"The highway is alive tonight": Murakami and Steinbeck in Nuevo Laredo

This novel begins with such a normal scene: the narrator in the kitchen, boiling spaghetti and listening to an opera, “which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.”(5) There's absolutely no indication in the first 100+ pages that the story is going to end as weirdly as it does.

This was absolutely the most perfect book in the world for me to read at this particular point in my life. The friend who gave it to me told me he'd read it during a time in which his “flow was obstructed,” and I guess the same goes for me. There was just something so warm and reassuring about reading this book. I would be in the office or in the field all day in Nuevo Laredo, learning all these new concepts and absorbing all these incredibly draining, intense experiences, and yet, at the end of the day it would all be okay, because I knew I could come home to my little apartment, sit on my beat-up couch, eat my cornflakes and yogurt and read another 100 pages of Wind-Up Bird. It was like coming home to cuddle a stuffed animal, albeit one that talked a lot about the Japanese military efforts in Manchukuo.

I loved reading this book. *Loved* it. I wanted to hug it to the chest and clap my hands gleefully with happiness, like a happy seal. I love all the different Joycean techniques Murakami employs to tell his tale: computer chats, letters, newspapers, hallucinatory dream sequences. It feels important that the story begins with a very straightforward, realistic narrative that is almost boring in its simplicity: a man begins searching for his wife's missing cat. In the last couple of chapters, you're no longer sure if what's going on is happenning in this world, a parallel universe, inside somebody's head, or inside several people's heads (that's about as spoiler free as I can be). Also, as a history geek, I loved reading the parts about the Japanese army in Mongolia or the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and the prison camps in Siberia. There's so many parts of the world and of history that I have yet to learn about...

My absolutely favorite thing in the world about Murakami is all his descriptions of what the characters eat. A ham, tomato and cheese sandwich. Stir fried green peppers. Coffee, constantly. These little details sounds so simple, and yet they add so much to the story: it grounds it in something that's so real and very much every day. The literary cliche gods help me, but I have to call it Kafkaesque: we believe all the crazy things that happen later, because everything that happens early on is so credible, to the point of being monotonous almost. It really is clever technique.

This is a very postmodern novel in the sense that it deals a lot with the question of the self. As in, do we actually have one? Can you ever actually “know” yourself, let alone another person? More than anything else, I think this is the central question of the novel. It reminded me a lot of Tori Amos' concept album, American Doll Posse, in which she assumes the persona of five different female archetypes, each representing a different side to the female personality. This idea of having several different selves, as opposed to one that is already neatly, conveniently formed, is a theme I believe I've already brought up in this blog. I really like the idea of having this “wise self” inside of me, this very pure, intuitive wisdom that I can turn to, time and time again, in order to reassure myself and calm myself down, make myself feel like everything is going to be all right. What about all my other selves? Is complete integration an illusion? Is being mildly fragmented the best that any of us can ever hope for? The question feels even more relevant if you consider victims of trauma like war (as in Wind-Up Bird) or rape (as in American Doll Posse). Trauma can shatter you, splinter you apart. How do you go about rebuilding yourself, making yourself whole again?


This idea of rebuilding and coming together appears in a very different form of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, the other book I looked forward to coming home and reading these past few weeks. Steinbeck is about as straightforward as narrative realism gets, not much I can call postmodern here (though please feel free to correct me!). I liked how this book made me want to listen to Bruce Springsteen (which makes sense, since Bruce Springsteen has obviously read Steinbeck. I was surprised by how easily you could update The Grapes of Wrath to a 21st-century tale of immigration to the U.S., if you just substituted the Joads for a Mexican family, changed Okies to mojados, throw in a scene of crossing the Rio Grande.

