Book Review | Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami

"I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden."

Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are vanishing cats and smoky bars, lonely hearts and mysterious women, baseball and the Beatles, woven together to tell stories that speak to us all. 

Marked by the same wry humor that has defined his entire body of work, in this collection Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic.

***

"If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden," muses Haruki Murakami in the materials accompanying Men Without Women. He must, then, be something of a glutton for punishment, having immersed himself in metaphorical forestry for the decade and change since his last short story collection, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, allowed the World Fantasy Award-winning author to tend to his wending trellises.

Compared to the twenty four works of fiction featured in that last, Men Without Women is a strikingly slim volume, compiling only seven stories, six of which Murakami's legion of English-language fans may well have read already. And whilst I wish I could tell you their haunting quality makes up for their wanting quantity, so many of said struck me as uneventful retreads that I can only recommend this collection with a handful of caveats.

That being said, if you come to Murakami for the cats and the cars, the deep obeisance to The Beatles and the bars choked with smoke, then come! Men Without Women has all that jazz—and oh so many miserable men and mysterious women.

The day comes to you completely out of the blue, without the faintest of warnings or hints beforehand. No premonitions or foreboding, no knocks or clearing of throats. Turn a corner and you know you're already there. But by then there's no going back. Once you round that bend, that is the only world you can possibly inhabit. In that world you are called 'Men Without Women.' Always a relentlessly frigid plural.  

Only Men Without Women can comprehend how painful, how heartbreaking it is to become one. (p.224)

That's as may be, but if this collection is about anything, it's about communicating that pain, that heartbreak, to the reader.

Book Review | Death's End by Cixin Liu

Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge. With human science advancing and the Trisolarans adopting Earth culture, it seems that the two civilizations can co-exist peacefully as equals without the terrible threat of mutually assured annihilation. But peace has also made humanity complacent.

Cheng Xin, an aerospace engineer from the 21st century, awakens from hiber­nation in this new age. She brings knowledge of a long-forgotten program dating from the start of the Trisolar Crisis, and her presence may upset the delicate balance between two worlds. Will humanity reach for the stars or die in its cradle?

***

The translation and publication of Cixin Liu's Three-Body books has been a singular highlight of the science fiction scene in recent years. The Hugo Award-winning opening salvo of said saga took in physics, farming, philosophy and first contact, and that was just for starters. The world was wondrous, the science startling, and although the author's choice of "a man named 'humanity'" as that narrative's central character led to a slight lack of life, The Three-Body Problem promised profundity.

A year later, The Dark Forest delivered. Bolstered by "a complex protagonist, an engrossing, high-stakes story and a truly transcendent setting, The Dark Forest [was] by every measure a better book" than The Three-Body Problem. Not only did it account for its predecessor's every oversight, it also embiggened the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy brilliantly and explored a series of ideas that astonished even seasoned science fiction readers.

But "no banquet was eternal. Everything had an end. Everything." (p.27) And when something you care about does approach that point, all you can do is hope it ends well.

Death's End does.

Book Review | Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a seventeenth-century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Blind and silenced, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children's beds for nights on end. So accustomed to her have the townsfolk become that they often forget she's there. Or what a threat she poses. Because if the stitches are ever cut open, the story goes, the whole town will die.

The curse must not be allowed to spread. The elders of Black Spring have used high-tech surveillance to quarantine the town. Frustrated with being kept in lockdown, the town's teenagers decide to break the strict regulations and go viral with the haunting. But, in so doing, they send the town spiraling into a dark nightmare.

***

An ancient, archetypal evil meets a miscellany of modern motfis—such as surveillance and social media—in HEX, the first of Dutch wunderkind Thomas Olde Heuvelt's five genre novels (of which this is the fifth) to be translated into the English language.

You may well have heard of the aforementioned author already; after all, he won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2015, and was nominated for another unsettling short story, 'The Boy Who Cast No Shadow,' two years previously. HEX is long-form horror, however, and long-form horror is hard, not least because the unknowable, on the back of which so much such fiction is built, can only remain so for so long before folks get sick and tired of not knowing.

Yet in HEX, we know what would be unknowable in most horror novels from the get-go: the cause and the consequences of the ghost that has haunted the heart of the Hudson Valley for hundreds of years. We know her name and approximate age:

"It was in Black Spring that [Katherine van Wyler] was sentenced to death for witchcraft in 1664—although they didn't call it Black Spring back then; it was a Dutch trappers' colony known as New Beeck—and it's here in Black Spring that she's remained." (p.63)

It's even worse than that, though. This too we know; that before the noose was wrapped around her neck—as "an act of mercy," (p68) if you can credit it—Katherine was made to murder her own son in order to save her dearest daughter. Little wonder, then, that she's been making life difficult for the residents of Black Spring since; so difficult that an infrastructure unlike any other has had to be erected around her.

Book Review | The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

The universe is a forest, patrolled by numberless and nameless predators. In this forest, others are hell, a dire existential threat. Stealth is survival. Any civilisation that reveals its location is prey.

Earth has. And the others are on the way.

