Category: fangirling

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fangirling raves writers

The Wondrous Oscar Wao

There may be a new writer for me to swoon over. Haruki Murakami may be given a run for his money.

Here’s a book I’d been waiting to read until it came out in paperback and I had a really good stretch of uninterrupted time to enjoy it. Now I know I don’t usually blog about new books, because well, there are so many brilliant book review blogs, I’d rather leave that to them.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (by Junot Diaz) though, was a crystal-exploding-in-my-cortex type of book. You know when you feel like a book was written specially for you?

This one won the Pulitzer Prize, too. So it must be good.

Reading Oscar Wao felt to me like reading a funky hip take on Gabriel Garcia Marquez/Mario Vargas Llosa, set to a reggaeton rhythm…but about a character whose references were straight out of my own young-adulthood; Dungeons and Dragons, Blake’s 7 and Doctor Who, Watchmen, Lord of the Rings.

To my young blog readers – this is probably one to save until you are an adult. I would NOT want you to tell your parents I recommended this book. Like many works of Latin American literature, especially those set in brutal dicatorships, there are tales of violent atrocities and some extremely ‘adult’ situations.

To the old fogeys among you, READ THIS! It’s probably unlike any book you’ve ever read. It’s unlike any book I’ve ever read but then I can’t imagine there being another book like it.

Here’s the story: Oscar is a fat nerdy boy growing up in New Jersey. He adores comic books, fantasy role-playing games and sci-fi, he also falls hopelessly in love with girls all over the place but to no avail. Oh the shame of it, because he for all his geekery he is still a Dominican (from the Dominican Republic – it’s the Spanish part of the island of Hispaniola, the other half is French/African Haiti).

Dominican men are meant to be super-macho! They’re akin to Afo-Cubans – part African, part Spanish – 100% macho. Oscar’s mum nods with approval when aged 7 he dates two little girls at once. Once they dump him, Oscar’s romantic life is effectively over. Until much later, when fate returns him to the island of his heritage – and final destiny.

The story of Oscar is narrated with dispassionate energy by Yunior, a close friend. It’s not just Oscar’s tale but the island story of his mother and grandfather, just two of the many, many victims of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Hideous horrible violent and utterly unjust things happen to his mother and her family. It’s all described by Yunior with the pitiless yet sympathetic omniscience that is similar to the sweeping narratives of Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa. More minimalism though, which I like. Which I admire, too.

Historical footnotes provide more information – and it’s here that the voice becomes irreverently venomous. The DR sure was a total rathole (putting it VERY mildly) during Trujillo’s reign, a nightmare totalitarian state where justice ceased to exist and fear ruled supreme.

In common with other Great Writers, it’s not just the power of the story but the evidence of wisdom, shrewd observations of depths of human truths which mark out this author. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

Note to authors. Set your story in a totalitarian state and watch as plot just falls out. When every single person might legitimately be a liar who is about to feed your hero to a torture machine, the streets are paved with pure High Drama.

Categories
fangirling raves writing

I am so going to fangirl Haruki Murakami…

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“Norwegian Wood” by Haruki Murakami – One of my favourite books ever. 

Well I am! (Details at the end of this post, and I promise to keep you all updated…)

I only wish I could claim to be the first children’s author to be massively influenced by the wonderful Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Even if there aren’t any Japanese children’s authors who are evidently under his spell – and how could there NOT be – there’s Daniel Handler.

Daniel Handler – aka Lemony Snicket, author of “A Series Of Unfortunate Events” once wrote a brilliant article with the succinctly direct title: I Love Murakami. Handler, being a graduate of English and a Very Clever Bloke to judge by the cut of his gib,  writes eloquently of Murakami’s general excellence in a way that I never could.

But I do know what reading Murakami did for me and it’s nothing less than this: it enabled me to write a publishable novel.

I’ve written before about the day I met several publishers who were interested in acquiring ‘The Joshua Files’. And one of them commented “We can’t believe this is your first novel!” to which I replied (laughing) – “Well it’s not – it’s my first publishable novel. I’ve written three before this.” “So what happened,” they asked, “between writing the other three and writing Joshua Files?”

So I told them the truth. In the meantime I’d read almost all of the works of Haruki Murakami.

