Reading List part 4

Gunter Grass - Cat and Mouse
Set in Danzig, Germany during World War II and centered on the narrator's vivid recollection of a boyhood scene, this marvelously entertaining, powerful and at times very funny narrative explores the serious undercurrent of what it means to be human in an age of wars and rebellions staged for the world's political theatre. As relevant today as it was when it was first written in 1961, Cat and Mouse was written directly after the publication of Grass's famous work The Tin Drum.

George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
What was a nice Eton boy like Eric Blair doing in scummy slums instead of being upwardly mobile at Oxford or Cambridge? Living Down and Out in Paris and London, repudiating respectable imperialist society, and reinventing himself as George Orwell. His 1933 debut book (ostensibly a novel, but overwhelmingly autobiographical) was rejected by that elitist publisher T.S. Eliot, perhaps because its close-up portrait of lowlife was too pungent for comfort.
In Paris, Orwell lived in verminous rooms and washed dishes at the overpriced "Hotel X," in a remarkably filthy, 110-degree kitchen. He met "eccentric people--people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent." Though Orwell's tone is that of an outraged reformer, it's surprising how entertaining many of his adventures are: gnawing poverty only enlivens the imagination, and the wild characters he met often swindled each other and themselves. The wackiest tale involves a miser who ate cats, wore newspapers for underwear, invested 6,000 francs in cocaine, and hid it in a face-powder tin when the cops raided. They had to free him, because the apparently controlled substance turned out to be face powder instead of cocaine.

In London, Orwell studied begging with a crippled expert named Bozo, a great storyteller and philosopher. Orwell devotes a chapter to the fine points of London guttersnipe slang. Years later, he would put his lexical bent to work by inventing Newspeak, and draw on his down-and-out experience to evoke the plight of the Proles in 1984. Though marred by hints of unexamined anti-Semitism, Orwell's debut remains, as The Nation put it, "the most lucid portrait of poverty in the English language."

Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician.
Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century.

If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, that theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight.

David Bret - Morrissey: Scandal and Passion
A household name in his native England, Morrissey just might be the most obscure mega-celebrity in America. While his albums-both as a solo artist and as the frontman of revered 1980s rock outfit The Smiths-rarely reach the charts, he routinely sells out stadium shows in record time. One struggles to think of an artist with a more devout (some would say fanatical) following, and the diversity of his audience is legendary; he has long been a gay icon, yet he also enjoys a rabid following among Latino teenagers. His music-characterized by witty, literate lyrics that tend toward the angst-ridden and the morose-has been the comfort of a generation of sullen teenagers, earning him the mantle "The Pope of Mope." A fixture of the British tabloids due to his outspoken vegetarianism, anti-royal diatribes and any number of other stances and foibles, "The Moz" is also a polarizing figure in the tradition of Michael Jackson-simultaneously revered and reviled at home and abroad. Thankfully, author Bret's profile is not the sensationalist exposé one might expect given this volume's titillating subtitle. Considering Morrissey's penchant for controversy and his infamously vague sexuality (he has been alternately labeled gay, bisexual and celibate), Bret's restraint is downright gentlemanly. In fact, this is an appropriately English take on a uniquely English personality, to the extent that at least half of the author's references require an intimate knowledge of British pop culture, circa 1960-80. Written without the cooperation of the notoriously press-shy singer, the book is unfortunately light on biographical detail, but it's a compelling (if sometimes fawning) exploration of the cult of Morrissey nonetheless.

Cat and Mouse by Gunter Grass doesn't quite live op to its precedor the Tin-Drum, George Orwell's account on being poor however is a must read. It's shocking to see that some of the stuff Orwell encountered so many years ago, is still going on today. Murakamis' Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is his best book I've read and probably the best book I've read this year. Lots of history as well as strange characters combined in an epic story. David Brets' book on Morrissey is quite nice and probably most of all is a good introduction to the world of Morrissey for people just getting into him and the Smiths.