“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

I’d never read any Murakami before until a friend recommended this book to me over the summer. Murakami is a Japenese writer but his work is truly international. His work is heavily influenced by his work translating other writers including J D Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut. You can also see the influence of two of my favourite authors: Kafka and Kundera. You can see Kafka’s influence in Murakami’s focus, exploring the self and looking at isolation. In terms of style, Murakami has clearly been influenced by Kundera (a Czech author who was massively influenced by Kafka himself) in his explorations of sex and sexuality as well as themes such as (mis)remembrance and nostalgia.

Norwegian Wood is a story particularly steeped in nostalgia as a middle-aged Toru Watanabe recalls his time as a student in Tokyo in the 1960s. The background is one of revolution, change and consistency. The name of the novel comes from the song by The Beatles, a song that triggers Watanabe’s memory of his student days. The story revolves around love and death. At 17 Watanabe suffers a tragic loss as his best friend Kizuki commits suicide and his death has a profound effect on the protagonist and on Kizuki’s girlfriend, Naoko. The grief they share forces them closer together, spending more time together until eventually they make love in a moment of profound grief and confusion. For Naoko, the confusion is so great that she is forced to retreat to a sanatorium.

Afterwards, Watanabe befriends the aloof and temperamental Midori  — a foil to Naoko. Midori is as outgoing, confident and assured as Naoko is reserved, insecure and confused. A relationship sparks between the two whilst Naoko is away and Watanabe is constantly torn between a relationship with someone emotionally and physically distant but with whom he shares a deep history and connection (Naoko) and one that is immediate, safe and rewarding but new with little foundation (Midori). I shan’t, however, spoil the rest of the story.

Murakami is dealing with difficult subjects, including suicide which he writes about in a very real manner and without judgement. He discusses death and the impact that any death has on the experience of life, on memory and how we think about the dead: “People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.” As someone who is perennially afraid of dying I was surprised to find myself reassured by some of Murakami’s philosophising. He reflects on the inevitability (and almost the necessity) of death: “Death is not the opposite of life but an innate part of it. By living our lives, we nurture death.”

Murakami’s style is very rich, his use of the first person really pulls you in and even when Watanabe is in ridiculous situations, you feel like you are there quite naturally. If you are a fan of Kafka and Kundera I’d strongly recommend trying Murakami.

‘What is the point of an intellectual if he doesn’t’ intervene in a matter that corresponds precisely to his field of expertise?’

Unlike most of the other stuff I’ve reviewed, this is relatively recent so:

*Spoiler Alert*

It’s February 1980, and the great semiotician and literary theorist Roland Barthes has been knocked down by a laundry van on the streets of Paris. He died a month later from his injuries. History has dismissed this as a tragic accident but in Binet’s novel, Barthes was killed for more sinister reasons: power and control. Barthes has stumbled across the seventh function of language*: the ability of language to control the listener, to enact action. Its political uses are infinite and every major government of the world wants it.  Police Detective Bayard attempts to investigate Barthes death, plunging himself in the murky depths of postmodernism with the help of a young semiotician, Simon.

Simon’s role in the story, at first, is to act as a translator for the detective. He helps explain all the complicated theories to the detective (a proud layperson) and by extension helps explain some of the issues to the reader. He introduces the detective/reader to the key figures of the period from Foucault, Sellers, Kristeva, Derrida, Althusser and Eco. As the story progresses, and we become more comfortable with the settings, Simon becomes the key figure, travelling across the world and risking life and limb in underground duels of rhetoric as they track down Barthes’ murderers and try to prevent the 7th function from falling into the wrong hands. All whilst being chased by mysterious Citroëns and other ghosts of Barthe’s mythologies.

Binet’s novel might be seen as a bit heavy in places but this philosophical depth is not uncommon in French literature. Many of these figures are household names in France. The novelist is clearly well-read and has devoted a lot of time familiarising himself with all the theorists but this is far from a hagiography of postmodern thought. In places, it is a scathing attack on some of the key figures of 1980s postmodernism. It is hard not to see Binet’s disdain for figures such as Philippe Sollers who comes across as rather emasculated.

Binet blends fiction and fact together in a masterful way. (Morris Zapp from Changing Places makes an appearance alongside the real academic figures). Some of the most surprising and unbelieve moments of the book are the ones that are actually seeped in the truth. Enthralled by the quick pace of the narrative, I was shocked when Louis Althusser strangles his wife Hélène Rytmann. Then I remembered this was not an act of fiction, he actually did kill his wife in 1980 (see his autobiography: L’avenir dure longtemps). The result is a thrilling story that even when you know it’s being truthful, you question it. And even when you know it is ficitionial you can’t help but wonder. 

