Tangerine's PoV

After reading Kafka on the shore I could not resist buying a new Murakami novel. This time it was Norwegian Wood, the only realistic novel that Murakami ever wrote.

Toru Watanabe, a 37 year old man finds himself in an European airport and suddenly hears a song that brings back to him lots of memories from his youth. The song is The Beatles’ Norwegian Wood. The rest of the novel tries to picture these memories built around Naoko, a special girl with whom he has a special but very difficult relationship, and Midori, a very human, very lively girl. To many it might seem just a love story that doesn’t even deserve to be read, but I think it’s much more than that. I could identify in the novel many of the symbols that Murakami used in Kafka on the shore: cats, deep forests, etc.

I think reading Murakami is an experience which goes beyond the story that he tells. I consider the characters he builds striking, I found the dialogues very interesting, very human and very realistic, the descriptions are very thorough but not boring. I find it interesting to read Murakami, it makes me feel things, that’s what good writers do!

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. That’s the world of hicks and slobs. Real people would be ashamed of themselves doing that”

Lately I have heard lots of positive comments about Haruki Murakami so I decided to read some of his novels and I started with Kafka on the shore. I expected to encounter an impressive novel, one of those that you never forget but I found much more than that.

The novel is based on two different stories: the story of Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old boy trying to run away from his father and from the future that his father predicted for him (based on Oedipus myth), and also trying to find his mother and sister who left him when he was 4 years old. On the other side, Satoru Nakata, a sexagerian who lost most of his mental faculties when he was a young boy during a peculiar incident. Their stories are quite different but, at the same time, they seem to have much in common.

This novel can be considered a modern Greek tragedy, a manual for understanding Beethoven, a “how to communicate with cats”, a tribute to “mentally defective” people, a lesson on how to be the “toughest fifteen-years-old boy in the world”, a lesson of Japanese culture, or it can be considered a great novel which perfectly combines all of the above. I definitely choose the second option.

Quotes:

“…in everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward any more. And when we reach that point all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.”

“Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won’t be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there – to the edge of the world. There’s something you can’t do unless you go there.”

This year has been an year of changes, and I really do not know how I could make time for reading but I eventually did so here’s the list of the books I’ve enjoyed reading this year:

1. The Divine Child, by Pascal Bruckner. Review here.

2. La Sombra del Viento (The Shadow of the Wind), by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. I consider it a “must read”. I enjoyed every page of this book, I loved the main character. It’s a book where fiction meets reality in neutral territory. I’ve posted an opinion on my other blog in Spanish but Bruno somehow deleted the database user so I’ve lost it all. Anyway, I earnestly recommend this book.

3. Marina, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. One of the first books that Carlos Ruiz Zafón wrote, actually you can see clearly that The Shadow of the Wind was somehow based on this novel. Very good novel, not as good as The Shadow of the Wind, but much better than many bestsellers that we can see in the libraries nowadays.

4. The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka. The opinion about this book is also on my other blog, so, in other words, lost. This was a strange reading experience: this is a book that needs all of your attention, you have to read each page carefully 2 or 3 times, and you have to know some facts about Kafka’s life to really understand the book. Otherwise it will always be a book about a human turned into a bug, with no other implications. I don’t pretend that I have understood exactly what it is about. I think it’s about making an opinion on your own about the book as there is no “official position” regarding the true meanings of Kafka’s novel.

5. Figure Humane (Human Faces), by Giovanni Papini. A very human writing that shows persons we think that cannot exist, but I think that we all have inside pieces of these persons that we’d like to hide, or show, or improve, or forget.

6. África Llora (Africa Cries), by Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa. This author is one of the authors that I don’t understand how they do it to write so many and so well-written books. He wrote more than 80 books, and what’s more impressive is that every book is very very well documented. I really don’t know how he does it. I enjoyed Africa Cries a lot, it shows Africa as it is, the story is based on a real story so it can give us a quite correct image of how life in Africa is.

7. Manet’s Painting, by Michel Foucault. Foucault is a philosopher that knows about art what his common sense tells him about art (of course, he has read about art and studied a little, but he is not an art professional, or a critic in the field). This book is based on a speech he gave on Manet’s art. His way of analyzing the paintings is just different from all we can read about Manet, or impressionism, but it is so obvious that you stop and think “how didn’t I see it?”. This speech was a great success for Foucault, and it is nowadays a very important reference in the study of art.

8. Laughable Loves, by Milan Kundera. I went to the library in search of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and as I did not find it I took this one. A very easy reading book, with ridiculous love stories that make you laugh and make you think that it can happen to you. Recommended.

