Book Review: 1Q84 – Book One by Haruki Murakami

Title: 1Q84: Book One
Author: Haruki Murakami
Translators: Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 978-0345802934
Genre: Literary Fiction
Pages: (Book One): 387
Source: Personal Copy
Rating: 5/5

I think reviewing a Murakami novel is sometimes far more difficult than reading one. I have just finished the first part of 1Q84 – a three-book volume by Murakami and I have to admit that the guy will never fade or let go of his writing prowess. I have been an ardent fan of all his books and devoured all of them. So somewhere down the line, I was expecting the writing technique and the plot and sub-plots to consist of the regular elements: Parallel universes, Jazz, Classical Music, Strange creatures and situations, estranged lives, loss of love and a deep identity crisis.

My love-affair (so to say) with Murakami started with Sputnik Sweetheart in 2001 and it has been eleven years now and it is still going strong. 1Q84 (as the title goes) is a play on 1984 by George Orwell. 9 sounds like Q in Japanese, hence the replacement. Murakami always keeps the reader behind a veil – never giving away too much, keeping the reader wanting more and hanging in the balance. May be that is why 1Q84 was first published as three volumes, each installment at a time, making readers wait.

I intended to read it in that manner. Hence this review of the first volume only. The plot is about two people living in Tokyo, 1984. Aomame is a powerful, liberated woman who delivers justice in her own vigilante style. Tengo is a reticent genius who is involved in a controversial behind the closed doors deal to ghost-write a novel. The plots seem totally unrelated, but over the course of the year 1984, Tengo’s and Aomame’s paths cross, and may be not just for the first time. Their paths cross due to a secret cult and Aomame’s need to find out it’s leader who supposedly has a penchant for young girls (brutal description) and something to do with Little People (who are also featured in the book Tengo is ghost-writing).

This is coupled with the fact that Aomame suddenly finds herself in a world much like the one she was a part of in 1984, only that certain things are different (cops’ uniforms and guns they carried and the presence of two moons in the sky) and she wants to know what has happened. Hence till then she names this world: 1Q84. (Q also stands for Question mark in her case)

In the first book, we are introduced to the main characters (or so it seems) – Fuka-Eri, the original writer of the book Tengo is working on, Professor Ebisuno, who is more or less Fuka-Eri’s guardian, the dowager who commissions Aomame to carry out “justice” on selected people, Tamaru, the gay bodyguard of the dowager, Tengo’s absent father, Aomame’s over-zealous and religious parents who are waiting for the world to end, and then there is a cult which plays a major secondary character in all of this.

Like I had mentioned earlier, reviewing a Murakami is probably far more difficult than reading it and that’s true. The plots are inter-connected and the reader at one point finds it difficult to keep pace with what is going on (though it is not that difficult). Murakami’s writing is simple and yet very effective. Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel as his translators for years now are masters of their craft. They know exactly what words to use to capture the emotion and the scene as I am sure must have played out in the original.

Murakami’s characters are as complex as he pleases them to be. Aomame and Tengo as the protagonists are forever struggling to get their questions answered while the others play their parts and blend in fantastically to the story.

1Q84: Book one ends on an open-ended scene, but of course to pave the way for the second installment. The novel is dense and this I am talking of just volume 1. There is beauty. There are all kinds of social commentary. The book is a complete feat I am sure. Murakami does it only the way he knows how to: Stupendously.

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Book Review: The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick

Title: The Shawl
Author: Cynthia Ozick
Publisher: Vintage Books
ISBN: 978-0-679-72926-7
Genre: Literary Fiction
Pages: 70
Source: Library
Rating: 5/5

The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick is one of those books that will not let go once you have read it. It is a collection of two inter-linked stories and the impact they will have on any reader is heart-wrenching and stupendous.

The Shawl consists of two stories, “The Shawl” and “Rosa”. The title story is of a woman named Rosa and the death of her child Magda in a concentration camp, at the hands of a guard, due to her niece Stella. The second story – shows the appearance of Rosa, thirty years later in a Miami Hotel as a madwoman and scavenger, remembering what she can of her child.

In both these stories, the shawl is a key element, binding them and reflecting on the times lived – before and after. The Shawl grabs your attention from page one and doesn’t let go. Ozick also beautifully represents the immigrant element through English as a Second Language medium in the second story. She also looks at the complexities of language, class and identity in the Jewish community through these stories.

