Killing Commendatore

Killing Commendatore

By Haruki Murakami

It did not take long to find parallels between this novel, Murakami's latest, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which I read last year and loved. The main character is an easy-going, quiet middle-aged man who, out of the blue, loses his wife. A New York Times review of Killing Commendatore referred to this character as "Murakami Man", not rich but not in need of money, into art and music and cats, reflective to the extreme, and confused more than afraid in the face of supernatural events. And, of course, in search of a lost mate. 

And there is a hole. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, the hole serves as a type of portal to an underworld that allows the character to see the machinations that make the above-ground "wind-up" world run. A pit in Killing Commendatore plays a similar role. It is buried, and subsequently uncovered, behind the main character's rented house in the mountains when a mysterious ringing begins to emanate from it in the middle of the night. 

Which leads to the most obvious connection of all: the supernatural. In this novel, it begins with the main character's discovery, in the attic of his rented home, of a painting by the once-famous artist who lived there. It is a rendering of a scene from the opera Don Giovanni called Killing Commendatore. It turns out to be an allegory for a botched assassination plot in which the artist was involved when he lived in Nazi-era Vienna in his youth. The uncovering of the painting beckons other-worldly figures into the character's life. The main one explains that he is an Idea and he appears before the main as a miniature, two-foot version of the Commendatore in the painting. 

Not long after his first appearance, a conversation between the two reveals what I think is the premise of the book: "The question is whether or not an idea can be treated as an autonomous entity, right?" Put another way, the book explores the power that art, and the ideas it contains, has on the world. On the one hand, it seems to suggest that once art is put into the world, the artist no longer can control the ideas it unleashes. It is for this reason that several of the main character's paintings -- he, too, is an artist -- are left unfinished. He explains that it would be "too dangerous" to complete them and unleash the ideas contained within into the world. On the other hand, it explores the way that our individual ideas, the stories we tell ourselves, can end up controlling us. Across the valley from the main character, for example, lives Menshiki, a wealthy man obsessed with the idea that he might be the father of a child to the point that he moves into a a hill-top mansion just so he can spend his evenings spying on his would-be daughter through a pair of high-powered binoculars. It is Menshiki, playing the role of a winder-upper, who sets most of the book's "action", if it can be called that, into motion. He commissions the main character to paint a portrait of his perhaps-daughter, which leads to a relationship with her aunt, which leads to the daughter's resentment and curiosity, which leads to her becoming trapped in the mansion, which leads the main character's descent into the land of Metaphor to free her. Significantly, Menshiki says he doesn't want to know if he truly is a father; it is the idea that he MIGHT be that he is obsessed with -- and which causes so many problems. So what's the message here? That we need to interrogate our "truths" lest the leads us astray? But, then again, the main character ultimately reconnects with his wife, who has a baby that may or may not be his, and he, too, expresses ambivalence about the "truth" and winds up happy. So how to reconcile these?

There is, in the end, much that is irreconcilable about the book. At the end, the main character and the young girl he "rescues" talk about their experiences. They decide that the opening of the pit opened a circle that unleashed their adventure. Did they close the circle? They don't know. Neither does the reader. The main character's strange adventure and the girl's entrapment are never really connected. The book seems more like a musing than a coherent thought. 

But that is just fine by me. I wasn't after a statement -- I was after a mood. There is something about Murakami's storytelling and prose that I find mesmerizing. Reading his books is like falling into a trance. It strikes me that his books, where the real and unreal, the supernatural and the mundane mix so freely is a pretty good reflection of these pandemic times. And by immersing myself in his strange world I was, for an hour or so a night, able to escape my own. 

Caste

 Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

By Isabel Wilkerson

Here's another book that I arrived at through an author's previous work. That one was The Warmth of Other

Sons, which was one of the first nonfiction books I had read in quite some time. It told the story of the wave of black migration from the south to northern and western cities, and its brilliance was the way Wilkerson grounded the tale of this group in the stories of four individuals. They became characters that, by the time the book was over, had become something akin to friends. 

This is a different sort of book. It is very clearly an argument that we Americans need to begin thinking of the divide between groups of people not as a function of race and racism but of caste and casteism. Wilkerson compares segregation and racial stratification in the US to similar systems in India and, more horrifyingly, Nazi Germany. In making these comparisons, she identifies eight "pillars" of caste, including divine will, control of marriage, an emphasis on purity, inheritability, occupational hierarchy, dehumanization, terror, and inherent superiority/inferiority. It is hard, after reading this section, to disagree that what we have in the US is, in fact, a caste system.

