NP - Murakami

bekah bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net
Tue Jun 27 03:42:56 CDT 2006


Lemon drops.  Follow the lemon drops in Murakami.   He was sucking on 
them when he quit smoking during the writing of Wind-Up Bird and 
every book since (with the possible exception of Underground which is 
non-fiction) has had someone sucking lemon drops.   Lemon drops and 
cats and spaghetti.   (lol)    I still love it and even if he's not 
the best, he's still darned good.

bekah

At 1:59 AM -0400 6/27/06, jd wrote:
>He works very closely with his translator.  The person who translated
>Wind Up Bird Chronicle is his favorite, I think his earlier books were
>translated by someone he wasn't so much of a fan of and didn't have as
>much contact with.
>
>I don't think he's bad but I think he's lacking and it's pretty much
>from the horse's mouth that he's writing off the cuff and his vagaries
>simply are, in fact, vagaries.  So in short, like I said before, he's
>better than a lot of the slush coming out these days, but he doesn't
>use his skill to go all the way to make something really great.  IMHO.
>
>He's very personable however.  At MIT he showed up carrying his suit,
>which he didn't wear because the air conditioner was broken, and
>instead wore a tshirt that said PICKLE, with a pickle on it.  He's a
>funny, personable guy.
>
>A good example of the "vagaries" is how he works spaghetti into a lot
>of his books.  Someone, at the MIT event, asked him if spaghetti was
>sort of a theme for him.  Instead of going into this long diatribe
>about the symbolism of pasta & etc he simply said that, well, he liked
>to eat spaghetti while he was writing.  So it shows up in his writing
>a lot.  A lot of his "themes" seem to have about as much depth as
>that.
>
>On 6/27/06, Joe Allonby <joeallonby at gmail.com> wrote:
>>Whenever I read something in translation, I wonder how much of what I'm
>>enjoying is actually the work of the translator. The more I learn about
>>Murakami, the more I know that he is the guy responsible for what I'm
>>reading. Sorry snobs, he rocks.
>>
>>
>>On 6/26/06, Ghetta Life <ghetta_outta at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>http://www.theage.com.au/news/books/the-lone-wolf/2006/06/21/1150845234882.html
>>>
>>>  Yet Murakami has always distanced himself from the Japanese tradition of
>>the
>>>  writer as social admonisher: "I thought of myself as just a fiction
>>writer."
>>>
>>>  Murakami's resistance to literary cliques has led him to be seen as
>>thumbing
>>>  his nose at Japan and its literature. He refuses to fulfil the typical
>>>  public duties of writers - participating in talk shows, judging panels and
>>>  literary festivals - and declines all requests for television and
>>telephone
>>>  interviews.
>>>
>>>  As dreamy and introverted as his disaffected protagonists, Murakami has no
>>>  literary friends and never attends parties. He has spent large stretches
>>of
>>>  his adult life in Europe and America; we meet, in Murakami's unassuming
>>>  Ayoama office, during his brief return to Tokyo from Harvard, where he
>>holds
>>>  a writer's fellowship. "I have no models in Japanese literature. I created
>>>  my own style, my own way. They don't appreciate this."
>>>
>>>  As a teenager, Murakami kicked against the reading tastes of his parents -
>>>  both lecturers in Japanese literature - by consuming pulpy American
>>mystery
>>>  novels in English. He read "to get away from Japanese society". Murakami's
>>>  idols remain American writers - Fitzgerald, Carver, Chandler and Vonnegut.
>>>
>>>  His offhand prose, studded with references to American low culture,
>>>  contrasts with the formal elegance of Japan's literary lodestars - Yukio
>>>  Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe and Junichiro Tanizaki. The heroes of his
>>>  surrealistic, genre-bending novels are more likely to eat spaghetti,
>>listen
>>>  to Radiohead and read Len Deighton than drink sake or quote Oe. They are
>>>  under-employed drifters, without children or long-term partners, who
>>refuse
>>>  to genuflect to the Japanese group ethos of the family and the
>>corporation.
>>>
>>>
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>>>




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