Novel

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20
Dec 11

Don’t Be A Pansy

I’m reading another Murakami book, this time What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. It is a memoir about…well, running.

I’m only three chapters in but I felt compelled to write my review now rather than wait till i’m finished, because I just have to write about this immediately. I was particularly struck by this quote on p. 46*:

Whenever I feel like I don’t want to run, I always ask myself the same thing: You’re able to make a living as a novelist, working at home, setting your own hours, so you don’t have to commute on a packed train or sit through boring meetings. Don’t you realize how fortunate you are? (Believe me, I do.) Compared to that, running an hour around the neighborhood is nothing, right? Whenever I picture packed trains and endless meetings, this gets me motivated all over again and I lace up my running shoes and set off without any qualms. If I can’t manage this much, I think, it’ll serve me right.

I have the same sentiment about biking in Beijing. Every time I think it might be too cold to bike, I think about the old people who have no choice but to bike every day**. So many people are out biking in subzero temperatures, and they don’t even own gloves or hats. They must be dying, especially when the wind gets up, but there they are, biking along as stoically as can be.

If these people have to bike every day, then I certainly can too, with my expensive winter coat and gloves. Don’t be a pansy. That’s my motto. Except when it comes to Disney movies. And Harry Potter trailers.

Please Note, this blog does not mean to suggest that Murakami is a pansy. You on the other hand, probably are.

*All things being relative, citing the page number is relatively useless.

** They don’t have any choice about being old either. Cold and old. Is there a worse combination? If there is, I bet it doesn’t rhyme.

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15
Sep 11

Don’t Be An Asshole, And Other Things We Learned From Japan

I’m currently reading Murakami Haruki’s novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. As regular readers of The Chaos Factory know, I’m a big fan, and his latest novel is so good I’m ready to write a review and I’m only halfway through. Read this book. Or anything else by Murakami. You won’t regret it.

This one is a modern detective noir thriller, except nothing really happens. The hero does lay at the bottom of the well for three days, reflecting on the emptiness of his life, but I don’t know if that actually qualifies as a happening. Either way, it’s more exciting than a recent M. Night Shyamalan movie of the same name.

Even if you don’t read any of his novels, please take Murakami’s advice and don’t feel sorry for yourself. There are enough assholes in the world already.

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23
Aug 11

The Nature Of Evil

Photo by Zoey Zozo

In the masterpiece that is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn*, Twain does a masterful job of using irony to get his point across. As Huck debates whether to help Jim escape from slavery or turn him into the authorities, he says to himself:

It was a close place. I took . . . up [the letter I’d written to Miss Watson], and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up. It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming.

This is the critical turning point in the novel, when Huck decides the type of person he want to be. After much struggle, he determines to do what feels right, even if it means he’s going to Hell. Of course, the irony is that helping Jim is the right thing, even if Huck and society at large don’t realize it yet. It’s not Huck who will be going to Hell.

Taken in a wider context, Twain is showing the relative nature of good and evil. He points out how an entire culture can be ignorant of the evil they are causing. It’s a willful ignorance, perhaps, and ignorance even an uneducated boy can see through, but an ignorance nonetheless.

I understand what Twain means. Take the above grape for example. It is clearly putting on a clever facade. Yet most people would be swayed by the cute smile and remain blissfully unaware of its true, evil nature.

I guess it’s for reasons like this why people should read more.

For more information about evil grapes, check out this tumblr.

Please Note, if you suffer from heart disease, high blood pressure or any cardiovascular conditions, you should consult with a doctor before reading this blog.

*One of only two possible candidates for the Great American Novel

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31
May 11

#2 The Great Gatsby

Continuing our series of reviews of the top 100 novels of the last 100 years, let’s move near the top. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby checks in at number 2 on the list. This wasn’t the first time I’ve read the novel, but it might as well be. I could remember almost nothing about it from my high school days, except for a general image of some people driving in a car towards a house. If that’s all I could remember, I figured there wasn’t much to recommend the novel and all the acclaim it received from literary critics and English teachers was mostly hype.

