A Title (and Author) for Norm

Just in case you weren't checking all of the various spots where I vomit words regularly, here's a link to my post-finishing Haruki Murakami's 1Q84. It ended well, and I mention the link because I mentioned the book a few posts ago.

My next book, the one after the one I'm reading right now, will likely be The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, sometimes called Murakami's best, and is, if I remember correctly, your current material?

Now, though, I'm working on the first novel of one of the few guys I mentioned we'd be talking about in the first post:

This is one of the various editions of The Broom of the System, by David Foster Wallace.

Pynchon, Murakami, Wallace and Robbins, they seem to be the Core Four. Maybe my next one will be Skinny Legs and All, by Tom Robbins (just found a 1st edition for a buck).

Okay, so, Norm, I know you've got very little time to do any reading. But, if there's anybody to get with after exhausting the formidable list of the Ruk-man's works would be the three--three--novels by Wallace. The first one is here, the second is the 1200+ page Infinite Jest , and the third was published posthumously, and called The Pale King.

This book truly belongs on the list we're building here. The main character is a young lady named Lenore Beadsman. For some reason her elderly great-grandmother (and some kind of mentor) has disappeared, which is kinda weird anyway, but the fact she needs to be in a sauna-like room at 98.6 degrees because she's turned cold-blooded makes it even more oddball. The action mostly takes place in and around Cleveland, and with a trip to Amherst. There's the G.O.D., or Great Ohio Desert, and a company that creates deserts; the Beadsman family is a giant in the baby-foods industry, and the name of the patriarch is Stonecipher. Other names that are Pynchonian: Mindy Metalman, Judith Prietht, and a great big fat-man trying to eat himself to an infinite weight named Bombardini, Lenore's older and jealous boyfriend named Rick Vigorous, and a narcissistic parrot named Vlad the Impaler, and I'm only halfway through.

It's been pretty wacky in a non-Murakami way.

Pynchonian Timeline

I'm planning on doing the Pynchon lady post, or posts, later. This idea had been kicking around in my head for a bit, and since I have these pictures, I thought now would be a good time start using them.

So, this isn't really an in-depth discussion of what we like about the books. Nah, this is likely much more boring. This is a preliminary discussion of the timeline for the seven Pynchon novels, and by that I mean just a quick rundown of the basic time-frames.

Here are the seven in chronological order by the time periods in the stories:

So, Norm, I had some internal debate about the last two, Vineland and Inherent Vice. Vineland's early part is in 1969, while Inherent Vice takes place spanning '69 and '70. But since Vineland starts in 1984, I decided to place it as the most current temporally. I generally like to think of Inherent Vice as a tale from the Zoyd and Frenesie LA hippie era, as a separate story in the canon.

The first book in that lineup is Mason & Dixon, taking place in England, the tiny island of St. Helena, and pre-revolution America. A Bodine makes an appearance, as does another Pynchon concept (however inaccurate): pizza. The colonies are a wonderland full of magic and resources and and endless wilderness, and the forming idea of America as a thing is starting to coalesce.

The next is Against the Day, spanning the World's fair in 1893 to just after the end of WWI. Another Bodine makes an appearance, I'm sure pizza's here, but I can't remember right away in which scene, Tesla also makes an appearance, and every character experiences the Tunguska Event. Anarchists abound, as do dynamite cowboys and the world was becoming enthralled with science, but what was science? The line today is marked pretty well, but not at the turn of the 20th century.

The next is Gravity's Rainbow, which takes place during the end and aftermath of WWII. There is a Bodine and pizza, and lots of, eh...stuff. This one is considered the first post-modern literature book, and one of the most important books in English since WWII, as well as an impenetrable mess of prose. I found it more rewarding than M&D, and maybe even easier.

Then we get V., Pynchon's first novel. Like Vineland, it bounced between the twenties and the fifties, with the main thrust being the late '50s. The malaise and restlessness of the youth that lived through the war but were to young to fight. Pig Bodine is a star, if not the main character. A chapter here can be found in Pynchon's collection of short stories in an earlier form, that is, the story from the collection was changed up and the characters made it into V.

The pre-LSD and weed '60s is seen in the small The Crying of Lot 49.

Candy-corn treats for the fans of his work, Inherent Vice is the detective novel, Pynchon-style. It takes place from the winter of 1969 to the summer of 1970.

