Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami (1985)

My 17-year-old son is a fan of Haruki Murakami and has read several of his novels.  I've read his book about running, which I enjoyed very much.  I also recently read "Norwegian Wood", which I didn't blog about at the time because I wasn't sure what to think of it.  It seemed to be so foreign to me on so many levels: the setting and time were so specific, the main character was so unusual to me, and there was so much quiet sadness permeating the book.  I should see the film, perhaps I would understand more.  But the book certainly does seem to be much more appealing to a young man than a 40-something woman.

In any case, my son had a copy of "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" here at home and so I decided to read it.  It took me a long time to get into the book, but once I did I could not put it down. The book is actually two novels that alternate chapter by chapter, but the reader quickly realizes that the two seemingly disconnected stories are in fact connected to each other by one and the same narrator.  The first half, "Hard-Boiled Wonderland", is a sort of detective story whereby the main character finds himself unwillingly caught up in a mysterious case of information theft and top secret research on the nature of human consciousness; and frighteningly enough, he discovers he is one of the guinea pigs - in fact, the only one who has survived the experiments that have been done on his mind.

In the second novel, "The End of the World", we slowly discover a mysterious Town surrounded by an impenetrable Wall.  The narrator is newly arrived in the Town and must learn all the strange customs.  His Shadow is cut from him and imprisoned by the Gatekeeper who guards the Town, where no one is allowed to keep their Shadow or their mind.  Our narrator is given the job of "reading dreams" in the Library where he is assisted in this by the young Librarian, whom he becomes attached to.  His Shadow, however, is anxious for him to make a map of the Town so that the two of them can make their escape back to the real world.

I won't reveal just how the two novels are connected, but I found myself impatient to discover how things worked in the Town (in some ways it made me think of the movie "The Village") and whether or not the narrator was going to be able to turn his precarious situation around at the end. 

If you enjoy a kind of dreamy science fiction novel with a touch of action-adventure and lots of references to food (I loved that the narrator made a dressing with umeboshi plums, among many other delicacies), music, movies, literature, whiskey, beer, cars and life in modern Tokyo, then I can recommend this book.

The Sea House by Esther Freud (2003)

Esther Freud was born in London in 1963.  She trained as an actress before writing her first novel, "Hideous Kinky" in 1991, which was made into a movie starring Kate Winslet.  I haven't read that book but did see the movie a few years ago.

I picked up "The Sea House" at the library, and enjoyed it, although it was sometimes a difficult to follow - the novel alternates between the past and the present in the same seaside town on the English coast.  In the present we have Lily, who comes to Steerborough to do academic research on the architect Klaus Lehmann, a German who emigrated to the UK with his wife Elsa.  Lily stays in a seaside cottage and finds Lehmann's letters to his wife strangely evocative of the feelings she has for her boyfriend, Nick, back in London.  She starts questioning their relationship and her life in London as she becomes entranced with the slow paced life in the village and the two little girls who are staying next door, as well as their father.

The passages about Lily are alternated with the late 1950s in the same location, where we see the artist Max, a deaf German immigre whose sister recently died.  He comes to Steerborough, invited by his sister's good friend Gertrude to come and paint.  Little by little Max comes into contact with Lehmann and his wife and as the story progresses we begin to see the connections between Lily's work in the present and the impact that Max, at the beginning a simple observer, ends up having on the history of the village and the people in it.  At the end of the story all the connections are made clear. 

Helpless by Barbara Gowdy (2006)

Barbara Gowdy, (born 25 June 1950) is a Canadian novelist and short story writer, who lives in Toronto.  Gowdy's novel "Falling Angels" (1989) was made into a film of the same name.

I'm not that familiar with Canadian novelists, so I knew nothing about her work when I found a few of her books on the shelf in our library.  "Helpless" caught my attention so I took it home, and it turned out to be one of those books you can't put down until you find out what happens.

The novel is the story of the stalking and kidnapping of nine-year-old Rachel, who lives with her mother, Celia, a struggling pianist, in Toronto.  Ron, an appliance repairman who lives in the neighborhood, becomes obsessed with Rachel, quietly stalking her as she walks home from school and keeping an eye on her while she is at home and on the playground. 

The first few chapters of the book made me think of the way Jodi Picoult writes about similar themes, but it got much darker once the abduction takes place.  The striking thing about this novel is the access we are given to the inner workings and the past of Ron, the kidnapper - it's almost too close for comfort.  In June 2008, the novel was abridged and adapted for BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime. This resulted in several listeners complaining that the novel was 'dark', 'disturbing' and had '(frightened) the life out of them'. One listener described it as 'inappropriate for any time of day least of all at bedtime' and another claimed that Gowdy's graphic description made him feel 'physically sick'.  I won't say there were passages that made me physically sick, but a lot of it was definitely disturbing. 