I’m here to admit that I was wrong.*

If you haven’t read The Great Gatsby, read it now. If you haven’t read it in a while, read it again. It is one of the most amazing pieces of fiction you’ll ever hold in your hands.

What stands out about the novel is the way it captures so perfectly a key component of human nature. Gatsby is consumed by his need to rekindle the past. He can’t let go of his memory of Daisy, and this singular obsession is what drives his entire life. He’s too overwhelmed to realize that the Daisy he loves is a figment of his imagination. It is inevitable, yet still tragic, that he learns people are who they really are, not who we wish them to be.

Fitzgerald writes:

I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams–not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.

The novel is short and simple and elegant. It so artfully expresses a feeling that we have all experienced, yet makes it seem fresh and profound while familiar at the same time.

But for all that, it is the following quote that summarizes exactly why I’ve fallen in love with the novel:

“He considered for a moment. Then, with reluctance: ‘I want to get the grass cut,’ he said.

We both looked down at the grass–there was a sharp line where my ragged lawn ended and the darker, well-kept expanse of his began. I suspected that he meant my grass.

That, dear readers, is what Mrs. Libby meant when she said in 12th grade English class, “Show, don’t tell.” One simple exchange about lawn care tells us everything we need to know about the relationship between the narrator and Jay Gatsby.

*This does not happen often. Savor it.

Please Note, If anyone wants to volunteer to cut our grass, there’s no need to stand on formality. We encourage all of our readers to help out with the chores around here.

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8
Mar 11

#8 Lolita

The second book in my series of reviews on the top 100 novels of the last 100 years, Lolita is perhaps the most infamous of the list. I had never read it before, as I have always been turned off by what I assumed would be a depressing story. Now that I’m finished, I can say that Lolita both was and was not the novel I was expecting.

Nabokov tells the story through the first person perspective of Humbert Humbert (not his real name), who must go down as one of literature’s least reliable narrators. As he relates his love affair with his 12-year-old step-daughter, we can never be sure of what is fact and what emanates from his skewed imagination. For many of the events he is drunk; for all of them, he does his best to hide himself from the truth of what he has done. I was fully expecting to feel nauseous at the realistic portrayal of pedophilia. I was not prepared for the mad onslaught of ecstatic prose that characterizes Nabokov’s style.

As I’m fully aware that every English major with a computer and an internet connection is blogging about the Great Books, I’ll keep this short. I have two things I want to say about Lolita. If I exceed the two, feel free to punch me in the stomach.

First, the flowery onslaught of visual language, whether in the form of metaphor, turns of speech, invented vocabulary, or descriptive wordplay, strikes me as the apotheosis of high school prose. It’s eagerness is only equaled by its earnestness, and it infiltrates the inner voice of the reader with the same determination as Catcher In The Rye. I’d hate to be the creative writing teacher who has to grade all the short fiction produced just after the class has finished reading Lolita.

But Nabokov is not simply engaging in self-congratulatory linguistic gymnastics. He lets us in on the secret almost immediately, when Mr. H allows, “If you can still stand my style…” This is Humbert Humbert’s story we’re reading, not Nabokov’s, and if he wants to weigh down his reality with affectation and an antiquated lexicon, well, it must say something about the type of person we’re dealing with.

This is not realism. Mr. H dare not face reality. His entire world is a fiction, lest he be subjected to the horrors of his grotesque malignities. HH is a romantic, and he believes he and his step-daughter are embarking on a grand love affair. Even at the end, when he can no longer entirely hide from his crimes, he still believes there were light moments and true affection. He believes he always tried to have Lolita’s best interests at heart. It’s only in the margins we understand the extent of his malevolence. The truest moment of the entire book is when he casually mentions that Lolita cries herself to sleep every night.

Second, Lolita explores the very dark question of what happens when a person is afflicted with dangerous, destructive impulses which they cannot deny. As evil and twisted, and as nausea inducing, as HH might be, I still can’t help but feel pity for him. He cannot help his desires, that much is clear. His compulsion absolutely does not absolve him of his actions, but it does require us to more closely examine the fragility of human nature. Is Mr. H doomed to his living hell, or is there some way for him to escape his pathologies without giving in to them?

