Magical Realism

Review: The City and Its Uncertain Walls

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Cover image of "The City and Its Uncertain Walls" by Haruki Murakami

The City and Its Uncertain Walls, Haruki Murakami (Translated by Philip Gabriel). Alfred A. Knopf (ISBN: 9780593801970) 2024.

Summary: A young couple falls in love until she disappears to a mysterious city of people without shadows.

A teenage boy meets a girl at a writing competition. They write and are drawn to each other, visiting and cuddling and longing for more. He loses his heart to her but she asks him to be patient, saying she wants to give herself wholly to him. And then she just disappears. But before this happened, she told him that her real self lived in a city with walls, unicorns, a clock tower without hands, and that in that city, she was the librarian. The girl he knew was a mere shadow of that girl.

Understandably, he longs to follow her to that city, but does not know how. He never marries and works in publishing. Then, one day when he is forty-five, he falls into a hole and finds himself outside the city with a wall. To enter, the Gatekeeper must remove his shadow, which will live separately. Then he must go through a painful eye treatment to fit him for his job. He will work with the girl at the library reading everything in its collection. Not books, but the dreams of past inhabitants of the city.

So, each day, he arrives, the girl makes a tea to help his eyes, and gives him egg-shaped dreams to hold and “read.” Then he walks her home along the river to the housing where she lives. But she doesn’t recognize him from their relationship outside the wall. However, his shadow interrupts this companionable routine. The shadow is dying and must return to the outside world. Finally, he is convinced, but turns back at the last minute while the shadow departs.

Yet we meet him next, not in the city but back at home. He has a shadow again. But he is dissatisfied with his life. He asks a friend to help him find a different job in a small town. He applies for a job as a director of a small library. After an interview with the founder and retiring director, Mr. Koyasu, he is hired despite his scant qualifications. Mr. Koyasu is unusual. He wears a distinctive beret and a skirt. But he drops by and mentors the man, including taking him to a secret room that is warmer in winter. Only later do we learn that Mr. Koyasu is dead. A shade if not a shadow!

He finds Koyasu’s grave and talks to him on his days off. And he meets a woman who owns a nearby coffee shop. It appears that, if not first love, then some kind of love might be possible. Except a boy turns up who reads at the library every day, and knowing your birthday, can tell you the day on which you were born. Apart from that, he doesn’t communicate. Yet he connects with the director. And one day he overhears him talking to Mr. Koyasu at the grave about the city…

Shadow and substance. What is real? Murakami gives us his own version of Socrates’ Cave. And do we not sometimes feel alien to our own world, and think there might be another where we are more at home? And yet the nameless narrator doesn’t find his real love in the city without shadows–nor in this one. We wonder if he will accept the possibility of love in front of him from the coffee shop owner. Apart from that relationship, one feels he is living a shadow existence, unconnected with others in the town.

This is the second Murakami novel I’ve read, and I find myself drawn to his narrative voice. It is both quiet and evocative without becoming overpowering. He draws the reader into the mental and emotional landscape of his main character. Then he throws enough surprises and twist in to keep it interesting and make you wonder where this is going.

Murakami adds a fascinating postscript. He first wrote this story as a novella forty years ago but never was satisfied with the ending. This work is a re-working as he finally found a way to complete the story. We learn he added parts two and three. I’ve not read the earlier work. I’d like to hear from Murakami fans who have read both this and the earlier novella. Do you think he succeeded?

Review: Kafka on the Shore

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Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami. New York: Vintage International, 2002.

Summary: In two parallel plots Kafka tries to escape a curse and find his mother and sister (and himself) and Nakata tries to recover the part of him lost during a strange school outing incident in his youth.

This represents my first encounter with Murakami, one that left me strangely fascinated. I’ve not always found myself drawn to magical realism, but I could not put this down.

