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Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami {Reviewed by STELLA}
Reading this collection of short stories is like watching a movie through a smeared lens, or like trying to listen to a conversation on the other side of a double-glazed window but being able to catch only fragments because there’s a party going on in the room you are in. My initial reaction to these stories made me think of peering down a jar made of thick glass – it’s all a bit opaque. Yet these are far from wishy-washy stories – they are precise, well-paced and ingenious. The reader is held at the exact point that keeps one moving on with increasing curiosity through this collection. Men Without Women is a wonderful observation of loneliness, of choosing aloneness over the pain of closeness. The men in Murakami’s stories often remain elusive, sometimes somewhat bland or hidden, avoiding pain or the risk of pain or disappointment, they make sure their connections with women are tenuous or remote. Despite this, Murakami cleverly draws you in - you have an emotional investment in these men’s tales. Loneliness and avoidance, along with reinvention are themes that run through the stories. The conversations that reveal the men’s relationship dilemmas are played out to the reader through an oblique association or a retelling by a third person, so the reader becomes an observer, a listener, nodding or shaking his/her head in agreement or surprise and always reading on, hankering for a bit more information. The reader is curious, and it is that same sense of curiosity that drives the actions of some of these men also. In the opening story, 'Drive My Car', Kafuku, a theatre actor, must find himself a chauffeur. His mechanic advises him to seek out a taciturn young woman, Misaki, who, it turns out, has the knack of listening well and asking the 'cut to the chase' questions that disarm Kafuku. He finds himself revealing his friendship with his (now deceased) wife's lover. His wife, he reveals, had often taken lovers and, out of curiosity, he strikes up a friendship with last of these after her death. During her lifetime, he had never queried her infidelities, preferring to imagine them not so, to accept her need for others, but as a widower he becomes curious and feels compelled to seek answers, answers that will reveal more about himself than about his wife’s behaviour. In 'Yesterday', a young man is avoiding everything like nothing else: avoiding his feelings, changing his history (he takes on a different dialect just to be different from everyone else), purposely failing his entrance exam, suggesting that his girlfriend date his most recent friend, our narrator of this tale. He’s avoiding what he sees as his pre-ordained life or a relationship that to anyone else makes perfect sense. His story is told through his new friend – a friendship that turns out to be fleeting in many ways, a vehicle only for an escape from connecting in any meaningful way with a young woman he has known most of his life. These tragi-comic stories have all the hallmarks of Murakami’s writing: fascinating observations, clever reflections that reference popular culture, a sense of the unusual in the usual humdrum of everyday existence, and characters that in isolation seem insignificant yet you can’t quite keep the whole cast from sneaking into your subconscious, and Dr.Tokai’s plea to another, “Who in the world am I?” in the haunting story 'An Independent Organ' from resonating well after you have shut the book. |
   | Gecko Press produce excellent books for younger readers, and they have a knack for finding those quirky tales that will make you smile and have children laughing, commiserating and cheering for their favourite story friends. An early chapter book series, with short chapters and plenty of pictures dotted throughout, is 'Detective Gordon', written by Ulf Nilsson and illustrated by Gitte Spee. The First Case introduces you to Detective Gordon, an old toad (he’s 19!) – the police chief of the forest. When Squirrel discovers that 204 of his 15,704 nuts have been stolen he is understandably upset and rushes through the forest to report the crime to the famous detective, insisting that his missing nuts must be found. Detective Gordon stands vigil at the scene of the crime, and, when a young mouse flits away with another nut, he makes to pursue her. Unfortunately, he’s frozen and stuck under a mound of snow. The young mouse digs him out, and then she is promptly taken to the police station, which is warm and snug, with a comfortable bed and plenty of cakes (Gordon has a penchant for a nice cup of tea and cake for every meal and between times too, and he sometimes (but don’t tell anyone) nods off). When the detective discovers the mouse has no name, no home and only stole the one nut due to extreme hunger, he takes pity on her, promptly names her Buffy and feeds and homes his new assistant. And then it's time to solve the crime! Squirrel’s becoming further agitated by his missing nuts and wants the criminals caught, but who is it? With snow falling and the tracks being covered, can the Chief and his new assistant catch the culprits? A lively and charming story with plenty of cake and lots of heart. There are three 'Detective Gordon' books, so far, to be enjoyed.
