Yan Geling is one of China’s most promising contemporary writers. Earlier this year, while I lay in bed recovering from an a bad case of the flu, I did a lot of reading – and I happened to have two of her novels on my bedside table: The Flowers of War (also: 13 Flowers of Nanjing) and The Uninvited (also: The Banquet Bug).

That these books differ so greatly in terms of not only content, but voice, style, characterization just proves that Yan is a force to be reckoned with. The Flowers of War is a slim, spare novel – elegantly written, poignant, and attempts to capture a difficult time in Chinese history: the Japanese occupation/WWII. In this particular novel, Yan keeps the writing pared back and minimal in order not to sentimentalize or overdo what are potentially some horrifying scenes.

It is completely unlike the gory, graphic [non-fictional] account of the war by Iris Chang (The Nanjing Massacre). In a way, exploring the brutality of war is not her primary motive; rather, she uses the era as a backdrop to tell the stories of the ‘flowers of Nanjing’. Yan steers the reader away from the bloodshed by creating an enclosed world within an abandoned church, where a group of stranded schoolgirls are being looked after an American priest, Father Engelmann. Things become interesting when thirteen courtesans climb across the walls, seeking refuge in the church. (Side note, but I also highly recommend Zhang Yi Mou’s film version, starring Christopher Bale as an Oskar Schindler-type figure, who becomes an unwilling saviour for these schoolgirls/courtesans).

The Univited, on the other hand, is a tour de force through the corrupt, rambunctious, often dazzlingly dynamic paradoxes of modern China.  I would’ve been very dismissive and skeptical of Yan’s writing ability had I not picked up this second novel. It follows the life of a disgruntled factory worker who takes on a fake identity as a journalist in order to attend state-funded banquets.

Here, being unrestrained by a ‘heavy’ topic which has historical significance for thousands of Chinese citizens who suffered during the wartime era and their descendants, Yan takes on a playful approach, indulging us with decadent descriptions of gourmet dishes and taking her characters through a world spun with irony and black humour.

Despite this lighter touch, and the wry comedy of it all, The Uninvited pokes fingers into some pressing concerns about what some would call the disease of contemporary China – i.e. the rat race for wealth/prosperity and development, and the moral vacuum at the heart of it all.

We can try to understand China by keeping up with the news/media, and all the speculation by Western intellectuals (Martin Jacques, Fareed Zakaria, yeah we’ve heard it all), but perhaps we should also be listening to the voices coming from China itself. It doesn’t always need to be so politicized. There’s a lot to be learnt from the nation’s literature if you only look closely enough.

How wrong I was to have neglected madeleines, and how wrong I was to have been intimidated by Proust. Swann’s Way is definitely a little nuttier than I expected. It’s every bit as meandering and off-tangent and wildly dreamy as I thought it would be, but there’s an irony; a real barbed wire sharp edge to Proust’s voice underneath all the musings. And oh God, how the musings go on. I’m just about nearing the end of Combray, the first section, and if I try to recollect what I’ve been reading about, it’s just really hard – to remember exactly what went on. There is no (detectable) solid form to this thing. And the characters, they’re so bizarre. The world they inhabit is like a madhouse, as much a work of surrealism and farce as The Master and Margarita in a way. The characters just don’t make sense; in real life, they’d be absolute caricatures of themselves, but they just work. They’re utterly believable and loveable.

Do I love it? Yes. Is it crazy? Completely. He’s just nuts. Am I going to read the next one? Probably! Why? Because it’s not sappy and sentimental, as you would assume from a mere ‘summary’ of the plot of this book – if one can even presume to summarize this baggy, loose-ended monster of a novel. There’s more to Proust that meets the eye, and I’m determined to get to the bottom of it all. Swann’s Way is really only the tip of the iceberg. Next up: Within a Budding Grove.

Mo Yan weaves together a tale of  ’brutal honesty’ and sheer poetry in his story of the garlic-farming peasants of Paradise County. The novel centres around the arrest of Gao Ma, Gao Yang and Fourth Aunt, who have been imprisoned for participating in a mass riot against the local government. But interspersed with this main narrative is the tragic love between Gao Ma and Jinju, as well as the stories of former landlords and the struggling garlic farmers, based on the villagers of Mo Yan’s hometown in Shandong Province.