Oh, it just makes me sad, it makes me angry, it makes me want to—I don't know, I was going to write “run into the street, burn something, write to a Congressman,” but to be completely honest, what it makes me want to do is read more. I want to read more about the history of labor movements in the early 20th century, I want to read more about the development of 21st-century immigration policy, I want to read more about socialism. I want to sit up late reading drinking my carrot juice, underlining passages in pencil and maybe even scrawling a note to myself in the side margins (yes, I am thus revealing myself to be a book vandal!). I want to read and think and write my thoughts down and them talk about them, late into the night with other people. And then I want them to give me more books to read and tell me, “I think that you would like these ones.” More than anything else it makes me feel hopeful and happy to think that there are other people like this in the world, other people who can relate to the feeling of your heart beating as you hand a book over to another person, the words in your throat bursting with eagerness as you say “oh! This one—you really need to read this one!” What would the world be like, after all, without all these people who want to read great books and think silly thoughts about them and then go out and do completely random-seeming things like intern for a microfinance institution in a border city?

Nobody's fooling nobody about where it goes.

People Who Don't Know the Answers

If I could write fiction like any author, I'd want to write like Anne Tyler. The first Tyler novel I ever read was Saint Maybe, which my sister checked out of the Colegio Bolivar library. It's the same copy I have with me now; I guess one of us in an act out of an audacious sense of entitlement must have stolen it. If you look at the little flap of paper in the back (how old-fashioned and antique that seems now!), where the librarian would stamp the due date under FECHA DE VENCIMIENTO, the earliest date is 24 March 1998—more than ten years ago! Next to the due date we were supposed to write the grade we were in (who knows why), so there is also a historical record of the changes in my sister's handwriting as well as mine. The small squat sixes of sixth grade, the taller and more elegant eights of eighth grade. A single thin nine. I guess it was after ninth grade, once we realized that we were the only people checking the book out, over and over again, that we decided that we were the proper owners of the book. Sorry, Bolivar library, forgive us! If it's any consolation/defense, it has definitely found a loving home in our bookshelves.

I started re-reading Anne Tyler at exactly the right time. I've been sick since Sunday with an upper respiratory tract infection. TMI Warning I've been producing all this absolutely grotesque green phlegm, with the consistency of yogurt End TMI. It's equal parts fascinating and disgusting—I am kind of amazed that something like this could come out of my body. On Friday night I took some Dayquil, drank some Visoda and bravely went out on the town with Corey for a birthday night of dancing at the 80's dance night at the Crystal Ballroom. In the middle of "Burning Down the House," I slipped on a puddle of water and dislocated my left knee, the same knee I've been injuring chronically since high school. This is at least the fourth time it's been sprained. It's much better today than yesterday, but it still feels weird, all stretched and unsteady. I'm taking Matt's joints rehabilitation vitamin pills and icing it a lot. I can sort of hobble now, which is a big improvement.

Thus it feels like subconscious psychic foreshadowing on my part that I had the foresight to check out all these Tyler novels last week, like The Accidental Tourist and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. I re-read Tourist , lived vicariously through Macon's injury and recovery and am now plunging eagerly through Dinner, which I'm not sure if I've ever read completely. I have this weird deja-vu feeling reading it, so I'm thinking that maybe I started reading it at some point, but just never finished.

There is something so wonderful and comforting about an Anne Tyler novel. When I'm keeping an injured leg elevated about heart level to encourage reduced swelling while reaching for the roll of toilet paper and hacking my guts out, I can't think think of any other author I'd rather read. "The perseverance of human beings suddenly amazed him," realizes one of the characters in Dinner. It's this perseverance and doggedness that Tyler is particularly skilled at highlighting. Or as a character in Tourist observes,

'You ever wonder what a Martian might think if he happened to land near an emergency room? He'd seen an ambulance whizzing in and everybody running out to meet it, tearing the doors open, grabbing up the stretcher, scurrying along with it. 'Why,' he'd say, what a helpful planet, what kind and helpful creatures.' He'd never guess that we're not always that way; that we had to, oh, put aside our natural selves to do it. 'What a helpful race of human beings,' a Martian would say. Don't you think so?'

It's just really nice to read books about people who are genuinely trying to be good, even if their actions don't always make it seem that way. Tyler has a lot of love for her characters and it shines through in a way that makes me think of that famous quote about Salinger, that he loved his characters more than God loved them. (Further research led me to learn that this quote was by John Updike, and was meant as a criticism of Salinger. I never liked your writing anyway, Updike.)