{REVIEWED BY STELLA}
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Bluets by Maggie Nelson {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us but because it draws us after it,” wrote Goethe. Maggie Nelson’s book, comprised of 240 short numbered, mostly beautifully written passages, describes her life-long affinity for and attraction to (what she calls ‘love’ for) the colour blue in all its literal and figurative senses, along with describing a period of mourning after the end of an intense relationship (also called ‘love’). She is, she says, not interested in learning “what has been real and what has been false, but what has been bitter, and what has been sweet.” To this end, and with the assistance of a range of co-opted “blue correspondents” reporting from art, literature and history, she intimates a field of nuanced responses to the colour blue, even though subjective colour response is almost impossible to communicate. Indeed, blue’s attraction is almost its absence of meaning, or its relief from meaning. “Blue has no mind. It is not wise, nor does it promise wisdom. It is beautiful, and despite what the poets and philosophers and theologians have said, I think beauty neither obscures truth nor reveals it. It leads neither towards justice nor away from it.” More than colour, blue is also merely colour, altering the cast of whatever it is seen upon. Although she attempts to draw correlations between the two (“I have found myself wondering if seeing a particularly astonishing shade of blue, for example, or letting a particularly potent person inside you, could alter you irrevocably, just to have seen or felt it. In which case, how does one know when, or how, to refuse? How to recover?”), there is an apparently unbridgeable gap in Nelson’s life, at least in the period treated in this book, between, on the one side, her intellectual passions and, on the other, her physical passions, between, as she would term it, thinking and fucking. Each side yearns towards the other, but encounters only the seductively nullifying colour of the void between them: blue. |
 | Zone by Mathias Énard {Reviewed by THOMAS} Enard's text is like a ball-bearing rolling around indefinitely inside a box over surfaces imprinted with every sort of information about the wider Mediterranean, from Barcelona to Beirut, and Algiers to Trieste (the "Zone"), past and present. Enard very effectively uses the necessarily one-directional movement of a sentence to sketch out, through endless repetition and variation, the multi-dimensional complexity of the political, cultural, historical, social and physical terrain of the entire Zone. The narrative, so to call it, takes the form of a single 520-page sentence perfectly capturing (or perfectly inducing the impression of) the thought processes of the narrator as he travels, in ‘real’ time by train from Milan to Rome bearing a briefcase of classified information on terrorists, arms dealers and war criminals to sell to the Vatican, speeding on amphetamines, fatigue and alcohol, in his memory through multistranded loops from his experiences, which include his involvement as a mercenary in Croatia and working for the French secret service as well as his string of personal relationships, and in even greater loops of knowledge and association that pertain to the places in which his experiences took place and the history associated therewith. Enard’s prose is so irresistible and so mesmeric that the reader is effortlessly borne along, its forward movement not at all inhibited by the encyclopedic effect of the loops, and the loops upon the loops, upon the strand of the narrator’s journey, nor by the pieces of painful psychological grit not yet abraded from the narrator’s personal history of involvement in the recent traumas of the Zone. By so seductively inhabiting the mind of his less-than-admirable narrator, a mind caught between obsessive focus and restless discursion, Enard provides a panoramic view of the political and personal violence that has shaped the history and cultures of the Zone, and also intimates the way in which an individual is caught irretrievably in the great web of their circumstances, submission to those circumstances being the price of travelling along them. |
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See You When I See You by Rose Lagercrantz and Eva Eriksson {Reviewed by STELLA}
