Reality's Cul-de-Sacs: Kafka on the Shore
Author: cleveland browsie
Just got done blazing through this amazing book. All the quotes are from the New York Times Book Review. However, you probably shouldn't read the reviews and be suprised by the plot like I was. I've never read anything like it. I would imagine that Ink-Stained must have read some Haruki Murakami, but the rest of you all should really check it out. I may read it twice because i hear that upon repeated readings there are riddles to figure out.
"Although the dreamlike quality of his work makes the film director David Lynch his nearest American counterpart, Lynch's palette is primarily nocturnal while Murakami's welcomes the noontime sun."
"Murakami is like a magician who explains what he's doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers."
"But while anyone can tell a story that resembles a dream, it's the rare artist, like this one, who can make us feel that we are dreaming it ourselves."
Thanks for the head's up on this... I actually haven't read his stuff, but I've been meaning to ever since someone told me that he's kinda like the Japanese Philip K. Dick. And man, have I been on a PKD revival of late. (Have you read Murakami's nonfiction account of the Sarin gas bombing of the subway in Japan [Underground, I think it's called?])
i can see some parallels between pkd and murakami, but the david lynch analogy is the closest i think, but even that is tenuous. he's really in a class of his own.
he decided to become a writer when he was at a baseball game and someone hit a double, and WHAM... for no apparent reason he realized he could and should become a writer. crazy. but that's how his world operates, and it shows in his work.
anyway, i pretty much want to read everything he did now, so the gas attack jawn is on the list.
by the way, what's your fave pkd?? i think now wait for last year and the world jones made. scanner darkly was up there too, but the movie sort of ruined it for me somehow.
I think the PKD reference, like the comparisons to Lynch, are referring to Murakami having an awareness of the essential strangeness of Reality. Anyway, I'm looking forward to checking out Kafka on the Shore (though I wonder if he washed up just a little way down from Einstein on the Beach).
Re: PKD -- The World Jones Made and Now Wait For Last Year? For reals? They're both books I know I read, but which I have only the vaguest memories regarding.... not even in the top 20 best Dicks for yrs. v. truly.
Hard for me to isolate a Single Greatest for St. Phil, so I'm gonna cheat and do the Top 5 thing.
1) VALIS -- his bizarre, moving, semi-autobiographical account of his 1974 "religious awakening"/"alien encounter"/"psychotic break." (Pick one interpretation, as PKD certainly does not.)
2) A Scanner Darkly -- I kinda know what you mean about the movie; I was deeply impressed by its fidelity to the source, but in a weird way, it made aspects of it oddly sterile; and some of that shit just doesn't play on screen. (Like Kubrick's Shining, a work which borders on big-A Art unlike the source novel; but which contains parts that make virtually no sense if you watch the film without knowing the inner logic explained in the book.) The exact opposite of the Bladerunner / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep dynamic, wherein the movie and the book are whole, separate entities which exist symbiotically because they're so different, breathing new life into one another.
3) UBIK - The best of his late '60s psychedelic, thrill-ride twisters, with reality crumbling every 10 pages along with our current theory of WTF is going on. As a piece of sheer structural cunning, it's a masterpiece.
4) The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - His darkest, scariest work, a chilling glimpse right into the maw of the Da'athic Abyss; a book which still raises hackles on my neck just thinking about the motherfucker.
5) Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said - Badly betraying its drugged out, early seventies composition, I found it to be a disjointed, barely-nailed together trainwreck of a story that was shot through with so much heart and undeniable soul that I ended up loving it unconditionally.
Honorable mentions: Man in the High Castle (his breakthrough "alternate history" novel, fully merging modern "realistic" novel techniques with his sci-fi imagination); Confessions of a Crap Artist, a "conventional" novel which is a devastating portrait of a fringe UFO-obsessed outsider trying to survive in the 1950s; and the rest of the VALIS Trilogy / Unofficial Quadrology: The Divine Invasion (the futuristic interpretation), Transmigration of Timothy Archer (the religious interpretation); and Radio Free Albemuth (the paranoid/Nixonian interpretation). Oh, and Clans of the Alphane Moons for Lord Running Clam, the telepathic slime mold from Ganymede who is somehow the most "human" of all PKD's characters.
out of the ones you've listed i've read scanner darkly, three stigmata, flow my tears, man in the high castle, and radio free. i agree that it is very difficult to pick favorites. flow my tears should actually be up near the top as well. i think i picked jones made because the characterizations were particularily compelling to me. it is one of his deeper books emotionally i think. i picked last year because it is so totally madcap, but not to the ridiculous level of three stigmata which i feel relies on drug imagery and shock value a little too heavily. (i did, however, splurge on a perky pat layout after reading it.) i need to get on the rest of the valis trilogy. i also think i have ubik laying around someplace. i am going to go find it right now.
Great, now you made me want to go back and take another look at Jones and Now Wait... sometimes you pick up a book, or movie, or record, and it's a completely different animal than you thought it was the first time around.
Ubik, be advised, is in much the same vein as Eldritch...
But VALIS is just devastating, darkly funny, painfully real, magically transcendent, impossibly dense; despite the odd specificity of Dick's alien satellite gnostic revelation, I think it can't help but speak to anybody who has spent their time on the fringes of reality, looking for deeper meaning in the soul. It starts like this:
Horselover Fat's nervous breakdown began the day he got the phonecall from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals...
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yeah baby hook up the nembutals!