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Kafka on the Shore
Haruki Murakami
Lifespan | b. 1949 (Japan)
First Published | 2002
First Published by | Shinchosha (Tokyo)
Original Title | Umibe no Kafuka
“I’m a concept, get it?”
Haruki Murakami, born in Kyoto to a Buddhist father and merchant mother, spent much of his childhood absorbing the Japanese literature that his parents both taught. His interest, however, is in American literature, a tension between East and West that he reconciles in much of his work.
Kafka on the Shore could perhaps be described as a piece of psychoanalytic magic realism. Kafka Tamura is a fifteen-year-old boy whose father has told him, in an Oedipal prophecy, that he will kill his father and sleep with his mother and sister. Kafka runs away from his father to escape this prediction but also, ironically, to go in search of his mother, who took his sister and abandoned him when he was a child. A second parallel story about an elderly simpleton called Nakata haunts Kafka’s world. Kafka and Nakata never meet, but their journeys through life are inextricably bound together.
The novel explores the relationship between life events and the folds of time, connections between ghosts and music, the healing effects of forgiveness, dream-realities, violence, love, memory, and loss. We are presented with a world of inexplicable events where humans communicate with cats and dogs, and fish fall from the sky. Larger-than-life characters such as Johnny Walker and Colonel Sanders have an effect on the fate of everyone.
Through his finely tuned prose style and attention to detail, Murakami pulls the tones of a chaotic, surrealist universe into harmony with a Zen-like meditation. Kafka on the Shore is a carefully constructed piece of writing that attempts to come to terms with the modern world by weaving together Eastern and Western thinking in a way that explores and enhances our attitudes toward the mysteries of time, life, and death. PM
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2000s
The Namesake
Jhumpa Lahiri
Lifespan | b. 1967 (England)
First Published | 2003
First Published in | Houghton Mifflin (New York)
Original Language | English
“Motherhood in a foreign land.”
Abandoning their tradition-bound life in Calcutta, recently married Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli move to a town outside of Boston, Massachusetts to pursue their version of the American dream. Unwilling to give up their Bengali culture, Ashima in particular struggles against Western assimilation, attempting to maintain ties with India. However, the births of their son, Gogol (named after the Russian writer), and their daughter, Sonia, who grow up American first, Bengali second, undermine their hope of respecting the customs of their former world. As they cling to the past, their children endeavor to overcome the schizophrenia of being at once inside of and marginalized from the only society they have ever truly known. Recording the immigrant experience in a direct and resonating prose, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake illustrates how a clash of cultures may erupt between generations within a single family, and how, ultimately, home becomes a microcosm of the self.
An immediate best seller and winner of both the New York Times and New York Magazine Book of the Year Awards, The Namesake was Lahiri’s much-anticipated first novel. Whereas the novel describes the experiences of second-generation Indian immigrants to America and the sense of being torn between the country of their birth and the country of their parents’ birth, her debut work, a collection of short stories entitled The Interpreter of Maladies (1999), looked at the strain of leaving behind the familiarity of one’s homeland for the strangeness of a completely foreign culture. This collection earned her the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000—a prize rarely given to debut works or collections—as well as the PEN/Hemingway Award, and has been translated into twenty-nine languages. BJ
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2000s
Vernon God Little
DBC Pierre
Lifespan | b. 1961 (Australia)
First Published | 2003
First Published by | Faber & Faber (London)
Man Booker Prize | 2003
“DBC Pierre” is the pseudonym of Peter Warren Finlay; “DBC” stands for “Dirty But Clean,” while “Pierre” is a childhood nickname.
Winner of the 2003 Man Booker Prize, Vernon God Little is a black comedy written with a Texan drawl so intense you find yourself mouthing the words under your breath in order to catch their sense. The book is set in the town of Martirio (Spanish for “martyr”), the “barbecue sauce capital of Texas”—an ordinary town, full of average, self-obsessed people. Our hero, fifteen-year-old Vernon, is a survivor of a high-school massacre, carried out by his closest friend, Jesus. As police and media attention focus increasingly on Vernon, he begins to be seen as an accessory to the crime rather than a near-victim.
Vernon is powerless. He lacks the maturity to take control of his situation. He must do what the adults around him—teachers, his mother, the police—tell him; he mistakenly places a childlike trust in these people, and, again and again, they fail him. The author constantly plays with Vernon’s middle name Gregory, calling him “Vernon Gone-to-hell Little” and “Vernon Gonzalez Little,” each time reflecting the influence Vernon feels himself under. On death row, at the end of the book, Vasalle, the axe-murderer tells Vernon: “You’re the God. Take responsibility.” It is only when Vernon takes responsibility for the things that are happening to him that he can influence the direction of his own life and become “Vernon God Little.”
