Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson

So much of cyberpunk attempts to ape Gibson's style without realizing what makes it so special. Blade Runner is set in a broken world of dark grays and synthetic food. No sunlight, fake humans, broken society. The Matrix is a post-apocalyptic science fiction epic in which human life has been all but extinguished, taken over by humorless robots. Cyberpunk media nowadays often depicts human society on death's doorstep, hanging on by a thread. The world, and, by extension, its rulers—our human species—are already dead. We just don't know it yet.

William Gibson may be a cynical bastard, his bleak outlook sometimes bordering on dark humor, but his world is anything but dead. On the contrary, it's packed so full to the brim of living, writhing humanity that it jumps out at you on nearly every page.

He remembered the litter of the old man's chamber, the soiled humanity of it, the ragged spines of the old audio disks in their paper sleeves. One foot bare, the other in a velvet slipper.

This isn't the romantic life-begets-life, happy-go-lucky style of humanity, but the Dostoyevskian irrationality of the human animal on full display. Gibson's characters are hopeless drug addicts, violent malcontents, sexual deviants, empty shells filled with emotional scar tissue. But through all of this, they're intensely human. They're equal parts numbness and societal ennui as they are emotionally wild, angry, lustful. They make poor financial decisions on a whim, they get high before a big job with full knowledge that the comedown will affect their capabilities, they become emotional and, by extension, reckless; which puts them in great danger. Neuromancer bleeds humanity—a special sort of irony for a science fiction novel about the activities of an artificial intelligence, and one which was penned in the 1980s. And so much of what makes this novel special for me is an all-powerful artificial intelligence being faced with such irrationality. It's brilliant and impactful and caused a lengthy bout of introspection for me in which I identified certain episodes of my life in which I, myself, had acted so irrationally.

As unpredictable as the human animal is, the end tally of all of our actions often seem angled toward the same goal: Happiness. Fleeting as it is, impossible as our chase for sustained contentedness might be, we still reach for it. With hard drugs the night before a big job, with lustful, meaningless sex, with pointless consumerism.

Gibson's world is special in its richness, density, texture, and the layers present in each new locale our dirty, globe-hopping "protagonists" set foot: There's new tech on top of slightly out of date tech on top of corrugated iron, rust, broken pipes, and dirt which seem as if they're relics of the 19th century. Gibson's gift for layering his world is readily apparent and his scene-setting opening paragraphs are exquisite and unforgettable. His admirable quality as a writer of prose only enhances the impact of such stage-setting. It's a pleasure slipping into Gibson's world, and such is certainly why this novel continues to remain popular decades after its publishing.

The grungey hipsterism this book constantly displays is fully campy, almost corny, but somehow it all works. There's such an original feel represented by this world, its characters, and this plot. It's quite unlike anything else, science fiction or otherwise. Neuromancer deals with technology slipping its lead and running amok, and it deals with humanity's betrayal of itself through its own irrationality. The prescience of the former made it a noteworthy science fiction novel on its release; the latter makes a continually impactful work that is still widely read and enjoyed to this day.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) by Raymond Carver

It was a white moon and covered with scars. Any damn fool could imagine a face there.

As I made clear in my review for Will You Please Be Quiet, Please, I love Raymond Carver.

What he does is like magic. His combination of a compelling scene, genuine characters, and gruff voice always seem to come together as a sum more than their parts. It's amazing to me he can pack so much emotional payoff in sometimes as little as just ten pages, and using such spare prose. He's a master of subtlety; a master of the craft who's able to impart big feeling is small action and with few words.

This collection of short stories sees Carver regularly rely on the common motif of broken relationships. Right off the bat, Why Don't You Dance? is a great example of this, fashioning a poignant narrative on the life cycle of relationships in typically spare prose over a short length that has the same impact of stories exponentially longer. The majority of the stories present in this collection take place in and around the ruins and the downslide of relationships that are doomed to fail, or have already. These are something all adults have experienced at least once in their lives, and they have always left their mark on us and changed us somehow. Thus the experience of reading them hits all the more harder. Carver's characters are not good people; they're lazy, incompetent, petty, and bitter. But we can relate to that, too, because—if we're being honest with ourselves—we've all experienced such character flaws in ourselves, just like we've experienced doomed and broken relationships.

A small wax and sawdust log burned on the grate. A carton of five more sat ready on the hearth. He got up from the sofa and put them all in the fireplace. He watched until they flamed. Then he finished his soda and made for the patio door. On the way, he saw the pies lined up on the sideboard. He stacked them in his arms, all six, one for every ten times she had ever betrayed him.

Some of the images Carver creates here are far more striking than anything I recall in his previous collection (such as a boy seeing his mother kissing a man 'with the television going' while spying through a window, a mentally disabled man and his attachment to his bass pond, and others). He also has a penchant for disarming the reader with his subtle, everyday depictions of working class life, only to hit them with a burst of unexpected violence or tragedy near the end of the stories.

Carver's brilliant and this is masterful work. The best fiction is that which turns a mirror toward us, forcing us to admit to ourselves our flaws and idiosyncrasies, and become better, more self-aware people, and Raymond Carver's collections of short stories do just that.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

For Whom The Bell Tolls (1937) by Ernest Hemingway

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be.

There's so much to like in this book. Hemingway's writing is genuine; his knowledge feels authentic and he's choosing to depict a conflict that doesn't receive much attention, despite its outcome dictating the next several decades of Spanish history. The Spanish Civil War is viewed by many as a tragic lost cause, but the nuance present in both sides and the greater global conflict that was simmering at the time provides an intensely fertile ground for morally gray characters and factions and timeless, enthralling storytelling. The questions asked by this book are numerous, and nearly all of them are compelling: Is the lesser of two evils really worth fighting for, even if it means you're essentially fighting for evil? Which types of people would choose to fight, and which would abstain? Do two wrongs make a right? When, if ever, is it acceptable to answer atrocity with atrocity? How do human beings act and think when faced with death?