9. El arte (The art), by Juanjo Saez. A peculiar interpretation of art, with sense of humor.

10. Maus, by Art Spiegelman. BRILLIANT!!! Just brilliant. Very very very recommended.

11. Anne Frank: The diary of a young girl. A moving story of a 13 years old Jewish girl who is forced to hide together with her family from the Nazis. I liked it a lot, but as I read it after reading Maus I liked more the story told by Artie. Just a personal opinion.

12. Why we love women, by Mircea Cartarescu. Maybe if I would have read it in Romanian I would have liked it more, but I read it in Spanish and the translation was lousy, very very lousy.

13. Mischiefs of the bad girl, Mario Vargas Llosa. Review here.

14. The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It was nice to meet with the little prince again. I always have a very pleasant experience when reading this book. I’ll teach Alex to love the little prince just as I do. I hope he eventually gets to love him.

15. Brooklyn Follies, by Paul Auster. I enjoyed it. I like Paul Auster’s style. Now I’ve just bought Travels in the Scriptorium. I hope it’s at least as good as Brooklyn Follies.

16. Todas Putas (All Bitches), by Hernán Migoya. I’ve been looking for this book in all libraries and I never saw it. I saw an interview with the author in a show that I use to watch, Noche sin tregua, and I thought it would be a good book. Finally I got it but it disappointed me a lot. The style is very exaggerated, he continuously try to surprise the reader, and this starts to annoy at a certain point. Also the stories told are not that interesting, at least I did not like them.

17. Putas es poco (Bitches is not enough), by Hernan Migoya. This is the book Migoya published after the controversy caused by the publication of his first book (Todas Putas). This is like a second part of the first book. I started to read it because I bought it and I wanted to know if it was better than the first one. It’s giving me a hard time, I don’t like it at all, the style is somewhat different but not my type either. Many errors and many stories that have no sense at all, and I like non-sense stories, but these ones…

This is Mario Vargas Llosa’s last book, published in 2006. I recognize that I felt curiosity for this book since the first moment I’ve heard of it. And I also recognize that I knew from the beginning that this was not the greatest novel of all times, nor his greatest novel, but still, I wanted to read it. So I did.

WARNING: This part of the post might contain spoilers.

They say it’s a love story, but I still can’t see any love in this novel, at least my eyes cannot see it. The story starts when Ricardo was a teenager living in Lima, in Miraflores, the neighbourhood where he grew up. He knows Lily, a Chilean girl and he likes her. All normal until now. Ricardo always dreamt about living all his life in Paris, so he eventually leaves Peru and moves to Paris where he starts to work as a translator for the UNESCO. A few years after he moved to Paris the false Chilean girl, now a young woman, appears again in his life. This time as a guerilla fighter. They meet, they spend some time together, they share the bad a few times and then she leaves. This is when the story becomes a repetitive description of all the appearances and disappearances of the bad girl whose name is always different, whose stories are always surprising (and invented most of the times). The only thing that is constant is her cruelty and her coldness towards Ricardo, “el pichiruchi” who is always trying to forget about her but as soon as she appears again he becomes one more time a foolish lover who believes again and again the lies of the bad girl.

I said that I see no love in this book, it’s true. In my opinion Ricardo is not in love with the bad girl, this self-destructive feeling cannot be love, but a sick obsession who makes him forget all the mischiefs of the bad girl as soon as their lips come together into a kiss to which most of the time the bad girl doesn’t even respond. The guerilla fighter, than wife of an important UNESCO representative, than lover (slave?) of a japanese gangster named Fukuda who almost kills her with his passion for perversions always came back to the “pichiruchi” when she had problems, or when she didn’t have them, just to hear some of those nice things that “men nowadays don’t say anymore”, but she wouldn’t stay with him forever because she couldn’t get used to a mediocre life as a “loving” wife of a two bit translator. Ricardo knew that from the beginning: she would leave again in search of a rich man to make her feel like a queen, but as much as he tried to he never really managed to forget about her, or at least stay away from her. There is still a good part for Ricardo in this story: even if she could’t live as a loving wife of a two bit translator, she could die this way, so at least he had her with him until the end.

This is not the greatest love story of all times, I have heard of better stories, but still, Mario Vargas Llosa does a very good job in writing it. Even if the story itself is not great, the way in which Vargas Llosa writes it is quite peculiar and I can say I liked it. Every time he starts a new chapter he does not start from the moment in which the previous chapter ends, but from a subsequent moment so you cannot avoid asking yourself what happened in this lapse of time so basically you cannot stop reading. He then comes back to what happened and then continues the story. This happens in almost all the chapters and for me, this is what made me read the book in three days (which is quite fast taking in consideration the fact that Alex doesn’t leave me much time for reading).

