2/too long novels, three short, one collection of stories
bookwise the week started off on a sort of low-key note. I finished up Murakami's short story collection After the Quake, then moved on to his really long novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which I definitely liked less than Kafka on the Shore. I mean, it wasn't terrible, I just wasn't very interested in the protagonist's personal journey. The descriptions of a surreal reality living intermixed with ours remain very compelling, especially those passages that described the dreamworld. And I'll definitely never forget the way someone being skinned alive was depicted. ugh.
On Tuesday I started in on Don DeLillo's Underworld, which after slogging through all 827 pages of it, I have decided is about the Cold War, the disparity on American perceptions of class and family, the indeterminate nature of blame and truth, and the disconnect between what is really happening and what might be or may be happenning. Obviously DeLillo did very well in manufacturing this sense of disconnect, because I was certainly disconnected from the characters in the novel. In his defence, the ending of the novel was memorable without departing from the tone or style of the complete work.
I finished up the last 50 pages or so of The Island of Dr. Moreau, which was great. The format and narration style practically scream for a movie adaption worthy of the original. But I see on imdb that two have been attempted with little success. Probably because movie writers feel this compulsion to add female characters in, which really is unnecessary. ...They'd probably do something ridiculous like make Dr. Moreau a woman to even it out. Sure, that'd be scary as all heck, but it's totally not necessary. (hmm has going to a women's college made me a woman hater? ponder.) (except now I can totally see Dr. Cameron from House being all evil Dr. Moreau. amusing.)
A Thousand Splendid Suns by the author of The Kite Runner, covers much of the same time frame as his first novel, but from the point of view of women. It's apparently my curse to be reading books on the Thursday afternoon commute home that make me want to cry. Okay okay, what made we want to cry the most at that point was the fact that a character had to choose only five books out of his library to take with him. I'm a little shallow like that. But I paid for that when I finished it up walking home and the last 30 pages really did bring tears to my eyes.
And I finished up An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro this morning. I really liked this book. It was very easy to sympathize with the narrator's confusion about what the society of post-war Japan expected from him. He had been a prominent artist before the war and had helped the war effort out of patriotism, but now it is this patriotism that is making it difficult for his daughter to marry. His sense of national pride has no place in occupied Japan and makes no sense to his colleagues, his former students, and his family. Plus there is Godzilla. Marginally, but still. Godzilla.
On Tuesday I started in on Don DeLillo's Underworld, which after slogging through all 827 pages of it, I have decided is about the Cold War, the disparity on American perceptions of class and family, the indeterminate nature of blame and truth, and the disconnect between what is really happening and what might be or may be happenning. Obviously DeLillo did very well in manufacturing this sense of disconnect, because I was certainly disconnected from the characters in the novel. In his defence, the ending of the novel was memorable without departing from the tone or style of the complete work.
I finished up the last 50 pages or so of The Island of Dr. Moreau, which was great. The format and narration style practically scream for a movie adaption worthy of the original. But I see on imdb that two have been attempted with little success. Probably because movie writers feel this compulsion to add female characters in, which really is unnecessary. ...They'd probably do something ridiculous like make Dr. Moreau a woman to even it out. Sure, that'd be scary as all heck, but it's totally not necessary. (hmm has going to a women's college made me a woman hater? ponder.) (except now I can totally see Dr. Cameron from House being all evil Dr. Moreau. amusing.)
A Thousand Splendid Suns by the author of The Kite Runner, covers much of the same time frame as his first novel, but from the point of view of women. It's apparently my curse to be reading books on the Thursday afternoon commute home that make me want to cry. Okay okay, what made we want to cry the most at that point was the fact that a character had to choose only five books out of his library to take with him. I'm a little shallow like that. But I paid for that when I finished it up walking home and the last 30 pages really did bring tears to my eyes.
And I finished up An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro this morning. I really liked this book. It was very easy to sympathize with the narrator's confusion about what the society of post-war Japan expected from him. He had been a prominent artist before the war and had helped the war effort out of patriotism, but now it is this patriotism that is making it difficult for his daughter to marry. His sense of national pride has no place in occupied Japan and makes no sense to his colleagues, his former students, and his family. Plus there is Godzilla. Marginally, but still. Godzilla.