March 18, 2012

About reading — Random books I’ve read, while waiting for Murakami

I must confess that I read a lot more books than what I am able to convert into reviews and blog posts. Because reading is one of my default positions, I read — or devour — at least a couple of books each week. Then there’s the scholarly reading for my work, and then there’s the newspapers and magazines. So I would estimate I’m up to around  thousand pages each week.

Now, it’s impossible to review that many books during my spare time, even if fiction only adds up to half of what I read. And much of this is what I like to call comfort reading, when I am tired and want something I don’t have to use that much energy to process — like mystery novels.

This last week I have been planning to go to a bookstore and get Book 3 of the amazing Murakami novel 1Q84, but work (and a pleasant weekend in Berlin) has taken toll of my time. When I did drag myself to two bookstores, they were sold out!

So… This is what I’ve read while waiting for (myself to go to another bookstore and get hold of) Murakami:

Review — Oliver Sacks: The man who mistook his wife for a hat, and other clinical tales

Originally published: 1985

Although not fiction, but rather a collection of essays about a neurologist’s patients, this is a highly entertaining — and challenging — read. Oliver Sacks, a New York-based neurologist, has written several popular books about his work and his patients, including Awakenings, which was made into a major movie in 1990, starring Robin Williams as Sacks and Robert De Niro as his catonic patient Leonard Lowe.

In “The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat”, we are told 24 tales about patients with various neurological conditions, such as Parkinson’s, autism, Korsakoff’s syndrome (a alcohol-induced amnesia that may be irreversible), aphasia (various forms of loss of language) and many others.

I would strongly compare the book to a sort of House, M.D. collection of tales, without the dysfunctional main character from the TV series. It would not surprise me if many medical TV shows found plot ideas in this book. Several of the stories here, like the autistic savant twins who only spoke in primes, have been used in movies such as House of Cards and Rain Man.

It is a very entertaining book of ‘freak cases’, alien hand syndrome and the likes, and to me it is interesting that Sacks uses a phenomenological approach. Ultimately, the book handles questions like: are you really human if you have no sense of bodily control, or have no memory outsde this moment? Recommended!

Review — Elizabeth George: A Great Deliverance

Originally published 1988

This mystery novel, which I have read several times, is the first in the Inspector Lynley series, featuring the odd Scotland Yard couple Thomas Lynley, who is Lord Asherton, and working-class background Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers. Even though George is American, her novels are set in England, highlighting social issues like class struggles and nobility.

“A Great Deliverance” is the first book of the series, and in my opinion, although I’ve only read a couple more, clearly the best. The book opens with a Catholic Priest, Father Hart, who is clumsily traveling from the small village of Keldale in Yorkshire to visit Scotland Yard in London. He travels all this way to insist on the innocence of Roberta, an obese and shy 17-year-old girl found next to her fathers decapitated body. Since Father Hart found her, Roberta has only spoken a few words: “I did it. I don’t regret it.”

The unlikely partners Havers and Lynley are asked to cooperate during the investigation. This is a last chance for Havers, who is an extremely emotional and aggressive woman. She detests Lynley because he is high class and a womanizer, and is completely convinced that the only reason she is put on the case is that she is ugly, and therefore ‘safe’ for Lynley’s advancements.

Arriving in Kendale, they soon begin to sense that not all is what it seems beneath the charming village surface. It turns out that both Roberta’s mother and sister left the village over the years, that there are several affairs between the villagers, a church organist is following a young artist — and baby cries can be heard from the church at night.

And as the case is slowly untangled, the strong resentment Havers feels for Lynley, her diffuculties in the family, Lynley’s great sorrow in life and the gruesome actions happening under the surface in Keldale all come to light.

If you are going to read a mystery, this one is one of the best.

Review — Donna Leon: A Noble Radiance

Originally published: 1998

The second mystery I read this week actually covers some of the same topics as the above-mentioned “A Great Deliverance”. This time, it is not the inspector, but the victim’s family which are high class nobility. A young man, Roberto Lorenzoni, from one of Venezia’s most prominent families, has been missing for a couple of years when a body is found in the garden of a country-side estate. Struggling with his supervisors, commissario Brunetti tries to unravel what is behind the abduction and murder, but meets closed doors when trying to get access to high class society.

Unfortunately, ‘A noble radiance’ is neither that compelling nor deep. While George’s book really makes a mark, I forgot the plot of Leon’s book about five minutes after I closed it. This is a book for passing the time.

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March 4, 2012

Review: Haruki Murakami — 1Q84, Book 1 and 2

Wow, it’s really time this guy won the Nobel prize for literature.