Swedish duo, writer Rose Lagercrantz, who has a genius for telling a simple story well, for capturing the small yet significant moments in Dani’s world, and illustrator Eva Eriksson, with her delightful, evocative pen-and-ink drawings, bring us the fifth book in the 'Dani' series, a wonderful Gecko Press series about Dani, a young girl who will steal your heart and appeal to the younger children in your life. We first met Dani in the delightful My Happy Life, and since then we have walked alongside Dani as she has started school, made friends, found out about bullies, lost a friend, got into a few scrapes, been happy and sad, scared and worried. Now, in book five, Dani is well at home at school and she is off to the zoo for a class trip. The rules are clear, and if you get lost you must wait where you saw your class last. Well, Dani does get lost, but when a class from a different school runs by in an unruly manner, who should she see? Ella! Her best friend. And suddenly the dilemma, stay put or follow Ella? Of course, Ella has grand plans that involve them adventuring on their own, and headstrong Ella is difficult to resist. Dani is delightful, loyal to her friend, conscious of what she really should be doing, torn between the rules and what feels best. Alongside this innocent adventure, is another : Dani’s father, still recovering from an accident, is doing his best to get Dani to like Sadie, the new person in his life. Yet he’s not quite getting it right. And why is Ella so upset - why does she think their friendship is in danger? Can Dani make it better? The great thing about this series is the ability of the author to create a character like Dani who doesn’t always do the ‘right’ thing, but is always full of heart, with stories that children will relate to, focusing on their concerns and worries, while also creating a sense of joy and a little mischief. |
 | The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami {Reviewed by STELLA} With the new Murakami collection of stories on my reading pile, I just re-read The Strange Library, a charming illustrated novella about a boy who walks into a library and finds himself in a terrible situation. Wonderfully designed, this book is beautiful: a small hardback with images throughout, laid out perfectly with gorgeous endpapers and compelling details on each page. Yet it is the text that will take you on the best journey. You will open the book and not close it until you reach the end, delving further into the strange library alongside the boy, hoping for an outcome that will deliver you both back to safety. This is Murakami through and through, with its labyrinth of winding passages for feet and mind, and characters who are part-human (the bird girl and the sheep man), its sparseness of text which is somehow expansive, and a sense of unease in which we can place our own fears and apprehensions. Above all it is charming. |
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Phone by Will Self {Reviewed by THOMAS}
Will Self concludes the threesome of novels that comprise his modernist ‘Busner-Project’ with this 617-page bilge of words pumped straight out of the minds of his characters, notably psychiatrist Zack Busner, drifting into a dementia that weakens his grip on the present and delivers him to the breakfast bar of a Manchester hotel without his trousers, and Jonathan De’Ath, spy and secret lover of Colonel Gawain Thomas, about to lead his troops into Iraq. Self’s great achievement and presumed intention is to create, by the breaking and reconstitution of language, a remarkable study of how thought moves in the mind, looping, moving at any one moment on many parallel tracks, in cul-de-sac curlicues and feedback loops. Thought is constantly assailed by interference, often arising from the mechanisms of language itself but also from the instability of referents, and Self’s text is full of rather funny linguistic jokes and precise ironic observations, and is frequently every bit as irritating as your own thoughts. The identities of the narrators segue into one another, Busner’s actual world barely registering on, and having no clear delineation from, the loosely bundled and rebundled memories and urges that hardly pass as personhood, the distance between each stitch of ‘actual’ narrative containing great tangled loops and knots of mental thread. If our thoughts cannot define us, what can be the organising principle of our identities? (if we are to have identities). The mobile phone is a technological intermediary positioned on the membrane between the so-called internal and so-called external parts of our worlds, positioned, in other words, at the only place where identity could be located, a place of interplay and contention. Do we define our identities or can they only be defined for us by others? Not only do we outsource our memories, our communicating faculties, our (illusory) identities to our mobile phones, these mobile phones are linked, at barely a few steps remove, to all other mobile phones, and it could be said that all phones comprise one vast technorganism, a collective consciousness parasitic upon (and formative of) the thoughts and words of the flaffing and ludicrous individual consciousnesses it auxilliarises.