I have to say that this was a welcome respite from the Proust’s dreamy voice/narrative style in Swann’s Way. Mo Yan is sharp, in both his language and observations, and such a powerful writer. Having formed an image of him as the Chinese Communist Party’s poster boy, I was surprised to see that he writes with such unnerving frankness. He never once shies away from telling the difficult truths, nor does he sugarcoat the actions of corrupt government officials. Several of his books, including this one, are banned in the mainland because of their non-government approved stance on certain issues.

While (as with Barnes’ recent Booker winning The Sense of an Ending), I don’t want to detract from the merits of this book by making this post about politics, I want to just point out that Mo Yan is hardly a friend of the CCP for “failing to speak out” about the imprisonment of writers such as Liu Xiaobo. It’s like the P. G. Wodehouse and the Nazi radio broadcast all over again. I’m not the one to say whether he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize or not. But let’s not allow some of his poor choices or his personal right to act or not act in a certain situation to discolour our view of his writing itself.

For instance, Salman Rushdie has dismissed Mo Yan as a “patsy” for the Chinese government for not speaking out, but do we all need to conform to Rushdie’s standards? He might think he has the right to point fingers at others so easily, because he’s had his life put on the line as a result of one of his works. We can’t deny that Rushdie has been through a hell of a lot for the freedom of literature he believes in. But would Rushdie himself, having the benefit of hindsight, choose to publish The Satanic Verses all over again, knowing the ordeal he’d have to face – or want anyone to face a similar ordeal? We aren’t talking about signing any old petition against whaling or something – censorship and freedom of speech is a deeply political issue in China. And Mo Yan has the right to choose whether or not he wants to get himself deeply involved in those things as a writer. 

Key word: writer.

I thought a writer’s primary role was to write. Anyone who has read Mo Yan’s work closely will find it hard to accuse him of being a ‘patsy’. Knowing that this generation of writers have emerged from a culture of fear and persecution during the Cultural Revolution, it’s a big step that writers are gaining the courage to write with honesty and conviction again. There is a vibrant literary scene in China at the moment – Yan Lian-ke, Mo Yan, Yan Geling – all these writers are speaking out against social injustice/corruption. Let’s not crush that momentum by pointing fingers. We in the West are too hasty, always expecting things to transform the way we want them. Why isn’t China a democracy yet? Why is there such a wealth divide in China? Why are artists and intellectuals still imprisoned for speaking out? Well, guess what? Change doesn’t happen overnight. You have to look at the bigger picture to see that yes, there is a lot happening.

“A writer should express criticism and indignation at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature, but we should not use one uniform expression,” Mo said in a speech at the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair, “Some may want to shout on the street, but we should tolerate those who hide in their rooms and use literature to voice their opinions.” Mo Yan is not a human rights activist, he’s not a spokesperson for some liberation movement – he’s a writer. And he’s done his job by writing powerful works about injustice and the plight of ordinary people in contemporary China. In his own words,  ”For a writer, the best way to speak is by writing. You will find everything I need to say in my works. Speech is carried off by the wind; the written word can never be obliterated.” I, for one, agree with him.

Blogland is a little like Narnia: once you stray away from it all, you have no sense of how much time has passed when you return. Though three months is hardly my longest hiatus, it’s still a long time to have been away from books. And in this time, I’ve been mulling over things and concocted up this crazy idea that I’d like to tackle Proust this year. It’s crazy, because honestly speaking, I have less and less patience for books which require concentration. It’s not so much that I resent the effort, but I simply don’t have time to devote hours and hours to reading anymore, and I know I’ll get stuck somewhere along the way. I’ll probably put it down, get back to it a few weeks later, then lose interest and not pick it up again. As I did with Middlemarch. And with Portrait of a Lady. Speaking of that particular Henry James novel, I’ve stuck it onto my February reading list too. Seems I’m a stickler for torturing myself.