‘Every man laughs for himself.’

Despite his parodic approach to postmodernism, Binet is wonderfully ludic in his own use of it. We see throughout the book the presence of an author desperate to keep control of a story. If there is a ‘death of the author’, Binet does not go gentle into the night. The presence of the author grows alongside the danger as the story progress. Simon, the young semiotician, increasingly suffers from an existential crisis and starts to wonder if he is just a character in a novel. Does he have control over anything? This existentialism comes to a crescendo at the book’s climax. Simon is stuck in a precarious situation and it looks like his life is over: the story, and consequently the novel, are in fact coming to an end. Throughout the final stages of the novel, you can feel Binet struggling with the decision to either save a character he has grown to love or kill the character and completely finish the story. We get glimpses of Binet’s thought process through Simon’s own thoughts:

‘In his last moments, Simon renews his dialogue with that transcendent authority he used to imagine: if he were in a novel, what narrative economy would require him to die at the end? Simon goes over several narratological reasons, all of which he considers questionable’
[…]
‘He must deal with this hypothetical novelist the way he deals with God: always act as if God did not exist because if God does exist, he is at best a bad novelist who merits neither respect nor obedience. It is never too late to try to change the course of the story.’

Simon’s existential crisis is simultaneously hilarious, tragic and approachable. Aren’t we all just characters in someone else’s novel? Do we have any control over our own stories or are we just forced to go from scene to scene at someone else’s whim? Binet offers us some comfort:

‘And it may well be that the imaginary novelist has not yet made his decision. It may well be that the ending of the story is in the hands of his character, and that that character is me.’

*For anyone who is interested in the other six functions:

1. referential function
2. poetic function
3. emotive function
4. conative function
5.  phatic function
6. multilingual

Rereading my notes from Milan Kundera’s Slowness got me thinking about how much of what Kundera discusses seems to apply to politics in Britain today. In Slowness, the fictional historian Pontevin talks at length about his ‘dancer concept.’ According to Pontevin, all politicians are dancers and dancers are often in politics. A dancer is different from a regular politician because a dancer does not seek power but glory:  ‘[H]is desire is not to impose this or that social scheme on the world (he couldn’t care less about that) but to take over the stage so as to beam forth his self’.

To excel at being a dancer you must strive to keep others out of the limelight through ‘moral judo’. You challenge the world to determine who is the most moral and you try to make sure that you are constantly putting your opponent in a morally difficult position. The dancer denounces all secret deals and will lay out his plans openly, publicly whilst trying to trip up his opponent by putting them in a moral quandary loudly and publicly. In Kundera’s example, a dancer surprises his opponent with: ‘Are you prepared right now (as I am) to give up your April salary for the sake of the children of Somalia?’ The opponent has a choice: refuse and discredit themselves as enemies of children or say yes in a way that is personally uneasy and plays out unfavourably in the media.

This got me thinking greatly about the political stage that Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn have been using as a dance mat. Brexit has turned into a moral issue. ‘Will you, Corbyn, honour the results of the referendum?’ He can either refuse and discredit himself the enemy of democracy, or he can say an uneasy “yes” and cease being leader of the opposition (giving up his time on the floor). ‘Will you, Johnson, agree that parliament is sovereign?’ He can either refuse and discredit himself the enemy of parliamentary democracy, or he can say “yes” and risk losing the populist moral high ground. In each case, the purpose of these questions is not about finding the right answers but about keeping the opponent off the stage, confined to the morally inferior backstage.

Corbyn and Johnson are also dancers because for both of them it is seemingly about glory, about maintaining one’s role on the stage and not about imposing their own actual ideas on the world. Corbyn is (and has always been) a eurosceptic. He was openly and publicly anti-Europe in previous decades. He opposed Britain’s entry into the EEC. He opposed the Maastricht and Lisbon Treaties and he supported an earlier referendum on leaving the EU.  Through his quiet inaction during the referendum he remained anti-EU, despite claims to the contrary. He is also forced into morally dubious corners in the House of Commons when he is attacked for not honouring a referendum result he actually supports.