What Wilkerson makes less clear, however, is why it matters. Even the review in The Week seems to miss this point, saying instead that it replaces the "tenuous language of racial animus with a sturdier lexicon" and that it "wrenches out established way of thinking about race out of its rut and encourages us to see it anew". But it is more than these vagaries. I think Wilkerson is arguing that we need these new words because of how misunderstood the old ones are (and always have been). Wilkerson points out that racism is often conflated with prejudice. We think of racism as mean statements or overt acts of hatred. It is therefore easy for people to absolve themselves of racism. They don't hate. They don't use slurs. So they aren't racist, right? Well, no. Because in its true sense, racism is, by definition, a structural phenomenon. Racism isn't perpetrated by individuals so much as it is imposed upon individuals as they bump up against a system designed to denigrate. The point is not whether we as individuals have prejudices against people with different skin colors. The point is that these prejudices are baked into almost every aspect of our lives. We are racist because we live in a racist system that very few of us do much to change. By removing the very charged, and very misunderstood, "r word" from the equation, Wilkerson argues that we can better see systematic discrimination for what it is. In a sense, it absolves the individual while indicting the group, both past and present. 

At least that is what I think she is arguing. I could be wrong. Because at the end of the book when she finally gets around to discussing what should be done to rectify the system, Wilkerson seems to imply that the best we can do is act individually when we can. "Each time a person reaches across caste and makes a connection, it helps to break the back of caste," she writes. "Multiplied by millions in a given day, it becomes the flap of a butterfly wing that shifts the air and builds to a hurricane across an ocean." This is a lovely thought, and maybe it is right, but it feels disheartening to learn that all I can do with the knowledge she has imparted is to do my best to treat the people I come into contact with as equals. Wilkerson's ideas aren't all that original; in fact, rather than breaking new scholarly ground, her book is really a synthesis of others' thinking about the relationship between racism and caste. So what I was really hoping for was a new way of looking at ways forward and on that front Wilkerson does not seem to deliver. (Not that she claims to: she compares herself to a house inspector, who, obviously, only investigates the integrity of a home rather than making any necessary repairs.) At the end of the book, Wilkerson reminds us that we are responsible "with time and openhearted enlightenment, our own wisdom." I continue to find that elusive.      

Transcendent Kingdom

 Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

I came to this book by way of Gyasi's first book, Homegoing, which I loved. For some reason, it's not in my blog -- perhaps I read it before I started keeping it? -- but it was great. It traced slavery's horrors from a village in Africa to modern-day America and back again. The power of the novel was both in its subject and its telling, which subtly tied a thread between seemingly disconnected places and people.

This is a different book. It tells the story of Gifty, whose parents moved from Ghana to Huntsville, Alabama, shortly before her birth. The tragedy that propels this story is not slavery but addiction. Gifty's brother, we learn early in the book, succumbed to an opiate addiction when she was young, destroying her world. His death pushed Gifty toward science, the experimental world of which allowed her to establish order and control over an otherwise unwieldy world and to seek a cure for addiction. Also woven through her life is an internal conflict over faith. Gifty was raised in a deeply religious household, and, though Gifty herself has given up on her mother's religion, she struggles to reconcile the role it continues to play in her life with the ostensibly godless -- or maybe it is god-like? -- impulse of science. And finally there is Gifty's relationship with her mother, which seems to lack affection. Early on, it is dismissed as a cultural difference, but later we learn of the depression that had wracked Gifty's mother since her brother Nana's death. All of these factors come to a head when Gifty's mother moves in with her during the final stages of doctoral research at Stanford.

Transcendent Kingdom just appeared at the top of the best novels of the year in The Week, where it was praised as "'a book of blazing brilliance' that, with its penetrating reflections on science and spirituality..." I didn't find it to be that, exactly. Maybe I wasn't reading closely enough, but those "penetrating reflections" to me actually seemed rather superficial. They weren't embedded in the story for the reader to find for themselves; they were, rather, stated explicitly by the narrator. To me, this is another case of telling rather than showing. The effect was that much of the book read more like an essay than a novel. It felt plotless. Though conflict abounded, it seemed to be ALL conflict, until the book's final pages, when everything seemed to miraculously resolve. The ending felt supremely unsatisfying and unrealistic. I'm not sure what Gifty, or the reader, learns. That addiction blows up more than the life of the addicted? That time heals all wounds? That faith and science can exist simultaneously? Perhaps I need to read it again.

First Light

 First Light

By Rebecca Stead

I first encountered Rebecca Stead when our entire school read one of her books, Goodbye Stranger, a few years ago. The whole-school read idea ended up being misguided for a number of reasons, but the book was quite good, and we followed it up with an author visit. Since then I've sought out anything and everything she's written. 

Like many of Stead's books, this story combines some science-fiction elements with modern-day realism. In this case, the realism part comes in the form of Peter, a 14-year-old New York City kid whose dad, a glaciologist, brings the family on a research trip to Greenland. The sci-fi part comes in the form of Thea, the youngest direct descendant of Grace, who led a group from England to Greenland to escape persecution from witchcraft. In Greenland, the group found refuge inside a glacier. Relying on scientific ingenuity -- they found a way to preserve ice so that it could retain its ice-like properties whilst remaining impervious to temperature -- they built a thriving community below the ice, safe from their pursuers.

