Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra

There are times when the length of a review is a clear indicator of a reviewer’s feelings. I know from my own experience that my lengthiest reviews are the books I most adore or the books that inspire the most ire. This leaves me in an odd position for Alejandro Zambra’s Chilean Poet, a novel about which I took precisely zero notes but which I nonetheless see as essentially perfect.

Despite being published a mere four years ago (!), Chilean Poet already feels timeless, eternal, classic. It inspires a feeling I haven’t had towards contemporary novels very often, though Zadie Smith’s White Teeth comes to mind. I’m trying to identify why Zambra’s work feels like a classic already and I think it comes down to the fundamentals of novel writing just being done extremely well. Chilean Poet has a flexible, lively style that adapts itself to the purpose of scenes. The characters are all fleshed out beautifully and they feel authentic and relatable, even and especially in their flaws—at the core, they are all likable. The plot and structure provide the right balance of forward momentum whilst not abandoning the reflective interiority of the characters. There’s also something about the omniscience of the narrator that speaks to the timelessness of the tale.

It could be argued that the novel has three main characters: Gonzalo, Carla, and Vicente. Gonzalo and Carla are teenage lovers sneakily touching each other under a pancho who inevitably break up—partly because of Gonzalo’s love of poetry and Carla’s complete disinterest. Roughly six years later, the two reconnect and Gonzalo quickly and correctly deduces that Carla has a son, Vicente. The following six years are the flourishing of the trio’s domestic life, which is replete with the beauty of small moments and the quiet tragedies that undercut our bliss.

Zambra’s capacity for selection, for focus, is stunning. Each scene, even the quotidian, is critical. For instance, there’s a scene in which Gonzalo and Vicente are caught off guard by a clerk to name their bond. Awkwardly, they describe themselves as “friends” and then have a discussion about the connotations of the word step-father in different languages (stepfather in Spanish holds a diminutive). There’s a tragic moment where Carla miscarries and it sets off a sequence of events that feels (narratively satisfyingly) inevitable in the way only carefully constructed novels achieve. There’s a whole sequence in which Gonzalo reads his poems to Carla, who is unimpressed, and then plagiarizes poems from other poets, who impress her. He gets caught in a lie about publishing a book and he commits to the falsehood, which also forces him to withhold the information that destroys his relationship with Carla: he has been accepted into a PhD program in New York and it is time to leave.

Each of the characters are so distinctive and beautiful and true in all of their weird little details. Vicente, for instance, needs to be weaned off of his addiction to cat food when he’s six years old. The interiority of the characters makes them so rich and likable. Seeing their inner tensions is insightful about how people are while also being compelling in terms of the conflict. In the final movement of the book, Zambra reunites Gonzalo and Vicente after years of separation. The two discover a great deal of experiential overlap, both being passionate about poetry. In the final sequence, there’s a tension of whether the two will ultimately reconcile. There are some truly excellent lines of dialogue where they offer barbs alongside praise, and sometimes the comments are both praise and disparagement at the same time. Their fates are left ambiguous, and it feels so beautiful to see their own uncertainties emerge. The last page of the book, without ruining anything, is mischievously evasive, which gives readers a kind of uneasy optimism about their futures.

Gonzalo, Vicente, and Carla are my favourite characters. There is, however, a fourth main character—Pru. She’s an American journalist in her thirties that finds herself in Chile for a story following a messy breakup with her girlfriend. Her section gives more insight into Vicente, of course, but also she ends up on a story where she interviews all kinds of Chilean poets. Zambra has a real knack for being able to describe literary culture. Again, it’s riddled with tensions of people who like each other’s work but whose jealousy prevents them from open admiration and they pretend to read each other’s work to seem enlightened but also are trying to eschew everything in the name of a new generation of poetry. The whole culture of poetry is depicted as a bit of a farce and, like his character, it feels completely real.

I think it’s really hard to be funny in literature. Zambra, though, has great timing and great turns of phrase. There’s a playfulness to the text that gives it a light touch. The fact that the tone isn’t overly serious makes some of the dramatic moments hit that much harder. Who would have imagined that the simple act of rearranging a fridge magnet would have such a heartbreaking quality? (Incidentally, Zambra explores some translingual meditations, one of which is about how adjectives in Spanish are gendered—except for triste (sadness), implying that sadness knows no gender or bounds). 

Chilean Poet has some elements of the Künstlerroman tradition (novels that focus on the artistic development of its main character from their youth to adulthood). Think: James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or perhaps The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov. Throughout the book, we are treated to poems that the characters have written. Particularly in the final movement, the poems once again elevate the conflict and the insight into the characters. The commentary that runs alongside the poems and offers to the audience moments of such wonderful tenderness.

Against John Keats, I’d argue that beauty and truth are sometimes mutually exclusive. Not so here. The book is beautiful and true and touching. It’s gorgeous and sad and funny and moving. It had everything I would want from a genuine classic and offered, on top of that, surprise. I adored it. I hope at some point I’ll read this one again and feel the same magic and the same heartbreaking beauty the next time around.

Happy reading!