Hemingway's depiction of guerrilla warfare seems so authentic. There's a hurry-up-and-wait structure to the entire book that seems appropriate to what I understand of military campaigns, the popular adage that war is ninety-nine per cent boredom and one per cent sheer terror seems apt. The cast of characters throughout more than half of the book spend their time keeping a post, scouting, eating, and drinking, with not much of anything happening. The guerrilla nature of the war shows itself with the lack of discipline of several of the main character's comrades-in-arms; a man leaves his post to hunt a rabbit, for example. The left's guerrillas hide in caves in the woods, sustained mostly by their need not to fight for the right. The right, with their warplanes, and finely maintained cavalry, seem a tier above, rendering the conflict's appearance even more hopeless for the left. But any sympathetic drive to root for the underdogs is dampened by Hemingway's deft touch in painting both sides as being vulnerable to executing the same atrocities. Early in the narrative, a scenario recounted depicting the savage execution of suspected Fascist sympathizers is brutal enough to encourage us to pick a side only after having ingested a sizable boulder of salt.

War is ugly; civil war is uglier, and I applaud Hemingway for pulling no punches in its depiction. It'd have been too easy to have made one side too sympathetic, and Hemingway resists the urge, making the narrative that much more enticing and thought-provoking. For Whom The Bell Tolls is not a smash-the-fash treatise for unthinking banner-wavers. He further humanizes the Republicans and Communists; depicting those of the Party in their full bureaucratic sloth and incompetence, an image which would only become so popular and recognizable decades later. Both sides are riddled with human fallibility, both sides equal parts detestable and sympathetic. The fascists and the communists may be equally guilty of cruelty, ignorance, and malice on a grand scale, but at the end of the day they're made up of human beings, and the further you focus down to the individual, the more we recognize ourselves in them. The more we realize—hopefully, if our heads aren't so firmly planted within our asses—that we are all capable of the same atrocities, given the circumstances. That war is hell, and we are all its devils. Such an idea is well-worn and almost cliched in our modern day, but back in Hemingway's 1937, it must have been rather refreshing to read.

Hemingway in Spain

The more I've read of Hemingway, the more I've felt that there's a core flaw in the way he writes relationships. It makes an appearance in A Farewell to Arms, as it makes an appearance in For Whom the Bell Tolls. In both books, the core "romance" feels utterly shallow. On making contact with the guerrillas in the hills, Robert Jordan meets Maria, a beautiful young Spanish woman scarred by the conflict at the heart of the novel. The two fall for one another almost immediately, and instantly begin a tryst. When separating this relationship from context, it's ridiculous. There is no common interest, no connection between these two characters. Robert Jordan is a hardened, competent soldier, likely very attractive. Maria is a young, comely woman herself. That's it. That's the romance. There's no series of conversations in which the two get to know one another's morals and interests, what makes each tick, etc. They're just attracted to one another and they begin sleeping together. The relationship doesn't hold up to any scrutiny whatsoever, and I found myself bored to tears by it, rolling my eyes at each instance in which Jordan professes his undying love for his beau, whom he had just met 2 days ago and knew very little about.

However, when considering the context of the great conflict occurring around them, I believe the connection makes more sense. It's even remarked on by Jordan himself, partway through the novel in a conversation with Agustin; that their relationship occurs the way it does because they lack time to get to know one another. I think there's more to it than that, and I think the characters are aware of it. As with A Farewell to Arms, I began to view the relationship as two doomed people latching on to one another; the two of them shipwrecked and drowning sailors desperately grasping for driftwood after a storm. They aren't actually in love with one another, they're just desperate for something to hold onto; an endgame, something to look forward to, a prayer to chant to themselves in the quiet moments, when the war seems hopeless—"I will take Maria with me and marry her after the war... We'll go live somewhere quiet". Maria is Robert Jordan's candle in the dark, his vision of a better time once the conflict is over. His hope that life can go back to normal, that the conflict might end and he might settle quietly once more. A rationalization he tells himself, when knowing, just beneath the surface, that he is overwhelmingly likely to die in the hills at any moment. Such is the hopelessness of the conflict he finds himself embroiled in.

Whether Hemingway intends this to be the case, or whether he's just inept at depicting a meaningful, deep relationship between two human beings is anyone's guess. After reading The Sun Also Rises, I tend toward belief in the former rather than the latter. And, in any case, Hemingway is dead—both proverbially and literally—and his literature lives on for us to interpret as we will.

For Whom The Bell Tolls is a deep, nuanced view of civil war, of war in general, of soldiers and death and duty, and what all of those things force us to experience when we're faced with them. And, perhaps most compelling of all: The change they force in us if we're lucky enough to survive them. How we act in the face of death is part of what makes us human, after all. A human being's mortality tends to define us, and I think that's at the core of what Hemingway writes. Not just in this book, but all of his books.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

A Man Called Ove (2014) by Fredrik Backman

Ove, our narrator, is a grouchy old man, overly obsessed with following the rules. He's curmudgeonly and close-minded. However, he represents something all people should aspire to: He knows exactly who he is and what he wants.

He’s never understood young people who natter on about “finding themselves.” He used to hear that nonstop from all those thirty-year-olds at work. All they ever talked about was how they wanted more “leisure time,” as if that was the only point of working: to get to the point when one didn’t have to do it.

