I listened to this novel in the excellent recording by Sean Barrett of the English translation by Philip Gabriel. Kafka on the Shore is a Bildungsroman.  On his 15^th birthday our hero, who has renamed himself Kafka after the Czech writer (Kafka means 'crow' in Czech), runs away from home where he has been living in estrangement from his father and in the absence of his mother, who ran away years before.  Is there an instance in Murakami of a father and son who get on?  He is one of those Murakami young men who make a virtue for the reader of not knowing what to do with themselves.  He is also running from Œdipus’ curse delivered as extended by his father: that he would sleep with his mother, sleep with his sister, and kill his father. It is difficult to write about this novel without injecting spoilers, but I think I can say that whether Kafka fulfills or avoids his curse depends on what it means to say something really happens.  

This novel is not speculative fiction like Science Fiction, nor does it create a coherent alternate world like fantasy, but there are unworldly departures from the commonplace.

It includes at least two touching love stories, and a violent murder by a reluctant murderer.

This is a long novel with several fully developed secondary characters.  The most important is a man who as a child was traumatized in a strange event during the second world war, which is recounted in full, and involves something that suggest American bombing of Japan and as well the sexual fantasies of his grade school teacher.  The victim grows up in a sense retarded, but able to talk with cats (Who can name a Murakami novel without a cat?) and his special powers enable him to effect the denouement.  Another important character is a transsexual librarian who is a bit of an authority on everything and a mentor to the hero.  Another is an uneducated truck driver who befriends the cat whisperer, learns to like Beethoven, and is treated for his good works to a hot prostitute who explains Hegel to him.  His physical strength contributes to the denouement.  So you see, there are many threads and arrangements blended carefully into the conclusion.

A secondary personage who has important role in the plot manifests as Colonel Sanders.  He explains that he is neither a god nor a Buddha nor a person.  Really, he is a sort of plot device, but utterly credible in another way, and teaches us something about the issue of character-driven plots and vice versa.

During the course of many trials and temptations, the hero spends some time in a distant forest that suggests purgatory but also suggests the Western Paradise of Pure Land 

Buddhism.

The hero has some remarkable erections in unworldly circumstances. Can anyone name a Murakami novel without remarkable erections?

I feel I am failing utterly to give the tone of this novel. It must sound chaotic and self-conscious. It is not. It is orderly and full of surprising but inevitable plot maneuvers. It is serious, entertaining, and moving.

For me the key to apprehending reality in unreality lay in the character and action of lady Rokujo in TheTale of Geji, which the worldly-wise librarian is at pains to explain to the questing hero. Lady Rokujo is one of Genji’s many lovers. The Buddhist psychology that underlines Lady Murasaki’s characterization requires that each person have a ruling aspect, and allows people to have spiritual extensions of themselves, like ghosts.  But these extensions may manifest while the person is alive. Lady Rokujo's ruling aspect is jealousy, and, without the corporeal Lady Rokujo even knowing it, her spiritual extensions slowly kills a competing lover.

It is in a world that includes such kinds of reality that Kafka undergoes trials and temptations and learns to be a person through many adventures both realistic and remarkable.

Harriett Scott Chessman’s The Beauty of Ordinary Things

Spoiler Alert

Reading this book you're closely following the thoughts and feelings of the main character and the principal secondary character.  The main character a Vietnam vet, in 1974, is deeply burdened by memories of physically and morally horrendous incidents in the war.  The secondary main character is a novitiate at a farm that is a Catholic nunnery who is trying to make up her mind to take her vows.  Each character is seeking equanimity.  While this book focuses on the course their individual experiences, their experience is always involved in a set of binding relationships, mostly with his large family, to which the novitiate is a friend.  These friends and relatives have serious problems of their own, which is part of their closeness.  These characters sometimes feel lonely because of their struggle, but the reader always knows that they are not alone.

The critic Ivor Winters once described the poetry of Wallace Stevens as, somewhere "the thought takes place in the images.”  Chessman brings this technique to narrating the thoughts and feelings of her characters with remarkable felicity.  Often their conversations are rather tacit, but you know what they think and what their thoughts mean to them because of her lucid descriptions of the world as it exists at the moment they're speaking or when, later, their feelings are evolving.  Each scene is a metaphor for what people are feeling there.  This may seem like the much-disparaged pathetic fallacy (“It was a dark and stormy night….”) but she executes it with such grace and care that it is very seldom uncomfortable.  Here is an example:

[After a disturbing revelation] 

“Back at home, I sat out on my second-floor porch for a while, trying to calm down.  One of my neighbors, an old, old Polish man, came tottering out of his house with a watering can.  I watched him filling the cam, walking it over to the little patch of garden where he planted what books like tomatoes, lettuce, basil, zucchini, and a whole bunch of weeds.  Maybe the old guy had a landlord like mine who almost never came around to repair faucets or mow, much less help with the weeding.  The old man wore a canvas hat to protect his wispy haired head from the sun.”