100 Simple Secret of Great Relationships: What Scientists Have Learned and How You Can Use It by David Niven

        In this relationship self-help book, David Niven offers a hundred simple secrets, which, when we really get into it, feels like an overpromise. Each of the chapters spans two pages (or three at most) and they all follow the same formula: a short paragraph to explain the ‘secret,’ an anecdote or case study of people demonstrating that secret in their relationships, and then a related factoid to close. The formula gives 100 Simple Secrets of Great Relationships an accessible, if repetitive, quality.

Ultimately, it feels like Niven’s work skirts along the surface and could easily be cut in half. A number of the chapters offer mirror images to each other. For instance, “No One Wins the Comparison Game” and “Beware Second Opinions” could just be one chapter that addresses both comparing your relationship to others’ and receiving their input. While some of the advice is good advice, it’s nothing revolutionary. Moreover, some of the advice offers principles but not really step-by-step instruction. For instance, the chapter “Be Willing to Evolve” essentially says that relationships are better if people are less rigid in their thinking. Well, yeah. Of course. But Niven doesn’t offer a practical strategy for becoming more willing to evolve.

Scaling back on the quantity of ‘secrets’ would give Niven the space to elaborate in more meaningful ways on ‘quality’ secrets. The anecdotes sometimes appear disconnected from the opening paragraph from each of the chapters or insufficiently exploratory. What I really wanted more of was analysis of the factoids at the end of each chapter. I wanted more information on the methodology for the studies or further elaboration on the factors and variables. I guess I was hoping for a more scientific approach than an anecdotal one. At the same time, the book felt weirdly dated. It was talking about gender stereotypes on television that seem long past prevalent and the fact that there was any controversy over men doing housework seems laughable. A lot can change in 20 years, I suppose.

In the end, the book just felt like it was doing too much and not enough simultaneously. It’s probably not going to hurt, but I don’t see this being any more valuable than other resources out on the market for people looking to deepen their relationships.

Happy reading!

Girls Against God by Jenny Hval

        There is an illicit pleasure in reading Jenny Hval’s Girls Against God. The main character is charged with hate and sees hate as a true creative force; the titillating cynicism and adolescent rage of the book couldn’t help but bring smiles to my face.

The main character of Hval’s novel is a young girl in conservative Norway that is looking for any kind of alternative to the quotidian existence she sees around her. To that end, she has an obsession with black metal and witchcraft and what she refers to as the “cosmic internet.” The novel follows these fascinations as it jumps around in time; we see her early roots as a member of a black metal band that (maybe) never actually plays concerts—instead she engages in performances so subterranean as to be undetectable and not even music related. The lines between music, visual art, witchcraft, and language collapse. So too does the idea of an independent producer become incomprehensible as subversive art becomes by necessity a collective, collaborative work. The other component of the book follows the main character’s filmic ambitions, including a full account of her film in the back third of the film. If you’re looking for a conventional story, Girls Against God is largely lacking, but if you’re looking for some vibes and philosophical reflection, Hval’s work is an absolute treat.

If you’re a true devotee of my reviews, you might remember my commentary on The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan. I find that premise extraordinarily unlikely. One of my critiques of The Hearing Test is its referentiality to other art works and it really relies heavily on readers’ knowledge. Girls Against God does something similar, but Hval is much more generous in elaborating on its touchstones. There are extended summaries and analyses of the works, often replete with imagery. In that way, the text is more accessible even in its offputtingness. Or, maybe it’s just that the touchstones are more part of my cultural lexicon.

Hval expounds in particular on the aesthetic of early black metal—an interesting angle, given the author’s own musical style. She describes music videos found as extra features on early black metal CDs and the way she describes its grittiness and content and wild cuts and sweeping shots of high-contrast nature is just perfect. In the aesthetic, she sees a primitivism that restores sincerity to art. When planning for her film, she notes, “I don’t know what the film is going to be about yet, but I like the early black metal aesthetic, so near to my own childhood. Strangely, it gives me hope, hope that it’s possible to make art primitively, in a way that isn’t steeped in professionalism and compromise. Art that still hates. I remember how much hope there is in hatred” (8). That manifesto sets the direction for all of the main character’s efforts. I adore this notion that hatred is hope—indeed, there has to be hope for there to be hatred, or else we would simply have indifference and apathy.

Throughout the book, she seeks connection with others through various means. One way that manifests is in the Satanism associated with black metal: “I can establish a connection or a pact, demonstrated through the connect-the-dots drawing between myself and the world of the gods, the underworld, or between myself in the past tense and myself in the present. Or all of it simultaneously. Maybe I could even draw up a map between me and you” (26). She’s trying to be part of something bigger than just herself. The connect-the-dots metaphor works in that way; she’s looking to be the lines between points. To that end, when she plans her film, she thinks, “Maybe this film has created a place to meet” (26). She makes a direct address to the audience—which is in itself odd, given that there is not a frame narrative that establishes she’s writing for others. Nonetheless, she presents the audience with a series of questions: “Do you also recognize the desire for secret and impossible connections? Do you recognise the loneliness, could we share in it? Could we get closer to each other? Could you and I and the film be the start of a we? A we which takes the form of an expanding community of girls who hate?” (26).

