 I didn't think too highly about Ms Ice Sandwich in the first tens of pages: the story is written in the perspective of a fourth grade Japanese schoolkid (the style is exemplary, and really captures the voice and observations of a fourth grader) who lives with his mother and his paternal grandmother and is infatuated with Ms Ice Sandwich, a lady at the sandwich counter at his local grocery store with large eyes and electric blue eyelids.
Our protagonist finds out, one day, that Ms Ice Sandwich is to leave the grocery store and disappear forever, Ms Ice Sandwich, who had been a part of his daily rhythms (and one that he looked forward to). "As I ramble on like this to Grandma, I start to feel a pain in my chest and tears suddenly start to roll down my cheeks, and suddenly I'm crying my eyes out. I'm not sure what's causing it, why I'm so unhappy, but I can't stop the tears. The angel decorations in Mum's salon, or the smell of the blue crayon, the pattern on the zabuton cover that I trace with the tip of my finger, Tutti's backpack getting farther into the distance, maybe all of this--everything inside me feels scrambled..." The above quotation cannot quite capture this raw poignant purity of the first goodbye, something that Kawakami was able to evoke so well, and remind me of what I'd lost
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 Finally found this novel--I found it and read it in a hostel in Guilin in 2015, for some reason it lingered, however, I had forgotten the title.
The novel begins with a reminiscence of the first-person narrator's past, where he participated in the Russian civil war as a 16 year old and shot a bullet into the chest of a man with grey eyes on a white stallion. This "murder" marks the start of his independence, and has "left an unconscious mark on everything [he] was destined to learn and see thereafter" (p. 13). He encounters a book of short stories that tells of the exact same story from the point of view of the man he was supposed to have killed, written by a man named Alexander Wolf. The novel has the feel of a detective story. The protagonist is pulled physically by a fatal force while he simultaneously makes detached, incisive observations; note how the start of an affair with the cold and enigmatic Yelena Nikolayenev is written: "More keenly than ever before in my life I sensed that all this came down to some blind, obscure movement, to a sequence of visual and aural impressions, accompanied by an unconscious, simultaneous muscular gravity that was developing uncontrollably... this was of the greatest importance, and this predetermined what was to come" (p. 90). The protagonist struggles with the contradiction between his animal self and his body's desire for sensuality, and his devotion to art and culture (maybe these are very Russian categories, I am reminded of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan/Aloysha vs Dmitri), his analysis of the boxing match demonstrates a harmony of these two sides. Alexandre Wolf is described through the same categories of sensuality and spirituality, but his narrow escape from death kills off his physical body and his sensual self, leaving him a spectre with a perspective of life haunted by the presence of death; like Hemingway's Lost Generation the experience of war has left previous, stable-seeming systems of morality in ruins. However, the last remnants of Wolf's physical body provokes him to revenge, and in the end fate captures what had barely escaped it.  What an imagination--and if not wrested out from the imagination to be put on a blank page, what a life!
Ryu Murakami's Almost Transparent Blue shook me violently, coming from Kawabata as I was. The novel evokes a series of scenes, detached yet fitted into a plot, centering on teenage Ryu the protagonist, his friends, and Lilly his maternal bedmate as they do heroine, do Philopon, have sex, drink, vomit and live a life in the eternal hedonistic present. What happens in these scenes is nothing extraordinary in the context of their lives, but Ryu Murakami's writing and his generous, gratuitous descriptions pull these scenes out of the ordinary flow of life and they are rewritten as events. These descriptions are trangressive; nouns, verbs, and adjectives that should be kept separate for decency's sake are melded into one another in the subversive corners that Ryu and his friends inhabit, in the smoke and haze of alcohol and drugs. Even the formal aspects of the novel are not secure; dialogue seems to vacillate from a separate formal entity (marked by quotation marks) to being pulled into the undifferentiated text. Murakami's writing is an experience of the senses, his writing provokes a corporeal reaction that is at once grotesque but oddly pleasureable. "Moko was on top of Oscar, who rocked her while he gnawed a piece of chicken... A lot of stuff ended up of the red rug. Underwear and cigarette ashes, scraps of bread and lettuce and tomato, different kinds of hair, blood-smeared paper, tumblers and bottles, grape skins... Pressing her chin on the table, breathing hard, Moko attacked a crab like a starving child. Then one of the blacks stuck his shaft in front of her, and she took that in her mouth too. Stroking it with her tongue, she pushed it aside and turned to the crab. The red shell crunched between her teeth, she pulled out the white meat with her hands. Piling it with pink mayonnaise from a plate, she put it on her tongue, the mayonnaise dribbling onto her chest. The odor of crab flowed through the room" (p. 41 - 42). These descriptions are balanced out by the detached and 'objective' first person perspective of Ryu. Ryu is like a bystander who observes his own life from a distance. It is as if he is caught up in the inescapable currents of his hedonistic life, of which he is a passive recipient, much like in the sex scene on page 56, where he plays both a heterosexual and homosexual, but passive, role. Much like in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, there is an unnameable, oppressive something in the life of Ryu and his friends, who are caught like flies in a spider's web.  I just felt like reading an antiquated work of fiction, where it may be observ'd an earlier state of the English language; and may thus allow me notice of the stages to its actual transfiguration. Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719, so exactly 300 years prior to today.
