NCAA tournament and Kafka on the Shore

Today is the first day of the NCAA tournament and one of the benefits of my job status is that I get to actually watch the games all day. Unfortunately, the TV in my room does not get CBS clearly at all, so I'm sitting on the floor of my living room watching the game in HD. However, the day is a little too nice for me to sit in my house again so I'll probably go outside and hit some tennis balls. Btw, I'm always looking for a playing partner, so if you're reading this and you know how to play reasonably well, BRING IT ON!

I filled out a bracket in a mini league with some people I do fantasy football with, and despite the fact that there is only 5 of us, I don't really expect to win. The closest I ever came was 4th year Spanish House pool where I was leading going into the final game but had Illinois winning instead of UNC, thus ending my closest chance to win in the various years I've filled out brackets. And now, without further ado, my brackets:




That's the end of that.

KAFKA ON THE SHORE BY HARUKI MURAKAMI

I'm going to preface this review by saying that this is the first book that I ever read for a girl. Normally I only read for myself, but this girl that I hooked up with in Boston (who then proceeded to stand me up in New York City) recommended it, saying it was one of her favorites, so I gave it a shot. Needless to say, if this is what her taste in books is like, I'm kinda glad it didn't work out. (If for whatever reason you happen to check out my blog and read this, I'm just being honest. ed. If I was actually telling that to someone, you'd see me do a little fist pound to the chest. As no one is here, I'm going to just ask you to picture me doing it.) Okay, so I'm going to start off positively in my review. I don't know Japanese, but this seems to be a pretty good translation by Philip Gabriel. Murakami is actually a very talented writer. His prose for the most part feels very natural and reads smoothly. In that sense, the book was actually quite pleasant to read. Here's my problem with it. When you read Science Fiction/Fantasy, you expect that literary world to operate outside of the realm of normal, “real” world scenarios/physics. So when something “crazy” happens, it's believable within the world created. It's why those types of novels work. If you don't believe that those events could happen within the world created, the novel doesn't work. It's the same thing with a horror movie. As long as you believe the foundation the plot is built on, seemingly ridiculous events work. (A perfect example of the failure of this was when I went to see Darkness with my dad starring Anna Paquin whom I just learned was Canadian. Anyway, about 2/3 through the movie, I stopped believing the outer shell, making the last third of the movie just shitty.) Coleridge's “willing suspension of disbelief.” Anyway, I feel like the text takes fairly great pains in the first 70 pages to make the outer shell realistic, as if the world of the book was the same world as ours. These were actually my favorite pages, especially when they were talking about Japan during WWII. Then, some weird things happen, and though initially I was intrigued and wanted to see where it was going, after a while, I was just like “Huh? I'm definitely not buying that.”

For example, the text is constructed upon the Oedipus myth. ed. For those of you who don't remember their Greek mythology, that's the one where Oedipus kills his father, marries his mother, and, upon finding out the truth, carves out his eyes and wanders around the Earth as a hermit as futile penance. That last part is actually important. There's nothing inherently wrong with this; however it feels far too forced. I mean, first off it's referred to explicitly! There is no subtlety about it which I find to just be piss poor writing stylistically. Furthermore, a new twist of including a sleeping with his sister as well as his mother. Again, nothing inherently wrong, except for the fact that we are told explicitly that the girl filling this role cannot possibly be his sister! Oh, and he sleeps with her in a dream which doesn't fucking count though she does actually give him a hand job. I never actually understood why she did that. In fact, Kafka Tamura (the main character), kills his father in some crazy out of body experience when he is 400 miles away. Lastly, he sleeps with this lady who's supposed to be his mother (My first reaction when I read that this woman was his mother was “No she's not,” and I never lost that impression.) knows that Kafka is supposedly her son, and she does it anyway. Part of what makes the myth effective is the ignorance of the characters and the awareness of the reader. If the characters know they are committing incest, and do it anyway, it just becomes revolting. Oh, and before I forget, Kafka is 15 though if you didn't know that, you'd sweat he was at least 25 based on the way he is presented. That just makes things seem less believable.

To complicate matters, there's a second story line starring Nakata who is retarded after some (annoyingly) half-explained incident and can talk to cats. A bunch of weird things happen to him that just get more and more ridiculous and incongruent with what I felt could reasonably happen in this world. I'm not going to get into specifics, but I read some review talking about how the book was surrealistic. As we got beaten into during my Modern Spanish Lit class in grad school (and my oral exams, thanks Prof. Anderson though you'll never read this.), it's not surrealistic at all. Surrealism is a philosophy shared by very few people specific to early 20th century France (Unfortunately, Prof. Anderson was of the idea that Dali was not a true Surrealist, though he may have been pretty close), these events were just fantastical and not even in a good way.

All that being said, the novel could have been redeemed somewhat had the ending sort of tied up a lot of loose ends and brought the story together. Unfortunately, the ending does not do this and leaves far too many things unclear. Now, despite my rather strong feelings about this book, I'm only one person and a lot of people liked it, so I gave it to my friend Tina to borrow to see what she thought. She pretty much agreed with me, so I'm glad to know that my ideas about the book were pretty justified. All in all, a decent book with good writing but far too many issues for me to consider good or worth reading. However, if you want to read it on your own, I'd be more than happy to let you borrow the book.

Anyway, that ends another long post. Come back tomorrow when I review Returning to Earth by Jim Harrison which I just finished and thought was awesome. Read it in 3 days. I may share some interesting stories that popped in my head while reading it.

Miggity

Forgot to add that music listened to during the creation of this blog: The Shins and The Postal Service