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fangirling raves writing

I am so going to fangirl Haruki Murakami…

norwegian_wood-covers.jpg

“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
writing

Laying Down Some Intertextual Licks

Oh, but I’m a big old sucker for intertextuality. Which probably shows that deep down I’m a bit of a postmodern poseur.

I’ve mentioned this to my agent a few times – he seems to think it’s quite charming that I’ve buried references to the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino, Borges and Haruki Murakami in my children’s adventure stories. Some of it happened quite unconsciously – I wrote the first draft so quickly that apart from the plot, which I constructed carefully, much of the writing came straight out of my subconscious without much modification. Some of it, however, is there quite intentionally, even structurally. I won’t say what.

Months later I looked back and thought – crumbs, what have I done? I’ve given away A LOT of personal information here – that anyone who knows me well will be able to deconstruct. (N.B. I removed quite a bit of this in the editing process). And what the heck is the point of all this intertextuality?

Why do we do this? My agent thinks it’s like a secret message to readers in the know.

Which begs the question – who do we write for?

A friend of mine knows the children’s author Philip Pullman, whose ‘His Dark Materials’ books are (in my opinion) the best children’s books ever written, along with The Chronicles of Narnia and the William books. Pullman allegedly told my friend once that in ‘His Dark Materials’ he’d written a book for adults that people as young as eleven also could read.

I guess I’ve written a book for teenagers that I hope they’ll re-read as adults and go ah…now I see where you got that. My books aren’t remotely similar to those written by my literary heroes, so it’s possibly too much to hope the people who read my books will go on to read Gabo, Calvino, Murakami and Borges.

But if they did, it would be so, so, so cool.

Oh, I’ve started keeping score of people I’ve persuaded (mainly by badgering) to start reading Murakami and now they really like him too:

In chronological order: David (my husband), Nathan (close friend), Steve (a writer friend), Martin (close friend), Rich (writer friend), Peter (agent). Hmm, all blokes. I have tried to persuade a few women friends but they haven’t gone for him in quite the same way.

I have one Murakami book left to read – After Dark. I am saving it up as a treat when I finish the current manuscript. And then it’s back to re-reading him, scouring the Web for rare short stories of his and generally being a sad fangirl.

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.