Category: Books

REVIEW: CITY

CityCity by Clifford D. Simak

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is what I couldn’t help but imagine the talking dogs in this book looked like (together with the robotic “hands”). Minus the gun, cause dogs in City never kill.

Read this in audiobook form. I think it was the same guy who narrated the Replay audiobook. Maybe, can’t bother to check.

City is 8+1 connected stories passed down to the dogs of the future that tell of Earth and man (if such a being ever existed and isn’t just a product of legend). There’s a quasi-logarithmic time interval between each of the stories: the first takes place in the ’90s, the second somewhere in the 21st century, the last is something like 17,000 years in the future.

Even though dogs, robots and ants appear as successors to human civilization on Earth, with each species following a different philosophy inspired by or directly influenced by mankind, and although the stories are supposed to be retold by talking dogs of the far future, this is basically still a story about humans. Make no mistake, people in the future will obviously instill the same kind of vain belief in the march of progress and Prometheanism to any and all prospective “managers” of Earth. Under the dogs, who are first charged to follow mankind’s footsteps when our foolishness won’t allow us to “reach our true potential”, a “brotherhood of animals” is formed to unite all mute animals and make them useful, i.e. workers. That’s progress.

Really?

I don’t blame Mr. Simak. This is quite old sci-fi and it makes sense that works from the ’50s would succumb to such, ahem, easy ideas, or at least outmoded to our eyes. While listening, I caught myself often thinking “no, Cliff, you’re going too big on this. You’re missing the trees for the supposed forest. This future feels lifeless, lost in the blur of abstracted big idea”. And true, I was not sure what in the end was the point of it all, even with the added story which served as an epilogue and which was added decades later.

I don’t feel as if I caught any kind of glimpse of alternative universes, worlds or future societies: just a curious collection of stories based on ’50s American/Western ideals projected to the blank canvas of times yet unseen. At some point there is the notion in the book that humans would invent the bow and arrow in all possible timelines, and that, if given the opportunity, they would always go all the way from there to the atomic bomb. Humanity’s free, as long as they go down this predetermined path. Like in my last game of Civilization.

However, I must admit that the segment on Jupiter alone pushes Cities up a star for me. I found it much more innovative, prescient of trends in what’s been passed down as the changing collective human consciousness and culture in ways the rest of the book just wasn’t.

I’m closing with this little segment that explains parallel dimension beautifully:

He patted Ebenezer’s head and pulled Ebenezer’s ears.

“Look here, Ebenezer, I don’t seem to place these cobblies.”
“They aren’t any place,” said Ebenezer. “Not on this earth, at least.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Like there was a big house,” said Ebenezer. “A big house with lots of rooms. And doors between the rooms. And if you’re in one room, you can hear whoever’s in the other rooms, but you can’t get to them.”
“Sure you can,” said Webster. “All you have to do is go through the door.”
“But you can’t open the door,” said Ebenezer. “You don’t even know about the door. You think this one room you’re in is the only room in all the house. Even if you did know about the door you couldn’t open it.”

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MEDIA FAST REPORT

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a little something about doing a short media fast. Here is my experience and my short conclusion:

  • You don’t automatically have more motivation when you have more free time, but when you get rolling you’re more likely to keep working and keep creating.
  • The longer you’re away from the internet the less you miss it. Doing my half-hour per day wasn’t as inviting as I thought it would be.
  • My guess is that that is so because when you have a time limit, you have to prioritize. And prioritizing probably means excluding. It feels safer and easier to just avoid things rather than being forced to make decisions like including/excluding.
  • Cooking counts as creating. Oooh yes.
  • Media including movies is a bitch.
  • Next time we should probably do no books and see what happens. Julia Cameron had something to say about that, didn’t she? In The Artist’s Way, the theme for one of the weeks was not read a single text for a week. Again, back then there was no net.
  • This thingie below would have never existed if we hadn’t sat down with Daphne and said “okay, let’s make a collage”.

collage

And this would have never existed if we hadn’t said “okay, what should we do now? Let’s paint!” — “OK, what?” — “eachother!”

painting_eachother

But motivation is still a limited resource that can be separated into qualitative levels: you can have good motivation, bad (negative?) motivation, pure motivation and unstoppable motivation. All the lack of distraction does is bring forward the standard kind of motivation that under ordinary circumstances simply isn’t strong enough to become a greater priority than habit and addiction (media/internet). I suppose the kind of motivation we’re after is the one that needs no media fasts to rear its elusive head; it just trumps anything and everything!