The story involves two connected plots, advanced in alternating chapters. The first follows the title character Kafka, a fifteen year old who runs aways from his father, the famous sculptor Koichi Tamura, to search for his mother and sister, who left when he was four. He makes his way to Takamatsu where he meets an accommodating young woman, Sakura, who shelters him when he awakens to find himself covered with blood and no memory of how it got there. His trek eventually takes him to a private library in a former wealthy home administered by Miss Saeki, who many years before had recorded Kafka on the Shore, remembering a young lover lost. He’s welcomed and protected, by Oshima, a transgender man. For a time he lives at the library, and then when in danger of being found by the police, who are seeking him as a material witness in the murder of his father, Oshima shelters him in a cabin deep in a forest in the Kochi Prefecture

The second plot involves Nakata, an aging man who as a child was part of a group of school children who fell unconscious during a school outing during the Second World War. The others recovered to lead normal lives. After several weeks of lying unconscious, Nakata awakened but couldn’t remember anything and could no longer read or write or learn how to do so. He’d led a quiet life, working in a kind of sheltered furniture workshop. He eventually received a government subsidy on which he lived alone. He had a unique ability to understand the language of cats and to find lost ones and restore them to his owners. On one such search, he encounters a sinister character, Johnnie Walker, who has been capturing and beheading cats to make a magic flute. To recover the cat he is seeking, Johnnie Walker tells Nakata that he must either kill Johnnie Walker or he will kill the cat. Nakata, utterly non-violent, eventually does so, returns the cat, and then flees. Hitchhiking, he meets up with Hoshino who takes him to Takamatsu, where they have a variety of strange adventures including an encounter with Colonel Sanders, who is a kind of spirit guide (or concept).

That raises one of the main ideas in the novel–the way spirits leave the body encountering others. Though Kafka has fled his father to evade a kind of Oedipal curse, Kafka’s bloody clothes episode and Nakata’s murder of Johnnie Walker, who turns out to be Koichi Tamura, occur at the same time. Miss Saeki visits the room where Kafka sleeps in the library each night as a fifteen year old girl looking at a painting, eventually having sex with him, as later Miss Saeki herself does.

As I mentioned, there is a kind of Oedipal curse going on with Kafka, murdering his father, and sleeping with both mother (Miss Saeki) and sister (Sakura, in a violent rape dream).

Meanwhile, Nakata is also on a quest of the kind that he knows it when he finds it, trying to the patience of Hoshino, who is also transformed by his time with the old man. He’s only had a thin shadow since the childhood incident. Likewise, Miss Saeki, always at her desk writing…and waiting.

Two people, Nakata and Miss Saeki, trying to find what was lost. Kafka, trying to find himself, in his lost mother and sister. And Oshima? What is his role? Perhaps as a wiser guide than Crow, the alter ego of Kafka (which in Czech means “crow” or “jackdaw”), who just tells him he has to be “the toughest fifteen-year-old in the world.” As the novel concluded, I found myself wondering, what of Oshima? 

There is so much more, and I find myself with many questions like this one. It’s a book that invites multiple readings. As one may pick up from this review, there are scenes of violence, a vivid dream of a rape, and descriptions of sexual intimacies, so this may not be for everyone. None of it is gratuitous (well, maybe the scene in which Colonel Sanders fixes up Hoshino with a hooker, although there is something going on with sexual energy here). There is also the compelling power of music, whether it is Miss Saeki’s Kafka on the Shore or Beethoven’s Archduke Trio. I wonder about archetypes, if that is the right word, like Colonel Sanders and Johnnie Walker. This is one of those books I’ve finished but it isn’t finished with me….

Review: The Shadow of the Wind

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The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Translated by Lucia Graves). New York: Penguin Books, 2005.

Summary: Daniel Sempere’s life is changed when he finds a mysterious book in the Cemetery of Lost Books, and embarks on a quest to learn the true story of its mysterious author, one that places him in great peril.

Daniel Sempere is the son of a widowed bookseller, struggling to retain the memory of his mother’s face. Then his father takes him through the labyrinthine streets of Barcelona to the Cemetery of Lost Books where he is directed to find one book that would become his. The book he chooses will be one he is to make sure never disappears. The book he chooses is one titled The Shadow of the Wind by a Julian Carax. He is enthralled and would know more about its author.

His father sends him to a fellow bookseller, from whom he learns that he possesses the only copy, all the others having been burned. He falls for the man’s blind daughter, several years older than he, and even gives her the book at one point, only to catch her in flagrante with her piano teacher. He retrieves the book.