We all have our damaging impulses which haunt us. We are addicted to chemicals. We gamble and we drink. We lie and steal and get into arguments with strangers. We cheat on our spouses. We know an action is wrong but something compels us to do it anyway. We have phobias and manias and neurological disorders and dysfunctions. It’s sad to think about a person who’s been afflicted by some damaging obsession they simply can’t ignore no matter how strenuously they try. It’s something I can fully sympathize with.

I’m a Kansas City Royals fan after all.

Please Note: The style of this blog post was in no way affected by having just read Lolita.

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10
Sep 10

#49: Blood Meridian

With it increasingly difficult to discover great books and great authors I haven’t already read, I downloaded a list of the top 100 novels of the past 100 years. Inspired by the list, I decided to read each and every one of them. Classics such as The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye I had previously slugged through in school, but I determined to reread them as part of my endeavor since I paid scant attention to their literary merit during our first encounter. Give me my C and let’s move on was my mantra at the time.

I recently picked up Blood Meridian without even realizing it was in the Top 100. Early this year, I read The Road, a downer of a novel but memorable for its bleak message about survival, plus I’ve seen No Country For Old Men, so I thought I’d give it a try. It turns out Blood Meridian is an American version of The Iliad, replete with bloody massacres, attempted Genocide, and ruminations on fate and free will.

Two things stand out the most:

1. Blood Meridian lives up to its name. It is extremely violent. It graphically depicts a series of encounters between a small band of Indian scalpers and their Apache and Mexican victims. The author makes no attempt to tinge this violence with a moral component. The violence just is, and for the most part, the characters accept it as a part of life.

2. The writing is stark. McCarthy employs plenty of majestic words, many of them archaic, but he does not adorn the writing with much narrative omniscience. We mostly have description. A description of the land, the barren desert of the Southwest. A description of the action, which is mostly men sitting on their horses, wandering forlornly through that desert. A description of the aforementioned violence. Conversations do not come adorned with quotation marks. You might go several pages without finding a comma. It is easy to get lost in the constant stream of pronouns and verbs, wandering who belongs to which, or weighed down by the long stretches of geography that provide wide buffers for the sudden outbreaks of activity. But the further you go, the more you become absorbed in McCarthy’s unique rhythms.

According to the novel, our lives amount to little more than blood and dust:

If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.

I found Blood Meridian strangely engrossing, despite what you might consider merely a serviceable plot. Instead of a complete narrative, you have a series of bloody episodes where the threat of violence creates a hopeless tension. Can the characters find some way out, or are they all doomed? McCarthy seems to answer that each and every one of us is doomed from the beginning. The truth, much like our lives, is stark.

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19
Dec 08

Norwegian Wood came up on random play as I was writing this, suggesting that either life is not random, or I spent a long time to finish this review


I just finished reading Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami. It is not an easy book to encapsulate, nor to recommend. It is at times depressing, and at other times quite graphic.

The story revolves around Toru Watanabe, whose best friend committed suicide while they were both 17 years old. A deathly pallor hangs over everything, and each character seems to confront reality in his or her own unique way. Just like Kundera’s Immortality presents a group of characters struggling with their identity in the face of their own mortality, Norwegian Wood likewise delves into the meaning of self when faced with life in a meaningless void. The novel is gripping in the way it portrays these tortured individuals who are never entirely comfortable in their own realities, and is certainly thought provoking, but it is not an easy read.

Sanity is an issue for several of the characters. Two have been voluntarily admitted to a kind of psychiatric retreat, and they repeatedly say the only difference between the people inside and the people outside is that the people inside know that they are crazy. Indeed, Toru’s friends on the outside are just as peculiar and maladjusted to society as his friends inside, maybe even more so. Toru himself feels isolated, and has few companions at his university, and struggles with the direction his life should take. He battles deep bouts of depression, and often retreats into complete solitude. He finds no comfort in the people around him, who are continually exposed as hypocrites. The one friend he regularly spends time with has overcome hypocrisy by living live as selfishly as he can, a kind of Nietzschean superman who feels nothing but contempt for most of the people around him, and in the end is revealed to have a pointless, empty life.