Hval’s narrator’s gesture is twofold. On the one hand, she’s aiming to escape the prison of subjectivity and on the other she’s trying to build a subterranean network of connection. Reflecting about her relationship with religion, she notes, “Sin is still inside me; everything is my fault and my responsibility, because I’m doomed to be alone, locked inside this subjectivity” (37). There is an exhaustion to the process of creating oneself: “I am so tired of chasing after it, this subjectivity, looking for something that’s all mine, that doesn’t have any context, surroundings or background. It’s so lonely. It’s so limited. It’s so heavy” (37). I appreciate this angle to exploring the posthumanist principle that we are not individuals but rather we exist in a context that has formulated us. She continues, “The subject is reflected negatively, the subject is so alone, so threatened, so scared, so dying, so guilty” (37). She considers how she wants to swap some of these negatives for “something else, something shared” (37). The passage ends with a delightful crescendo and what some might deem an anticlimax but which nonetheless has a ring of truth for those in the know. She concludes the passage, “I want to take part in a chaos of collective energy. I want to be in a band” (37). The fact that a band is what embodies that collective energy and chaos is just so humorous but also it imbues me with a sense of nostalgia and the optimism of such a project. The other side of Hval’s project is the desire for community, specifically through her witchy communities: “In blasphemy, there’s a secret pact, a desire for a community that isn’t rooted in the Christian, Southern spirit” (43). She elaborates on how the subversiveness allows for these connections:

Blasphemy protects us against the moral fables we grew up with; blasphemy renounces anything that requires our submission. It shows us a crack in this reality, through which we can pass into another, more open meeting place. Blasphemy has not forgotten where it came from; it maintains that defiance and energy. Blasphemy looks for new ways of saying we. And the band is a we, a community that happens without anyone asking. It’s an unknown communal place, an impossible place. In a place like that, we can make art magic. (43)

I love that spirit of togetherness and spontaneity. I feel like it elevates the idea of being in a band to a metaphysical tour de force.

I’ll return to that in a moment, but I also want to bring up the idea of time. Bands shape sound in time, so there’s a bit of a connection already. There’s also a stunning series of pages—too long to quote here—where the narrator describes her experiences with the early days of the internet. She describes its cosmic power, its ability to connect people across time. It brought me back in time, completely. The way that she describes the experience of finding communities, largely anonymously, and sharing files, connecting over subterranean media—it’s a perfect blast from the past. Then, towards the end of the book, the narrator gives an account of a photograph. Just before the photograph, she blasphemes and she delights in the moment where it is impossible to tell her apart from her well-behaved classmates. She notes that it is “impossible for an unknowing eye to spot the difference in our smiles, but at the moment this picture was taken, I’ve just said fucking hell, in the middle of the photo shoot” (214). The moment is imbued with a power because, even though it’s such a mundane kind of rebellion, it is elevated as symbolic of the collapse between herself and others—yet one that is distilled in time. In aspic? She continues on to say that “Half the class are about to stop smiling; they are about to look around for the sinner as they cautiously cross themselves and touch their hands to their hearts” (214). It’s a moment where the offense has not yet been detected and “a moment later, everything will be defined, crossed, damned, forgiven and blessed” (214). The moment that lacks definition has its subversive power: “right now, in this image, there is chaos; the students aren’t sure what happened yet, who said the word” (214). She continues, “Sound is faster than comprehension, faster than what they call heart and soul and sin. Right now my voice could have come from any of my Christian classmates, a slip of the tongue, a Tourette’s tic; that’s why they react and why they are about to cross themselves” (214). Hval seems to present the idea that a sin has its power when it has not yet been defined or remedied; sin exists as potential and “everyone in the class is a potential sinner” (214). The narrator notes, “the uncertainty is shapeless, even in the middle of this conformity; they themselves aren’t exempt; the guilt includes everyone in the room and leaks from one thing to another. No one remains dry, everyone is defined” (214). It’s a great parallel to the idea of everyone existing in connection with one another. Everyone gets joined by sin and guilt into one mass and “just as the most evangelical of them feel defiled when we’re taught by the lesbian teacher; they fear that she’ll lure them over to her side, that they will say what she says, that they’ll become, or realise that they already are, like her” (214). The notion of the subversiveness awakening something in its audience gives it a compelling power—and there’s a kind of optimism in that.

Towards the end of the book, there is dedicated focus to the symbolism of aspic. Aspic is a kind of jelly in which other things float. It’s a great symbol for the lack of distinction between individual entities. A passage that identifies the sense of connection in aspic reads as follows:

Aspic is made from the collagen in the bone marrow of pigs, and I dream it’s also made from our own bones and our own marrow, because marrow is the very best we have to give of ourselves. In the marrow is found the collagen, the creative power, the coherence. The same sounds ring in marrow as in margin. In my language it’s even the same word. In the margins are the experiments, the bonus material, the unwritten scenes, the unused leftovers, a suggestion for a new world, a suggestion for impossible connections. In the margins are the comments, the hope and hate, suspended in the thick, translucent marrow broth. (229).

