Book Reviews in 200 Words or Less: Haruki Murakami’s IQ84

If you think I’d give a thumbs-down to Murakami, you’re crazier than 1Q84’s two moons hanging in the sky (which, by the way, no one notices save our two protagonists).  There’s always the intensely weird and uneasily sinister lurking at the edges of (or blasted in your face by) a Murakami novel, and we have that here: multiple realities; creatures existing and acting beyond human moral systems (that enter the world through the mouths of dead goats, no less); a superhuman forced by an undefined religion to rape (or have “ambiguous congress”) with young girls; fee collectors still doing rounds while in comas, that make reading his work more about the experience than understanding.  But in IQ84, with its nearly 1,000 pages, we’re slogging through quite a lot of the mundane, the pace-breaking backstory, and the oftentimes too many and too silly analogies to describe simple things, but does that mean you shouldn’t read it?  No.  Read it twice, once for each moon in the sky.  And if you don’t understand it, don’t worry, Murakami gives you a pass: “If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you won’t understand it with an explanation.”

Sean Conaway’s work has appeared in Arcadia Magazine and the American Fiction Anthology.  He’s currently working on a novel that he hopes one day you will read.

 

 

 

 

Book Reviews in 200 Words or Less: Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot

Girl meets Alpha Boy, eschews cozy friendship with Beta Boy.  Alpha Boy, we find, is manic depressive; Beta Boy goes to India to find religion and justify his theology degree.  Girl marries Alpha, Alpha divorces Girl, Girl screws Beta (home again but smelly from his travels) for a tidy rebound.   (Oh, sorry: SPOILER!): Book ends.  In between these dots are a bunch of sentences constructed of words, loads (and loads) of summary and backstory, even that obnoxious technique where we read the same experiences through different points of view.  Worst of all, it’s another goddamn coming of age story?  I mean, hasn’t Eugenides grown up yet?  In the 10 years since my beloved Middlesex, hasn’t he gleaned anything compelling from adulthood to write about?  With that said, there’s some fun poked at the expense of deconstructionism and its proponents, some fantastic musings on where the ego stops and spirituality begins, and all three main characters have compelling (if, in the end, disappointingly flat) third-person points of view to perch from, and I know that Eugenides fans aren’t going to be dissuaded from giving the book a whirl by this rather snarky review; I was just hoping for more, is all.

Sean Conaway’s work has appeared in Arcadia Magazine and the American Fiction Anthology.  He’s currently working on a novel that he hopes one day you will read.

Donate a Story to the Struggling Writers Association this Season

Let’s face it: it’s going to be a crapper of a holiday season any way you slice it, but when the economic climate is stormy for the general population, it’s a goddamn tornado for fiction writers. A tornado that will never blow itself out, I guess—or maybe it should be a hurricane. A really big hurricane, or maybe strange isolated tornados attracted only to struggling writers. Metaphors like this keep struggling writers struggling, and they need your help, now more than ever.

Right now there’s a writer struggling, and s/he needs a story. Will you help?

Send your fictive donation to storiesfortheseason@swa.com.

Note: You can claim your donation on your tax returns, but must submit Art Addendum I56, which asks that you quantify the donated story’s worth monetarily. Subsequent audits should be expected.

Sean Conaway’s work has appeared in Arcadia Magazine and the American Fiction Anthology.  He’s currently working on a novel that he hopes one day you will read.

iWrite!

With all the hubbub surrounding Apple’s recent game changers—OSX Lion, OS5 with its futuristic Siri, and iCloud—iWrite! hasn’t received any of the attention it deserves, but let me tell you, this app rocks!  Like all Apple innovations, iWrite! allows the user to focus on creativity and form, and leaves the humdrum nitty gritty (in this case, craft) in the hands of invisible programmers who have, as always, thought of just about everything a writer needs to produce work s/he can, if not necessarily be proud of, at least expect to yield some dividends by way of publications, contracts, and—if the right settings are chosen—probably some major prizes.

Short Story Challenge: The Happy Story

Is it that unhappy people are drawn to writing that we never get a happy story?  Or that most people aren’t really happy?  How often do you read a story populated by even one happy person?  Maybe the question should be, do you know any happy people at all?  For most fictional characters, if they ever experience happiness, it’s brief, and they end up questioning their happiness more than anything.  Most stories end with only the hope of future happiness.  Endings come too soon for happiness to occur, perhaps because the writer worries that if the story progresses towards the moment when happiness is reached, the reader, bored to tears, has already moved on to something else.  So maybe it’s not the writer’s fault at all, but the reader’s.  Maybe readers aren’t happy, and read only to prove to themselves that no one is happy and the act of reading is vindication for being unhappy.

The Art of Hype

Working on my own novel, it’s a selfish curiosity that compels me to buy and read (and be jealous of) emerging authors’ first novels.  I read these books differently, I know, than I do other books, and perhaps not in the right spirit to engage literature, trying to suss out what these authors have that I do not (besides, obviously, an agent, contract, and, one would assume, readers).  I do have a novel, but I’m not yet a first-time novelist for the simple fact that my novel is not available to be read.  So, why not?

Seventh Garden

I’ve put up a garden for the last several years, let’s say seven, since it’s a number of portent.  My seventh garden.  The first six, it’d be nice to claim, were training gardens, but that would mean I’ve learned something.  I’m not sure I have.