If you like Haruki Murakami, you'd like ...

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There are other Murakami threads and other book recommendation threads, but unless I missed it, there hasn't been this exact thread. So. Turns out my public library is pretty good, and the parking is decent, which means I go there much more often than the last one. I read six books on Catholicism this week and I've been paging through an Italian grammar just cause I can.

This is a good time, in other words, for me to go check out some authors that folks like when they like Murakami.

― Tep (ktepi), Friday, 18 July 2003 02:48 (twenty-two years ago)

Raymond Chandler + Philip K. Dick + Yasunari Kawabata = Murakami. Also: Kobo Abe, Soseki, Kenzaburo Oe (except all his books are about his son, gets a little tedious), Amos Tutuola (for the matter-of-fact acceptance of the supernatural), and Julio Cortazar for sure, esp. Hopscotch for sneaky emotional moments buried in the modernism and Cronopios & Famas & Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

― Neudonym, Friday, 18 July 2003 02:55 (twenty-two years ago)

Julio Cortazar!

― s1utsky (slutsky), Friday, 18 July 2003 02:56 (twenty-two years ago)

Maaaany authors I haven't read! Excellent. I know some of them by reputation. I've read Chandler and Dick, of course. The only Japanese author I've read other than Haruki Murakami is Ryu Murakami (well, and manga and some science fiction stories here and there. I wish I remembered who wrote the one about the Triceratops in Tokyo.)

― Tep (ktepi), Friday, 18 July 2003 03:06 (twenty-two years ago)

Start Cortazar with his story "House Taken Over," a really perfect ghost story.

― s1utsky (slutsky), Friday, 18 July 2003 03:08 (twenty-two years ago)

yeah, "The Axolotl" will creep you the fuck out too. I just got the book of poems Cortazar published before he died, they're lovely.

― Neudonym, Friday, 18 July 2003 03:18 (twenty-two years ago)

Oooh, what's it called?

― s1utsky (slutsky), Friday, 18 July 2003 03:19 (twenty-two years ago)

Paul Auster and soccer.

― Mary (Mary), Friday, 18 July 2003 03:21 (twenty-two years ago)

cortazar = "blow-up"?

― jaymc (jaymc), Friday, 18 July 2003 03:22 (twenty-two years ago)

yah

― s1utsky (slutsky), Friday, 18 July 2003 03:23 (twenty-two years ago)

s1utsky, it's called Save Twilight, it's on City Lights. Lots of prose poems, and stuff like this:

"I'll never learn how to take off my shoes and let the city bite my feet,
I won't get drunk under bridges, I won't make mistakes of style.
I accept this destiny of ironed shirts[....]
Look at this lousy lover, incapable of jumping into a fountain
to catch you a little red fish
in front of the outraged eyes of cops and nannies."

But seriously Cronopios y Famas is better, and even better than Murakami even.

― Neudonym, Friday, 18 July 2003 03:26 (twenty-two years ago)

thanks!

― s1utsky (slutsky), Friday, 18 July 2003 03:30 (twenty-two years ago)

what did people think of the Wind Up Bird Chronicle? I just finished it, my first Murakami, and I'm not sure what to think. I enjoyed the experience of reading it, but little more than that. Perhaps the reviewers were using 'impressionistic' as shorthand for 'beautiful, doesn't make sense when you get right down to it'?

― Dave M. (rotten03), Friday, 18 July 2003 08:23 (twenty-two years ago)

That woman... what's her name. She's Japanese and her name either sounds like "Banana" or rhymes with Banana or has something to do with Bananas or Yellow or something... who am I talking about? She wrote an amazing book about an island full of ghosts... Did I imagine reading that?

― kate (kate), Friday, 18 July 2003 08:26 (twenty-two years ago)

Jonathan Lethem's 'Gun with Occasional Music'.
David Bowman's 'Let the Dog Drive'.

― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Friday, 18 July 2003 08:28 (twenty-two years ago)

Banana Yoshimoto. Asleep is lovely.