In this fashion he's somewhat of a mythical creature. Since a very early age Ove has consciously recognized his strengths: He's a handyman; good with machines and desiring of work that allows him to use his hands to fix a problem. So Ove needs very little to be happy; a job that allows him to diagnose problems, tinker, and arrive at solutions.

Ove is fallible in that he is a wholly concrete thinker. There is no room for the abstract in Ove's world. Everything he does makes sense on paper. The problem with this, of course, is that human beings often don't. So Ove finds himself struggling, particularly when dealing with people. I enjoyed this aspect of the book and, indeed, found its narrator to be compelling for this purpose. Backman continues to throw colorful characters at Ove, and it's enjoyable watching him respond. Ove could easily have fallen prey to cliché, but his touching moments when dealing with people who are worlds different from him made for some nice twists in Ove's story:

He’s silent. And then they both stand there, the fifty-nine-year-old and the teenager, a few yards apart, kicking at the snow. As if they were kicking a memory back and forth, a memory of a woman who insisted on seeing more potential in certain men than they saw in themselves. Neither of them knows what to do with their shared experience.

A Man Called Ove is cloying at times, and obviously shoots for for sentimentality, but the character of Ove's back is strong enough to bear the brunt of it, and Backman—earnest in what he's set out to do—is a skilled enough writer in his tuned-down, low-key way that it all somehow works without feeling like it's trying too hard:

“I feel so much loss, Ove. Loss, as if my heart was beating outside my body.” They stood in silence for a long time, with their arms around each other. And at long last she lifted her face towards his, and looked into his eyes with great seriousness. “You have to love me twice as much now,” she said. And then Ove lied to her for the second—and last—time: he said that he would. Even though he knew it wasn’t possible for him to love her any more than he already did.

A Man Called Ove is ultimately a very light read, but it's earnest and it's happy, and we could all use a bit of that these days. It doesn't quite reach the happy-go-lucky heights of something like Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, but it strives for it, and it doesn't strive poorly, and sometimes that's enough. Highly recommendable to pretty much everyone, easy to read, and competently crafted.

⭐⭐⭐

Abaddon's Gate (2013) (The Expanse, #3) by James S.A. Corey

There's a cardinal sin of fiction in which the writer (or in this case, writers) stop using their characters to work through questions and predicaments they find interesting, and begin using them to lecture their readers and pontificate instead on the solutions the writers believe to be correct. If I want to be instructed, I'll read non-fiction. When I pick up fiction, it's to exercise my empathy muscle and to gain valuable context to use via the lived experience of others, so that I may arrive at my own conclusions with as much information and emotional experience as possible. Fiction provides this in a way which non-fiction does not; it allows us to experience emotions that we'd never be in a position to experience in real life. I will likely never travel in a space ship. I will surely (hopefully?) never come into contact with alien technology. I will likely never be in a crew like the one in the Rocinante, nor will I experience a political conflict like the one between Earth and Mars. I read series like Expanse to try and sample how I might apply my own moral compass in reaction to such things. I don't read it to have the authors tell me how I should be solving the problems that arise within this world.

I bring this up because a strength of Corey's Expanse series is its characters. The crew of the Rocinante work really well together on the page. They have a really endearing dynamic, and each are memorable in their own way. They call forth a Kingesque vibe of the lovable losers; people who are altogether competent, but have suffered some downturn in their lives which have placed them on the path of the less fortunate. It's enjoyable riding along with them and watching them grow. They feel like friends.

Unfortunately there are notable instances in this book in which certain characters stop talking like themselves, and start speaking with the voice of the authors. You can feel the writers' hands on the scales as they artificially manipulate dialogue and character interaction to make a point, which is never good. Nobody wants to feel like they're reading propaganda, and at times that's what Expanse feels like. Of course, some great writers do this quite often, but James S.A. Corey—in my opinion—are not skilled enough writers to pull it off in a way which feels natural. Done wrong, it's crippling. And in Expanse, it's jarring and immersion-breaking, causing me to wonder where the characters I've known and grown to like have gone, and why the authors are choosing so obviously to insert their own voices in these characters' mouths. Characters will pull a complete one-eighty on a decision they've just made in less than a page, and suddenly say something like "wow, jeez, I am such an asshole! That was wrong of me!". This is clearly not a natural piece of character growth—it's the author appearing within the story, and letting the reader know they think their character is being an asshole and is wrong. True change in a deeply held opinion does not occur like this in human beings; people will often break before they bend. True change in opinion requires catastrophe, pain, tragedy, and James S.A. Corey do not seem to understand that. When things like this occur in the story, it breaks the characters completely, rendering them flimsy cardboard cut-outs of the human beings they used to be to us. And it's frequently glaringly obvious why the writers are doing it—They want to speak from on high to their readers by creating a contrived situation in which their character does something the writers find distasteful, and then continuing by lecturing their readers on how wrong it is through the mouth of said character. It's insulting and amateurish. Allow your characters to be human, and grant your readers the benefit of the doubt in that they might read the situation correctly. The best fiction presents complex, inspired problems and allows its characters to approach solving these problems from various different positions. If the writer is writing fiction to teach their readers a lesson, their fiction is probably shit.

Although I do enjoy the characters when they're themselves and not James S.A. Corey, Expanse's strength has always been in the fresh world Corey have created. It's nice reading a space opera which preserves the laws of physics, rather than handwaves them away with technology so advanced it may as well be magic (looking at you, Mass Effect). Expanse's political dynamic between Earth, Mars, and the belt is engrossing and intriguing, and it plays off of very human aspects such as prejudice, fear of the unknown, and greed. It all works really well and it's the single strongest aspect of this series that keeps me coming back.