Related to this, the vet is a lapsed photographer who resumes his craft during the course of the story, and it is no coincidence that he is capturing and delivering images, as images have captured and delivered him for the reader.

Similarities and contrasts reminded me of some of the work of Robert Stone, another writer I greatly admire.  Stone also frequently deals intimately with desperate people hostage to inward horrors, and as well with good nuns.  But, while in Stone equanimity is in short supply and self-destruction usually triumphs, often in scenes of histrionic violence, in Chessman similar characters evolve toward quiescence.

When I first read the last chapters of this book I shook my head in disappointment, thinking to myself, this is too nicey-nicey, this is to easy.  The novice filled with exultations and beset by doubts quietly becomes a nun offstage and seems satisfied and indeed delighted with her life.  The vet returns to his art, and through his art, through his friendship with the nun, and through his feeling for his family seems set on a successful, and tranquil life.  Do I believe that in the real world such outcomes are possible?  Absolutely, but they are somehow unsatisfactory in literary terms.  They do not provide what Aristotle called a catharsis of pity and fear.  .  Chessman provides soothing like an dissolution of pity and fear.  My discomfort raises questions about what ‘realism’ means in fiction.  I mean, if we take, say, Balzac, as realism, it partly means his characters’ motives are base and their periods of happiness brief.  But, really, people’s motives are sometimes noble, or at least not base, and lives are sometimes happy.  I think Chessman would not mind my discomfort.  She is noting that resolution lies in ordinary things.

Note the remarkable range of Chessman’s subject matter.  Her first novel, Ohio Angels, which I have not read, is set in the midwestern city she grew up in.  Her second novel, Lidia Cassatt Reading the Morning Newspaper, which I consider a masterpiece, is set in late 19th-century Paris among the sort of people your meet in James’ The Ambassadors.  Her third novel, Someone Not Really Her Mother, recounts the story of a family dealing with the Alzheimer's of their matriarch.  The family is in New England and the Jewish matriarch escaped from the Nazi’s in France and lived in England, though her memories are fleeting away.  Then this novel set among Catholics of Irish origin  in New England.  The three I know offer real characters with full verisimilitude.  They each involve certain preoccupations: family, the drama of non-drama, the importance of things unspoken, death, and the importance of inner life.

 Quite a level of accomplishment in the way of an author putting yourself in different worlds and people.

Kindle ebook sales for indie publishers | Books | The Guardian

http://www.authormedia.com/2012-publishing-predictions/

Amazon reveals quarter of Kindle ebook sales in US were for indie publishers | Books | The Guardian

But read it carefully. Yes, indie or self-publishing is no longer the kiss of death, but big-name publishers are still better if you can get them — wider exposure, more sales, better chance of reviews. If your aim is not big sales but producing better literature, all this is of secondary importance, but even the most literarily ambitious of us would still be pleased to have more readers.

Comments on Mansfield Park

This novel provides the usual pleasures of reading Jane Austen: Elegant and incisive prose.  I took particular pleasure in her long sentences, often with more than one dependent clause, and even dependent clauses within dependent clauses, which remain lucid and thus articulate the relationship between ideas.  A plot that is the usual question of finding a husband for the heroine and for other important female characters, threaded among complex circles character conflict and family and class relationships.  Leading characters that are thoroughly realized human beings.  Jane Austen tends to keep her distance from her characters –; she presents them a little bit as if they were in a painting we all admire.  This distance is more striking in this novel than in, say, Pride and Prejudice.  Austin does not like all these people she has created, and freely spends the sharpness of her wit upon them.      

The pater familias of this novel is Sir Thomas Bertram, baronet.  His wife, Lady Bertram, is a woman so lazy as to be almost inanimate.  Her younger sister had married below her class and had several children by a drunken sailor.  The baronet takes one of these daughters into his household at age 8, the protagonist, Fanny Price.  Lady Bertram has another sister who is part of the household by virtue of being married to the clergyman annexed to the baronet’s estate, Mrs. Norris. Aunt Norris is not exactly a villainess, but she is so self-centered, self-deceiving, and power-hungry that she harms the lives of everyone around her especially Fanny.  She never lets Fanny forget she is a poor relation although, or because, Mrs. Norris is in a similar position.

Two issues interested me in this rereading of the novel: the limitations of Fanny as a heroine, and telling rather than showing.

