In the Time of the Blue Ball by Manuela Drager

Like everyone I know, Lili Nebraska had never been talented at police work, and she surely didn’t jump for joy to know that, from now on, she would replace the police. But you can be sure that she is doing her best. Since being put in charge, if you need her, well, she does her best.

Reading the paragraph above, you might assume that Lili Nebraska is a human woman who has, through some sequence of events, found herself as the head of the police department. This is a reasonable assumption, and is also wrong. The next paragraph goes on to say:

For a long time, Lili Nebraska had been a street violinist, a virtuoso brown as gingerbread with adorable black patterning on her face and around her navel, and with a violin under her arm, a bow in her hand and no other clothing. Even behind the crate of vegetables, she had not lost this proud musician’s appearance.

In the Time of the Blue Ball is like this: lucid and peaceful at sentence by sentence level but surreal and unknowable when seen from a distance. There’s no complicated prose, no metafictional tricks, no intricate plotting. Each of the stories follows the same structure: the narrator Bobby Potemkine--who is also a private investigator--is given a job: find the man who created fire; save Auguste Didion, a sentient piece of macaroni(!); find out where all the baby pelicans are coming from since there are no grown pelicans anymore. He sets out on these journeys with the help of friends he meets along the way, like Lili Nebraska above, or Gershwin, a tiger that smells strongly of urine and can’t help but eat anything that moves like a rodent, or his dog Djinn, who accidentally eats a performing fly and becomes a virtuoso on the vaguely woodwind-sounding “nanoctiluphe”. Each story ends with the task being accomplished, and in the course of things Bobby always runs into the “very pretty” Lili Niagara, a “batte”--which I assume is a batlike creature--with whom he was infatuated in grade school and who may like him now. But of course Battes like to mock other people/creatures and she may just be gathering gossip material.

Of these three stories, I liked Our Baby Pelicans the best. It asks, in an absurd way, for us to consider various relationships: parent and child, friend and “lover”, wage slave and artist, oppressor and oppressed, but it provides very little in the way of concrete anchor points. Does Lili Niagara like Bobby Potemkine, and by the way, what even are all these characters we follow? There’s a sense of isolation and lostness about the whole enterprise, as whimsical as it is.

The last story ends with Bobby having convinced a large lake to become a mother to all the baby pelicans. Through his words and her sheer force of will, they are able to remake the world in a way that leaves everyone happy, or so it seems. But the story ends the same as the earlier two: with the mission accomplished, the companions cheerful, and Bobby alone.

The title refers to the passage of time. Rather than years, months, hours, minutes, periods are indicated by spheres of varying color. Blue, red, Azure, green, periwinkle. No reference point is given for these units, so these characters all, including Bobby, exist in a space outside our comfortable reference points, and sometimes, we suspect, theirs as well. It’s never explained why the world is as it is, or even how it was before. In the end, the people living there are as confused as the reader, and left grasping at the same fleeting moments of lucidity and hope--fire, love, a pretty face, a beautifully patterned belly, a musical fly, a stinky tiger, a baby pelican hung about the neck of someone who’s still alone.

Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West

Dear Miss Lonelyhearts--

I am sixteen years old now and I dont know what to do and would appreciate it if you could tell me what to do. When I was a little girl it was not so bad because I got used to the kids on the block makeing fun of me, but now I would like to have boy friends like the other girls and go out on Saturday nites, but no boy will take me because I was born without a nose--although I am a good dancer and have a nice shape and my father buys me pretty clothes.

I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people even myself so I cant blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves me, but she crys terrible when she looks at me.

What did I do to deserve such a terrible bad fate? Even if I did do some bad things I didnt do any before I was a year old and I was born this way. I asked Papa and he says he doesnt know, but that maybe I did something in the other world before I was born or that maybe I was being punished for his sins. I dont believe that because he is a very nice man. Ought I commit suicide?

Sincerely yours,

Desperate

I’m not sure what to say about Miss Lonelyhearts; reading (and reviewing) it so soon after Day of the Locust has made a lot of my observations about this book a little redundant. Once again, it takes place in West’s grotesque, hopeless world, with another man, not particularly dissimilar from Locust’s Tod, trapped in circumstances beyond his control.