― Archel (Archel), Friday, 18 July 2003 08:29 (twenty-two years ago)

Yes!

― kate (kate), Friday, 18 July 2003 08:31 (twenty-two years ago)

other books with lousy endings?

I like his books, but every one I've read has had a really bad ending.

― chris (chris), Friday, 18 July 2003 08:32 (twenty-two years ago)

Try David Mitchell too Tep?

― Archel (Archel), Friday, 18 July 2003 08:35 (twenty-two years ago)

'island of ghosts book' = amrita

― joni, Friday, 18 July 2003 08:37 (twenty-two years ago)

Yes Archel is right: Mitchell is a good answer -(but read 'Ghostwritten' before 'No9Dream').

― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Friday, 18 July 2003 08:38 (twenty-two years ago)

yea, auster i guess

― gareth (gareth), Friday, 18 July 2003 09:30 (twenty-two years ago)

You're rubbish for not mentioning Richard Brautigan, the only writer Murakami himself checked at the Prince Charles talk (apart from veteran sci-fiers). The pasta opening in the Wub Chronicle is very similar to a vignette in The Tokyo Montana Express.

― Chris T-T (duckyfuzz), Friday, 18 July 2003 14:05 (twenty-two years ago)

WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING BACK HERE, CHRIS?!?!?

YOU WERE THE ONE AND ONLY PERSON WHO SAID THEY WERE NEVER COMING BACK TO ILX AND NEVER DID!!! DO NOT BREAK THAT RECORD!!!

― kate (kate), Friday, 18 July 2003 14:07 (twenty-two years ago)

(Plus, Brautigan is shite.)

― kate (kate), Friday, 18 July 2003 14:07 (twenty-two years ago)

I see shades of Bulgakov at times in Murakami, in terms of the impossibly strange things that happen to normal people.

― Daniel (dancity), Friday, 18 July 2003 14:19 (twenty-two years ago)

brautigan is terrible

― gareth (gareth), Friday, 18 July 2003 14:19 (twenty-two years ago)

I'd just like to go on record as saying that I think Murukami is shite. It's obvious he makes his books up as he goes along, with no revision, which for me makes them one dimensional.

― thoth (Jake Proudlock), Friday, 18 July 2003 15:08 (twenty-two years ago)

Murakami is not shite, and Brautigan is (mostly) not shite. Shame on you two for your bad posts.

― Neudonym, Friday, 18 July 2003 15:24 (twenty-two years ago)

Shame on you too for yer bad tastes!

― kate (kate), Friday, 18 July 2003 15:26 (twenty-two years ago)

sorry Kate. 2 days ago Charles emailed his thread about songs to mark one's life and I stumbled in here. But I'm not back I promise. In fact I'm gone.

:o)

― chris tt (duckyfuzz), Friday, 18 July 2003 15:42 (twenty-two years ago)

Everyone makes their books up as they go along, except Capote.

This is a great thread! I'm about to hit my library catalogue to see how many of these are available.

― Tep (ktepi), Friday, 18 July 2003 16:24 (twenty-two years ago)

Surely some writers outline their books beforehand, or chart them, or something.

― Mandee, Friday, 18 July 2003 16:28 (twenty-two years ago)

I was being sort of facetious, more like "fiction = made-up stuff, so duh" :) I don't know how closely people stick to outlines. The only time I hear one mentioned, it seems to be because the author is talking about the ways he veered from it. Even if you outline, though, unless you're reeeally detailed you're still going by ear.

― Tep (ktepi), Friday, 18 July 2003 16:31 (twenty-two years ago)

brautigan is lovely.
you might want to try 'froth on the daydream' by boris vian.

― joni, Friday, 18 July 2003 16:35 (twenty-two years ago)

Yeah, I realized after I posted that of course all writers play it by ear. Mega duh on my part. Sorry!