Saint Maybe particularly hit home for me at this point in my life, mainly because it's about a character who spends most of the book taking care of children who are not his own. Ian's wry observations about taking care of children had me nodding my head vigorously, yes, yes:

He wondered how people endured children on a long-term basis—the monotony and irritation and confinement of them.
You could never call it a penance, to have to take care of these three. They were all that gave his life color, and energy, and... well, life.
It wasn't easy. A lot of it was just plain boring. Just providing a warm body, just being there; anyone could have done it. And then other parts were terrifying. Kids get into so much! They start to matter so much. Some days I felt like a fireman or a lifeguard or something—all that tedium, broken up by little spurts of high drama.

The other part of the book that drew a straight line between my heart and the pages were the sections about the incertitude of knowing. A lot of the book is about learning how people who seem to "know all the answers" really, well, don't. In fact, nobody does. Understanding the meaning of someone or something in your life is eventually understood as something that's ultimately impossible to do:

Apparently, he thought, there were some people in this world who simply never came clear. Reverend Emmett, Mr. Brant, the overlapping shifts of foreigners... In the end you had to accept that the day would never arrive when you finally understood what they were all about. For some reason, this made him supremely happy.

It's the "happy" part that's key. Ian's main conflict in this book is kicked off by the "arrogant certitude" with which he informs his brother that his wife is cheating on him. At the time, he feels like he definitively "knows" this as a fact, but over time he has to admit that no, he really doesn't know it at all. More than anything else, this book seems to me now to be about surrendering that need for possessive control, to "know" how things are and how things are going to turn out. In the opening pages, Ian is described as someone who is always imaginng his life as seen from a distance, as observed by an outsider:

There were moments when he believed that someday, somehow, he was going to end up famous. Famous for what, he couldn't quite say; but he'd be walking up the back steps or something and all at once he would imagine a camera zooming in on him, filming his life story. He imagined the level, cultured voice of his biographer saying, 'Ian climbed the steps. He opened the door. He entered the kitchen.'

This passage really hit home for me with a particularly sharp pang because I used to do the same thing as a really little kid. I'd make lists of all the novels I was going to write. Sitting on the toilet or high up in the mango tree in the yard, I'd talk to myself and answer questions about my life, pretending I was being interviewed on a talkshow or by a reporter. Yeah, I was a particulary imaginative kid, but more than that, I had this ambitious, feroscious drive in me that I had to *BE* someone, you know? My ego was a hungry-hungry-hippo, and it wanted to feed. It still does.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about ego lately (thanks Siddhartha!). When you graduate from college, you're really forced to think about what you want to do in a grandiose, epic fashion: "so are you going to be one of those people who are going to *BE* somebody??" the ego hungrily, greedily chatters at you. "You're not just going to waste and fritter your days/years away, right? You're going to *DO* something, right?? You're going to be GREAT!!" Sometimes this voice is helpful, because it can drive you to do things you wouldn't normally do. Other times, it can be quite exhausting. Your ego is always demanding knowledge, knowledge, knowledge, defitive plans, facts, schedules. Sometimes you just can't have that in life, though.

In Saint Maybe, another one of the main lessons that Ian learns is about "leaning into his burden." About viewing it as a gift, rather than a weight. This is the only life you'll have. So you might as well not get stressed out about things, you know? Next week I won't be working as a prestigious research assistant with a really important professor in a well-known university, but I will be building submaries with third graders. And for now, that's enough. It's enough for now to listen to Alex Murdoch's "Orange Sky" and the Dixie Chicks' "Travelin' Soldier" on Corey's pandora country music station and daydream about the piece of bread with melted cheese I'm about to get up and make myself in a minute. Maybe this afternoon I'll work on some applications for some potentially cool summer/fall stuff. And maybe learn the Higitus Figitus.