Johnson’s entire premiership so far has been about dancing on stage, making his opponent defend their moral stance rather than actually imposing his own stance (which I don’t think even he knows). Actually, I think Johnson could be seen as a true dancer. A dancer throughout his whole life and not just during his time in politics. The challenges to Corbyn (‘You great big girl’s blouse’) and the disingenuous actions towards the EU whilst withholding any of his proposals all seem to be attempts to keep himself on the stage. His disappearance act with Prime Minister Xavier Bettel and the protesters in Luxembourg can be seen as a way of making sure that he jealously guards the stage. One that backfired thanks to Bettel’s quickstep.

Of course, it is not just these two. Dancers have been a prominent feature in British (Western) politics for a while since Kundera started writing. Theresa May was Corbyn’s ultimate dance partner, tapping her feet to the Leaver’s tune when for years she had been humming to the Remainer’s. Cameron and Blair are dancers in their own idiosyncratic ways. Aspects of Kundera’s concept seems to apply — however, one aspect that Kundera misjudged is the fact that a dancer doesn’t need to be irreproachable. They just need to loudly pretend they are. And as long as they are pointing at someone else’s moral inferiority we can forgive (or perhaps forget) their past moral transgressions.

I’m not saying there is (this is just pontificating in the dark) but if there is anything to Kundera’s dancer-concept in politics, can someone change the record soon?

(Blondie prepared me for a lot in life, but not Moravian culture.)

The Joke

‘Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remember stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but times moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away….”

The Joke is a sort of political revenge story. Although like most of Kundera’s novels, the story revolves around several key characters, the standout one is Ludvik Jahn. Ludvik is a popular and successful student under the communist regime who foolishly writes a joke on a postcard (‘Optimism is the opium of mankind! A healthy spirit stinks of stupidity! Long like Trotsky!’). The party fails to see the humour and he is forced to work in the mines after being thrown out of the party. Ludvik, after a few years, ends up with a good life but he remains bitter towards his former students, especially Pavel, who was instrumental in expelling Ludvik from the Party. To get revenge for an act that occurred a lifetime ago, Ludvik seeks to seduce Pavel’s wife: Helena. Helena is by far the most sympathetic character. She is a largely innocent victim of Ludvik’s machinations and the literal butt of the biggest joke in the book. She is seduced by Ludvik and unloved by her husband. It’s easy to dislike Ludivk and everything that he does in his pursuit of revenge, especially his approach to sex, but it is also hard not to see most of our own impulses and paranoias in Ludvik and his actions. He serves as Kundera’s warning to us all about cosmic humour. The central plot reminded me a lot of Voltaire’s line:

‘God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.’

The most interesting part of The Joke for me was actually Kundera’s stuff on history and folklore. The secondary plot focus on the Ride of the Kings and Moravian culture. Here, I think Kundera excels and is in his element as he weaves lighthearted philosophising in between the ‘love’ story. The technical discussions about Moravian music can be a little difficult to follow, especially for someone whose musical knowledge is limited to 1980s pop music. (Blondie prepared me for a lot in life, but not Moravian culture.)

Overall, The Joke is an interesting novel and it is easy to see how many of the themes in this story merged with his other books to form the foundation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It is perhaps because I started my Kundera journey with his chef-d’œuvre that I don’t quite appreciate the nuance of his earlier works.

“They are gazing at God’s windows. A person gazing at God’s windows is not bored: he is happy”

Slowness

Slowness takes place on two midsummer evenings, two hundred years apart. The plot focuses on five characters, including the author himself who appears at the start. (I do have to confess, although it is a little ‘post-y’, I do like it when authors include themselves into the novels.) Set in a chateau, the story traces the seductive dance between Madame T. and the Chevalier in the eighteenth century and two stories of seduction in the present involving Berck (a dancer), Vincent (a friend of the author) and two women they meet at the chateau. It is less a novel really and more of a philosophical essay, one that explores the relationship between speed, memory and love. One simple (but interesting) discussion explores the fact that we walk slowly if we want to remember something but if we want to forget what has just happened we tend to quicken our pace:

‘There is a secret one between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting… the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory, the degree of speech is directly proportional to the intensity of fogetting’.

These narratives are underpinned by Kundera’s exploration of speed, history and memory which all serve as a warning to the reader to avoid the modern pressures to be hasty in modern life and to embrace slowness.

The other major theme in Kundera’s novel is the concept of the ‘dancer.’ All politicians have a dancer in them, we are told, because they seek glory not power; they desire to ‘take over the stage so as to beam forth his self’ rather than actually enact ideas. (It is hard not to see a bit of a ‘dancer’ in Boris Johnson.) To dominate the stage, politicians need to make sure no one else is on the stage by ensuring their opponents are seen as morally inferior.