A mysterious, and seemingly sinister figure approaches him to buy the book. He calls himself Lain Coubert, the name of a character in the book. He smells of smoke and his face darkened, shriveled. Daniel refuses, keeps his commitment to the book, and to learning the truth of Carax. He is aided by a beggar, Fermin, who he and his father take in. Fermin turns out to be a fascinating figure, and his and Daniel’s investigations take them on escapades throughout the city, one of the funniest in an asylum where they make a promise to a horny old man, He becomes Daniel’s mentor in the art of love as Daniel falls in love with his friend Tomas’ sister Beatriz.

Their investigations bring upon them an old enemy of Fermin in the form of police detective Fumero, an ambitious figure who pushed a mentor to his death, and has a vendetta against Carax. Their investigations also lead to a woman with a connection to Carax’s publisher, Nuria Monfort. They learn that Carax had been in love with Penelope. the daughter of the powerful Aldaya family, coveted by Fumero. In the end, he flees to Paris, where Nuria came in contact with him. He was supposed to have returned to Barcelona for Penelope, only to have supposedly died in a duel–Julian’s father seems to indicate that it was not his son whose body was found. It turns out that Nuria knows much more, revealed in a letter she writes for Daniel when she realizes her own life is in danger. It occupies the last third of the novel, revealing the truth about Carax, as well as truths of which Carax was unaware.

The reader notices the parallels between Julian Carax and Daniel. Both worked for fathers, with mothers dead or estranged. Lain Coubert, a character of Carax, haunts Daniel. Then there are the loves of Julian and Daniel, including Daniel’s trysts with Beatriz in the abandoned Aldaya mansion. Above all, there is the book, and Daniel’s quest to know its author.

It’s a plot that drew me in, along with the delightful and sometimes riotous relationship between Daniel and Fermin. One almost can visualize their Barcelona (and the book includes a walking tour of the real places). Zafón has been compared to the likes of Eco and Marquez. I actually preferred Zafón, whose writing involved more realism and less magic, One delights in the affection of Daniel’s father for his son, and the loyalty between Daniel and Fermin, who supplants his friendship with Tomas. The one plot element I wonder about was using Nuria Monfort’s letter to unravel the mystery of Carax. So much of the story is in that letter, which is a engrossing read, but one wonders if Zafón could not find another way to unravel the story through the investigations of Daniel and Fermin.

The novel doesn’t end with the letter bur I will refrain from saying much more except to say, what an ending, well worth the 450 pages that precede it!

Review: Hangdog Souls

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Hangdog Souls, Marc Joan. London: Deixis Press, 2022.

Summary: A fugitive English soldier in southern India makes a Faustian bargain winning endless life at the cost of countless others over three centuries.

John Saunders is a fugitive English soldier in the Dravidian highlands of southern India as the British colonials are invading. He has a beautiful wife and an adorable son, who has captured the eye of the corrupt ruler with a mysterious machine in the dome of his castle complex. John is feigning that he is Portuguese and has brought seeds of eucalyptus trees that he hopes to establish in the highlands, making his fortune. As the British lay siege, he plans an escape for himself and huis family, but is found out by the ruler, who offers him a Faustian bargain, to become the “bridge” for souls, offering them a better world for their lives.

His trees are saved, and recur throughout the succeeding vignettes. But his wife and son are not. But John cannot die, even from a wound that nearly beheads him. He must live with his shame while ushering others to their fate. The story unfolds as a series of vignettes over 300 years. A priest burdened with the death of his wife Emma who encounters John. A butterfly enthusiast seeking the Black Papilio, and finding so much more. A functionary of the Sarpal Tea Company sent to the Kalisholi estates to investigate accounts ends up offering himself to a snake at a time when the local gods demand five garlands, five lives. A tourist glimpsing the mysterious woman in a blue sari, An embalmer who must create images of three gods using human corpses. A boy indentured to an uncle who immolates himself after listening to John’s story.

On it goes until three hundred years later, a Keralan particle physicist, Chandy John, involved in an experiment that has driven the previous scientist mad. Will he succumb to the burden of his own losses and griefs, having lost his wife in a tragic accident or will he break the cycle?