The Trisolarian fleet has left their homeworld and will arrive... in four centuries' time. But the sophons, their extra-dimensional emissaries, are already here and have infiltrated human society and and derailed scientific progress. Only the individual human mind remains immune to the sophons. This is the motivation for the Wallfacer Project, a last-ditch defence that grants four individuals almost absolute power to design secret strategies, hidden through deceit and misdirection from Earth and Trisolaris alike. Three of the Wallfacers are influential statesmen and scientists, but the fourth is a total unknown. Luo Ji, an unambitious Chinese astronomer, is baffled by his new status. All he knows is that he's the one Wallfacer that Trisolaris wants dead.

***

If The X-Files taught me one thing, it was to be afraid—to be very afraid—of escalators. I learned early to take the stairs, or else be consumed by Eugene Tooms. But the recently revived TV series taught me at least two things, in truth: that, and the fact that thinking of Earth as the cradle of all creation in the unimaginable vastness of the galaxy is an act of absolute arrogance.

I want to believe, in other words. Absent any evidence, however, belief is a difficult state to sustain. It necessitates a leap of faith I've never been able to take—though that's no longer a problem for the characters at the heart of the startling second volume of Cixin Liu's translated trilogy, as they, and humanity as a whole, have had that proof.

In The Three-Body Problem, our wildest dreams were realised in the same second as our worst fears: they are out there, and now that they know we're here, they're coming... coming to wipe out every last trace of humanity from the galaxy.

The thing is, they're going to take four hundred years to get here.

But when they do? We're toast, folks.

The assembly fell into a prolonged silence. Ahead of them stretched the leaden road of time, terminating somewhere in the mists of the future, where all they could see were flickering flames and the lustre of blood. The brevity of a human lifespan tormented them as never before, and their hearts soared above the vault of time to join with their descendants and plunge into blood and fire in the icy cold of space, the eventual meeting place for the souls of all soldiers. (p.43)

In this way, a great wave of defeatism sweeps the people, not least because they know that nothing they do now will have the slightest impact on the Trisolarans. The present-day generation's only potential legacy is laying out the groundwork for humanity to develop in centuries ahead. Today, the knowledge base just isn't there, nor indeed will it ever equal the quantum technology bolstering the Trisolarans' far superior force. That's because of the sophons: a mass of microscopic particles which interfere in certain experiments, establishing an energy-based barrier beyond which scientists simply cannot cross. We haven't hit it yet, but we will, one day. And then? Well, it'll be The End, my friends.

Book Review | The Rabbit Back Literature Society by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen

Only nine people have ever been chosen by renowned children’s author Laura White to join the Rabbit Back Literature Society, an elite group of writers in the small town of Rabbit Back. Now a tenth member has been selected: a young literature teacher named Ella. 

Soon Ella discovers that the Society is not what it seems. What is its mysterious ritual known as "The Game"? What explains the strange disappearance that occurs at Laura White’s winter party? Why are the words inside books starting to rearrange themselves? Was there once another tenth member, before her? Slowly, as Ella explores the Society and its history, disturbing secrets that had been buried for years start to come to light.

***

Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen proposes that places, like people, have particular interests. Some specialise in film; some in food. Others areas boast about an abundance of athletes, or artists, or authors. The small town of Rabbit Back "was known to have no less than six writers' associations, and that was without counting the most noteworthy writers' association, the Rabbit Back Literature Society, which accepted members only at Laura White's invitation."

Laura White is an almost mythical figure in the Finland of this baffling but beautiful English-language debut, which is fitting considering the contents of the Creatureville series:

The local ceramicists for the most part produced water sprites, pixies, elves, and gnomes. Laura White had made these creatures popular all over the world through her children's books, but in Rabbit Back in particular you ran into them everywhere you looked. They were presented as prizes in raffles, given as presents, brought to dinner as hostess gifts. There was only one florist in Rabbit Back, but there were seven shops that sold mostly mythological figurines.

To be taken under Laura White's wing is no little thing, then, and though she hasn't asked anyone to join the Society in some time—in forty-odd years, in fact—speculation about a potential tenth member remains a sensational subject, so when an invitation is unexpectedly extended to substitute language and literature teacher Ella Amanda Milana, Rabbit Back pretty much erupts.

Ella herself jacks in her job to focus on her fiction, but at the ball where she and her sponsor are meant to meet, the Lynchian mystery this book is about begins:

There was a party, then there was a snowstorm in the house and Laura White disappeared right in front of everyone's eyes, and the tenth member isn't going to be trained after all. That's it in a nutshell.

Book Review | The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami

"All I did was go to the library to borrow some books."

On his way home from school, the young narrator of The Strange Library finds himself wondering how taxes were collected in the Ottoman Empire. He pops into the local library to see if it has a book on the subject. This is his first mistake.

Led to a special 'reading room' in a maze under the library by a strange old man, he finds himself imprisoned with only a sheep man, who makes excellent donuts, and a girl, who can talk with her hands, for company. His mother will be worrying why he hasn't returned in time for dinner and the old man seems to have an appetite for eating small boys' brains. How will he escape?

***

A couple of months ago, a story about the closure of yet another local library caught my eye at the same time as I was searching for a subject for the sixty-some students I teach to tackle—a problem of sorts for them to set about solving. I had in my head an exercise which would require each pupil to suggest a selection of strategies that might make the local library relevant again. 