Robinson Crusoe recounts his tale of shipwreck and from this posterior perspective he tells of his foolish youthful desires for adventure, going against his father's counsel and wishes, against his father's insistence that the "middle state" is best and most conducive to happiness. Crusoe runs away from home, and after many adventures he is the only survivor of a storm on a deserted island, where he will be stuck for 28 years. Two thirds of the novel recounts his gradual mastery of his condition, the last third is a bit more exciting and recounts his encounters with cannibals and mutineers. Robinson Crusoe demonstrates a certain colonial/protestant ideology of 17th/18th century England (I do not know the precise terminology for it), an ethics of work, individualism, and cultivation over nature (as a pure, primordial state). Crusoe goes from a scared victim of shipwreck to regulating order (culture) onto the island (pure state of nature) through agriculture, domesticating animals, familiarizing himself with weather patterns, building tools, etc. While in this active pursuit of order he submits himself to God and God's will, repenting on his sinful ways of the past, cultivating himself as a refined religious subject. The practice of cultivation is also a form of colonialism. Crusoe saves a 'savage' from other cannibalistic savages and names him Friday. Friday conforms to the image of the noble savage, a nostalgic image of purely natural and innocent man and Crusoe teaches him and reforms him, teaching to eat goat stew and bread instead of human flesh, and to worship the one and only God instead of his primitive deity. After finding some more stragglers on his island, he fancies himself a king with subjects under his island dominion. While reading Robinson Crusoe, I almost felt nostalgic at this possibility of an untouched island in a pure, natural state. The beaches of an unpeopled island are now probably littered with plastic waste, the material vestiges of human culture. Even if free from the traces of human materiality, the island is already "known" in the virtual world, represented by Google maps. An uninhabited island. Even if I were to make it my space of solace, it is impossible to disappear and escape the gaze of the state and the gaze of Google, as my digital footprint will linger forever.it.  Chikako was once Kikuji's father's plaything (Kikuji's father, deceased in the novel, was a Japanese man of leisure with a reputation in tea ceremony). Kikuji remembers going with his father to Chikako's home as a child and seeing her with her kimono half-open, "cutting the hair on her birthmark with a small pair of scissors" (a great example of the ugly in Kawabata). His father's affair with her ends after a short time, but the image of her giant, repulsive birthmark clings stubbornly throughout the novel, mirroring the old and neutered Chikako, whose life festers with a venomous ressentiment.
As the novel begins, Kikuji is on his way to a tea ceremony that Chikako is hosting. Chikako lures him in with the promise of introducing him to a girl. The Inamura girl, who, with her kerchief with a thousand cranes, is beauty, much like Yoko in Snow Country. Is the neuter and venomous Chikako choosing her successor in the pure and clean Inamura girl? At the tea ceremony, Kikuji meets Mrs. Ota and her daughter. Mrs. Ota replaced Chikako in his father's life, and was his mistress to the end of his life. In Kikuji Mrs. Ota sees his father, and they become lovers. Kikuji experiences something akin to a youthful sexual awakening in his experience: "He usually wanted to make his departure roughly; but today it was as though for the first time someone was warmly near him and he was drifting willingly along. He had not until then seen how the wave of woman followed after. Giving his body to the wave, he even felt a satisfaction as of drowsing off in triumph, the conqueror whose feet were being washed by a slave." (p. 29). Chikako interferes again, and her venom (indirectly) leads to the suicide of her old rival, who succumbs to guilt and shame at her relationship with Kikuji. Kikuji discovers in the daughter something of the mother, and an intimacy warms from between them--and the old drama between Kikuji's father, Mrs. Ota, and Chikako move on in the bodies of their new owners through the ancient ritual of the tea ceremony. However, unlike the tea utensils that they use--the tea bowls from Old Masters of several centuries past--these new hosts are not so easily prone to manipulation: these bodies are modern subjects that possess a subversive agency, while the tea bowls are passed around with their strange careers, imprinted with the histories of their old owners. [1] [1] It is interesting to see how modernity, post-war Japan, is suggested in Kawabata's work. Kikuji is a salaryman who works in an office. He does not care for the tea ceremony. Mrs. Ota's daughter looks for work after her mother's death, like the other Japanese women entered the labour market. Kikuji considers selling his house, as housing and land is also becoming commodified.  Finally read this classic work; what pushed me to read it was Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, the 3rd part of the book refers to the Poetics and uses Aristotle's language, i.e. recognition and revealing as ethical universal.