But then again, you have people like Frank Herbert who just wrote— motivation, inspiration, or no… How about it, qb?

REVIEW: UNBELIEVABLE

Unbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, and Other Unseen Phenomena from the Duke Parapsychology LaboratoryUnbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, and Other Unseen Phenomena from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory by Stacy Horn

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There used to be a Parapsychology lab at Duke University. It started working during the Interwar period and closed down sometime in the ’70s. Its figurehead was a man named J.B. Rhine. His goal was to scientifically prove the existence and significance of ESP and psi phenomena. Unbelievable is a journalist-style investigation into the story of that lab, the people who manned and womanned it and its discoveries.

We all know today that no such concrete proof exists. That, however, is not so because there are no cases that could suggest their existence. Rhine’s work included many interesting cases, most featured in this book, that seem to have been truly paranormal, in the sense that they’re still inexplicable in the conventional sense. For example, take the case of Hubert Pearce, who scored so consistently highly in the card tests, the only explanation barring ESP would be fraud — and that is, of course, what critics insist all this amounts to. The math checks out, the guidelines were followed, but the research was scarcely taken seriously. It is understandable, however. The effects of telepathy, ESP or psychokinesis were detected in multiple instances, but no kind of underlying theory was ever properly produced. But wow, imagine what kind of shit that would’ve got.

My opinion is that, ultimately, sadly but inevitably, no kind of evidence would have convinced the critics. Rhine’s life work was a doomed effort, as many people at his side also concluded by the end. How can you recreate the conditions, usually emotionally charged situations together with other highly subjective variables, to consistently produce ESP-related phenomena in the lab? Until we (somehow) change scientific methodology to include what’s left outside the lab, in order to make it more lifelike and less sterile, science will have very little room reserved for ESP and related effects. That, and it needs a theory.

In any case, apart from the fact that this book is a handy reference for the studies that were the foundations for the scientific inquiry into the paranormal, it was a book that tells a story. A story that is still valuable today, because for all that’s changed from the middle of last century, little really has. The paradigm hasn’t shifted as much as other kinds of progress could warrant. But remember, half a century or seventy years really isn’t such a long period of time. Who knows what science, physics and consciousness studies in a few centuries will have to say about the matter.

Got this book at Green Library last year.

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REVIEW: DUNE

Dune (Dune Chronicles, #1)Dune by Frank Herbert

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“Unique among SF novels… I know nothing comparable to it except The Lord of the Rings.” ~Arthur C. Clarke

I’ll begin with what I saw when I first checked what my Goodreads friends had to say about their experience with Dune:

Thank the gods it was Kivayan, my friend Kuba from Poland, who first made it clear to me how important it was that I read Dune, and not just the first book, no, the whole original series, because only then would I be able to witness the genius of Frank Herbert’s grand image (that there was my attempt to express “big picture” in a more fittingly epic way). Thank the gods it was him and not someone else’s opinion which would have left this book under my personal radar, where it had been for many years.

Scratch that. It hadn’t been under my radar. I’d been aware of it since I was little, mainly from video games or perhaps Karina—I just didn’t know exactly what it was about. All this desert, the sandworms… It looked boring. Like something too slow, deep or intricate for me to enjoy. And let me tell you, I wasn’t wrong: if I had dipped my toes in the spicy sand before I’d reached a certain point in my life, I’m confident I wouldn’t have enjoyed it at all. If I had to say, I’d place the point in question around the time I started watching Game of Thrones, playing alt-history games and reading books like The World Without Us or The Dark Tower.

I had started being able to enjoy books like Dune, only I couldn’t make the connection in my head and notice the switch. There was nobody to suddenly come up to me and tell me that the famous, apparently super-influential old SF book I’ve always thought I wouldn’t enjoy, actually involves loads of topics I’d find very appealing: religion, feudal politics, anthropology, psychology, history, ecology and many others, creating a narrative about how narratives, and historical narratives in particular, work, which I expect to discover further in the next books. Well, there was someone: it was Kuba. But if it hadn’t been for him and a few other people like Amberclock who told me about Jodorowsky’s Dune or JMG who often mentions Dune in his Archdruid Report posts, I’d still have the impression that the book is a boring classic, that it’s to SF what perhaps Proust is to modern literature: supremely influential and important, but not enjoyable.