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 | A Million Windows by Gerald Murnane {Reviewed by THOMAS} A central concern in Murnane’s writing is the relationship between the fiction he writes and what he calls the ‘image world’ (he insists this is nothing to do with ‘imagination’ in the sense of making things up (he is, he says, incapable of making things up)), and, to a lesser yet strongly implied degree, the relationship between these two and the ‘actual world’, which he seems to regard as little more than an access point to (or of) the image world, and a place of frailties, disappointment and impermanent concerns. When Murnane describes the “chief character of a conjectured piece of fiction… a certain fictional male personage, a young man and hardly more than a boy” preferring the image-world relationship he had inside his head with a “certain young woman, hardly more than a girl” he sees every day in the railway carriage in which he travels home from school to the actual relationship he starts to develop (and soon abandons) with her after they eventually start to converse, he underscores a turning away, or, rather, a turning inward to the more urgent and intense image-world. Like some woefully under-recognised antipodean Proust, Murnane is fascinated by the mechanics of memory, which he sees as an operation of the image-world upon the actual, giving rise to the ‘true fictions’ that allow elements of the image-world to present themselves to awareness in a multiplicity of guises and versions. Murnane differs from many theorists of fiction in that he does not attribute primacy to the text but to the image-world to which the text gives access and which may contain, for instance, characters who have access, perhaps through their fictions (their fictional fictions), to image-worlds and characters inaccessible (at least as yet) to us. The million windows (from Henry James: “The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million”) are those of “a house of two or maybe three storeys”, inhabited by writers, all perhaps versions or potential versions of Murnane himself, who look out over endless plains as they engage in the act of writing fiction, or discuss doing so. The multiplicity of this process stands in relation to an unattainable absolute towards which memories and other fictions reach, or, rather, which reaches to us in the form of memories and other fictions. Murnane’s small pallet, his precisely modulated recurring images and his looping, delightfully pedantic style are at once fascinating, frustrating, soporific and revelatory. |
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A few years ago I read Vendela Vida’s The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty. It’s one of those books that stays with you, and at the time it had me thinking, laughing out loud and completely enthralled for a few days. Set in Morocco, the story opens with our protagonist on a plane avoiding someone – she doesn’t want to be noticed. We are given a glimpse of a life going awry. We know she is preparing to divorce, that she has a secret – a situation that upsets her that she can’t face. On arriving at her hotel her bag is stolen and suddenly she has no credit cards, no passport, and no ID. The police look into it and claim her bag has been recovered. They give her the black backpack – actually they insist she takes it! And then things start getting crazy. She has credit cards, a passport, but she’s taken on someone else’s identity. As she flips through a series of events in Casablanca, she moves through a variety of identities changing her name, her appearance and telling tales. Paranoia, a heightened sense of being found out, and a desire to keep running dictate her options. The reader is taken into her confidence, walking alongside her, sometimes amused, sometimes shocked at her risky and often audacious behaviour. But we can’t help but feel that we are part of this, kind of egging her on to take control, to be autonomous from her past life. This week, I read an earlier work from Vida, The Lovers. This time we are in Turkey, at a small rundown tourist village. Yvonne, recently widowed, goes back to this coastal area in an attempt to recall happier times. From the moment we enter Yvonne’s world we get a sense of foreboding, that something is slightly off-kilter. Arriving at Istanbul, the driver who is to meet her to take her to the holiday house isn’t there. Yvonne at once feels foolishly naive, but after a phone call she finds out she’s just been waiting on the ‘wrong’ side of the terminal. On meeting Ali, the owner of the holiday house, she begins to wonder if she has made a mistake in coming to Turkey. The village isn’t what it used to be and she can’t seem to find a connection to the happy memories of the past. The sudden death of her husband haunts her and her concerns about her adult children weigh her down. Determined to make the most of her holiday, she heads for the neighbouring village, where she strikes up a friendship with Ahmet, a boy she meets on the beach. Back at the holiday house, she is surprised to encounter Ali’s estranged wife, Ozmet, visiting. Ozmet and Yvonne, an unlikely match, confide in each other and Yvonne finds herself revealing her fears and sadness. As things seem to be improving for Yvonne, suddenly we are back with that sense of foreboding, a storm at sea, hostile villagers, a message from her addict daughter. These little unsettling triggers are setting the scene for an incident that will force Yvonne to confront herself and her sense of guilt. Vendela Vida is adept at placing the tragic and the comedic together with a subtly which is beguiling.