Read in Norwegian, translated from the Japanese by Ika Kaminka (2011)
Original release 2009

As much as I liked Dance, dance, dance and the other works I have read by Murakami, in my view 1Q84 is much more finished, more elegant, and more fulfilling for the reader — and that’s before I’ve even read the third and last book.

The books takes place in Japan in 1984, and alternates between the perspective of Tengo, a maths teacher and aspiring writer, and Aomame, a personal trainer with an unusual side job. Aomame — with a rare first name, meaning green peas — is sitting in a taxi stuck in traffic when the radio starts playing a classical piece, ‘Sinfonietta’. The book opens with her reflections around the piece and the personal history of its composer, when Aomame suddenly realizes she has no idea how she knows all this.

Suddenly she becomes aware that the taxi is very different than usual taxis, with a posh interior, and it’s exceptionally silent. She gets an strange bodily sensation as well — a sort of twisting feeling, where it feels like her whole body is being physically turned and twisted. She proceeds to follow her driver’s advice to get out of the traffic by jumping out of the taxi on the highway and go down a safety ramp, from where she can easily get to a subway station. The driver warns her, before she gets out, that doing this might make the world seem a bit different; but she shouldn’t be fooled — there is only one reality.

And this marks Aomame’s entry to a parallel world called 1Q84.

We first meet Tengo, on the other hand, while he is reliving a childhood memory that has been tormenting him for many years. He remembers (or does he?) that he is lying in his cradle just a toddler, and a stranger (not his father) is suckling on Tengo’s mother’s breast. The memory is a sort of focal point in Tengo’s life, partly because his mother died (or left?) soon after, and he was left alone with his cold and distant father.

This time, the ‘attack’ of the memory happens in the middle of a business meeting with Tengo’s acquaintance, publisher Komatsu, who has a strange idea on a business scheme. It turns out that a young girl, only 17 years old, has written a striking story and sent it to Komatsu, who wants to enter it to a aspiring writer’s contest. The story, called Air Chrysalis, is awkwardly written, and Komatsu wants Tengo to re-write the story so as to polish the language and the child-like writing style.

Tentatively moving parallel and towards each other, Tengo and Aomame are scooped up in the same events, but from different perspectives. The young girl who has written Air Chrysalis, Fukaeri, seems to come from a sectarian religious cult that abuse children. Aomame, through her unusual side-job,  meets another small girl that escaped the same cult, severely traumatized and with serious damage done to her reproductive system.

But as in many Murakami-novels, nothing is quite like it seems.

What really happens inside the religious cult? Who is their leader? How are Tengo and Aomame connected? What or who are the threatening ‘Little people’, who ‘make things happen’? Is Tengo’s memory of his mother real? Why is he being pestered by a representative of the sect?

I don’t have all the answers either, as I have book three left, and I really doubt it if I will understand everything even then.

What is striking to me, while I am doing a PhD on social spatiality and am thus being completely one-track minded, is Murakami’s use of spaces as portals and passageways into different realities. Much like the elevator in the hotel of ‘Dance, dance, dance’, in 1Q84 the taxi, and especially the ramp from the motorway, work as spatial portals into other worlds. The topics are somewhat similar too: in ‘Dance, dance, dance’ the unnamed protagonist is looking for his girlfriend Kiki in a different reality just beyond the scope of his own world, while Tengo and Aomame start looking for each other under similar circumstances in 1Q84.

And while the main character of ‘Dance, dance, dance’ meets the Sheep-man, a sort of spiritual guide who pushes him to live his life; a goat plays a key role in 1Q84 as the first portal to the ‘little people’. The mysterious ‘little people’ enter through the goat’s body into this reality and manipulates a communist collective, which eventually turns into the aforementioned religious cult.

There are, of course, both direct and discreet allusions to Orwell’s 1984, but I do not see this theme to be the most central as of yet. Right now, I am not sure what is the central topic of the work, although Tengo and Aomame seem to be ‘star-crossed lovers’ as a sort of modern day Romeo and Juliet.

I am pretty sure I am going to have to run to the store to buy book three, and review it — meanwhile, you should all get started on book one and two!

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January 20, 2012

Review — Mary Beard: Pompeii. The Life of a Roman Town

Yay — finally reviewing a book about archaeology! Although this popularized, non-fiction book doesn’t qualify as literature per se, I higly recommend it as an introduction to the wonderful site that is Pompeii. And I’m not even a classical archaeologist..!

First published: 2008

This impressive tale of the well-known city, buried by the volcanic explosion of Vesuvio in 79 CE, takes the reader from house to house and street by street through a city many of us think we know, but actually do not know at all. First, let me state that I have (unfortunately) never visited Pompeii, and, as written in the introduction, have little scholarly knowledge of the site, as I work with an entirely different field of archaeology.