Backtrack a little. There I was with two manuscripts written in 6 months and both getting essentially rejected by agents. Actually the second ms was getting some interest but it wasn’t quite making the grade. And I understood this: without a quantum leap, my writing was not going to be good enough to be published. Something had to change; something major. I had maybe 50% of what was needed. The rest of the 50% was going to have to come with hard study, graft and experience. Or a bolt from the blue.

I couldn’t be bothered to do it the hard way. Crumbs, I was almost 40 years old! I didn’t have too much time left to get a writing career off the ground whilst I was still young enough to enjoy it (both my parents died aged 46 – that gives you a sense of urgency…).

So I began actively to search for the bolt from the blue.

I read a book on how to structure stories for screenplays, even wrote a screenplay for practice. And meantime, I read all the works of an author until then unknown to me – Haruki Murakami.

Bless TIME Magazine – it was the second time in my life that reading an article there literally changed my life. I read about this Murakami guy whose new book “Kafka On The Shore” was selling like hotcakes. The combination of elements that his stories used sounded scrummy – mysterious young women, missing cats, magical realism, laconic and distant young men, jazz, Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart and dreams. Too good to be true!

So I went to Borders and picked out three books “South of the Border, West of the Sun”, “Sputnik Sweetheart” and “Norwegian Wood”. (Kafka was only out in hardback and I’m stingy). I figured I’d dip my toe first…I began with “South of the Border, West of the Sun” because it’s the shortest.

From the first page I was – more than captivated – almost possessed. There was something about this wistful, minimalist and apparently very straightforward style that was entirely new to me. It was direct and with the simplest of language, sprinkled with unusual and naturalistic metaphors, tapped something deep within.

This is common for readers of Haruki, so I hear. Fans talk about feeling that their brains have been altered. I read that book almost at one sitting and finished in a daze, wondering what had just happened. I moved on to “Norwegian Wood”, a longer read, and began to feel even more deeply moved. It’s a story of a boy aged 19 who falls in love with a strangely troubled girl, with tragic consequences. But the sequences where the two teenagers walk together, talk and fall in love reminded me so keenly of the first time I fell in love, one summer in Mexico when I was 18, that I actually began to cry from the memory. And frankly, with sorrow for the fact that I broke that boy’s heart by being too afraid to let what developed between us grow into anything permanent.

Okay so we all fall in love for the first time and it’s often painful. When we’re middle-aged of course we look back and wonder. That’s what Norwegian Wood is about – a guy in his late 30s looking back at his first love. Nothing new under the sun, and yet Murakami’s writing spoke – as no other writer ever had – directly to those memories. It brought them back. Sad though they were – it was good to see them again!

Dang, I thought. My boy hero needed some of that Murakami wisftulness and haiku-like poetry. It could be just the antidote to the high-octane action and conspiracy thriller elements. I was already planning a sequel to the original version of Invisible City. So I wrote the first few pages, under the influence of Haruki.

It changed something. The character was totally different to the first boy I’d written. He was lost in grief. He longed for his missing father, or at least for answers. The disappearance of Andres Garcia had tapped deep into his psyche, with resultant disturbing dreams. In fact I stole one of my own dreams, from when my mother died.

So when I came to rewrite my boy-hero-discovers-hidden-Mayan-city story, I knew exactly what he sounded like. That particular chapter, by the way, now appears near the opening of Joshua book 2. (Still no title…)

There are homages to Haruki all over Invisible City, if you know what to spot. The most obvious one is the jazz motif. The second most obvious is the Hotel Delfin (Dolphin) – of course a reference to the infamous Dolphin Hotel of “A Wild Sheep Chase” and “Dance, Dance, Dance”.

Haruki’s memoir “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” is out soon, and of course I’ll be buying it right away and eating it up.

But also – I’m going to send him a copy of “Invisible City”. Yeah I know, stalkah, fangirl… I just have to though. He has to know how grateful I am.

This is how good Haruki Murakami is; amnesia-worthy i.e. worth getting the memory of reading him wiped from your mind so that you can read him all over again for the first time.

If you want to know more I recommend reading this: Ten Things You Need To Know About Haruki Murakami (quite accurately subtitled The key facts about the coolest writer in the world today.) And for a taste – just a teeny one – here’s a short story of his: On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning.