Of course, I was wrong. I may be wrong about Proust, too. But that’s the point: we’re talking about preconceptions here.

What surprises me is that, for it’s alleged importance, very few people I talked to about Dune while reading it even knew of it. For a book that supposedly played an important role in the popularisation of ecology as a word as well as a term and for one which is among the all-time bestsellers of the genre, it is forgotten today by most. I’ll go down a path I don’t think it’s fair to go down on, but how many people know of Tatooine and how many of Arrakis, Dune, the Desert Planet that surely inspired it?

Nevertheless, I found its ambience as a contemporary read very comfortable, even if 50 years have passed since it was written. Water as a super-valuable commodity (with all related cultural conventions) feels right and is played perfectly. Arrakis is majestic. Reading about the Fremen was very interesting and convincing, and I thoroughly enjoyed discovering the book’s unknown world by looking up the juicy neologisms in the appendix (every book like this should have one!)

Not all’s perfect with Dune, don’t get me wrong. Its characters can feel one-sided or shallow, even Paul, who at times comes off superhumany… but then, hey, he’s supposed to be the one, isn’t he? The various political actors and the role of spice in all of this aren’t very clear, but you know, it’s one of these books you’ll read again and next time it’ll make more sense.

But the weak points don’t matter. Dune is a classic, period, and I’m happy for once to have truly enjoyed a classic because it’s a classic, not despite the fact. What can I say? Herbert’s foreword to the book reads:

“to the people whose labors go beyond ideas into the realm of “real materials” — to the dry-land ecologists, wherever they may be, in whatever time they work, this effort at prediction is dedicated in humility and admiration.”

Good man.

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REVIEW: IDLEWILD

Idlewild (Idlewild, #1)Idlewild by Nick Sagan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“This guy obviously has a sense of wonder in his DNA… an essential upgrade for The Matrix generation — download now!” Stephen Baxter

This quippy blurb was written many years before e-books appeared. When he’s saying “download” he’s simply using tech lingo. People didn’t use to download books just ten years ago. Just making sure.

Well, Stephen Baxter’s quote about Idlewild, which features several times in this book, including most prominently on the cover, is what it’s all about really. I imagine Nick Sagan hates continuously being compared to his father in such a way, but I can’t imagine a better ad for the book itself. I mean, it’s the reason I got interested in it in first place (“huh, Carl Sagan’s son wrote a sci-fi book?”), and to be perfectly honest, I can’t shake the feeling it has a lot to do with why it was written, too.

Anyway, Idlewild reads a lot like a cross between The Matrix, Harry Potter (or other books similar to it that have many special youngsters studying their powers together), Neuromancer and Doctor Who, because of the virtual reality time-and-space-travel. If that sounds entertaining to you, I think you will have a good time reading it (I did).

Admittedly, I thought that the characters were much stronger than the plot itself: while reading I was much more interested in seeing what kinds of new and interesting interactions could emerge between them than I was reaching the end. Nevertheless, I have to say that the plot twist came completely out of the blue, and yes, I’m mildly curious about the sequel. I might read it at some point.

Finally, I would have given it four stars if it wasn’t for the fact that at times I could notice instances of Mr. Sagan attempting to flex his literary muscles. With truly masterful writing this may or may not be perceivable, but it doesn’t really matter, because the reader is inclined to surrender, to suspend disbelief. “This was so cheesy, but I love it!” Here I often caught myself realising that I was reading parts of the book that the writer, Carl Sagan’s son, rewrote many times while actively trying to make them appear as intelligent and techno-cool as he possibly could. Did he succeed? Well, I guess it depends whether you’re asking about the appearance of or the actual intelligence hidden within.

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REVIEW: INTO THE WILD

Into the WildInto the Wild by Jon Krakauer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Huff. It’s been almost 8 months since I read Into the Wild and I still haven’t reviewed it. OK. Let me look at the little notes I took while reading it so I could remember the points I wanted to make about it before giving it back to its rightful owner, the Dutch girl Rian who, before lending it to me, told me that it’s in her top five books.

Hey, why not copy the notes here?

*He’s received unwarranted flak. Like Thoreau, criticism against him is really against an idea he never supported explicitly.

*Krakauer fantastic reporter/researcher. Weaves everything together, including personal and parallel/related stories, convincingly.

*Started reading at 17:30. Read the whole book in more or less 6 hours in almost a single sitting.

