Book Review | 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

There comes a time in every reader’s life when they are sorely tempted to club their favourite author on the head. With their own book, no less.

My turn came very recently with Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 which I attempted to romance over a course of 3 months. Forget that this book, desperately trying to be his “magnum opus”, is over 1300 pages long (in paperback) and that it could have done away with at least 1000 pages (the person who edited this book needs a tight slap too); 1Q84 is printed proof that Murakami is officially too full of himself (to put it mildly)!

In the year 1984, we read into a world within a world in Tokyo, Japan. This world has two moons, something the author can’t reiterate enough, Little People, a cult organisation functioning under the guise of an organic farm and two protagonists whose fates are intertwined by a series of parallel events.

1Q84 is told from two perspectives – Tengo, a Math teacher who moonlights as a writer, and Aomame, a martial arts instructor moonlighting as an assassin. It gets off to a promising start. Tengo is commissioned to rewrite a novel for an inarticulate 17-year-old with a shady past, we’re intrigued already. On the other side of town, Aomame is commissioned to kill Leader (with a capital ‘L’), head of Sakigake, the organic farm disguised as a cult. Some 500 pages in, we’re about to give up, when we realise that Tengo and Aomame have a shared moment from when they briefly went to school together. The two, in fact, are in love with each other’s 12-year-old selves. How romantic! Suddenly, the book has intrigue, mystery and a fatalistic love story that could go either way. Heck, even the two worlds, two moons and the two lives of our two protagonists gain literary momentum.

But another 300 pages in (that’s nearing 900 pages, with 400 to go) we reach, are dragged more like, to a climatic scene where Aomame finally meets this Leader, the chief antagonist of the novel whom you fear and loathe just a little less than Johnny Walker in Kafka on the Shore. A few too many pages of philosophy and un-gasp-worthy revelations in, Aomame “sends him to the other world”; simultaneously, Tengo is the subject of a really weird exchange with the 17-year-old monosyllabic writer whose work he rewrote and you suddenly realise, as a reader, you just…don’t…care…anymore!

Murakami was and still is one of my favourite authors. Kafka blew my mind, while After Dark converted me to Magic Realism. I even started off the New Year resolving to read each and every work published by Murakami!

But 1Q84 has taught me something very elementary about literature and the authors we idolise. They’re not golden geese. Every book of theirs cannot be a work of genius. I experienced this revelation for the first time with Carlos Ruiz Zaffon – loved Shadow of the Wind and The Prince of Mist, hated The Angel’s Game. But I dismissed that as the folly of a writer attempting to promise more mystery and mind blowing awesomeness than his story-telling skills could cope with. But now, with Murakami, I see this very mortal mistake at play once again.

1Q84 was destined for greatness. But it fails because of sheer volume and the author’s need to state, restate and reiterate facts, details and flashbacks he’s already tackled. It’s a waste of a story that could have blown your mind in 500 pages but instead, is stretched out to ridiculous proportions just so one man can have his giant ego printed across 1300 pages (in paperback).

The Reality of Magic

A still from Pan's Labyrinth, directed Guillermo del Toro.
One of my favourite movies for the genre -- recommended
for those who dislike its use in books.

It's easy to imagine worlds from scratch. It's easier still to see what will be, judging by how things are now. But to blend into a setting and imagine things for what they could be, but don't reveal, is what brings magic realism to life.

Our book club is reading The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafaq this month. It was picked from a coffee cup that also held Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Swimming by Nicola Keegan. Two excellent titles recommended by members who have read, loved and wouldn't mind picking them up again. That's the new rule... eliminates disasters such as the last one when none of us could get beyond four pages of the first chapter. Thanks for Cloud Atlas Mr Mitchell... not really...

Admittedly, I am partial to the genre of magic realism. I don't know how to justify this affliction except to say it's because "what exists isn't, and what isn't, is". Know what I mean?

I started my affair with the genre when I read and loved Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind. There was something so eerie about Lain Coubert's introduction in the novel that I found it hard to put down thereon. He stands in the shadows under our protagonist's house, not a a distinctive feature to be put into words, except the smell of burning books that engulf his wake. I don't think the author put it in there, but in my mind' eye, the minute it is revealed that Courbert is a character from the author, Julian Carax's book, and a sinister one no less -- the devil -- I could just picture a little red tail creeping out of his overcoat, warning you to get out of his way, or provoking you to come just a little closer.

