"You're reading a fish book."

The name of this post, Norm, is based on one of the early lines in the Christopher Walken movie Suicide Kings. Denis Leary, as his driver, is showing off his boots to Charlie Barret/Carlo Bartolucci (Walken), and tells him they're made of sting ray. Walken says, "You're wearing fish boots."

That doesn't count as a segue, but whenever I pick up the book I'm reading that line passes through my brain. My dad suggested a book by a guy Richard Flanagan, who's Tasmanian. Now, my dad has a pretty good track record with his suggestions to me, like Haruki Murakami and Dennis Mitchell, who wrote the excellent Cloud Atlas. Flanagan was described as a read that would stretch your imagination, and I found a copy on Amazon.com for a penny plus shipping, so I picked it up. It arrived before I finished The Garlic Ballads, so I started it before The Wind Up Bird Chronicle.

It's called Gould's Book of Fish:

I'll have a longer explanation in a bit, but it's almost like Flanagan has a streak of Pynchon in him, at least in some of the early nineteenth century sentence construction. It's good.

Christopher Walken's voice, though, going on in my head, "Your're reading a fish book."

Two Things from the "Chinese Murakami"

I finished the beat-down book, The Garlic Ballads, by Mo Yan. I wrote a post about it over on the OG site after having finished only half of it. Those impressions pretty much hold up; that almost every section contains an act of brutal violence upon another person is a valid observation. There are some scenes that don't revolve around violence of a physical kind, but they usually revolve around verbal abuse, or a kind of bureaucratic malfeasance that borders of abuse. This is a very angry book.

Calling Mo Yan the "Chinese Murakami" is not what I would do if, Norm, you and I were talking books over a cup of coffee. But I noticed in a conversation with a lady working at the grocers that I used Murakami in the same sentence, trying to shed light on the kind of hyper-kinetic feel the book elicits. Calling him a such probably does a disservice to both.

But, there were Two Things I wanted to mention after finishing the book:

The First is the Parakeet Battle.

The two main characters in the book are cousins, Gao Yang and Gao Ma. In Chinese, the family names (Western last names) come first, and, because the translations of "yang" is "sheep" and "ma" is "horse", our main characters would be called "Sheep Gao" and "Horse Gao".

Gao Yang and Gao Ma just sound better to me. In any case, Gao Yang is the pussy pushover who is forced to drink his own urine and gets a thorned branch shoved up his ass; and Gao Ma is a former soldier who's cynical and forward thinking--basically the hero. He represents human dignity and human rights progress, and he's beaten to within an inch of his life in almost every one of his sections. I shouldn't be so hard of Gao Yang, though. He represents the good people who are obedient and respectful, those who have faith in the System, and how that System fucks those people, while Gao Ma is the more Western-heroic archetype, the rabble-rousing rebel, and we all know how the System treats them.

At one point late in the book, Gao Ma sharpens his family's heirloom saber to air-slicing sharpness.

His next door neighbor's thousands of parakeets are always causing a chirpy ruckus, and on this day Gao Ma's past his point of chillness. And the parakeets are buzzing around inside his house and yard, fully out of their pens.

Gao Ma proceeds to battle the swarm of parakeets with his super-sharp saber, causing plumes of tiny colorful feathers like smoke to fill the air. He goes after them, and then they gang up on him, and he's fighting for his life. By the end, there are maybe six or seven sad and wailing parakeets left, and an angry, sword-wielding, parakeet-blood covered Gao Ma, standing over a pile of halved and twitching parakeet bodies.

It's the kind of thing the likes of which I've never read before.

The Second is part "1." of Chapter 17.

Those twelve pages could easily exist out of context. They star Gao Ma, but you don't need to know anything about the character...knowing what he's gone through by that time enhances the enjoyment, though. These are the kinds of pages that show how talented Mo Yan truly is.

He oscillates between an interrogation, a flashback, an anecdote/story during the flashback, while showing how the lesson learned from the story within the flashback has plenty of importance to his situation with the interrogators.

It's really fun to read and see how Mo Yan works it out with the words. I should make some photocopies; it could be a great teaching tool for young writers.

