This is the second book I read by Palahniuk, after I was amazed by Fight Club, both the book and the movie, so I looked for more of his work. This book is quite more specific and disturbing than Fight Club, but follows more or less the same topics, as all Palahniuk's books are. The main character is a sex addict who is also a son of a single mother who spent her entire life in jail for different acts of social terrorism and kidnapping. Palahniuk describes the sex addiction working groups and the people who come there in great detail, but with superfluous gory details which actually detract from the strength of the book. I prefer Murakami's subtle and metaphorical description of the greatest evils and deeds. Palahniuk actually succeeds in making even mundane actions, like flossing of teeth, into disgusting gore-fests, complete with description of rotten chunks of food and bleeding gums.
Victor Mancini, the main character, chokes on food in restaurants and has people save him; people who become his life-long sponsors because he gave them the pleasure and meaning of saving another person's life. He also works as an actor in a pioneer fortress nearby and describes the drug use and debauchery that goes on there. Eventually his mother dies and the doctor that was going to save her turns to be just another patient. Victor is arrested and his diaries of step 4 in SA are discovered, so all his dirtiest deeds are being read aloud in the police station. He tries to choke to die, but is saved again by the policemen. It becomes a metaphore for his entire life: choking, but unable to die.
Friday, September 2, 2011
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
"Norwegian Wood" by Haruki Murakami
This is, hands down, one of the most beautiful love stories ever written, in the history of humanity, rivaling Romeo and Juliet. The fantastic elements from other Murakami books are almost completely absent. Murakami said he wanted to write an "ordinary" story. It propelled him to a superstar in his native Japan upon publication and much to his surprise. A movie was made in 2010 with Kiko Daniel as Midori but a 39-year old actress was cast as Naoko? That makes no sense, though I haven't seen the movie yet. And I don't think I want to see it by myself. It would be too much to bear. The book ends sadly and happily, as most Murakami's books, but it is a tear-jerker, make no mistake.
The book depicts several years in the life of Toru Watanabe, an 18 year old student in Tokyo, who becomes almost 21 by the end of the book. The story contrasts the beautiful but so fragile, physically and emotionally, Naoko, and the vivacious, honest, down-to-earth and full of life Midori, the other love interest of Toru. Watanabe is a witness of the student protests in 1969 in Tokyo, as the book happens '69-'71. Toru is torn between Naoko, who is in mental assylum and the former girlfriend of his best friend Kizuke who killed himself at age 17, and Midori, his fellow student from drama class, who has been forced to grow up ahead of her years because of family disasters.
The emotional life of Toru is depicted with such honesty, emotion and depth, one cannot help but feel it deeply and identify with the character who seem to take a very philosophical view to all the terrible things he has to go through and all the decisions life forces him to make. Toru Watanabe is very alike a young Toru Okada from the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Toru's college friend is Kasagawa, who is very smart and learned, studying diplomacy, but has very little scruples left. Kasagawa brings Toru around Tokyo to hunt girls for one night stands, and Toru is initially excited but after 7-8 times, he gives up, feeling the loneliness only growing. he breaks all connections with Kasagawa when, several years after the book events, he is completely unemotional towards the suicide of his college girlfriend, who went through so much for him, and whom Toru was secretly liking.
An amazing, honest, human, real book, about real people and real emotions. No pretense, no attitude, no high-brow, just emotions and people, the way they really are.
The book depicts several years in the life of Toru Watanabe, an 18 year old student in Tokyo, who becomes almost 21 by the end of the book. The story contrasts the beautiful but so fragile, physically and emotionally, Naoko, and the vivacious, honest, down-to-earth and full of life Midori, the other love interest of Toru. Watanabe is a witness of the student protests in 1969 in Tokyo, as the book happens '69-'71. Toru is torn between Naoko, who is in mental assylum and the former girlfriend of his best friend Kizuke who killed himself at age 17, and Midori, his fellow student from drama class, who has been forced to grow up ahead of her years because of family disasters.