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”

--T. H. White, The Sword in the Stone (found on Slate's The Happiness Project blog, my latest fascination/addiction)

Chick Lit for the Soul

If you have a vagina and are kind of hippy-dippy, chances are you will probably enjoy this book. I've devoured it with great relish over the past day and a half. I picked it up in one of my BFF's bedroom while I was waiting to go to dim sum the other morning. It was given to her as a gift from another BFF. It has a little price sticker on it in pounds, so I guess she must have bought it in England somewhere. How appropriate that this book has been passed on hand to hand (I was going to write "vagina to vagina," but that is a little too reminiscent of that line from "Me, You and Everybody We Know." If you've seen that movie, you should know what I'm talking about). The cover proudly boasts a quote from Julia Roberts of all people, exclaiming "It's what I'm giving all my girl friends" in elegant red cursive. (there's also a rave from Minnie Driver, but really, who cares about her?)

This is the kind of book I would expect to be enthusiastically praised by sources such as Gwyneth Paltrow's website. I am very sorry to say that in a fit of interest last December, I signed up for the weekly newsletter. Now, there's been a lot written about this stupid website. What interests me is not so much what it says about this weird alien blond creature, but more what my interest in it says about me. I may not be qualified to give a stirring cultural analysis on the mindset of early-20's females, but gosh darn it, I sure can blab about myself.

Anyway, so basically this book and this website appealed to me as escapist fantasies. It is so, so, nice--almost pornographic--to indulge in these things, to imagine oneself doing them. My BFF's favorite part of the book is the first section, where Gilbert is in Italy, pigging out on pasta, pizza and all those wonderful carbs. But my favorite part of the book is the middle section, where she's in an ashram in India, mainly because it sounds so foreign and strange to me (which is not to say that I'mm pigging out on carbs all the time--I wish!). It's just so appealing. It makes me think, "Damn! I wish I had the money to buy a ticket to India and the time to live in an Ashram and the mindset and capacity to meditate so much!" Yoga has loosened up my hamstrings enough so that I can touch my toes, and that's pretty much it. On that same note, Maybe I'm just strange, but I really enjoy reading Gwynie's recommended recipies for her post-Christmas fast/cleanse and her favorite workout exercise videos. It makes me think "Damn! I wish I had the time and the money to buy almond milk and miso soup and all those other crazy ingredients, and work out that much and do all those crazy ridiculous butt crunches where I'm kicking out my legs behind me and boy, does that exercise look like it would really hurt my knee."

I guess on one hand it's nice that my fantasies are of doing hippy dippy stuff (like cleanses and intense meditation retreats), as opposed to, I dunno, buying shoes. It just makes me feel good, you know? I loved sinking into this book and Gilbert's funny, witty, wise tone and her amusing anecdotes like a warm fuzzy blanket. This book came along for me at the exactly right time in my life, much in the same way as Melissa Banks' The Wonder Spot. I remember reading Banks lying on my stomach in my bed in England, post-breakup, and reading chapter after chapter and just nodding "mm-hmm--been there, done that." My sister underlined several passages in pencil and wrote "That's me" for some particularly eerily parallel scenes. The same thing happenned to me with EPL: it's just creepy how Gilbert writes about some of the exact same things that I've experienced, specifically in the quest for inner peace, fufillment, stability, strength, and all those other good strong-sounding one-syllable words.

I remember finishing TWC, closing it and then sitting up and feeling if not exactly compeltely healed, at least a little more than before (Steve Martin's Shopgirl was also a most unexpected big stepping stone in the heart healing process for me). And then taking out my journal and writing it down: I feel better. That's the same feeling that Eat Pray Love gave me: it just made me feel better, having something so enjoyable to read on the Max, something that taught me about all these interesting things I've been wondering and thinking about lately, like yoga and ashrams and traveling in Asia and Eastern religions and all those other hippy dippy young adult quest things. Again, I repeat: if you have a vagina and are becoming increasingly hippy dippy in your old (young) adult age, you will probably find yourselve folding over page corners or underlining a lot of passages in this book, because they will more than likely really hit home for you.