I’m trying to keep up with my blogging, because I’ve got so much going on this week I really don’t want a backlog to overwhelm me next week. Hence the late posting.
I cannot promise quality, but I am all about volume.
And the fact I need to write things down because I have an absolutely shocking memory.
This is a very short post, sponsored by nobody, about David Mitchell’s Number9Dream, a book which has been on my Amazon wish list for a while, and which I was excited to find in the library just before we went on holiday. I have become a convert to the ways of David Mitchell this year after reading and loving The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Black Swan Green by him.
I was really, properly, nerdily excited about Number9Dream. It is set in Tokyo and I have a small but enthusiastic thing about books set in Japan or by Japanese authors. I have a major love for Haruki Murakami, ‘The Wind Up Bird Chronicle’ is one of my favourite books. I also love the work of Banana Yoshimoto, a Japanese woman author who writes novellas about modern Japan which are all about connection with the ghost of the past, and which are beautiful and haunting.
The synopsis for Number9Dream reads much like a Murakami novel. The protagonist, Eiji Miyake travels from a small Japanese island to Tokyo to track down and confront his birth father after nineteen years of being passed from pillar to post by grudging relatives.
The story is told in 9 sections, which is presumably a reference to the title of the book, and veers from straightforward narrative to a much more surreal reading experience with dream sequences, symbolic coincidences, the gratuitous addition of cats, a mystery and some very Joycean mid sections.
I should have loved it.
I did not.
All the way through it I kept thinking; ‘Murakami does this better. Why repeat the exercise?’
It references modern Japanese literature and I believe it may be an homage to Murakami, or an answer to one of his works, but it just never worked for me. I was so, so disappointed.
If you haven’t read Murakami first, you might love it, is the best I can think to say.
I have a fair idea that David’s wife is Japanese.
I’m still stuck on the 1000 autumns, as I couldn’t get past the first 5 pages. You know, with the… illustration. *fans self*
I must try “The Wind Up Bird Chronicle” again. I started it and stopped after 50 or so pages as I realised the ending was going to be depressing. But I found the writing/storytelling curiously captivating. And his latest “1Q84″ looks as if it might be interesting the same way, but also depressing – I read the trailer on my Kindle the other day and can’t decide whether to buy it or not given my experience so far with “The Wind Up Bird Chronicle”.
HFF
LOL.
Keith
I got quite excited by IQ84. Am waiting for the last one to come out though. Don’t want to start and not be able to finish. I hate that.