The Stone Raft

The book itself is really enjoyable, or at least the first 100-or-so pages that I’ve read have been. I am no stranger to Saramago’s visually intimidating style^[2], and it’s not a difficult read by any stretch either. However, comparing this novel to my first exposure to Saramago, The Double, the first was a much more engaging read. It had a slow build-up, but was strangely captivating in a way that Stone Raft seems not to be. I can’t be sure as to how or why the two novels differ in this aspect. A theory which I am going to pluck out of thin air seems that The Double was a much more tightly focused novel—only one major protagonist to follow, and one we get to know very well. The Stone Raft has a wider focus, with five main characters, and the first half-or-so of the book spent collecting them all into the same place.^[3]

Considering this theory some more, the most engaging book I read recently was Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. Norwegian Wood is an immensely personal novel, focused very tightly on one character, as most of Murakami’s novels are, and we learn a great deal about the narrator. I wouldn’t say it’s his best novel, but I honestly could not put it down. I read it through work. I read it between and during classes. I read it on the train, at meals, in bed… well, actually I managed to finish it in one day’s worth of reading. It was an amazingly satisfying experience to tear through an amazing novel in such a brief period of time. Norwegian Wood, I should point out, is not a long book, 298 pages. but neither is The Double (336 pages) or The Stone Raft (292 pages). Length isn’t a factor in engagement: Infinite Jest had me totally caught up, and that was over 1000 pages, while another 1000+ page novel, Against the Day has been my white whale.^[4]

I have found that it is very hard for me to really break down and focus on any task or activity that I am not fully engaged in, or fully emotionally invested in.^[5] Perhaps it’s the same way with books. If a novel is truly captivating and engaging, I will make the time to read it, rather than try and remember to read it. That, of course, makes all the difference… and yet, I can’t quantify to any certainty what gets me engaged in a novel. My question to you, then, is what makes you, the reader, engaged with a novel? Post your answers in the comments, and maybe something will ring a bell.

1. I’ve recently moved, am going to be moving again in a few weeks (with luck), searching for full-time employment, and had a few other things get in the way of basic pleasure reading. ↩
2. multi-page paragraphs, run-on sentences, no dialogue markers, etc. ↩
3. I’m only at the point where they’ve acquired the fourth member of their party. ↩
4. Moby Dick, however, is not on my immediate reading list. I’ll get to it. ↩
5. My grades in college reflect this well. Any class that I took and had no actual interest in beyond satisfying an arbitrary requirement ended up with a lower grade than a class I actually cared about. As an example, I earned a C Survey of English Literature Part 1 which I really had no interest in once we’d finished discussing “Beowulf”. Survey of American Literature Part 2, however, was my favorite class at Temple University, and my only A+ grade. ↩

It’s a brief little book, pages about the size of a 3×5 card. I managed to finish it in one night, pausing every few chapterettes for a breather. For such a short novel it’s amazingly captivating, and even this early, the key elements of Murakami’s fiction are in place. You could almost use a checklist. Disaffected, first-person narrator? Check. Flashbacks to important events in narrator’s life? Check. The one main thing missing is the Murakami surrealism, which must have developed a bit later, probably in A Wild Sheep Chase. In some ways, I can understand why Murakami has disowned the work. It’s not a masterpiece like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but whose first novel ever is? I suppose some of the atypical elements and lack of a real plot are shortcomings, but the darn thing is really quite good.^[2]

Compraing Hear the Wind Sing to After Dark, it’s easy to see how far Murakami has come as a writer. After Dark, and the previous novel, Kafka on the Shore^[3] feature Murakami taking more risks in his fiction and style. After Dark is completely unlike any other novel Murakami has written. Ditching his familiar style is a serious risk, and the reviews I’ve read are mixed on the new direction—if it is even a direction and not a momentary diversion. I like it, and have said so, quite vocally. Considering these stylistic deviations, it only makes sense that after a twenty-some odd year literary career, perhaps Murakami is trying to experiment more, and I can’t blame him.