Miss Lonelyhearts, never given another name, is a man, an advice columnist for an unnamed paper. Started as a joke, the letters—several of them reprinted in full and packed with all manner of depressing minutae in the text—eventually become all Miss Lonelyhearts can think of. He tries to bury his sorrows, turning to religion, sex, bucolic getaways, but can find no relief. Unlike Tod, Miss Lonelyhearts has a soul, a true all-feeling soul, buried too deep for him to reach, even if he wanted to. As he sinks deeper into the morass of his job, his feelings rise to the top, until, during an unwanted tryst with an advice-seeker, he snaps, beats her up, and runs away. His crumbling emotional state (and, it is implied, possibly some physical ailments) lead him to a fevered vision, wherein he speaks to God, who promises to work as his editor and give him proper answers to those who seek his help. Unfortunately, the beaten woman’s husband, Doyle, with whom Miss Lonelyhearts earlier forms possibly the only sincere emotional connection in the entire novel, comes after him. There is violence, of course.

Miss Lonelyhearts is the disturbed fever dream of The Day of the Locust. There are loads of parallels, from Miss Lonelyhearts’s coworkers discussing well-deserved rapes they’ve heard about, to Doyle’s Homer Simpson-like breakdown, to everyone’s inability to make their world a better place. The difference is primarily one of tone: If The Day of the Locust is the world distorted in a funhouse mirror, Miss Lonelyhearts is the mirror itself. Everything is exaggerated, macabre, obscene. The letters, with their realistic depictions of people in desperate situations, are somehow less bleak than West’s hyper-real world, where rape is an acceptable dinner topic, everyone’s a fraud, and a revelation from God is just another way to get killed.

Sloth by Gilbert Hernandez

Sloth is an original graphic novel by Gilbert Hernandez, one of the Hernandez Brothers behind Love and Rockets, possibly the longest running and most influential indie comic going. I haven't been able to track down a collection of L&R yet, but wanted to sample some of the Hernandez's work.

Sloth is short, easily the shortest book I've read this year, but what it lacks in size, it makes up in sheer bizarreness. The story follows three Hispanic teens, Miguel, Lita, and Romeo. When the story opens, Miguel has just awoken from a year long coma and is trying to restart his life. The coma itself is a mystery, mostly because no medical reason for it can be found. To all appearances, Miguel willed himself into the coma out of boredom and a general malaise. He returns to Lita, his girlfriend who may or may not have developed an attraction to Romeo during his year MIA. He also can't help but notice that trying to move at any speed besides "slow" causes his joints to burn.

To this point, the story is quirky but not exactly surreal. The strangeness starts when the three go to an orchard where a mysterious goatman is said to reside, coming out only at night. According to legend, the goatman offers those who see it a chance to change places. If they agree, they become the goatman and have to find someone to switch with.

The story only gets stranger from there, as the three encounter the goatman, Miguel finds that he may or may not be able to fly, and a major and completely unexpected twist at the 2/3rds point when (spoiler) Miguel actually becomes Lita in some alternate universe featuring all the same characters (except Miguel) in drastically different roles.

As far as conclusions, that's tough. The primary theme seems to be identity, but the specific applications Hernandez is making are unclear, as is the narrative arc. Is the implication that one of the three switched places with the goatman changing the fabric of reality? Is it all a dream inside of a still comatose teen's head? By the end of the story, all three teens have switched identities and willed themselves into comas, although not simultaneously. There's something beautifully tragic about the dreamworlds of the protgaonists, if that's what they are: the worlds aren't perfect, but they are realities where things happen, where there are rockstars, goatmen, and adventures.

The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Marukami

Well, this book was strange.

It follows a man, whose name I can't remember because it's Japanese, through several months of his life, during which his marriage disintegrates, he meets a young girl who is obsessed with death, he loses his cat, he has psychic sex with a girl who fluctuates between constant pain and complete numbness, he develops the ability to suck bad things out of people's heads, and he learns that his brother in law has the ability to go inside women and split them in half... or something.

This book was really confusing.