In addition to their falling victim to speaking through their characters' mouths, Corey are not very skilled writers of prose. Maybe this is just me donning my book-snob hat for a go at the new and popular thing, but there are notable instances of clumsy prose that seem, to my ear, to require editing (and if anybody's an expert on shit prose, it's me, lemme tell ya).

It was the smart thing. The wise one. He was neither smart nor wise.

 

An hour or two with some structural steel and a couple welders and the place could be almost defensible. He hoped it wouldn’t need to be. Except that he hoped it would.

Egad.

I can excuse some shoddy sentences if the book is strongly plotted, and Expanse usually is. However I've noticed, particularly in Abaddon's Gate, that the authors have begun to press a thumb on the scale in their plotting in the same groan-inducing way they tend to speak through their characters' mouths in order to lecture their readers. There are multiple instances in Abaddon's Gate in which the plot is clearly manipulated by impossibly coincidental circumstances that challenge the reader's suspension of disbelief in order to get the plot to where the writers clearly want it to go. Characters will make unlikely jumps to conclusions in order to facilitate the decision the writers want them to make. Characters will show up just in the nick of time to save someone's life.

There's one particularly egregious instance at about the midway point of the book in which one of the key character's lives is at stake. At first I congratulated Corey, as killing this character would have taken admirable writing cojones, and the waves created from the character's death would have significantly impacted all of the characters in the story, thus changing several major characters and putting them on a darker turn and presenting them with new challenges that I'd have found fascinating, and further propelling them down the road of change.

But it doesn't happen. Instead of being a fantastic, growth-inducing moment, it's played for a cheap thrill, because ultimately, that's the kind of story Expanse is. When the chips are down, Corey make it clear that their story has no real aspirations of affecting its readers in a profound way. Instead, it becomes a schlocky, disposable network television soap opera. A character who has no reason to spare their victim suddenly hesitates for no reason, then another character shows up, coincidentally, just in the nick of time, and prevents the murder from occurring. It's really too bad, because such a turn would have been really intriguing.

This sort of thing happens regularly, and it's disappointing. This series was originally created as a world in which to set a roleplaying game, and it shows, because worldbuilding is the only thing it does truly well. Expanse could have been so much more. It could have been ambitious; the framework (its worldbuilding and character construction) is in place for it to become a space opera with literary aspirations, dedicated to exploring big ideas and challenging the humanity of its characters. Instead, it relies on flimsy and artificial character turns and clichéd, convenient plot turns. It leans too heavily on these ultimately disposable turns that serve only to get the reader's gander up for a dozen pages or so, before dissipating in a typically wimpy manner common to most low-effort fiction. Thus it ends up affecting nothing at all, and the entire series is relegated to an airport-read-for-nerds that will be forgotten just a few weeks after the reader has finished consuming it. 

Expanse is a sugary treat, one which is enjoyable at the moment, but ultimately not satiating in the same way a hearty meal such as A Song of Ice and Fire aspires to, and is. Despite what Corey frequently say, it has no true aspirations to telling a human story and affecting its readers. It just likes to think that it does. And so Expanse is, to me, one of the few works of fiction that makes for a better television series than it does a novel series.

⭐

Kafka on the Shore (2006) by Haruki Murakami

Ah, Murakami-san. I've quite liked some of your work, but the more surreal of your novels have always seemed to fall flat for me. 

Kafka on the Shore is perhaps the most surreal novel of his I've read, and it's trash. I'm sure that statement will ruffle some feathers, and I'm sure some will simply retort that I 'didn't get it', but in my opinion Kafka on the Shore is utter nonsense with very little substance and almost nothing beyond some unique imagery to make it a worthwhile endeavor to carve through its near-500 pages of bullshit.

Reading Kafka on the Shore is like meeting an oddball at a party. A skinny fellow at the snack stand with dyed blue hair and wearing a smart blue blazer and tie, sipping a non-alcoholic selzer-water and eating fritos dipped in honey mustard. What a curious fellow, you think, he must be interesting! You chat him up about all manner of things; turns out he's actually a lepidopterist. Whoa, never met one of those before! He doesn't drink, nor use recreational drugs, because he believes they're poison and wants to keep his body and mind sharp. He has incredibly deep knowledge about things you've never even considered. His job is to manage inventories of cold film storage for classic TV shows, so he spends his days around golden age television cans and regales you with odd stories about Car 54 and Gunsmoke and how TV just ain't how it used to be. You take down his number and want to hang out with him to hear more about these things you've never thought about; to learn more about the dark corners of life experience you've never even considered.

You hang out with this individual a few more times, learning more and more. But eventually, something starts to bother you. Beyond these oddball pursuits, you begin to get a sense that there's just not much there. You eventually learn he simply hates the taste of beer, and he actually does smoke marijuana every so often. He doesn't actually collect butterflies yet, though he is interested in the hobby. At the moment he just likes to read a lot of Nabokov and finds the hobby a fascinating affectation, so he seeks to emulate it. His vocation is not something he's actually passionate or romantic about—he simply works part time on contract at a warehouse that happens to store these classic TV film canisters, and he's caught a glimpse of them before.

You realize he's just a guy. A regular dude. There's really not all that much special about him. He goes to work, he comes home, he pays his bills. The things he recognizes as being cool are pretty interesting, you admit, but he doesn't have such a deep, compelling knowledge of them after all.

He has nothing to say beyond, "Hey man, check this out. Isn't this pretty cool?".

That's Murakami's fiction to me.

Haruki Murakami

On the surface Murakami's work seems profound, different, fresh, compelling. But when you dig a bit deeper, there's very little actual substance there. Murakami's fiction is very light on story and humanity, and very heavy on imagery that doesn't actually say much at all. The more I read his stuff, the more I suspect he's an utter charlatan, carefully crafting his fiction so that what you're reading appears to be the tip of the iceberg when, in reality, it's a cardboard prop painted blue floating along on the sea, depthless.