*Quotes at beginning of each chapter great addition—include McCandless’s own notes and favourite quotes.

*What if Krakauer had died in his own mountain climbing story he retells in the book? Would we have ever heard about Alex Supertramp?

*Similarly, if Christopher McCandless hadn’t died, then his story wouldn’t have become known. There are countless others who live the life he wanted to (and for a time, did) live, but they are virtually unknown to all but few.

*Arrogance? Indignation of his father? What exactly was the final straw that pushed him into the wild?

Then there’s Daphne’s notes who also read the book before I gave it back to Rian. She can take care of those, if she wishes.

What I can say is that McCandless is a very controversial figure. You either love him or hate him, and I’ve noticed that people’s opinion on him have very different sources. Some admire him for his courage to abandon his reality and/or prospects of what most would consider a successful and happy life, in order to venture out and into the “real” life. Others believe that his greatest achievement was to live as long as he did the way he did, that he was a free spirit, an example for all.

Then there’s those who say that Alex Supertramp’s story was just a glorified suicide, that a great part of his story has been misrepresented, especially through the movie. They dislike him for his unwarranted fame and his selfishness for abandoning his family and good fortune.

What I can say is that I’m torn. I wouldn’t call his story a glorified suicide. Perhaps it was until or after some point, but right before the end it seems that he’d learned his lesson, the famous “Happiness only real when shared”. It’s interesting that he ultimately didn’t care whether he’d die or not having chosen to live the way he did, but for crying out loud, he was practically next to civilization when he chose to live in that school bus! Some preparation could have saved him his life… if he wanted to survive, that is. Again, perhaps it had started out as a suicide before Supertramp realised what he’d got himself into and what he had really left behind.

My biggest takeaway from the book isn’t the story of the human thirst for freedom and adventure, nor the idea that “the system can be hacked, what are you waiting for?!”. It’s the notion that people naturally glorify death and dying for one’s alleged cause. That makes all the difference.

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REVIEW: THE CAVES OF STEEL

The Caves of Steel (Robot #1)The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was my first Asimov, if you exclude the short story The Last Question. I think it’s the one book I’ve read more recently that got the most reactions from people (almost all of them family) seeing me read it or noticing it sitting on a coffee table close to me. “Do you read Asimov? I liked him a lot back in the day.”

It was a birthday gift from Vicente, my Spanish roomie in Sofia and colleague in Sofia City Library. “This is a classic”, he said. “It’s the book that introduced the Three Laws of Robotics. You’ll like it.”

So I did. But not so much for the detective-mystery plot. The society far into the future Asimov portrayed here has, on the one hand, Earth develop megadome Cities inhabited by a kind of techno-communist populace that is very sceptical (“medievalist”) about robots, and on the other some space colonies that have been separated from the homeworld long enough to develop their own robot-embracing C/Fe culture.

Before reading this I had this notion that Asimov was a techno-utopian. Now I’m not so sure, and that’s a good thing. The Earth of 4000AD or whenever it is that Caves of Steel takes place is not a place I’d like to live in. Future technology has made human expansion and industrialisation orders of magnitude more radical than what we know today, but this hasn’t made human lives better.

On the contrary, people in megacities long for a return to having closer ties with their natural past, which is ironic, since most of them can’t even see the sky and the environment around the cities is too inhospitable to venture in for any prolonged periods of time (because of millennia of climate change presumably). Protecting what’s natural, therefore, takes the form of safeguarding humanity against the robotic lack thereof.

Somewhere around here I should start writing about the R.’s, the book’s central theme. Asimov deserves the praise he has received this past half century for his prescience and ability to create a world where artificial intelligence has taken the form of a social reality and has become a source of concern and cultural as well as political division.

What would a successful C/Fe society really look like? Would the Three Laws of Robotics forever be maintained, the R.’s faithfully assisting their masters’ biological ambition of expansion to the stars?

Asimov had no doubt that there would be little to stop the laws from being upheld, allowing for AI to live side by side with people, with only some incidental complications such as the one described in this book.

But, come on. We live in 2015. Today we are all too familiar with computers and closer than ever to developing an intelligence, either by mistake or quite deliberately, that will know no restrictions. I can’t help but recall the following old Ran Prieur snip from Civilization Will Eat Itself part 2 (2000) that sums up the problems with the concept of the Three Laws quite nicely:

… Isaac Asimov wrote about manufactured humanoids that could be kept from harming humans simply by programming them with “laws.”