I discovered Murakami's Kafka on the Shore a few months after The Shadow of the Wind. It wasn't an easy read at first. The multiple story-lines, parallel only if you are patient enough to get through the initial confusion, didn't appeal to me at first. But I head on the minute Nakata waltzed into conversation with a lost cat. I also found Johnny Walker quite interesting. Another character, much like Coubert, who has a sinister air about him. Do all magic realists stun their audience to attention with characters such as these? They're so psychotic you hope they aren't real. But to get into this genre you have to make a choice to believe or disbelieve, go by face value -- something that isn't easy since their faces, being of no consequence, are rarely given much character. I also think that's what defines how badly they can infest your dreams.

Lucky then, there isn't an antagonist in The Bastard of Istanbul. But there is a djinn -- the dark one, one enjoys his role as the bearer of bad news: He's called Mr Bitter. He isn't evil, nor does he have a hidden agenda. But he does have the power to tear away a layer of skin (metaphorically) to reveal that which is buried, and painful as it is, needs to be unearthed. I won't ruin this book for my fellow Caterpillars. All I can say is I hope, sincerely, that they enjoy the book as much as I did. Magic realism is for everyone. The only trick is to decide whether you're up for looking at the real world with a hint of magic.

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The Sequel to a Prequel | The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The Angel’s Game was written with a muddled mind as though Carlos Ruiz Zafon was at war with himself throughout the process. With characters that are neither here nor there it leaves you hanging till the end wondering which ones will be most paramount to the novel.

Divided into three ‘Books’ – City of the Damned, Lux Aeterna and The Angel’s Game – Zafon’s prequel to The Shadow of the Wind, is narrated in first person. The story revolves around an orphaned writer named David Martin who writes a series of raunchy thrillers called City of the Damned. Painted with a colourful imagination and figures of speech that audible and visual at the same time, the novel starts off with great promise. Martin moves into a tower house abandoned for years that hints at a mystery after the demise of the previous owners. Here he spends his days locked away, writing, by his estimate, 6.66 pages a day to fulfill his quota of for 200 pages of the manuscript he must deliver to his slave driving publishers every month. But things go awry for young Martin when his health suffers from being over worked not to mention helping out his mentor and benefactor, Don Pedro Vidal, while facing a crisis of in executing his own novel.

Soon, worked to the bone Martin finds he has only a short while to live due to a tumor (how very Bollywood of you Mr Zafon) lodged in his brain. But the book suddenly takes a Hollywood twist when a mysterious publisher of religious texts from France gets in touch with him to write a book in exchange for 100,000 francs and a Faustian pact that will fulfill his heart’s desire. What follows is an attempt at cracking the mystery of the previous owner who, it’s hinted, has a lot more in common with Martin than he first thought.

"Sit and squeeze your brain until it hurts," says our Martin to his apprentice Isabella about the art of writing. It would seem that Mr Zafon has done the same – perhaps adding conversations he was having inside his own head to the dialogue between the characters. Unfortunately, the book has too many plot lines running through it to do any one justice. It could have made a good mystery that our professional-writer-turned-amateur-detective must crack. It could have also been a focused thesis on the process of writing and deriving inspiration by, as it mentions, squeezing your brain until it hurts. At points it borders dangerously on being a novel about the root of religious beliefs and their influence on society through the ages. But by no means is it one complete book that serves its purpose of being a satisfying read by an author with the power to chill you to the bone.

When we put Carlos Ruiz Zafon in the spotlight on his blog around a year ago, I had mentioned only that it had disappointed me immensely. But I recently decided to force myself to attempt it again because a sequel to the sequel written before the prequel is scheduled to release in English. And while I’m still looking forward to The Prisoner of Heaven (due to release sometime in July), I wish Zafon would have taken his own advice and sat his ass down to concentrate on one good book instead of creating a confluence of dreams, inspiration and, can’t grudge him this as an aspiring writer, the process of writing a novel.

