Tristessa by Kerouac

Okay, Kerouac is one of those authors I’d never read and kept meaning to get around to, so a few weeks ago, I saw Tristessa sitting there and decided to pick it up.

My only regret is that I didn’t get it at half price books.

I won’t say it was a complete waste of time since it only took me a day and a half to get through, but it didn’t really make me wanna go out and read anything else he’s done.

It’s the story of a drifter who becomes enamored with a junkie named Tristessa, (Hence the title. Get it?)

It really isn’t a cohesive narrative, but I don’t think that was why it didn’t click with me.

Naked Lunch is one of my favorite books after all and it doesn’t even have anything really even resembling a story let alone a plot.

And maybe that was the problem is that I was trying to read Kerouac from start to finish like one would a conventional novel.

Maybe, like Naked Lunch, Tristessa is best when just meandered through.

With Burroughs, the parts are generally greater than the sum and that’s just fine.

Kerouac did seem to have the knack for calling up distinct emotional snapshots in a very few simple words.

“It’s like winning an angel in hell,” and “morphine takes all the sex out of your parts and leaves it somewhere else, in your gut.”

And the page or so when Old Bull eloquently explains to us why morphine is better than love is truly a beautiful and sad passage.

So, I guess I’m not ready to pass judgment just yet.

I’ll probably pick Tristessa up again in a few months and just casually flip through it and we’ll see if, like Burroughs, Kerouac is best enjoyed a bit at a time.

God is Dead by Ron Currie

It’s odd that the last book I read last year is easily in contention with The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafron as the best read of 2008.

But God is Dead by Ron Currie Jr. is that rare, frenzied yet slow, angry but gentle, repudiation of naivety and faith without the drippings of cynicism you’d expect.

As we start out, God has taken the form of a Dinka woman in the northern region of Sudan. His mission to earth is twofold.

First, he wants to experience the suffering that His indifference over the centuries has caused and second, he wants to help.

He roams from village to village, from refugee camp to refugee camp carrying a bag of never-ending sorghum.

He can pass out as much as he wants to the starving masses, yet the bag never empties.

Kinda like the loaves and fishes trick, I mean miracle.

Unfortunately for the universe (and who could’ve seen this coming?) God, in the form of a Dinka woman is killed.

It takes a while for the news to spread and even longer for the world to figure out what exactly this means, but God is officially dead.

The rest of the book is really a compilation of shorts juxtaposing the extreme reactions of diverse, clashing cultures and characters.

In one chapter, we find that holy wars can take place very well without the presence of a God, thank you very much.

Even when everyone realizes that God is dead, they kill each other over the right way to put this knowledge into a pragmatic context. In another chapter (my favorite) a group of friends, weary after weeks of hedonism because what are you gonna do when God dies, enter a suicide/murder pact.

The way it plays out is funny, disturbing, heartbreaking and revolting in turns.

We also get to meet the dogs who, after feasting on the corpse of the Creator, have not only human, but godlike intelligence.

They’re not quite omniscient, but they’re close.

From the title and description on the cover, I hoped this book would be thought-provoking and it is.

Actually, I’m not sure if Currie is criticizing the stringency of religion or the potential chaos that can go with a godless worldview.

Maybe it’s both.

But what was wonderfully surprising was the humor. And not all of the laughs come from dark places.

Even in a universe where humanity is the highest power, a terrifying thought, Currie seems to believe that there is room for hope nevertheless.

Rant by Chuck Palahniuk

Fu.

King.

Wow.

I don’t even know where to start. If you’ve read anything by Palahniuk you already know that there really is no quick summary I can give.

I still haven’t decided if Palahniuk is a very dark comedy writer or a very funny gloomy Gus.

I do know that Choke might no longer be my favorite of his works.

Thanks to Evil Darien, I’m in the middle of an experiment. He burned me a copy of Rant the audio book.

So, I’ve been listening in my car as I’ve been reading this, always keeping about a hundred pages or so behind.

Um, this was the first time I had ever listened to an audio book, much less listening to it as I read the book.

Turns out, this is the perfect book to try this with.

The way Palahniuk slowly reveals his characters, listening to the audio books behind reading the book, everything takes on new meaning, things you haven’t caught before.

So now that I’ve finished the book, I can listen to the rest of the CDs.

I’m kind of anxious to see what I hadn’t noticed or realized the significance of the first time I read it.

This will most likely be one of those rare books that I actually revisit within the year.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

I have said before that my favorite author is the Japanese surrealist Haruki Murakami, but until recently, I had not ready any of his shorts, just his novels.