DBC Pierre’s novel targets all the usual ills of contemporary America—guns, teenage alienation, dysfunctional families, the justice system, gluttony—as well as offering a chilling portrayal of the way the media is able to twist events to its own ends. The book’s dark comedy occasionally loses its way among these multiple targets, becoming puerile or farcical, but the plot swings along at such a pace and with such startling twists that this relatively minor quibble scarcely seems to matter. ClW
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2000s
The Successor
Ismail Kadare
Lifespan | b. 1936 (Albania)
First Published | 2003
First Published by | Shtëpia Botuese 55 (Tiranë)
Original Title | Pasardhësi
This novel, written by Ismail Kadare, winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005, is set in Tirana, the capital of Albania, and is based around the death of Mehmet Shehu, the “Successor” to the “Guide,” communist dictator Enver Hoxha, who ruled Albania for fifty years and in 1981 was poised to surrender his power. The Successor’s family having been arrested or eradicated, it remains unclear whether or not he was murdered or committed suicide. The mystery of his death is accompanied for most Albanians by a long-bred fear of inquiry.
It is this fear that Kadare’s clear, precise, and unsentimental prose communicates, reinforcing the tension brought by the unresolved murder. Tension and fear produce the paranoia that consumes his Albanian characters: Suzanna, the Sucessor’s daughter, who is traumatized by the termination of her engagement to Genc, due possibly to his alliances with the former regime; the pathologist who worries that in performing the Successor’s autopsy, he is securing his own death; and the architect who builds the Successor’s great house—bigger, he comes to realize, than that of the Guide.
By linking political fear to geographic isolation, Kadare brings his Albanian audience to the fore. It is in the character of a supernatural old aunt, whether spy or ghost, who appears to the family of the Successor after his death, that the narrative is conveyed to Albanians. Her prophecies are as transcendental as the past they must acknowledge before shedding their cloak of fear. JSD
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2000s
Lady Number Thirteen
José Carlos Somoza
Lifespan | b. 1959 (Cuba)
First Published | 2003
First Published by | Mondadori (Madrid)
Original Title | La Dama número trece
In his novels José Carlos Somoza has alluded to very distinct literary genres: from mystery stories and erotic fiction to futurist fantasy and the scientific thriller. But for Somoza, the conventions of a genre are merely tools for developing a literary game around questions such as philosophy—The Athenian Murders—or art—The Art of Murder—or the power of poetry—Lady Number Thirteen, a novel that falls within the realm of the terror genre.
A professor of literature, Salomón Rulfo, suffers a recurrent nightmare in which he finds himself present at a triple murder in a house familiar to him, while a woman desperately asks him for help. Despite his doctor’s attempted explanations, the dream seems incredibly vivid and Rulfo believes that the desperate woman will actually be killed. Rulfo decides to enter the house surreptitiously, to reexperience the setting of his dream. From that moment, he seems to enter another reality, in which “human language is not inoffensive” and people do not suffer simple misfortunes but live caught in a curse, in a “combination of powerful words.”
Somoza was a psychiatrist before becoming a novelist and, as with his other novels, the mystery of Lady Number Thirteen revolves around psychological obsession. He writes with great power of conviction and, in a story full of supernatural portents, he persuades his readers to suspend their disbelief, taking them on a vertiginous succession of witches’ sabbaths in sumptuous settings. The result, once again, is a novel as exciting as it is intelligent. SR
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2000s
What I Loved
Siri Hustvedt
Lifespan | b. 1955 (U.S.)
First Published | 2003
First Published by | H. Holt & Co. (New York)
First UK Edition | Sceptre (London)
“The hand that had painted the picture hid itself in some parts of the painting and made itself known in others.”
What I Loved examines the bonds aging art historian Leo Hertzberg created and lost with his closest friend Bill Wechsler throughout their twenty-five-year relationship. Bill’s early painting of a young woman captivates Leo, and prompts him to seek out the unknown artist. An intellectually charged discussion in Bill’s studio culminates in Bill giving Leo “permission” to see the shadow in the painting as his own, a gesture of intimacy that launches their fraternal affection. Throughout the intervening years, the men share improbable but evocative parallels. Bill and his wife, Lucille, move into the loft above Leo and his wife, Erica, and later Bill’s model and second wife, Violet, comes to stay. The families welcome baby boys within weeks of each other. Both suffer the loss of their sons—precocious Matt Hertzberg in a childhood boating accident and Mark Wechsler in a perplexing yet persistent drift into mental disorder. By the time of the narrative, Leo is the lone remnant of a once robust world of personal and creative engagement. His quietly mournful voice unflinchingly describes the consequences of some catastrophic failures.
Populated with artists, academics, and poets, the world of Siri Hustvedt’s novel bristles with an experimental energy against which the characters’ domestic tragedies unfold. Bill’s art stakes its claim at the periphery of the intelligible. Leo’s patient readings of Bill’s work ease it into articulateness, while testing the boundaries of interpretation in art, criticism, and our everyday lives. AF
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A Tale of Love and Darkness
Amos Oz
Lifespan | b. 1939 (Jerusalem)
First Published | 2003
First Published by | Keter (Jerusalem)
Original Language | Hebrew
Born Amos Klausner, Oz adopted his surname—Hebrew for “strength”—after joining the Kibbutz Hulda at the age of fifteen.
