A Wild Sheep Chase : a review

A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami (1989)

In this early Murakami novel, the unnamed protagonist is a youngish divorced man who is called upon by a stranger to solve a mystery. The main character had published a photo of a sheep with unique markings and the mysterious stranger demands that the exact sheep be found. Our hero and his girlfriend embark on a strange adventure to Hokkaido and then to a remote village to learn more about the sheep they are seeking.

The novel is somewhat fantastical, but mostly I found it frustrating and confusing. Had I not been reading it for a book group, I would have stopped after 50 pages. In the first 100 pages nothing whatsoever happened. There were vague references to people and events without context so I promptly forgot them. Near the middle when our hero and his girlfriend start on their quest it got interesting and I started to enjoy it. But then the ending left me bewildered.

The writing is not formal exactly, but not conversational either. There is no warmth or humor anywhere in its pages. None of the characters are named - except the cat who is named about halfway through the book (Kipper, if you are interested) - though a couple of them have nicknames. I can only speculate that this to retain the cold impersonal feeling of the story. There’s also a great deal of abstraction and symbolism, which is pretty much always lost on me.

The only other Murakami I’ve read was non-fiction, so I don’t know how this compares to his other fiction. I’ve heard that some of his books, especially The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, are quite good. But after slogging through this unpleasant mess, I probably won’t ever find out for myself.

I'm done procrastinating

I’m officially throwing in the towel on the Practical Procrastination Pullover. I screwed it up again and realized it isn’t worth ripping back and redoing. Not because I don’t think I can get it right - I can - but because I’ve realized that I’m not going to wear the damn thing anyway.

A wise person once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Well, I’ve knit several short-sleeved sweaters, like this one and this one and this one, and I don’t wear any of them. I’ve said time and time again that short-sleeved sweaters are impractical – if it’s cold enough for a sweater, surely you want your arms covered. Yet I continue to knit them for reasons which are unclear even to me. Oh, in this case I tried to convince myself that because the yarn is DK weight it would be more useful than a short-sleeved bulky sweater and I’m sure that’s true to some extent, but it’s still wool. Despite this pattern’s name, I suspect this one would be just as impractical as the others, and like the others it would loll about in a drawer until the Apocalypse.

Do you know what I do need? Some hats, mittens, and scarves that actually match each other. I don't think I want to take on another scarf right now, but I’m ripping out this damn sweater and making myself a hat and mittens. Now that is practical.

Eleanor Rigby : a review

Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland (2004)

Liz Dunn is a lonely woman leading a quiet life. One night while out renting videos to get through a convelescence after the next day’s oral surgery, she sees a comet streak through the sky. That is the moment in which she decides she would rather have peace in her life than certainty. Soon after, she receives a phone call from a hospital. A young man has been admitted after an overdose and his medic alert bracelet lists her contact information. She has never met this young man, Jeremy, but she knows who he is and his sudden presence changes her life.

Written in first person, we visit a few different time periods in Liz’s life. The novel opens in the scene described above, but the story also skips ahead several years to a trip to Austria, and there are flashbacks to a high school trip to Rome. Towards the end of the book, events start happening in real time. For instance, Liz will say that something is currently happening and mentions something she is expecting, and then updates after it has happened.

Liz is not a happy person, though meeting Jeremy is obviously a huge turning point in her life and enables her to make peace with her past. The only allusion to the title is when she gives out her email address which starts with “eleanorrigby@” but it’s clear that lonliness is a major theme in the book. But her self-deprecation is never tiring, in fact she is insightful and quite witty. For instance: “But when you’re alone, you know that money is the one thing that can keep you safe. Safe from what? Safe from being hauled away in the middle of the night and baked into protein wafer cookies to feed people who are in relationships.”

See? How can you not like this character? The novel is very easy and quick to read, but don’t be fooled – there are sad, serious themes here. They are just wrapped in packaging that makes them easier - and more fun - to digest.

Strangers at the Feast : a review

Strangers at the Feast by Jennifer Vanderbes (2010)

A family comes together on Thanksgiving and the day goes from bad to worse, beginning with a faulty oven and ending in bloodshed. The hostess is Ginny, an academic who has just adopted a 7-year-old mute Indian girl and bought her very first home. Her brother Douglas arrives with his wife Denise and their kids, and the family is rounded out by Douglas and Ginny’s parents, Eleanor and Gavin, a housewife and a Vietnam veteran.

The day begins at Ginny’s new house. Her recent settling-down is cause for surprise and doubt in her family. When it becomes clear that her oven isn’t working – and that much in her house isn’t up to code – the family decides to pack up and drive to Douglas and Denise’s home which not only has a working oven, but a tv so they can watch the football game. Though the home is large and extravagant, Douglas and Denise are struggling financially and it’s putting a strain on their marriage as well.

Meanwhile, a couple of young men are planning a break-in. Peppered throughout the book are chapters focusing on Kiko and his friend Spider, two young men from the projects. Kiko feels responsibility towards his grandmother and wants to help her leave their neighborhood. He doesn’t want to become involved with crime like so many of his peers, and today is a one-off for him. But it’s something he feels he needs to do, for reasos that become apparent as more background is slowly revealed.

Switching perspective between six different characters, the day is broken up with many flashbacks to flesh out the characters and give more substance to the story. Each chapter was named for the character whose perspective we were seeing, which eliminated the usual confusion of that storytelling technique. The present day story was strong enough that the flashbacks didn’t leave me feeling untethered as so frequently happens.