Fanny is no Elizabeth Bennett.  Though she is smart and eventually grows up pretty, Fanny is a problematic because she is a boring little prig.  I have heard her compared to the treacle-sweet heroine of Bleak House.  There is considerable tension in this novel between what we might see as moderate sexual license versus an attitude of intense and fearful defense of an appearance of chastity and fidelity.  All this in an society where the threat of scandal could quickly ruin a woman's life.  For example, while the baronet is away tending to his estates in Antigua, the young people stage a somewhat flirtatious and suggestive theatrical.  Fanny is stubbornly opposed to such goings-on, which earns her points with a clergyman cousin and with her uncle when he returns.  But does it earn points with the author or the reader?

To put this in context, note that Jane Austen's family frequently put on theatricals, usually restoration comedies, when she was growing up in which she almost certainly performed.  Bear in mind also the recent republication of Austin's early novel Lady Susan, in which the heroine is a sexual predator, and that Jane Austen's aunt almost certainly derived what little financial security she enjoyed from being the mistress of Warren Hastings.

Fanny has integrity, intelligence, and stubbornness and sticks to her guns when various family members put pressure on her to marry a man whom she perceives to be wrong for her.  She also passingly brings up the morality of the slave trade with her uncle, albeit inconclusively.  As far as I know that is the only mention of the slavery in Austin's work.

In creative writing classes and stereotyped advice to writers you often hear the formula, "show don't tell.”  I note with interest that the final three chapters of Mansfield Park, which very successfully tie up numerous plot lines and consummate or foresee various marriages, are entirely told.  Of course, we know all the characters pretty well by then so we don't need "showing" as an exposition of character.  But still, it is a resounding example contrary to the "show don't tell" formula.

Comments on Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita

The bulk of this novel is descriptions of pranks played by Satan’s retinue (sketched above) on bureaucrats and other citizens of soviet era Moscow.  It is a little like Terry Southern's The Magic Christian.  The pranks fit in a tradition associated with the Faust legend; there are lots in Marlowe's Faust, Goethe’s Faust, and Boito's, Mephistopheles, for example.  The book has a reputation as a satire of Soviet bureaucracy in the tradition of Gogol or of Dostoyevsky’s The Double, but, while you get a sense of what it was like to be a member of one of the all-important writers organizations, to live in their quarters, to face living in overcrowded apartments, and to live in fear of institutionalization in psychiatric hospitals, it is not a satire in the sense that sharply delineates a perspective on his victims.  There are a lot of yucks in this book, but the jokes could be on the pretentious and greedy of any nation.   The prose style is inconsistent. Part of the book is taken up by several chapters of a conventional historical novel about Pontius Pilate' role in Jesus' crucifixion.  Toward the endof the novel, the prose grows more lush and romantic.  There is a witch's Sabbath, and the final ride into the darkness of eternity by Satan, his retinue, and a couple of the recently dead, has a Gothic, elegiac quality.  There are surprising hits of feminism in Margarita's enthusiastic response to becoming a witch.  Characterization is imaginative rather than deep.  There are six major characters, Satan,  his retinue , and the titular master and Margarita, who by the way, don't appear until about a third of the way through the novel.  There are dozens of minor characters, amusing little caricatures of Soviet types.  The plot is hard to follow.  The book's strengths are imagination, the wealth of secondary characters, and ingenuity of the jokes played by the retinue.

It is little hard to understand why Pontius Pilot is so prominent in this work.  Pilate embodies the conflict in early Christianity about whether Christ was killed by the Romans (a version of history preferred by early Christians who were a Jewish sect) or by the Jews (a version preferred by the Church after it become the Roman state religion) and embodies the problems inherent in the concept of predestination, that is — was Pilate personally guilty of ordering Christ's execution, or was he merely playing a necessary part in a predestined sacred drama.  But it is not clear how either conflict fits into the book as a whole.  Pilate may represent a darker version of the Soviet bureaucracy.

The novel bares an epigraph from Goethe's Faust where Mephistopheles says, "I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.”  This observation made a little more sense out of various parts of the book including role of Pilate. 

The book was written in fits and starts over many years during which Bulgakov suffered the alternation of favor and with dangerous disfavor many artists suffered in Stalin's time and suffered also upheavals in his personal life.  Perhaps if we understood these misfortunes better we would understand the book better.  But would that make it better?

The NY Times on Obstacles First Time Authors Face: ‘There Was Absolutely No Buzz’ | The Authors Guild

The NY Times on Obstacles First Time Authors Face: ‘There Was Absolutely No Buzz’ | The Authors Guild

That's why we've banded together as "Thoth," to give our authors what buzz we can. A very faint buzz, alas, but at least each of us can let everyone in his or her network know of a new book. Well, it's not as good as a New York Times review, but better than silence.