Slowness is one of Kundera’s shortest novels, but it is also one of his most detailed and dense stories. It is written in a style that transcends and complicates time, which can be a little confusing in places but there is something immensely sweet about Slowness. 

Farewell Waltz 

I love Kundera, but I do not like this story. Set in a spa town in Czechoslovakia, it centres around sex and love. Not uncommon in a Kundera story, but there is a much darker and misogynist tone than normal in this story.

Klima is a famous musician with a remarkably beautiful wife (Kamila). However he is prone to having numerous affairs, and one such affair ended with Klima impregnating a nurse at the spa (Ruzena). The story focuses on Klima’s attempts to convince Ruzena to get an abortion, an act that requires permission from the Board. In order to convince Ruzena to get an abortion, Klima has to promise her that he will leave his wife for her, which he has no intention of doing as he is greatly in love with Kamila (who has decided to visit the spa in order to catch Klima out). This is pretty standard stuff for Kundera.

But the two secondary plots are more extreme than normal. The gynaecologist at the spa helps couples who are struggling to have children. He doesn’t help by normal medical practices: he impregnates the women without their knowledge so that the vast majority of children at the local school share a considerable physical resemblance to the gynaecologist… Horrific.

Yet that’s not even the worse bit. One character Jakub visits the spa before he leaves the country. He wants to thank the gynaecologist for giving him a suicide pill to use if his days as a political exile got too dark. He carries this pill with him everywhere, concealed in a loose handkerchief. Whilst he is at the spa he sleeps with the daughter of the man he betrayed years ago by pretending that he was his best friend. In the restaurant, Ruzena the pregnant nurse leaves a tube of her anxiety pills on the table. Jakub and his “friend’s” daughter sit down to eat at the table she has vacated and Jakub sees the pills. He notes that they are the same colour and shape as his suicide pill, so (naturally) he puts the pill into the tube. When the nurse comes back and picks up her pills, he doesn’t tell her that she now has a suicide pill in the mix. For the rest of the novel, he has countless chances to tell her that her life is at risk but in the end he decides to drive away and flee the country, comforting himself with the thought that he’ll never know whether he is a murderer or not. Ruzena, who is rather naturally anxious about everything that is going on at the spa, takes the suicide pill by accident and dies a quick but painful death. This conveniently solves Klima’s quandary and Ruzena’s death is glossed over by the other characters in a callous fashion.

Kunder’s treatment of women has often been problematic, to say the least. A lot of time it seems that the misogyny is less Kundera’s and more his characters’. That is to say, that Kundera paints a character that is misogynistic, one who is indicative of how a lot of men think. But this story treats women as wholly expendable. The misogyny is not an insight into a character’s psyche (and by extension society’s) but is just gratuitous.

My Kundera journey is nearly complete. I now only have one more novel of his to read: Life Is Elsewhere.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am an avid fan of horror and gothic literature. All types really: I’ve read the complete works of Lovecraft, a lot of Stephen King, Clive Barker and I even enjoyed a fair few Dean Koontz novels in my youth. That means it takes a lot for a story to have much of an effect on me. Most of the time I appreciate the writing and the story, but they very rarely scare me. Forster’s novella The Machine Stops (1909), which is a science fiction story and not a horror, freaked the crap out of me. 

At just over 12,000 words Forster paints, in enviable prose, a vision of the future in which humanity has been forced to live underground. Everyone lives in small individual hubs, similar to a cubicle but one in which all our needs are met by a machine. If you want food, it delivers food; if you want some music, it will play something you want; if you need some poetry, the machine delivers. It is even equipped with a sophisticated version of Skype and has the ability to repair itself.

The main character Vashti is very content, happy with everything the machine provides her with and happily delivering lectures on ‘secondhand ideas’ to likeminded people across the world (I agree!). Her son, Kuno, however, is disillusioned with the mechanical world and distrustful of the machine. He manages to get Vashti to travel across the world to see him instead of relying on Skype. When she arrives Kuno reveals to his mother that he is rebelling against the modern world and seeks to explore the surface of the Earth which is now a toxic wasteland. He explains that he managed to break out of the ventilation system (seemingly putting everyone at risk) and briefly sees some evidence of life surviving on the surface beyond the reach of the machine. Kuno’s rebellion sees him threatened with exile from the council and his relationship with his mother is strained more than ever.