You can’t always create a masterpiece. But when you’ve got a potential bestseller on your hands, I do believe that you have a duty to your loyalists. But with critical acclaim comes pressure. And with pressure comes a work like The Angel’s Game, that finds its talented and imaginative author trying hard to repeat with greater magnitude what he did with The Shadow of the Wind with disastrous results.

Author Spotlight | Etgar Keret

Reality takes a backseat when Etgar Keret writes a short story. But in the guise of magic realism, the truth of the matter is very much there, hiding, waiting to jump out from between the lines. Trick is that you have to catch it before the story ends.

Discovering Keret wasn’t difficult. His short story, Creative Writing was published in The New Yorker last week and I found it depressing that I hadn’t heard of him before. So I did a bit of research, code for typing words into Google, read some of his other works and was pleasantly surprised to find that each story was more impressive than the last. Guava is the story of a man whose flight is about to crash and his last wish isn't that his wife and family live in comfortable abundance forever after, but for world peace. Creative Writing is about Maya and three really fantastical worlds she creates in a creative writing class, much to the disdain and curiousity of her husband who starts to take them a tad more seriously than he should. Stupour of Our Time is a narrator's analysis of his father's insistence on voting for political parties that do not get to parliment. It's hilarious, batty and strangely, identifiable with at least one or more members of your own family.  In The Nimrod Flipout, the narrator and his friends, Miron and Uzi go uncontrollaby insane in turns, and blame it on their dead friend Nimrod.

Keret's stories are short... shorter than the usual short, and extremely insane. So obviously I'm in love with him. He's got this rare talent that allows him to establish characters in a limited amount of time despite the length. Of course, there's only one to three characters in each story, so that limits the complexity to a large extent. Does that make him simple to 'get'? Not really. But reading him, somehow, transports you to this world where nothing and no one else really matters but the main character and the path leading down to the climax.

Journalism school aims to teach you a lot of things - check facts, establish integrity, don't commit suicide unless you're in a war zone chasing a story, and hate McJournalism (longer stories presented as short nuggets of information) to name a few.

Keret's stories remind me of this paper I wrote about McJournalism and how shorter news stories (in some cases as long as 250 words and as short as 140 characters) aren't giving the audience the opportunity to understand an incident in a fair and balanced manner. Keret's shorter than shorts did bring this theory back to mind when Creative Writing left me wanting more. Much, much more than another story with another protagonist facing another crisis. So I can see why he wasn't too popular with critics in the start. One columnist went so far as to say he is "not so much of a stylist - you get the impression that he throws three or four of these stories off on the bus to work every morning". But if you're a grown-up who isn't experimenting with illicit substances, you know how difficult it is to imagine something that, well, isn't, no matter how much you enjoy it. So to me this statement is appalling, and a very haphazard judgement to pass because stories as fantastical as these don't get "thrown" on a bus, toilet or even during intense boredom. They're nuggets, yes I said it, of inspiration that come in spurts that must be penned down before they get diluted by distraction or logical thinking.

These shorter than short stories aren't Keret's only source of fame. He's a filmmaker of good repute in Israel (I haven't seen the film yet) and has collaborated on several graphic novels (which I haven't read yet). His website is quite interesting for, you know, an author's website, woven around a theme that reminds me of Phoebe from Friends talking about her song: 'Su-Su-Suicide'. He also writes articles that find their way into The New Yorker, New York Times and The Guardian among others. Indeed, Keret, the storyteller, is definitely someone you should keep an eye on. He's a revelation of sorts, my first revelation for that matter, in the new year.

(India) Buy The Nimrod Flip-Out, a collection of Keret's short stories from Flipkart.com

(Everywhere Else) The Nimrod Flipout: Stories on Amazon.com

Review | The Japanese Lover by Rani Manicka

I love sagas. There is nothing better than watching a young pretty girl blossom into an obnoxious teenager, mature into a confused single twenty-year-old and age gracefully into a corporate tycoon all in the space of a weekend. You guessed it - every Daniel Steele heroine ever written. This particular tale starts off in a promising albeit strange manner. We meet an old woman living in the storeroom of her daughters house in Kuala Lumpur when someone asks her to record her life story and so Parvati is born into a poor Sri Lankan family. On eve of her birth a grim prophesy is told of a doomed marriage to an extremely wealthy man. To avert this fate she bathes a golden serpent in milk every day and is locked in the shed behind her house by her father until the wealthy man from the country of Malaya comes knocking at her door.