I didn’t even realize that Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman was a collection of his short stories when I bought it and I don’t mind telling you, I was just a little disappointed.

I had set my mind on losing myself inside the peculiar, nightmarish world of a so-ordinary-it’s-abnormal protagonist. Each of Murakami’s novels, most notably Dance Dance Dance, Kafka on the Shore and, my favorite book of all time, The Wind Up Bird Chronicles has a way of enveloping you in a world that you don’t think you could possibly recognize, but feels somehow familiar, even comforting just the same.

My disappointment melted quickly after I started.

In fact, this collection reads very much like one of his novels, structured very similarly to Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (a novel striking in its episodic nature) in that it weaves carefully in and out of realism, changing protagonists without ever breaking the story’s thread.

In Murakami’s work, the protagonists are often interchangeable because the focus of his work is not how a character reacts to the events taking place around and to him but rather on how minor characters and even the world these strange creatures inhabit react to the protagonist.

How Murakami can take traditional narrative structure and completely invert it the way he does and still manage to create a universe as beautiful as it is mystifying and often even cruel is a testament to how, after all these centuries and millennia, art still has the capacity to surprise us.

It’s been said that there is nothing new under the sun.

Bullshit and fuck you.

In this collection, we encounter men who may or may not be made of ice, crabmeat with worms, staircases in which you can disappear and be spit out across the country for no apparent reason, crows tearing each other apart, ripping out the intestines of their fellow birds in the quest for tasty snack cakes, an absolutely goddamn terrifying mirror, nausea that strikes as if it were a villain with its own mind, a one-legged surfer ghost and my favorite, an employee of the Public Works Department who just can’t wait for an excuse to beat up, kill and/or torture a talking monkey.

Diary by Chuck Palahniuk

“Your blood is our gold.”

It seems that most writers (at least the ones I read) try their hand at channeling Shirley Jackson at some point and Diary by Chuck Palahniuk is certainly right up there with The Long Walk by Stephen King as one of the best. But Palahniuk is inventive enough to inject a copious amount of ideas of his own so it doesn’t feel borrowed at all.

Where The Lottery is a commentary on conformity, Diary is an indictment, not merely on greed, but the nature of wealth itself. Apart from the thematic elements, which I could go on and on about, this is a very funny book.

Highly recommended.

Exterminator! by William H. Burroughs

If Naked Lunch is 1984 on acid, then Exterminator! is Animal Farm on PCP & crack. Seriously, Burroughs & Dr. Seuss were the premiere existentialists of the 20th century. And yes, it’s an apt comparison.

I know Burroughs is usually associated with the whole junkie culture, but that is a simple assessment at best. Yes, drugs are prevalent in all his works, but they are incidental. Junk is purely the means by which Burroughs distorts the reality of his different characters/narrators.

It’s not that dissimilar from how Dostoyevsky used religion and conscience to present the different points of view in The Brothers Karamazov. And yes, that comparison is also apt.

But aside from the snooty, philosophical, boring, pretentious, etc. reasons I could give for reasons why you should read something by Burroughs before you die, seemingly random, flung together cusses like MOTHER-LOVING STUPID-ASS BIBLE-BELT CUNTSUCKERS are just goddamn poetic

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

If you’ve never read anything of his, the best way I can describe his work is to tell you that I can’t imagine anyone but David Lynch translating one of his novels into film. (Okay, maybe Jodorowsky or Bunuel.) Murakami, like Lynch has a way of creating a universe that is completely contrary to everything we know, but entirely believable. This is a universe that we are drawn to on the one hand but on the other hand, wouldn’t want to come within a thousand miles of. His characters’ most mesmerizing trait is that they are just so goddamn ordinary. Like Hitchcock, Murakami paints an everyman and then throws him into the unexplainable just to see how an ordinary person would react to it. Murakami gets this pitch perfect. Their reactions are believable and the secrets about them that are slowly revealed are blasé and beguiling at the same time. I’m not sure that he’s ever going to top Noboru Wataya from The Wind Up Bird Chronicles as far as excellent villains go, but here, he comes damn close. Again, our primary villain, Shirakawa, is just so common and his motivation so simple, (he had to do it) that we’re left scratching our heads which may not sound like a compliment, but it is. So, for the uninitiated, please read something, anything of Murakami’s. For those of you who love chick stuff, Sputnik Sweetheart or Norwegian Wood may be a good introduction of his world. For those who are more bold, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles is one of those books that just might change the way you look at literature forever.