The emotional life of Toru is depicted with such honesty, emotion and depth, one cannot help but feel it deeply and identify with the character who seem to take a very philosophical view to all the terrible things he has to go through and all the decisions life forces him to make. Toru Watanabe is very alike a young Toru Okada from the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Toru's college friend is Kasagawa, who is very smart and learned, studying diplomacy, but has very little scruples left. Kasagawa brings Toru around Tokyo to hunt girls for one night stands, and Toru is initially excited but after 7-8 times, he gives up, feeling the loneliness only growing. he breaks all connections with Kasagawa when, several years after the book events, he is completely unemotional towards the suicide of his college girlfriend, who went through so much for him, and whom Toru was secretly liking.
An amazing, honest, human, real book, about real people and real emotions. No pretense, no attitude, no high-brow, just emotions and people, the way they really are.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
"Wild Sheep Chase" by Haruki Murakami
On the heels of the 'Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' which, although starting slow, by the last few chapters it became my new top-favorite book, the "Wild Sheep Chase' is more organized, more 'ordinary' if that can be said about any Murakami's work, and definitely more accessible, although not as rewarding at the end. It is the third tome in the "The Rat Trilogy" and although "Dance, Dance, Dance" continues with the same characters, the plot is completely different.
Again, the book starts somewhere in the middle of the story, and then each chapter jumps around the past and future to slowly start forming the background story. The book start with the unnamed narrator being left by his wife of 4 years who had had an affair with his friend for the last year. Almost all the characters in the book are unnamed or referred by labels and nick names. The narrator is a partner in a small advertising agency in Tokyo, however all hell breaks loose when he publishes a picture of sheep that his friend "The Rat" sends him from Hokaido. He is contacted by a powerful right-wing political figure and set on a wild sheep chase, from which his life will be forever changed.
The narrator meets his new girlfriend few months after his divorce. She is a call-girls, a translator, an ear-model and also somewhat psychic, at least when relating to narrator's sheep chase. Like most female characters in Murakami's books, she is quirky, says strange things, lives life by strange principles and dissapears from the narrator's life unceremoniously before the end of the book, explained in only a couple of sentences. The narration is split between Tokyo and remote parts of Hokaido. At the end it ends in anti-climax, nothing really happens or gets resolved. The narrator goes back to his old life, the politician dies, the Rat dies (in a very weird, post-modern way), and everything goes on as if the sheep-chase never happened.
Again, the book starts somewhere in the middle of the story, and then each chapter jumps around the past and future to slowly start forming the background story. The book start with the unnamed narrator being left by his wife of 4 years who had had an affair with his friend for the last year. Almost all the characters in the book are unnamed or referred by labels and nick names. The narrator is a partner in a small advertising agency in Tokyo, however all hell breaks loose when he publishes a picture of sheep that his friend "The Rat" sends him from Hokaido. He is contacted by a powerful right-wing political figure and set on a wild sheep chase, from which his life will be forever changed.
The narrator meets his new girlfriend few months after his divorce. She is a call-girls, a translator, an ear-model and also somewhat psychic, at least when relating to narrator's sheep chase. Like most female characters in Murakami's books, she is quirky, says strange things, lives life by strange principles and dissapears from the narrator's life unceremoniously before the end of the book, explained in only a couple of sentences. The narration is split between Tokyo and remote parts of Hokaido. At the end it ends in anti-climax, nothing really happens or gets resolved. The narrator goes back to his old life, the politician dies, the Rat dies (in a very weird, post-modern way), and everything goes on as if the sheep-chase never happened.