Quite quickly we hit a wall, as I recall. It wasn't that the kids didn't grasp the task at hand; if anything, they understood the problem too well. None of them, you see—not a one—had even been to a library, far less used its facilities. In short order I saw that I'd based the week's work on a false premise: that local libraries had ever been relevant to them.

They certainly were to me, once—as they are to the narrator of The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami: a nearly new novelette from the author of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.

Originally released in Japan in the lean years between After Dark and IQ84, The Strange Library, as translated by Ted Goosen, tells the tale of an anonymous boy who gets more than he bargained for when, on the way home from school one afternoon, he visits his local library to look through a textbook or two:

To tell the truth, I wasn't all that eager to learn about Ottoman tax collection—the topic had just popped into my head on the way home from school. As in, I wonder, how did the Ottomans collect taxes? Like that. And ever since I was little my mother had told me, if you don't know something, go to the library and look it up. (p.7)

To that end, The Strange Library's nameless narrator is directed to a room in the basement of the building, where "a little old man" with "tiny black spots [dotting] his face like a swarm of flies" (p.6) suggests several suitable books. The thing is, these books can't be borrowed—they have to be read in the reading room—and though the boy is already second-guessing himself, he's so obscenely obedient that he allows this apparent assistant to shepherd him still deeper into the library's lower levels.

Book Review | The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

With the scope of Dune and the commercial action of Independence Day, the near-future Three-Body Trilogy is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience a multiple-award-winning phenomenon from China's most beloved science fiction author.

The first book in the trilogy, The Three-Body Problem, begins against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, when a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and begins planning their introduction to Earth. 

Over the next few decades, they establish first contact via very unlikely means: an unusual online video game steeped in philosophy and history. As the aliens begin to win earthbound players of the game over to their side, different schools of thought start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision.

***

What would you do to save the world?

That is, the planet as opposed to the people—we're the problem, after all—so better, perhaps, to ask: what would you do for a solution? Would you kill your own comrades, if it came to it? Would you sacrifice yourself? Your sons and daughters? Would you betray the whole of humanity today for a better tomorrow?

These are some of the provocative questions posed by The Three Body Problem, the opening salvo of Galaxy Award-winner Cixin Liu's fascinating science fiction trilogy, which takes in physics, philosophy, farming and, finally, first contact.

But it all begins in Beijing in the 1960s, when Ye Wenjie watches in horror as an unrepentant professor is beaten into oblivion by four fourteen-year-olds "fighting for faith" (p.19) at "a public rally intended to humiliate and break down the enemies of the revolution through verbal and physical abuse until they confessed to their crimes before the crowd." (p.11) The subject of this so-called "struggle session" is Ye's father, in fact, and his is a death she'll never forget:

It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race. [...] This thought determined the entire direction of Ye's life. (p.28)

Book Review | Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

Tsukuru Tazaki had four best friends at school. By chance all of their names contained a colour. The two boys were called Akamatsu, meaning 'red pine', and Oumi, 'blue sea', while the girls' names were Shirane, 'white root', and Kurono, 'black field'. Tazaki was the only last name with no colour in it.

One day Tsukuru Tazaki's friends announced that they didn't want to see him, or talk to him, ever again.

Since that day Tsukuru has been floating through life, unable to form intimate connections with anyone. But then he meets Sara, who tells him that the time has come to find out what happened all those years ago.

***

"From July of his sophomore year in college until the following January, all Tsukuru Tazaki could think about was dying." (p.1)

So begins Haruki Murkami's first novel since the bloat of the book many expected to be his magnum opus. Happily, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is essentially the inverse of IQ84. It's short and sweet where that last was extended in its dejection; gently suggestive rather than frustratingly overbearing; and though the ending is a bit of bait and switch, it's one which feels fitting, unlike IQ84's dubious denouement.

If you were worried, as I was, that Murakami may have had his day, then rest assured: his new novel represents a timely reminder of the reasons you fell for his fiction in the first place.

As with almost every book to bear the international bestseller's brand, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage immerses readers in the mindset of a single, emotionally crippled character; a man approaching middle age, in this case, whose major malfunction is made plain from the first page, as he reflects on his lowest moments:

There was an actual event that had led him to this place—this he knew all too well—but why should death have such a hold on him, enveloping him in its embrace for nearly half a year? Envelop—the word expressed it precisely. Like Jonah in the belly of the whale, Tsukuru had fallen into the bowels of death, one untold day after another, lost in a dark, stagnant void. (p.2)

But before this death, this darkness... life, and light. Light composed of the colours of his four best friends, with whom his life was intimately intertwined:

The two boys' last names were Akamatsu—which means 'red pine'—and Oumi—'blue sea'; the girls' family names were Shirane—'white root'—and Kurono—'black field'. Tazaki was the only last name that did not have a color in its meaning. From the very beginning this made his feel a little bit left out. (p.6) 

Not half as left out as he felt when, one day, they "announced that they did not want to see him, or talk with him, ever again. It was a sudden, decisive declaration, with no room for compromise. They gave no explanation, not a word, for this harsh pronouncement. And Tsukuru didn't dare ask." (p.3)

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage takes place decades after this rejection.

