities. Love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” A sudden sharp crack behind us, like the striking of a giant typewriter hammer, followed by some muffled shrieks. “I know I’m a bad person for saying this,” my friend said, “but that’s why I don’t mind your work, Nam. Because you could just write about Vietnamese boat people all the time. Like in your third story.”

He must have thought my head was bowed in modesty, but in fact I was figuring out whether I’d just been shot in the back of the thigh. I’d felt a distinct sting. The pellet might have ricocheted off something.

“You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing. But instead, you choose to write about lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins, and Hiroshima orphans — and New York painters with hemorrhoids.”

My Take: The cover blurb of Norwegian Wood describes the novel thus:

“When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire – to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.”

This could easily be off putting to my mind. Stores of teenaged first love and ‘impetuous young women’ set against cultural upheavals can easily cross over into the twee if not handled well by the author. However, this is anything but trash teen lit. Murakami’s prose throughout Norwegian Wood has an affecting, melancholic sensuality and the story arc is anything but formulaic. In fact, The Guardian’s review of this book describes Murakami’s writing as ‘gossamer’ which I think perfectly sums it up. As such, the ultimate impression left by the book is not one of teen-hormones ran amok, but of an otherworldly, dreamlike reminiscence. In fact, it has something of a Gatsbyesq quality to it in the way that it meditates on the nature of the past and how much of what has past is a part of you and how much you can escape from.  This is really one of my favourite books and one that I have come back to on a number of occasions.

This was also the book that first got me into Murakami as a writer, which is ironic, because it’s really not illustrative of his work. Norwegian Wood is a straight narrative and forgoes the more fantastical quirks of his other works (there are no talking cats anywhere to be seen in this book). It’s easily the most accessible of Murakami’s novels and made him a super-star of Japanese fiction when it one of the highest selling books in the nation’s history. Apparently Murakami strongly resented the attention at the time of the book’s release, and you can understand a degree of frustration at being fated for a book that doesn’t really reflect the core of your writing. That being said, probably as a result of the prominence that Norwegian Wood has afforded him, Murakami has been able to carve out a very successful career for himself writing pretty well whatever he wants (however bizarre). So there are some upsides to success I guess.

Highlight:

“Each day the sun would rise and set, the flag would be raised and lowered. Each Sunday I would have a date with my dead friend’s girl. I had no idea what I was doing or what I was going to do.”

A further highlight of Norwegian Wood are the exquisite different covers that the book has been released with. You can browse through them at a dedicated page on the publisher’s website.

On a final note, thanks to the loving thoughtfulness of JJ, I have a beautiful first edition of this novel that comes in two small red and green miniature books designed for ease of reading on public transport. A treasured possession.

My Take: It might be living life once removed, but when I travel I like to read deeply about the places I go to while I’m there. An outsider’s appreciation of a place is unavoidably limited by ignorance – without a bit of context it’s impossible to even know what to look for. So with this objective I picked up the Pulitzer Prize short-listed “Maximum City” to digest over a week’s worth of beer and curry at Café Leopold during a recent trip to Mumbai.

Before reading this book and visiting the city my knowledge of Mumbai was scant and stereotypical. The home of Sachin Tendulker, slums and street food; my impressions of Mumbai were two dimensional at best. To be honest, it wasn’t exactly at the top of my list of places to head to for a city escape – I’d only ended up there as a result of the quirks of discount travel. However, after reading “Maximum City” I knew that I’d have a life-long fascination with this eternally complex, seething mass of humanity.

It’s been said in many past reviews of this book, but it’s worth saying again here: Suketu Mehta’s “Maximum City” is a genuine tour de force. To produce such a masterful, detailed and sprawling biography of a city of such economic, religious, political and cultural extremes is truly an extraordinary achievement.

As, Mehta notes when introducing the book, Mumbai is truly a colossus of a city:

“There will soon be more people living in the city of Bombay than on the continent of Australia. Urbs Prima in Indis reads the plaque outside the Gateway of India. It is also the Urbs Prima in Mundis, at least in one area, the first test of the vitality of a city: the number of people living in it. With 14 million people, Bombay is the biggest city on the planet of a race of city dwellers. Bombay is the future of urban civilization on the planet. God help us.”

Mehta skilfully explores the energy and conflict that teems throughout the city through a series of detailed portraits of the daily lives of some of its more interesting characters. What gives these portraits a real sense of immediacy is that Mehta immerses himself in the lives of his subjects and tells their story from the perspective of a participant in their lives. Mehta describes the process of writing the book as being:

..like a kid in a candy store. People opened up to me on incredibly personal, private matters. It was the kind of access I couldn’t dream of getting in New York, like meeting a killer who liked the Backstreet Boys and the sound of a Mauser firing. His friend, another hitman, said that he always kept strictly vegetarian, for it kept his mind calm while he was working. The police invited me to watch them torture suspects; the biggest Bollywood film stars were telling me about their sex lives. They thought I was writing a novel, but I always said I wasn’t.

Over the seven years he spent writing the book, Mehta befriends and socialises with subjects as diverse as a slum dwelling gangster, a Bollywood director, a murderous police officer, a cross-dressing ‘bar girl’, a homeless poet and a Jain monk. Mehta’s subjects come and go from the narrative and overlap with his own life giving the book itself the feeling of a crowded and bustling city street.

This approach puts Mehta into some quite extraordinary (and I’m sure dangerous) situations. Some of the most interesting sections of “Maximum City” are the portraits of those involved in the religious/political conflicts in the city’s slums and parliament. Mehta’s interactions with many of the protagonists in the 1993 Bombay bombings and resultant riots are fascinating (and horrifying) to the uninitiated. His conversations with the malevolent Hindu extremist Hindu party Shiv Sena and its puppet-master Bal Thackeray are a revealing insight into the corrupt underbelly of the city.