What I found most amazing was the fact that so much could be said in a mere seventy page book. Sometimes one doesn’t need more words to express the emotion. Rosa is a bitter, psychologically fractured and a woman who doesn’t need anything from anyone. She just wants to be left alone to her madness and that doesn’t seem to happen.

Cynthia Ozick’s writing shines on every page. The book is not an easy read, considering the subject; however Ms. Ozick does not shy away from describing the period of horror, and its impact, even thirty years on. In essence, it is so true, that experiences never let go and Rosa is a befitting example of this.

The Shawl is not a read for the faint-hearted. Like I said Ozick doesn’t mince her words. She is direct. The book makes you wonder: Does the past really leave you or not? The book is just an exquisite tale of human suffering. A cautious read. I recommend it only to those who are interested in something like this.

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Book Review: The Sense of Sight by John Berger

Title: The Sense of Sight
Author: John Berger
Publisher: Vintage USA
ISBN: 978-0-679-73722-3
Genre: Non-Fiction, Art Criticism
Pages: 300
Source: Personal Copy
Rating: 5/5

When John Berger writes something and you read it, it is nothing but poetry in prose and sometimes even his non-fiction woks stand out even more so. I was introduced to John Berger by chance and thank god for that “by chance” moment or else I would have never known the beauty of his works and he would never have become an integral writer in my life.

“The Sense of Sight” is a collection of essays by him – on the visual aspects of our world. The way we see things, perceive them and ultimately judge what we see. John Berger traces what vision means to us and its importance to see things differently, from paintings to rivers to dreams being a vision and how that amalgamates with the world surrounding us.

With art criticism in tow, he speaks of other things as well – politics, love, food, class, travel and immigration, dreaming, passion, art as an activity, feasts, Van Gogh’s compulsion to bring his canvas and reality together to what two self-portraits of an unrivalled artist speak of art.

Berger writes with fervor and brilliance. Art in his words become something else altogether. There are stories hidden in these essays and the reader only has to look for them and that is good for a reader. This book bridges the gap between seeing and the spoken. The writing is intense and just there for the reader to assimilate. Berger has a neutral view to art and everything else under the sun, and that is why one can relate to what he writes. His range is vast and that helps in the book not getting monotonous or lame at any point of time.

The Sense of Sight may not be a book for everyone however if you are interested about art and life, then maybe you should pick it up.

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Book Review: The Easter Parade by Richard Yates

Title: The Easter Parade
Author: Richard Yates
Publisher: Vintage Books
Genre: Literary Fiction
ISBN: 978-0099518563
Pages: 240
Price: £7.99
Source: Personal Copy
Rating: 5/5

The Easter Parade can be seen as a bleak novel in that great swathes of sadness, loneliness and ugliness permeate through the protagonists’ lives. Much of this is due to Yates’s simple, matter-of-fact style. He relates the story in a no-frills way, so that the utter pointlessness of life pokes through like a bony white toe through a threadbare sock. He rarely dwells on events and in many ways skims over the joys – motherhood, aunthood, love, friendship – that punctuate life. Seen from this vantage point, any life might appear bleak: the bitter-sweetness of childhood, the disappointment of finding that noone is perfect, the vileness of physically and emotionally cruel people, serial monogamy which, if a person ends up single, can be seen pessimistically as a series of failures, the ant-like way we live, scurry around and then die. That Yates manages to make the novel not only readable but also mesmerising is testament to his powers as a story teller. In Yates’s hands, less does mean more, his pared-down style and conscious absence of literary gymnastics resulting in story-telling that is simultaneously easy to digest and hugely satisfying.

The story follows the lives of two sisters, Sarah and Emily Grimes, daughters of divorced parents, born in 1921 and 1925 respectively. Growing up with their flighty mother with occasional visits to their idealised father, they are very different. Sarah embraces conventionality and settles down early for what she hopes is an idyllic life with English public school-educated Tony who, to her infatuated eyes, looks like a young Laurence Olivier. Emily is spikier and more independant; she samples sex before marriage and decides she rather likes it, so she follows a more (for the time) daring route in life, working and having serial relationships with men. But long-term happiness is elusive for both sisters. Throughout their lives, they keep in touch, and their sisterly relationship is as complex as sibling relationships can be, their undoubted mutual love coloured with swirls of jealousy and intolerance.

