"Watching the hot sunlight falling on the tablecloth covered with sticky blotches & crumbs, Andrei was struck by the thought of what a genuine tragedy it was for millions of light rays to set out on their journey from the surface of the sun, go hurtling through the infinite void of space & pierce the kilometres thick sky of Earth, only to be extinguished in the revolting remains of yesterday's soup. Maybe these yellow arrows slanting in through the window were conscious, hoped for something better- and realised their hope was groundless, giving them all the necessary ingredients for suffering."
From The Yellow Arrow
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9 comments:
An absolute hoot! I'll look out for him nonetheless.
that's funny, reminds me of Chekhov
A real joy, Neil!
Undoubtedly one of the best around today Andrew. There are some perfect stories in that Werewolf book. Hardly ever hear of him over here though.
I think he seems to even be going out of print, Gearoid, I'd trouble getting The Life of Insects recently. That Abebooks looks a useful option, though.
Murakami, who is in no dnager of going out of print, can be very good as well
Currently reading Murakami's Wild Sheep Chase which is excellent. I think I've figured out a way of explaining why Pelevin is so appealing is that he's a natural corrolary to the kind of music I'd love, like The Beatles great stuff roughly from Revolver on to bands like Underworld at their best; Pelevin being of the same sense of consciousness...if the Lennon of I Am the Walrus was writing fiction, Pelevin would be a rough equivalent. Murakami more of a natural novelist than Pelevin but the writing, perhaps at the natural expense, can be comparatively mundane...Pelevin a kind of cosmic, philosophical sharpshooter like in that brilliant story, The Adventures of Shed XII, in The Blue Lantern.
Is ther some kind of inverse relationship between "big-style" and big-theme/s? The likes of McEwan can write beautiful crystaline descriptions of the minutia of daily living (e.g. theres a great desciption of a squash game in Saturday) but never goes head-on at the big themes of good and evil or stuff at the edge of consciousness/literality; Murakami a lot of the time writes in little more than a kinda make-do, moves-the-whole-thing-along-anyway sort of style while really pushing the envelope theme-wise. any thoughts?
I'm not sure how useful my thoughts can be....maybe I should give this a while, but Murakami's books work on a kind of cumulative level rather than the in-the-moment genius of Pelevin, & Murakami's quiet style(I wonder has anyone counted the number of times a cigarette is described as smoked in his books)allows the vision to slip in hte back-door of one's consciousness, so to speak. Mk does seem to have some kind of pulse on the zeitgeist & its emerging undercurrents...with particular mention to an evil at the heart of the establishment. I wouldn't really place him in Dosteovsky's company as far as importance as an artist, but there are similarities at a certain level which these words by Hermann Hesse on Dostoevsky might make clearer:
"He is a seer and an oracle. A people, a period, a country, a continent has fashioned out of its corpus an organ, a sensory instrument of infinite sensitiveness, a very rare and delicate organ. This sensory instrument, this mantological faculty is not crudely comprehensible like some sort of telepathy or magic, although the gift can also show itself even in such confusing forms. Rather is it that the sick man of this sort interprets the movements of his own soul in terms of the universal and of mankind. Every man has visions, every man has fantasies, every man has dreams. And every vision every dream, every idea and thought of a man, on the road from the unconscious to the conscious, can have a thousand different meanings, of which every one can be right. But the appearances and visions of the seer and the prophet are not his own. The nightmare of visions which oppresses him does not warn him of a personal illness, of a personal death, but of the illness, the death of that corpus whose sensory organ he is."
I'll probably reproduce a fuller segment of the essay as a post later.
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