Inspired by the film Julie & Julia, I want to try get through one book every two months – which may not seem very ambitious at all, only that as we all know very well, Remembrance of Things Past (a title more reflective of its nature than Time Regained) is a dreamy, hazy, meandering sort of thing. And judging with my past experiences with stream-of-consciousness writing, narratives that are dreamy and hazy and meandering actually require more effort. You’ve got to catch the wave, and then ride with it, keeping with the rhythm, and once you lose that rhythm, you’re just lost. Lost. Not lost in the pleasant sense of the word either. Lost, as in you’re swimming against the current and trying so hard not to drown that you can’t make any sense of what’s going on around you. Anyway, no point fretting about that now. It’s too late to regret anything, because I’ve just ordered my copy of the first volume, Swann’s Way - in the Moncrieff translation published by Vintage Classics. Wish me luck! :)

Everyone seems to be making good progress so far! Rachel recently finished Gogol’s short story, The Nose, which she adored. I think I’d also be interested in reading this after I’m done with Dead Souls, because Nabokov actually goes into some detail about Gogol’s obsession with noses in his critical biography. Claire has also been captivated by Gogol’s writing in Dead Souls. Alex in Leeds is reading two works of Russian literature which she hasn’t specified yet – I think one may be The Russian Gentleman by Sergei Askakov. Meanwhile, she looks on back on her experience of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which she finished in July of this year. Alex has also written a fantastic review of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived a Woman… (Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby), stories which she describes as being ‘dystopian fairytales’.

These stories are delicate but brutal, intriguingly dream-like and frequently have a twist or unexpected change in tone that makes them truly ‘fantastic’. There is a cruel streak running through them. They are potently bleak. They are, to some readers I imagine, beautiful.

Set frequently in a place the author calls ‘orchards of unusual possibilities’ (which is a wonderfully Soviet euphemism), the subjects range from the eponymous woman who tries to kill her neighbour’s baby to ghostly meetings in the woods, from deadly epidemics to post-apocalyptic homesteaders. The collection is broken into four sections – Songs of the Eastern Slavs, Allegories, Requiems and Fairy Tales – and they were written over a thirty year period, deeply rooting them both in the ancient mythology and modern history of Russia.

A character experiencing the start of starvation in one story serves as a great example of this – starving in a fictional post-apocalyptic future, living like many of the peasants who died in the all-too-real brutality of the Stalinist era and yet very firmly reminding the reader of darker, older fairy tales. A matryoshka doll of myth, history and imagination calmly included as a bit-part character in a much bigger story.

Sounds absolutely amazing, and I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy!

November’s been a surprisingly busy month for me. But I guess that’s life, it’s never what you expect! Still, I’ve managed to trudge through The Master and Margarita (more thoughts on that later…) and am now halfway through Dead Souls, which is fantastic stuff. Also halfway through Nikolai Gogol, by Vladimir Nabokov, which is extremely well-written but probably only readable because I’m going through Dead Souls at the same time. On its own, it’s a tad dry.

In other reading endeavours, I haven’t been doing too well. I’ve been quite unwell lately, and so I find it hard to concentrate for long periods of time, and can’t seem to commit myself to a single book either. I’ve just been flitting half-heartedly through different things without really finding anything I like.

And so (sorry Claire), I’ve decided I just can’t finish Wolf Hall. It’s just a chore at the moment, because I couldn’t care less about it. Knowing my habit of eventually coming back to books I can’t finish, I’ll probably read it at some later stage. Okay, actually, the real reason is because it’s a library loan and I’ve been so negligent with returning the books that my library card has been cancelled. Haha! So I need to go and sort that out, and unless there’s a lot of goodwill on their side, there’s not much chance of them renewing those books for me…

After re-reading Norwegian Wood (yes, that’s my own copy) for Bellezza’s readalong, I’ll probably stick my nose into something on my shelf that I haven’t read yet – Moby Dick, or some of the Chinese classics maybe.