(And if I receive a reply – which I doubt because he’s a GENIUS and I’m NOT WORTHY – I’ll let you know what he says…)

Categories
fangirling nostalgia

With Deep Anger And Resentment

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I’ve only once been to a booksigning. My favourite authors hardly ever visit Oxford (two of them, never, what with being deceased). When they do it’s probably as an honoured High Table guest at one of the colleges rather than a humble book signing session.

But once, I did have a chance to meet a literary hero, none other than Douglas Adams, author of “The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy”.

I may have mentioned before what a total fangirl I am and always have been. I was actually a member of ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha, the HHGTTG fan club, once… (John Lloyd, producer of the original radio show and later, via QI.com, a customer of my IT company, gave me a hug when I told him that!). So when I had my chance to have Douglas Adams (or as he’s known to the fan community, ‘Bop Ad’) actually sign his latest book, I of course included some obscure reference to the BBC radio show. And asked him to sign my copy of ‘So Long And Thanks For All The Fish’ with the words:

With deep anger and resentment.

Well, it won a smile from dear old Bop, who was kept busy all afternoon that day in Blackwell’s.

Categories
fangirling writing

Gabo vs Haruki Part 1: The Genius of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I don’t see why one has to have a favourite writer. If I’m ever asked, how could I choose between Haruki Murakami and Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Nope, it’s not a fair question. I cannot choose.

However, I can differentiate. Haruki moves me and Gabo astounds me.

(And Haruki also astounds and Gabo also moves, but each marginally less than the other…)

Garcia Marquez has these unforgettable openings, like the famous one in “One Hundred Years of Solitude”:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

The power of that ending can only be appreciated much later in the book, when the reader realises (in my case with a shout of joy) that the Colonel, presumed dead (by the reader), only takes his full place in the story later on…And the way that the novel’s ending resolves the opening section with the gypsy’s manuscript is beyond genius, one of the few times in my life I remember being left literally breathless with admiration for a writer as I read him.

And that’s not the only time he uses the ‘Many years later’ formula. In his novels, linear time and cyclical time coexist; the stories are often simultaneously related at two levels.

I read recently probably the most influential Mexican novel of the last century, Juan Rulfo’s ‘Pedro Paramo’, a book allegedly adored by Gabo. Not only is Pedro Paramo an early example in Latin American literature of a novel told in two different time streams (the narrative alternates between a first-person narrator who visits the town where his father had lived, and a first-person narrator from the town’s past), but it includes this passage, which strikes a chord with any aficionado of Garcia Marquez:

“Years later Father Renteria would remember the night his hard bed had kept him awake and driven him outside. It was the night Miguel Paramo died.”

Rulfo’s ‘Pedro Paramo’ is brief yet dazzling. I myself have written whilst under its spell and can attest to its mesmeric hold.

I am reading the first volume of Gabo’s autobiography, ‘Living To Tell The Tale’. The opening, as ever, is delicious:

“My mother asked me to go with her to sell the house. She had come that morning from the distant town where the family lived and she had no idea how to find me.”

What follows is an account, related with the characteristic shifting time streams, of young Gabriel’s visit to the old house of his grandparents in the distant town of Aracataca, from where his early childhood experiences were to inform the creation of his fictional town of Macondo and all its inhabitants. And the older Gabo now recognises with the trained eyes of the writer he has become (not yet a successful novelist, but definitely on the path), the material which has lain dormant within him all these years. It’s a moment of thunderous import and it shakes him to the core. The past, present and future collide during that visit. When finally he returns (some 100 pages later) to his cosy literary hangouts in Baranquilla with Colombia’s literati, he knows, even at 23, where this can take him.

I just read this great passage where Gabo relates showing a rough draft of his manuscript to a man highly respected within his writers’ circle: Don Ramon. Don Ramon reads two pages without change of expression, then makes one or two incisive technical comments. But as Gabo leaves him that day, Don Ramon adds:

“I thank you for your courtesy and I’m going to reciprocate with a piece of advice: never show anybody the rough draft of anything you’re writing.”

So, so, SO true. And Gabo followed that advice TO THE LETTER.