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{Review by STELLA}
First in the 'Red Abbey Chronicles' by Maria Turtschaninoff, is Maresi. Named after the narrator, this is an excellent novel for teens, especially if you like Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter or Ursula Le Guin. This is a captivating new series where feminism, mythology and magic meet. Maresi, to avoid poverty and certain starvation, is sent to the Abbey from her mountain home, knowing she is unlikely to ever see her family again. The Abbey is on an island where only women live and no men may enter. Fortified by both walls and magic, the Abbey was founded by a The First Women; it is productive, respected and feared. Life is ordered yet idyllic, with a code of conduct and study based on the mythology of the three goddesses, the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone. Maresi, now thirteen, has lived here for four years, savouring the order, the affection of the women, the companionship of the other novices and. most enchantingly, the wonderful library, when Jai arrives. Jai, inward and fearful, clings to Maresi, becoming her constant companion. Yet Jai brings danger. For Jai comes from a wealthy and powerful family in a society where women have little say in their lives and there is a strict code of conduct that must be adhered to. Jai is smuggled out of her home by her mother fearing that life won’t be safe for her daughter. But even the Abbey’s walls can not stop Jai’s vengeful father. When the men come, Maresi will witness chaos and carnage, but also the strength of the Sisters and a power and knowledge within herself that will harness all her best qualities: bravery, intelligence and compassion, as well as a darkness that will give her strength. The second book in the series, Naondel has just arrived and will be on my reading pile.
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99 Stories of God by Joy Williams {Reviewed by THOMAS}
Joy Williams is a devastating observer of social vacuities, yet shows great sympathy for the ways in which her characters attempt to shore up their dissolving realities, and a sharp eye for the tiny details which form the pivots upon which great weights of existence turn. A few years ago The Visiting Privilege introduced many of us to four decades’ worth of work from the underknown Williams, one of America’s finest short story writers, and 99 Stories of God shows her now becoming even sharper, stranger, more despairing and compassionate. The stories, few more than a page long, many a single paragraph or even a sentence, are each written such sharpness and lightness of touch that they draw blood unexpectedly and without pain. Sparely, flatly written, using the language of the newspaper report or the encyclopedia entry, trimmed utterly of superfluities, the stories read like jokes that make us cry instead of laugh, or like laments that make us laugh instead of cry. Comparison may be made with Thomas Bernhard’s The Voice Imitator, the scalpel-work of Lydia Davis or the Franz Kafka of the Zurau Aphorisms, but Williams’ sensibilities and turns of phrase are very much her own: she comes upon her subjects at unexpected angles, giving insight into the strangeness hung on the most ordinary of details (and, conversely, making the strangest of details seem necessary and familiar). The 99 stories have the texture of Biblical parables or Aesopian fables but they are not parables or fables due to the indeterminacy of their meanings (unless they are parables or fables which eschew lessons and morals and return the reader instead to the actual). The title of each follows the story and often sits at odds with the reader’s experience of the story, forcing a further realignment of sensibilities. Brevity, sparsity, clarity: these are distillates of novels, tragedies told as jokes, aqua vitae for anyone who reads, observes, thinks or writes. >> Read Williams on what writing is for. |
 | Flights by Olga Tokarczuk {Reviewed by THOMAS} When something is at rest it is only conceptually differentiated from the physical continuum of its location, but when moving its differentiation is confirmed by the changes in its relations with the actual. Likewise, humans have in them a restlessness, a will to change, a fluidity of identity and belonging that Olga Tokarczuk in her fine and interesting book Flights would see as our essential vitality, an indicator of civilisation so far as it is acknowledged and encouraged, otherwise a casualty of repression or of fear. “Barbarians stay put, or go to destinations to raid them. They do not travel.” Flights is an encyclopedic sort-of-novel, a great compendium of stories, fragments, historical anecdotes, description and essays on every possible aspect of travel, in its literal and metaphorical senses, and on the stagnation, mummification and bodily degradation of stasis. The book bristles with ideas, memorable images and playful treatments, for instance when Tokarczuk reframes the world as an array of airports, to which cities and countries are but service satellites and through which the world’s population is constantly streaming, democratised by movement, no preparation either right or wrong in this zone of civilised indeterminacy. To create a border, to restrict a movement is to suppress life, to preserve a corpse. Tokarczuk’s fragments are of various registers and head in different directions, but several strands reappear through the book, such as the story of a father and young son searching for a mother who disappears on holiday on a small Croatian island. Historical imaginings include an account of the journey of Chopin’s heart from Paris to Poland following his death, the ‘biography’ of the ‘discoverer’ of the achilles tendon, and an account of the peripatetic sect constantly on the move to elude the Devil. For Tokarczuk, we find ourselves, if we find ourselves at all, somewhere in the interplay between impulse and constraint. |