The simplicity of Yates’s style is in many ways deceptive – huge themes are tackled, but with a touch so light that the ensuing thought-process is largely the reader’s. This works well – rather than being force-fed processed emotions like a foie gras goose with purreed nutrients , the reader bites the crisp, uncluttered text and thinks for themselves. When Yates writes of Emily meeting her father for lunch ‘she thought he looked surprisingly old as he came down the steps, wearing a raincoat that wasn’t quite clean’, he encapsulates succinctly the shock many people feel when they first become conscious of their ageing parents’ impending mortality and their fallibility.

Perhaps the book’s blackness is in part due to Yates’s refusal to give in to sentimentality – he doesn’t describe the little joys that characterise the good parts in a relationship or life, so that the reader is left with a skeletal sketch of the failures of each. But peering through the dark, I did catch glimpses of hope. For all Tony’s grim, bigoted, veiled thuggishness and the joylessness of two of his sons, his and Sarah’s middle son Peter is a ray of light, a kind, sensitive person who responds to Emily’s reaching out. Even at the end, after Emily’s bitter outburst, he is willing to welcome her into his home – the book’s first suggestion of unconditional affection for a long time.

The thing that made this novel so sad, yet so very moving at the same time, was the fact that each sister was miserable with how their life turned out yet, they envied the life that the other one had. Although I never had a sister, I felt deeply for the Grimes sisters, and rooted for each of them at different times. Themes of how early promise can erode is most evidenced by how Sarah’s once-promising and beautiful life morphs into something straight out of a very sad movie. She clings to her early dreams of how things should be by resisting any kind of change; the brutality and ugly moments in her life are glossed over in her own mind, reminding us that nothing changes without our own desire to make that happen.

If you love fine literature and an author who can pull you into the lives of his characters, then I know you will enjoy The Easter Parade. If I had to change one thing about this novel, I would have liked to have had it told in alternating POVs instead of just Emily. Despite this, I would highly recommend this book.

Book Review: The Palace of Dreams by Ismail Kadare

Title: The Palace of Dreams
Author: Ismail Kadare
Publisher: Vintage Books
Genre: Literary Fiction
ISBN: 978-0099518273
Pages: 192
Price: £7.99
Source: Personal Copy
Rating: 5/5

As he did in his Man Booker International Prize-winning novel THE SUCCESSOR, Ismail Kadare portrays in THE PALACE OF DREAMS an autocratic, vaguely Islamic, East European state controlled by rumor, innuendo, superstition, and irrationality. The instrument of power this time, however, is not the whim of an all-powerful dictator who induces a constant state of fear and uncertainty in his subordinates, rivals, and subjects. Rather, it is a post-Freudian dream factory, a monolithic and opaque institution that serves the state by interpreting the nightly brain-ramblings of its citizenry. The purpose of the Tabir Sarrail, the Palace of Dreams, is simple: to sift through the thousands of sparsely remembered dream descriptions in search each week of a Master Dream, the one and only dream that will be presented as meaningful to the Sovereign. Presumably, that dream and its accompanying interpretation convey important information for running the state – for making key decisions, warning of impending crises or revolts, or just predicting the future. Of course, no one can say for sure how that Master Dream gets selected by the Palace’s director, how its particular interpretation is chosen, or whether the presented dream in fact ever took place or was simply fabricated for political purposes.

Kadare centers his tale around a most unlikely hero, Mark-Alem Quprili, the ineffectual scion of a long-powerful clan of ministers, viziers, and businessmen. As his given name suggests, Mark-Alem lives in a world half-Western and half-Islamic, with a last name of Albanian origin that translates as bridge. Not just any bridge, it seems, but an Albanian bridge of three arches (another of Kadare’s books is titled THE THREE-ARCHED BRIDGE) in which a murdered man was walled up inside its foundations. A family meeting decides Mark-Alem’s future – he will take a position at the Palace of Dreams. The young man enters his job naively, completely unaware that he is being positioned in the Tabir Sarrail to protect his family from the inscrutable machinations of government. He begins with a job in the Selection department, one of dozens if not hundreds who sift through the week’s collected dreams to choose those worth further consideration. In surprisingly short order, he is promoted to the Interpretation section, which analyzes those sent from Selection for meaning, including culling out the relatively small group that might become the week’s Master Dream.