Upside-Down Bird Covers: Good Eye, Norm

Way to go eagle-eye Norm for the recognition of the birds. Here's the comparison:

I haven't read the Ruk-Man's book here, but it's on my list.

     So here I go, my first shot at a post.  I just wrapped The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.  All I'm left with is, Wow.  What an intimate, amazing and encompassing story.  It was similar to the other Murakami works I've read in that it was many stories tied to a solid yet evolving  base.  Another thing I should note was the ability it had on me to produce tears.  Much the way A Wild Sheep Chase brought me to tears, the emotions that built their way to the end of the novel were overwhelming to me.

     I'm so drawn into this world that Murakami creates that I'm very tempted to start into IQ84.  I have it, and am ready to begin my ascent.  But here's the problem.  I still haven't started or tried starting Gravity's Rainbow.  I have that, thanks to you brother.  So a little help persuading me in the right direction would be appreciated  as you've read both.  And Mason and Dixon is out of the picture for now.  I'm waiting to grow some more brain cells back before I try that again.

     Another bizarre realization hit me with your post about Wallace.  The picture on the cover, the upside down Cockatiel, is very much like my cover of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.  I'll try to post it later.  Also, I'm tempted to try this box method of sleeping for Norman.  If I do, pictures will follow.

     Sorry for the lag, reading working and Fathering are a lot for a nut like me!!

Found at the Library

So, Norm, I was walking around the downtown branch of the Long Beach Public Library, and then turned a corner and saw:

Chilling on the shelf looks like a first edition of V.

Upon closer inspection, while the cover could be original, the book underneath has an "LBPL" stamp on the bottom of the binding, like these:

It seems like the book itself had been printed for libraries, and the stampings were added later.

On the other hand, this happens to be an actual first edition, but is pretty tattered.

Another Book...

It's easy to stay on top of books when you're recovering from a broken leg and have no go-to-and-work kind of a.job. And no kids.

So...I finished The Broom of the System, and it was a pretty cool first novel from a writer who died too early for some of us Post Modern literature fans.

I was looking through my library, Norm, for something else to read, and decided before getting into The Wind Up Bird Chronicles that I would work through a book that I started before, but eventually abandoned. This book I picked up for free one day coming home to Bed-Stuy. It was on a sheet labeled "Free Books".

This would be the first thing I've ever read by Faulkner, and when I finish it, I'll be adding it as an entry in my Library Blog. Maybe that should be if I finish it.

I know Faulkner is a master, or one of the American's from between the Wars who's literarily important. I know he worked in Hollywood for years to get bills paid. As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury are the masterworks, I hear.

Allen Tate wrote an introduction to this edition, and he writes with much reverence that he places Sanctuary with those other two as a third masterwork. The first line written on the back-cover of this copy is a quote from William Faulkner himself, describing the genesis of the story: "The most horrific tale I could imagine".

This book is hard to get into. Nothing happens for the first forty pages. It's moody and atmospheric and kinda scary, but really, nothing happens. A guy is drinking from a spring in the backwoods of Mississippi and seems to be menaced by the spring's owner, the supposed main antagonist named Popeye. Then the spring-drinking guy gets led back to some old pre-Civil War house full of weirdos and whores, and a sleeping baby in a box. Yeah, a sleeping baby in a box; the box affords protection from rats, according to the mom who put him inside.

Then the spring-drinking guy is led to a truck, where he gets a ride to his sister's house, and he meets a guy who might be interested in his sister (who's a widower with a child), except he's got a date with a girl who'll be raped by Popeye, which is the main event of the book. Except that hasn't happened yet. Nothing's happened yet.

When Horace Benbow finally meets Gowan, and Gowan leaves to pick up Temple is where I am, and it's maybe forty pages in, and they're forty of some of the weirdest and slowest pages I've read.

I remember putting it down the first time through; when you're focusing on Pynchon and Denis Johnson and Politkovskaya and Bolanyo, Faulkner is like their stylistic grandfather, but this little book is unassumingly dense and less exciting to read than I'd hoped.

Now I'm slogging again, maybe to try and tackle Ulysses next.