"Pigs Have Wings" by P.G. Wodehouse
Recommended by many as a great intro to Wodehouse's work, this book is a classic example of English humor. Although Jeeves, Wodehouse's most famous creation, does not figure in the book, we have a close surrogate in the buttler Beech, but even more in the figure of Galahad Gully Treepwood , the brother of Lord Elmsworth, the pig-breeder and competitor of Baron Parslow. The plot is quite silly: two lesser British nobles are vying for the prize of the fattest pig, and when a few resourceful buttlers, siblings and servants get involved, along with a few romantic subplots, it becomes a chaos of miscommunication and misplanning.
The book uses lots of names in the beginning and it is somewhat difficult to follow all these British antiquated names, but by the middle of the book, one gets used to them. There is plenty of humor, but it is the British kind, tongue-in-cheek and dead-pan being ever-present. Overall an interesting book and a good introduction to Wodehouse's works, but a book about Jeeves would be a better way to get to know his opus.
The book uses lots of names in the beginning and it is somewhat difficult to follow all these British antiquated names, but by the middle of the book, one gets used to them. There is plenty of humor, but it is the British kind, tongue-in-cheek and dead-pan being ever-present. Overall an interesting book and a good introduction to Wodehouse's works, but a book about Jeeves would be a better way to get to know his opus.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
"Foundation and Earth" by Isaac Asimov
This is the last book of the foundation series, timeline-wise, although not the last one written, as Asimov wrote two prequels after this volume, which tie the Foundation series even more tightly into the Robot series, to the level that Hari Seldon's wife was a robot. It is basically a continuation of the same story from the previous book, where the exiled counsellor, Golan Trevize, is trying to figure out if he made the right decision when he gave his nod to Gaia and eventually to Galaxia (in the previous volume "Foundation's Edge"), and withdrew it from both the Foundation and the Second Foundation, leaving their leaders furious. Trevize now embarks on galaxy-wide search for Earth, the mythical 'origin' planet of the entire human race, now populating the entire galaxy. He finds that every reference to Earth is carefully deleted from any and all record keeping systems of the known universe, but then he discovers the "Spacer" worlds and coordinates for three of them.
In this way Asimov ties the Foundation series with his Robot series, which is in a much closer future alternate universe, and originally was unconnected. He further completes that tie when in the last chapter of the book reveals that the secretive 'man in the shadow' was no one else but Daneel Olivaw, the most famous protagonist of Asimov's 'Robot' stories. On the three Spacer world they visit, the crew is always exposed to danger which is usually only escaped by the 'deus-ex-machinae' device of 'Bliss' the representative of Gaia on the ship, who is also accidentally a very sexy woman, in a physical relationship with the third crew member J. Pelorath, a mythologist.
The book is less of a character-based novel than a barely-disguised scientific discourse in futurism of the highest sort, about the future of the entire human race, and it shows in cold logic that this is the only viable way of long-term (and long-term here meaning millions, even billions of years) survival for the entire race and life in general, in a case where the human race is the only sentient race in the galaxy, even in the universe, though the other galaxies are irrelevant in Asimov's fiction. At moments the book reads very slow, as the flow is adulterated by huge tracts of non-sequitur monologues, and there is not much of the character drama for which the atmosphere of the original Foundation Trilogy was famous. Both this and the previous volume won awards, don't get me wrong, but this might have been more like tribute to Asimov's universe, than to the readability of the tomes at hand. Ultimately, a great conclusion and tie-in with Asimov's other series, but definitely not for the beginner in Asimov's universe.
In this way Asimov ties the Foundation series with his Robot series, which is in a much closer future alternate universe, and originally was unconnected. He further completes that tie when in the last chapter of the book reveals that the secretive 'man in the shadow' was no one else but Daneel Olivaw, the most famous protagonist of Asimov's 'Robot' stories. On the three Spacer world they visit, the crew is always exposed to danger which is usually only escaped by the 'deus-ex-machinae' device of 'Bliss' the representative of Gaia on the ship, who is also accidentally a very sexy woman, in a physical relationship with the third crew member J. Pelorath, a mythologist.
