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I've never got poems, myself. Try as I might, I can't generally see the advantage over prose. Most poems are really indirect and cryptic, but the only thing that achieves from my point of view is that every reader projects whatever they want onto the poem, and the text itself is almost an empty vessel. I overgeneralize I know, but...

The only verse I like is stuff like Eugene Onegin, that would work great as prose too. (That, and a contemporary poet called Mark Irwin, but that's only because something connects with me in his preferred imagery and it's really a whim rather than a sober critical assessment.)

I'm open to the possibility that this is a blind spot in my aesthetics -- a looking for the wrong thing -- rather than a failure of the form, but I can't see what exactly I should be appreciating. At least I know I'm not the only one who feels this way, since poetry barely sells, even in comparison to highbrow novels.

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Although I'm not very fond of Hard-Boiled Wonderland in general, I don't remember anything especially awful about Birnbaum's translation. Your complaints amount to saying that he likes to use formal expressions occasionally, and it's not clear to me that that's inappropriate for Murakami.

In fact the only thing that struck me about the translation was the clever rendering of kuroguro as "INKlings" -- a lesser translator might've gone for the literal rendering "black-blacks", and I appreciate the degree of effort and creativity that went into preserving many of the connotations there. (Admittedly it is offbeat, though.)

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parkbench, at first I thought you were talking about actual Kafka there (as opposed to Kafka). The same thing is often said about his works.

There are literally thousands of books devoted to interpreting Kafka's pure symbols as allegories for God, Marxism, Judaism, sexuality, parent-child relations, whatever. They are all plausible but finally pretty unsatisfying. One recent critical essay I read argued that Kafka's symbols were designed intentionally to be fraught with strong yet undetermined meaning, goading the reader into endlessly, fruitlessly trying to interpret them -- much as the characters in the stories obsess over their own futile quests.

Kafka's first great story, The Judgement, is probably the worst in this regard. As I recall there even exists a book entitled Thirty Interpretations of Kafka's The Judgement. I myself tend to take most of Kafka's books more or less at face value, but when I first read that story I felt compelled to spend several hours rereading it over and over to concoct an elaborate explanation for it. It is just too perfectly tight and self-consistent and carries too many implications and undertones for it not to have some ultimate hidden meaning -- and yet you can't find it. I don't remember what I came up with anymore, except that it involved multiple layers of deceit and the claim that one character was an oblique renaming of the narrator (because of his shame, he externalized a part of himself). All this for a 10-page short story.

Of course, if Kafka had ever gone out and provided an "official" interpretation of anything, that would very much have cheapened his work.

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Yeah Dickens kind of deserves a little birdy disrespect though.



"You would need to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell." -- Oscar Wilde

(Ohhhh burn.)

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I also like Kierkegaard's way of creating multiple characters and ascribing different points of view to them. (Although, er, admittedly I haven't read him. But I like it in principle.)

As for things more recently written, J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (which is halfway between a novel and a work of philosophy) also makes very effective use of the multiple character technique. What's particular about that one is that Elizabeth, as brilliant as she is, seems to be going a little crazy in her old age and her opinions are clearly extreme. So there is an unusually large distance between the opinions expressed and the author. The overall effect of the book is very unsettling -- like truth always has elements of falsity and falsity elements of truth, and they almost seem to blend together in all the ambiguity and complexity after a while.

I'm inclined to say methods like this are the only way to honestly philosophize, once you've accepted that philosophy is built on mud and it's mud all the way down.

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Yeah I like Hear The Wind Sing. It is better than Pinball and Wild Sheep in my personal opinion (I didn't much like those two either). It is very short, in brief fragments and disjointed compared to Murakami's later work, but the essence of what makes him good is there.

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Just read Primo Levi's If This Is a Man (a.k.a. Survival in Auschwitz). At some level I did not really want to read it, but I'd been a great fan of Levi since I read The Periodic Table last year, and bought it along with A Tranquil Star. Now I can't stop thinking about death camps all day. But it was worth reading.

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Yeah Murakami is generally so disconnected anyway that he doesn't gain that much from length. Unless you consider the disconnection itself to be a strength, as many people do with Wild Sheep Chase. But I think that's just mental jujitsu to try to explain why we persist in thinking it's so awesome despite being full of extravagant plot holes: it must be, we tell ourselves, that the plot holes themselves are somehow awesome. But I'm inclined to think it's more a question of "despite" than "because", and the short stories bear me out.

