1Q84

[Mark Kohut]

I, too, felt immediately that Murakami's moons were Iceland Spar
inspired even. Like, anyway. 

From: John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com>
To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> 
Sent: Wednesday, January 18, 2012 10:15 PM
Subject: Re: 1Q84

If anyone's still reading the book, pay attention to the lengthy
section when a character begins using question marks who had
previously been robbed of them. No one notices it.

Forgive the bolded and italicised text - translators decided to add
that so you'd know when the narrative shifts from third-person to
third (which was more ambiguous in the original).

Also the translators decided to rewrite the entire novel in the past
tense, presumably with Murakami's consent, which is another big
mistake in my book.

Read up on the Kappa (if you can get a copy of Akutagawa's novella of
the same name, better).

Thinking of the moon splitting not as an alternate reality but an
Iceland Spar thing; the world becomes cross-eyed but the key is in
who's eyes are crossed at any moment.

The maza-dohta relationship is named after the Japanese pronunciation
'mother-daughter'.

Lots of major and minor characters (maybe most) are mirrored by
someone else in the parallel narratives; Green Beans and Fuka-Eri
share almost identical histories, for instance, as if one were a
fictionalised version of the other.

Check out the meanings of "fuka" and "eri".

And the air chrysalis thing is a bloody obvious metaphor nobody seems
to discuss.

On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 1:53 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> The alliteration and style sound like you, Alice, is it?  Your secret is
> safe with me..
>
>
> From: Technopaegnion Tapinosis <technopaegniontapinosis at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Sent: Wednesday, January 18, 2012 8:14 PM
> Subject: Re: 1Q84
>
> Have you read his earlier novels?
> They're all clunkers.
>
>
> His works, I understand, have received great acclaim. I never expected that
> they would read like either a poor translation or a budding novelist in need
> of a teacher and editor. Now that I think about it, the Tengo narrative can
> be read as...well...it does build a triangle of sorts around exactly this
> kind of relationship. But the Green Beans narrative is quite awkward; the
> characters are described as if the author needs to push certain facts about
> them out at us so that we don't miss them. At the same time, I never
> expected that Green Beans would kill anyone. was I missing something about
> her? Did any of the seemingly forced characterizations matter? For example,
> we are told things about her abilities to remember, to connect, but then we
> can't quite make out, since she can't either, why she recalls certain things
> or makes certain connections. The work is, like the high school girl's
> story, full of promise, dense with story-teller's magic, but it is far from
> a work that one expects from a novelist who has been sold to us as a genius
> novelist. Or is it the translation?
>
>
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