What is in your library?

Haruki Murakami's novella, The Strange Library (Taiwan version) is a pretty little hardcover, only 70 pages thick with Sheep Man and tiny gold specks on the front cover. So pretty, I cannot resist but grab a copy from the bookstore!

The short story was first published in the short story collection On Seeing The 100% Perfect Girl On One Beautiful April Morning back in the early 90s.

The Taiwanese Chinese version that I have is translated by 賴明珠 and includes illustrations by Kat Menschik from the German version. The illustrations are mainly grayscale with muted colours, very dark but elegant as well.

The story goes, as usual, very Murakami-esque:

A boy went to his local library intend to read up about tax collection during Ottoman empire. Unlike his usual trips, he was directed to a dark, creepy room underground by the librarian. There a strange, bald man led him through a maze of sorts, and then a small man covered with sheep skin locked him in a cell.

In the cell the boy is required to finish the 3 books the bald man has gave him, and which the bald man said will release after a month if he has finished the books. The truth was, however, that he might not end up alive.

That aside, the boy was fed extremely well by Sheep Man (great doughnuts) and met with a beautiful girl whose existence did not seem to be certain. In a peculiar way he found himself to be able to absorb the knowledge from the books much easier, and even able to experience the story itself. He also worried about his mother and his pet.

I always love the fantasy elements in Murakami's works, as if those alternate worlds do exist right here on Earth; and somebody we don't know is travelling through it. I am slightly disappointed that this is not quite a children's book (not an appropriate expectation); nevertheless I still adore the story and the accompanying illustrations a lot. My future trips to libraries will never be the same anymore.

p/s I wish I had browsed the English translations to get Ted Goossen's version instead :O

Dance to a __ song

My first encounter with Milan Kundera, a Czech-born writer and one of the world's best known author, through his best-known book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I remembered not being able to understand the story, being less like a novel but more of his meditation about Life and Humanity. It was really easy to read but to digest is another thing.

Slowness (Le Lenteur) is written 11 years after the publication of Unbearable. Like the latter, Slowness is a light piece of reading (known as one of his lightest work) but it certainly is not as shallow as that.

The author weaves stories that happened in a midsummer's night of more than 200 years apart together. For a slim volume (140 pages in the Chinese translation, which I finished in less than 2 hours)

Throughout the novel, Kundera talks about how each and every one of us are performers (here he uses the word "dancers"), performing in front of everybody or think we are performing in front of everybody. Using different circumstances in the book, he explains the concept of "performance" either in politics, social etc., which relates to self-identity ("id", in Freud's term?):

When a person sees himself as elect, what can he do to prove his election, to make himself and others believe that he does not belong to the common herd? That is where the era founded on the invention of photography comes to the rescue, with its stars, its dancers, its celebrities, whose images, projected onto an enormous screen, are visible from afar by all, are admired by all, and are all beyond reach.

Kundera also uses the concept of speed to describe memory, sensuality, and modernity. There are particular quotes in the book that I quite like:

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him.

Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his space, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.

In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.

And this:

Why has the pleasure for slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature? There is a Czech proverb that describes their easy indolence by a metaphor: "they are gazing at God's windows." A person gazing at God's windows is not bored; he is happy. In our world, indolence has turned into having nothing to do, which is a completely different thing: a person with nothing to do is frustrated, bored, is constantly searching for the activity he lacks.

At the end the stories fold itself back to the narrator. I found it rather peculiar, but cliche as well, as if I had seen it coming. I personally felt this cliche spoiled the story, but it may just be my personal taste. Honestly I read this book just to clear off my book shelves haha so it did not leave a deep impression to me. (It is also a disrespect to the author!) Alas, this book is not meant to be rushed to be enjoyed in slowness ;)

Also, just in time for Valentine's day:

The religion of orgasm: utilitarianism projected into sex life; efficiency versus indolence; coition reduced to an obstacle to be got past as quickly as possible in order to reach an ecstatic explosion, the only true goal of love-making and of the universe.

;)

Kokuhaku こくはく Confessions

Kokuhaku means "confessions" in English. The Japanese has a kokuhaku culture in which the men/women confess their love/feelings to each other. If the confession cum proposal is accepted, they will officially start dating each other/be in a serious relationship!

It has been a week since I finished reading Confessions by Kanae Minato (Mandarin translation version, 告白); and until today whenever I thought of the book, I still feel really disturbed.

Confessions started off with a goodbye speech given by a teacher of a middle school, Yuko Moriguchi, who was retiring after her daughter was found dead in the pool not long ago. She later revealed that her daughter's death was not accidental, but a murder conducted by two students in her class, making them recognisable to the rest of the students without giving out their names. Before she left, she unveiled her revenge plan - taint the milk of the 2 students, Shuuya Watanabe and Naoki Shimomura, with HIV-tainted blood.

The rest of the story proceeded with different points of view given by different characters, peeling the layers one by one of a seemingly simple crime story. I thoroughly enjoyed how the story gets deeper as it goes, stories behind stories; and when there is nothing left to be uncovered, be prepared to be surprised with the conclusion.

Moriguchi-sensei decided against reporting the case to the police as the Japanese law do not punish juveniles harshly, and felt it was best to take it to her own hands. She succeeded, and very well indeed. No-one was left unaffected. Strings of bully cases, social disruption, more murders - did Moriguchi-sensei want to take revenge against the two students only, or bring everyone else down with them?