One of the most disturbing aspects of the book was the character of Nancy, Ron's unwilling accomplice, and how someone who is not mentally ill (I suppose) was, due to her life circumstances and current situation, unable to take a decision on a moral issue that seems so obvious and clear cut.  I found myself angry at Nancy, shouting at her in my mind to just get Rachel back to her mother and turn Ron in!  She immediately knew what Ron was doing was wrong, it just seemed to take her forever to put her own self interest aside in order to do something about it.  And even then, it only seemed she took action when it became clear that there wasn't anything in it for her anymore.   Nancy reflects the modern person who won't stop and help someone who needs help, because it might inconvenience them, someone we are all in danger of becoming, in one way or another...

Renee

This lovely statue of a girl reading is called "Renee", the artist Armand Loveniers, and is located in the city where I live, on the Naamsestraat, appropriately right next to a bookstore! It is also the location of many university buildings and the first female dormitory at the KU Leuven.

I love to find artwork about books and reading...

This statue is sometimes called "Fronske" (Little Frown) because, as a serious and hardworking female student she is the antithesis of the "Fonske" statue of the merry male student on the Fochplein in Leuven, who simply pours knowledge (or is it beer?) effortlessly right into his head.

Renee has been on her spot, studying, reading, dreaming... since 1997.

This is How by M.J. Hyland (2009)

M.J. Hyland was born in London in 1968, studied Law and English at the University of Melbourne and she is currently a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Manchester.

The book "This is How" tells the story of Patrick Oxtoby, a young man who is going through a very difficult time in his life. His girlfriend, who he thought he would marry, has broken off their engagement, and he decides to move away from his home town to get away from the discomfort and shame he feels.

Patrick has never felt easy around other people, he has never felt confident that others really like him, and he has always had a hard time interacting with others, including his own mother, father and older brother. Throughout the book I felt that Patrick was in some way autistic. He was very intelligent as a child and got into university but simply couldn't settle into life there, so he came back home after failing his first year and took a mechanics course, something he really loved to do and was good at, in spite of the fact that his family is very disapproving of this choice. He ended up getting a job at a local garage where the customers and his boss really appreciated him.

But because of the break up of his relationship, he decides to move to a seaside town, get a room in a boarding house and work at a different garage. His boss is sorry to see him go, but helps him find a new job. So at the beginning of the novel we see Patrick arriving at the boarding house, where his discomfort with other people becomes immediately clear in his first moments with his landlady Brigit, and then later with the two other men who are boarders at the house.

Patrick tries to fit in and tries to make a go of his new life, but things simply don't seem to go his way. His mother shows up for a desastrous and embarasssing visit, the two other boarders seem to look down on and ridicule him, his new boss turns out not wanting him there full time, and his attempts to date a local cafe waitress, Georgia, don't work out the way he hopes. Frustration builds up inside of Patrick, something he attempts to deal with through drinking binges, and he ends up doing something violent and irreversible which lands him, in the second half of the book, in prison.

Physically frail and mentally unstable as Patrick is, as a reader one is terribly apprehensive about him being funneled into the penal systerm, but is just as powerless as Patrick is to stop the flow of events. Throughout his initial nights in jail, through his trial and later imprisonment, it is difficult to imagine how he is to survive in the hostile environment. His family has completely dropped him, and his father only comes to visit him once before informing Patrick that they are moving very far away. He is an easy target for guards and fellow inmates alike, although he does find a few individuals in prison who seem to want to help him, they often expect something in return.

This is a very grim book, but in the end, it seems that Patrick finally finds a small shred of hope with his new life in prison: "I'm sometimes happier in here than I was out there. I'm under no pressure to be better in here and life's shrinking to a size that suits me more."

Wow. I was totally struck by that statement. And having gotten to know Patrick in the previous 338 pages I could totally understand that, while prison life may be brutal and dehumanizing and violent and filthy, that for some people, it might well be the size of life that fits them better than the one that was possible for them in the outside world. It also got me to thinking that we all have a certain size life that suits us best. Some, like the Madonnas and Lady Gagas of this world, are suited to a life that is huge, loud, crazy and constantly moving; while others of us, perhaps nuns or monks, those who still choose a cloistered life, are more fit for a much smaller, quieter, well contained life. It got me to thinking, what size life am I best suited to, and more importantly, does my current life reflect that? Food for thought - and this is an excellent book.

