NP but Murakami (mentioning Pynchon)

[John Bailey]

A very readable 2004 interview with Haruki Murakami that gets better
as it goes. The preamble is a bit rubbish and hyperbolic ("The Wind-Up
Bird Chronicle... quietly mutates into the strangest hybrid narrative
since Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy" errrrrrrr no) but the Q&A
becomes quite funny and revealing.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2/the-art-of-fiction-no-182-haruki-murakami

On translating realist writers when his own work is more aligned with
western postmodernists:

"I learn a lot from the realistic writers. Their work requires a very
close reading to translate, and I can see their secrets. If I were to
translate postmodern writers like Don DeLillo, John Barth, or Thomas
Pynchon, there would be a crash—my insanity against their insanity. I
admire their work, of course; but when I translate I choose realists."

On what many (inc here) have found as the grating superficiality of his style:

"My stories are more actual, more contemporary, more the postmodern
experience. Think of it like a movie set, where everything—all the
props, the books on the wall, the shelves—is fake. The walls are made
of paper. In the classical kind of magic realism, the walls and the
books are real. If something is fake in my fiction, I like to say it’s
fake. I don’t want to act as if it’s real.

[...]

We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news. We
are fighting a fake war. Our government is fake. But we find reality
in this fake world. So our stories are the same; we are walking
through fake scenes, but ourselves, as we walk through these scenes,
are real. The situation is real, in the sense that it’s a commitment,
it’s a true relationship. That’s what I want to write about."
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l