The book is less of a character-based novel than a barely-disguised scientific discourse in futurism of the highest sort, about the future of the entire human race, and it shows in cold logic that this is the only viable way of long-term (and long-term here meaning millions, even billions of years) survival for the entire race and life in general, in a case where the human race is the only sentient race in the galaxy, even in the universe, though the other galaxies are irrelevant in Asimov's fiction. At moments the book reads very slow, as the flow is adulterated by huge tracts of non-sequitur monologues, and there is not much of the character drama for which the atmosphere of the original Foundation Trilogy was famous. Both this and the previous volume won awards, don't get me wrong, but this might have been more like tribute to Asimov's universe, than to the readability of the tomes at hand. Ultimately, a great conclusion and tie-in with Asimov's other series, but definitely not for the beginner in Asimov's universe.
Friday, June 17, 2011
"The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (ねじまき鳥クロニクル Nejimaki-dori Kuronikuru?)" by Haruki Murakami.
If I died yesterday, I would not have been richer for the shattering experience (in a good way!) that is the reading of "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" by Mr. Murakami! Well, I am dramatizing, of course, as it took me almost three weeks to finish the audio book (with AMAZING voice acting by a SINGLE person, exactly the way I prefer it. It is an audio book, not radio-drama), but this book is becoming my new favorite book and that hasn't happened since "Cien Anos de Soledad" replaced Tolkien about 10 years ago, and Tolkien replaced "Against the Fall of Night" about 7 years before that.
This book is a masterpiece of modern literature, seamlessly fusing all previous genres, and jumping and combining genres in a seemingly unintelligible jumble, just to let the reader realize, in an emotion catharsis, that all that is really not important anyway, and art is somewhere beyond all that, beyond form, right into the middle of the "thing in itself" to paraphrase Kant. Without respect of linearity, whether of time or place, Mr. Murakami still weaves an irresistible web of characters and events that seem so real, one could almost swear one already knows them. Starting with such seemingly trivial passages like several pages on cooking noodles and making coffee, the life of the main protagonist, Toru Okada, an educated, intelligent, but lacking ambition, man in his 30s, becomes more and more weird with every passing page culminating in, well, do we dare say it, well, Mr. Okada saved the World in a way.
Mr. Okada's wife Kumiko dissapears, and the entire book is mainly concerned with Mr. Okada trying to find her and get her back. His brother-in-law Noboru Wataya is a powerful politician, who seems to have suddenly catapulted in power, but who hides a terrible dark family secret which threatens the very existence of his sister, Kumiko, just like driving their youngest sister into a suicide years ago. Throw in there clairvoyant characters named after Mediterranean islands, Malta and Creta Kano; fashion designers who "fit" something evil out of people and are named Nutmeg and Cinnamon Asakawa, mother and son, and finally the diabolical Mr. Ishikawa, a disturbing charicature of a man, queerly resembling a familiar from the medieval magical grimoires. Finally, the entire thread is held by an underaged teenage girl Mai Kasahara who through letters and personal visits, helps make sense of Mr.Wind-Up Bird's world, as she calls Mr. Okada.
This book is a masterpiece of world literature and true world heritage, the heritage of the entire human race. It is a privilege to enjoy Mr. Murakami's book and I wish that pleasure upon many people to come!
This book is a masterpiece of modern literature, seamlessly fusing all previous genres, and jumping and combining genres in a seemingly unintelligible jumble, just to let the reader realize, in an emotion catharsis, that all that is really not important anyway, and art is somewhere beyond all that, beyond form, right into the middle of the "thing in itself" to paraphrase Kant. Without respect of linearity, whether of time or place, Mr. Murakami still weaves an irresistible web of characters and events that seem so real, one could almost swear one already knows them. Starting with such seemingly trivial passages like several pages on cooking noodles and making coffee, the life of the main protagonist, Toru Okada, an educated, intelligent, but lacking ambition, man in his 30s, becomes more and more weird with every passing page culminating in, well, do we dare say it, well, Mr. Okada saved the World in a way.