Great introduction that contextualizes the Poetics in Aristotle's work, and explains key concepts--the introduction is longer than Aristotle's actual study. For Aristotle, mimesis/imitation is inherently pleasurable to human beings, so the most important element of tragedy is plot, which is the imitation of an action, with the goal of arousing fear or pity. "The imitation is not just of a complete action, but also of events that evoke fear and pity. These effects occur above all when things come about contrary to expectation but because of one another" (p. 17). The plot has to be a coherent, spherical (Aristotle doesn't use this word) whole of a certain magnitude, and events must be contained within this whole, so episodic stories are the worst. Characters cannot be bad, because the audience does not feel pity for bad things that happen to bad people, characters must be admirable but similar to us, so not overly heroic or noble. Complex plots rely on reversal or recognition or both, while keeping within the logical flow of events in the whole. Good people attempt to make admirable decisions, but their efforts lead unexpectedly to a bad result, because of their ignorance (the state before recognition) that leads to an error, leading to a reversal. It was only after Aristotle that I began to see the value of plot, the construction of character, and the use of recognition/reversal (recognition is used everywhere). I would always engage in literature, film etc. through a formal and stylistic lens. No wonder I like Hong Sang-Soo so much, his films are formal experimentations with the same plot and characters, and I snicker in cerebral satisfaction watching his playful formal variations. Aristotle has taught me to value a new way of seeing that is the complete opposite; I wonder what this type of seeing will show me.  A collection of 12 short stories that show another face to Chekhov (many signed Antosha Chekhonte), the Chekhov in his youth, who wrote satirical, comedic stories to support his family.
These stories are joyful, light, and comedic: they serve as a well-polished (but caricaturing) looking glass onto Russian society in Chekhov's time (like a written version of those fun house mirrors), at least I assume this is the case, not being an expert on Russian society. "Artists' Wives" describes the lives of megalomaniac Russian bohemians and the unhappy wives who support them. "Papa" parodies the Russian patriarch, who cheats on his wife with the maid, and bullies and bribes the math teacher of his idiot son who is held back several grades. "A Sinner from Toledo" takes place during the Spanish Inquisition, which pits superstition and religion against science and learning. The last story, "1,001 Passions, or, a Dreadful Night" has the subheading 'a <i>timid</i> (haha) imitation of Victor Hugo' which is anything but timid. It ends like this: “Yesterday my second son was born--I was so happy, I hanged myself. My second boy reaches out his little hands to the readers, exhorting them not to listen to his papa. His papa had no children; his papa had no wife. His papa fears marriage like the plague. My doesn't lie. He is an infant. Believe him. Infancy is a holy age. None of this ever happened... Good night."  Difficult read, I doubt my own ability to give a good book review but here is what I understood of it.
