Just finished: Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore. The second Murakami novel I've completed, stylishly translated by Philip Gabriel. Much of what has stalled me out on Murakami's other novels, particularly those translated by Jay Rubin, is the affectless prose -- a parade of affiable he-said, she-said dialogue that puts me in mind of Doug Coupland's similarly flat sentences.

I remember Bernadette once criticizing something I'd written in university, saying, your language and symbols tell me this scene means something to you, but I have no clue what that is, because your words presuppose that you and I know exactly what plot elements A and B mean, and I don't. All this stuff does is foreground its own interiority.

A good argument in favor of keeping younger writers away from symbolism all together, and one I probably didn't pay enough attention to at the time.

So, with regard to Murakami, two problems: a strained Oedipus narrative tacked onto the usual parade of eccentics and fantastic occurences, and many purple passages in the main narrative, wherein young Kafka, his mother, and her fifteen year old ghost talk about their feelings like Banyen Books customers. I need, I want, I yearn, yadda yadda yadda.

Highlights? Supernatural beings, much like Twin Peaks' Killer Bob, who prowl between worlds, have no conception of human morality -- being concepts, not people -- and take on temporary forms lifted from contemporary mass culture (Colonel Sanders, Johnnie Walker). A man who talks to cats, and the many cats who talk back to him. A kind of Banff Center for spirits and ghosts, guarded by Japanese WWII soldiers who haven't aged since the war. And an accurate, and very moving account, of what it feels like to be like far away from home, and displaced from your normal routines, and how reading helps to mediate that loss. (A few pages, early on, reminded me very strongly of sitting in Borders Books, right at the western edge of the Las Vegas suburbs, reading and drinking free refills, just waiting for it to be late enough to venture out into the cold and the ten minute drive to the freezing campground over the crest of the hill).

- posted by cjb @ 11:09 AM