The characters were fairly well developed, especially considering how many of them there were, but I didn’t really identify with – or feel especially drawn to – any of them. Ginny’s story was probably the most interesting, though I also enjoyed Eleanor and Gavin’s back story of their early relationship.

Vanderbes used two techniques that I usually dislike, and this double whammy of heavy flashbacks and switching perspective could have gone badly, but she managed to pull it together pretty tightly. The novel was well orchestrated, the pieces of the story coming together smoothly for the final, climactic scenes. I liked the book a lot, but if the characters had resonated a bit more, I could have loved it. It sounds like Vanderbes’ first novel, Easter Island, is a bit more personal and character-focused, so I’m adding it to my list now.

Full Dark, No Stars : a review

Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King (2010)

Like Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight, this new collection from Stephen King consists of four long short stories. In the first story, “1922,” a farmer murders his wife, who has threatened to sell off part of their farm so she can move to the city. Though the crime is covered up from the authorities, the farmer - and his son who he enlisted to help with the crime - are subsequently haunted in different ways. “Big Driver” is a man who rapes a cozy mystery writer on her way home from a reading, but instead of reporting the crime to authorities, she chooses to wield her own justice. The third, and shortest, story is “Fair Extension,” in which a man dying of cancer makes a deal with the devil to save his own life, thus damning his best friend and his family. Finally, in “A Good Marriage” a woman learns that her husband has been committing horrific crimes for decades and she must decide what, if anything, to do with this new knowledge.

Though all the stories were good (I hesitate to use a word like “enjoyable” when describing horror), the first and last were the strongest. “1922” was the most like a traditional horror story in the amount of violence, gore and creepiness. What I liked the most about this story is that it was mostly realistic, with just a hint that maybe there is more going on. Is that corpse speaking to the farmer from beyond the grave? Are those sinister-looking rats planning something? Or is his imagination just playing tricks on him? That doubt is as close as it gets to supernatural, but it is enough. It’s a sad story too: the son’s loss of innocence, the destruction of a family, rendering the original plan to save the family’s farm completely pointless.

My favorite by far was “A Good Marriage.” King got the idea after the BTK murders, when the killer’s wife claimed she knew nothing about his crimes. Similarly, the wife in this story was happy in her life and satisfied with her marriage, until one day she stumbled across evidence of her husband’s secret life. Of course this changed everything, no matter how much she wanted to pretend it didn’t. The story was unpredictable and the ending clever. King does a good job of putting ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and it’s easy to imagine being this woman. There is nothing supernatural here, but it is a deft exploration of the dark side of human nature and the reader can’t help but wonder “What would I do in this situation?”

A longtime Stephen King fan, I have skipped his last couple of books because of their length and the mixed reviews, but Full Dark, No Stars is well worth reading. The entire book is only 368 pages, but of course you can just read an individual story or two. Though I bet if you start this book, you won’t stop after one story.

Room : a review

Room by Emma Donoghue (2010)

Jack and his mother live in Room, and Room is all that Jack has ever known. But his mother hasn’t always lived there – she was taken by Old Nick who locked her away where nobody could find her.

The voice of Jack narrates the story, roughly half of which took place inside the room in which Jack has lived all of his five years, (and his mother even longer). The other half was their adjustment to the outside world, a world completely new and overwhelming to Jack, filled with loud noises and complicated rules.

Writing from the view of a small child is risky, and so rarely successful. I read an interview with the author in which she explained that she had a child Jack’s age when she was writing this, and she borrowed some of his speech patterns and even made him roll himself up in a rug to see if he could get out. Clearly it was well researched, and that paid off.

Room is a great book – not in a literary award sort of way, but in an unputdownable way, which in my opinion is what counts. I can’t do it justice here, or adequately explain why you should read it but trust me, you should.

World Made By Hand : a review

World Made By Hand by James Howard Kunstler (2008)

Sometime in the unspecified future, the people of Union Grove in upstate New York live without law, electricity, oil, news of the outside world, or many other things we all take for granted today. Robert has lost his whole family, as so many others have, but still struggles on trying to create a life of normalcy. He and his peers remember the old days of computers, cars, and corporate jobs but for younger folks this is the only life they have known. When a young man from the town is shot over a misunderstanding, some members of the community decide that the lawlessness has gone on long enough. Their new sense of justice spurs clashes that result in minor tragedies, but Robert and his neighbors are determined to build a society run on order, not fear.

Religion unsurprisingly takes on a larger role in this broken society full of desperate people. One of the major plots involves Brother Jobe and his New Faith followers moving into Union Grove after fleeing the violence of the South. Though many in the town (including Robert) are wary of religion, it becomes clear that the New Faithers want to integrate into the peaceful community and by the end of the book they seem to be forging an alliance.

I didn’t quite understand what had happened to the world, and if it had happened everywhere or just to the US. There was mention of bomb attacks on a few different American cities, and I’m not sure if that’s why the US no longer had oil or if it’s because there was no oil left to be had (see: James Kunstler’s non-fiction work The Long Emergency). Illness was rampant, and had claimed many lives including Robert’s wife and daughter. But I couldn’t quite connect how these events led to the society described in the novel.

This wasn’t the best post-apocalyptic book I’ve read, but it wasn’t terrible. I liked that this future isn’t a dystopia. It’s not an easy life, but many of the characters don’t miss the “old times” much at all. Unfortunately, none of the characters were developed well enough for me to care about them. I think this could have been a much better book than it was, (and the trailer makes it looks appealing) but it fell flat and left me a bit disappointed.