The book revolves around the question: What weight can balance the death of an innocent? How much grief must John bear for the grief he causes, and for how long? When will the scales be balanced? John is able to do what he does because of the griefs others bear. The appeal of escape through death, perhaps atoning for one’s guilt and shame. But the question makes us wonder if in fact whether there is any human counterweight to the death of an innocent?

I’ve seen this book classified in the horror genre. It seemed to me to have elements of horror, historical fiction, and magical realism about it. I’m not sure I know what it is. For the first hundred pages or so, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Yet as story after story unfolded, variations on a theme I found myself wondering how or whether this would all end, and drawn into the storytelling to find out.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: The Underground Railroad

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The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead. New York: Doubleday, 2016.

Summary: A fictional narrative of a Georgia slave, Cora, who with another slave escapes the plantation, and through a series of harrowing experiences, and the existence of an actual underground railroad with trains and engineers, escapes to the North.

The Underground Railroad has received critical acclaim, winning a National Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize, and being chosen for Oprah’s Book Club. This is a very good book, portraying the brutal realities of Antebellum slavery on cotton plantations, the brutalities of slave owners, overseers, patrollers and night riders, and slave hunters. The character of Ridgeway, the slave hunter, is among the great evil characters of fiction. The protagonist, Cora, is a resilient, even fiercely determined character who will murder more than on of her potential captors, even while both angered and motivated by her mother Mabel, who escaped while she was a little girl and never was caught.

Cora agrees to escape the Randall Plantation with Caesar when Terrence Randall, a tyrant, takes over for his deceased brother.  Caesar has learned from a sympathetic merchant of an underground railroad that will take slaves to freedom. At the last minute, another slave, Lovey, joins in, but is soon captured while Caesar and Cora, who fatally bludgeons a young man attempts to hold her, escape and contact the station master. What they find is an underground railroad that is no metaphor but a vast subterranean rail network with rails, trains, and engineers, built by those engaged in the fight against slavery.

Their flight takes them to South Carolina, where they hide under assumed names in an “enlightened” town educating them for citizen, but with underlying sinister motives. Ridgeway shows up and Cora escapes, but Caesar is taken. Cora arrives unexpected at a closed down station in a North Carolina town on a freedom crusade of lynchings and house searches. Reluctantly, Martin and Ethel Wells shelter her, running a terrible risk. In the end Ridgeway finds her and takes her into Tennessee, where she is rescued by Royal, a militant version of Harriet Tubman. One of Ridgeway’s men is killed, Ridgeway bound and left to die, and they escape to a utopian Freedom Farm in Indiana. But will they be safe even here?

The plot is interrupted by “flashbacks” that fill in content, but felt like an interruption. But the feature that worked the least for me was the railroad. This aspect of the book had a magical realism feel, and just didn’t work for me, but then I’ve never been a fan of this technique/genre. It seems that the main function of the railroad was to get Cora to the next scene of action, where the real interest and the strength of this narrative lay. We see the courage of station masters, to be sure, but the actual journey, the risks run by slaves, and in many cases, rescuers like Tubman seemed to be minimized, even though the title suggests a focus on the railroad. I also found the decisions to stay in South Carolina, and later Indiana, somewhat implausible when all slaves knew their only chance of safety, especially from figures like Ridgeway, was Canada. I might have liked some documentation of sources for the portrayals slave conditions and race hatred, and some comment on what was based on fact, along the lines of what Stowe did in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

All in all, the  plotline, strong characters, and portrayal of slavery and race hatred make this a good and important work. I think it could be more powerful if it portrayed the efforts of the historical underground railroad. But the portrayal of slavery and racism in this book is important to our nation conversation. To meaningfully, say “never again” we must understand to what we are saying “never again.”

 

Review: Midnight’s Children

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Midnight's Children

Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie. New York: Random House, 1981 (25th Anniversary Edition, 2006).

Summary: Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight when India won its independence. He believes his life is “twinned” with the fate of the country, even as he is telepathically linked with the other “midnight children”, all of whom have unusual powers.

