Failed my due diligence
So there you are in a bookstore, looking for some reading for your 16 hour flight home. You see a book with a very interesting title. It is called, Autofiction. You recognize the author's name from somewhere... Hitomi Kanehara's Snakes and Earrings gets a lot of street cred in the Japanophile spheres you frequent, and Ryu Murakami vouches for it.* You read the back: sexual obsession, reverse sequential storytelling, a violent and disturbing past? Sign me up! And heck, for what it's worth, Vintage has packaged it up to attract the Haruki Murakami crowd:
Dig it:
But you didn't do your due diligence!
See, because had you spent three minutes of yomatachi ("a standing read") and flipped to any point of the book, you would have ended up with passages like this (I am literally sampling randomly):
"So, so, so, Rin, you had a long-term boyfriend before, right? Did your ex have a big dick? Really? Really thick? And it bent to the right? Wow, could he pee straight? So why don't you get a new boyfriend? Do you think you're asking too much? Are you looking for a guy with an extra thick one? A nice long one that he can keep hard all night?"
Well okay, that's just one character. Let's flip further:
"How dare my pussy rule my thoughts! Shut up! Shut up! You're just a cunt. Don't you fucking cry. Don't you fucking give me orders. Die, you nagging cunt, die! What are you to talk about morals? About love? Chastity? Are you fucking stupid? A fucking pussy talking about chastity? Well there's the tail wagging the dog! I mean, isn't that weird? Besides, how dare you -- a pussy -- give me orders! Really, you're some pussy. But you should remember your place."
I won't go further on this one. I remember this passage. This goes on for five pages. Let's just flip somewhere else random.
"But it's scary. I mean, what if Smith-Smith decides to turn off both the portable player and the audio deck at the same time? And what if I hear the trunk at that precise moment? The terrible thought comes into my mind that I might throw myself out of the window if I hear that sound again -- slam, whiz...splat! And I imagine myself a broken mess on the ground. But what should I do? What should I do? I don't want to die, I don't want to die! I love Shin so unbearably much, but I don't want to die. To love is to die. If I were alive, I couldn't love. To love or to die. To love or to give up love. It is all so unbearable."
Basically, the entire book, beginning to end, all 212 pages that yes, I bothered to read, is one long amped-to-11 internal recursive whine about sex, love, and wanting to die from the point of view of that one drug-addled scarred-wrist club girl with the constantly abusive boyfriends she gets in with. And even that description I just wrote makes this book sound several times more awesome than it is, because if someone managed to pull that concept off with some amount of empathy and pacing and do so without being sensationalistic, it could be a good book.
Instead we have a book aiming for Flight of the Bumblebee and actually hitting sustained air-raid siren: a red-hazed mess of rambling with few to no concrete details or characters (ironically, it's the male characters that come off as empathetic and real, even when they're outright abusive) and more adolescent whinging than a, uh.... LiveJournal (yes I've written those posts too). And the part that gets me is that flipping to literally any page of this book reveals what an unfocused and dissonant mess it is, which means but two minutes more of my time and I could have avoided it.
And I wouldn't have finished it at all, but seriously, sixteen hour plane ride.
Anyway, I am big on not buying books unless they are really worth it and looking into purchases in advance so as not to hit this type of situation, but ultimately I am disappointed in myself. Gotta remember to do my due diligence.
That said, I am going to have to read up more on Snakes and Earrings to see what's going on behind THAT, because if it's getting so many kudos and cred maybe it's actually better than this mess and there's some legitimate reason why Kanehara is on the radar. Because otherwise, I couldn't even imagine how this book saw fit to get published, less translated into English.
And a note about that: for the first twenty pages or so I wondered if it was just the translation, but seriously twelve pages of a woman yelling at her pussy for crying (her words) over her boyfriend while she's cheating with someone else must be difficult to translate without thinking, "Is this really necessary? Does hysterical pussy itching** really need to be going on and on like this?"
*That said, I actually haven't gotten around to any of Ryu Murakami's work quite yet and if he's vouching for this type of stuff, already knowing how unimpressed I was with the Ring movies it gives me further hesitation to follow up on that track of Japanese popular fiction.