― Mandee, Friday, 18 July 2003 16:36 (twenty-two years ago)

Hard Boiled Wonderland was the most disappointing book I've ever read and extraordinarily simplistic. the metaphor was transparent and the end was balls. Whenever you bring in a character to explicitly explain what's going on: blech. I did read a short story by him in the New Yorker that I liked a lot more but that book put me off reading any more of his novels. This might all be the fault of dumbed down translations.

― anthony kyle monday (akmonday), Friday, 18 July 2003 16:57 (twenty-two years ago)

Fave Murakami: the short-story collection, The Elephant Vanishes

I love Cortazar, especially the short stories. There's one called "We Love Glenda So Much" that I really love. Who doesn't wish they could erase their favorite artist's less-than-satisfactory work--with extreme prejudice, if necessary?

I would recommend Orhan Pamuk, "the Bestseller of Byzantium" (sez the NYTMag. He's probably the best-known Turkish novelist currently working, and he's unreconstructed modernist. Top of my list would be (in order) The Black Book and The White Castle. (The newest one, My Name Is Red, is still waiting in my bedside pile.) Black Book and White Castle both offer variations on the same theme (the former set in contemporary Istanbul, the latter during the high Ottoman period), but I enjoyed both quite a bit.

― Lee G (Lee G), Friday, 18 July 2003 17:53 (twenty-two years ago)

Didn't read this thread closely enough to see whether Jose Saramago's name has been mentioned, but All The Names (the only one of his I've read, admittedly) is pretty simpatico.

― Sean Thomas (sgthomas), Friday, 18 July 2003 18:27 (twenty-two years ago)

I'm slightly wary of Saramago because I had real issues with Blindness, in terms of the way it was translated -- but All The Names has a different translator. So it goes on the list.

People mentioned on this thread so far who I've found at the library: Kawabata, Abe, Oe, Cortazar, Bowman, Yoshimoto, David Mitchell, Bulgakov, Pamuk, Saramago (and Auster, one of the few I've read). Woo.

― Tep (ktepi), Friday, 18 July 2003 18:35 (twenty-two years ago)

can someone recommend a good yoshimoto book to start with please?

― mark p (Mark P), Friday, 18 July 2003 18:35 (twenty-two years ago)

Kitchen is as good as any.

Is the Blindness translation that bad Tep? I really enjoyed it, probably more so than the other two books of his I've read.

― RickyT (RickyT), Friday, 18 July 2003 18:52 (twenty-two years ago)

I quite enjoyed Saramago's Balthazar and Blimunda, and have no problem with Blindness so far. (Put it down to start Stand on Zanzibar though.) (Then put that down to read At Swim-Two-Birds again.) (Then got Anthony Cronin's biography of Flann O'Brien/Brian O'Nolan and am reading that now.) (Well, that and Everything Is Illuminated.)

But yeah, Saramago rules like a metrestick.

― Neudonym, Friday, 18 July 2003 18:57 (twenty-two years ago)

Is the Blindness translation that bad Tep? I really enjoyed it, probably more so than the other two books of his I've read.

I can't speak to how bad it is per se, cause I don't know Portuguese. But the way it reads ... I was working as a writing tutor at the time, and nearly all of my time was spent with English-as-a-Second-Language students. The book read like ESL; not all translations do, of course, most take the liberty of moving sentence structures around so that you're translating grammar as well as vocabulary. This might not bother me now, since I left that job two or three years ago.

― Tep (ktepi), Friday, 18 July 2003 19:06 (twenty-two years ago)

I'm a big fan of Saramago, though I wasn't nuts about All the Names. Dude has a very particular way of constructing his sentences that I really love (and that goes beyond the no-extraneous-punctuation thing). Try The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (helps if you're familiar with Fernando Pessoa).

― s1utsky (slutsky), Friday, 18 July 2003 19:35 (twenty-two years ago)

oh man s1utsky I've just been reading The Book of Disquiet by Pessoa and also got his Collected Poems, now yr gonna make me go get TYotDoRR too

― Neudonym, Friday, 18 July 2003 19:40 (twenty-two years ago)

Read it dude, it's really great! If you like Pessoa and you like Saramago this is the book for you.