“My father could read sixteen or seventeen languages . . .”
A Tale of Love and Darkness is Amos Oz’s first autobiographical novel, and it won him numerous awards, including the Goethe Cultural Award and a nomination for the Nobel Prize. Opening with Oz’s birth and ending with his mother’s death three months before his bar mitzvah, Oz unfolds the story of his childhood and adolescence, his parents’ lives, and the family’s roots in a fluid, nonchronological account. The personal narrative, spanning five generations of Oz’s family, is masterfully woven into a larger history—the fate of East-European Jews from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the Zionist movement, the British mandate in Palestine, the siege on Jerusalem, the War of Independence, and the founding of Israel.
The core narrative, which binds together the myriad subplots, is that of Oz’s mother, Fania. Her suicide is repeatedly broached throughout. Oz struggles painfully with his family’s inherent compulsion for silence regarding emotions: “From the day of my mother’s death to the day of my father’s death, twenty years later, we did not talk about her once. Not a word. As if she never lived.”
It is not until the very last pages of his memoir that Oz succeeds in finally shattering the “thousand dark years that separated everyone,” and recounts the final days of his mother’s life. It is in this poignant moment of the narrative that Oz’s literary ingenuity comes into full play. Relying on his recollection of his aunt’s and uncle’s account, he glimpses his mother’s death “as though an old moon was reflected in a windowpane from which it was reflected in a lake, from where the memory draws, not the reflection itself, which no longer exists but only its whitened bones,” and (re)constructs an evocative, moving, and eloquent description. IW
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2000s
Your Face Tomorrow
Javier Marías
Lifespan | b. 1948 (U.S.)
First Published | 2002–04
First Published by | Alfaguara (Madrid)
Original Title | Tu rostro mañana
Sophisticated and unhurried, Marías slows down the action in his novels to expose rich seams of observation and reflection.
“One should never tell anyone anything . . .”
Even without the projected third volume of Javier Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow, the first two installments of this massive work, Fever and Spear and Dance and Dream, are enough to confirm the literary ability of a writer created in the magisterial mold of Juan Benet. Marías insists that Your Face Tomorrow is not a trilogy but a novel in three volumes and, as such, comparisons with Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu are inevitable. Without leaving the central themes of his novel, such as the weight of uncertainty in our life, or the distrust of the supposedly well known, Marías has opened new imaginative areas in his novels. In particular, his questions now concern the past and the credibility of narratives in which the past is described, and the many interests that threaten the possibility of a conclusive description of the past.
The novel describes the biased historical retelling of events in the Spanish Civil War (such as the case of Andreu Nin, killed by the communists), and the experiences of characters who, during the Second World War, were British espionage agents, coming from the highest spheres of the British universities: the protagonist of Fever and Spear, Jacques Deza, is working in London during the Civil War, where he is recruited to the British Secret Service by retired Oxford professor Sir Peter Wheeler. “Never tell anyone anything,” this massive novel memorably begins, a reflection on the impossibility of knowing the trustworthiness of individuals, from the viewpoint of a protagonist whose trade consists of detecting possible genuineness. The novel uses speculation as a narrative device, and the style is always labyrinthine and involving, like a gauze weaved by a narrator while meditating and searching for certainties. JGG
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Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell
Lifespan | b. 1969 (England)
First Published | 2004
First Published b
y | Sceptre (London)
First U.S. Edition | Random House (New York)
The psychedelically styled cover, by Kal and Sunny, suggests an unfamiliar world after the downfall of science and civilization.
“If there be any eyrie so desolate . . . that one may there resort unchallenged by an Englishman, ‘tis not down on any map I ever saw.”
Cloud Atlas is a glittering compendium of interlacing parables. Divided into six different accounts spanning several centuries, Mitchell ranges from the journal of a nineteenth-century explorer to the postapocalyptic memoir of a herdsman, Zachry. Each testament breaches time and space. Thus, in the second story, the financially destitute musician Robert Frobisher happens upon the explorer’s journal and includes it in a letter to his lover Rufus Sixsmith; in the third story, Sixsmith is a scientific advisor blowing the whistle on a nuclear conglomerate’s reactor; the report of the young journalist accompanying him then enters the custody of Timothy Cavendish, a publisher fleeing his underworld creditors. As Cavendish hides in a nursing home, Mitchell propels his reader into the future, where we encounter the plangent last testament of genetic fabricant Somni-451, detailing for the archives her life as an automaton under state control prior to execution.
Mitchell has recalled that “lurking in Cloud Atlas’ primordial soup was an idea for a novel with a Russian-doll structure” that would allow him to house multiple narratives within each other. He notes Italo Calvino accumulated twelve plot layers with this device, yet “never ‘came back’ to recontinue his interruptions.” Mitchell makes the return journey, allowing Cloud Atlas to “boomerang back through the sequence.” And the novel’s language is just as dynamic as its structure. Mitchell has secured this book with a rhapsody of contrasting dialects. DJ
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 107