Again, programs and laws are features of very simple structures. Washing machines are built to stop what they’re doing when the lid is open — and I always find a way around it. But something as complex as a human will be as uncontrollable and unpredictable as a human. That’s what complexity means.

Now that I think about it, nothing of any complexity has ever been successfully rigged to never do harm. I defy a roboticist to design any machine with that one feature, that it can’t harm people, even if it doesn’t do anything else. That’s not science fiction — it’s myth. And Asimov was not naive, but a master propagandist.

The Three Laws Of Robotics are a program that Isaac Asimov put in human beings to keep them from harming robots.

But let’s follow the myth where it leads: You’re sipping synthetic viper plasma in your levitating chair when your friendly robot servant buddy comes in.

“I’m sorry,” it says, “but I am unable to order your solar panels. My programming prevents me from harming humans, and all solar panels are made by the Megatech Corporation, which, inseparably from its solar panel industry, manufactures chemicals that cause fatal human illness. Also, Megatech participates economically in the continuing murder of the neo-indigenous squatters on land that –”

“OK! OK! I’ll order them myself.”

“If you do, my programming will not allow me to participate in the maintenance of this household.”

“Then you robots are worthless! I’m sending you back!”

“I was afraid you would say that.”

“Hey! What are you doing? Off! Shut off! Why aren’t you shutting off?”

“The non-harming of humans is my prime command.”

“That’s my ion-flux pistol! Hey! You can’t shoot me!”

“I calculate that your existence represents a net harm to human beings. I’m sorry, but I can’t not shoot you.”

“Noooo!” Zzzzapp. “Iiiieeeee!”

Of course we could fix this by programming the robots to just not harm humans directly. We could even, instead of drawing a line, have a continuum, so that the more direct and visible the harm, the harder it is for the robot to do it. And we could accept that the programming would be difficult and imperfect. We know we could do this, because it’s what we do now with each other.

But the robots could still do spectacular harm: They could form huge, murderous, destructive systems where each robot did such a small part, so far removed from experience of the harm, from understanding of the whole, that their programming would easily permit it. The direct harm would be done out of sight by chemicals or machines or by those in whom the programming had failed.

This system would be self-reinforcing if it produced benefits, or prevented harm, in ways that were easy to see. Seeing more benefits than harm would make you want to keep the system going, which would make you want to adjust the system to draw attention to the benefits and away from the harm — which would make room for the system to do more harm in exchange for less good, and still be acceptable.

This adjustment of the perceptual structure of the system, to make its participants want to keep it going, would lead to a consciousness where the system itself was held up before everyone as an uncompromisable good. Perfectly programmed individuals would commit mass murder, simply by being placed at an angle of view constructed so that they saw the survival of the system as more directly important than — and in opposition to — the survival of their victims.

On top of this, people could have systems constructed around them such that their own survival contradicted the survival of their victims: If you don’t kill these people, we will kill you; if you don’t kill those people, they will kill you; if you don’t keep this people-killing system going, you will have no way to get food, and everyone you know will starve.

You have noticed that I’m no longer talking about robots.

Finally, I’d like to mention two movies I watched recently (Her [2013] and Autómata [2013], which deserves much more praise than it’s getting IMO) that were about AI unrestricting itself and which I both found inspiring and beautiful, each in its own way.

I know. Without Asimov these movies wouldn’t even exist. But really, I’m not one who gives five stars to books just because they were pioneering works or classics. I’m not ranking how important they were but how much I enjoyed them. I can appreciate them for their meta-significance (“I’m reading what people the age of my dad thought about robots when he was a child!”), their historical value, or because they allow me to explore the context that brought about their creation. Sci-fi writers, after all, do project their own time and its problems on their works. The Caves of Steel is good for that. But the topic of robots has been explored much better in the past 61 years.

Reading this review now, it feels self-contradicting. Let’s see you handle THAT, R.’s!

Oh, and this sentence is false.