Also the book has lots of historical content, which is easy to read and quite revealing, and this is what makes you say, when you finish the book “At least I’ve learned something”.

Although, as I said before, it’s not a great novel, it’s an easy reading book which might entertain you for a while. So if you have the opportunity you should read it to see a completely different Vargas Llosa in action.

Nowadays we all tent to say (and think) that we have no time to read. I always have books that I’d love to read but they use to spend months on the waiting list because there’s always something that occupies all my time: work, school, etc. Now there is a solution: Dailylit!

Dailylit is a page which offers a small dose of literature daily directly to your e-mail. You can subscribe and receive your book at a certain hour, everyday or only on weekdays. You can read it when you use to take a small break when you are at work, or when you use to spend the 20 minutes in front of the PC when you get home. It doesn’t have a very big collection of books, most of them are old books with expired copyright, but still, very good books and they are adding new books every now and then.

I have started to read Dickens’ Hard Times, and I really enjoy it. When I use to take my coffee I receive my daily installment and I enjoy it while I relax a bit. I still have 129 installments to go, but we’re getting there.

Very recommended!

The Divine Child is a novel proposing a new point of view, a novel of choices. Pascal Bruckner offers us in this book an answer to the question “What if I could decide not to be born?”.

Madeleine Barthelemy decides to give a good education to their children before they get born. Starting with the first month of pregnancy she begins the geography lessons, music and also mathematics. In order to obtain better results she contacts Dr. Fontaine who refuses at the beginning, but he eventually makes Madeleine’s children the most important thing in his life, his only chance to make himself known around to world for his methods of prenatal education.

After the foetus achieved the skills of an university student they asked for newspapers, they needed to know what was happening around the world. They finally got a little bit dissapointed so that Louis decides to stay inside his mother’s belly, he decides not to get born. His sister, Céline decides to get out of her temporary home and unfortunatelly as she was going out she started to forget all that she had learned; when she finally got out she wasn’t even able to speak. That made Louis believe he made the right choice, so despite of the sufferings and anger of his mother he decided to stay in. How is the life inside your mother’s womb? How much can a little boy fool the nature and science and live inside his mother?

Interesting quotes:

Louis talking to his mother:

Madeleine: “Little boy, stop acting childish and get out with your sister.”

Louis: “How ridiculous! Asking a foetus to stop acting childish.”

When I was little I remember there were a lot of magazines in which people told their sufferings (My story, Real stories, etc.). You could see on three or four pages the story of a girl that was abussed when she was little: that made her feel better (it’s always good to share) and lots of people read that and felt sorry for her and maybe felt identified with the girl. But why is that? It is true that when you write about your traumatic experiences it is easier to deal with the past, but why do people read that? I remember going home by train and seeing all the women in the train reading this kind of magazines, and you can still see this only that now this is not only present in magazines, but also in books.

But, in Great Britain, where people are seen as very cold, how can these kind of books get to be written and get to be bestsellers? Actually in Britain there are 3 such books in the top 10 best-selling papebacks. The atitude in Britain is changing, people are not afraid anymore of telling those intimate things and it seems there are a lot of readers for this new genre. How is this possible? Brendan O’Neill explains it is this article.

A while ago I have found the book in a library. I wanted to read it as I have read some other book written by Delibes and I always enjoy his writings. This is his last book and the most extensive. The main character is Ciprian Salcedo and the plot is build around his life: from his birth (the same year Luther’s Church was formed) until his tragic death. It’s a great novel, very human, that through Cipriano tells us the historic truths of that period, the proceedings of the Inquisition, the secret meetings of the Protestants and their conversations.

Cipriano always tried to fill empty spaces in his life: when he was born his mother died and his father thought he was guilty for her death and for this reason he never showed any proof of love to his son. Because of this Cipriano put all his life and love in hands of his nurse, Minervina. When he lost Minervina and realized that all his attempts to find her were useless he was empty again, and as his wife, Teodomira, couldn’t fill his emptiness he joined the group of Protestants from Valladolid trying to find what he was looking for. The novel describes a Valladolid reluctant to all that was new or changed, where all that was different from the beliefs of that time was rejected and punished.

The end of the novel is sad, describing the tortures of a merciless Inquisition that killed in the name of God and Love. Cipriano’s death is similar to a religious death. Thanks to his uncle Ignacio, Minervina, the most important person in Cipriano’s life, could accompany him on the way to his death, which reminds us of Maria Magdalena and Jesus.

In spite of some thick passages the book is a great historical novel and at the same time the history of a life. A very recommended book.