Vashti returns home and over the years the omnipotent Machine comes to be seen as a god as society shifts towards a ‘technopoly’. The Machine is now revered and humanity is willing to sacrifice aspects of society in favour of the Machine. But, as the title foretells, one day the machine’s ability to repair itself breaks down and no one can remember how to fix it. We see, through Forster’s words, a sort of mechanical stroke in action as different aspects of the machine starts to break down. The Machine begins, for example, to omit key sections from its music and its poetry become garbled and confused. The ventilation system breaks down. As the Machine crumbles, humanity crumbles. The Machine simply stops, and so do we. The story ends in a dark tunnel that is full of putrid, foul air. The story ends quickly, but not quick enough:

‘Only the whispers remained, and the little whimpering groans. They were dying by hundreds out in the dark.
She burst into tears.
Tears answered her.
They wept for humanity, those two, not for themselves. They could not bear that this should be the end’

Maybe it was because I read the story in the dark, but that final image of hundreds of people gasping for air, trapped underground, struggling to breathe and dying without any control or chance for escape…

This story was inspired a little by The Time Machine by H. G. Wells (see earlier review) which is fairly evident, but the story is also terrifyingly prescient. Not only does Forster predict a lot of the technology that we rely on, including the very medium which I am communicating right now, but he also seems to predict the social issues that come with this technology. I rarely communicate with anyone in person outside of work, preferring to use Skype or instant messenger. I don’t know how most of the technology I use actually works – it just does. As we rely increasingly on technology to supply most of our needs, what would happen if it simply stops?

But perhaps the most terrifying aspect of Forster’s work lies in his description of an Earth stripped of resources: barren and lifeless. In 1909, he seems to predict the devastating effect humankind will have on the world, the effects of climate change.

‘But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.’

Perhaps what makes Forster’s novel so terrifying compared to the cosmic horror of Lovecraft or the supernatural stories of King is the fact that I’m in this nightmare.

‘I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.’ Hunter S Thompson.

Last week, in preparation for my new MA in Creative Nonfiction, I started to read some of the classic texts that blur the lines between fact and fiction starting of with Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing. 

Originally, published in Rolling Stone, it is a story without a clear plot. Thompson’s character Raoul Duke is sent to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race, accompanied by his attorney Dr Gonzo. This is, however, very much a loose plot with the majority of the story focusing more on characters’ use of recreational drugs from Amyl, ether and mescaline to name a few. Duke and Gonzo’s approach to recreational drugs is far from recreational as they seemingly apply a strong work ethic to achieving and maintaining various highs and lows. Throughout the book, it is purposely difficult to ascertain what is real and what is fictional as we experience the paranoia and paroxysms of Duke and Dr Gonzo as they evade the authorities and blend into Las Vegas society (‘In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught’) all while trying to find the American Dream — a dream that increasingly turns into a nightmarish fever.

Ralph Steadman illustrates Fear and Loathing

The main characters are compelling, and remarkably well written, but they are far from likeable which is clearly the point of Thompson’s narrative. These two characters destroy, challenge, belittle and question the ugly side of the American Dream whilst also seemingly embodying the ugly by-products of that very dream themselves, taking advantage of anyone they come across, including a very young, naive artist. There is, despite the thorough unlikability of the characters, perhaps begrudging respect for their talents which are all too elusive for most sober-minded people (‘I went back… where I began to drink heavily, think heavily, and make many heavy notes…’) and some admiration for Duke’s ability to see through the murky mirage of society in Vegas. (Duke notes at one point that Vegas was not a town to do psychedelic drugs in because the ‘[r]eality itself is too twisted’.)

There are some genuinely hilarious bits as well as the enthralling descents into madness. Duke is very aware of his risky lifestyle on the edge, living with the prospect of being gutted by a friend too far gone to the constant strain the drugs place on his heart, which manifests most obviously in prodigious perspiration: ‘My clothes are soaking wet from dawn to dusk. This worried me at first, but when I went to a doctor and described my normal intake of booze, drugs and poison he told me to come back when the sweating stopped.’

Fear and Loathing’s legacy is far-reaching. Although this was not the first case of Gonzo Journalism (nor is it a successful case of gonzo journalism by Thompson’s own admission), it is a key moment in American Literature and one that has had a wide impact on American culture more broadly. It hard, for example, not to see this influence even in things such as Bojack Horseman on a deeper level than just drug use (‘Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars’).