Writing fiction is a strange beast. In my experience, it feels almost like reverse-dreaming. Instead of sleeping and passively experiencing random imagery from your brain, you are drawing that imagery from your brain and putting it down in order to augment whatever story you're planning on telling. You're actively sorting through your own lived experience and pulling pieces from your subconscious to shape your story and your characters in a compelling, genuine manner. Murakami does this exceptionally well. He's completely honest with himself, and the imagery which seems to fascinate him is often quite enchanting. Often times the quirks he's depicting are enough to carry the scene, alone, and his workmanlike prose facilitates this perfectly by getting out of the way and letting the images take center stage.

But there's just not much else there. Murakami is a poor storyteller. His characters are frequently flat and seem to make arbitrary, nonsensical decisions. Many of his novels feature contrived conflict that isn't really all that interesting, or (as is the case in Kafka), no conflict at all. His pacing is often too blown out because he needs to give himself such space to indulge in these episodes of wading into the odd imagery and scenarios he finds so fascinating. Further—and perhaps most egregious—at times he treats his fiction as if it's little more than an avenue from which to explore his fetishistic interests; eg. young girls' breasts, or being masturbated by your sister. If you're hitting me with your kinks, you better be saying something important with them. If you're not using them as a means to a storytelling end that's going to make your fiction more thematically impactful, then you're just engaging in literary masturbation. It's leaving me feeling dirty, like the writer is pulling a Louis C.K. and sitting in the corner jacking off and I'm standing there in the locked room, forced to watch.

The more I read Murakami, the more it feels like his fiction is just a vehicle from which he imparts ideas he finds interesting. That's not a problem, really. The best writers also do this—George R.R. Martin cannot stop depicting romantic hearts stuck in cynical worlds, Ernest Hemingway is utterly entranced with the idea of death and how each mortal man and beast faces it, James Joyce is obsessed with Catholicism and Irish politics. What Murakami lacks, though, and what's so severely damaging to his work, is that there's no storytelling foundation on which all of this imagery might sit, rendering such imagery ultimately meaningless. Martin's characters are so human you'll swear they're standing right next to you, Hemingway's devastating plotting will break you for a full week, Joyce's prose and humor will make you feel the love and the passion of his characters' so deeply your chest cavity will burn with their fervor. Murakami, however, only has his imagery and not much else. His books are a set of really nice windows and skylights sitting on a lawn, with no house into which they might be installed. While they might have augmented a proper story enough to propel it into the realm of profundity, they have zero utility. Yeah, those are some great windows, but who the hell needs just a window? Alone, they're useless. Just like Murakami's imagery.

Kafka on the Shore is a nonsensical story with vast pretentions of grandeur. Murakami gives us two empty vessels to follow; an angsty, horny teenager and a developmentally disabled old man. The teenager reads as if he's written to be intelligent and interesting, though I found him mostly petulant and boring. The old man was the more likable of the two, and his quirk was something I found endearing and interesting, but ultimately not much is done with it. The real problem is that neither of these characters have any concrete conflict driving them forward. There's very little forcing them to change, and so we meander through the plot with them, never fully invested in their struggles, never fully caring about who they are. Murakami hits you with some shit, sure—an incest fetish, some shocking depictions of violence against animals, and various bits of nonsense I find impossible to take seriously (building a magic flute, oh my!)—but without a concrete story to carry it along, it all felt meaningless and silly, like a Jackson Pollock, except it's just random house paint spilled on a driveway rather than something constructed on an actual canvas.

If you enjoy the surreal and aren't a big stickler for, you know, actual storytelling? Maybe you'll like this book. I hated it and I'm eager to move on from it to something else.

⭐

Mystic River (2001) by Dennis Lehane

What if I'm wrong?

One of the most blessedly introspective questions in existence; intensely important to personal growth and paramount to properly balancing our interaction with other human beings. One which prevents us from committing mistakes everywhere on the spectrum from minor social faux pas to great atrocity.

What if I'm wrong?

A sobering, humbling question to ask oneself. One which must be asked—or, at least, certainly deserves to be asked more than it is.

Not a popular question, of course. What if I'm wrong? douses all of our haughty, unearned self-righteousness like sand on a grease fire. Four words which heave us from our high horse and dump us right back in the muck with The Rabble™, one which no longer lets us confide in simple saying "people are stupid". It sets us back to square one and takes away a great deal of our strenuously accrued self-worth. Self-worth which, had we been looking in the mirror in the first place, we'd have realized has been built on a foundation of wet sand. Our great castles of ourselves, constructed with muck and lurching sickly to one side, about to collapse, only to be shored up with more mud and bullshit. We look at it and tell ourselves it's Neuschwanstein. Look! Look at how intelligent I am. How righteous and morally good, how altruistic. I am never unjustly unkind, I do not make mistakes. The people I hurt and speak down to deserve it.

I am not wrong.

Jimmy Marcus knows it. He'll make this right, because he's the only one who can. The police are too hamstrung by red tape and ineptitude, they're too slow and too imprecise. What Jimmy fails to realize is that his must is a want. Jimmy wants to quench his grief with violence and vigilante justice, and he can't bring himself to stop and properly analyze things around him, because he's too clouded with tragedy.

