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uthors i disagree with one reviewer who has claimed the sheep stands precisely for right wing evangelical christians i made that last part up that s actually what my knee jerk find the meaning in the symbol reader self did what i found most interesting is the book s last section that takes part in the remote northern mountains as our hero and his girlfriend with the portentous ears trek up to the last leg of the quest their journey up the mountain to the high meadow is like a spiritual passage they had to pass by the treacherous windswept dead man s curve where they topped out into the peaceful vast mountain meadow there are several associations with shinto in this section the animism of the sheepman time is in temporary suspension the grandfather clock needs winding and the suggestion of a portal the bedroom mirror i am not up on my knowledge of buddhism but i am guessing digging in that direction would be fruitful what i took away first a mention must be made about this translation by alfred birnbaum it is excellent i have gathered translators of some of his other englished novels is a mixed bag and there is a controversy about how much finally was edited out of the english version of his most acclaimed novel the wind up bird chronicle i have no problems with murakami s famous western pop culture references indeed without a few place names the lion s share of this story could have taken place in california murakami s narrator s voice and sensibilities hit close to home particularly the tone and take of his humor and his zany more than slightly askew entry points into observations about his culture s traditions yet at the same time showing a tenacity in the face of gloom gloom is a direction on murakami s compass but using its magnetic point as a reference we think there are ways around it just stay away from those ancient cave openings 3 comments filed under haruki murakami tagged as japan august 14 2009 1 25 am aura carlos fuentes you open the thin book you have heard much about this writer this giant of latin american fiction disciple of cervantes and borges in the first page you meet the protagonist historian felipe montero you read further into the story you find that you are walking into the old section of the city after seeing an advertisement in a local paper offering 4000 pesos a month plus room and board to edit an old crone s late husbands memoirs wait you are felipe montero not having read a novel narrated in second person since robbe grillet i took readily to being the hero of the story i am reading for a change carlos fuentes novella aura was the start of his named cycle of novels el mal del tiempo dealing with the problem of time in an early interview fuentes declared that this part of his vast cultural historical project was to examine and negate western linear time i want to announce that my concept of time is linear also cyclical also eternal returns or sometimes a spiral once armed with this and a bit of biographical snippets hinting that fuentes spent a lot of his life in libraries and has whole rows of cultural history probably committed to his memory you may be right to assume therefore if a mention is made by the narrator that the street number of the decrepit mansion has been crossed out and changed to 815 then a faceless voice tells you in the unlit hallway that you must take 13 steps to the left and then 22 steps up the numbers probably have symbolic importance and all the seeming innocuous details species of plants colors of the character s dress more than likely point to a subtextual layer a bit of delving may point to associations with the white goddess allusions to hecate and artemis and the tripartite aspect of the moon goddess of birth death and rebirth you felipe montero have already decided that this place and its widow crone are beyond creepy and weird but the niece aura well that will be another story the editing of the old general s memoirs is gravy you want to milk this to last long enough to pay for some me time later but there is the matter of interior lighting or lack of it along with the fact that consuelo the ancient widow is often found kneeling down waving a fist in the air in front of a christ figure carved in black wood surrounded by votive candles is a bit bewildering but 4000 pesos a month you can put up with some infirmities but then you have those dreams or are they dreams there was or wasn t something beheaded as if in a sacrifice the senses are gradually less sure of the interiors of this place that moonlight you have exchanged the gaze mirada with the crone and aura its as if its a portal between two worlds and you know you are eternally bound to find out the rest of the plot by reading aura what i took away the narrative reads like a story by poe the characters other than felipe of course are as ethereal as they are of blood and flesh which is anyway integral to the dual world fuentes creates when the jolt to our senses occur when the realm of the fantastic intrudes on our reality we are called to question which world we fuentes you are located in disoriented by the intrusion of another reality the question of sanity even becomes a matter of perspective but then again it may have only been a nightmare 2 comments filed under carlos fuentes tagged as mexico august 12 2009 11 47 am in the skin of a lion michael ondaatje lured by rumors of michael ondaatje s heady prose and some popular as well as critical success i had no qualms in grabbing his 1987 in the skin of a lion next out of the nobel prize candidate stack there are other worthy canadian candidates alice munro and margaret attwood come to mind but as a sucker for poetic leaning narrative i took the bait putting to rest the lame fishing metaphor prior to opening this michael ondaatje s second novel i was aware that its sequel the english patient had won a booker prize and also that he is noted to be an accomplished poet one sentence bio born in sri lanka he moved first to england and then finally to canada in1962 where he became a canadian citizen viscera set in ontario and primarily toronto of the 20 s and 30 s the novels characters the six stars and a moon referenced in the opening authorial aside are immigrants who have roles to play out in the construction of the city this aside to the reader is key to the conceit for the narrative s style this is a story a young girl gathers in a car during the early hours of morning she listens to the man as he picks up and brings together various corners of the story attempting to carry it all in his arms and he is tired sometimes as elliptical as his concentration on the road it gives ondjaate s narrator a license to freely work and shape his memories to suggest order to the chaos and create a history out of the backwoods immigrant patrick lewis s story as a young boy we learn early on that he is acutely aware of minutiae in his surroundings nah too much plot summary for this blog you can wiki here if you want it spoiled bones the narrator is aware that he is linking together fragments of his memories as the narration occurs ondaatje uses a technique of narrative pull backs of creating two present tenses in the story time present in the darkness of the car ride as well as the present tense in each storyworld scene as it occurs the modal verb would as in years later he would facilitates this pull back device and is exploited freely to extend details in the story to bestow historical