Belatedly narrowing down my reading choices from the Booker longlist (I never like to restrict myself to just the shortlist):

• Skios, Michael Frayn – seems like a good read for summer. I’m partial to things set on the Greek islands, and I don’t even mind if they’re twee or or a bit cheesy (like Mamma Mia). The cover does make it look like supermarket chick-lit, but I’m trying to get over my atrocious habit of literally judging books by their covers.
• The Garden of Evening Mists, Tan Twan Eng - fo sho, the type of book I enjoy and adore and will possibly be disappointed by, but I really doubt it at this stage, because it looks wonderful! (I’m already raving)
• Swimming Home, Deborah Levy. Heard some fantastic things about this one. Sounds a bit like a modern Tender is the Night, though perhaps it won’t be as glamorous as the jazz age world Fitzgerald paints.
• Narcopolis, Jeet Thayil – some readers I know have snidely dismissed this as the ‘token’ Indian novel, but come on people! If it’s a good book, it’s a good book so just give it a chance. Perhaps this also applies to this year’s winner, which I’m really just dubious about.

This brings me to my next point. Yes, you may have noticed that a certain prominent book by a certain prominent author is missing; namely, the winner, Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel. But I’ve decided not to read it, because dear Booker judges, I didn’t like your 2009 choice Wolf Hall that much! And (somewhat childishly, I know) I’ve decided not to even give the second book a chance.

Today is the first day of Russian Reading Month! I hope you’re all ready to crack open your copies of Dostoevsky or Nabokov or Gogol. Right now, my copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s Nikolai Gogol is sitting on my desk next to a glass of frothy, freshly squeezed orange juice (it’s nearing summer here, for all you Northern Hemispherers), and I plan on digging in as soon as I’m done writing this post.

I’m not sure if I would classify this particular work as ‘Russian Literature’, seeing as it’s written in English. Some would even go so far as to call Nabokov a quintessentially American writer, and not a Russian one (Nabokov considered himself a ‘cosmopolite’, and noted once in an interview that he was a “perfectly normal trilingual child”). But since this work is a critical study and biography of the great Russian poet-novelist Gogol, I’m reading it as a sort of prelude to Dead Souls. I really know so little about Gogol, and I’ve only ever read one story by him (‘The Overcoat’), so I’m hoping this book will help me along.

Over the next month, I’ll also be tackling Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita and of course, Dead Souls itself. For all of you who are joining in, I won’t really impose any schedules on you, just write reviews or thoughts at a pace comfortable to you, and link them to me so I can create round-up posts.

As for short stories, I’ve got two links for you today: Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades and Gogol’s The Overcoat, which I think serve as a good introduction to Russian shorts.

And finally – a weekly meme, just for fun! Open to everyone, not just those participating in Russian Reading Month :)

What has your relationship with Russian literature been like thus far? What are your expectations for the following month – and perhaps your expectations towards the novel/writer you’ve chosen to read?

Enjoy!

Photo credit: a screenshot from Tran Anh Hung’s picturesque film rendition of ‘Norwegian Wood’

1970s Japan. Love, youth, revolution, The Beatles. A painful shadow of death.

Won’t you join us for your first taste of Murakami, or simply a re-read of Norwegian Wood, over at Dolce Bellezza?

How abysmally late is this post? I had it in my Drafts folder (almost) ready to publish on Sunday, but it completely slipped my mind because I had such a chaotic weekend. Sunday Salon on Wednesday! Hah.

To me, it seems to be the case that these sorts of books never stray far from the same generic themes: cultural divide within migrant families, usually between the first-generation children, and the second generation parents; identity crises, the hardships of their new homes (see previous thoughts on this here).

It’s not that I’m insensitive to these sorts of struggles, being a second-generation Korean Australian myself. It just seems as though writers never strive to depict the migrant experience in a fresh, engaging way.

I therefore found myself being first pleasantly surprised, then rather blown away, by Otsuka’s unusual but powerful narrative technique. What’s unusual about The Buddha in the Attic is that the entire novella (I hesitate to call it a novel, because it is so slim) is narrated in a collective – i.e. plural – first person voice, which represents the voice of Japanese war brides sometime prior to the second World War.

Initially, I found the approach gimmicky, and I wondered whether it would be a prologue to stories told by each of the women. Young, fresh-faced, naive Japanese girls, I should say, rather – sailing across the oceans with nothing but photos of their betrothed and heads full of dreams and hopes. In any case, the entire novel turned out to be narrated in the same fashion.

The obvious strength of this sort of storytelling was that there was no single narrator, and I found myself imagining not just a single woman, but  the lives and fates of all early Japanese migrant women in America, which I suppose was been the intended effect. A downside was that the story felt extremely fragmented. Describing this novella as having a concrete plot would be a bit of a far stretch, seeing as it’s comprised mostly of small anecdotes and fleeting glimpses of their lives.

