A bristling memoir about Flynn growing up in Scituate, MA, his mother struggling to keep it all together and his father acting as a heavy, yet absent, presence. Like both his parents, Flynn learns to cope with substances and he stays in Boston, where he knows his father is or tends to return, even though he desires no relationship or contact with him. He begins working at a homeless shelter almost randomly. Eventually his father is evicted and arrives at the shelter against his son’s wishes. He struggles to come to terms with his father, with his dreams of being a writer, of his Great American Novel, as he begins to be recognized for his poetry.
It’s possible this story doesn’t even have to work very hard to be good, the core of it already holds so much power, but Flynn brings it together in a smooth style, without romanticizing hardships, with a calm insight into a relationship and personality similarities between a father and son who barely know each other, as well as some light cast on his work with homeless men in general.
“The novel as series of nested dolls”: it starts with a journal from colonial times, moves on to a series of letters from the 1930’s, a mystery from the 1970’s, a British comedy script idea placed contemporary time, a science fiction story in the form of an interview, and then a post-apocalyptic oral narrative—after which it retreats back from where it came, the stories all interlocking. The layers build on and you can peel them back as you wish and let them operate in many different ways: recurring themes in history; trends in literature or more specifically, how stories are told; the transcendence of the soul. The more I consider this novel, the more it opens up.
Having fell into the habit of stopping by Danny Gregory’s site over the past year after first hearing about this book, it seemed time to check out the book. Part sketchbook and part memoir, the book explores the aftermath of his wife’s subway accident that left her paralyzed and him struggling to reevaluate inside a new existence, partially by teaching himself how to draw. Sometimes there isn’t much cohesion between the memoir bits about dealing with his bouts of existential angst and the sketchbook bits of various scenes around New York City—sometimes it feels like there should be more of a narrative as well, but the art is beautiful
I got this from the library after Keri Smith made reference to it a few times. I thought maybe it would help me figure out how to start writing in my journal more consistently again, to remind me how to think on a page, and so far it seems to be working. Also it has been good to remember how to enjoy solitude, which is obviously the main recurring theme in this book. Reading this also reminded me that I once had the idea of reading the diaries of Anaïs Nin, but couldn’t ever catch the early diaries at the library. I went through a little Nin phase in college but have barely even thought of her since then.
I love Spiegelman’s Maus books, so I was interested in his response to 9/11. The book is very tall and printed on board. The pages were originally published as installments in several periodicals, but it was pretty disappointing to read it all at once. It is repetitive and lacks an overall narrative arc. Near the end it goes off on a more involved tangent of recalling old comic characters (which was present from the beginning). But I think it’s to be expected, as Spiegelman was making these pages in the midst of everything, and it was so impossible to see the bigger picture most times. And a lot of people burnt out and sought distractions in all sorts of things. It’s definitely not as profound as Maus to me, but an interesting perspective from someone who lived in lower Manhattan at the very least.
Legend has it that on a warm day in Spring 1974 while watching a baseball game Murakami-san had the inspiration to write his first novel, later called Hear the Wind sing.
• murakami.ch
This early book, a precurser to A Wild Sheep Chase, hasn’t been officially published in the US, but an edition published in English as an English teaching guide can be found in certain channels. It’s short and a little scattered and barely surreal or fantastic in any way like his later works, but does give some depth to the characters of the Rat, J, and the narrator of A Wild Sheep Chase. In certain ways it reminds me of Norwegian Wood in mood, and there is the intrigue of recurring references to an American writer Derek Heartfield, who is apparently entirely fictitious.
One of my goals for 2005 is to read the rest of Murakami’s books, with Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World next, probably. Apparently it’s “the most readable mind-fuck ever.” The others being Dance Dance Dance, South of the Border, West of the Sun, and the new book coming out this month Kafka on the Shore. As well as Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words (a semi-biography by Jay Rubin, who has translated most of his works into English) and another early book, Pinball 1973, if I can find it. That alone should keep me a little busy, at least for a few months.