Fear and trembling is an extended meditation on faith partly through the story of Abraham. After 70 long, long years of waiting in faith with his wife Sarah, a miracle happens and God permits him to beget a son, Isaac, who was his joy. And then comes the ultimate test, God bids Abraham to sacrifice Isaac to him at Mount Moriah, a journey that takes three long days to complete. Once at Mount Moriah, Abraham would have been required to prepare the firewood, the pyre, to take out the knife, and finally, plunge the knife into his one and only beloved son, Isaac. But through this process and while performing these motions (how must have all this felt?) Abraham had faith in God, and doubted not even for a moment in God's command. Faith: "the divine madness." Kierkegaard contrasts Abraham, "the knight of faith" with the "tragic hero." The tragic hero makes the "movement of infinite resignation" but does not go further--the tragic hero moves on the plane of the ethical which is the universal. If Abraham doubted and made the movement of infinite resignation (putting his actions on the plane of universal/ethical) then he would have plunged his knife in his own breast as a surrogate sacrifice for Isaac. The knight of faith makes an additional movement and believes in "virtue of the absurd" and there is a paradox, for by faith (the virtue of the absurd) "the particular [the individual] is higher than the universal [system of ethics]." This is because "the individual as the particular stands in an absolute relation to the absolute [God]." And thus, by faith, Abraham keeps Isaac. Faith, through the virtue of the absurd, is fear, is trembling, is dread. "...when I have to think of Abraham, I am as though annihilated. I catch sight every moment of that enormous paradox which is the substance of Abraham's life, every moment I am repelled... I strain every muscle to get a view of it--that very instant I am paralyzed" (p. 44). Not being a believer, I personally cannot relate on a corporeal level to the dread that Kierkegaard has written about, but, like in his time, Kierkegaard challenges men and women of faith today--how many can read about Abraham with the same kind of reverence and terror?--how many can live in with faith confronted with the same sleep-stealing dread?  Really enjoyed this novel by Lee Seung-U, I bought this novel because I read his short story Magnolia Park almost two years ago and thought it was amazing.
This novel is supposedly semi-autobiographical, and Lee takes an interesting formal approach to the material of his life. The novel takes the form of a book written by a journalist who is tasked to write a critical book on Korean writer Bak Bugil, exploring the intersections between his life and his oeuvre. Bak is a reluctant recipient of this honour, so the journalist-I narrator writes the book through interviews with Bak, his various works, and his own conjectures, constructing a work of multiple perspectives from various layers and various depths of subjective/objective analysis. "The past is completely based on memory, and all memories have been censored and carefully selected. Time is unflinching, and my ego is huge, a small universe surrounded by so many layers. Every layer has its own truth, which is only true in that layer. Is there no truth that can penetrate through all the layers like a harpoon? ..." (p. 78 - 79). "Of course, I'm not such a hare-brain that I can't distinguish between a novel and a memoir or an autobiography... Readers, however, are naturally intrigued when they find passages in a work of fiction which match real life. Writers obviously do not record their lives exactly..." (p. 130) -- is Lee warning us, the readers not to misread this work as a confession? Interesting note about my copy: inside the front cover, there is note from the translator to recently deceased East-Asian scholar Nancy Abelmann. I guess I have her personal copy. Unfortunately, I found the translation a bit lacking at parts: "That's how foolish things happen. Common sense means staying on track and thereby staying safe. Once one strays from the path, nothing guarantees one's safety. Thereafter, the abnormal becomes common sense. Paranoid thoughts blaze paranoid paths..." While I have limited exposure to written Korean in literature, I have the sense that there is a preference for short and precise sentences. I thought more transliteration was necessary for these types of paragraphs, however, they sound too tedious and platitudinous.  I keep hearing this phrase 'the Fourth Industrial Revolution' being thrown around without knowing exactly what if refers to so I decided to read a book about it. This book is written by Klaus Schwab the Founder of the World Economic Forum, the organization that hosts the ultra exclusive Davos Conferences, so one has a sense of how he is positioned in society, and how his positionality influences his views.
Schwab claims that the Fourth Industrial Revolution will "entail nothing less than a transformation of humankind" (p. 1) through technologies that bridge across the "physical, digital, and biological worlds." It is unlike the other industrial revolutions due to the "size, speed and scope" of the transformations, and he makes a good case for believing so. The transformative potential of the Fourth Industrial Revolution can either be an opportunity or a disaster for contemporary society. (We can already see the signs of the transformation in the form of precariats who may have been middle class workers a generation ago.) However, as he points out, access to the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution will not be equally distributed: 17% of the global population lack stable access to electricity and half the global population lack access to the internet, which means that they do not experience the second and third industrial age. Schwab divides technological innovations of the Fourth Industrial Age into three categories: physical (autonomous vehicles, robots, new materials), digital (IoT), and biological (CRISPR). The Fourth Industrial Age is disruptive because of the potential combination of these technologies. These technologies have vast implications for the economy, for society, for individuals, nation-states etc. One interesting thing I've noticed is how apolitical his POV is. Schwab writes about issues like climate change as a matter of negative externalities that can be solved through technology. His explanation for wealth inequality is the destructive effect of new technologies and automation, which substitute capital for labour. One can compare his narrative with David Harvey in his book on neo-liberalism for a completely oppositional narrative. |
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