This is the crux of the novel. The blind spots we sport as individuals, and how they're remedied via added perspective. People are irrational. Often they are stupid, petty, and violent; they kill and hurt others for the worst reasons. And the actions of the book serve only to reinforce this idea. But even considering this, our only cure for these tendencies of self-delusion are via cool self-critique, often with the help of those same irrational, stupid, petty, and violent peers and loved ones. Lone wolves often exhibit an inherent weakness in that they fall prey to believing their own bullshit. There are no checks and balances, and they sometimes make heinous mistakes which may have been remedied with just give more minutes of honest self-critique or added perspective. But such hard looks in the mirror are so much less desirable than a flimsy sense of self-righteous fury.

Being alone does not strengthen our resolve, it merely removes all the external influences which temper it, refine it. Being alone removes important blocks in the foundation of our decision-making process and gives us a false sense of confidence that this solution is the right one. It's not that there are no flaws or no better hypotheses when we are alone, it's that we are blind to them. Like a hive mind, our processing power shrinks when we have no other human beings to present us with alternate solutions or flaws in our perception.

But oftentimes, we don't want to see them. That makes it all so difficult. No, we want the bullshit solution. It's the easiest, the quickest, and, most importantly, it's the most satisfying. I don't want to know that the fine nuances of someone else's lived experience makes their opinions and their actions just as valid as my own, I want them to be a stupid, misguided fool with bad ideas—bad ideas which I can blast down with my own vitriol. They are in the wrong, you see. They are so in the wrong, and I am so hurt, that I am justified in committing violence against them.

Brendan knew about the truth. In most cases, it was just a matter of deciding whether you wanted to look it in the face or live with the comfort of ignorance and lies. And ignorance and lies were often underrated. Most people Brendan knew couldn't make it through the day without a saucerful of ignorance and a side of lies.

 

The bullshit solution. I get you, Jimmy Marcus. I wish I didn't, but I get you.

Mystic River is, above all else, a tragedy. The moving parts present are phenomenally well-orchestrated by Lehane. His character writing is superb; particularly his construction of Dave Boyle, the emotionally stunted crux on which the fates of the novel weave their tapestry. Dave's inner dialogue toward the end of the book felt, to me, like a genuine depiction of mental illness. Dave Boyle isn't a deranged lunatic, looking to burn Gotham and gleefully manipulate the bat man in his games. He's not the cannibalistic professor hiding behind a sheen of aristocracy and education in order to better facilitate his heinous crimes... Dave's just a guy. He's a guy with a wife and kid, a guy struggling to do better, struggling to be someone good but hopelessly hamstrung by past trauma. And god, it works. Because who hasn't been there? Who hasn't felt frustrated and inadequate, who hasn't genuinely wished to be better, more altruistic, more giving and loving, a better parent and a better significant other? Dave's struggles are a magnitude above anything I've ever dealt with, of course, because I've been fortunate in ways that he hasn't been. But nevertheless, Dave is someone everyone can identify with. Dave is universal. Life breaks us all, in the end—and sometimes in the during. We are all broken creatures with our own inadequacies and our own past trauma, and we are all trying to do better. We will all die trying to do better. We're all Dave. We're just not as Dave as Dave is.

I've never been that great a fan of Lehane's hard-boiled street-guy voice, but in Mystic River, particularly, it seems a bit more restrained. Lehane's capable of producing some great sentences and some phenomenal character writing, and this helps buffer the feeling that, sometimes, he's trying just a bit too hard to be the cool guy writing a cool narrative.

He woke up with the dream draining thickly from the back of his brainpan, the lint and fuzz of it clinging to the undersides of his eyelids and the upper layer of his tongue. He kept his eyes closed as the alarm clock kept beeping, hoping that it was merely a new dream, that he was still sleeping, that the beeping only beeped in his mind.

 

The harsh light above them caught her face, and Sean could see what she'd look like when she was much older - a handsome woman, scarred by wisdom she never asked for.

He wanted to go on for hours. He wanted someone to listen to him and to understand that speech wasn't just about communicating ideas or opinions. Sometimes, it was about trying to convey whole human lives. And while you knew even before you opened your mouth that you'd fail, somehow the trying was what mattered. The trying was all you had.

It's not pretty, but ultimately the story goes where it needs to. I think most readers will be struck with a sense of, "Oh, shit... Please don't do this. Don't go where I think you're going..." It's fairly obvious the route the story will take by about the halfway mark, but the way Lehane brings it there shows skill. His dialogue is excellent and the inner monologues of his characters are consistently enjoyable. Their grief and their anger is palpable. None of it feels melodramatic or clichéd, which is a significant accomplishment considering how easy it is for the writer to go overboard from tragedy to melodrama.

Please note: Spoilers follow the image.

Ultimately, I felt the whodunit was rendered a bit unsatisfying by the conclusion of the novel. I had figured from about the mid-point of the book that Brendan's brother Ray was the one who had killed Katie, but I suspected his motive had been to keep his brother—the sole person in his life he loves, and his caretaker and sole confidant—near him, and to keep him from running away with Katie to Las Vegas. Perhaps this is still the case, but it's never outright stated by Ray or the police investigating the crime. It's left for the reader to infer, and the characters investigating the crime merely chalk it up to a random killing; two psychopathic teenagers out to shoot somebody for no good reason. I'm not sure if Lehane expects us to infer Ray's motives or not, but I found the in-text explanation to be relatively unsatisfying.

Additionally, I felt Brendan's and Katie's relationship could have used a bit of added backstory. What was it Katie saw in Brendan? Brendan in Katie? Was it merely that Brendan wanted an escape from his awful family situation? That doesn't really fly for Katie; she has a large family who loves her and she has a future. So what was it that attracted these two people so strongly to one another?

Ultimately, these are relatively minor gripes. Mystic River is a really good book. It's strongly themed and it leaves you with questions to gnaw on, but it's also a superb slow-burn mystery-thriller with well-defined characters which, once it gets going in its second act, doesn't really take its foot off the gas.