Upon arrival, the women are crestfallen to discover that their husbands-to-be are jaded, weather-worn old bachelor farmers. The photos date back to two decades ago, when they were still fresh-faced young boys hopeful of a new future in America – and the romantic love letters are nothing but lies woven together by conniving matchmakers.

Otsuka takes us through the usual stuff of migrant misery memoirs – lost lovers, unhappy marriages, pregnancies and births and abortions and miscarriages, cultural misunderstandings, early setters’ lives, embarrassing parents and rebellious children. But towards the second half of the novella, there are glimpses of darker, more sinister things to come:

I’m referring, of course, to the lead-up to the second World War and the Japanese internment camps. She tells a story of collective blind-eye, where an entire nation of non-Japanese Americans quietly resume their lives despite the sudden, mass disappearance of neighbours and schoolchildren and corner shop owners and launders. Of entire families and communities, in fact.

A powerful piece of writing, at times gimmicky and contrived, as I mentioned previously – but it doesn’t detract from the story itself, which is a poignant and moving one of both one woman, and an entire generation of Japanese migrant wives, mothers and daughters.

Dracula by Bram Stoker arrived in the mail yesterday. I’ve been hooked since. Move aside, Angela Carter and Hilary Mantel!

Elizabeth Miller, a ‘Dracula expert’  describes it as being ‘one of those rare novels that just about everyone has heard of but few have actually read’ – so, so true. But how far removed our caricatured ideas of these sorts of novels are from the original masterpieces! After they’ve been distilled through the horrors of popular culture and children’s films (Disney is the usual culprit), they emerge quite unrecognisable.

Does anyone remember Infinite Summer, the Infinite Jest readalong that took the literary blogosphere by storm back in 2009? (The index of posts, complete with reading schedule and an accompaniment of notes and discussions, is still available online) Well, after the first readalong, there was actually a Dracula project by the same people, that I’m now having fun reading over. Beware of plot spoilers though!

Also, not strictly classics related, but currently wondering which books of the following authors I should read next: Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I’m thinking Snow, My Name is Red, Midnight’s Children or East West for Rushdie and Pamuk, but not sure about where to go in terms of Marquez.  I’ve read Love in the Time of Cholera, Hundred Years and Chronicles of a Death Foretold so far. Maybe just the Penguin edition of his collected stories? Maybe I should broaden my horizons and read some completely new writers like Chinua Achebe, who I’ve been meaning to read for a while now…

Any recommendations?

It’s already October 15, and Russian Reading Month begins in just over two weeks’ time! Completely unrelated, but in November I’ll also be reading Wolf Hall with Claire, if anyone wants to join.

We have a cosy group so far, for next month:

• Jackie from jackiemania - The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky
• Claire from kiss a cloud - Dead Souls, Gogol; Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak
• ‘vernzap’ – Brothers Karamazov, possibly Master and Margarita or Anna Karenina
• Bellezza from Dolce Bellezza – Master and Margarita, Bulgakov
• Rachel from Resistance is Futile – Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
• Alex from Alex in Leeds - A Russian Gentleman, Sergei Aksakov
• Myself – Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol (biography by Nabokov), Master and Margarita
• Andrew Blackman, who will be following the event (not sure if he’ll be reading along)

Currently in the process of hunting down stories for Short Story Week, for those interested in participating, but wanting to stick to something light/short.

I may also try to squeeze in The Brothers Karamazov if I have time. Over stretching myself? Hardly. I finish my final semester of uni – well, until I begin postgrad studies anyway – this very week, so I’ll have hour after hour to devote to summer reading in November. Just have to get my final batch of essays and exams over and done with. Cannot wait.

Sign-ups are open until the end of this month, so just comment below if you’re interested!

The final verdict: Kristin Lavransdatter is not a book that impressed me. I know because I can hardly remember a thing about it; the two things I do recall firmly being that (1) the heroine’s name is Kristin Lavransdatter (hardly an achievement, given that this name is, in fact, the title) and (2) it is set in medieval Norway.