Book Review | The Madonna on the Moon by Rolf Bauerdick

November 1957: As Communism spreads across Eastern Europe, strange events are beginning to upend daily life in Baia Luna, a tiny village nestled at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains. As the Soviets race to reach the moon and Sputnik soars overhead, fifteen-year-old Pavel Botev attends the small village school with the other children. Their sole teacher, the mysterious and once beautiful Angela Barbulescu, was sent by the Ministry of Education, and while it is suspected that she has lived a highly cultured life, much of her past remains hidden. But one day, after asking Pavel to help hang a photo of the new party secretary, she whispers a startling directive in his ear: “Send this man straight to hell! Exterminate him!” By the next morning, she has disappeared.

With little more to go on than the gossip and rumors swirling through his grandfather Ilja’s tavern, Pavel finds curiosity overcoming his fear when suddenly the village’s sacred Madonna statue is stolen and the priest Johannes Baptiste is found brutally murdered in the rectory. Aided by the Gypsy girl Buba and her eccentric uncle, Dimitru Gabor, Pavel’s search for answers leads him far from the innocent concerns of childhood and into the frontiers of a new world, changing his life forever.

***

In Baia Luna, a small village of some 250 self-sufficient souls hidden away at the base of the Carpathian Mountains, "today was like what yesterday was and tomorrow would be." (p.50)

But not for long. On the contrary, a time of great change awaits. It's November 1957, and the fictitious nation of Transmontania is about to be sucked whole-hog into the socialist bloc. Communism is of course on the cards, and whomsoever stands in the way of the Conjucator shall surely be squashed.

"About to turn sixteen [and] stuck in a swamp halfway between a boy and a man," (p.78) Pavel Botev has more immediate problems to attend to at the outset of The Madonna on the Moon, the first novel by Rolf Bauerdick, an award-winning German photojournalist. Raised by his aunt and his grandfather, a "formerly commonsensical" (p.325) sort convinced that the body of the Virgin Mary is on the moon, Pavel becomes caught up in a bizarre conspiracy which will dog him to the end of an era that has hardly started.

Book Review | S. by J. J. Abrams & Doug Dorst

A young woman picks up a book left behind by a stranger. Inside it are his margin notes, which reveal a reader entranced by the story and by its mysterious author. She responds with notes of her own, leaving the book for the stranger, and so begins an unlikely conversation that plunges them both into the unknown.

The book: Ship of Theseus, the final novel by a prolific but enigmatic writer named V.M. Straka, in which a man with no past is shanghaied onto a strange ship with a monstrous crew and launched onto a disorienting and perilous journey.

The writer: Straka, the incendiary and secretive subject of one of the world’s greatest mysteries, a revolutionary about whom the world knows nothing apart from the words he wrote and the rumors that swirl around him.

The readers: Jennifer and Eric, a college senior and a disgraced grad student, both facing crucial decisions about who they are, who they might become, and how much they’re willing to trust another person with their passions, hurts, and fears.

Conceived by filmmaker J. J. Abrams and written by award-winning novelist Doug Dorst, S. is the chronicle of two readers finding each other in the margins of a book and enmeshing themselves in a deadly struggle between forces they don’t understand. It is also a love letter to the written word.

***

S. is not what you think it is.

From the moment you slit open the slipcase — the same slipcase that bears the only explicit admission of J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst's involvement — and slit it you will, in an act of introductory destruction that implicates us in the worst impulses of the characters we'll meet in a moment — from the second, then, that we see what waits within, there is the suspicion that S. is not so much a novel as it is an object. A lavish literary artefact.

But also an artefact of art. Of passion. Of intellect. Of ambition. Of all these things and so much more, in the form of a metafiction so meticulous and considered and meaningful, finally, that House of Leaves may very well have been bettered — and I don't make that statement lightly.

What awaits, in any case, is an unassuming clothbound book called Ship of Theseus. The author: a V. M. Straka, apparently. On the spine is stuck a library sticker, complete with an authentic Dewey Decimal reference. BOOK FOR LOAN is emblazoned on the endpapers, and on the backboard, below a record of the dates it's been borrowed on — Ship of Theseus has been untouched, we see, for thirteen years — an apocalyptic warning from the library to KEEP THIS BOOK CLEAN; that "borrowers finding this book pencil-marked, written upon, mutilated or unwarrantably defaced, are expected to report it to the librarian."

The title page makes a mockery of all this. Lightly pencilled in is an instruction to return the book to such-and-such a workroom in the library of Pollard State University. Then, in pen, a note from Jen, who responds as follows: "Hey — I found your stuff while I was shelving. (Looks like you left in a hurry!) I read a few chapters + loved it. Felt bad about keeping the book from you, since you obviously need it for your work. Have to get my own copy!"

Suffice it to say she doesn't. Instead, Jen and the other scribbler, who eventually introduces himself as Eric — though that's not his real name either — compare their notes about the novel, making an immediate mess of the margins. See, irrespective of the resulting small caps scrawl, Ship of Theseus is something of a puzzle...

Book Review | The Days of the Deer by Liliana Bodoc

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It is known that the strangers will sail from some part of the Ancient Lands and will cross the Yentru Sea. All our predictions and sacred books clearly say the same thing. The rest is all shadows. Shadows that prevent us from seeing the faces of those who are coming.

