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Friday, October 27, 2006
Norwegian Wood
Unsurprisingly, Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood
There’s quite a bit of sex. Murakami’s neatly dodges any and all potential ’bad sex‘ bullets. (Mostly the sex is awkward, which makes it less awkward to write. And maybe it helps that it’s Japanese, so the characters can always commit suicide later.) What really makes the novel work are masterful, multiple characterizations - a half dozen really intriguing figures orbiting each other uncomfortably; and each pulls away from the action like a whole, layered slice of Japanese culture. You end up feeling you have taken in a panorama - city and society and culture - when, on reflection, it was all very economically rendered by means of a few character sketches. And the characters are rather isolated, solitary, self-contained misfit-types. So it’s a bit mysterious how they can come to feel so much like symbols for Japan in the 60’s.
The Guardian blurb on my copy effuses that "such is the exquisite, gossamer construction of Murakami’s writing that everything he chooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibility." Yes to trembling. No to gossamer. In fact, I think the novel’s opening sort of klunks, qua gossamer. What do you think?
I was 37 then, strapped in my seat as the huge 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to Hamburg airport. Cold November rains drenched the earth, lending everything the gloomy air of a Flemish landscape: the ground crew in waterproofs, a flag atop a squat airport buidling, a BMW billboard. So - Germany again.
Once the plane was on the ground, soft music began to flow from the ceiling speakers: a sweet orchestral cover version of the Beatle’s "Norwegian Wood". The melody never failed to send a shudder through me, but this time it hit me harder than ever.
I bent forward, my face in my hands to keep my skull from splitting open. Before long one of the German stewardesses approached and asked in English if I were sick.
"No," I said, "just dizzy."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, I’m sure. Thanks."
She smiled and left, and the music changed to a Billy Joel tune. I straightened up and looked out of the window at the dark clouds hanging over the North Sea, thinking of all I had lost in the course of my life: times gone for ever, friends who had died or disappeared, feelings I would never know again.
The plane reached the gate. People began unfastening their seatbelts and pulling luggage from the overhead lockers, and all the while I was in the meadow. I could smell the grass, feel the wind on my face, hear the cries of the birds. Autumn 1969, and soon I would be 20.
The stewardess came to check on me again. This time she sat next to me and asked if I was all right.
"I’m fine, thanks," I said with a smile. "Just feeling kind of blue."
"I know what you mean," she said. "It happens to me, too, every once in a while."
She stood and gave me a lovely smile. "Well, then, have a nice trip. Auf Wiedersehen."
"Auf Wiedersehen."
Do you think this is a good opening?
I don’t. (Sorry if I’ve poisoned your pristine intuitions with my opinionations prematurely. But tell me what you think.) It seems to me a bit dull, maybe a bit imprecise and even cliched. "Norwegian Wood"-induced nausea seems weird without being funny or interesting and the stewardess dialogue is slightly off, to no obvious purpose. But by p. 389 it works great, retroactively.
Consider this, if you will, a follow-up to my sententious criticism post. I’m not sure it’s healthy for fiction if we demand good first sentences - that is, if we demand first sentences that take us by the lapels, dangle us over a cliff, make us laugh or otherwise ravish us with the antics of a few phrases. Likewise, I’m not sure it’s healthy for for fiction if we demand that the first 10 paragraphs be good. Maybe it has something to do with the death of the novel. Novels are so worried we’ll think they’re dead that they jump up and down in their hospital beds. That way lies hysterical realism. Anyway, Norwegian Wood is one damn fine novel.
Comments
Someone who’s read Murakami translated into both English and French (but never, I think, in Japanese) has assured me that the English translations—at least one set of them, I can’t remember if he was talking about Rubin or the other guy (Birnbaum?) or who did Norwegian Wood—aren’t very good compared to the French. But I’ll agree to your characterization of the opening.
Also heard that Murakami has repudiated or otherwise tried to distance himself from NW, though I haven’t been able to find anything more out about that and don’t know if it’s true.
"Gossamer” is one of those words that is actually a neon sign saying “This Reviewer Has Not Bothered to Think.”
A first sentence does not need to drop you off a cliff. But it does need to make you think, and at least be tickled. My reading strategy, whenever I go to a bookstore and see something that might be worthwhile, is to read the first two sentences. I know whether that writer is a good writer in the first two sentences. I always try, but always fail, to not read the back-cover blurb. Ninety-nine percent of the time, a back-cover blurb will be written in such cliches (and occasionally even grossly misrepresenting the book) that it will have the opposite effect that it intends, and I’ll be repulsed by the very text that wants me to be attracted. Occasionally I go to bookstores and read the back covers of my very favorite books in the world, and think: “Wow, I’d never want to read this if this is what it were really about.”
John, thanks for the recommendation. I thought the opening was so terrible that I put down the book, and didn’t bother with the rest of Murakami’s catalog. It’s nice to know that it, and he, are worth a second look.
One comment? Really? (Kicks tires, stares. Opens hood, stares. Does things with tools. Stares. Kicks tires.) That should do the trick.
I find it very peculiar that when there are four comments, the counter registers only two.
Yes, Joseph, you really ought to fight through that bad first page. Glad to have been of assistance.
dignam, I think you’ll miss a lot of great books that way. But then, like John, I’m a first line skeptic. Even if I wasn’t naturally inclined towards more structural concerns, fiction workshopping would’ve made me sick of “the hook” pretty quickly.
My own browsing technique is to open the book at random about two-thirds of the way through and read a bit, then about a third of the way through and read a bit. I’ve heard this formalized as “judging by page 117”, and the rule was presented as such in a panel at Readercon 3.
John-- Having decided to take you up on this one, I was so struck by the similarities between Toru and other “ordinary” characters with extraordinary friends (such as Gene Forrester, Nick Carraway, and Sal Paradise) that I went and blogged about it here:
http://kugelmass.wordpress.com/2006/11/02/the-artist-type/
In Robin Thicke’s song “Lost Without You” he says that in a lyric or part of lyric, “get norwegian wood with me”. What does that mean?