Were there unsatisfactory marriages and knights in shining armor and illicit romances and lots of blonde Scandinavian children? Were there? Do I even care? I waxed lyrical about this novel in my earlier reflections and midway impressions, so why have I come to be so indifferent about it? I’m not sure. Strange phenomenon, indeed, because I reached the opposite end of the rainbow with 1Q84 recently, when I found myself liking it more and more as I inched closer to the ending.

I may decide to re-read this someday. I do have a perverse tendency to re-read things I dislike. Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, for instance – I thought it overworked and too stylized in my first reading, but came to like it in the second. Maybe Salman Rushdie’s Enchantress of Florence (which I mistakenly referred to as the ‘Empress of Florence’ in my indifference towards it) will also charm me second time round?

I’ve long since realised that the reason I finish things I dislike is because I have this innate curiosity which desires to know why such and such a character said something or behaved a certain way, or why the writer chose to write this book, or even why it is I dislike it so vehemently. And I usually feel as though I won’t get answers unless I’ve finished the damn things. But as to why I choose to re-read them? Who knows. It may be the burning questions.

The burning question in regards to Kristin Lavransdatter is most definitely: how on earth did this thing win Sigrid Undset the Nobel Prize for Literature? Anyone care to toss up some answers?

Kristin Lavransdatter readalong:

• Early impressions
• A note on translations
• The Wreath
• The Cross

Even earlier, in July, I’d written that Murakami had ‘lost his magic’. It just felt like a whole lot of exposition and back story (which is usually never present, or at least is seamlessly done in his novels), and ice-picks, creepy girls and Little People. Not great writing, on the whole.

Besides, his characters – every single one of them without fail, were plain creepy. Tengo’s borderline obsession with the ‘nice chest’ of the seventeen year old Fuka-Eri, yeah normal enough, but Aomame’s preference for middle-aged balding types with nice head shapes? Er? And that’s just scratching the surface of the creepiness.

But my final verdict? I loved it! How did this transformation come about, and around what stage? Probably when I was a third of my way through the second book. How is a little trickier, but I think it does shed some light on Murakami’s almost universal appeal, hence his rise to the enigmatic position of cult novelist.

1. Suspense. The web that Murakami weaves is one full of intriguing questions, and to use an image drawn by Murakami himself, it’s almost as though the reader is in a pool full of question-mark floaties, and we are entranced by all the possibilities (or floaties):

So in an equation it would be something like this, in the initial stages:

Enigma > mediocre writing.

Normally, by the end of the book, you don’t get the answers you expect. Murakami leaves those mysteries unresolved. You just have to accept that there are enigmatic an unexplainable elements of the worlds he creates. This is all part of the enigma that draws readers in.

But in 1Q84, there is a double-edged satisfaction, because the ending is perfect. Therefore:

Nice, neat ending* > Enigma > mediocre writing.

* which still leaves a multitude of doors open to the reader’s imagination, plus has a tinge of enigma to it (the reversed Tiger billboard, and the previously unheard of highway laws, leading to the question – yes, we’re out of 1Q84, but is this the old world or a different one altogether?)

Of course, it’s a shame for the hundreds of disillusioned readers out there who probably never made it to the end, and are therefore wondering how Murakami could let them down like this. Here’s a bridge, get over it. He didn’t write it for your personal satisfaction, it’s still a work of literature, and therefore of art, no matter how flawed that art may be.

2. Personality. There’s the appeal of Murakami himself. Usually, readers are as drawn to a charismatic personality as much as to the work of fiction itself. Any other writer, and I wouldn’t have bothered to trudge all the way through 1Q84. But ‘because this is Murakami,’ I kept thinking, ‘he’ll redeem himself’. I do have faith in Murakami, because he’s one of the writers out there (in contemporary society, at least) who genuinely sees the novel as an artform, and weaves words (and worlds) together purely for the joy of creating – this is one of the key reasons, I believe, why he is able to leave so many questions unanswered in his novels, and yet draw readers back to him time and time again. Because it’s about the journey, and not the destination.