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I've read about half of Nabokov's work, and I can say that Lolita is distinctly a level above his other work. Pale Fire -- and most of his other books, which are very cold and tend to revolve around complicated patterns, wordplay and narrative trickery -- is about on the level of Joyce, and similarly overrated by a vocal minority. Ada is passionate and filled with a vast amount of elaborate trickery but ultimately shallow and implausible. His autobiography has some great lines in it but I find it too unrevealing (as I recall it has been called the least informative autobiography ever written) and self-indulgent.

In Lolita Nabokov is both passionate and at the height of his analytical powers. The book is full of humanity (despite/because it has Nabokov's most monstrous narrator) and it is completely immune to reductionist analysis. The only real flaw with it is the unfortunate loss of narrative momentum in the second half, which probably leads a lot of people to stop reading at that point though the best is yet to come. (Nabokov very cleverly attempts to quash this particular criticism in the afterword by implying people who bring it up are shallow pornography-seekers, but don't let him get away with it!).

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Since we're on the topic, the saddest novel I've ever read is Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day.

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I actually like it on its own terms, but yeah it fails completely in terms of adapting Lolita the novel. Everything is either removed or weirdly distorted and there is almost no element of the novel that it carries over accurately. The overall experience is nowhere near as sublime.

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Again, I didn't say "bad", I said "failed". And I'm only asking for an adaptation to at least carry over some of the spirit of the thing.

Okay, for instance. The Quilty murder is arguably the high point of the film, and I love it in itself. But it distorts the book in so many ways. The fact that it's a flashback shown at the beginning means that the long mystery as to whether Quilty actually exists or is a figment of Humbert's paranoid imagination is eliminated -- along with the whole "mystery-novel" element of Lolita, with all the subtle hints as to his existence ("Qu'il t'y", the Enchanted Hunters, etc). The misleading impression that Humbert will probably end up murdering either Charlotte or Lolita (since he admits to being a murderer on the first page, but doesn't specify who) is eliminated. Quilty is no longer drug-addled, and his murder is far less prolonged and bloody. The implication that Quilty is Humbert's doppelganger no longer exists. He appears as a cheerful fellow rather than a dark shadow dogging Humbert. I could list a similar litany of serious distortions on the subject of Lolita, Charlotte, and most of all Humbert himself, whose eloquent voice completely dominates the novel while he is reduced to silence in the film.

This isn't just fan whining about certain trivial details; everything that makes Lolita Lolita is lost. What is the point of making an adaptation of a masterpiece if you are not intending to preserve anything that makes it a masterpiece, but rather recreate another, merely good film from its bare outline? That is why I say the film is a failure.

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Well yeah, of course, the "loyal" 1997 Lolita film, weighed down by a droning narration etc, was by all accounts (I haven't bothered seeing it personally) an even greater failure than Kubrick's. Actually I don't think it is even possible to succeed at adapting Nabokov.

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Hmm... it's been several years since I read him, but I remember there was something clunky and schematic about D.H. Lawrence's characterization and morality that really rubbed me the wrong way.

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Finally read Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach. It's put me in a melancholy mood for most of the weekend.

McEwan's never written a bad word, but this is the first book of his that makes me think he might be a great writer as opposed to merely solid. There's a lucid, fearless beauty and simplicity to it. McEwan is maturing as a writer in an unexpected and wonderful direction: shedding complexity and gimmicks and affectations to yield a startlingly taut and powerful book.

Weird connection maybe, but one image that latched onto me from McEwan's previous book The Child in Time is the description of the nonexistent novel Lemonade, written by a character who is a writer. I barely even remember anything else about The Child in Time, but I remember that fake novel Lemonade which was only sketched out in a few sentences, this simple and powerful story of childhood affection and profound loss in a vivid natural setting. In some respects the concept of On Chesil Beach is similar, and I wonder if I am right in thinking that it's an evolution of Lemonade in McEwan's mind. At any rate, this is the novel I've always secretly wished McEwan would write.

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Elizabeth Costello is a very experimental work and an unconventional place to start with J.M. Coetzee (it happened to be where I started, and I liked it, but your mileage may vary). His most widely praised work is Disgrace.