For all its sprawling nature, Girls Against God has a knack for recreating this kind of connective aspic. There are a number of strange false starts to the book that float around. The focus on the margins and experiments is critical to what Girls Against God is up to. It is itself “bonus material”---auxilliary content about other works. It is the unused leftovers; consider, for example, we get the fragment of her film as an additional chapter that takes up a reasonable portion of the book. 

Girls Against God asks a question that I find perpetually troubling whether it’s phrased as “can the subaltern speak?” as it is in the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, or as it appears in Mark Fisher’s question about capitalism: “is there no alternative?”, or indeed, as it is asked by Terese in Girls Against God, “Why does resistance always end up just polishing the traditions?” (69). Hval is exploring the idea of how we might preserve a space of genuine resistance to tradition, a genuine alternative that does not get subsumed into the aspic like everything else. She notes this paradoxical position—wanting to have connection as a form of subversion and yet preserving a special space for the truly radical. Hval offers an extended meditation on the topic: “Think about that word, EXCLUDED. To exclude something, to explain something. THe nature of the subversive isn’t actually to be directly visible but to roam the shadows, to give texture to the seemingly shiny and clean, to scrawl public walls with inexplicable nonsigns that refuse to materialize into language” (96). She’s looking for that shadow space: “the subversive desires to be seen and not seen simultaneously, it desires both to be excluded and to be explained” (96). I think that’s a critical observation for the counterculture; we are riding the line between legibility and rewriting. The trouble, as Hval notes, is that “it’s so easily muted, left behind, forgotten, excluded without being explained. Or it gets picked up and transformed into a language we all understand, that is, explained, but for some reason that always seems to mean commercialised” (96). This succinct passage puts to words the trouble I feel with my own subversive subcultures—how much are we preaching to the choir? When we are preaching to the masses, how does the meaning get hidden behind dollar signs?

I really appreciated the way Hval characterized the grotesque resistance in black metal music videos. I’m not sure I recorded the quotation, but there’s a part where she describes the sound of the music like flies and worms wiggling out of the tape. As she navigates the “cosmic internet” she finds additional videos and details to supplement her research into primitivism in art. She finds a clip of “a black metal gig that looks as if it took place in an assembly hall in an early nineties secondary school” (8). In her note, “wholesome Norwegian youths talk amongst themselves and walk in and out of the room while the band plays on, completely unaffected. Black metal crawls unnoticed through adolescence, mine too” (8). There’s a real love of the genre and the music scene that shines in Hval’s work. There’s a sincerity and authenticity to the depiction of shows like this—I can vividly picture videos of grainy punk shows in a rented church. She thinks about how “it doesn’t burrow down completely. But for as long as it’s there it lives and crawls” (8). She reflects on how one one of the youths in the video could have been her “if [she]’d been a few years older, or if the clip had been from 1997 and not 1991. If [she] hadn’t been a girl and excluded from the black screen” (8). She concludes, “It could have been me: we could have hated, all of us, together. Instead I had to hate alone. Provincial hatred” (8). In the description of black metal music videos, the graininess of the image, the rapid cuts, the high contrast colour palettes, and so on, brought me back to a special moment where the internet made all kinds of possibilities real. Essentially, it was a modern day dada movement. I think in particular of the revolution it caused in my brain when I saw the video for Some Girls’ “...Warm Milk” or the freneticism of The Locusts’ album Plague Soundscapes. Sure, it’s not quite the genre Hval described, but it’s adjacent enough to feel the same.

Hval’s book is, in many ways, about representation and connection. She philosophizes that “to describe is also to construct form and perspective; it’s the reflex of mortal dread” (206). She wonders, “could language be used for something else? Aren’t there other reasons to write? If we let go of the descriptions, will we discover that we’re no longer moving at all, since we already exist within everything in here?” (206). Girls Against God is a quest to renegotiate with language and art: “we’re given up shapes, our own shells and components and we’re back in a flow, that gelatinous substance that ruled the earth before the harder minerals, rock types, skeletons and shells came into existence. This could be the beginning, the white egg, the original place, the original life” (206). Girls Against God is a quest to find that area of potential, the origins, the not-yet before everything gets established and codified. 

Hval meanders in all the right directions. It felt to me to be a deeply intimate and resonant novel that was also accompanied by humour and thoughtfulness. Hval’s other novel, Paradise Rot, had a bit more in terms of story, but she clearly has a gift for introspection and ambitious projects to revolutionize both literature and the world.

Hope we can appreciate the margins without taking out their teeth. Happy hating!

Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami

For years, I’ve seen Hiromi Kawakami’s short story collections on the shelf at the book store and think “I should really read some of her work.” Well, by coincidence, her book Under the Eye of the Big Bird was shortlisted for this year’s 2025 International Booker Prize and my partner has purchased the shortlisted works for me so that I can judge for myself. So, I’ve finally dived into Kawakami’s writing.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird is a strange book. I hesitate to call it a short story collection, because each section takes place in the same world, but I hesitate to call it a novel because it’s profoundly episodic. The characters between each chapter change, for the most part, although some characters repeat or we see a throughline between the narratives. Readers are thrown into the book without context and it feels truly alienating. We are the outsiders caught up mid-stream trying to figure out how the world operates.