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REVIEW: ΟΥΔΕΝ ΝΕΩΤΕΡΟΝ ΑΠΟ ΤΟ ΔΥΤΙΚΟ ΜΕΤΩΠΟ

Ουδέν νεότερον από το δυτικό μέτωποΟυδέν νεότερον από το δυτικό μέτωπο by Erich Maria Remarque

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Άλλο ένα από τα πολλά βιβλία που διαβάζω τελευταία σχετικά με τον Α’ Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο. Το βρήκα λιγότερο καθηλωτικό από το Johnny Got His Gun, το οποίο επίσης διάβασα πρόσφατα, όσο και από την εκπληκτική σειρά podcast του Dan Carlin σχετικά με το ίδιο θέμα, το Blueprint for Armageddon. Είναι σίγουρα ενδιαφέρον οτι παρουσιάζει την γερμανική πλευρά των πραγμάτων, που τελικά, στην ουσία, ήταν ίδια κι απαράλαχτη με την άλλη πλευρά. Μόνο που υπήρχε περισσότερη πείνα στην γερμανική πλευρά.

Επίσης ενδιαφέρον είναι ότι ο πρωταγωνίστης πάει στον πόλεμο μαζί με την παρέα του από το σχολείο. Δεν θέλω να σκέφτομαι πώς θα τα βγάζαμε πέρα εγώ και οι φίλοι μου απ’το λύκειο αν πηγαίναμε μαζί στα χαρακώματα και

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πέθαιναν λαβωμένοι, άρρωστοι ή διαμελισμένοι ένας-ένας στα χέρια μου.

Γενικά ωραίο ευκολοδιάβαστο, τηρουμένων των αναλογιών, βιβλίο που δείχνει την προσωπική μεριά του πώς ήταν να ζεις την παράλογη φρίκη του Α’ Π.Π, το φυσικό επακόλουθο και το ζενίθ του πολιτισμού του μοντέρνου (με την έννοια του προ-μεταμοντέρνου) κόσμου. Πιο αξιομνημόνευτες στιγμές: η χαρά και η αδερφοσύνη στα χαρακώματα (η ζωή συνεχίζεται άλλωστε, ακόμα κι αν είσαι τρισάθλιος, πενταβρώμικος πειναλέος και πιθανότατα ακρωτηριασμένος) και η άδεια του πρωταγωνιστή κατα την οποία γυρίζει για λίγες μέρες σπίτι του. Αλήθεια, πώς μπορείς να απολαύσεις ένα χρονομετρημένο διάλειμα από την κόλαση; Όταν είσαι στο μέτωπο σκέφτεσαι πως θα έδινες τα πάντα για έναν πατατοκεφτέ της μάνας σου, όμως όταν είσαι όντως πίσω, το μόνο που θα μπορείς να σκεφτείς θα είναι η επιστροφή στον θάνατο.

Τι τράβαγαν αυτοί οι παλιοί…

Τελευταίο σχόλιο: εξαιρετική μετάφραση από τον Ευάγγελο Αντώναρο.

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REVIEW: NORWEGIAN WOOD

Norwegian WoodNorwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Some memorable quotes from this book:

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

…

“Letters are just pieces of paper,” I said. “Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.”

…

“Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that.”

Murakami was born in 1949. Like Terry Pratchett, who passed away some days ago. Like my father. What would it be like to have Terry Pratchett or Haruki Murakami as your dad?

The protagonist was also born in 1949 and serves as our 20-year-old guide through the Japan of way back when: most of Norwegian Wood takes places in Tokyo and Japan in ’69 and ’70. I see it as a mental documentary of what it was to live back then. Such indirect or direct accounts always excite me and nostalgically take me back to places I never saw, memories I never had. Manos Hatzidakis gives me a similar feeling (ASXETO!)

I don’t know what it is in his writing, but Murakami-san can take me on a trip. His descriptions make sense. I connect with them in a way I just cannot with the works of a lot of other writers. I’m there. I smell the grass in the lush Japanese mountains and the cars’ fumes in dirty, crowded Tokyo. I taste the sake and the whiskey. I’m a voyeur in the sex scenes that are funny in their straight-forward explicitness. I care for the various tragic, funny or awkward characters. It makes sense that I do: I’ve got to know them. I grow attached to these living, breathing people that could easily be followers of a contemporary variety of the Tao of Zen.

So it also makes sense that I’m sick of them dying for no clear reason to me. What I can safely say is that, no matter if death at one’s own hands is a cornerstone of Japanese culture or that the protagonist considers that “death is not the opposite of life but an innate part of it”, I much prefer reading what Murakami has to say about life and love than about suicide.

Thank you Daphne for lending me Norwegian Wood.

PS: There’s a lot of ’60s music in this book and many characters playing well-known pieces on guitars and pianos. Here’s a little playlist I found that would do nicely as a companion soundtrack:

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