Here the story takes a more predictable turn as she travels to the distant land and embarks on a difficult journey to fit into Kasu Marimuthu's life, my favorite character in the novel, and play with the strange cards she has been dealt. Namely a witch doctor cook and an altogether depressing disposition. You have to give it to Rani Manicka in that it takes guts to create a character this lacking in well, character. There is absolutely nothing extraordinary about her. She is tone deaf, has no interest in art and comes across as any ordinary village girl should. The essence of the story from then on out is her entry into Malaya social scene- a Princess Diaries meets My Fair lady meets Beauty and the Beast that is really quite enjoyable until you find the story lacking any direction after the predictable transformation takes place. You can sense the author's conundrum as she  as she begins to throw in a possible love affair, mysticism and family drama into the mix unable to fuse each story thread together in a believable manner. At one end she is cursed with a utterly terrible children and on the other has to deal with a  constant undercurrent of superstition that somehow never comes together. Once the Japanese general enters, he brings with him a much needed outlet for releasing tension that Manicka builds up quite nicely but is unable to execute. While Parvati's sudden sexual awakening could have been more fully explored, I do love Manicka's lovely way with erotica. A particular scene with Parvati in the ocean was almost orgasmic as are her surreal moments as a Geisha. The book flap talks about a how Parvati had to choose the man who was her sworn enemy as her lover, something I thought should have taken more than the one paragraph that it happened in. The mysticism and supernatural elements continue to linger until it culminates in some sort of serpent frenzy that completely goes over my head and over Parvati's as well.

This could have been an amazing book if Manicka had made it longer and given it that space to develop as it deserved. I would have loved to know more about the history of the time and the broader Malay landscape. I really did want to like Parvati but felt like I was never given the chance between the magic realism and Japanese invasion. The writing is always fluid and you get a lovely sense of this beautiful house by the beach and the jungles near by. The humour of the mami's afforded me the occasional laugh and her matter of fact third person view point keeps us involved even us story threads confuse us. Perhaps the most interesting parts were the authors take on India and Indians. Manicka when asked about this said; "For me, this is a message to Indians in this country because they really do have a self-esteem problems and they deny it whenever I speak about it. It is so ingrained in them. With this book, I am saying it is okay if you are dark skinned."

I am never a fan of novels that are overtly preachy but part of me does like the fact that a main theme of this book is that dramatic lives can happen to even the most ordinary people.

Verdict: Worth a read on a rainy afternoon. Pass it around your girlfriends, especially the ones that live with mami's.
Buy The Japanese Lover from Flipkart.com

RecommendedReads | A taste of Murakami

I’m going to dedicate this week’s RR to one of my favourite authors (in translation), Haruki Murakami. I’ll be honest though, he’s tough to understand unless you read his books twice over and then slyly Wikipedia the title when no one’s looking. Oh get off your high horse… You know you do it too! Murakami’s different, you see? And every time I finish one of his books, I want to pat myself on the back because I’m proud of my inability to put him down mid way, give up, even though I find myself doing that very often with other authors.

Murakami transports me to a zone that's somewhere between concentration and spacing out, but ultimately manages to keep me hooked to the worlds within the worlds that exist in pockets of Tokyo and other parts of modern day Japan. In fact, I fully plan to write a review of Kafka on the Shore, the second Murakami I ever read, which sealed my bond with him forever.

I’ve been ploughing thorough The Elephant Vanishes, a collection of short stories for a while and would really recommend you start with that if you’ve got a short attention span or just can’t wait to get to the end of a really absurd story. You won’t regret it. I promise. Buy The Elephant Vanishes from Flipkart.com

But if you want a taste before actually making the investment, you might want to read Town of Cats, a short story that was recently published in The New Yorker. Sure, it starts off well enough: Son goes to visit an emotionally unavailable father for whom he feels nothing. Suddenly, he recalls a scene from his infancy that seems innocent enough until a certain detail, disturbing to the reader, not the son who’s reminiscing it, strikes him as odd. Is there a possibility that his father, with whom he doesn’t really feel a connection, who won’t talk to him about his dead mother, is not his biological father at all? Tengo, the protagonist, can only hope.