I’m not sure I have the specifics, really, though towards the end there is some more explicit exposition. Come to think of it, Kawakami might have shown some more restraint and trusted the readers a little more—one character gives the entire history of the world in a conversation with children. In any case, the world feels foreign. The events are taking place hundreds or thousands of years in the future, and humans are just about extinct. They now reside in what we can infer as separate communities without any contact, vaguely united by “mothers” and “watchers” who care for them. Meanwhile, each of the characters seems to be a replica or reincarnation of a previous version of themselves. In one community, this means they have names like 32 of 6 (the 32nd copy of the 6th model or something to that effect). In other communities, it means that you might open the door and find a younger version of yourself, which is your cue to get out of town and be replaced.

That very thing happens in the early chapter “Narcissi.” The chapter’s opening line is “I turned up today. / I opened the front door, and there stood a much younger me, with long hair” (13). The two engage in conversation as the new model moves in. This leads to some of the most interesting grammatical and conceptual content of Under the Eye of the Big Bird. The boundary between self and other-self gets muddled in an interesting way: “As I watched me walk away, I recalled the day the great mother had left” (20). This odd mirroring and duality of selfhood then becomes even more strange as the two swap memories and experiences. The new version of the character arrived in a hovercraft, hid it in the bushes, and approached the home of her predecessor. The predecessor, now having to leave, creeps into the bushes and finds the hovercraft “she” rode in on. It’s an engaging concept, especially because it’s so early on and everything is unfamiliar; Kawakami reels you in as you try to explain the scenes.

On the topic of swapping memories, there are also characters that can essentially connect with other creatures telekinetically. It almost reads like Animorphs except the character seems to be inside a hawk’s brain, witnessing its world, while their physical body remains in place. This psychic connection emerges in several of the stories to explore Kawakami’s themes of love and connection. In one section of the book, split over two parts, Kawakami recounts the tragic story of two lovers. Each has the ability to ‘scan’ the other—that is, dive into the depths of one another’s minds and retrieve any kind of thought or feeling. The woman is both clairvoyant and telepathic and, out of respect, the man refuses to scan her. He comes across as noble and kind until he becomes jealous enough to scan her, finds her complete love of him, and then disappears out of shame. It’s a Blackbeard’s closets kind of situation. In the next section, though, the perspective switches to the young woman’s and we see that she is unfaithful and that her clairvoyance has led her to see how their relationship would operate, how he would behave, and so on and so forth. Him reading love within her mind is chalked up to his lack of practice with scanning—he’s pathetic and she pities him.

Those two chapters stand out as being self-sufficient in their story arcs, while others are components in Kawakami’s narrative mosaic. Eventually the book builds to a section where there is only one great mother left and two girls. Hope for the human race is essentially zero until one of the girls draws on knowledge from the past and starts cloning animals. She has some success over about eighty years, and you might expect it to end there before she’s successfully cloned a human, but then since these beings live for hundreds of years you realize she’s still got some time. If you’d like the spoiler version of the story, I offer it following this sentence. As it turns out, when the human race began to decline, they started experimenting with cloning to help the human race survive; then, they tried to use AI to enhance the defects and whatnot until it became the case that AI embedded itself into human DNA. The mothers are previous iterations of AI that get replaced with the younger versions of themselves; the great mother is the AI that’s miles ahead of the others—but now that seems to be failing and there is likely no hope left.

There’s a lot to like about Under the Eye of the Big Bird—it’s an impressive foray into some creative territory with some cutting-edge concepts that remain the human touch. The downside to the book is that the characters are, by necessity, forgettable and largely underdeveloped. I didn’t feel all that connected to the characters and then before long they would be replaced by another set that drove the world-building forward but felt more like conceptual devices than individuals. It’s a catch-22 with high concept books.

I have to give Kawakami points for offering such a unique project. Now next time when I’m in the bookstore maybe I’ll need to actually pick up her short story collections.

Happy reading!

Take the Long Way Home by Jon Claytor

        There seems to be an increasing canon of autobiographical works presented as graphic novels, and Jon Claytor has now added his own entry with the Take the Long Way Home, a story about traveling across the country and back for an artist’s retreat.

The art style is more or less sketchy and unfleshed out in a free and breezy way with some special attention played to the natural world and the view from the dashboard. It’s pretty inviting. The story, also, is pretty sketchy. It’s a series of vignettes that does not really have much of a consistent build towards a climax. It’s a road trip where we stop in various cities, check in with families members and friends, and then move on. The main dramatic tension of the text is Claytor’s struggles with alcoholism and the moments that he thinks he might take a drink or dreams that he has.

As a result, the book is more like a series of loose threads handled with an engaging style but also tact. For instance, Claytor finds out that he has a long lost brother that he has never met; his kids are extremely invested in finding him—but that’s, maybe, the subject of another book. Similarly, he finds out about his parents and a number of “characters” have wild backstories, but he suggests it is not his story to tell.