**FYI, the crying pussy and the hysterical itching pussy sequences are separate, distinct sequences and average about 7 or 8 pages in length. In other words, a substantial percentage of this short book is restating "Stop my itching pussy" or "Shut up, you crying pussy" with various exclamation and question marks to help break up the otherwise straight-laced decapitated heads from nowhere and obsessive codependency ranting. You know, for breather space.
--PolarisDiB
Dig it:
But you didn't do your due diligence!
See, because had you spent three minutes of yomatachi ("a standing read") and flipped to any point of the book, you would have ended up with passages like this (I am literally sampling randomly):
"So, so, so, Rin, you had a long-term boyfriend before, right? Did your ex have a big dick? Really? Really thick? And it bent to the right? Wow, could he pee straight? So why don't you get a new boyfriend? Do you think you're asking too much? Are you looking for a guy with an extra thick one? A nice long one that he can keep hard all night?"
Well okay, that's just one character. Let's flip further:
"How dare my pussy rule my thoughts! Shut up! Shut up! You're just a cunt. Don't you fucking cry. Don't you fucking give me orders. Die, you nagging cunt, die! What are you to talk about morals? About love? Chastity? Are you fucking stupid? A fucking pussy talking about chastity? Well there's the tail wagging the dog! I mean, isn't that weird? Besides, how dare you -- a pussy -- give me orders! Really, you're some pussy. But you should remember your place."
I won't go further on this one. I remember this passage. This goes on for five pages. Let's just flip somewhere else random.
"But it's scary. I mean, what if Smith-Smith decides to turn off both the portable player and the audio deck at the same time? And what if I hear the trunk at that precise moment? The terrible thought comes into my mind that I might throw myself out of the window if I hear that sound again -- slam, whiz...splat! And I imagine myself a broken mess on the ground. But what should I do? What should I do? I don't want to die, I don't want to die! I love Shin so unbearably much, but I don't want to die. To love is to die. If I were alive, I couldn't love. To love or to die. To love or to give up love. It is all so unbearable."
Basically, the entire book, beginning to end, all 212 pages that yes, I bothered to read, is one long amped-to-11 internal recursive whine about sex, love, and wanting to die from the point of view of that one drug-addled scarred-wrist club girl with the constantly abusive boyfriends she gets in with. And even that description I just wrote makes this book sound several times more awesome than it is, because if someone managed to pull that concept off with some amount of empathy and pacing and do so without being sensationalistic, it could be a good book.
Instead we have a book aiming for Flight of the Bumblebee and actually hitting sustained air-raid siren: a red-hazed mess of rambling with few to no concrete details or characters (ironically, it's the male characters that come off as empathetic and real, even when they're outright abusive) and more adolescent whinging than a, uh.... LiveJournal (yes I've written those posts too). And the part that gets me is that flipping to literally any page of this book reveals what an unfocused and dissonant mess it is, which means but two minutes more of my time and I could have avoided it.
And I wouldn't have finished it at all, but seriously, sixteen hour plane ride.
Anyway, I am big on not buying books unless they are really worth it and looking into purchases in advance so as not to hit this type of situation, but ultimately I am disappointed in myself. Gotta remember to do my due diligence.
That said, I am going to have to read up more on Snakes and Earrings to see what's going on behind THAT, because if it's getting so many kudos and cred maybe it's actually better than this mess and there's some legitimate reason why Kanehara is on the radar. Because otherwise, I couldn't even imagine how this book saw fit to get published, less translated into English.
And a note about that: for the first twenty pages or so I wondered if it was just the translation, but seriously twelve pages of a woman yelling at her pussy for crying (her words) over her boyfriend while she's cheating with someone else must be difficult to translate without thinking, "Is this really necessary? Does hysterical pussy itching** really need to be going on and on like this?"
*That said, I actually haven't gotten around to any of Ryu Murakami's work quite yet and if he's vouching for this type of stuff, already knowing how unimpressed I was with the Ring movies it gives me further hesitation to follow up on that track of Japanese popular fiction.
**FYI, the crying pussy and the hysterical itching pussy sequences are separate, distinct sequences and average about 7 or 8 pages in length. In other words, a substantial percentage of this short book is restating "Stop my itching pussy" or "Shut up, you crying pussy" with various exclamation and question marks to help break up the otherwise straight-laced decapitated heads from nowhere and obsessive codependency ranting. You know, for breather space.
--PolarisDiB