Mr. Okada's wife Kumiko dissapears, and the entire book is mainly concerned with Mr. Okada trying to find her and get her back. His brother-in-law Noboru Wataya is a powerful politician, who seems to have suddenly catapulted in power, but who hides a terrible dark family secret which threatens the very existence of his sister, Kumiko, just like driving their youngest sister into a suicide years ago. Throw in there clairvoyant characters named after Mediterranean islands, Malta and Creta Kano; fashion designers who "fit" something evil out of people and are named Nutmeg and Cinnamon Asakawa, mother and son, and finally the diabolical Mr. Ishikawa, a disturbing charicature of a man, queerly resembling a familiar from the medieval magical grimoires. Finally, the entire thread is held by an underaged teenage girl Mai Kasahara who through letters and personal visits, helps make sense of Mr.Wind-Up Bird's world, as she calls Mr. Okada.
This book is a masterpiece of world literature and true world heritage, the heritage of the entire human race. It is a privilege to enjoy Mr. Murakami's book and I wish that pleasure upon many people to come!
Saturday, June 4, 2011
"Xenocide" by Orson Scott Card
This is the third book in the "Ender Tetralogy", which was the original envisioning of the series (which got much expanded afterwards and pretty much turned into a franchise). The original envisioning was a trilogy actually, "Xenocide" and the following book "Children of the Mind" supposing to be one volume, but it became too lengthy for one book, so it got split into two. "Xenocide" is the only Ender Tetralogy book where the story doesn't end naturally on the last page, but actually ends in mid-action. "Xenocide" is a very ambitious book, almost like a space opera of the likes of Dan Simmons or Ron Hubbard. There are multiple settings (on two planets) stories, plots, twists, etc.
The Starway Congress fleet is advancing towards Lusitania with the MDD device on-board, while Ender is trying to get the piggies (pecaninos) and the hive queen off the planet before Jane is turned off for the most part. A genetically enhanced, but OCD_controlled humans on the planet called Path are much more intelligent than normal humans, and are used by Congress to advance their aims. Path is populated by Chinese, and lives in a very traditional, patriarchal, class society. Meanwhile on Lusitania, human scientists are trying to develop a form of the Descolada which will give Pecaninos their life processes, but will not be aggressive and harmless to humans. They call this new virus the "Recolada" but it only gets created during the first faster-than-light experimental trip.
Eventually Jane with the help of Ender, Grego and some insights from the Hive Queen finds a way how to travel faster than light and pretty much instantenously to anywhere in the universe. However, as a consequence of the first trip, Peter and Valentine, as they were in Ender's mind were created in flesh and blood. The book ends with Peter bringing a virus that will cure the people of Path of their OCD. The solution to all plots is in the next and final book of the "Ender Tetralogy" - "Children of the Mind".
The Starway Congress fleet is advancing towards Lusitania with the MDD device on-board, while Ender is trying to get the piggies (pecaninos) and the hive queen off the planet before Jane is turned off for the most part. A genetically enhanced, but OCD_controlled humans on the planet called Path are much more intelligent than normal humans, and are used by Congress to advance their aims. Path is populated by Chinese, and lives in a very traditional, patriarchal, class society. Meanwhile on Lusitania, human scientists are trying to develop a form of the Descolada which will give Pecaninos their life processes, but will not be aggressive and harmless to humans. They call this new virus the "Recolada" but it only gets created during the first faster-than-light experimental trip.
Eventually Jane with the help of Ender, Grego and some insights from the Hive Queen finds a way how to travel faster than light and pretty much instantenously to anywhere in the universe. However, as a consequence of the first trip, Peter and Valentine, as they were in Ender's mind were created in flesh and blood. The book ends with Peter bringing a virus that will cure the people of Path of their OCD. The solution to all plots is in the next and final book of the "Ender Tetralogy" - "Children of the Mind".
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