However, I, like many others, have preconceptions of the town: the rapid disaster, people buried alive in the lava streams and volcanic ash, the many brothels of the town, the exceptional, undisturbed and well-preserved remains. Wrong! Mary Beard takes us through many of the myths while giving a virtual tour of Pompeii, and little is as we perhaps would think.

For instance, the disaster did not happen quite as suddenly as many of us have come to believe. Beard points out that there had been warning signs possibly days ahead of the eruption. A big chunk, maybe even the majority of the population, have grabbed as many belongings as they could and left before the eruption. Many of them have also returned when the danger was over, to try and salvage their possessions.

Apparently many houses show signs of reentry, by tunneling through the debris and collecting valuables. If this was done by the rightful owners, or by opportunistic looters, is another question. In any case it was a dangerous enterprise, which doesn’t make the fact that the tunnels in places were so small that only children could have fitted, seem any better.

But there are other surprises as well. Did you know that the lavatories, which are a common feature in Pompeian houses, are found in the kitchens? As much as we like to think of the Romans as our cultural predecessors, and much alike ourselves, this is a somewhat different house planning what us modern, Western people would have done.

When it comes to bedrooms, they are not identified. It seems that many rooms would have a bed or sofa that could be used for sleeping, but isn’t necessarily a bedroom.

These quirks, and many others, demonstrate that the neat and clean layout of Pompeii, not only the households, but the streets as well, is a modern construct. When the early excavations began in the 19th century, the excavators labelled housed with names and rooms with functions because they, as is very common in dealing with the past, projected their own, contemporary ideas onto the past.

One of the strengths of the book is the critical review of the city and of the work that has been done there. The hygienic baths are revealed as germ pools, the annihilating eruption did perhaps kill as few as 10 per cent of the population, and so on.

However, the book is perhaps a bit too packed with facts, and the illustrations are dreadful (paperback edition). I personally also miss even further exploration of the mentality of the populations, not just their material remains.

That being said, it is a fascinating, sometimes funny and intriguing book, bringing, as the title promised, a roman town into life.

At the end of the book, I bet many readers will, like me, be planning a trip as soon as possible to this amazing archaeological site.

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December 13, 2011

Review — Arto Paasilinna: The Year of the Hare

A true Paasilinna fable complete with the dark Finnish landscape, eccentric characters, the vodka always lurking in the background; and a true and special friendship between a man and a hare.

Original title: Jäniksen vuosi
First published: 1975
Available in English

Karlo Vatanen is a journalist working a case in the Finnish forest together with a photographer. While driving back at night they hit a hare with their car. Vatanen jumps out of the car and follows the rabbit — in an Alice in Wonderland-sense — into the forest.

He never looks back.

Within a week Vatanen has left his former life for good. He quits his job, leaves his wife, sells his treasured boat and travels with the hare all over Finland. He takes odd jobs here and there, almost loses his hare to veterinarians and posh, upper-class women, fights ravens and policemen and — perhaps the highlight of the book — follows a mean old bear across the border into the Soviet Union. He also manages to get engaged without remembering it during a particularly heavy period of binge drinking.

The book is short, like all Paasilinna novels, but is filled with episodes from the year Vatanen spends traveling around the country with his beloved hare (one memorable episode features Vatanen trying to pull a cow up from a marsh).

It is difficult to re-tell as the charm and cleverness of the book lie in the surprising and absurd episodes, which one has to read for oneself.

It is supposed to be Paasillina`s own favourite, and I do not blame him. It is absurd, and funny, and different, and brave. Although it doesn’t, in my opinion, beat the hilarious “Collective Suicide”, it is still a classic in its own right.

Perhaps it would do several of us some good to meet a hare in the forest one day, and take a good look at our lives and how we are leading them..?

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December 13, 2011

Archaeological field work equals much reading, way less writing

Wow, the last six months have just sped by…!

To my defense they may have been some of the most action-filled months I have experienced. I got married (yay!), I worked on the other side of the country for three months, I started a new job and I applied for a research fellow position at the university — which I just got.

Also, I have come to realize that archaeological field work is quite tiring. Being out in the sun (or rain, or wind – why did I choose this profession again?) all day, shoveling, the excitement, being away from your family, and all the social activities at night can really wear you out.

Or maybe I am just getting older.

And so, the blog has suffered. However, as this blog is mainly written as a hobby and as a plus-energy project, I cannot promise that the frequency of blog posts will increase in the near future. I promise, though, that as long as I have the will and desire, you`ll still hear about my literary experiences.