3. The Fantastic. Interspersed with the seemingly mundane aspects of daily life are moments of magic and utterly bizarre surrealism. Again, Murakami succeeds in poking that chink in our armour, our Achilles heel – which is love of the supernatural, and the otherwordly. How else could readers bear to read page after page about Coca Cola, and The Beatles, and jazz cafes, and downtown Shibuya/Shinjuku (though in 1Q84 it’s more Janacek’s Sinfonietta and Remembrance of Things Lost/Past - i.e. the elusive Marcel Proust), and how to prepare the perfect grilled mackarel with grated daikon radish, and miso soup with tofu and littlenecks and green onions, and cucumber slices with wakame seaweed in vinegar.

For those in the West, there is also that added fascination of the Orient, or that cultural enigma, Japan. Even though the descriptions of modern Japan will seem ordinary to his Japanese audience, or even to his Korean or Chinese or Taiwanese audience, to those unfamiliar with Japanese culture, even these mundane descriptions will fascinate. Like I said, however, the real crowd-pleaser is those threads of magic interwoven into the cloth of everyday life – hence, the universal appeal.

Having said all this, I don’t think that 1Q84 is representative of Murakami’s work. It departs from anything he’s done previously. While in narrative style, it’s probably closest to his classic 1970s love story, Norwegian Wood, the depth and complexity of the plot far exceeds that straightforward storyline. Even his fictional world, 1Q84, took surrealism to a whole new level. One of Murakami’s key plot devices is, as mentioned above, that he injects elements of the surreal into an ordinary setting. Here, however, the protagonists were transported into a different dimension, which I felt was a big departure from his previous works.

My main problem was with the storytelling itself. The creepiness, I could deal with. Granted, there were plot elements that just made me step back and think, ‘oh my goodness. Don’t even go there. That is disgusting’. But it was the writing which I felt let this book down. It had a very slow start, and I think my inability to connect with it in the earlier sections was due to this poor editing. There were just chunks and chunks of plain back story and exposition, told in the most uninteresting of voices. I stand by my previous belief that 1Q84 could have at least a third of it edited out, and it would work. In fact, not only would it still work, but it would be a better piece of literature, and give less strain to the wrists when reading it lying down.

Finally, here are some interesting articles on translation, from the Chinese translators of 1Q84 (stumbled across this while I was reading the Mandarin translation of Volume 1 alongside the English version):

The thing I’ve found with such writers is actually that their books tend to vary from the genius/virtuoso to the abysmally mediocre. McEwan’s peak was (imo) Atonement, Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Ondaatje’s probably The English Patient (haven’t read it yet, though, hence the ‘probably’), and Pamuk’s probably also Snow or My Name is Red. Then you get the weird and wonky anomalies: Solar, The Empress of Florence, The Unconsoled, Divisadero – books which make you cringe and make you wonder how the same writer could churn out two such different works.

Every work of literature is valuable in its own way, of course, and it’s unrealistic to expect writers to live up to some sort of standard set by their best piece of work – but the difference just seems to be all the more marked with these sorts of writers. Perhaps it’s a matter of editing? I’ve certainly noticed a similar trend in Murakami’s body of work (1Q84, anyone?) and somewhat hilariously in J K Rowling’s Harry Potter series (the books increase in size over the series, but not in quality – the earlier ones are so much tighter and wittier).

From what I’d heard of The Museum of Innocence, it seemed to be one of the mediocre ones, and so I’d planned on reading My Name is Red as my first Pamuk. I knew from the very title of this book, that The Museum of Innocence was going to be sappy, and long-winded, and self-indulgent - which is why I was pleasantly surprised when I found myself entranced by Fusun and Kemal’s doomed romance (despite being all those things above). I can’t explain the appeal. It was everything I was afraid it would be, but I loved it. I was entranced, and addicted, and absorbed in the world that Pamuk depicted.

As a synopsis/introduction to the themes in this novel, I’ll share an excerpt from the words of Orhan
Pamuk himself:

“The Museum of Innocence” chronicles the love story of Kemal, an upper-class person, a person who is occasionally described as high-society. He is 30 years old in 1975 and chronicles his infatuation with a distant relative, a twice removed cousin, Fusun, an 18 year-old shop girl, but very beautiful. As sort of a compensation for his failure to get her hand, he collects everything he can get that Fusun touches, and in the end he makes a museum of the objects that their story is associated with.