significance since the narrator is aware of his role as a teller of a tale a choreographer of fate i found what seems to set this novel apart beyond its stylistic elements is its extreme ontological awareness apologies for the pretentious term the cognition of place of each character in their historical cultural landscape so why should you care simply because what stands out in this tale what seems to be a break in the magnetic attraction to doom that its the opposite of the vast majority of premises implicit in current literary fiction do i need to even repeat the litany inhuman bleak absurd hopelessness and so not on ondaatje s characters in the skin of a lion actually have an affect in their interaction with their landscape they are actioners as well as reactioners they are not all unhistoric my favorite word in the novel this is what history means he came to this county like a torch on fire and he swallowed air as he walked forward and he gave out light energy poured through him that was all he had time for in those years language customs families salaries patrick s gift that arrow into the past shows him the wealth in himself how he has been sewn into history you would find its addicting this would if you read the novel references to each character s horizon their centeredness in it at that particular time ondaatje s links this sense of the characters individual horizon s on a level outside above the story level itself to create a vast diorama of some criticial events in the construction of the toronto s polyglot cultural history this linking of landscapes is one of the ways the narrator attempts to gather all the corners of the story the elliptical prose can be evocative and atmospheric as well as revel in minutia it is gorgeous the depth perception enabled is impressive between the close ups lending a tactile quality a felt texture to the story s visible surfaces to the sudden view from the heights i at first admitted to a problem with some character dialogue pitched in the same register as the narrative this especially occurs in exchanges between our hero patrick and his two haunting loves clara dickens and alice gull but a quick flip back to the all important open settled matters skin in the epigram at the novel s beginning we see a translation from an excerpt of the epic of gilgamesh i will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion a mention should be made to its connections in the text i will crucify by oversimplification skin s are a referent to the immigrant s abilities to assimilate to their new landscape it is often all that exists between the self and its survival it is not only a protector from the elements it can often be a mask or a means also of escape from threat the protagonist significantly works at one point for a leather goods manufacturer and is cutter of raw unprocessed cattle skins what i took away the american novelist stanley elkin once said that a novel either says yes or it says no though doubtful character trajectories abound in the book and it is rampant with its hard scrabble times the novel s landscape though not windswept can be survivable as long as one as a sense of their horizon if you would read this book 1 comment filed under michael ondaatje tagged as canada august 8 2009 11 25 pm the slynx tatyana tolstaya benedikt coughed politely to interrupt my life is spiritual in what sense i don t eat mice having worshipped at the alter of some classic black humor slash absurdist fiction back in the day i was grinning like i was getting away with something most of time reading tatyana tolstaya s first novel the slynx little did i suspect when i first dipped into this contemporary russian writer s book that at times it would shake out fond memories of vonnegut robbins and harris though associating their wordplay sheer inventiveness and bludgeoning irony these guys played in a much shallower end of the pool than leo tolstoy s great grand niece this novel was an on again off again 14 year project started when she lived in the usa and taught at princeton during the glasnost and perestroika years and finished in 2000 though i openly admit to being unread in utopian dystopian fiction not even 1984 oh snap it seems as a given that books belonging to that genre are approached as line item allegories this_______stands for that________ after finishing the last page of the slynx i searched for and read three online book reviews for the novel something i normally don t do and found substantially three different interpretations of what the various this in the book my grin broadened further mouse meat the narrative is all free indirect basically 1st person point of view that is made to sound like third person from the protagonist benedict our 30something hero is a delightfully engaging pragmatic simpleton in the two centuries after the blast the inhabitant s staple and currency is mice which are eaten made apparel and candles out of and strings of them are the coin of the realm benedikt is a scribe a copier of decrees ostensibly penned by the ruler fyodor kuzmich glorybe similar to clockwork orange there is a bastardized vocabulary that the golubchik s comrades use to describe everyday items most all golubchiks have various mutations from radiation called consequences there exists a small sub group or class of those that have survived the blast called oldeners who mysteriously do not age but have avoided the mutations and are outsiders dissidents of the post apocalyptic society in the remnants of culture the existence of books are just rumors benedikt though for the most part a happy camper like all golubchiks lives a subsistence level life he reasons by observing and this empirical narrative lens lets tolstaya direct the reader into the storyworld with the same wide eyed wonder our hero has been shown to have pudential some possibility of artistic talent and unexpectedly marries above his class his new father in law is the head sanitorion a government official in charge of cleansing retrieving books surreptiously kept by golubchiks in the background lurking is the titular mythic beast the slynx more detail than this would mess the plot mutant bones scattered throughout the narrative the many snippets of poems and allusions to great russian poets pushkin a looming figure in the novel blok and pasternak serve as artifacts fossilized bits from a pre blast culture and are unidentified annotations for the oldener s introspections also in a sense this is a warped bildungsroman as our practical hero has tasted art in the form of reading books and he quests to obtain more his questing is confused books for him are a form of living vicarious lives simply another experience he seems to only understand what he reads at the literal level in a scene where he reveals to his oldener friend nikita ivaniich that he has actually read confiscated books benedikt tries to impress by telling them he knew how freedom is made he read knitting and plaiting sweaters and it had explained a technique of stitching to create freedom of movement enlisted and tutored by nikita bennedikt carves a wooden statue of pushkin and helps erect it at the village crossroads his mentor has tried to explain immanuel kant s discovery of the categorical imperative our inner moral law is inscribed in fiery letters in the book of being and our life young man is a quest for this book and pushkin knew this i wish i could read russian just to compare jamey gambrell s translated prose with tolstoya s orig...