Lehane's good. He knows how to entertain, but perhaps more importantly, he has ideas and he has questions. I look forward to reading more of his stuff.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Don Quixote (1605) by Miguel de Cervantes

Don Quixote is an odd book. Often considered the first modern novel, it reads more like a collection of short stories. While there are a series of strong overarching themes which permeate the book, there's not really any general overarching story. The titular Don and his companion Sancho Panza travel the land, writing wrongs, making silly mistakes, and getting into various amusing hijinks. And, really, that's enough to carry things.

Cervantes is, above all else, a superb writer of comedy. His dialogue, double entendres, and knack for writing physical comedy are the most consistently excellent aspect of Don Quixote. In many cases it reads like a far more modern comedy; the slapstick is constant and always humorous and the comedy, in general, never feels forced or routine. Above all else, this book is funny, and that's not something you can say about many 17th century classics.

None of the comedy would be possible, of course, without an adequate translation from the original Spanish. Edith Grossman's translation is more than up to the task; it reads flowingly and beautifully and includes excellent footnotes illuminating Cervantes' clever wordplay in the original Spanish that is lost in the English text. So natural is Grossman's work that I would regularly forget that I was reading a translation at all, until I came across a bit that needed to be rectified with these footnotes. This is such a superb feat of translation that I have grown to consider this to be the best translation of literature I have read thus far. It's utterly fantastic. I can't say enough positive things about Grossman's work here.

Don Quixote is popularly known as a celebration of romanticism, but often reads quite the opposite. Quixote is responsible for various damages to property and grievous injury among the poor people he comes into contact with, including the wanton killing of several sheep in a shepherd's flock, the disruption of funeral rites resulting in a peasant's leg being broken (which, during the time period, may in extreme cases be as good as a death sentence if it removes a peasant's ability to work the land), and other such instances. I found myself disliking Don Quixote early, and found these stories to be an example of why living a make-believe life with your head in the clouds is a terrible thing, rather than an admirable quality. Quite different than what I expected, and the reputation this book has.

Sancho Panza, representing the practical realist, quickly became my favorite character. Although he appears otherwise, he's more intelligent than Quixote and often goes along with the titular character's hijinks in full awareness of their ridiculousness, if only to garner a flask of wine as a result. He's a lovable scoundrel, whereas I view Don Quixote a moronic, mentally ill, misled figure. I understand that that's part of Quixote's charm, but it didn't work for me. Perhaps I'm too cynical to appreciate the whimsy in the moon-brained romantic, and thus instead gravitate towards the ill-bred rogue.

With this book, Cervantes reminds me of a 400-year old Quentin Tarantino; a man so hopelessly in love with his favorite medium that it bleeds through his work, constantly making itself known. There are an endless number of references to romantic renaissance fiction from years past within these pages, works on works that I've never heard of, all helpfully cited in the footnotes of this edition. I found it amusing that Don Quixote, in its contemporary period, was a strongly influenced spin-off and commentary of works already in existence, despite its existence to us as a ground-breaking work of originality. Also amusing is the fact that Cervantes always planned the book to be concluded at the end of its first part, and only found himself driven to write the second part when unofficial sequels to his initial great work were being produced. The second part is a bit of a departure in style, but stands up to the first, in my opinion. It makes me curious as to the quality of said unofficial sequels that were produced.

This isn't my favorite book, but it was a whole heap of a lot more enjoyable than I expected it to be, and I'm wholly unsurprised that it maintains its reputation, more than four centuries after its inception.

⭐⭐⭐

The Drop (2014) by Dennis Lehane

The Drop reads pacily and feels more like a novella than a full novel, despite its multiple viewpoints.

Not a huge fan of Lehane's voice in this novel. It reminded me a bit of King's, but felt at times it was trying a bit too hard to affect a gritty, street-wise tone and some of the clipped sentences and slang felt too how-do-you-do-fellow-Bostonians to me. The prose in general was workmanlike, though Lehane is more than capable of pulling off a great sentence when he wants to:

Happiness destroyed was worth wrapping your arms around because it always hugged you back.

What I found Lehane to be best at was his characters. Bob jumped off the page for me as a subtle, thoughtful man who was far more on the inside than he outwardly appeared. His dedication to his faith made sense and the nuance with which Lehane writes him prevents him from spiraling into Catholic cliché. Bob is plagued by guilt and self-flagellates in the form of limiting his interaction with other people, effectively enforcing a crippling loneliness on himself, denying himself the key relationships that human beings require in order to survive. This isn't made clear to the reader immediately until he's contrasted on the page by Torres, another seemingly devote Catholic. As we get to know Torres we realize that his devotion to his church seems little more than lip service. He sins, confesses, and takes communion, never really displaying any guilt or regret in the way Bob does. Bob prevents himself from confessing and taking communion out of a deep guilt, and constantly feels the pressure of his religion, feeling he does not deserve to be forgiven for what he's done. I liked the depth.

The Drop is an enjoyable novel, perhaps a bit scattered between its many viewpoint characters (for its size, at least), but its explosive climax and twist more than make up for its shortcomings. An entertaining read with some sufficient character depth to keep your mind satiated.

⭐⭐⭐

Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker

It's been a while since I last read a book that was so undone simply by its own popularity.

Stoker relies so strongly on the air of mystery to carry Dracula's experience, and the very fact that this book has become such a pop culture phenomenon completely undoes that aspect of its strength. Everyone reading this book already knows the answers to the most tantalizing questions Stoker poses: they know Dracula is a vampire, they know his castle is supernatural, they know Lucy's odd ailment is due to having her blood sucked. Surely Stoker knew that such mysteries would create fear and unsettlement in his contemporary audiences, but modern readers—long inundated with the Twilights and the Blades and the Interview with the Vampires and the Castlevanias—are already well-informed about (and enamored with) vampirism in action and horror films of various sorts and will be able to pick up on this stuff nearly immediately. This isn't the first time I've considered such a disarmament of a novel's strengths in plotting by pop culture, and such a thing continues to fascinate me.