There’s a kind of beautiful tenderness to the book that is worth noting. Early on, Claytor recounts his challenges with alcoholism and attempted suicide and it gives the pages that follow a heartbreaking kind of quality. The book is, on the whole, pretty uplifting. There are so many personal connections and the book works as a celebration and gift for those special relationships in his life. If there is a climax, I would make the case that it is as Claytor returns home and reflects on the people he has learned from, spread out over six pages with four portraits each interspersed with thoughts from the drive.

The personable nature of the book is really endearing. The phone calls home have a special sincerity and a clear appreciation for quiet moments. In one scene, Claytor calls his children from Kamloops. He calls his children “turkeys” and they call him “pops” and they are “reading about zombies.” Meanwhile, the family dog has a thought bubble as he sleeps that says “I’m a happy dog” (199). It’s really cute, but one of the best things about it is that when he calls he just listened to them turn pages.

I also really liked the interactions between animals that he imagines. There’s a sequence with wolves where one of them confesses to the other that he tried to be a badass lone wolf but the truth is that he’d rather spend time together. It’s a beautiful exchange: “You and me? Together?” / “Forever!” and then a full-page illustration that has the two wolves side by side with the caption, “Now, let’s go fuck shit up! Like the badass wolves we are” (163). There are also interactions with birds, bears, and rabbits, which take on a symbolic significance, as well.

Overall, Take the Long Way Home is a lovely journey full of that introspection and sincerity of expression that makes up for the seeming deficit of plot. I liked it. It felt truly personal and a book built for connection.

Happy reading!

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

    Depending on how you count it, Norwegian Wood is either the ninth or tenth Haruki Murakami book I’ve read. I can’t expect everyone to remember, much less track, my previous reviews of Murakami’s work, so to sum up: the more I read of his work, the more it felt the same and the more uncomfortable I was finding his way of writing about sex and women. I felt like he was delivering cheap tricks, essentially on autopilot. 

    Ironically, Norwegian Wood strikes me as one of Murakami’s more literary works—ironic because this book was, as I was informed by the biggest Murakami enthusiast I know, the book that shot Murakami into superstardom status (at least so far as it exists in the literary realm). I have it on good authority that Norwegian Wood is the book most often cited by angsty teenagers. I can definitely see the influence of works like The Catcher in the Rye, so it makes sense.

    And yet.

    Norwegian Wood stands out to me as one of Murakami’s more finely wrought works. For one, it provides more lush description of setting, often to surprising effect. In one scene, Murakami establishes a picturesque girls’ school: “Midori Kobayashi and I sat on a park bench together, looking at the building where she used to go to high school. Ivy clung to the walls, and pigeons huddled beneath the gables, resting their wings. It was a nice old building with character. A great oak tree stood in the schoolyard, and a column of white smoke rose straight up beside it. The fading summer light gave the smoke a soft and cloudy look” (59). The description reads to me like a cloudy painting or even a vague watercolour. It’s lovely on its own, but what really enhances it is Murakmi’s immediate inversion of the scene. Midori asks the narrator, Toru Watanabe, if he knows what the smoke is. When he does not know, she tells him they’re burning sanitary napkins: “Sanitary napkins, tampons, stuff like that [...] It is a girls’ school. The old janitor collects them from all the receptacles and burns them in the incinerator. That’s the smoke” (59). The characters then break down the math, figuring how many girls had started their periods, how many are having them at the same time, how many sanitary napkins that would require, and the impact that would have on the old janitor. I found it beautiful that the lovely scene is peeled back and provided an additional layer of meaning.

    In many ways, Norwegian Wood is a setting-driven novel. A large portion of it takes place at, essentially, a sanatorium—-Toru is reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which serves as a pretty clear influence, as well. Given how dependent key moments are on the setting, it is all the more surprising when the novel’s final passage pulls the rug out from under the reader: “Gripping the receiver, I raised my head and turned to see what lay beyond the telephone booth. Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. Again and again, I called out for Midori from the dead center of this place that was no place” (293). What a magnificent finish! This moment of total disorientation comes at just the right time. Rather than resolution, we’re given an ambiguous moment, completely charged by its uncertainty. If I were a better academic, I would write an essay about the epistemic value of place—I’d draw on Heidegger, talk about thrownness, and discuss how Murakami exemplifies setting-as-knowing.

    But I’m not currently that academic, so instead let’s continue to delve into the descriptive language of the text. It extends beyond just setting. The details Murakami includes—or doesn’t include—create a chilling tone with more emotive power than I’ve experienced in most of his novels. Early in the text, a seventeen year old boy commits suicide. The description is precise, if sparse in description, and it feels more heartbreaking than it had any right to. Another suicide is alluded to later in the text, referenced merely in passing, which makes it even more tragic that nobody seems to give it much thought. By contrast, a third suicide in the novel is provided with an extensive description. Naoko offers a lengthy account of being the one to find her sister dead. It’s provided with rich detail, equally as haunting as the lack of it for other suicides in the text: “In autumn when I was in the sixth grade. November. On a dark, rainy day. My sister was a senior in high school at the time. I came home from my piano lesson at six-thirty and my mother was fixing dinner” (145). It begins by setting the stage, and framing it through the eyes of a young person just makes it worse because you have the layer of perception and the layer of truth. Naoko “figured she was probably sleeping. [...] She was standing by the window, staring outside, with her neck bent at a kind of angle like this. Like she was thinking” (145). Knowing what has happened makes her ignorance hit harder, and the appropriation of ostensibly lovely imagery for darker purposes establishes the haunting atmosphere perfectly. She continues:

