Review: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (2009)

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
Random House, 2009, 368 pp.

Rating: C

In 1974, all of New York watched Philippe Petit walk a tight rope between the two towers of the World Trade Center. Let the Great World Spin tells the stories of an assortment of characters in New York at the time, as the event is always present in the background of what is going on in the narrative. Although the novel would have accomplished the same thing without the shared event of the tight rope walker, it creates a good context for this award winning novel.

There are two rather key reasons why I don't feel like this novel is worth all of the accolades being heaped on it. First and most important, the prose is pretty rough at times, but inconsistently so. There are entire chapters where I could actually find myself getting lost in the way McCann writes, but others where I wanted to tear pages out of the book. His style varies from section to section, even borrowing fellow Irishman James Joyce's hyphenated dialogue style occasionally (but not always). It actually makes the thing come across as purely disjointed rather than of any originality.

To make things even harder to get behind, the varied cast of characters is really quite stale. The problem with any novel that has too many characters and not a very high page count is that rarely is there enough time to get to know any of the characters well enough for them to really become interesting or memorable. This turns out to be exactly the case in Let the World Spin, as the characters are not only lacking the necessary fleshing out, but are pretty much entirely generic. There is a hooker who is smarter than she looks, a radical Irish monk, an artist couple that seems to have domestic troubles, and a mother mourning her dead son. It really seems like McCann pulled the characters out of some list of generic archetypes and tried to make them interesting.

Starting with generic characters isn't necessarily a recipe for failure, but the key is to put some kind of twist on the characters. There needs to be something, as the novel progresses, that will cause these characters to change. This is pretty much a requirement for any piece of art that considers itself character based. In television, if a show lasts for six or seven seasons and the main characters in the beginning are the exact same as they are at the close of the show, that's a shitty show that had no business going on for that long. It's much the same as a novel. Although a book doesn't quite have the amount of time to develop characters in the way a long-running television show does, and in that sense is a more difficult task, it is absolutely necessary for a novel to accomplish this to be successful as a character piece.

All problems aside, the novel isn't a total failure; there were definitely times when I found myself engaged in the individual stories here. There were some, like the story of the mourning mother, that were poorly written and bored me to tears, but others, like that of the Irish monk trying to get by in New York, that turned out interesting and had a couple of twists that I didn't see coming. If there is anything about his novel that saves it from being crap, it is some interesting moments and a strong overall story to tell. In the end, though, the wooden characters and infuriatingly inconsistent prose make Let the Great World Spin an average novel at best. Definitely not deserving of any major awards.

Review: Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (2002/2005)

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
Kodansha, 2002 (JP)/2005 (EN), 656 pp.

Rating: A+

Not since reading Jack Kerouac's On the Road in high school has a single novel managed to so drastically alter my "to-read" pile in one fell swoop. I remember fondly the days of going through just about every novel Kerouac ever wrote one after another over the course of the six months following my first experience with the Beat generation; it was the kind of novel that changed the way I look at literature. Kafka on the Shore has managed to somehow recreate that sensation I had only assumed was a result of being young and impressionable. Murakami proves that books can still affect me that profoundly, as in the seven weeks or so that have passed since reading this, I have read nine of Murkami's books.

Kafka on the Shore is best described as a surrealist bildungsroman. Kafka Tomura is a young boy whose mother ran away with his sister when he is very young. He is sick of his absent artist father, and decides to pack up and hit the road. It doesn't seem that the sole reason of Kafka's adventure is to find his lost family, but any young boy who misses his mother and his sister is going to try to find them everywhere he looks.

What starts as a simple idea for an adventure becomes all the more complex when the secondary storyline starts to unfold in the form of weird reports about an incident in Japan in World War II in which a group of school children suddenly collapsed while collecting flowers. People around the incident are interviewed about the circumstances, including the school teacher who was unaffected by the strange phenomenon. To make things more interesting, another storyline pops up featuring a slightly intellectually disabled old man called Nakata who has the gift of being able to communicate with cats. As an additional source of income from his government benefits, he runs his own business of using his gift to find missing cats.

It all starts out like three separate stories that don't really have much to do with one another, but two stories quickly become one and the two remaining move rapidly towards one another through the course of what is apparently a quite lengthy book. I was really surprised to look up the page count of this, which I read electronically, as I read it over the course of only three days and barely took breaks. It seemed to just fly by for me, as I have not been so engrossed in a novel in years.

The big question of the story revolves around Kafka himself and his family. He meets a young girl called Sakura who he decides must be his sister, despite all the evidence on the contrary. Not long after, he starts to frequent a library where he decides the manager, Miss Saeki, must be his mother. To help him along, he strikes up a friendship with Oshima, the only other employee at the library. Oshima is a great character with a lot of depth and interest, who manages to come across as very real despite being very uncommon.

Although this is the kind of novel that suggests a lot but leaves the reader to decide for him or herself as to what is really going on, I think the brilliance of the book is that it doesn't really matter what the answers are. Some may be frustrated by a long journey that doesn't really have an end, but I think that those people may be missing a key point. It doesn't matter whether or not Sakura or Miss Saeki are actually Kafka's missing family; the point is that a young boy who misses his family will always try to find his family everywhere he is. No matter who he had met on his travels, they would have been the family in his head if they even vaguely resembled the age of his lost loved ones. It's about a young boy who balances a childlike optimism with a profound need to be loved by his mother and his sister, even if they left.

Never have I read a novel that has actually made me feel just about the entire array of emotions possible. There were some moments that had me laughing to the point of tears. There were others that were so sad that I had a hard time not tearing up, and at least a few times that were so sexy I was kind of uncomfortable. Anyone who has read the novel will also be familiar with a particular scene that made me furious, and just about stop reading the book. It's a hard book to read in that way, but in another, it would have been impossible for me not to continue at that point. It is a brilliant novel, and a classic, but not for the faint of heart. Be prepared to laugh, cry, scream, and, let's be honest, masturbate.

Blog relaunch.

I'd like to thank anyone who has decided to bear with me while this blog gets transmogrified into something new. After thinking about it a while, and re-discovering my love of regular old fiction while on vacation, I decided I would turn this blog into something where I review modern contemporary fiction-- pretty much anything published since the recent turn of the century (though I may occasionally review things a bit older than that if they are earlier works of current writers). There will be no discrimination based on indies or big publishers-- I'm just going to be writing about whatever the hell strikes my fancy. The name is in reference to the Haruki Murakami novel Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Reading Murakami obsessively over the last few weeks is basically the reason why I'm reading non-SF fiction again.

In similar very exciting news regarding my reviews, I'm writing for a new SF blog that focuses on self-published and indie books called Adarna SF. Hope you will check out my writing there, as I'll be posting at least 1-2 reviews a month on there. Looking forward to working on that blog, too.

I haven't even decided on a review schedule or anything like that, but keep up with my Twitter and I'll let you know when I do.