The Palace of Dreams is an immense and forbidding structure, filled with endless corridors and locked doors. Each new experience there is for Mark-Alem a waking nightmare – wandering lost through empty and unmarked hallways, hearing faraway footsteps, seeing the dead bodies of citizen-dreamers who were brought in for interrogation being spirited away. Over time, however, the dreams whose readings fill Mark-Alem’s days become more real than life outside the Palace. How, after all, can real life possible compete with the wild imaginings, the sheer magic and impossibility, of dreams? Mark-Alem finds that he has even stopped having dreams of his own. As his responsibilities increase and his hours lengthen, his life becomes a dream state within a dream world in a dream-processing factory. It is not until he attends a dinner at his Vizier uncle’s home that reality, and the machine of State, impinge murderously on Mark-Alem and shock him awake. He discovers the truth of his situation in the Tabir Sarrail and how he failed to protect his family. Yet almost simultaneously, the attack on the Quprili’s is answered with a political counterattack that will forever change Mark-Alem’s life. This benign butterfly of a man becomes a powerful instrument of the State and its evil affairs, and he even dares to dream his own dreams again.

Ismail Kadare’s prose is powerful in its very sparseness. His setting is Balkan, but the time period is deliberately unspecific, vaguely 19th Century in feeling. THE PALACE OF DREAMS progresses easily and quietly, but the story feels like a dream itself, a nightmare world of uncertainty, unnamable fears, and evil portents. We experience through Mark-Alem a ceaseless sense of confusion, of being constantly lost and unable to find our way out. Various newspaper reviewers likened this novel to Kafka’s THE TRIAL and THE CASTLE (the obvious choices), Borges’s labyrinth, Canetti’s AUTO DA FE, or Auster’s THE MUSIC OF CHANCE. For me, the analogues were Plato’s cave, Saramago’s THE CAVE, and Solzhenitsyn’s THE FIRST CIRCLE. Regardless, THE PALACE OF DREAMS is a chilling, almost nightmarish story of a world where reality is governed by irrational belief in the quasi-religious predictive power of dreams. It is a forbidding world in which government is run by superstitious faith, where decisions of life and death are divorced from the reality-based world. THE PALACE OF DREAMS is a first-rate tale, an unsettling horror story that mirrors modern life too closely for comfort. Ismail Kadare deserves a wider audience. His work in eminently readable, and he has much to tell us.

Book Review: Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman

Title: Everything Flows
Author: Vasily Grossman
Publisher: Vintage Classics
ISBN: 978-0099519164
Genre: Classics, Literary Fiction
PP: 320 pages
Price: £8.99
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

“Not under foreign skies, Nor under foreign wings protected
I shared all this with my own people
There, where misfortune had abandoned us.” – Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem

If Life and Fate (New York Review Books Classics) may rightfully be seen as Vasily Grossman’s masterpiece, his Everything Flows may rightfully be seen as his testament, a requiem if you will not only for his own life but for the lives of those who lived in his time and place.

“Everything Flows” tells a simple, yet emotionally deep and politically nuanced tale. The story begins with the 1957 return to Moscow of Ivan Grigoryevich after 30 years of forced labor in the Gulag. 1957 marked the year, following Khrushchev’s denunciation of the excesses of Stalin, in which the tide of prisoners returning from the Gulag reached its peak. He arrives at the Moscow flat of his cousin Nikolay. Nikolay, a scientist with less than stellar skills, has reached some measure of success at the laboratory through dint of being a survivor. The meeting in the flat is entirely unsatisfactory for both parties. Grossman paints a vivid picture of Nikolay, more than a bit jealous that Ivan’s light had always shone brighter than his own prior to Ivan’s arrest. Nikolay suffers from the guilt of one who was not arrested and who is painfully aware of the choices he made to keep from being arrested. It seems clear that Ivan represents a mirror into which Nikolay can see only his own hollow reflection.

Ivan leaves Moscow for his old city of Leningrad, the place where he was first arrested in 1927. By chance, he runs into the person, Pinegin, whose denunciation placed him in jail in the first place. Once again, Ivan is a mirror and Pinegin is horrified at what he is faced with, what he has buried for thirty years. Ironically, and to great effect, we see Pinegin’s horror recede once he settles down to a sumptuous lunch at a restaurant reserved for foreigners and party officials. Ivan does not know about the denunciation and Grossman here embarks on a discourse on the different types and forms of denunciation available to the Soviet citizen. It is a remarkable discourse that shows how many different ways there are to participate in a purge and how many ways there are to legitimize ones participation and/or acquiescence.

From Leningrad Ivan travels to a southern industrial city where he finds work and eventually finds a deep and satisfying love in the person of his landlady Anna. The centerpiece of that relationship is the brutal honesty involved; Anna spends a night detailing her role in the pointless, needless famine that swept the Ukraine in 1932-1933. It is an account made even more chilling by the straightforward, confessional nature of its telling. But it is also redemptive and shines a light on what might be called Grossman’s vision that love and freedom are two goals, not mutually exclusive, that an honest accounting of our lives forms the essence of our shared humanity.

