Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore (translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel, 2005) is a modern-day, Japanese Oedipus Rex. There are some alterations: the person who foretells that Kafka Tamura will kill his father and sleep with his mother and sister is not a disinterested augur but the soon-to-be-murdered father himself, who doesn't banish Kafka for it, and seems quite content with the arrangement, and in fact he probably was the one to ordain it. Fifteen-year-old Kafka bans himself from the kingdom, a great gated estate in Tokyo, maybe in order to avoid the curse but mainly to avoid his odious father entirely. His mother and sister left home when he was small and he does not know either of them. Lots of mystical events ensue, some of which are explained and others which are not.
It's very replete with cultural references, but in a way that's not annoying. There's a marriage of Western and Eastern artistic heritage that I find interesting. Many of the characters are conversant with the western literary and musical canons, and they also have a great interest in Japanese literature and art. I enjoyed feeling like that cleavage between the two histories isn't necessarily as deep and immutable as my university great books classes made it seem. I also like thinking about a world in which people are so in touch with literature and art, so day-to-day affected by them.
It's a fantasy book, I guess. Its mystical events are not just backdrop but central stage, the meat of the story. But it's an inward-looking, character-driven sort of fantasy. Even the other-worldly slime-being who climbs out of a dead man's mouth looking for a portal seems has personal salvation in mind.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
An Upper-Middle-Class Manifesto
1. We will not hide our disapproval of drunks, especially if they are men of colour, walking on our streets.
2. We try to avoid all contact with people not like us, including changing our route so as not to drive through their neighbourhoods on the way to our summer cottages.
3. We will not hide our disgust, even when we are invited into people's homes and treated with civility.
This is what I get from Paula Fox's Desperate Characters (1970). Jonathan Franzen, in his 1999 introduction, puts it this way:
When I wrote about Fox's kids' book a few months ago I said I thought it was the perfect novella experience - more concise than a novel, but with more depth and breadth than a short story. This book, still a novella but over 50% longer than The Stone-Fraced Boy, at 153 pages, is more like a short story with a few extra scenes spliced in. Nothing happens. I like many novels where things happen very slowly, but there's usually something. Here there's a cat bite which might be infected but turns out not to be. There's no character growth, there's no realizations about their worlds or themselves, there's no change of situation of any kind. It's written nicely enough, and for the first fifty pages or so I enjoyed it, but then the relentless whining about poor people, without any authorial distance or perspective, got to me. I read to the end thinking there would be some kind of redeeming change in these people, but there wasn't. I found it too hard to take their eponymous desperation seriously when they were so callous about everyone around them.
2. We try to avoid all contact with people not like us, including changing our route so as not to drive through their neighbourhoods on the way to our summer cottages.
3. We will not hide our disgust, even when we are invited into people's homes and treated with civility.
This is what I get from Paula Fox's Desperate Characters (1970). Jonathan Franzen, in his 1999 introduction, puts it this way:
Sophie and her husband, Otto, are pioneering urban gentry in the late 1960s, when the civilization of the Free World's leading city seems to be crumbling under a barrage of garbage, vomit and excrement, vandalism, fraud, and class hatred.I don't want to sound mean or petty, but it just makes him sound like he's signing on to the manifesto. Franzen lives in Brooklyn, like Sophie and her husband Otto, and maybe he's also against drunks walking on the sidewalks of his neighbourhood. The Free World's leading city? I find it funny that New Yorkers always say that as though it's trivially true.
When I wrote about Fox's kids' book a few months ago I said I thought it was the perfect novella experience - more concise than a novel, but with more depth and breadth than a short story. This book, still a novella but over 50% longer than The Stone-Fraced Boy, at 153 pages, is more like a short story with a few extra scenes spliced in. Nothing happens. I like many novels where things happen very slowly, but there's usually something. Here there's a cat bite which might be infected but turns out not to be. There's no character growth, there's no realizations about their worlds or themselves, there's no change of situation of any kind. It's written nicely enough, and for the first fifty pages or so I enjoyed it, but then the relentless whining about poor people, without any authorial distance or perspective, got to me. I read to the end thinking there would be some kind of redeeming change in these people, but there wasn't. I found it too hard to take their eponymous desperation seriously when they were so callous about everyone around them.
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