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69 by Ryu Murakami

Posted by Gareth R Davies on February 10, 2025

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69 fiction Pushkin Press Ryu Murakami

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The Heat's On by Chester Himes

It was laughter dripping wet with tears. Coloured people's laughter. It’s not something on which I’ve dwelled for any great length of time, conventionally or historically – although it is now creeping around the page edges of the fictionalised autobiography in the shop window of my thoughts thanks to books like Glyph by Percival Everett amongst others – but I am guilty of what Siang Lu calls , “ontological whiteness - where you default a character, if not otherwise specified, as white.” In all honesty, guilt probably isn’t the correct response as it would imply that there is a right and wrong way to imagine the characters in a novel, when matters of culture and nurture and considered, and assuming people are WASPs (like me) is devilment, although bias is perhaps an imbalance at best. I refer you to the chapter in Glyph where baby Ralph states for the first time to the reader that he isn’t white, despite what the reader might assume (leading in my case at least to a notably reverse...

Our Ancestors by Italo Calvino

The dog signifies nothing... Now is as good a time as any I suppose to admit that I regularly confuse Italo Calvino with Umberto Eco and when struggling for the name of one of them, invariably come up with the name of the other. What value does this add to a review of either’s work? None whatsoever. I just thought it would pay to be honest up front, so that if I start talking about semiotics, the discourse of literary criticism, or beards, then you’ll know my train of thoughts has switched tracks and is heading for a bridge under construction. Of course, reading the Wiki pages on the two of them (to make sure I was talking about the right fellow) I noticed with some dread that Our Ancestors is one of the best known works of the most translated contemporary Italian writer (at the time of his death) and here I am, trying to make sense of it in my own personal context. Well, I’m always going to be treading down some fool’s heels so why should I care if it’s actually most peopl...

And The Ass Saw the Angel by Nick Cave

Three crows circle overhead! Someone told me this novel, now nearly thirty years old (holy crap), Nick Cave's first and, possibly, his best, began life as a screenplay when he was still touring with The Birthday Present. That seems equally plausible and implausible. It is a wildly cinematic novel, narrated in flashback by the hermetic mute boy Euchrid Eucrow, who slithered into the world as one of a pair of damaged twins, the only one who survives the neglect of their first day on earth, and is vividly, viscerally visual. But it's also complicated, wildly imaginative, and at heart, finds a safer and more permanent berth in the gently revered world of literature than in the ever-changing and perfidious zeitgeist of cinema. The story goes that Euchrid, after throwing himself into a bog into which he slowly sinks as he narrates his tale (to whom? and how?), was born, mute and unloved, into a truly Southern Gothic existence, mother a moonshine drunk, father a mean, bitter a...

Mindfulness - A Practical Guide To Finding Peace In A Frantic World by Mark Williams and Danny Penman

Warning - I'm annoyed by Amazon and might vent... A book on mindfulness - now, this is a departure for me. I wasn't planning on reviewing this for a number of reasons, including but not exclusively because I've not finished the course of meditation it prescribes. I wasn't really planning on reading it either, but I did, also for reasons which I am not going to relate. Good stuff so far, eh? For a few years my wife has been gently suggesting that I try meditative activities to temper my tendency towards displays of extremes of emotion. I have resisted thus far because the one time I did concede ground and attended a Buddhist centre to take part in a guided meditation session, when asked how it was afterwards by a kind and gentle soul, I told him it filled me with a rage so profound that I felt I should go and stand outside so as not to hurt anyone. I did also read a book by Karen Armstrong on compassion , which had a 12-step process (instant recoil) towards a more...

Breakfast Of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool. In days gone by, when repeatedly pressed about what my favourite book might be, a banal question seeking an impossible and crude reductionist answer to which I was usually rude in response, I would offer Breakfast Of Champions as a pacifier. I first read it in University, and it has, to some degree, influenced how I think and feel about a lot of things. Strikingly, I've never wanted to re-read it. Perhaps I was afraid I'd find fault the second time around and wanted to uphold it as a paragon of meta-fiction. Perhaps, but then I'm a relentless consumer of fiction and was always on to the next consumable work, never having time or inclination to go back. So in the spirit of a more considered and thoughtful phase of my life I decided I wa nted to read something that once made me feel good. I'd clearly not remembered it very well. But before that, I'm amazed I've g...

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69 by Ryu Murakami

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