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.

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

I can’t believe I hadn’t gotten around to reading The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie until now.

People are trying to kill a guy for writing this and I haven’t read it yet? What the hell is wrong with me?

Plus, once again, big fan of Satan. Satan in the title.

How could I go wrong? I gotta tell you, this book is easily one of the ten best novels I have ever read.

There is so much in here that I really need to digest it and maybe even reread it in the coming months before I can get a handle on it. I think that if most authors were to attempt something on this scale, it would end up being a mess, but Rushdie is up for the task.

Verses is congested with all kinds of crazy ideas and jumps from theme to theme, from story to story, from protagonist to protagonist.

We start with two fellows falling out of a plane that has just blown up. It doesn’t sound like it should be a funny chapter, but it really is. We follow them all the way down to earth as they miraculously land, unharmed.

We travel alongside them as they learn that maybe survival isn’t in and of itself the prize.

There is something more.

Then, Rushdie takes us back to the brothel where twelve prostitutes pretend to be the twelve wives of Mahound, the prophet.

Such sacrilege.

Then, it’s on to a disastrous pilgrimage with a delusional, leader who claims to be taking orders from the Archangel Gibreel. Is the prophet sadistic or foolish? Not only am I not sure, I’m convinced that Rushdie himself doesn’t know..

Rushdie juggles so many characters, so many stories, so many story arcs yet he weaves them together with such credibility that it really doesn’t feel as experimental as it really is.

It’s a rare novel that really experiments with theme, character, and story and is simple and accessible at the same time.

When it comes down to it, while Verses deals chiefly with religion, transformation, (one of our protagonists changes from a man to a faun to Satan himself and back again only to find that he really hadn’t changed much at all.) deception and death, on a broader level, it’s really about how we react to the unknown.

Rushdie studies both the insanity of belief and the stubborn arrogance of disbelief.

Goddamn, this book was good.

Rushdie’s style is so simple and lovely.

When he states that, “Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy,” it just really impacts the entire book with a very short, simple sentence.

I really need more time to digest and then I may post more thoughts on it in the coming weeks/months/years.

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.