The book's titular Count Dracula

Regardless of the fact that this novel has been innately spoiled, I was able to appreciate Stoker's careful crafting of the mystery from a more objective point-of-view, and I respect how he pushed his contemporary readers forward through the plot by asking them what, exactly, was going on here. It's skillfully rendered and impeccably paced; drip-feeding new reveals to the reader. But I couldn't help being robbed of this enjoyment by being easily able to guess what was happening, and so the book subjectively loses this core aspect of its quality and renders much of its investigation as much more dry and rote than it should be. These reveals are robbed of their impact and thus the new discoveries of Van Helsing and co. feel more like busywork than like the new and surprising bits of information they ought to be.

Many readers say that Dracula was their introduction to classic literature in general, and to Victorian literature more specifically, and I think it makes a superb bridge into both for the newer reader. Stoker's prose is surprisingly clean and easily readable, yet still aesthetically pleasing. This kind of novel perhaps represents the bridge from the earlier, stuffier, more labyrinthine prose of high Victorian literature into the more easily consumable, yet still pleasing modernist literature I tend to love so much. I like Dickens as much as the next guy, but he does get a bit long in the tongue at times, which often threatens to undo his propensity for sheer prosaic beauty.

Stoker's prose doesn't quite hit Dickensian highs, but it more than gets the job done for me:

There was a deliberate voluptuousness that was both thrilling and repulsive. And as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal till I could see in the moonlight the moisture. Then lapped the white, sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited. 

 

Never did tombs look so ghastly white. Never did cypress, or yew, or juniper so seem the embodiment of funeral gloom. Never did tree or grass wave or rustle so ominously. Never did bough creak so mysteriously, and never did the far-away howling of dogs send such a woeful presage through the night. 

 

The tomb in the daytime, and when wreathed with fresh flowers, had looked grim and gruesome enough; but now some days afterwards, when the flowers hung lank and dead, their whites turning to rust and their greens to browns; when the spider and the beetle had resumed their accustomed dominance; when time-discoloured stone, and dust-encrusted mortar, and rusty, dank iron, and tarnished brass and clouded silver-plating gave back the feeble glimmer of a candle, the effect was more miserable and sordid than could have been imagined. It conveyed irresistibly the idea that life - animal life - was not the only thing that could pass away. 

I've always been a fan of the epistolary structure, though I'm not quite sure why. Perhaps having everything strictly segregated by chapter appeals to the overly orderly, anal being inside of me. While I enjoy this 'found footage' style of novel, I do have to say that Stoker's use of voice between his viewpoint characters left a lot to be desired for me.

Bram Stoker

The novel begins very enjoyably as we're thrust into Jonathan Harker's view. His voice seems appropriately proper and Victorian, and the mystery we're confronted with is relatively fresh, atmospheric, and intriguing. Harker is somewhat relatable as being a stranger-in-a-strange place. Later in the novel, the reader moves on to the other male characters, such as Sewell, Arthur, and Quincy Morris who seem to share an identically proper, buttoned-up, curiously professional characterization to Harker, despite the new characters being from drastically different places in life; Sewell being a physician, Arthur being Lord Goldalming, and Quincey Morris being from Texas. Surely the last of them, at least, would feel remarkably different? The two female characters of Mina and Lucy suffer similar lack of differentiation—the lines and actions of one would suit the other perfectly. And so the characters felt, in general, unremarkable to me and I did not feel myself empathizing with them, since they did not feel unique to me.

The one character safe from this criticism is, of course, Dr. Van Helsing, our resident kooky mad scientist-type. I found myself picturing him as sort of a Christopher Lloyd type from Back to the Future. An eccentric, friendly quack doctor on whose breadth of knowledge regarding the supernatural you can count. His optimistic, hopeful manner was apparent to me and was a nice change of mouthfeel from the deliberately dark and Gothic touches residing throughout the rest of the story. 

I found his dialogue to be particularly brilliant; I enjoy that you can hear just a touch of Van Helsing's Dutch accent in his dialogue:

It is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and troubles. And yet when King Laugh come, he make them all dance to the tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall, all dance together to the music that he make with that smileless mouth of him. Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears come, and like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too great, and we break. But King Laugh he come like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again, and we bear to go on with our labor, what it may be.

This sort of dialogue crafting is brilliantly subtle—only slight errors here and there—but just deliberate enough to affect the voice of the character. I really enjoyed the dialogue throughout Dracula and found it to be one of Stoker's strengths. He handles others, such as the cockney London working class accent, with similar skill. This is not something common to writers of even the greatest horror literature, so I appreciated it here.

Outside of Van Helsing, of course, I found little to differentiate these characters and thus was forced instead to rely instead on the atmosphere and the norms of Victorian London to carry me along, which, most of the time, was more than enough. Stoker is adept at painting a scene, especially those drenched in Gothic horror tropes, and I enjoyed the novel mostly just for that.

So, while I found some of Dracula to be wanting, I did like a lot of it, and I believe its structure and the ease at which its prose can be read makes it a fantastic introduction both to Victorian literature and to classic literature in general. I'll likely recommend it to new readers of the classics quite regularly from here on out, but its flaws keep it from sitting the pantheon next to my very favorite novels.

It's just a shame that so much of Dracula happens to be undone by its own popularity. But it's hard to hold that against it.

⭐⭐⭐