― s1utsky (slutsky), Friday, 18 July 2003 19:55 (twenty-two years ago)

i'm on it. will report back when more is known.

― Neudonym, Friday, 18 July 2003 19:58 (twenty-two years ago)

No, you're right Tep, it was a bit ESL. But I liked the way it made the book seem more obviously foreign, which worked with the whole blindness/disorientation thing.

Nabisco wrote some good stuff abt translation as literary device somewhere on ILX which is u+k here, but I can't for the life of me remember on what thread.

― RickyT (RickyT), Friday, 18 July 2003 20:06 (twenty-two years ago)

Well, if it's deliberate .. ahh, I don't know. It reminded me so much of work, and God, that was an emotionally draining job (we were the laundry chute for most of the university's problems). But I think I still have the book somewhere, so maybe I'll try again.

― Tep (ktepi), Friday, 18 July 2003 20:14 (twenty-two years ago)

: (

― Cozen (Cozen), Friday, 18 July 2003 20:18 (twenty-two years ago)

Capote is not like, but he is bril.

― Mary (Mary), Friday, 18 July 2003 20:48 (twenty-two years ago)

Banana Yoshimoto is the only writer whose book I've picked up purely because of the name. Yeah, try Kitchen first, probably.

Surely best known Turkish novelist is Yashar Kemal, unless he has died. I love his work.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Friday, 18 July 2003 20:51 (twenty-two years ago)

S'possible Kemal's still around, though it'd be news to me. Best-known under 50, then?

― Lee G (Lee G), Friday, 18 July 2003 20:53 (twenty-two years ago)

Best known in America, likely.

― Mary (Mary), Friday, 18 July 2003 21:42 (twenty-two years ago)

hot people read saramago;)

― gareth (gareth), Saturday, 19 July 2003 09:13 (twenty-two years ago)

YES

― s1utsky (slutsky), Saturday, 19 July 2003 17:04 (twenty-two years ago)

hot dim people;)

― Mary (Mary), Monday, 21 July 2003 02:59 (twenty-two years ago)

duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhh...wha?

― Neudonym, Monday, 21 July 2003 03:05 (twenty-two years ago)

exactly;)

― Mary (Mary), Monday, 21 July 2003 03:08 (twenty-two years ago)

Much ho ho *coughcoughbillgriffithscoughcough* different medium similar aesthetic.
(helps if you're familiar with Fernando Pessoa).

yes but which pessoa? Soares? de Campos? the childhood chevalier de Pas? (incidentally it always used to amuse me that i was the boss of a guy called ricardo reis). Desire to create your own nationalist canon represent.

― Matt (Matt), Monday, 21 July 2003 03:11 (twenty-two years ago)

all them pessoas

― s1utsky (slutsky), Monday, 21 July 2003 03:28 (twenty-two years ago)

two months pass...

Update:

Kobo Abe: loved The Box Man; picked up The Ruined Map the other day and am sporadically making my way through it in spare moments (the back cover blurb made it sound like Paul Auster; so far the style's very different, of course).

Julio Cortazar: loved Hopscotch, glad I didn't read it when I was in my early 20s or I would've spent a long time getting my pretentiousness on and trying to replicate it without admitting that's what I was doing.

Banana Yoshimoto: Something about Asleep rubbed me wrong. Not sure what. Willing to try something else next time her books aren't out of the library.

Jonathan Lethem: Girlfriend's got Gun With Occasional Music, and I'm waiting to let her read it first.

And not mentioned on this thread, but recommended elsewhere -- Primo Levi: STILL NOT IN THE LIBRARY. I think someone checked all his books out and ran off to Montana.

― Tep (ktepi), Sunday, 19 October 2003 16:15 (twenty-two years ago)

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