The ending offers little in the way of hope either. Life is lived until death, and their is no magical plan for happiness. The only sanctuary may be to find love, but love is fleeting and tortuous and convuluted and our own need to be wanted and understood too often gets in the way of our ability to return that love.

Gripping the reciever, I raised my head and turned to see what lay beyond the phone box. Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. Again and again I called out for Midori from the dead centre of this place that was no place.

It is easy to get lost when we have no idea where we are or what direction we are headed, and when the road map presented to us directs us to keep moving forward but gives us no answer as to why we should go there or what to expect when we arrive. But for Toru, and all the characters in Norwegian Wood, that is the type of journey they are on. They can only hope they have a nice cold cucumber to enjoy along the way.

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17
Dec 08

The Best Example You Will Ever Find Of The Phantom Menace Syndrome Apart From The Phantom Menace Itself


I would like to use this space today to heartily recommend that you begin reading The Wheel Of Time series of books, by Robert Jordan. I would like to say that they are among the greatest books, of any genre, that I have ever read. I would like to tell you that if you enjoyed Harry Potter, than you will be even more enamored by this complex fantasy epic.

I came across the first book of the series, The Eye of the World, while I was in high school. I had always loved reading, loved stories, and more than once had tried my hand at writing a novel of my own. But it was after The Eye of the World that I first seriously entertained thoughts of becoming a writer.

So I would like nothing more than to urge you to toss whatever drivel you are reading right now, whether it be Shakespeare, Joyce, or Hemingway (or this blog), and grab a book that is truly compelling.

Unfortunately I cannot. The first four or five books in this series became a part of my life in the same way your favorite cousins from Pennsylvania who you only see twice a year are a part of your life, the same way your winter boots are a part of your life. You wish you could play with them everyday forever, but you always have to say goodbye and wait until next time. That is how it was with these books. I would savor each new volume. After plowing through the first few hundred pages in two nights, I would force myself to slow down, because I knew it would be at least another year before a new one came out. And once I finished, a long slow wait would begin. Each time, when the next volume was released, I would read through the whole series from the beginning so I was fully primed for the latest one.

But gradually, things began to fall apart. Book five was not quite as good as book four. Book six was undeniably sub-par. By book seven, I approached each new book with an increasing sense of hope mixed with dread. Would this book be better than the last, or would it be even worse? By books nine and ten, the experience of reading these stories had become almost tortuous, all the worse because I could not put them down, just like you could never turn away from a loved one suffering from a debilitating disease.

These characters had become a part of my life, and I had no choice but to see them all the way through no matter what the outcome. It was so maddening. What had gone wrong? What had happened to Robert Jordan, the best fantasy writer since Tolkien? What were his editor’s thinking. The last two or three books were so bad, they reminded me of my own nascent attempts to write novels in high school and college. It was nonsense. It was preposterous that someone had thought to publish someone’s first draft and package it as a finished novel.

As the years went by, the pace of their release slowed down. I read book eleven probably four years ago. That’s right, book eleven! Jordan began releasing several prequels in the meantime, none of which I have read. I was only interested in finishing the main series, and hoped that through some miracle the story would be redeemed before the end. At one time, he had been a masterful writer. And I was not alone in this belief. Anyone I ever encountered who had read these books loved them just as enthusiastically. I had never heard a bad word. At least until book six.

I found out today that Robert Jordan died last year. I had been wondering when to expect the next book, and did a google search, and discovered the bad news. He had apparently been suffering from a terminal form of heart disease for some time.

My immediate response was to wonder if this disease could be part of the reason why the series had so tragically deteriorated. I have no answer, and I am not sure it matters. According to his publisher, another author has been commissioned to finish the series, using the notes and manuscript that Jordan left behind. Book twelve was always intended to be the final book.

I hope that the final book will approach the quality of the first several. But even if it does, it cannot repair the damage caused by the second half of the series. And if the final book is a triumph, it will always be bitter sweet for fans of the series, since the series’s rejuvenation could only come about after Jordan’s death.