One particularly memorable encounter involved Mehta’s gangster friend setting up a meeting for him with Chotta Shakeel, a Mumbai mafia don and close associate of Dawood Ibrahim, the gangster widely believed to be behind this year’s Mumbai terrorist attacks. At the conclusion of Mehta’s discussion, his gangster friend offers him the ultimate in fringe benefits:

Any trouble you have in Bombay. One work [murder] free. Bhai [brother] said so.

Similarly, in one of the saddest stories in the book, (the married with children) Mehta becomes very close to a damaged Mumbai ‘bar girl’ named Monalisa. It’s a testament to Mehta’s intimacy with his subjects that he felt compelled to justify his relationship with her in an interview promoting the book as such:

I became involved with her in a way that was more intimate than sex. I never did sleep with her. I realized if I had slept with her, all the stories would have been cut off. Then I would have been just another customer. I was at once a voyeur and her best friend.

While his relationship with Monalisa was probably closer than his relationship with any of his other subjects, the level of intimacy described above is fairly representative of the access he had to each of his subjects. The fact that Mehta left Mumbai after the book was published is hardly surprising.

Highlight:

My favourite portrait in “Maximum City” was also one of the shortest – the story of the teenaged, street dwelling poet, Babbanji. As the Financial Times review of the book describes him:

He has migrated to the city and lives on its footpaths simply because he believes Mumbai has the best stories of all. Babbanji encounters people singing on the train and follows them home to their shanty town by a sewer. “The sewer was overflowing with all kinds of plastic – plastic bags, plastic bottles – and Babbanji thought of his school science project,” of turning plastic into petrol. “And I thought, this is a treasury,” says the poet, whom it is hard not to see as an alter-ego of Mehta

]]> http://www.bloggingthebookshelf.com/2009/06/17/maximum-city-bombay-lost-and-found-suketu-mehta/feed/ 1 http://www.bloggingthebookshelf.com/2009/06/12/the-sailor-who-fell-from-grace-with-the-sea-yukio-mishima/ http://www.bloggingthebookshelf.com/2009/06/12/the-sailor-who-fell-from-grace-with-the-sea-yukio-mishima/#comments Fri, 12 Jun 2009 02:19:56 +0000 Tim http://bloggingthebookshelf.wordpress.com/?p=22 Synopsis: Teenage boy watches widowed mother sleep with handsome sailor through hole in bedroom wall. Boy becomes disillusioned with handsome sailor when he chooses his mother over life on the sea and begins plotting revenge.

My Take: In a word, dark.

Brett Easton Ellis dark.

Reminded me a lot of the Catcher in the Rye for its narcissistic narrator and ultimately nihilistic world view. Its outlook is too bleak for me these days – I think I would have enjoyed this more as a teenager – but Mishima is such a talented writer that the beauty of his prose alone was enough to keep me interested.

Highlight:

“Do you remember that day on the pier when I said there was only one way to make him a hero again… Well, the time has come.”

My Take: As you may have guessed by now, I have a real peccadillo for Japanese fiction. I love the nuance and non-linearity of the story telling and the subtlety of the characterisation. I appreciate the lack of exposition and the fact that in general, readers are left to scrutinise the thoughts, feelings and motivations of the characters with less direction than in much ‘Western’ literature (sweeping generalisations I know). While  Ishiguro has lived in the UK since the age of 5 and claims not to have been influenced by Japanese literature, I do think these ‘Japanese’ characteristics are deeply infused in his work.

In particular, I think the Japanese concept of ‘mono no aware’ strongly underpins Ishiguro’s body of work. It’s a bit of a difficult concept to explain, so I’ll quote from Wikipedia at this point:

Mono no aware ( mono no aware^?, lit. “the pathos of things”), also translated as “an empathy toward things,” or “a sensitivity of ephemera,” is a Japanese term used to describe the awareness of mujo or the transience of things and a bittersweet sadness at their passing. The term was coined in the eighteenth century by the Edo-period Japanese cultural scholar Motoori Norinaga, and was originally a concept used in his literary criticism of The Tale of Genji, and later applied to other seminal Japanese works including the Man’yōshū, becoming central to his philosophy of literature, and eventually to Japanese cultural tradition.

This melancholy ‘awareness of the transience of things’ is a feature of all of Ishiguro’s books to varying degrees. Ishiguro employs a first person retrospective approach in each of his books that allows him to subtly, but deeply, explore the attitudes, emotions and motivations of of his protagonist. In this way, the revelation and resolution of the protagonist’s self-deceptions and mental obstacles to ‘awareness’ become the driver of the story arcs of each of his novels. As Ishiguro has said:

“As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.”

In this sense, little actually ‘happens’ in Ishiguro’s books outside the mind of the protagonist. In fact, often his protagonists don’t even reach full awareness by the end of his novels – leaving many carefully developed plot threads ultimately unresolved. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I love it.

All of these characteristics of Ishiguro’s writing are clearly present in ‘An Artist of the Floating World’ Ishiguro’s second novel. In my mind this is Ishiguro’s strongest work and it’s not hard to see why it won a Whitbread Prize and was shortlisted for a Booker Prize. Given that the real joy of Ishiguro’s writing is the process of revelation, I won’t write too much about the contents of the novel, but suffice it to say, the societal upheaval of post-war Japan is fertile ground for Ishiguro’s style of contemplative reminiscence.

Highlight: Everything – just read it.