There's a section where a man is tied down and skinned alive by a man named, appropriately, Boris the Manskinner. We learn this from an old army veteran whose past seems to parallel the life of our hero. We also learn that Boris eventually took over the prison camp in which he was originally interned, and that he cannot be killed.

So, this was sort of an odd twist.

Our hero spends several days in the bottom of a well, until the walls of the well turn into Jell-O and he pushes through them to some spirit hotel where he somehow kills his brother in law. You might expect that everything would tie together at some point, but that doesn't really happen.

This book was pretty good, if you can believe that.

Pinball, 1973 by Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami is such a strange man. Pinball, 1973 was published in 1985, about 20 years before Kafka on the Shore, and you can really get a sense of him fleshing out his writing style. After I read it I learned that it’s the second of “the Rat trilogy,” his first three books plus a fourth added some years later (I am aware, as I’m sure he is too, that four books are too many for a trilogy). Unfortunately, the first two books are out of print in English (apparently he refuses to allow them to be published outside of Japan, which is a real shame), but you can download a PDF file of Pinball, 1973 in English here. The only copy of his first book is $2,400 on Amazon.com, if anyone’s looking to buy me presents.

Pinball, 1973 works pretty well as a stand-alone work, in my opinion. It’s just as confusing as Kafka on the Shore, but with fewer elements. In a nutshell: the main character, unnamed, works as an independent translator and lives alone until he wakes up one day to find twin girls asleep on either side of him. One day, almost as an epiphany, he develops an obsession with one certain pinball machine, an old favorite of an acquaintance of his, the Rat. The Rat’s separate storyline is told in alternating chapters throughout; he moves to his own apartment for university, drops out after three years, and befriends a bartender named J until he decides it’s time to move on. I assume that the next book deals with what happens next, but, knowing Murakami, there’s really no way to tell without reading it. It could just as easily be about ice cream cones.

For me, it was a lonely season. Whenever I got home and took off my clothes, I felt as if any second my bones would burst through my skin. Like some unknown force inside me had taken a wrong turn somewhere, and was leading me off in some strange direction to another world.

More than anything, this book deals with being alone, from all angles. One character seems to distance himself from those around him in order to protect them from some karmic part of himself that he can’t control, in some weird way. The other just can’t seem to open himself up enough, or even know himself well enough, to connect with the people who care about him. The writing is pretty simple, or else it comes off that way after translation, but I’ve come to know it as his style. A lot of the passages are very moving, and most of the book is strangely comforting and familiar, in a way. You really want to be where his characters find themselves. I still can’t say that I completely understand Murakami, but I definitely like his work. Here’s hoping he breaks down and publishes this and his first book in the US soon.

EDIT: Very bad news, sports fans. It looks like someone forced the website to remove the file with the full text of the book. If you want it, let me know and I'll email it to you.

EDIT (again): And now it's back.

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Little known fact: In Costa Rica, blogger.com is in spanish. I am exhausted from travel, nervous about studying abroad, and very confused by this book, but I will try to write a review as best I can.

This book was confusing, to say the least. It involved a 15-year old runaway escaping from an ominous prophecy straight from Oedipus imposed on him by his own father, an old man who can talk to cats, souls leaving bodies, souls entering dreams, bodies entering dreams, souls... dreaming.. bodies? I couldn't shake the feeling that this entire book was a metaphor, but for what, I have no idea. Perhaps some of the more tricky bits would make more sense if I had a background in Japanese cultural history; I get the feeling that a lot of the strange characters and elements of Murakami's story would mean more to a reader from his own country.

Murakami is an excellent writer, and completely lets his reader get inside the head of the main character, the incredibly intelligent, 15-year old Kafka Tamura (an assumed name). I really got a sense of Kafka's wandering consciousness, and some of the things that he speculated about the state of his own subconscious nearly made my head spin. Kafka on the Shore is written in a style similar to Jonathon Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated, where alternating chapters tell different story lines, the secondary story line beginning in the past and eventually converging with the present.

I really enjoyed this book, it was an incredibly well told story, but one that is so densely packed with metaphor and symbolism, that it would take much more effort than I can offer to extract any greater meaning from it.