In the House of Stars, the Astronomers of the Open Air read contradictory omens. A fleet is coming to the shores of the Remote Realm. But are these the long-awaited Northmen, returned triumphant from the war in the Ancient Lands? Or the emissaries of the Son of Death come to wage a last battle against life itself?

From every village of the seven tribes, a representative is called to a Great Council. One representative will not survive the journey. Some will be willing to sacrifice their lives, others their people, but one thing is certain: the era of light is at an end.

***

For generations, the Husihuilkes have lived off the land, making "use of all the forest and the sea could offer. Here at the Ends of the Earth, the Creatures faced the wind and the rain with strategies almost as old as the elements themselves," (p.6) and though they have become comfortable in the years since a real threat arose, they have not forgotten their nature. The Husihuilkes are a warrior people, the most fearsome fighters in all the Fertile Lands, and in the months to come, they will be called upon to take up arms again.

Why? Because there's a storm coming, of course! What epic fantasy saga would be complete without one?

As had happened every winter in living memory, another long season of rains was returning to the land of the Husihuilkes. The storms came from the southern seas, brought by a wind that spread heavy clouds over the Ends of the Earth and left them there until they had exhausted themselves. (p.5)

The Days of the Deer does not chronicle the Husihuilkes' war with the weather, however. Instead, the storm is an ill omen; a symbol of some encroaching force. But what shape will it take? And what might its appearance mean for the peaceable Creatures of the Fertile Lands?

The Magic of the Open Air has learnt beyond a shadow of a doubt that there will soon be a fleet from the Ancient Lands coming to our continent. It is known that the strangers will sail [across] the Yentru Sea. All our predictions and sacred books say the same thing. The rest is all shadows. Shadows in the stars and our books. Shadows that prevent us from seeing the faces of those who are coming. Who are they? Why are they travelling here? (p.57)

These are the questions that the central characters of Liliana Bodoc's debut are asked, and the longer they take to arrive at an answer—any answer—the worse the consequences will be. "The fate of everyone living in the Fertile Lands" (p.57) hangs in the balance, in fact... a responsibility so very terrible that it should be shared, surely, rather than shouldered by a single soul.

To wit, representatives of each of the Creatures who call the continent home—including Dulkancellin of the Husihuilkes—are called to the far-distant city of Beleram in the Remote Realm. There, they form a council of sorts, to talk about the right and proper response to this dangerous state of affairs. They're well aware that their situation grows more desperate by the day—or rather, some among them are; primarily our protagonist—but without more information, what else are they to do other than discuss and debate?

As they hum and hah, however, the host of Eternal Hatred—led by Misáianes, the Son of Death herself—draws closer and closer to shore.

"Hear this and remember. Misáianes came to destroy the time of mankind, of animals, of water, of living green and of the moon, the time of Time. Many will be intoxicated by his poison; many more will fall in battle. Better to fall in battle. [For] if we are defeated in this war, Life will fall with us. If we are defeated, light will be condemned to drag itself over ashes. And Eternal Hatred will stride through the twilight of Creation." (p.94)

Eternal Hatred, eh?

Initially, I cringed at the blunt terminology too, but the more I read of The Days of the Deer, the more fitting it felt. Above all else, this is an elemental epic, and its author is particularly interested in the opposition which exists between the aforementioned forces. Thus the Ancient Land's army of darkness and death invades a continent of bright light and life. The natural is set starkly against the unnatural; order against chaos; and this trend extends to the narrative's depiction of good and evil in the old mould. 

Ultimately, then, the idea of Eternal Hatred makes a certain amount of sense, but that doesn't detract from the bland fact of it at first. Nor is this the only obvious genre shorthand made use of over the course of The Days of the Deer: a book of broad strokes, at best.

That said, there remain reasons to recommend Liliana Bodoc's debut. Originally published in Argentina in 2000 as Los Dias del Venado, The Days of the Deer is the first part of an acclaimed fantasy trilogy—namely The Saga of the Borderlands—that has gone untranslated for thirteen years, and I am pleased to see it in English... though the translation is, I think, too literal. I'm certainly no expert, but I had Google go to work on a short Spanish language excerpt and it spat out something surprisingly similar to the text Nick Caistor and Lucia Caistor Arendar render.

So there's an abundance of clunk and some frankly laughable Fantasy Capitalisation: a problem given how very seriously we're asked to take The Days of the Deer. Nevertheless, its setting is excellent. Both historically and ecologically, Bodoc develops her world deftly; if the characters who inhabit it lack life, the Fertile Lands themselves positively vibrate with vim and vigour and taste and texture.

I'm not quite convinced that the author is "the Tolkien of the Americas," as the publicity promises, but I can understand the comparisons. There's a fellowship and some songs; an unknowable evil and a complex yet credible setting. By and large, alas, this is unhelpful hyperbole, and it does The Days of the Deer few favours.

More useful is the cover quote from Ursula K. Le Guin, who, when asked who she admires within her genre, can only come up with one name: Liliana Bodoc's, obviously. Understand, though, that her genre—environmentally-aware fantasy, shall we say—must be a small one, because though The Days of the Deer is indeed decent, if it represents the best of anything, there simply can't be much competition.

