Skip to main content

South of Pittsburgh, West of Anything Interesting

I think I've felt disappointed in the ending of every Murakami book I've ever read. At the same time I always sort of miss his protagonists after I finish the last page. I almost wish he'd write a series of doorstoppers with the same protagonists so you could spend more time with his heroes and never really have to worry about finishing it. It would be like one of those mediocre fantasy series with 15 books- but instead of having to put up with an endless imitation of Tolkien you'd  tag along with a group of sad but cultured people as they mope  around Japan for thousands of pages. I guess Updike's Rabbit series would be a closer comparison, only like with those pulpy fantasy novels I never liked them. Unlike most of Murakami's main characters  I never wanted to spend more than a few minutes with Rabbit and his sad problems. The world of those books isn't as appealing or as real to me for some reason (or the American setting makes it more relatable and thus too depressing to think about). It actually seems a bit jarring to me that you could visit every jazz bar in Tokyo and never actually find Hakime starring into space while sipping whiskey, or wander its streets without seeing someone starring intently at the sky like they're checking to see how many moons are up there.

His characters seem so settled, even the ones with a near complete lack of worldly success. They're comfortable with themselves and have environments they can function in, even if these environments don't extend beyond their one bedroom apartments. That's appealing and seemingly beyond reach, at least for me, though that's not really anyone's fault but mine. For all their lack of decisiveness most his creations at least seem confident enough to allow themselves to totally enjoy some small part of the earth.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It Will be Fun and Terrifying

  I pretend to be obsessed with Russian history and social movements, but this volume has been sitting on my shelf for the past year and I still haven't gotten through all of it. When I first started reading about 90's Russia, National Bolshevism, and nationalist movements in general this was exactly the sort of book I wished existed and now it does. Some of Adam Curtis' journalism touches on some of the themes here as well, which for me boil down to: Russian politics are so much more interesting than ours. Not to live through ( though from where I live we seem to be inching our way towards a softer version of 90's Russia which might not be totally fair since I live in Buffalo) but as a political environment to study. For all of our fringe political thinkers and movements, nothing outside of the competition between the boring center right and the boring center left has any depth. We don't have intellectuals forming post-modern extremist movements based on self consc...
Post a Comment
Read more

a double book review

Disenchanged Wanderer: The Apocalyptic Vision of Konstantin Leontiev.  by Glen Cronin. Published by Cornell Press. High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism.  by David Wills. Published by Beatdom Books. Adventures in Overthinking: Reactionary Russians and the Fall of Gonzo    I think you're supposed to read new books occasionally but as some of the poorly constructed paragraphs in the entries below imply, I don't do that very often. I've read two newish books recently, one the Leontiev biography I was losing my mind over a few months back and the second one a biography/literary analysis of Hunter S. Thompson. The latter joins a long list of books that have tackled Thompson but this is the first one I've read in a while that actually seemed necessary for people who like his books and take them seriously. The world doesn't need the 20th memoir by someone who hung out in Thompson's kitchen and thinks they're some kind of insider because they share...
Post a Comment
Read more

BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS

 I recently spent a few days at one of those Getaway campground cabins that sit on top of trailers and had one of those awful travel moments where I didn't know what to read. I finished Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami  on my Kindle faster than I expected and wasn't really in the mood for the physical books I brought as back ups:  Simulacra and Simulation  and Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above 1928-1941.  The latter I read years ago and still think of as a classic and I will certainly read again at some point, but it was not the thing to read while trying to distract myself from the types of thoughts that usually creep in around the evening time.  I bought Baudrillard's book thinking it might be useful to read something different from what I normally have my nose buried in - but French post-structuralism wasn't the ticket to distraction either. His ideas aren't really difficult to understand and there's some clever lines of thought ...
Post a Comment
Read more