So I would like to be able to recommend that you read The Eye of the World, but I cannot. Because once you start, you will not be able to stop. You will become deeply entranced with a whole new world, a rich epic of marvelous adventure and powerful characters. And then you will become disappointed and frustrated as the story declines, to the point that you will probably wish you never started in the first place.

What a tragedy.

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30
Nov 08

Waiting For The Raven King


Susanna Clarke took over ten years to write her first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. So the five years I have been working on mine seem like a pittance.

It was time well spent. You can read any review and find the basic premise: England of the early nineteenth century watches as two magicians battle to revive the lost art of English magic. A cross between Jane Austen and The Lord of the Rings. A Harry Potter for adults.

It is much closer to Austen than to Tolkien. We open on the English countryside, at a meeting of the Yorkshire Society of Magicians. Except these are not practical magicians, but theoretical. The last English Magician who could actually do magic disappeared over 200 years ago. No, these magicians merely debate and squabble over what magic used to be like, back when the Raven King still ruled the north.

That is, until a gentleman from Hurtfew Abbey named Mr. Norrell, shocks all of England by proving himself capable of casting spells. He comes to London as the only practitioner of English magic, but soon gains a rival, the younger and more handsome Jonathan Strange. Together they alternately excite and horrify London society as they battle to return English magic to glory.

The comparisons to Austen are just. Two qualities especially stand out as exemplary. First, is the description. The houses, the clothes, the manners, the social hierarchy, all are explained in rich detail. A delight and a humor gives the entire affair a serious levity. The greatest effort is made to infuse a narrative history into everything. The absence of magic can only be fully appreciated when juxtaposed with all the memories of England’s glorious past. An example:

Upon the instant, bells began to toll. Now these were nothing more than the bells of St. Michael-Le-Belfrey telling the half hour, but inside the Cathedral they had an odd, far-away sound like the bells of another country. It was not at all a cheerful sound. The gentleman of the York society knew very well how bells often went with magic and in particular with the magic of those unearthly beings, faeries; they knew how, in the old days, silvery bells would often sound just as some Englishman or Englishwoman of particular virtue or beauty was about to be stolen away by fairies to live in strange, ghostly lands for ever. Even the Raven King–who was not a fairy, but an Englishman–had a somewhat regrettable habit of abducting men and women and taking them to live with him in his castle in the Other Lands. Now, had you and I the power to seize by magic any human being that took our fancy and the power to keep that person by our side through all eternity, and had we all the world to chuse from, then I dare say our choice might fall on someone a little more captivating than a member of the Learned Society of York Magicians, but this comforting thought did not occur to the gentlemen inside York Cathedral and several of them began to wonder how angry Dr Foxcastle’s letter had made Mr Norrell and they began to be seriously frightened.

Second, even more impressively, is the way she uses character to drive the story. These are characters in the fullest sense of the word, each with his or her own idiosyncrasies. The heroes are not trying to save the world. The villains are not out to do evil. An excessive pride afflicts every male character of a certain social standing, almost as an afterthought. Clarke wants us to know that to be a gentleman in the nineteenth century means being elevated to a place of privilege that has nothing to do with your character, and that elevated status makes it impossible to escape a heightened egotism. The main antagonist, the man with thistle down hair, is a fairy, and so his motivations and ideas about right and wrong are quite foreign to us, but nothing in his character is especially malicious. He cannot help his capriciousness any more than Mr. Norrell can help his infuriating pettiness or Strange his melancholy temper.

Casting his shadow over the whole affair is the Raven King, the long departed king of Northern England who was the greatest magician to ever live. Legends of his exploits abound. Clarke has created an entire mythos, a lattice of folk tales and memories and place names and even whole geographies that have been left behind by John Uskglass, and everyone lives in either fear or expectation of his return.

Like Don Quixote and other massive epics of their ilk, the story is filled with digressions, interludes and side stories, not to mention a copious amount of footnotes. Every character has a story to go with him or her, and every story is filled with character. She allows the story to meander over its first two thirds, as we become fully immersed in this world, and then drives it to a furious conclusion.

Every one of you should read this book.

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