***

The Days of the Deer

by Liliana Bodoc

UK Publication: August 2013, Corvus

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Recommended and Related Reading

Book Review | Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa

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Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com

IndieBound / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

A woman goes into a bakery to buy a strawberry cream tart. The place is immaculate but there is no one serving so she waits. Another customer comes in. The woman tells the new arrival that she is buying her son a treat for his birthday. Every year she buys him his favourite cake; even though he died in an accident when he was six years old.

From this beginning Yoko Ogawa weaves a dark and beautiful narrative that pulls together a seemingly disconnected cast of characters. In the tradition of classical Japanese poetic collections, the stories in Revenge are linked through recurring images and motifs, as each story follows on from the one before while simultaneously introducing new characters and themes. Filled with breathtaking images, Ogawa provides us with a slice of life that is resplendent in its chaos, enthralling in its passion and chilling in its cruelty.

***

Consume them independently at your own peril, but taken together, the eleven dark tales contained in Revenge by Yoko Ogawa make for a single, delectable dish. One best served cold, of course.

Behold the beauty of the quote below. Know, though, that there's something very wrong with this picture:

"It was a beautiful Sunday. The sky was a cloudless dome of sunlight. Out on the square, leaves fluttered in a gentle breeze along the pavement. Everything seemed to glimmer with a faint luminescence: the roof of the ice-cream stand, the faucet on the drinking fountain, the eyes of a stray cat, even the base of the clock tower covered with pigeon droppings. 

"Families and tourists strolled through the square, enjoying the weekend. Squeaky sounds could be heard from a man off in the corner, who was twisting balloon animals. A circle of children watched him, entranced. Nearby, a woman sat on a bench knitting. Somewhere a horn sounded. A flock of pigeons burst into the air, and startled a baby who began to cry. The mother hurried over to gather the child in her arms. 

You could gaze at this perfect picture all day—an afternoon bathed in light and comfort—and perhaps never notice a single detail out of place, or missing." (pp.1-2)

So begins Stephen Snyder's sublime translation of Yoko Ogawa's 1998 short story collection, originally published in Japan as Kamoku na shigai, Midara na tomurai, and "Afternoon at the Bakery" is an ideal opener. It isn't about much at all, if the truth be told—an anonymous woman reminiscing about her son whilst waiting in a bakery to buy the strawberry shortcake she always orders on the anniversary of his untimely and doubly discomfiting death—yet this exacting introduction to the motifs and ideas which recur throughout Revenge does a great deal to prime readers for the unsettling efforts ahead.

"Fruit Juice" follows. It chronicles the fleeting first meeting of a distant father and daughter from a characteristically uncertain external perspective. Out of the blue—they're certainly not friends or anything—the daughter invites our narrator, whom Ogawa once more disdains to name, to accompany her to a French restaurant for this excruciating reunion. Afterwards, they hang out near an abandoned post office inexplicably stuffed full of fruit. Kiwis, even!

This is the first of several symbolic threads which run the length of Revenge, though the story it arises in is again fairly forgettable in itself. However the next narrative—namely "Old Mrs. J"—is effective even absent the chilling context of the stories surrounding it. Old Mrs. J is the landlady of a quiet apartment surrounded by gorgeous orchards, and it should come a little surprise to you that the author only allows us to glimpse her from a distance.

(That is to say the author of "Old Mrs. J," not the author who moves into this beautiful building—recommended to her, incidentally, by the editor of an arts and crafts magazine who dies at the outset of the subsequent story—and observes her attending her kiwis.)

Old Mrs. J also grows carrots, if you can credit it: carrots which to a one take the shape of "amputated [human] hands with malignant tumors, dangling in front of us, still warm from the earth." (p.36) Soon enough a reporter is dispatched to the apartment to write an article about these vile vegetables, and in the aftermath of its publication an appropriately depraved discovery is made, the repercussions of which ripple through the remainder of Revenge.

Oh, and the photo accompanying the aforementioned reporter's story proves pivotal to the narrator of a later tale... a narrator who may have appeared in a deceptively incidental role in Revenge already.

As one character wisely advises, "Even if something seems pointless at the time, you mustn't take it lightly. You'll see how useful it is later on. Nothing you study will ever turn out to be useless. That's the way the world is." (p.108)

To wit, almost everything is connected in this incredible collection, to the point that those things which are not seem far stranger for their isolation. As indicated, occasional people reappear, seemingly at random, yet rarely compared to the images the author summons up in one narrative after another. Some of said are sumptuous, others appear absurd; all are in service of the same resounding result, for Ogawa's tendency to delight is adequately matched by her impulse to disgust. See for example the stories at the dark heart of this awesome volume: "Sewing for the Heart" and "Welcome to the Museum of Torture."

Indeed, in a sense, reading Revenge is not dissimilar to torture of a sort.

"For a torture to be effective, the pain has to be spread out; it has to come at regular intervals, with no end in sight. The water falls, drop after drop after drop, like the second hand of a watch, carving up time. The shock of each individual drop is insignificant, but the sensation is impossible to ignore. At first, one might manage to think about other things, but after five hours, after ten hours, it becomes unendurable. The repeated stimulation excites the nerves to a point where they literally explode, and every sensation in the body is absorbed into that one spot on the forehead—indeed, you come to feel that you are nothing but a forehead, into which a fine needle is being forced millimeter by millimeter. You can't sleep or even speak, hypnotized by a suffering that is greater than any mere pain. In general, the victim goes mad before a day has passed." (pp.93-94)

This device describes the overall impact of Revenge: a sterling ensemble of short stories about darkness, death and depression, by way of love, loss and, at the last, blinding new life. As yet another of Ogawa's arrayed narrators notes, "The prose was unremarkable, as were the plot and characters, but there was an icy undercurrent running under her words, and I found myself wanting to plunge into it again and again." (p.148) You should, too.