Even as a young writer, I feel the need to push the limits of what I do with fiction. Certainly, there is nothing in Murakami’s work that could be considered “standard,” at least to the eyes of this American reader, but his stylistic development is something that is worth noting. It is also incredibly inspiring and reassuring to read his earliest works, realizing that Murakami, too, had his missteps and mistakes, and had to find his voice and style. I just need to save up for that copy of Pinball, 1973.

1. At the time of this writing, prices for Pinball, 1973 on AbeBooks run from a quasi-reasonable $45 to the absurd and insulting price of $2000. ↩
2. Of course, if it were to suddenly find itself translated and released in America, the audience may not realize it’s a first novel, and Murakami’s reputation would take a hit. ↩
3. Which is sitting on my shelf, waiting for me to get to it. Soon. ↩

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It was Sunday evening when the TV People showed up.

My first exposure to the works of Haruki Murakami came from a collection of Japanese short fiction I’d found on the “to be returned” shelf at the main branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia. The collection was called Monkey Brain Sushi, and they were pretty much all dull, save for one…

The season, spring. At least, I think it was spring. In any case, it wasn’t particularly hot as seasons go, not particularly chilly.

To be honest, the season’s not so important. What matters is that it’s a Sunday evening.

“TV People” is classic Murakami, a slow, controlled decent into surrealism, where a perfectly ordinary situation is thrown deeper and deeper into absurdity and surrealitly. Murakami’s most famous novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, works in a similar way. A man searching for a lost cat suddenly finds himself in a bizarre underworld where his brother-in-law exerts psychological control over others.^[1] “TV People,” by it’s form, is a much quicker decent, but just as controlled. Only Murakami could have a character talk about Sunday evenings devolve into written sound descriptions: “KRRSPUMK DUWB KRRSPUMK DUWB KRRSPUMK DUWB,” in four paragraphs.

Murakami loves to leave the reader guessing. A number of moments occur where the reader has to question the narrator’s own account of the events, such as the TV People entering a meeting room with a Sony TV, and walking back out without being noticed. The narrator is afraid to even broach the subject with his co-workers. His wife doesn’t notice the TV placed in their living room, knocking magazines and bric-a-brac out of place. The reader can never be sure of just what’s fact and fantasy, which the narrator shares in the climax, watching the TV People on his television, putting together an “airplane.”

In stories like this, Murakami can leave the reader stifled, gasping for air, some connection with reality, as they fall deeper into his well^[2]. The important thing is to relax, and let him guide you where he wants to take you. You won’t be abandoned, but you’ll certainly need some time to think about what’s happened to you. The ultimate strength of Murakami’s works lies in his ability to ferry the reader, safely, through dark, strange, and fantastic situations without leaving you utterly lost. The reader cannot explain, but they do not feel as if someone’s played a trick on them. If you need to start reading Murakami, and everyone does, The Elephant Vanishes is a great starting place; not just for “TV People.”

1. This summary is woefully insufficient. Just read the damn book. ↩
2. Another Wind-Up Bird reference. ↩

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I recently got ahold of House of Leaves (part of my reading list for 2008), and have been almost unable to put the damn thing down since I got it. Even without the strange formatting and typography, it would be a captivating read, though the strange formatting certainly adds to the experience, particularly during Expedition #4.

Reading it has me thinking about about multiple narrators and multiple points-of-view. It’s a technique that I’ve been using in my fiction for a while, and something I want to develop. The novel-in-progress I am working on currently switches between a limited first-person perspective with third-person limited perspectives^[1] and the occasional first-person flashback^[2] Multiple narrators and multiple POVs help to expose a reader to alternate sides of a story, providing perspective and exploring situations that affect the main plotline, but are not directly involved by the main character.