The above summary does not do justice to the power of Grossman’s prose or to the literary and political importance of the work. Since the death of Stalin, the Soviet line had remained relatively firm – Stalin’s excesses were the product of a disturbed mind that represented a horrible deviation from the theory and principles of Leninism. The USSR’s best path was the one that returned it to the path created by Lenin. Khrushchev first enunciated this line. Even Gorbachev’s perestroika was based on the theory that a return to first-principles, i.e. Leninism, would save the USSR from destruction.

Grossman, prophetically, did not buy into this line and Everything Flows’last chapters are notable for a remarkable attack not only on Stalin but on Lenin and Lenin’s anti-democratic tendencies that had more in common with Ivan the Terrible than the principles of revolutionary democracy. “All the triumphs of Party and State were bound up with the name of Lenin. But all the cruelty inflicted on the nation also lay – tragically – on Lenin’s shoulders.” Grossman may have been the first to make this leap and he paid the price for making that leap. (This involves the suppression of his Life & Fate and Everything Flows.) Grossman’s explicit claim that Stalin was not a deviationist from Leninism but its natural-born progeny was profoundly subversive and there is no doubt in my mind that it was this difference that explains why, under Khruschev’s ‘thaw’, that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was publishe while Life and Fate and Everything Flows was banned.

Despite the horrors set out, quietly and without excess rhetoric, Grossman returns to a somewhat optimistic vision of mans search for freedom: “No matter how mighty the empire, all this is only mist and fog and, as such, will be blown away. Only one true force remains; only one true force continues to evolve and live; and this force is liberty. To a man, to live means to be free.”

Robert Chandler’s translation of Everything Flows is exquisite. He brings the same clarity and emotional investment in Grossman’s work that he brought to his prize-winning translations of Platonov and Hamid Ismailov’s The Railway. In short, Everything Flows is a treasure and I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

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Book Review: To the End of the Land by David Grossman

Title: To the End of the Land
Author: David Grossman
Publisher: Vintage, Random House
ISBN: 978-0099546740
Genre: Literary Fiction
PP: 592 pages
Price: £8.99
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

When you choose David Grossman’s “To the End of the Land,” prepare yourself for a profoundly intense, emotionally exhausting read. This is a beautifully written, extremely intelligent piece of work dealing with love and loss. Grossman’s personal involvement with respect to the subject matter is very evident. Only a parent who has had a child deployed in a combat situation could have captured the concern and haunting terror expressed by the female protagonist, Ora, throughout the text.

Beginning in 1967 and initially set in an Israeli hospital, the novel introduces the reader to the three main characters – Ora, Avram, and Ilan. Although Ora marries Ilan, the three individuals’ lives will intersect throughout the years, sometimes with unexpected results. In each instance, the relationships developed while the three were hospitalized will influence their life choices and impact those around them. In the major portion of the novel, which is detailed through Ora and Avram’s walk across Israeli countryside, Grossman fleshes out the characters’ lives over the 33 years following the prologue.

Ora and Avram achieve a measure of healing as they walk through the beautiful mountains of Galilee. But it is always incomplete. We don’t know whether Ofer lives or dies — but as long as the perpetual war persists, someone’s son will be dying. As Ora and Avram walk, they pass one memorial marker after another for Israel’s fallen soldiers, the flower of its youth.

This book doesn’t shy away from some of the uglier aspects of Israel. It describes Ora’s very problematic relationship with an Arab taxi driver who is almost a friend — and yet not a friend.

This book is full of human compassion. It is sometimes not easy to read. It describes a depth of love and longing that is almost palpable — and is very powerful and painful, especially since we know about the author’s own tragedy. It captures the Israeli dilemma. In many ways Avram is Israel — brilliant, witty, intelligent, inventive — and yet terribly psychically wounded by a war that never ends.

There is no doubt David Grossman is a wonderful writer. His use of language, imagery, and characterization is exceptional. The reader can feel the emotional pain contained on the pages of “To the End of the Land.” It is an extremely difficult book to read because of its intensity. I was unable to become engaged in the story for the first 150 pages, but am glad I persevered. This is not a book to be read for its entertainment value. Nor is it a book to be read when distractions draw one’s attention away from the novel. It is, however, an excellent piece of fiction, rooted in reality, and deserves your time. It is because of these qualities that I rated this as a five-star read.