Though only a few of the stories collected in Revenge impress as individual entities, they gain far greater power and persuasiveness when read together, and recollected afterwards as a single, shocking thing.

It's taken 15 years for the first of Yoko Ogawa's uncanny collections to be rendered into exquisite English, and obviously this is no overnight process. I wouldn't want to lose the lens of Stephen Snyder, either. Be that as it may, I hope you'll join me in wishing that we see subsequent efforts from the rising international star... somewhat sooner.

***

Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales
by Yoko Ogawa

UK Publication: January 2013, Harvill Secker

US Publication: January 2013, Picador

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Recommended and Related Reading

 

Guest Post | Kristopher of The Sound and Fury Reviews We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Today on The Speculative Scotsman, it's my absolute pleasure to play host to a terrific critique of a book I'll freely admit I hadn't heard of before the text of this guest post arrived in my inbox.

Alas, even with my Amazon Prime membership - what can I say? I'm a sucker for "free" postage - the copy of We I immediately ordered didn't arrive on time for me to bundle it off to the States. But hey, it'll be something to look forward to when I get back!

If you've ever visited the comments section here on TSS, you'll know his name: Kristopher A. Denby has been a mainstay around these here parts, with always something interesting to say. But did you know Kris also keeps an excellent occasional blog? And if not, why not?! 

The Sound and Fury of Kristopher A. Denby has been in my bookmarks for many, many years, and if it isn't already among your favourite haunts, well... you need only read on to see why it should be.

***

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"The citizens of the One State live in a condition of 'mathematically infallible happiness'. D-503 decides to keep a diary of his days working for the collective good in this clean, blue city state where nature, privacy and individual liberty have been eradicated. But over the course of his journal D-503 suddenly finds himself caught up in unthinkable and illegal activities - love and rebellion.

"Banned on its publication in Russia in 1921, We is the first modern dystopian novel and a satire on state control that has once again become chillingly relevant."

***

I have a confession to make: I’d never heard of We or Yevgeny Zamyatin before the book was prescribed to me by a college professor. It’s best to get that out of the way straight off to avoid sounding know-it-allish while I attempt to persuade you to read this book. And make no mistake, you should read this book.

More likely than not, you are all considerably more sophisticated than I, and have covered the literary spectrum in your readings, dutifully paying equal attention to those noteworthy works which had spent the better part of a century (before we were all smitten with Glasnost) locked behind an iron curtain. On the off chance that you find yourself in my shoes, though, scratching your head in wonder at the notion that the Commies could have produced great sci-fi, then please, dear readers, allow me the chance to unburden you of your ignorance.

Written in 1921, a mere four years after the Russian Revolution, We tells the story of D-503, citizen of the One State and builder of the Integral, a great starship that will enable the totalitarian government of the One State to travel to the other planets in the solar system and subjugate their inhabitants “to the beneficial yoke of reason”. D-503 is a model subject, bending all of his thoughts and desires towards the goals of the One State. But when he encounters the strange, seductive female, I-330, his ordered world of numbers and degrees begins to unravel into chaos.

The plot should be familiar to any self respecting science fiction fan. We has inspired works great and terrible, big and small, from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to Lucas’s THX 1138, and everything in between, including the films Logan’s Run, Gattaca and Equilibrium. But beyond being a particularly prescient work of speculative fiction, warning of the ills of governments run amok, the loss of the individual within the collective, and the cyclical nature of revolution, it is also simply a damned well written book.

Zamyatin’s prose is a thing of such striking beauty that the reader is compelled to linger over certain passages as one might linger in a museum in front of a particularly beautiful painting. D-503’s (by way of Zamyatin) antiseptic, mathematical descriptions of his world and the people who inhabit it are, at times, breathtaking, and imbued with such an original and innovative command of wordcraft that it’s easy to forget that you’re reading a book that was written nearly a century ago. [Okay, I'm in! - Niall]

And if the language of We shows little signs of wear, the themes contained within its pages show even less. Zamyatin’s criticism of the new Soviet government and its ham fisted attempts at social and economic equity are perhaps (oddly enough) just as relevant today as they were then.

Within the Green Wall of the One State, the buildings are made up of a clear glass-alloy that affords no privacy to any of its inhabitants, except on Sex Days when citizens are allotted 20 minutes to lower the blinds and, ahem… conduct business. The transparency of Zamyatin’s glass buildings, and the society contained within their walls, bear a striking resemblance to our own surveillance saturated society. With cameras on every street corner, in every ATM, every store, public building, and in every computer; our world, the world of 2012, is the symbolic equivalent to glass world of Zamyatin’s totalitarian One State. Even the One State’s march towards human perfection via the excision of the imagination is a dead ringer for Eugenics, which has managed to rear its ugly head again in recent years. 