“The room was dark, the lights were out, and it was hard to see anything. [...]  That’s when I noticed that she looked taller than usual. [...] Did she have high heels on? Was she standing on something? I moved closer and was just about to speak to her again when I saw it: there was a rope above her head. It came straight down from a beam in the ceiling—I mean it was amazingly straight, like somebody in had drawn a line in space with a rope above her head. It came straight down from a beam in the ceiling—I mean it was amazingly straight, like somebody had drawn a line in space with a ruler. My sister had a white blouse on—yeah, a simple white blouse like this one—and a grey skirt, and her toes were pointing down like a ballerina’s, except there was a space between the tip of her toes and the floor of maybe seven or eight inches. I took in every detail. Her face, too. I looked at her face. I couldn’t help it. I thought: I’ve got to go right downstairs and tell my mother. I’ve got to scream. But my body ignored me. It moved on its own, separately from my conscious mind. It was trying to lower her from the rope while my mind was telling me to hurry downstairs. Of course, there was no way a little girl could have the strength to do such a thing, and so I just stood there, spacing out, for maybe five or six minutes, a total blank, like something inside me had died. I just stayed that way, with my sister, in that cold, dark place until my mother came up to see what was going on.” (145)

The ballerina imagery in particular strikes me for its horrific implications. There’s a kind of grace in her death, an ethereal quality. The slowness of the scene, though, and the way Naoko ceases to respond to the experience, provides the horror a quiet stillness. It’s hard to expand on, but this is among the most chilling scenes Murakami has written, at least so far as I can remember.

    You may have noticed how much this novel draws on suicide as a motif—and I haven’t even mentioned all of them! Murakami often explores the inner contradictions of our collective psychology, but his efforts here seem more sincere and fleshed out in Norwegian Wood than some of his more recent work, like Killing Commendatore. His approach has a Dostoyevskian quality (cf. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in particular), which emerges most in the conversations between the central characters. The highlight to me comes through in a conversation Toru has with Midori, who outlines her expectations for love:

“I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don’t want it anymore and throw it out the window. That’s what I’m looking for. […] And when I do it, I want the man to apologize to me. ‘Now I see, Midori. What a fool I’ve been! I should have known that you would lose your desire for strawberry shortcake. I have all the intelligence and sensitivity of a piece of donkey shit. To make it up to you, I’ll go out and buy you something else. What would you like? Chocolate mousse? Cheesecake?’” (76).

In my opinion, this passage could have been plucked from Dostoyevsky directly, were it not so particular about cheesecake. The extremes of passion and the entailing contradictions are so perfectly captured here; it’s a simple story that reads like an allegory—maybe not on the level of Dostoyevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor”, but powerful enough to etch itself into my memory. Once in a while, I tell you, Murakami strikes gold.

    Elsewhere, Toru narrates, “Letters are just pieces of paper [...] Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish” (292). I’m not sure if Murakami is a Derrida fan, but I feel like his wisdom is informed by Derrida’s discussion of the pharmakon—writing as both poison and its cure. This enigmatic line again points to the contradictions at the core of Murakami’s work.

 

    If my central thesis is that Norwegian Wood is more literary than some of his more recent texts, I’ve already established the imagery and the philosophy as core principles. I’d add, also, the historical influence. There are some passing references that help to establish the milieu. It’s around 1970 and Watanabe outlines how:

“During summer break the university called in the riot police, who broke down the barricades and arrested the students inside. This was nothing special. It’s what all the schools were doing at the time. The universities were not so easily ‘dismantled.’ Massive amounts of capital had been invested in them, and they were not about to dissolve just because a few students had gone wild. And in fact those students who had sealed the campus had not wanted to dismantle the university either. All they had really wanted was to shift the balance of power within the university structure, a matter about which I could not have cared less. And so, when the strike was crushed, I felt nothing.” (47) 

The milieu is not directly connected to the central conflicts in the novel, but it does add a touch of realism that helps ground the rest of the text. Moreover, it seems to have a thematic connection to other aspects of the novel. In particular, the way that the university is both broken down and not, that the riots both exist and not, reflects the fine balance between life-and-death Toru and his associates tightrope across throughout the book. The indeterminacy between states of being is sprinkled throughout the novel—even when it comes to imagery of smoke and fire.

    The story is somewhat lacklustre, as is sometimes expected from Murakmi. Very little happens by way of events and most of the powerful moments occur through dialogue between characters. The novel is replete with short stories, narrated from one character to another. As I mentioned, there’s a Dostoyevskian flare. Midori, for example, talks about her experiences in school and the class difference she experiences. She outlines the troubled relationship she had with her parents, who put a lot of pressure on her: “I had to listen to them grumble to me every time the school asked for a contribution, and I was always scared to death I’d run out of money if I went out with my classmates and they wanted to eat someplace expensive” (61). The passage humanizes her beautifully, offering an account of those oh-so-relatable anxieties when you don’t quite measure up. (Elsewhere, Midori’s inappropriate questions and outbursts are also humanizing, but I won’t retranscribe them here).