What, perhaps, I like best about multiple narrators is the idea of the unreliable narrator, and how an event or situation depicted from multiple perspectives can vary, leaving the true story somewhere in between.^[3] The three main intertwined House of Leaves narratives: that of The Navidson Record itself, Zampanó’s critical essay on The Navidson Record, and Truant’s exploration of Zampanó’s writing and its effect upon his own life all function to provide a different perspective on each individual narrative. They form a cubist structure, augmented by the physical structure of the text, reflecting back upon each other^[4]

I’d love more examples of novels with well done multiple narrators and points-of-view. If you want to make recommendations, leave a comment.

1. i.e. a third-person narrator that only can focus on one character at a time, and explore only that person’s thoughts. ↩
2. My first-person flashbacks are, curiously, in present tense to contrast them with the past tense writing in the main first-person narrative. ↩
3. The canonical example of this is the Japanese short story Rashomon, in which multiple narrators tell their side of a murder story. Natsuo Kirino’s Grotesque does a similar thing in a more modern setting. ↩
4. This reflection sometimes is physical, such as a footnote rendered in mirrored text or blue boxes revealing reversed versions of the text on the previous page, as if a window. ↩

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Happy Birthday. Your thirteenth is important. Maybe your first really public day. Your thirteenth is the chance for people to recognize that important things are happening to you.

David Foster Wallace’s story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men was my first introduction to truly experimental short fiction. Wallace dissects, plays with, and reassembles the short story into a variety of bizarre and intriguing compositions that are recognizable as narratives, but turn expectations on their head. Among the most striking examples of this are “Octet,” which takes meta-fiction to an illogical extreme, “The Depressed Person” where the true story is contained in multi-page footnotes, and the series of title stories. By their standards, “Forever Overhead” is amazingly simple and straightforward, yet its surface simplicity belies a clever and impressive command of language and narrative.

The main “trick” of “Forever Overhead” is its use of second-person narrative. The narration is subtle, not speaking to the reader/protagonist you, but about them. Wallace restrains his narration to simple sentences or fragments with one or two images for the majority of the work.

Things have been happening to you for the past half year. You have seven hairs in your left armpit now. Twelve in your right. Hard dangerous spirals of brittle black hair. Crunchy, animal hair. There are now more of the hard curled hairs around your privates than you can count without losing track. Other things. Your voice is rich and scratchy and moves between octaves without any warning.

Yet, he is able to switch this up, moving to complex, flowing writing when appropriate, such as the powerful description of a wet dream.

And dreams. For months there have been dreams like nothing before: moist and busy and distant, full of yielding curves, frantic pistons, warmth and a great falling; and you have awakened through fluttering lids to a rush and a gush and a toe-curling scalp-snapping jolt of a feeling from an inside deeper than you knew you had, spasms of a deep sweet hurt, the streetlights though your window blinds cracking into sharp stars against the black bedroom ceiling, and on you a dense white jam that lisps between legs, trickles and sticks, cools on you, hardens and clears until there is nothing but gnarled knots of pale solid animal hair in the morning shower, and in the wet tangle a clean sweet smell you can’t believe comes from anything you made inside you. This masterful, clever, and deliberate switching of tone and language draws the reader in, grabs their attention and establishes what is to come as important and impactful, as one’s first wet dream.

Even beyond the simple considerations of the language, Wallace’s masterful use of second-person speaks to, and connects with the reader. There is a certain universality of terms, familiarity with the emotions, and the sensations, if not the exact events.

You are in line. Look around. Look bored. Few talk in the line. Everyone seems by himself. Most look at the ladder, look bored. You almost all have crossed arms, chilled by a late dry rising wind on the constellations of blue-clean chlorine beads that cover your backs and shoulders. It seems impossible that everybody could really be this bored.

What thirteen-year old or former thirteen-year old, cannot relate to this?

Even more stunning is the story’s anti-climax, a surprising, intimate look behind a facade of banality. There is something to even a simple story of a birthday visit to a pool, behind a first try at the diving board, and it clicks, it connects with the reader in a way that could not be done through first or third person. This is a narrative that requires the reader to feel there, and be there. No work I have read in second-person before, and none since, has had the same level of impact and connection as “Forever Overhead.” It’s what made me fall in love with David Foster Wallace’s writing, and I hope it does the same for you.