And that leads us finally to Vineland. Split between 1969 and 1984, we get the sense an old hippie is trying to reconcile the failed hippie revolution and the ascension of Ronald Reagen.

So, does that establish context? Inter-textual context, anyway?

Current Reading Material

Right now, Norm, I'm nearly 800 pages into 1Q84, Murakami's newest, and by some critics' word, his magnum opus.

I hear that his level of involvement in the design of the look of the book was higher than normal, and the odd, wax-paper like dust jacket with the 1-Q-8-4 face cutout is inspired.

The name is to be pronounced like the year 1984, with the letter "Q" replacing the word/syllable "nine", so like "Q-teen-eighty-four". But this makes much more sense in Japanese, where "9" is transcribed as "kyu" and their transcription of the Latin alphabet letter "Q" is "kew"; seeing the title as "1Q84" makes much more sense to a normal Japanese person, and is an obvious (to them) play on George Orwell's 1984, a novel mentioned more than once in this book.

1Q84 was originally published as three separate books in Japan, with the first two on the same day, and the third months later. In the UK, the first English edition was published as three separate books, and staggered in release the same as the Japanese versions. In America it was initially published all together, but I've seen it since as three paperbacks packaged in a box that resembles in appearance the edition I have.

Below, the separations between books can be seen by the dark lines roughly trisecting the work:

It's definitely a Murakami work. He's moved onto the third person for this, and that seemed to have angered some of the few critics who disliked this novel. For the first two books, he cycles between two characters with even regularity as we grow to see how they must be connected, and with each new chapter a new level of the story unfolds, causing even more confusion and loose ends. You know...Murakami.

For the first two books it's like a hot-rod, getting out onto the road, pushing on the gas, then mashing it down with vigor, the throttle opening up, the excitement rising, how can this possibly work out, and Book Two ends with a ridiculous cliffhanging climax. I know I'd have been furious if I'd had to wait months for the last third to come out.

Now, some of the things that make us love the Ruk-man, as I like to call him, also lead to some of the unsightly literary things he's forced to do. You know what I mean: creating worlds so fantastical and bizarre forces him into the occasional pages of expository blank-filling-ins. That's to be excused (for the most part), because his stories are so full of fun and life and excitement and philosophy--we fans begrudge him that.

The first two books of 1Q84 are mostly devoid of that kind of exposition, which is a testament to his abilities as a writer.

Then Book Three starts. That revving, pedal-to-the-medal hot-rod seems to have found itself without fuel, sitting in a mud pit it can't get out of. It's a hard thing for the Ruk-man to get himself out of. He's added a third character to lead chapters, a character that had maybe fifteen to twenty pages of face-time in the first two books, and its through this third character that we're supposed to put togther different aspects of the story, using him as a marker, since we, as readers, know more of the story, we can follow his progress and try and "solve" it ourselves.

But the world he's given us doesn't really require solving as it were. And then we've got our two leads, who we've been following for nearly 600 pages. Murakami's stories always have such a kinetic flow, a vibrant feeling of life rushing through everything, and in Book Three, our two lead characters are relegated to literally sitting and waiting, for nearly a hundred-thirty pages of a the two-hundred I've read so far. The Ruk-man knows that this doesn't make exciting reading, and tries to spruce it up. The details of their situations might help the context, but there's only so much you can do with your stars literally sitting and waiting.

I still want to know how it ends, how it ties together, see it come together, for sure, but I can honestly say that I would've finished it weeks ago had that momentum been preserved going forward. My own urgency evaporated with the novel's.

I would still definitely recommend this work. Murakami spent two years writing it, and I think it does a fine job of illustrating how an artist can pin themselves, and hopefully figure out how to pull it together at the end. The first two books are some of the most exciting Murakami work I can remember. The looming threat isn't as intimidating as it is perplexing, but that shouldn't be a knock on the story. That's more of the complicated nature of the threat-as-plot-device, but that itself could be a problem.

But hey: literary frauds, assassin personal trainers, wealthy dowagers running a home for battered women, a gay bodyguard, anarchic religious communes, a wily yet fugly investigator, a math teacher who also writes fiction, two moons in the sky, and the bad guys known only as The Little People...it could be just vintage Murakami.

I was also thinking of starting my next Pynchon themed post: "Women in Pynchonian Novels: Besides Prairie, Are They All Whores?"