The conflict in the story revolves around Thea's attempt to revive her late mother's push to explore the outside world. She finds the long forgotten -- and sealed -- tunnel the original settlers used to travel into the glacier. Her Grandmother, the matriarch of the community, Gracehope, however, is set against this idea. When Thea travels to the surface anyway, an accident nearly kills her cousin and brings her into contact with Peter, who, it turns out, has a lot more in common with Thea than he initially knows. And I'll leave it at that in case someone out there is reading this before picking up the book.

Stead is a great storyteller, there's no doubt about that. So I really enjoyed this book, and, in fact, had a hard time putting it down. But it's not quite up there with some of her others, particularly When You Reach Me. The sci-fi part of the book didn't really work as well. It was kind of strange that she tried to link this strange community with real-world events without exploring those events in much detail. And her explanations for the technologies developed to survive in Gracehope serve to undermine the world she's created. The lanterns they have, for instance, run on "oxygen". Right. Better not to have explained it at all. And so it is the characters that bring this book alive, and keep you coming back to it. Though we met only briefly, I will miss them.

Little Fires Everywhere

 Little Fires Everywhere 

By Celeste Ng

It doesn't take long for the literal version of the titular fires to make an appearance: They are right there in the first pages. So the reader knows right away that a train wreck  -- train fire? -- of some sort is coming. Discerning who it involves and why is what keeps the reader going and on edge throughout the book. In the end, no one escapes a blaze. 

Tellingly, the book is set in Shaker Heights, Ohio, which, Ng takes great pains to explain, is the first planned community in the nation. Elena Richardson, the matriarch of a wealthy Shaker Heights family, loves this fact, and incorporates the ethos of the town into her daily life. Which, by all appearances, is going pretty darn well. Enter her opposite: Mia Warren, an artist whose life is unplanned to the extreme. She has spent her life wandering the US with her daughter, staying in communities only long enough to complete a project before packing up and moving on. It is the classic "A stranger comes to town" trope. And Mia and her daughter Pearl's appearance leave no Richardson life unscorched. Can the same be said of Mia and Pearl? Perhaps that's the real question.

At the heart of this novel is the best way to live a life, something that I think a lot of us have had too much time to ponder in this pandemic. On the one hand there is Elena, who finds safety and comfort in having her path set and accumulating the trappings of "success". She reminds me of the Puritans, who believed in predestination, which one would think would make the accumulation of wealth a moot point, God already deciding whether you were going to get into heaven and everything, but who wanted more assurance than that and so sought out wealth as a sign of divine favoritism. And then, of course, there is Elena's commitment and connection to her community. Mia, on the other hand, lives her life solely based on her own values and escapes connection at all cost. Interestingly, this seems to allow her to see people more clearly -- except, maybe, her daughter, who ultimately can't decide for herself how she would like to live the way Mia can.

Obviously, our choices aren't so dichotomous in real life. But what is real is that, no matter what path we choose, we are certain to encounter our share of fires.

Magpie Murders

 Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

I've been searching for a book to get lost in for a while, and thought that a murder mystery might do the

trick. Can't say I was wrong. This one started conventionally enough. It tells the tale of an unexpected death in a small English town, Saxby-on-Avon, that soon attracts the attention of a renowned sleuth named Atticus Pund. Set in the years after World War II, it reads much like the many British murder shows my parents like to watch. And with good reason: Horowitz is the creator of a couple of them (Midsommer Murders included). 

All of this hits the spot -- but just as you are enraptured in the mystery there comes a twist! The book is actually a red herring -- or is it? The actual murder involves the author of the book, and it falls to his editor to solve the crime. Very meta.

For what it is worth, I actually picked the eventual murderer, which I won't reveal in the off chance that someone who might want to read the book finds themselves on this post. But suffice it to say that it wasn't someone under suspicion and therefore seemed like an obvious choice. 

No profundity from this book, but it was certainly fun to read. And it felt like two books in one by the end.

Dig.

 Dig. by A.S. King

It's been a while since I've finished a book. I started and abandoned several in late summer and fall. I

finished this one. So that says something about it. 

Truth be told, I picked up the book because it won a Printz award; I couldn't resist the shiny medal on the front cover. The book tells the story of a family that is, at best, dysfunctional. The title is partly a reference to the origins of the fortune enjoyed by the heads of the family, Marla and Gottfied, the latter of which tricked his family into selling off their potato farm so he could cash in on the property. It is also a reference to the many teenage voices in the novel, each of whom is seeking to learn about their past. It is, I think, a commentary on generational trauma and the difficulties of breaking free from parents' mistakes and mistaken beliefs.

I did finish it. But I can't say I thought it was all that great. Marla and Gottfied are made out to be awful human beings. We learn that they kicked children out of the house when they became pregnant, and refuse to provide financial assistance to their kids despite $10 million in their bank accounts. But the way they interact with others in the present doesn't seem to match these horrors. Their present selves don't seem to match their reported past selves. In addition, the author seems to just lob in the fact that some of the characters are dealing with and, to varying degrees, confronting racism. But this seems like something thrown in to make the story more relevant. In the end, I think the author failed to create a world the reader could truly inhabit. The characters and their lives are a little too obviously made up.