queerbychoice

Today I received another present in the mail! I sent

seifaiden the book When I Was Five I Killed Myself by Howard Buten, and today I received a book from em, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera. With a comment about wanting to send me a Czech author. Actually,

seifaiden, if you're interested in other Czech authors, I've been meaning to read Bohumil Hrabal at some point - he's a Czech author and I discovered him by following a link that

sammka posted at some point. But I haven't actually read him yet.

And I finished reading the present from

ciarajanae, Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. In the time since I'd last read a Haruki Murakami book, I'd heard several people criticize his writing rather harshly, but reading this one re-confirmed for me how much his writing dazzles me. I think I have something of a preference for surrealist-tinged writing. It's awfully difficult for any writer to rehash Oedipal themes with any originality, because it's been done way too many times, but I think Murakami did a pretty decent job of it. And the extremely graphic cat-torture in this book was, exactly as

afro76 warned me, a bit much to handle, but at least mercifully short.

The biggest thing I didn't like about the book was the fact that his example of some random people who were seriously lacking in imagination and the ability to think for themselves was a pair of feminists. I mean, they were rather annoying feminists and he didn't claim they were typical of feminism as a whole, but just . . . out of all the infinite different examples he could have given as examples of unthinking, imaginationless lemmings, why did it have to be feminists? Why did it have to be people affiliated with any particular political position at all? Even though Murakami did not claim that they were representative of all feminists, the fact that they were the only characters in the book who were explicitly associated with feminism tends to rather leave an impression that they were. And also, replying to an accusation that one is a sexist male by announcing that one is actually female quite misses the point.

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Oh god, the "feminists" in Kafka were awful! What was he thinking? That hurt so much more than the cat scene. Also, it's possible that the cat scene was an allusion to the (much worse) cat scene in Yukio Mishima's _The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea_.

I'm not entirely sure which Bohumil Hrabal book you'd like best! I think you'd like Too Loud a Solitude or Total Fears (a sort of an autobiography, in the form of letters to an American woman who befriended him). You might also like I Served the King of England quite a bit. Possibly more than Too Loud a Solitude.

The main thing I'm concerned about with I Served the King of England and some of his other books is that there are bizarre gender issues in them that I'm not sure I'd interpret in a way favorable to Hrabal, if I hadn't already fallen in love with him as an author. For instance, in I Served the King of England there's a lot of tender writing about sex with prostitutes. However it's from the point of view of an obviously flawed narrator- this guy also does and thinks a lot of stupid things. I think Hrabal likes to write about people saying, doing, and thinking foolish or wrong things, but writes so fully and sweetly from their point of view that you sort of come to love them anyway.

Too Loud a Solitude is the one I've been planning to read, but I'll look up more information about the others now.

i think that the "feminists" would be more accurately described as standing in for people whose agenda is not informed by cultural, poltical, historical, aesthetic CONTEXT and, more significantly, for people whose agenda makes them myopic. a significant criticism of many American-style identity politics activists (NOT you, of course) is the tendency to disgregard other issues including, for example, geopolitics.

the fact that they were self-described feminists did allow Murukami to, almost sort-of-kind-of organically introduce his gender-bending plot-twist and complicated the book's gender-politics by refusing to allign itself with characters whose agenda might be perceived to be his own in some ways.

but yeah, still, it was a weird scene.

Well, if we're going to be picky about how to word what exactly the feminists were supposed to stand for, let's just stick to Murakami's/Oshima's own words: "Those are exactly the kind of people who murdered Miss Saeki's childhood sweetheart. Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible sytems. Those are the things that really frighten me."

So they're supposed to stand for all of those things. I think one of the things that bothers me most is the implication that feminists (or radical politics in general) need to be more "flexible," more "tolerant" of non-radicals and the status quo - it reminds me of the common American view that although "affirmative action" in the abstract might be capable of sometimes doing some good, the moment anybody imposes any kind of "quota" this is immediately bad - as though even in situations where 99% of people granted Prestigious Job Position X are male, we're somehow supposed to go on believing that this could be pure innocent random chance and not discrimination.

i think the "common American view" is that truth is simple, Good and Evil exist, and opinions are absolute. moral relativism and contextualized arguments have been demonized and marginalized in the States, where they are usually thought of as too "French."

. . . And I think that if you're asserting that the "common American view" does not simultaneously (and paradoxically)consist every bit as much of what I said above in addition to the rather contradictory opinions that you just described, then you're (Americanistically!) oversimplifying the truth yourself. :p

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