Discovering Ice

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

"One Hundred Years of Solitude" Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

Today is the 85th birthday of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I can't let this day go by without writing something about what his two most well-known works "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love In the Time of Cholera" mean to me. It's something deeply affecting and not entirely able to be explained - like magic.

I devoured "100 Years of Solitude" and I was not sated. I read through most of Marquez's works, fascinated by this type of writing I knew somehow from reading works by Borges and Rushdie and Murakami, but hadn't known were considered magical realism. 

I didn't give much thought to the labels applied to literature besides fiction and non-fiction, but "Solitude" changed me. It opened my eyes to a way of discovering literature that I'd never bothered with, but suddenly I couldn't get enough of. I Google'd my way around the Internet compiling lists of authors who wrote in the genre like Miguel Angel Asturias, Isabelle Allende, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Mikhail Bulgakov, Italo Calvino, Robertson Davies, Gunter Grass, Kafka, Ben Okri, Jose Saragamo, and Kawabata. 

One scan of my bookshelves and I can see the path that Marquez's work set me upon that was littered with masterpieces I might not have stumbled upon otherwise. 

Asturias' "The Mulatta and Mr Fly" and his children's book "The Talking Machine". His works were so difficult to find I got a membership to The American Library to read "Mulatta". I spent months searching online for an affordable copy of the first edition of "The Talking Machine" (which runs anywhere from $60 - $150 but I snagged on eBay for $3). 

I loved Allende's "House of Spirits" so much that I wrote her an email to tell her, to which she graciously responded and encouraged me to write a book of my own. Allende's TED Talk is undoubtedly one of my favourites. 

Through Casares I discovered a link to Borges who was already a favourite. Their work "The Book of Fantasy" is something I found on ABEBooks for a pittance and would rescue from a burning house. Through Casares and Borges I discovered Alberto Manguel's "The Dictionary of Imaginary Places" - one of the greatest books ever put to print and also worthy of rescue from flames.

I could go on about books I discovered and rediscovered because of the spell "Solitude" cast upon me. I in turn have always pressed it into people's hands, though I know the style and story isn't for everyone. Please, I have urged people, just give it a read. It might change you forever.

Before "Solitude" my mind didn't really understand the freedom the writer has at their fingertips. I'd buried my nose too long in books that were all realism and no magic. I reread  "The Chronicles of Narnia" almost in secret because I thought it was silly to read such things when I was attempting to be the author of serious literature. 

I wanted the notches on my belt of being able to claim to have read "Ulysses" (I've made many attempts and never made it past a few pages) and the other sort of books you hear people discussing at parties to show off. And while I've read many of the books that should give me the right to strut around parties like a pretentious peacock, it's not exactly my style to judge someone based on their taste in books, but I was still worried that somehow if I didn't have the right resumé I was somehow obviously going to turn out to be a shit writer.

After finishing "One Hundred Years of Solitude" I started writing a book. It was the first version of the book I've been trying to write ever since. Not to be like Joyce or Hemingway or Miller or Nabokov, but to simply write a book that one day might have the impact on another in that way that "Solitude" did on me.

Feliz Cumpleaños Señor Marquez y muchos gracias for this book that began with the discovery of ice and brought me to that instant where I began to decipher that I was living.

If you're interested in some of the other books that I've loved, you can find a Henry Miller inspired list here. 

Read more >>

Oh Haruki

"Who do you think the best living author is?" She asks, puffing away on a bright red Nat Sherman Fantasia.

"I guess it'd be Murakami," he answers, his eyes traveling over to one of the many shelves of books and down the spine of The Wind Up Bird Chronicle.  "I have a really nice edition of Noreweigan Wood," he says almost sighing.  "Really nice."

"Even after Kafka on the Shore?"