    Since the detail won’t fit elsewhere, now is as good a time as any to mention Midori’s father, as well. He is unwell in the hospital, unable to speak. Nonetheless, Watanabe forms a special bond with him. What I really like, though, is that the old man both doesn’t and does speak. Murakami puts his dialogue between chevrons rather than quotation marks: “Her father moved his lips. <Not good>, he said, not so much speaking the words as forming them from dried air at the back of his throat. <Head,> he said” (181). It’s these little touches that help make the characterization shine.

    There’s another story that Reiko tells Toru about giving piano lessons. Reiko is a woman in her thirties that provided lessons to a young woman, a compulsive liar with the face of an angel. The whole account has an ominous quality and eventually it turns down a dark and sexual path. Wildly inappropriately, the young girl takes advantage of her piano teacher, who finds herself unable to resist—until she does, and slaps the young girl across the face. The scene is extremely uncomfortable. After Reiko slaps her, she says, “I got out of bed and put on my robe and told her to leave and never come back. She just looked at me. Her eyes were absolutely flat. I had never seen them that way before. It was as if they had been painted on cardboard. They had no depth. After she stared at me for a while, she gathered up her clothing without a word and, as slowly as she could, as if she was making a show of it, she put on each piece, one at a time. Then she went back into the room where the piano was and took a brush from her bag. She brushed her hair and wiped the blood from her lips with a handkerchief, put on her shoes, and went out. As she was leaving, she said, ‘You’re a lesbian, you know. It’s true. You may try to hide it, but you’ll be a lesbian until the day you die” (156). It’s a strange and unsettling scene—and not just because Murakami comes across as a creep when writing about sex. The “lack of depth” in her and the way this child can turn off all emotion establishes her as a memorable character, though her storyline ends abruptly after her lies about Reiko circulate enough to ruin her life.

    I have not yet commented on the relationships between characters, though they are the fundamental element of the novel. The novel is comprised of triangles: triangles everywhere. The dynamics of three people in conjunction are well-encapsulated throughout Norwegian Wood. Whether it is Toru as a the third wheel of his friends’ relationships, the trio of Naoko-Reiko-Toru, or the love triangle of Naoko-Toru-Midori, Murakami is able to capture the way this structure of connection changes who people are, how they perceive themselves.

    There’s a theatrical component in this structure. When Harold Pinter delivered his Nobel Prize speech, he outlined his process for writing plays. He notes how he always begins with character A, B, and C. The rest of the play explores the way those three elements interact. Murakami seems to use that triangular structure, though his dramatic influence may lie elsewhere. When Midori’s father in the hospital, Toru outlines ideas about Greek theatre, and specifically comments on the controversy with Euripides:

“What marks his plays is the way things get so mixed up the characters are trapped. Do you see what I mean? A bunch of different people appear, and they’ve all got their own situations and reasons and excuses, and each one is pursuing his or her own brand of justice or happiness. As a result, nobody can do anything. Obviously, I mean, it’s basically impossible for everybody’s justice to prevail or everybody’s happiness to triumph, so chaos takes over. And then what do you think happens? Simple---a god appears in the end and starts directing traffic. ‘You go over there, and you come here, and you get together with her, and you just sit still for a while.’ Like that. He’s kind of a fixer, and in the end everything works out perfectly. They call this ‘deus ex machina.’ There’s almost always a deus ex machina in Euripides, and that’s the point where critical opinion divides over him” (190).

The thoughtfulness of Murakami’s commentary is another layer that provides Norwegian Wood a literary quality. In some ways, Norwegian Wood seems to delineate the controversy of deus ex machina as a device. For instance, the love triangle between Toru, Midori, and Naoko is somewhat “solved” by Naoko’s suicide (though, of course, that is contestable). The end of the novel is particularly indeterminate, giving the impression of a rejection of Euripedes’ approach. Wherein Euripides, a god comes and tells everyone where to go (the metaphor of directing traffic is significant), the end of Norwegian Wood has Toru in a place that is no place—that is, he has nowhere to go because he does not know where he is.

    I suppose that moment exemplifies Murakami’s approach above Euripides, but the moment is still indeterminate. Has Toru been told “you just sit still for a while”? Or has he not been directed at all, overlooked by the powers that be in resolving conflict? I’m inclined towards the latter, but in either case we’re left on a pause, rather than a solution. Euripides, who?

    With some Murkami works, I feel that there’s only so much to say. Surprisingly, Norwegian Wood is wonderfully layered, if at times slow in its progression. The fundamental elements of the text are interwoven nicely, and the commitment to realism provides the many moving moments of the novel with a greater weight than I find in his more surrealist and explicitly magical moments. For Murakami, reality is itself charged.

    And sometimes that is enough.

    Happy reading!