Salman Rushdie is a native of India of Muslim descent most often known for his book The Satanic Verses, the publication of which resulted in a fatwa calling for his assassination. Since 2000, he has lived in New York City. This novel, his second, brought him to the attention of the literary world and was awarded the Booker Prize and was selected one of the hundred best novels of all time by the Modern Library.

The central figure, Saleem Sinai, is narrating his life to Padma, “the pickle woman” who is taking care of him. Central to his life story is that he was born at the stroke of midnight at the moment India gained its Independence. He sees himself as a twin with India, and that his experiences and actions are intertwined with that of the country. His life and family dysfunctions and travails parallel those of India. In his personal history, he gets caught up in the Indo-Pakistan wars and Bangladeshi independence.

He and the other babies born in the first hour of Independence all have unusual powers. Saleem’s is the ability to telepathically link them together in the “Midnight Children’s Conference” where they deliberate how they might use their powers in their young country. The hopeful promise of these children is not attained, and one, Shiva, who was switched with Saleem at birth is a destroyer, symbolized by his powerful knees, while Saleem’s sensitivities are symbolized by his nose that can sniff out not only smells but dispositions and longings.

Rushdie writes in the genre of magical realism, similar to Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. Noses, knees, serpents, and impotent men recur through the book. When Saleem’s wife goes into labor, at the beginning of the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi, she labors thirteen days, until the emergency lifts. In all of this, the life story of Saleem is mystically linked with the nation.

The challenge in reading this work is both remembering this connection and understanding the history of India during the time spanned by the novel (1947 to 1979). One wishes, particular in the newer edition, that it would have been annotated for those not deeply acquainted with this history. Rushdie himself observes that western readers tend to read this novel as fantasy while readers from India see the book as almost a history.

We trace the central figure from the hopefulness and growing awareness of boyhood to a growing sense of pathos, sadness and, indeed impotence, perhaps reflecting the frustration of India’s hopes, particularly during the Indira Gandhi rule. A life story, that of its own seems sad, and at points dysfunctional, in fact becomes commentary for the early years of India’s statehood. Sadly, this narrative could be the story of many post-colonial states. But Saleem has a son, and perhaps a new generation…. Perhaps.

Review: One Hundred Years of Solitude

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One Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have friends who truly think this is an amazing book. You have to help me. Just not sure I get it. No, it isn’t the magical realism thing. I get that and got used to crazy things like insomnia plagues, gypsies with flying carpets, children being carried away with the laundry. Garcia Marquez definitely has a creative imagination!

The story in brief centers around the mythical town of Macondo, somewhere in Latin America, settled by people escaping Western colonialists. They were led by Jose Arcadio Buendia and his cousin-wife Ursula. Much of the plot focuses around the decadence of this inbred, incestuous family who keep breeding sons named Jose Arcadio or Aureliano. At one point there are even 17 Aurelianos who are all systematically hunted down and killed as the government tries to snuff out the revolutionary movement led by Colonel Aureliano Buendia. From a glorious beginning, the village and the family spiral down into insanity and decadence, abetted by the banana planters, the government executioners, and a several year monsoon that rotted everything and was followed with termites and ants who literally ate the village.

Yes, we see a chronicle of human nature, almost a second creation and fall story. We see a story of family tragedy. We see the inevitability of decline and fall in this miniature, fantastic civilization. But we also have a tawdry tale of incest, child abuse, and sexual obsession. It occurred to me that this would be a great family for Dr Phil to do an intervention with.

Yes, this is a book beautifully and imaginatively written. Yes, it exposes the dark underside of our human nature and our inability to escape our own inner demons, of ourselves. While I don’t expect serious fiction to have “they all lived happily ever after” endings and it doesn’t surprise me to see the tawdry elements of life, there is nothing elevating or ennobling about this book. It seems we are either nothing more than the sum of our physical desires, or deluded if we think there is anything more to it. There is no redemption. Religious figures are simply buffoons, other than the magician Melquiades, who, if anything simply captivates the men of this family in delusion and a fatalism that leads to their destruction.

I know this is supposed to be one of the great books of this past century. At this point, I have to admit that I am scratching my head wondering why? Maybe those of you who really loved it can illuminate me.

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