The mere mention of Kafka on the Shore is enough to abruptly end most conversations on Murakami it seems. It happened just today. I asked friends on Facebook who their favourite author was and one mentioned Murakami. The conversation was going along nicely until I dropped the KOTS bomb. Then it abruptly ended and I was forced to talk about Margaret Atwood's poetry. Even KOTS if better than Atwood's poetry, and it's my least favourite of Murakami's works.

He who loves Murakami enough to declare him the greatest living author is the same "he" who once had a cat that traveled around town and loved to be carried in a plastic shipping bag. I tell him about that time when I lived in New York and decided I needed to go to a Denny's after reading Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. There was a blizzard but I drove to New Jersey anyways and ate a Grand Slam breakfast not so far from Princeton University where Murakami had been a writing fellow and where he wrote The Wind Up Bird Chronicle.

At that time with only one of Murakami's books under my belt I was enchanted by the touches of modern life interspersed with parallel worlds. It was at once science fiction, cyberpunk, and a hard-boiled Chandleresque detective story. I didn't know enough of Murakami's works to know that the themes I so loved would be repetitive. Cats, spirits, spaghetti, love hotels, the Beatles, and of course Denny's. Denny's is mentioned so often in Murakami's work that once I'd progressed through enough them I wondered if he wasn't sponsored by the eatery. At best, Murakami should be entitled to free coffee at any Denny's for life.

I am a fan of Japanese literature in general. I read Lady Murasaki's Tale of the Genji before I knew what a big deal it was supposed to be and Miyamoto Musashi's The Book of the Five Rings is still a favourite. It was after reading Soseki's I Am a Cat that my interest in Japanese literature was reborn. I've since amassed a fairly impressive collection of Japanese authors, enough to see where one half of Murakami's style originates from.

But as of late I've found his writing to be a disappointment. After Dark was empty somehow. I read it in one sitting and was glad I'd saved my money and borrowed it off of someone. Seeing as I can buy a book just because I like the title, that in itself is the harshest criticism I could give an author. I didn't buy your book. In the case of After Dark, I never will.

Murakami's latest work 1Q84 is beyond my reading abilities in Japanese, and the English translation isn't going to be available until October. It's three volumes will be published all at once, but will it be worth it? If I were going to spend a massive amount of time reading any Japanese author's multi-volume work I'd keep reading Mishima's Sea of Fertility tetralogy. Spring Snow, the first book in the SoF was so brilliantly written that I almost don't want to read any of the others to allow it's perfection to remain unmarred like when you wake up early in New York after a big snow storm and to find that despite the fact millions of people live in the city there isn't a footprint on your sidewalk yet - which is in itself a perfect analogy for the book.

Kafka on the Shore's title put forth a fact any Murakami reader knows: Murakami loves Kafka. He has even won the Kafka Prize and Hard-Boiled is heavily influenced by Kafka's The Castle. But I can't help to think that Murakami, lover of running marathons, was running a marathon when he wrote it. On a treadmill.

It is difficult when the authors we love disappoint us. It has happened to me before. I read Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet and promptly set out to read every Rushdie book I could afterwards. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is still my favourite Rushdie book. I couldn't read Satanic Verses or Midnight's Children. Grimus was particularly terrible. I feel the same about Paul Auster. The New York Trilogy was amazing. The Brooklyn Follies not so much. I met Auster shortly after reading The New York Trilogy at a poetry event of his and was even more captivated after convincing him to come out and have a drink with me and my friend who was obviously quite in love with him. He is in short, a damn interesting person. It only made it harder when I was so let down by The Brooklyn Follies.

Maybe someday I'll publish enough books to know what it feels like to have created something so great that everything else I might write or have written will pale in comparison. I hope I do. I also hope I can take a dose of my own critical medicine. But as Henry Miller once said, "you learn as much from a badly written book as a well written one", and for me the lesson I've taken from Murakami is if I find myself writing repeatedly about the same things over and over to the detriment of my craft I'll seek out a psychiatrist instead of a publisher.

Are you looking forward to Murakami's 1Q84? Or, if you've read it, is it worth buying?

Read more >>