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar (2006)

The weekly literary supplement in our newspaper tipped me off to this book. Because of the current events in Libya and the fact that the author has a new book out (Anatomy of a Disappearance, published March 2011), there was a two page article on him. This novel was his first novel and I was lucky enough to be able to find it, in the original English, in our library.

Hisham Matar was born in 1970 in New York City, to Libyan parents. His father was a member of the Libyan delegation to the UN. When Hisham was three they moved back to Tripoli, where he spent his early childhood. In 1979 his father was accused of being against the Qaddafi regime and the family had to flee, to Egypt. He finished his secondary education in Cairo and then went to the UK for university studies in architecture.

In 1990, Matar's father was kidnapped in Cairo and has been missing ever since. Two letters the family received seem to indicate that his father was being held prisoner in Tripoli. The last news they had was that he had been seen alive in 2002.

Matar began writing In the Country of Men in 2000 and it was published in 2006, and nominated for the Booker Prize.

The novel is written in the first person from the point of view of Suleiman, a nine-year-old boy who lives with his young mother and older father in a residential area of Tripoli. He does not understand why his father disappears for days at a time, nor does he understand why his mother gets "sick" when his father is gone and drinks a foul smelling "medicine" she buys clandestinely from the baker. Suleiman is an observer and relates to us the smells, colors, and feelings he has in his daily life, while all around him the political situation creates a feeling of quiet menace and danger.

It is clear that Matar's own experiences and observations as a child for the basis for this book, and when you read the description of how Suleiman and his mother watch a neighbor tried and executed on Libyan television, it is obvious that something very similar was witnessed by the author, as it is impossible to imagine someone could make it up. The book is a fascinating window into how it was to live under the thumb of the Qaddafi regime.

At the same time, however, the book is a coming-of-age story of a young man who learns that his parents are not infallible, and how even though he escapes by moving to Egypt, there is always a link to his homeland because his family is still there. The book is also in part the story of Suleiman's mother and her oppression as a woman in a male-dominated society. There is a parallel to be found between the way Qaddafi oppresses the citizens of his country and the way the father and brothers of Suleiman's mother dominate and oppress her. She has no choice and behaves in the book like an animal cornered, self destructing through alcohol addiction as her only escape.

This is an extemely well-written book that opened my mind to a people who having been living for 42 years under oppression. It also reminded me how universal the job of being a mother is, and how difficult it is to get it right.

Incendiary by Chris Cleave (2005)

The subtitle to this book is "A Novel of Unbearable Devastation and Unbounded Love". This phrase immediately made me think of the book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, also published in 2005. But there are more similarities to these novels: both tell the story of a survivor of a terrorist attack in a large city, and how this person deals with the loss of someone they loved.

In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the story is about Oskar, a 9-year-old boy, whose father dies in the September 11 attacks in New York City, and how Oskar deals with this afterwards. (I loved this book and recently blogged about it here.)

In Incendiary, the story follows a young working class mother in London, who loses her 4-year-old son and husband in a fictional terrorist attack during a soccer match between Arsenal and Chelsea. We never learn her name, as the entire book is a letter she is writing to Osama Bin Laden, trying to convince him to stop bombing by showing him how much she loved her little boy. The bulk of the book is her story of how she tries to live after the attacks.

She spends weeks in the hospital, she becomes wrapped up in a sick relationship with a wealthy journalist and his girlfriend, she seems to get back on her feet by taking a job with her husband's old boss at the police, but just seems to keep getting kicked down again. As the novel progresses and her circumstances get worse, she sinks further and further down into desolation, and ends up seeing and talking to her deceased child nearly all the time, which are the most difficult scenes to read, extremely heart wrenching.

The terrorist attacks not only devastate the narrator's life but it also changes the way of life of the whole of London, and this is very realistically portrayed - as a reader, especially if you've ever been to London, you can easily imagine all the paranoid measures that are taken to protect the population. Tragically, the day Incendiary was released was the day of the terrorist bombings in the London underground in July 2005; the author talks about the novel and this horrible coincidence here.

This is a very gritty and dark novel. Where Incredibly Loud is poignantly hopeful and where Oskar is surrounded by people who do love him and want to help him get over the loss of his father, in Incendiary, we feel the complete hopelessness of the narrator and how alone she is - the few people in her life who seem to care about her are actually selfishly using her. She somehow manages to carry on, but as I finished the book I felt sad and deflated for her; she is physically alive but the magnitude of her loss will surely continue to pull her down. I can only think about the Japanese survivors in those towns that were completely washed away by the tsumami last week - how do you rebuild your life after everything is taken away from you?