Synopsis:

My Take: While I’m not much of a science fiction fan (relative to its real adherents), as a general principle I do try to give the seminal authors of all genres the benefit of the doubt. Most of the time, if you’re the best of breed in one genre, you probably have something to offer people outside of your niche. As a result, H. P. Lovecraft has always been on my list of authors to give a try.

His work, most of which was released in the mid-1920s has been deeply influential both within the Sci-Fi community (frequent references to his work on Boing Boing is a testament to this) and a broader fraternity of artists who take a darker perspective on the progress of human civilisation (including Stephen King, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Guillermo Del Toro, and Jorge Luis Borges). Writing before the Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror genres were even recognised (they were collectively referred to as simply weird fiction at the start of the 20^th Century) Lovecraft has subsequently become a canonical writer in all three.

So with this in mind, thanks to my trusty Kindle, copyright expiry and Project Gutenberg, I recently sat down with Lovecraft’s most famous work “The Call of the Cthulhu”.  TCOTC tells the story of a young man who stumbles across a pre-historic blood cult that worships extra-terrestrial beings who look like a cross between a squid, a dragon and a man and inhabited the earth before mankind. In the abstract, it all sounds more than a little absurd, but Lovecraft is a dab hand at the art of story-telling and “The Call of the Cthulhu” unfolds with impressive suspense through three independent, documentary style narratives. While each narrative largely stands alone, as each develops, the narrator reveals a bigger, horrifying picture to the reader.

Lovecraft’s admiration of Edgar Allan Poe and the influence that the great author had on his work is obvious in TCOTC. Despite its globe-wide setting, the book’s first person retrospective format gives the story a dark and claustrophobic feel. Overall, it’s first class horror. Amusingly enough, despite its fame and cultural influence Lovecraft himself was not particularly enamoured with TCOTC describing it as:

“rather middling—not as bad as the worst, but full of cheap and cumbrous touches.”

I think Lovecraft is being a bit hard on himself here. Yes, it’s a bit absurd – but it’s well told and atmospheric – more than enough for a good ‘weird fiction’ tale.

Highlight:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” Lovecraft’s protagonists are nevertheless driven to this “piecing together,” which becomes a primary plot device in many of his works.

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.”

Synopsis:

My Take: The way I remember it (and it could have course been completely different for everyone else), the mid-90s were a strangely depressing time. The Cold War was over, but instead of celebrating the lifting of this looming an existential threat, the Western world seemed to fall into a crisis of meaning. At a time when academics were proclaiming ‘The End of History’, people seemed to start asking “What’s the point?”. The great political and ideological struggles seemed to have been fought and people were left to contemplate a boring life spent climbing the corporate ladder. Personal angst flowed into the void created be the removal of political tension. This vibe seemed to change with the arrival of a new existential/ideological challenge in the form of the Global War on Terror, but there was a brief window when cynicism and resignation seemed to pervade the public mind.

To me, “The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming” felt like it was written in the middle of this mid-90s funk. The themes of the book – soulless corporatism and hollow relationships – combined with its method of delivery – a brooding internal monologue – gave the book a bleak feel that just didn’t speak to me. The writing’s not bad (if a little monotonous at times) but it just seemed unnecessarily bleak to me. Maybe this book would have connected with me more when it was written, but the crisis of meaning that seemed to underpin the stories just didn’t seem relevant to me today.

Highlights:

‘Madeline, my wife, never used to wear a watch. She does now, I am told. For a long time, in a very inexact way, I had kept time for her. There was the time before we were married and the time after. There was the time before I was hospitalised and the time after. There was the time she needed me and the time after. And there is now.’

…

‘Why did I start with them? Why do any of us choose one company over another as an employer? The money? At the beginning they all offer more or less the same and no one know how it will go after that. I guess it is often not so much your prospects at a particular firm, because these are essentially unknowable, but whether people will think you have done well to get the job there, that determines you choice. That was largely it in my case. It was really the prestige. They gave good letterhead.’

My Take: Here’s the thing about Augusten Burroughs. I love him – at its best, his writing zings and fizzles with caustic, but good natured wit. Sadly, my fiancée’s first exposure to him was via his least impressive work; his most recent effort ‘Wolf at the Table’. She wasn’t impressed, and to be honest, neither was I. This state of affairs is doubly unfortunate as it has led me to evangelise Burroughs to her even more than I ordinarily would. It’s a conundrum – the more I push it, the more the pressure will increase, building up the expectation to heights that can’t possibly be met and decreasing the likelihood that she will like him at all. It’s a strange thing this compulsion to bully your friends into liking the books that you yourself loved.

Anyway, I’m hoping that the next Burroughs’ book that she picks up (after I subtly wear her down) will be “Magical Thinking”. His life as a neurotic, gay, New York advertising executive turned best selling author with an excess of personal baggage from a truly bizarre childhood provides a rich subject matter. In this context, Burroughs’ furtive attempts to develop healthy, loving relationship with a partner in spite of his calamitous personal history are warmly and amusingly told:

”I must ease people into the facts of me, not deposit large, undigested chunks of my history at their feet. Too much of me too fast is toxic.” ….

”My brain is incorrectly formed, and I’m shaped like a tube. Plus, I’m an alcoholic, a ’survivor’ of childhood sexual abuse, was raised in a cult and have no education.” ….

”(The new boyfriend) knows I write every day for hours but has no idea that all I’m writing about is me. It seems wiser to let him think I’m an aspiring novelist instead of just an alcoholic with a year of sobriety who spends eight hours a day writing about the other 16.”

However, while Burroughs shows a little more of himself in this book than say “Running with Scissors” but the star of “Magical Thinking” is still Burroughs’ writing. The prose in this book sparkles like a Burroughs concentrate. Burroughs’ masterful dry wit is sprinkled liberally throughout the pages of “Magical Thinking” and his narrative asides are a delight:

“Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face.”  ….

”Telemarketers… (are) calling with the frequent urgency of dumped boyfriends. At this point, I cannot help but wonder, is the entire telemarketing industry one big, jilted, clingy gay guy?” ….

‘I was struck with a bolt of distilled horror like I have never known before. Far worse than suddenly finding yourself walking through a prison cafeteria wearing Daisy Duke shorts and a Jane Fonda headband.’

“Magical Thinking” is one of those books that leaves you giggling and chortling throughout. Highly recommended.

Highlight: “Roid Rage” the story of the time Burroughs’ spent using steroids in order to live up to the buffed stereotypes of New York’s gay dating scene”

‘To nobody’s surprise, steroid use is common among gay men. When you combine a love for men with a love for drama, you end up with a guy on steroids.’  …

‘I said – I’m doing it for medical reasons’ my boyfriend would reply ‘your vanity is not a medical reason.’ ….

‘On typical days, (dust) is simply irritating. On Roid Rage days, it made me want to stomp down to the highway, pull drivers out of their cars, and bash their faces into pavement; Suck up that dirt like a good little Electrolux, Jersey Boy Bitch.’  ….

‘It’s weird. The day after I get the shot, I’m usually fine. It’s the day after this where I turn into somebody capable of committing a triple homicide, then going to a Ben Stiller movie.’

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.”