One of the key themes in the novel is obsession, and the significance of objects as symbols of the things we cherish. Over the years, Kemal Bey accumulates an astounding collection of cigarette stubs, articles of clothing, porcelain dogs, postcards, medicine bottles, buttons, combs, earrings – all of which once belonged to his beloved Fusun.

What’s more astounding (and I think it reflects well on his supposed narcissism*) is that Orhan Pamuk assembled such objects, as might be found in the novel, into his very own museum – located in Istanbul, Turkey. Of this, he says:

My “Museum of Innocence” is a real museum too, which tries to pin down all these objects. I’ve been collecting things for this museum almost for six years. I bought a house which is actually where this part of the story has been taking place since about ten years ago. I converted it into a museum so the “Museum of Innocence” is both a museum and a novel.

The enjoyment of the novel and the enjoyment of the would-be museum are two entirely different things. The museum is not an illustration of the novel and the novel is not an explanation of the museum. They are two representations of one single story perhaps.

Why the Museum of Innocence, and not the Museum of Memories or Museum of a Life? I’m not sure if Pamuk would agree with my interpretation  but I was quite unsettled by the idea, expressed through Kemal’s reminiscences in the novel, that the happiest moments of our lives are rarely recognized to be such at the time. And so this sort of ephemera, used in our daily lives, is a physical manifestation of  our ‘innocence’ (i.e. lack of awareness) of the transient, fleetng nature of our happiness.

What would I include in my own museum?

• A little cloth tiger doll from the Muslim Quarter markets at Xi’an, to remind me of my year in China and all the life lessons learnt there.
• A little black leather Moleskine journal filled with momentos and ticket stubs and little notes that my boyfriend put together and gave me for our one year anniversary (right before I left for China, so a farewell present as well).
• A pale jade-hued stone seal  (on which sits a carved horse that is more like a chimera of mule and dog) that has my name in Chinese characters carved on the bottom and some wolf and deer-hair bamboo brushes to represent my love of Korean and Chinese painting.
• Rolls of film, prints and a part of my camera collection: Pentax ME Super, Helios and other Soviet-era glass lenses, and plastic fantastic toy cameras – Diana F+ Qing Hua, Holga 120 CFN as a symbol of my love for photography.

And a myriad of other things that sit in my room right now – hardly a museum exhibition, just things I’ve amassed over the years.

How about you, readers? If you had a Museum of Innocence, what would you exhibit in yours?

* Just a note on Pamuk’s ‘narcissism’: yes, it’s prevalent, and amusing because it’s so overt. See excerpt below, from The Museum of Innocence:

“This is how I came to seek out the esteemed Orhan Pamuk, who has narrated the story in my name, and with my approval. Once upon a time his father and uncle did business with my father and the rest of us. Coming as he did from an old Nisantasi family that had lost its fortune, he would, I thought, have an excellent understanding of the background of my story. I also heard that he was a man lovingly devoted to his work and who took storytelling seriously“

(even if this were true, why would you say it about yourself, and in your own novel, no less?!)

A short update on the event I’m hosting at The Classics Club in November. I’ve been terribly unorganized with this thing, changing my mind about the details at least twenty times over the past month or so. But here it is, in its final form, more or less:

Novel Readalong (the first two are my personal choices, which you’re welcome to read along with, but really, anything Russian is fine)

• Option 1: Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita
• Option 2: Dead Souls by Gogol (accompanied by Vladimir Nabokov’s biography, ‘Nikolai Gogol’)
• Option 3: Any work of Russian literature. The whole point is to read Russian literature, lots of it, all month long! :)

Short Story week: a week dedicated solely to the reading of Russian short story classics (mid-late 19th century to Soviet era). I will be posting link to online stories and also providing title suggestions. Highly recommend the Penguin edition of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (which you can get here).

Proposed schedule:

• 1 Nov – 10 Nov: The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov
• 12 Nov to 18 Nov: Short Story week
• 11-30 Nov: Dead Souls, Gogol and ‘Nikolai Gogol‘ by Nabokov

There’s not going to be any Mister Linky, so this is pretty much the sign-up post. Comment below (with any titles you’re thinking of reading) if you’d like to participate!

Book Depository links: Master and Margarita / Dead Souls / Nikolai Gogol