And I have of course saved up a buck-load of books I`ve read and re-read during the late summer, the honeymoon and during the autumn. Here are a few of the reviews you can expect (at some unspecified point in the future ;) ):

Beate Grimsrud: En dåre fri (A Fool, Free)

Håkan Nesser: the next two books after the great “Man without Dog”

En helt annen historie (A completely different story) and Beretningen om herr Roos (The tale of Mr. Roos)

Xiaolu Guo: Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

Alexander McCall Smith`s other series, besides The  No.1 Ladies Detective Agency — The Sunday Philosophy Club

And a bunch more. Stay tuned.

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June 29, 2011

Challenged by a reader – Not very politically correct

One of my readers challenged me today. Gary M wants a recommendation for a modern novel by a female author, non-Japanese, about love, without exploring the darker side. I have been thinking for 45 minutes, and still haven’t come up with one. What’s going on?

Off the top of my head, I can name five GREAT novels about love – among them the ugliest most beautiful love story I ever read, ‘The Bad Girl’, and my personal favourite – ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’. The problem with all my suggestions are:

1) The authors are exclusively male.
2) None of the novels “explore pure love” without going to the darker side of the most basal and perhaps, important emotion humans share.

The second problem is, I think, unavoidable. What would love be without hate? What is infatuation without jealousy? The line between passion and obsession is extremely slim. Love stories without darkness don’t make great literature, at least I haven’t read one yet.

My bigger concern is the gender-thing. Why can’t I think of one good love-centered, modern novel written by a female author? I mean, I can think of some, but they’re not that great. Have I lost my touch? Or are there really that few good female authors? I suddenly feel like a betrayer of my sex…!

But then it occurred to me: could it be the case that female authors don’t dare to write great love stories, because they would be reckoned as ‘romance novelists’, aka chic lit-writers — or to use the colourful Norwegian expression roughly translated as writers of ‘housewives’ porn’?

It is a fact that when men write great literature it is viewed as universal and valuable to all readers, but when women write, a lot men feel like they can’t relate. Could it be an effect of this we are seeing – female authors writing about love being reduced to ‘female literature’ by publishers and general readers alike?

Or am I just really tired today, and can’t think of any great love novels by women writers..?

I don’t have an answer yet, and I’ll keep thinking, Gary. Maybe other readers have a suggestion or two? I totally understand you on that science thing – it can be hard finding the time and energy reading something else than scientific journal articles at times.

Meanwhile, here’s a list of some of my favourite novels about love. Maybe you’ll find something here?

 

Gabriel García Márquez – Love in the Time of Cholera

Marios Vargas Llosa – The Bad Girl

Alessandro Baricco – Silk

Jan Wiese – The Naked Madonna

Jostein Gaarder – Maya

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June 26, 2011

Summer Reading

As the archaeological field season has started, and travelling to locations with minimum internet access comes with it, my blog has greatly suffered over the last few weeks. Luckily, my reading hasn’t.

Every season has its own charm, especially when it comes to reading. Who doesn’t love to snuggle up on the couch with a cup of hot chocolate or tea when the autumn rain storms are howling outside? Or bringing a fresh stack of mysteries to the winter cabin, in the comfortable chair in front of the fire, a glass of red wine in hand… But all-time my favourite season for reading has always been summer.

There’s something about the long, light, Nordic summer nights that gives you pause and time for reflection, hopefully in the company of a well-written book. Another classic is, of course, the beach book, smeared with tanning lotion and with impressive amounts of sand between the pages, which trickles into your bed when you want to read before your mid-day nap.

I love reading during the summer, even though it doesn’t much feel like summer has actually hit the west coast of Norway, where I’m currently working. I went into a local book shop the other day (a perpetual mistake) and came back poorer, but much happier.

The Paasilinna-monkey has returned to my back, and I started with his breakthrough novel ‘The Year of the Hare’, an absurdist tragi-comic novel about a man whose life is completely altered when he hits a hare with his car one day. I continued to ‘The Howling Miller’, which I’m currently reading. Both books are of the few of Paasillina’s translated into English!

I have also continued with Håkan Nesser’s series about Inspector Barbarotti, which opened with the brilliant ‘Man Without Dog’, and continued with ‘A Completely Different Story’, soon to be reviewed.

Other books I have ploughed through during the last few weeks are Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’, the latest installment in The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, ‘The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party’, the first in McCall Smith’s other series ‘The Sunday Philosophy Club’, and probably a bunch more which I have completely forgotten at the moment.

As long as my internet connection holds, I’ll try to fill you in on my summer reading experiences. Have a great reading summer, too!

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