And what about justice? How much justice is enough?

The narration of the story flows really well even with different perspectives of the story told. Each page is packed with shocks and twists, making it impossible to leave the book until you reach the last page.

Minato was a housewife before she became famous with this book. I really wonder what goes on in the minds of the average Japanese.

p/s I love this review of the book!

"I Have Done the Deed"

My first exposure to Javier Marias was a short story (read by Miette from Miette's Bedtime Story Podcast) called While the Women are Sleeping. I admired how he built his plot very slowly with seemingly ordinary scenes and conversations - and then a bang and you're left, together with the narrator, to think through what really just happened. (I wrote a short review here.)

A Heart So White opened with the suicide of the wife of a newly wed couple, just off from their honeymoon. Gun to the heart, bam! off Teresa went to the other world.

The husband of the couple is Ranz, Juan's father.

Juan did not know much about his father's personal life, besides the fact that Teresa is his mother's elder sister. Juan did not ask for details; and when he did, Ranz refuse to divulge any information to him.

Juan marries Luisa, who, like him, is a translator and interpreter for various government bodies and organisations. He is extremely sensitive to words - or, more accurately, the act of interpreting words, of interpretation itself. For every scenes or events that unfold before him, he would, consciously or unconsciously, contemplate and interpret the meaning behind.

So how did the title of the book come about?

My hands are of your colour but I shame
To wear a heart so white.
-- Macbeth, William Shakespeare

Throughout the novel Marias interweaves the theme in a series of seemingly unrelated and trivial events. We see how the theme evolve in these events, and slowly begun to see - but only the tip of an iceberg - of what the author has in mind.

I personally think it is extremely intelligent of him to write this way. It was quiet for perhaps the first 3/4 of the book, and at the end we see the theme again, but written like a musical piece, a crescendo to a sforzando and then back to piano. (I really love the ending!) The events, the meanings behind these events, layer upon each other, weave by the common theme from that line of Macbeth; but there seems to be something beneath all these, a core theme. What is it?

That is, perhaps, what the author wants you to do - find your own interpretation.

One important thing to note about Marias is that he writes without a plot in mind; and he does not go back to whatever he has written, he just moves on from where he has stopped, which may explain this: Marias lets Juan think in long paragraphs, even during a conversation. The words loop around and around a single idea - do it few more times (just like how humans get obsessed with certain ideas/thoughts and repetitively think of it) and I feel like yelling at Juan/Marias to get straight to the point!

Oh, one thing that annoys me - why don't the female characters have any character? To me, they seemed to exist as purely a medium to get across what is on the author's mind. Even the minor male characters such as Custardoy the Younger gets more personality than Luisa. I wonder if it's the Spanish machismo.

Reading this book felt like reading Marias's thoughts. There are parts where it seemed that he/Juan is quite against the institution of marriage - no, scratch that - more like he is against the notion of getting into marriage without a purpose, doing just for the sake of it. Being a 20-something with friends who dream of/is getting married, I do find it quite comforting to know there are someone out there who shares the same thoughts as me - do we do things just for the sake of it, going with society's standard?

It is only 288 pages but you are definitely not going to finish in one sitting. Too heavy for that. Repetitions can get quite tiring, really, but I would say this is one brilliant book that I would go back again and again.

p/s The paperback published by Random House UK is wonderful, it doesn't crease at the spine nor does the cover "floats up"!! We need good binding like this :D

Read: Javier Marias interview on The Paris Review; Interview on The White Review; Goodreads page

Of a flying - maybe - chicken

I got attracted to this book because of the clean and cute, minimalistic design of the cover; as well as the presence of an animal - a flying chicken, really? - on its title. Based on the first page, I thought it would be quite a humorous read.

The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly (Goodreads page) started off with a hen named Sprout, trapped in a coup laying eggs for farmers, dreaming of freedom outside the coup, of hatching her own egg and taking care of her own chicks. With naive, half-baked plans and strong determination, she freed herself from the barn system - but realised the outside world wasn't as rosy as it seemed.

Out there, she met little friends but many foes; she witnessed life and death in front of her eyes; she gave out love as generously as she possibly could. All in all, she lived graciously and elegantly.

Do not dismiss this animal fable as another children's literature. It is as realistic and metaphorical as it gets. Despite the simple storyline, The Hen in essence is not as simple as the traditional fairy tales. It makes you ponder on life, family, morality and mother nature itself. Finishing the book left the same empty feeling I get whenever I finished a good book - so many lessons learned, so many unanswered questions left for me to contemplate.

Hwang describes well, and her language (after translation, at least) was not complicated. The many animal characters (minor & major) in the book - reminiscence of Animal Farm and Charlotte's Web - are as human as they can get. Nomoco's illustrations (including the cover) are raw and somehow reminded me of white, wintry North Korea. Don't know why.

My personal taste tells me the story ended somewhat cliche and emotional, it is, nevertheless, a good way to end. When/if I have children, I will read them this story. They need to know the world is not only about happy endings.

This book is so good I will not sell it away!

Author: Sun-mi Hwang

Translator: Chi-young Kim

Illustrator: Nomoco