Another interesting, though confusing read today was an article in The Economist about The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle being adapted into a stage play that premiered at the Edinburgh Festival on August 21. I know chances of us ever seeing this, or any of his other stories, performed in the likes of NCPA, Bombay are bleak, but to watch Murakami's imagination interpreted through sound, light and real people would be worth its weight in creative gold.

This piece though, oscillating between good and bad, just like all of the author's works that blur that lines between the real and surreal, does little to support my resolution not to travel to the next destination that will be showing the play. But I guess, once you fall in love with Murakami, it’s important to plunge first and think later. So far I’ve gotten through Kafka on the Shore, Dance Dance Dance, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and After Dark. I haven’t lamented yet and I still love cats, goats and well, maybe not televisions or all-night diners. So away I go!


Please leave pledges for the Caterpillar Wind-Up-Bird-Fund for Afsha in comments section below.

A Magic Realist | Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Sorry for going MIA last week. I'm grateful to Reshma for holding the fort around here while I was off reading press releases on tiny-ass stools I had to share with three big bums (mine included). But since I'm back to the grind now, I can't put this off any longer lest my blogging buddy devours my liver for dinner tonight. So here goes...

I didn't discover Carlos Ruiz Zafon. He was sort of bestowed upon me one cold snowy Christmas a few years ago. Little did I know, after reading the synopsis of The Shadow of the Wind, that this Spanish Magic Realist in translation would become one of my favourite authors of all time.

Set in Barcelona after the Spanish Civil War, The Shadow of the Wind is a book within the book written by one Julián Carax. The story captivates the imagination of a young man named Daniel Sempere making him want to find more titles by the author. But this quest turns to dust almost instantly when he finds out that all the titles written by Carax were bought and burned by a mysterious man calling himself Lain Coubert, a character in Carax's novel who is the devil. Not one to give up easily, he uses the priviledge of having a lot of spare time and solves the mystery of Carax's missing books, his untimely death and a sinister secret buried deep in the darkest crevices of Barcelona.

The Shadow of the Wind is Zafon's best novel yet. With great story-telling and plot lines that make it impossible to put down, I recall finishing the book and then starting it again almost instantly. A great first sign. But not for long.

The thing is all of Zafon's books follow a similar pattern - the protagonists are young men, neither too rich nor poor, who come across a cloaked stranger giving them the heebie-jeebies. Throw in some strong and appealing female characters and a mystery that keeps you hooked until the end only because no one is willing to tell the whole truth without resorting to lying, and you have a plot that's not predictable, but not entirely original either.

The Angel's Game, a book I swept through shelves to find, disappointed me beyond belief. The Prince of Mist, managed to give me a sleepless night of watching the cupboard, but riddled itself with flaws in the end (in it's defense, it is a "horror young adult" novel). A preview of The Midnight Palace, another young adult novel most recently translated, was delivered to me via a Kindle. The monotony, quite like his previous works, almost killed me.

But Zafon is still my favourite writer. You have to admit - he has style and he has imagination, two very important traits of any good story-teller. What's more is that of all the authors of magic realism, he's the easiest to breeze through.

His prose is lyrical, almost poetic with something fatalistic about it. "He would always remember..." "... the first sparks of an electric storm crackled across the sky like a string of bright lights."

Unlike Gabriel Garcia Marquez, his stories don't ride into numerous decades, introducing a wide variety of characters you have trouble remembering. Unlike Rushdie, he uses shorter sentences. And unlike Murakami, his stories don't sound like adventures on acid. Zafon keeps it simple by limiting the number of primary characters and exploring a form of magic that's as familiar, yet unnerving as a carnival of characters.

He isn't the best in the genre though, considering he's dabbling in a form of story-telling where imagination is the limit. But he's my go-to guy. A sort of comforter I revisit every time I'm ill or sad. His prose makes for good friend to turn to when you want to forget, if only for just a minute.

I lost The Shadow of the Wind (my greatest regret to date). The Angel's Game and The Prince of Mist are up for grabs though, so feel free to get in touch.