We, though not as well known as its English successor, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is, nevertheless, just as important as the more well known work, and perhaps more beautiful and hopeful in its conclusion than Orwell’s famous dystopia. Regardless of what you look for in a book, however, be it keen social commentary or pure entertainment, this blast from the past, this classic titan amongst dystopian science fiction has got you covered. I highly recommend it.

Kirk out.

***

And how!

Five stars to this fantastic review, and here... doesn't the book sound cool too?

Thanks again, Kris, for putting this piece together for TSS. I owe you my left leg. Just let me know when you need it!

And readers? You know where he's at already. I bid you: go there, and be very merry. :) 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I'm returning to the blog tomorrow, for week two of Letters From America. So do stay tuned.

Book Review | Little Star by John Ajvide Lindqvist

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Lennart Cederstrom was walking in the forest when he saw it. A baby girl lying in a plastic bag.

Horrified, he rushed to give her the kiss of life. But what happened next changed his life forever. Her first breath was something astounding: a perfect musical note. For an ageing singer, this incredible child was irresistible, and Lennart could only hurry her home and take her into his care.

Fearing the watchful eyes of the authorities, Lennart decided to hide his foundling daughter from view. So he and his wife kept her in the basement.

Was what she became Lennart's fault for choosing to hide her? Did the person who abandoned her in the woods know something terrible lay in her future? Or was it just a trick of fate to turn this little star into the most terrifying thing imaginable?

***

In one fell swoop Let the Right One In launched the career of Sweden's answer to Stephen King, and it is, needless to say, a terrific novel... if not the equal (though I'll make no friends for saying this) of the exquisite, almost art-house adaptation that filmmaker Tomas Alfredson directed from a script by the original author in 2008.

Next to the timeless tale of Oskar and Eli, the protagonists of Handling the Undead, wherein John Ajvide Lindqvist attempted to do for zombies what his sensitive debut had done for vampires, paled rather into insignificance, and while Harbour - Lindqvist's ghost story - was quite a bit better, even it could not emerge from the long shadow of Let the Right One In.

Little Star does. In fact Lindqvist's fourth novel, not including an as-yet untranslated collection of short stories - give it to me! - is hands down his best yet. It sees the herald of a whole new wave of horror once again determined to humanise the essentially inhuman, with his sympathetic sights set this time on the idea of doppelgangers, twinned in spirit if not in appearance.

We meet Theres first... though to begin with she has no name. She's just Little One: an abandoned infant former folk artist Lennart Cederstrom finds in the woods one day, buried in a plastic bag like an unloved litter of kittens. In a moment of madness - that is, madness or absolute clarity - he breathes a second chance at life into this baby girl's lungs and takes her home.

Stuck with one another till death do they part, Lennart and his wife Laila have been utterly miserable together, and they see Theres, who by some quirk of nature can produce perfect musical notes, as a last chance at happiness. Thus they take her in, hide her in the basement, and - fearful of the police, and discovery, and a return to the nightmare of their lives before Theres - tell their impossible daughter that she must remain always in the house, lest the Big People with hate in their heads (versus the love Lennart and Laila have for her in theirs) eat her up.

So it's hard to hold Theres' subsequent behaviour against her. After all, when she smashes open the skulls of her parents, one after the other, to pick apart their brains, she is only looking for love.

Then there's Teresa...

Little Star is not, needless to say, a particularly pretty novel. Granted, it is prettily written - and ably translated, too, by Marlaine Delargy, come up in the world since her work on Anne Holt's abysmal 1222 - but in a lot of ways Lindqvist's latest is a book about ugliness; ugliness of all shapes and sizes, whether inherited, adopted or instilled by the hand of man. Also figuring into the equation, besides the aforementioned parricide: harrowing domestic violence, suggestions of sexual abuse, exploitation for financial gain, and some truly cruel and unusual bulletin-board trolling. I could go on, but I'd really rather not.

That said, Little Star does not trade in the dollars and cents of dread and disgust common to most modern horror novels. Thankfully, it appears Lindqvist has moved on from the things that go bite in the night he found such success with early in his career. Little Star has its chills and it has its thrills, yes - a thousand times yes! - but its most potent currency is I think the creeping, crawling idea of unease that hangs ever in the air, like a wisp of smoke no amount of wind can shift... the sense that something if not inherently evil then utterly, awfully ignorant of the difference between right and wrong is ever in the offing. And usually, it is.

I found the first few chapters of Lindqvist's latest perfectly impressive, which is to say solid, but not exactly remarkable in and of themselves. By the culmination of Lennart and Laila's nightmarish narrative, however, Little Star had buried its hooks deep in me, and when at last Theres and Teresa's paths cross, as they must, I was positively beside myself, reeling from the raw power of this tale of two sisters of sorts, who finally find themselves in one another.

As beautiful as it is twisted, Little Star - as in twinkle, twinkle, and it does - is bleak and mysterious from first to last, and though it is brutal at times, Lindqvist only renders the violence rather than reveling in it, as many of his contemporaries tend to, to the detriment of their texts. Like Let The Right One In before it, then, Little Star is leagues apart from that: disturbing, understated and sweetly, sickly stunning... a must-read for anyone with a passing interest in modern horror.

***

Little Star

by John Ajvide Lindqvist

UK Publication: September 2011, Quercus

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Amazon.co.uk / The Book Depository

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